Adventures with the Theory of the Baroque and French Philosophy 9781474228541, 9781474228558, 9781474228527

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Adventures with the Theory of the Baroque and French Philosophy

Also available from Bloomsbury Academic Aesthetics and Architecture, Edward Winters Being and Event, Alain Badiou The Fold, Gilles Deleuze Infinite Thought, Alain Badiou Marx Through Post-Structuralism, Simon Choat The Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture, edited by Nadir Lahiji The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture, Gregg Lambert

Adventures with the Theory of the Baroque and French Philosophy

Nadir Lahiji

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 Paperback edition first published 2018 Copyright © Nadir Lahiji, 2016 Nadir Lahiji has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgement on p. xxii constitutes an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Clare Turner Cover image © Jan Dibbets. Digital Image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/SCALA, Florence All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lahiji, Nadir, 1948- author. Adventures with the theory of the baroque and French philosophy / Nadir Lahiji. New York : Bloomsbury, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. LCCN 2016012988 (print) | LCCN 2016023746 (ebook) | ISBN 9781474228541 (hardback) | ISBN 9781474228527 (epdf) | ISBN 9781474228534 (epub) LCSH: Architecture–Philosophy. | Aesthetics, Baroque. | Aesthetics, French. LCC NA2500 .L34 2016 (print) | LCC NA2500 (ebook) | DDC 720.1–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016012988 ISBN:

HB: 978-1-4742-2854-1 PB: 978-1-350-06401-0 ePDF: 978-1-4742-2852-7 eBook: 978-1-4742-2853-4

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Figure 1 The Ambassadors, Hans Holbein, 1533. London, Great Britain.

For Kiana and Sean

Contents List of Figures Foreword Preface Acknowledgment Introduction: Philosophy, Architecture, and the Baroque Subject to Truth

1

Excursus: Variations on the Theme of Baroque Theory and Philosophy

Part 1

2 3

xi xii xviii xxii

1

13

The Philosophical Theory of Baroque

The Baroque and Jouissance: Jacques Lacan The Baroque and the Fold: Gilles Deleuze

37

Interlude I: Theorization of Baroque as “Event”

69

57

Part 2 Modernity, Madness, and the Baroque Criticism

4 5 6 7

Cogito and the Baroque in the Age of Reason: Reading Foucault Baroque Reason and the Madness of Vision: Reading Buci-Glucksmann Theology and the “Baroque Room”: Reading Benjamin Culture Industry and the (Neo)Baroque: Reading Adorno

Part 3

8 9 10 11

79 93 104 112

Architecture and the Theory of the Baroque

The Misadventure of Architecture with French Philosophy Digital Neobaroque and the Hyper-Deleuzeans of Architecture Against the “Architectural” Reading of The Fold The Draped Neobaroque: Is it Possible Not to Love Frank Gehry?

Interlude II: Postrationalism and the Theorization of the Baroque as Real

123 131 141 149

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Part 4

Contents

Postrationalism and the Adventure with French Philosophy

12 Desuturing Architecture: Philosophy and Antiphilosophy 13 Capitalism, Idolatry, and Critique of Neobaroque Ideology

181

Epilogue: The Missed Encounter of Architecture with Postrationalism

194

Notes Works Cited Index

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189

253 263

List of Figures Figure 1

The Ambassadors, Hans Holbein, 1533. London, Great Britain. Credit: © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY. Figure 2 Ecstasy of St. Teresa. Altar, Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680), Cornaro Chapel, S. Maria della Vittoria, Rome, Italy. Credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY. Figure 3 Las Meninas, or The Family of Felipe IV. Ca. 1656. Oil on canvas. 3.18  2.76 m., by Velázquez, Diego Rodriguez (1599–1660), Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain. Credit: Copyright of the image Museo Nacional del Prado/Art Resource, NY. Figure 4 The chess-playing automaton of Johann Nepomuk Maezel, 1769. Figure 5 The Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain, by Frank Gehry. Credit: Neil Setchfield/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY. Figure 6 Walt Disney Concert Hall, from Grand and First Streets, Los Angeles, California, by Frank Gehry. Credit: Jian Chen/Art Resource, NY. Figure 7 Veiled Woman (Femme drapée), photography by Gaëtan G. Clérambault, 1918. Print on baryte paper, 17.9  12.5 cm. Inv. PP0164255. Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, France. Figure 8 Veiled Woman (Femme drapée), photography by Gaëtan G. Clérambault, 1918. Print on baryte paper, 17.9  12.7 cm. Inv. PP0164266. Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, France. Figure 9 Statue of Liberty with head assembled/scaffolding. Photography by Gontrand Fernique. Location: Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division, New York Public Library. Figure 10 Head and torch of Statue of Liberty and metallic structure to build the body—half constructed. Photography by the artist, Gontrand Fernique. Location: Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division, New York Public Library.

