Against Architecture: Writings of Georges Bataille (October Books) Book

Against Architecture offers the first serious interpretation of this challenging thinker, spelling out the profoundly original and radical nature of Bataille's work. Over the past 30 years the writings of Georges Bataille have had a profound...

Over the past 30 years the writings of Georges Bataille have had a profound influence on French intellectual thought, informing the work of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, and others. Against Architecture offers the first serious interpretation of this challenging thinker, spelling out the profoundly original and radical nature of Bataille's work. It has already become the standard critical work in Bataille in France, where it was published in 1974 as la Prise de la Concorde.

Denis Hollier, who has written a new introduction to this edition, sets out Bataille's ideas in a way that is lucid and dazzling yet faithful to Bataille's own commitment to the formally elusive and heterogeneous. Taking into account the Bataillian requirement that such a commitment operate not only on the theoretical plane, Hollier's own writing echoes Bataille's position that writing is always linked to discord or disharmony. Against Architecture opens, in fact, with two beginnings, the second of which is bent on undoing the first.

The initial beginning is a theoretical excursus on Hegel's aesthetics, showing how the commanding position architecture is given in Hegel's philosophical edifice underlies a deeper and more fundamental modeling of his philosophical system according to the pattern of architecture--a modeling that turns philosophy itself into the servant of architecture. the second beginning is an analysis of Bataille's earliest text: a fervent prayer for the restoration of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame at Reims after its bombing during World War I. This religious meditation Hollier sees as the paradoxical origin of the long series of violations at work in Bataille's later writings.

In the second half of the book, "The Caesarean," Hollier analyzes the interplay between two modalities of built space--the pyramid and the labyrinth. The labyrinth was the elusive, almost invisible model of spatiality through which Bataille induced the undoing of structures linguistic as well as architectural. Hollier looks at the way that Bataille went on to map the space of the labyrinth onto the space of the body, and at the myths--the Pineal Eye, the Solar Anus--that he developed to project this complementary system.