The gift of the open hand: Le Corbusier reading Georges Bataille's La Part Maudite

Journal of Architectural Education

Volumn 50, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 50-67

  Lahiji, Nadir ^a  

^a GEORGIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61049539585     PISSN: 10464883     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/10464883.1996.10734702     Document Type: Article

References (69)

1. See Jacques Lacan, "Kant avec Sade," in Écrits (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966), vol. 2, pp. 119-50
2. The English translation, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), did not include this essay
3. See Allan Stoekl, ed., "On Bataille," special issue of Yale French Studies 78(1990): 2
4. See Manfredo Tafuri, "Machine et mémoire': The City in the Work of Le Corbusier," in H. Allen Brooks, ed., Le Corbusier (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 203-18
5. The reading of The Iliad preoccupied Le Corbusier until his death. He had planned to reillustrate his newly translated copy, which contained the drawings of John Flaxman, the eighteenth-century draftsman, but time did not allow him, and he completed no more than twenty-four drawings. For the analysis of these drawings, see Mogens Krustrup, Le Corbusier, L'Iliade Dessins (Copenhague: Borgen, 1986)
6. Also, Nadir Lahiji and David Leathetbarrow, Le Corbusier's Drawings of the Iliad, forthcoming
7. For Bataille's relation to the thirties, see Jean-Michel Besnier, "Georges Bataille in the 1930s: A Politics of the Impossible," French Yale Studies 78 (1990): 169-80
8. Also see Michel Surya, Georges Bataille, la mort à l'oeuvre (Paris: Librairie Séguier, 1987)
9. See Francis Marmande, Georges Bataille politique (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1985)
10. For more details of Le Corbusier's involvement in Chandigarh, see Stanislaus von Moos, "The Politics of the Open Hand: Notes on Le Corbusier and Nehru at Chandigarh," in Russell Walden, ed., The Open Hand: Essays on Le Corbusier (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977), pp. 412-57
11. See von Moos, "The Politics of the Open Hand
12. For a summary of Le Corbusier's urban planning, see Tim Benton, "Urbanism," in Le Corbusier: Architect of Century, exhibition catalog (London: Art Council of Great Britain, 1987)
13. Stoekl, "Truman's Apotheosis," 182
14. For an extended discussion on the Ordre Nouveau, see Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle, Les Non-Conformistes des Années 30 (Paris: Seuil, 1969)
15. See Piel, "Bataille and the World."
16. See Surya, Georges Bataille, p. 486
17. See Jean-Joseph Goux, "General Economics and Postmodern Capitalism," Yale French Studies 78 (1990): 206-24
18. For my summary of The Accursed Share, I have followed Goux's essay. For a philosophical discussion of the idea of general economy in Bataille, see Jacques Derrida, "From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve," in Writing and Difference, trans. and with an introduction by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 251-77
19. Goux, "General Economies and Postmodern Capitalism," p. 207
20. Bataille, "The Notion of Expenditure," p. 118
21. Also for the Acéphale figure in Bataille, see Allan Stoekl's "The Death of Acéphale and the Will to Change: Nietzsche in the Text of Bataille," Glyph, 6 (1979):43-67
22. The Accursed Share, p. 168
23. Bataille, The Accursed Share, p. 175
24. See the English translation by Dominic Faccini in October 60 (Spring 1992): 25-26
25. I have followed Hollier's interpretation of this passage in his Against Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), pp. 47-58
26. Tafuri, "'Machine et Mémoire'" p. 213
27. Mauss, The Gift, p. 46
28. See Jacques Derrida, Given Time: 1 Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)
29. Derrida, Given Time, p. 12
30. See Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (An Essay in Aesthetic Religion), (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 30
31. Georges Bataille, "Rotten Sun," in Stoekl, ed., Visions of Excess, pp. 57-58
32. Land, Thirst for Annihilation, p. 33
33. Cited in Land, Thirst for Annihilation, p. 33
34. See Rosalind Krauss, "Antivision," October 36 (1986):42-86
35. see also "No More Play" in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 147-54