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78 103 150

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Foreword Toward the Baroque Critique of Architectural Ideology David Cunningham

Like all great theories of the modern, Nadir Lahiji’s adventures with the baroque are marked by a profound doubling. The baroque is both past and present, repetition and newness: an appropriately Benjaminian constellation of “then” and “now” that is only tenuously held together by the “neo” of a contemporary so-called “neobaroque.” The baroque is both an aesthetic sign of modernity, in which is to be first found many of those features of fragmentation and dissonance most usually associated with the modernist new, as well as the manifestation of the modern’s collapse, or indeed regression, into “postmodern” ever-sameness. Politically, it is essentially conservative, rooted in the Counter-Reformation and the ideologies of absolutism, and yet, at the same time, it bears the promise of something radically subversive, setting in motion a scandalous disorientation and excess that might even encompass what Severo Sarduy goes so far as to term a “baroque of revolution.” The poison in the veins of an advanced capitalist society of the spectacle, the baroque is, as Lahiji puts it at one point in this fine book, simultaneously “its own antidote.” At least something of what is at stake in this can be grasped through a return to perhaps the most extensive philosophical engagement with the baroque— prior, at least, to Gilles Deleuze’s 1988 The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque— that of Walter Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama, written in the mid-1920s. Here, surveying the literary and artistic culture of his own time, Benjamin proposes that “like expressionism, the baroque is not so much the age of genuine artistic achievement as an age possessed of an unremitting artistic will [kunstwollen]. This is true of all periods of so-called decadence.” Denied the possibility of producing the “well-wrought,” “self-contained” individual work, not by virtue of any personal failing on the part of individual artists themselves but rather because of the historico-philosophical reality with which such artists in an age of “decadence” are confronted, the baroque, for Benjamin, acquires a new relevance and significance insofar as the “state of disruption” of the present

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age “reflects certain aspects of the spiritual constitution of the baroque, even down to the details of its artistic practice.” It is in this sense that, for example, Peter Bürger (like Lukács before him) will later read the theorization of allegory in Benjamin’s book as, implicitly, a “theory of the avant-gardiste (nonorganic) work of art” in general.1 To the degree that tragic drama is thus, on Benjamin’s account, the negative imprint of the impossibility of true tragedy—as the novel is for Lukács in its similar relation to the epic—the significance of the baroque lies in the peculiarly modern sense of destruction and loss that pervades it. In “the spirit of allegory,” Benjamin writes, the Trauerspiel is “conceived from the outset as a ruin, a fragment.” It is unsurprising, therefore, that it should be Albrecht Dürer’s “genius of winged Melancholy,” engraved a century before the baroque, that appears, for Benjamin, as the presiding figure of the Trauerspiel, as well as something like an emblem for the experience of modernity more generally.2 The concept of allegory that Benjamin relates to the seventeenth-century baroque finds its essential characteristic in a discontinuity, of image and meaning, signification and corporeality, which disrupts the false appearance of “unity” identified in the symbol. However, if the baroque’s “arbitrary grouping of elements” in the image reflects a “desolate, sorrowful dispersal” associated with melancholia, Benjamin, writing in the late 1920s and 1930s, also locates a form of fragmentation and dispersal in later modernism that takes on a more affirmative, and thus avantgarde, form. In Baudelaire’s “allegorical perspective,” in particular, “the Baroque becomes Modern,” as Christine Buci-Glucksmann notes. This is no doubt what Benjamin means when he writes of Baudelaire in the Arcades Project that he drew upon the “genius of allegory” as a means to resist “the abyss of myth that gaped beneath his feet.” For Baudelaire, Benjamin continues, “allegory has to do, precisely in its destructive furor, with dispelling the illusion that proceeds from all ‘given order’, whether of art or of life: the illusion of totality or an organic wholeness which transfigures that order and makes it seem endurable.” This is, he concludes, “the progressive tendency of allegory,” and hence a certain doubling of the legacies of the baroque itself.3 If Benjamin thus recognized a certain repetition (with difference) of the baroque in not only the “so-called decadence” of early twentieth-century expressionism, but in Baudelaire’s or surrealism’s more properly “progressive” allegorical perspectives, Lahiji identifies a rather different, historically specific return of the (neo)baroque in our own time. Here, in contrast to Baudelaire’s recourse to allegory as a means to resist “the abyss of myth,” the baroque resonances of the contemporary threaten, for Lahiji, to return us to

