Haven't learned anything from 1973 recently? HAH!

The work of French philosopher Georges Bataille has always baffled me, if I am to be totally honest. He is supposed to have had immense influence upon the leading figures of French thought in the post-war era—luminaries like Jacques Lacan, Michel de Certeau and others. As interpreted by friends like the eminent Jeremy Biles (see above), I have found his ideas stimulating. However, Bataille's writings themselves mix economic thought, eroticism, aesthetics and anthropological observations in ways that I always find inscrutable, at best. So, when I happened across Denis Hollier's book Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille, which promises to bring Bataille's writings to bear upon the problem of architecture, I was duly interested.



One important caveat: Hollier's book was written in the early 1970s, and the text is an unmistakable product of that era of high-flying poststructuralist fireworks. However, when read nearly forty years later—and in translation—Hollier's endless indulgences of wordplay, his appeals to the slipperiness of language against meaning and against itself ... well, they feel both turgid and completely unsurprising. So, if you're not in the mood to relive, say, 1974 in Comp Lit at Yale (and I was not), what follows is more or less an account of what the book has to say about architecture and specifically Bataille's antagonism to it.



Hollier begins by noting the anti-architectural trend in French post-war thought, most familiar to us now in the work of Michel Foucault, but also present in that of Bataille. But, where Foucault's privileged instance of panoptic, penal architecture is hidden in the coercive action it inflicts, Bataille's architecture is extroverted—publicly visible as a monument of the ruling order's violent power. Interestingly, Hollier notes that architecture, specifically the thirteenth century Cathedral of Rheims, was the subject of Bataille's earliest publication. Written in the wake of the first world war when the cathedral in this, Bataille's native city, was bombed, the piece is an idealistic vision of how the destroyed building could be recuperated in a kind of spiritual communion.

The main thrust of the book is how Bataille's subsequent thought effectively negates the basic moves of this earliest piece. First, against the idealization proposed in this early essay, Bataille's thinking resonates with his now-famous notion of "informe" (or formless), whereby entities are released from their high-minded trappings and brought back down to earth like a spider crushed on the ground. Secondly, architecture as understood in his Rheims essay was a crystallization of the very orders of stability and systematicity that much of Bataille's work would subsequently combat against. Presumably echoing Bataille, Hollier claims that architectural metaphors in language are hallmarks of ideological programs in societies: "There is [...] no way to describe a system without resorting to the vocabulary of architecture." So Bataille would himself observe, the appearance of architectural forms or motifs in other branches of culture is a sure sign of a prevailing taste for authority.



Yet, what Bataille seems to propose is not an architecture that repudiates this linkage to violence sovereignty. Rather, his opposition (at least as I understood it) was to the concealment of this violence behind architecture. Thus, Bataille contrasts the architecture of the bureaucratic Inca empire wherein sacrifices would be performed secreted away in the bowels of stultifying, deadening buildings with that of the Aztecs. On the tops of specially-constructed pyramids, Bataille claims, subjects would be sacrificed to the sovereign rulers—released from profane, worldliness and liberated into a communal spectacle of sacred violence. Aztec pyramids thus refuse the paralysis of death—the literal stabilization and endless reproduction of social order—performed normally by architecture in its malevolent, bureaucratic forms.

The book then concludes with an extremely long chapter of nearly one hundred pages, entitled "The Caesarean" who major themes are eroticism and the rupturing, spasmodic experiences that Bataille privileges, theorizes and supposedly achieves in his writings. Although architecture is almost entirely absent from this discussion, science very definitely moves into the foreground as the equivalent "bad object." Like architecture, science here is a tool of patriarchal order and what would be called "the rationalization of the world picture." Drawing from Alexandre Koyré, Hollier's account of science is one that negated the grounds of religion and yet put nothing its place. The concluding set of claims returns to the title, making the primal scene of the first "caesarean" as a typological moment where the birth of the ruling order comes at the price of the death of the mother. Because science is the attendant of this imperial power, it is always the instigator of this merciless rationalization.

However, so Hollier argues through a wide-ranging series of discussions, Bataille's work also suggests a second kind of caesarean—one that would decapitate the father, lop off the king's head in a spectacle of solar radiance evoking the shards of light claimed to be represented by pyramids. This kind of blinding solar vision is that which Bataille variously associates with eating feces, staring into anuses, vulvas and so on. Indeed, in a long digression, Hollier takes us through a range of longue duree fantasies of the pineal gland, what Bataille would call the "pineal eye," and the solar anus as a kind of "third eye" that doesn't look at the orders of the world but only at sacred profanity—staring upward through a ruptured skull at the sun. In a word: win!