Georges Bataille
French writer and critic Georges Bataille (1897–1962) remains a controversial figure
within French intellectual life. While he exerted an undoubted influence on many later
thinkers, such as Jean Baudrillard, his often disturbing prose has led many to question his
sanity. Yet the images of horror and obscenity in Bataille’s writing play a crucial role as
strategies of transgression within a world dominated by social norms and established
hierarchies. Bataille seeks to untie such hierarchies and to expose them as fictions. He
indulges in a form of counter-intuitive writing, which attempts to move beyond our
inherited understanding of the world. Thus in his famous example of the ‘solar-anus’,
Bataille presents an image of the sun excreting light. The sun and excrement both stand
for creation and creativity. Too much sun only blinds the viewer.
Architecture enters Bataille’s field of interest at both a metaphoric and a literal level.
Architecture for Bataille allows for the possibility of metaphor, and forms such as the
pyramid and the labyrinth are employed as metaphors for social structuration. On a
second level, the hierarchies and interconnections of society can be seen to be encoded
within the built environment. Architecture therefore serves as a literal manifestation of
social structuration which cements the existing order. Bataille, as a theorist of
transgression intent on overturning accepted norms, would have been opposed to
whatever might propagate these norms. Bataille can therefore be read as a theorist against
architecture.
In ‘Architecture’, one of three entries for the incomplete Documents dictionary,
Bataille echoes some of the themes of an early essay, ‘Notre-Dame de Rheims’, where he
had described the physical fabric of the cathedral as the embodiment of Christian values.
In addition to being a manifestation of social values, architecture may condition social
behaviour. Not only is architecture ‘the expression of the very soul of societies’, but it
also has ‘the authority to command and prohibit’.
‘The Slaughterhouse’ and ‘The Museum’ are the two further entries by Bataille. They
give a more representative sample of the main body of his work. The slaughterhouse is
the site of exclusion and the museum is the site of attraction. Yet for Bataille they are
related. The slaughterhouse is ‘cursed and quarantined like a boat with cholera aboard’,
but this is only because humans have lost touch with the notion of sacrifice. The museum
is linked to the slaughterhouse, in that the palace of the Louvre was only turned into a
museum after the slaughter of the French royalty. ‘The origin of the modern museum,’
Bataille observes, ‘would thus be linked to the development of the guillotine.’
ARCHITECTURE
Architecture is the expression of the very being of societies, in the same way that human
physiognomy is the expression of the being of individuals. However, it is more to the
physiognomies of official characters (prelates, magistrates, admirals) that this comparison