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something closer, at first sight, to the largely pejorative meaning that it had (prior to Heinrich Wölfflin’s late-nineteenth-century reconceptualization) of an apparently “pointless” excess and ornamentation; a meaning that associated it not only with artistic “decadence” but also with an authoritarian populism and theatricality born of a counterrevolutionary resistance to the democratic and rationalist impulses of the early modern era. It is important in this respect that, although he is nowhere explicitly cited within it, it is widely recognized that Max Weber’s account of Protestantism— and, more broadly, his theses concerning the secularization and disenchantment of the world—constitutes one key backdrop for Benjamin’s Trauerspiel book. In Gillian Rose’s summary (as quoted by Lahiji), if Protestantism thus gave rise to a new ethics of worldly asceticism that was in concordance with what Weber defines as an emergent “spirit of capitalism,” the Counter-Reformation (in both Catholicism after the mid-sixteenth-century Council of Trent and in various strands of Protestantism itself) produced a correspondingly reactionary baroque ethic of worldly aestheticization. The latter’s “allegorical” vision of a world populated by “the phantasmagoria or personification of soulless things” in this way provides a central passage for the rise of those paradoxical reenchantments of the world to be found in the dreamworlds of both commodity culture and Fascism. Benjamin’s account is supplemented in this respect by the great Spanish historian José Antonio Maravall’s 1975 Culture of the Baroque, which, as Lahiji points out, without ever naming Adorno and Horkheimer, makes significant use of the term “culture industry” in its analysis of the seventeenth-century baroque and hence implies a connection between the early-modern absolutist use of spectacle and its later, more fully capitalist forms.4 What Lahiji describes therefore as a political theology of worldly aestheticism, characterized by an affective “excess of signification” and “madness of vision” characteristic of the original baroque, may help us make sense, in turn, he argues, of the so-called neobaroque of our own neoliberal times. As Peter Wollen remarks, in a key passage cited by Lahiji: “Understanding the social, political and ideological humus which nourished the Baroque can help us to understand the context within which the neo-Baroque (and the postmodernism) is flourishing today.” Of course, significantly, as this quotation shows, the idea of a neobaroque is not one invented by the book in front of you but is instead appropriated, as it were, from an already existing discourse of the contemporary, to be found particularly in architecture theory and criticism, where it has often been used, somewhat loosely, to describe the digital fantasies of parametric design and what

