At Play in Potential Space: Reading King Qohelet’s Building Experiment with Winnicott

This paper explores the royal fiction in the book of Qohelet, 1:12–2:20, and its relationship to the cosmological poem which precedes it in 1:4–11. Interpreters struggle to read the two texts together: are they connected in a meaningful way or do they provide two independent entry-points into the book? There are also problematic elements in the royal fiction when read on its own. It is, for example, difficult to explain why a large part of the king’s experiment with wisdom takes the form of a magnificent building project (2:4–8). Are we simply meant to read this passage as a depiction of kingly might, giving credence to Qohelet’s claim that he is the richest and wisest king of them all, or does the building experiment play a more integral role in his exploration of humanity’s conditions of life? I show that a psychoanalytic/spatial reading of the two passages can cast light on these issues, allowing the introductory poem and the royal fiction to enter into a meaningful dialogue with each other. I argue that the king’s building project may productively be read as a counter-space to the cosmic space of the initial poem, established to protect his identity in the midst of a hostile cosmos. To understand the character and purpose of the king’s spatial project, I bring in Winnicott’s psychoanalytic work. Winnicott discusses the relationship between the inner reality of the individual human being and the external world in spatial terms, making him an ideal conversation partner for a study of the function of the different kinds of space in the book of Qohelet. His concept of potential space, an in-between space which mediates the relationship between the inner psyche and external reality, provides a particularly useful analogy to the way that space is utilized in the royal experiment.