36. Bataille, "Van Gogh as Prometheus," October, 36 (1986), pp. 58-59
37. For a comprehensive interpretation of the Open Hand, see Mary Patricia May Sekler, "Le Corbusier, Ruskin, the Tree, and the Open Hand," in Walden, ed., The Open Hand, pp. 42-95
38. and von Mooss, "The Politics of the Open Hand."
39. My analysis of the Open Hand is indebted to Tafuri's interpretation: see Tafuri, "Machine et mémoire."
40. Quoted in Michaud, "Van Gogh," p. 31
41. See U.E. Chowdhury, "The Bhakra-Dam in the Himalaya Mountains of India," in Willy Boesiger, ed., Le Corbusier Last Works (New York: Praeger, 1979), pp. 158-59
42. See Le Corbusier, L'Art décoratif d'aujourd'hui (Vans: Editions Vincent Freal, 1959)
43. For more information on this, see Hélène Lipstadt and Harvey Mendelsohn, "Philosophy, History, and Autobiography: Manfredo Tafuri and 'Unsurpassed Lesson' of Le Corbusier," Assemblage 22 (1994): 58-103
44. and Le Corbusier, Sketchbooks, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA, and New York: MIT Press and Architecture History Foundation, 1981), vol. 3 (1954-57)
45. Walden, The Open Hand, p. 83
46. See Gershom Scholem, "Walter Benjamin and his Angel," in Gary Smith, ed., On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollection (Cambtidge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), pp. 121-45
47. See Krauss, "Antivision."
48. Sekler, "Le Corbusier, Ruskin, the Tree, and the Open Hand," n. 86, p. 92
49. See John Lecht, "Surrealism and the Project of Writing, or the 'Case' of Bataille," in Carolyn Bailey Gill, ed., Bataille: Writing the Sacred (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 124
50. Also see Lecht, "Surrealism and the Project of Writing."
51. Roland Barthes, "The Metaphor of the Eye," in Critical Essays (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), pp. 239-48
52. Bataille, "Architecture," October, 60 (Spring 1992): 25
53. Hollier, Against Architecture, p. 51
54. Krauss, "No More Play," p. 83
55. Also see Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989)
56. See, especially, Daniele Pauly's detailed analysis in "The Chapel of Ronchamp as an Example of Le Corbusier's Creative Process," in Allen Brooks, ed., Le Corbusier (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 127-36
57. See Robin Evans, The Projective Cast: Atchitecture and Its Three Geometries (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), pp. 276-77
58. Also see Robin Evans, "Le Corbusier and the Sexual Identity of Architecture," Columbia Documents of Architecture and Theory 3 (1993): 149-81
59. Cited in Evans, Projective Cast, p. 277
60. Michel Foucault, ed., Georges Bataille: Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 1, Premier Ecrits, 1922-1940. (Paris: Gallimard, 1970)
61. See Evans, "Le Corbusier and the Sexual Identity of Architecture," p. 157
62. Sigmund Freud, "From the History of an Infantile Neurosis" (1918), in James Strachy, ed., Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), vol. 17, pp. 7-122
63. Also see Muriel Gardiner, ed., The Wolf-Man by the Wolf-Man (New York: Noonday Press, 1991)
64. See J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W.W. Norton, 1973), p. 111
65. Ned Lukacher, Primal Scenes: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 35
66. For the notion of sovereignty in Bataille, see Michele H. Richman, Reading Georges Bataille (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982)
67. For the Lacanian notion of the surplus enjoyment, see Slavoj ZiZek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989)
68. I have borrowed the term jouissance from the Lacanian psychoanalysis. This term cannot be translated into English. At best, it has to be translated as "orgasm" or "religious ecstasy." Lacan himself links the two in his mentioning of Bernini's statue of Saint Theresa. "The Jouissance of Transgression," in Jacques-Alain Miller, ed., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 7, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960, trans. Dennis Potter (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), pp. 191-204
69. Also see Catherine Clément, The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan, trans. Arthure Goldammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983)