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Buci-Glucksmann terms (with reference to Deleuze) a plane of “technological immanence.” Typically, it is, then, a common “ecstatic surplus of images” or “image-flux” that would seem, in this light, to join the seventeenth-century baroque and a contemporary “digital” neo-baroque together—and, certainly, Lahiji is far from adverse to developing such parallels here. (Frank Gehry’s architecture is compared, for example, to the buildings of a Jesuit baroque, in which neoliberal spectacle mirrors the earlier extravagances of the CounterReformation.) Yet if, like their absolutist predecessors, today’s “new architectural idols” work effectively to “further a deceptive and reactionary reenchantment of the world,” as Lahiji writes, equally crucially, he also insists, we should be wary of too-easy analogies between the two; most importantly, because to do so may obscure the very historically specific conditions of today’s culture of “spectacle” and its relations to a cultural logic of neoliberal capitalism that is very different from the absolutist and religious contexts of the original baroque. As Lahiji points out, the baroque’s affective appeal to the immediacy of the senses and its theatricalization of experience assume a very different “function” once they are put to work, not on behalf of ecclesiastical and monarchical power, but as a surplus to be “valorized” in the real abstractions of commodity exchange. Part of what is so impressive about Lahiji’s book is, for me, then the ways in which it refuses any simple analogy of baroque and neobaroque. For if, as Helen Hills has noted, the baroque is always, potentially, “the grit in the oyster of art [and architectural] history,” the point here is to make this productive in both political and artistic terms as the means toward a Benjaminian putting of the present into crisis.5 As such, the (neo)baroque character of the present—and not only in architecture—must always appear in two irreducibly interconnected, if negatively and positively charged forms. Negatively, because, Lahiji argues, as opposed to a classicist or modernist rationalism, the spectacle and culture industry in our time is effectively on the baroque side of modernity in its production of a surplus aesthetic “value” and a dazzling world of phantasmagoric appearances. But, positively, because it is only the “allegorical” force of a critical modernism of disorientation and fragmentation that may allow us, in turn, to break up the “false” wholeness of such spectacle itself, in order to be able to look at social reality, as Lahiji puts, anamorphically, or “awry.” As an alternative “scopic regime,” the baroque is its own “auto-critique.” It is from this perspective that among the many achievements of this book, none perhaps is more important than the recovery of what it identifies as a third great moment—alongside Benjamin and Deleuze—in the twentieth century’s adventures with the theory of the baroque: that to be found in the writings of

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Jacques Lacan. As Lahiji notes, even those contemporary philosophers best versed in Lacan’s work, including two of this book’s own guiding spirits, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, have had little or nothing to say about Lacan’s theorization of the baroque. (Meanwhile, Deleuze conveniently relegates Lacan to a footnote in The Fold.) Yet, “On the Baroque” was the title of one of Lacan’s most important seminars of the early 1970s, in which he identified himself with the “perverse” side of modernity and, in so doing, “situated” himself “essentially on the side of the baroque.” Most crucially, the baroque appears, again, as a site of a profound doubling in Lacan—both the cultural manifestation of an image of the absolutist big Other, but also, psychoanalytically, as a source of a subversive perversity and “paradoxical topological sublimations.” If, then, in turning to Lacan, Lahiji seeks to recover, too, the alternative “rationality” signaled in Buci-Glucksmann’s notion of “Baroque Reason,” this is done in such a way—a further doubling—as to turn these against the “rationalist” irrationalities of a contemporary dialectic of enlightenment and the latter’s return to the forms of myth. It is here that the importance of a specifically psychoanalytic working through of the baroque is most evident in Lahiji’s work. To the extent that Lacan’s “baroque reason” thus provides, for Lahiji, the most productive basis for a criticism of the present and for an insight into the production and reproduction of capitalist subjectivity (not least in architecture and design), it is also for this reason that it is necessarily posed against those forms of vitalist affirmationism (without negativity) that issue from Deleuze’s competing reading of the baroque. While, as Lahiji acknowledges, much recent architectural theory has, in mining Deleuze’s oeuvre, served to take ideas that were directed against capitalism in order to contribute to their co-option by capitalist development, so, too, he suggests, Deleuze himself can hardly be entirely absolved of all responsibility for this. It is not for nothing, Lahiji implies, that the pseudoradicalism of would-be cutting-edge design’s recourse to French theory, so as “to deliver architecture to the economic and ideological imperatives of late capitalism,” has found its own central heroes in Deleuze and Guattari. As against, then, disingenuous appeals to the liberation of (architectural) design, all-too-easily recuperated by what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello define as a “new spirit” of neoliberal capitalism,6 it is Lacan’s “antiphilosophy” that, in allowing for a thinking of the structure of the unconscious and the structure of capitalism together, offers the best model, according to Lahiji, for a critical project devoted to the uncovering of those gaps and forms of negativity that the neobaroque works to occlude.

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In this sense, recent architecture’s misadventures with the baroque stand in, metonymically, for its misadventures with radical philosophy and critical theory more widely, the consequence of which has been not only a characteristic instrumentalization of theory in the service of “positive” design, but also its profound aestheticization. On the one hand, Lahiji’s often admirably and exhilaratingly passionate arguments—exemplified by his assault on GilbertRolfe’s hagiographic account of Gehry’s architecture—may thus be read as directed against the specific defanging and domestication of that “radical core” running through a certain French and German philosophical engagement with the baroque. On the other hand, however, the book also provides a thoroughgoing critique of what it terms a “suturing” of contemporary architecture to philosophy in far more general terms, exemplified in this instance by the neobaroque’s appropriation of Deleuze’s conception of the fold in the name of “an aggressive legitimization of particular forms of institutional practice.” It is in emphatic opposition to this that Lahiji therefore seeks, finally, to revive also the often-denigrated tradition of ideology critique, and hence, too, a reenergizing of a properly Marxian disenchantment of the world against its reenchantment by capital. If the history of the baroque holds a particular importance here, it is because, of course, its problems of appearance and reality, surfaces and phantasmagoria, and its logics of fantasy, are (without simply being reducible to them) also those of the fetish-like character of the commodity form itself. In the face of a neobaroque return to iconophilia, Lahiji thus performs his own return to the project of critique and to a theory-as-politics that would be directed against a contemporary aesthetic ideology and its accompanying “affective turn.” In this, Lahiji’s marvelous book not only takes up again the political thread that has so impressively marked much of his own previous work7 but also reasserts the necessity of what the great critic and historian Manfredo Tafuri defined as the critique of architectural ideology. Indeed, as an act of radical iconoclasm in its own right, Lahiji’s book may be said to reinvent a smashing of idols for our own “age of decadence.”

Preface The return of the baroque in contemporary theory is apparent in the way various academic disciplines are attempting to reengage with it at a philosophical level. Contemporary architecture, in particular, is notable for an almost obsessive concern with the baroque and for importing many related concepts from French philosophy into its discourse. Unfortunately, however, to the price of such borrowings has been a massive simplification and reduction of the radical critical core of this remarkable body of work. In this book, I examine architecture’s misadventures with the baroque and submit them to a rigorous critique. I do not come to this subject from inside the discipline of architecture in order to push for a specific alternative architectural program, but simply to highlight the hubris presiding over contemporary architectural culture that has sought its legitimation, in large part, by making claims on the theory of the baroque and on contemporary French philosophy. The rudimentary knowledge of twentieth-century French philosophy and the affected uncritical naiveté that are so characteristic of the most rarefied forms of theory in this discipline are not without political consequences. In effect, the pretentious claims for so-called “new” design theory use French theory to deliver architecture to the economic and ideological imperatives of late capitalism. Neither the enthusiasm nor the pretense of political disinterestedness that characterize this new fad in academia can disguise the cultural and political nature of the enterprise. I began this study with a modest goal of questioning how French philosophy was being understood and applied in the discipline of architecture. In the course of my investigation, however, I realized that what Alain Badiou called the fundamental “adventure of the French philosophy” demanded a more thoroughgoing investigation of the instrumental and grossly reductive readings of the concept of the baroque within the architectural field. For reasons that should be obvious to any serious reader, this has meant exploring, at some length and in some detail, the variations on the concept of the baroque and its critiques in the twentieth century, including different thinkers who, in one way or another, have been concerned, directly or indirectly, with the notion of the Baroque, such as Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault, and Alain Badiou, as well as the main figures who have most advanced the

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theory of the baroque in the late twentieth century, especially Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan. Equally essential, of course, has been the need to spell out my own position on the Baroque, in defense of what I take to be the radical core of French philosophy against the reduced version of it imported into the discourse of architectural theorists. I make no apology for the politically motivated position that informs this investigation. This work is a philosophical act of resistance to the pseudoradical philosophical ruminations that continue to circulate in departments of architecture today. From the outset, I must dispel the notion that this is an art-historical inquiry into the concept of the historical baroque. There are many fine scholarly studies on this subject, to which I refer in the course of my analysis, and there is no need to rehearse them here. Besides, it should be clear to most readers that the fossilized academic pedagogy and scholarship that dominates the institutions of higher learning today is itself one of the targets of this study. This trend is the opposite of what Alain Badiou calls the “immanent exception” of the creative subject. Immanent exception always arises from a particular situation to attain universality when that particularity leaves its original condition of creation. Academicism has no truck with this notion of “exception.” Representation, be it in politics or within particular disciplinary fields, is the dominant mode of academicism; and contemporary architecture, which in its totality I characterize as Neobaroque, is all about representations that have abandoned the “immanent exception” to better lend themselves to the managerial imperatives of the Neoliberal order. This order comes with its own power, and as we know, power is always entangled with the state. That is why contemporary architecture is a representation of power, neoliberal power, which stands at variance from its counterpart, at the time of the Absolutist State, in the historical seventeenthcentury baroque. This book calls for a new immanent exception against the new power of neoliberalism dominating contemporary culture and architecture. I begin and end this inquiry with a firm conviction in the enduring value of philosophical rationalism. Those who would criticize the admittedly rational “Cartesian” stand I take in this work might do well to consider what Slavoj Žižek once noted about this allegedly “misguided” philosophical stance—that it is nowadays a customary ritual in academic departments to disown the Cartesian heritage and blame it for all the ills of society; that the goal of this antirationalist “holy alliance” is to “exorcise” the specter of the Cartesian subject. The opponents of rationalism easily forget that the latter’s aim, today, can hardly be to return to the cogito in the manner this notion has dominated modern thought, but rather, as Žižek points out, “to bring to light its forgotten obverse, the excessive,

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unacknowledged kernel of the cogito, which is far from the pacifying image of the transparent Self.” My theorization of the baroque on philosophical and psychoanalytical grounds is one attempt to precisely ground it in this tradition of rationalist thought. This means, among other things, that I am not ready to jump on the fashionable postmodern Cartesian-bashing bandwagon. I make a great deal of effort to explicitly bring baroque theory in line with the time-honored heritage of rationalism, precisely to highlight inherent internal contradictions within the Enlightenment tradition. As readers will notice, in the chapters devoted to architecture, I sharply criticize the abandonment of the tradition of rationalism in architecture and the importation into its academic discourse of a version of the baroque that has ultimately put the project of architecture directly against its “social project” and placed it in service to the irrationality of neoliberal financial capitalism. In my investigation into the adventures of French philosophy, I have gone back to an episode in its recent history, in the late 1960s, when a remarkable circle was formed at the École Normale Supérieure. The radical system of thought it developed has been renamed recently by one scholar as PostRationalism. In this book, I argue that not only must the historical baroque be conceived within the tradition of rationalism—albeit, as I show extensively, as its other reason—but that any theorization of the baroque in the present must pass through this tradition and its continuation in postrationalism, from which alone can the principle of “immanent exception” emerge. Any effective challenge to the abandonment of the project of rationalism in architecture must be founded in the discourse of postrationalism. It is from this basis, rather than from a misguided search through baroque theory for prescriptions to use in design practice, that architecture’s true project of critique must be formed. Thus the critique of the concept of the baroque I present in this book is geared to a radical political position grounded in the philosophy of rationalism, which I take to be the historical context for the adventures of French philosophy. But a sufficient critique of the baroque and of its architectural manifestations in contemporary culture is impossible without a prior exposition of the philosophical foundation required for any serious discipline of critique. Thus, readers who are anxious to get to the critique of architecture—treated in the second half of the book—must indulge me patiently as I engage in a scholarly exposition of the various conceptualization of baroque theory in the twentieth century. Without such a reflection, no serious consideration of the uses and misuses of this term today is possible.

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I make a categorical distinction between the historical seventeenth-century Baroque and the category of the neobaroque in contemporary culture, which some critics equate with the term postmodernism. While both, as I argue, are grounded in the “culture industry,” then and now, my sharpest criticism is directed at the neobaroque and its manifestations in architecture today. This distinction is not only methodological; it reflects rather a parti pris for “ideology criticism”—precisely that type of criticism that has conveniently been put aside in today’s academy. In my theorization of the historical Baroque as linked mainly to the notions of sublimation and jouissance—grounded in a psychoanalytical interpretation—I do not consider it the ideology of the absolutist state as such. I argue instead that the historical baroque was an authentic epochmaking discovery, a rupture, or an “immanent exception,” within the tradition of rationalism, precisely because it was intimately related to the discovery of jouissance in the human body that had to wait more than 200 years to be rediscovered by Jacques Lacan. Everything in the neobaroque, by contrast, is ideology, and contemporary architecture is its most potent manifestation. No matter how much the critics, theorists, or practicing architects of the neobaroque may pretend to be engaged in a value-free, disinterested form-making activity in the name of novelty and creativity, their efforts in the end are nothing but the aesthetization of a reality that has yet to be submitted to rigorous ideological critique. Whatever may be the problems—and there are many—of ideology critique, I am not ready to abandon it. It is in my future work that I will try to treat the capitalist valorization of jouissance and the surplus value it yields, along with architecture’s instrumental role in placing it in the service of the cultural logic of dominating social system.

Acknowledgment This book went through a long process of reviews and writing in its gestation. In this process, I benefited from discussions with my many academic friends and colleagues, to whom I am grateful. In the early stage of the review of the book proposal, I received helpful critical commentaries and constructive suggestions by anonymous reviewers. They brought to my attention source materials that I had missed in my first draft of the project. I thank Joan Ockman, who read the early draft of the manuscript. I benefited from the criticism she offered and her suggestions for the improvement of the work. I cannot thank enough my friend Libero Andreotti who agreed to go through the painful process of reading the entire final draft and make my English comprehensible. Without his editorial intervention, this book would not be readable. I envy his superior commend of language. My special thanks go to Colleen Coalter, the senior editor at Bloomsbury, who throughout the long process of the review of the book proposal patiently supported me. I enjoyed working with her and appreciate her trust in me. I thank the editorial board at Bloomsbury, who at the end of the review process proposed a revised title for the book that challenged me to live up to its expectation. I would like also to thank Andrew Wardell at Bloomsbury for his kind assistance and punctual communications. At last, I must thank the project manager, Grishma Fredric, for her excellent professional work during the final stage of production of this book.

Introduction: Philosophy, Architecture, and the Baroque Subject to Truth

At its origins, modernity is coterminous with the authentic thought of the Baroque. Baroque is the name for a historical “event” with an ethic inscribed in the constitution of the modern subject.1 The premise of this study is that the thought-event of the Baroque has a universal philosophical dimension—a claim to truth analogous to other universals. “ Thought,” according to Alain Badiou, “is the proper medium of the universal”—that is, truth and the universal are one and the same thing.2 This study builds on this premise to lay the groundwork for a new theorization of the concept of the Baroque. It begins with the observation that the singular universality of the Baroque in our time—its place as a dominant trend in contemporary culture—is apparent in the aesthetic ideology called neobaroque. Contrary to this formulation, while I would agree with commentators who have equated the neobaroque with postmodernism, I  would reject the idea that the philosophical thought of the baroque—which has, once again, been brought to the fore in recent times—can in any way be reduced to an ideology tout court. Indeed, at its inception in the seventeenth century, the Baroque as an event had already been contaminated with certain traits that we now associate with the neobaroque ideology in contemporary culture. To differentiate the authentic thought of the historical Baroque from the chaotic multiplicity of the neobaroque, and to highlight certain fusions that nevertheless exist between them, I use the notion of “disjunctive synthesis,” a term coined by Gilles Deleuze.3 A crucial point must be noted from the outset, however. Both periods associated with this term, the seventeenth century and the present age, are also periods that are thought to represent “decadence” in Western culture. Walter Benjamin, who was the first to diagnose the psychopathology of modernity and to locate it in the historical Baroque—he named it melancholy—recognized the presence of baroque forms in his own time, the early decades of the twentieth century. In

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the difficult “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” to his The Origin of German Tragic Drama, he wrote, For like expressionism, the baroque is not so much the age of genuine artistic achievement as an age possessed of an unremitting artistic will [kunstwollen]. This is true of all periods of so-called decadence. The supreme reality in art is the isolated, self-contained work. But there are times when well-wrought work is only within reach of the epigone. These are the periods of “decadence” in the arts, the periods of artistic “will.” Thus it was that Riegl devised this term with specific reference to the art of the final period of the Roman Empire. The form as such is within the reach of this will, a well-made individual work is not. The reason for the relevance of the baroque after the collapse of German classical culture lies in this will. . . . In this state of disruption the present age reflects certain aspects of the spiritual constitution of the baroque, even down to the details of its artistic practice.4

In my view, similar considerations could be made about the relevance of the baroque today. In his own day, Benjamin deployed the term baroque to elucidate “Expressionism” as a period of decline. Through the historical method of the “now of recognizability,” he intertwined the tendencies of the seventeenthcentury baroque with those of the first part of the twentieth century. A similar method might serve to highlight shared features between Benjamin’s time and the present. Indeed, it is with a similar “now of recognizability” that, 100 years after Benjamin wrote his treatise, we witness a renewal of philosophical speculation on the baroque concept. As two prominent commentators of Benjamin’s work, Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings, have recently pointed out, Benjamin borrowed the term “will to art” (kunstwollen) from Riegl’s model of cultural history. “Riegl’s approach to works of art presupposes that certain artistic epochs are constitutionality incapable of producing ‘a well-made individual work.’ Such eras—the late roman ‘art industry,’ the Baroque, precapitalist modernity—instead produce imperfect, broken works in which a no less significant will to art is manifest.”5 To this list of eras, I add the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—periods of total decline to which Benjamin’s reconceptualization of Riegl’s model similarly applies. However, I also argue that underlying the baroque concept is a paradox, a coincidentia oppositorum. This coincidence of opposites is the subject of analysis in this study. If the original thought of the historical Baroque, in the strict sense, was not an ideology, as I claim, the neobaroque today certainly is. By this I mean a

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way of thinking mired in the “immediacy of the senses” and the “positivity of consumption”; thought reduced to pseudo-thought, with no possible claim to Truth. Whereas the historical Baroque appealed to the intellect as well as the senses, for today’s neobaroque, to put it in Kantian terms, the “immediacy of senses” is all there is. If an authentic concept of the historical Baroque is to be elevated to the dignity of event, it must be understood in a strictly Badiouian sense as a “rupturing new” or “singularity of a rupture.” So the Baroque will be conceived in this study as a singular universal, an event that is opposed to the pseudo-event of the neobaroque. This means situating contemporary “new” architecture and naming it as nonevent; it means questioning its presumed “newness” and subjecting it to rigorous criticism. Architecture has attained an exceptional status in the current ideology of the neobaroque because of its close links to digital capitalism. This status has been propped up in the academy by an exaggerated and misleading philosophical claim with very little objective validity. In contrast to various apologists of the neobaroque within architecture, I argue that the direct transfer of Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the Baroque into the discourse of theory is both reductive and methodologically problematic. It is constructed on a misrepresentation  of Deleuze’s philosophy, especially his central concept of the Fold and its purported “architectural” connotations—a misrepresentation unfortunately abetted by Deleuze himself. More generally, I will interrogate the entire (mis-)adventure between architecture and French philosophy that has so dominated architectural theory in the last four decades, suggesting that at its basis is a complete disavowal of the rationalist epistemology of French theory—precisely the epistemology that is being reasserted today in a new wave of radical thinking in France and elsewhere. The first step of such a critique is to expose the style of pseudo-thinking that dominates architectural theory today, in line with Peter Hallward’s assertion that, from Plato and Alain Badiou, “to think means to break with sensible immediacy.”6 In part IV of this book, I present an outline for a possible alternative adventure with French philosophy. At the center of it stands the authority of what must be regarded as the most important and influential moment of French philosophical theory, the Cercle d’Épistémologie formed around Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in the 1960s, with its famous journal the Cahiers pour l’Analyse, a moment abstractly associated with French Structuralism and recently termed “Post-Rationalism.”7 It is within the critical discourse of this group and within the tradition of the French rationalist epistemology that I find Jacques Lacan’s idea of the baroque, around which I try to reconstruct the project of critique in architecture.

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Underlying this attempt, however, is a radical claim: that authentic criticism is always and only philosophical criticism in the sense Benjamin defined it in a passage deemed “obscure” by the smug German academics at the time, who rejected his “habilitation.”8 In his analysis of the baroque Trauerspiel (Mourning Play), he wrote: Criticism means the mortification of the works. By their very essence these works confirm this more readily than any other. Mortification of the work: not then—as romantics have it—awakening of the consciousness in living works, but the settlement of knowledge in dead ones. Beauty, which endures, is an object of knowledge. And if it is questionable whether the beauty which endures does still deserve the name, it is nevertheless certain that there is nothing of beauty which does not contain something that is worthy of knowledge. Philosophy must not attempt to deny that it re-awakens the beauty of works. . . . The object of philosophical criticism is to show that the function of artistic form is as follows: to make historical content, such as provides the basis of every important work of art, into a philosophical truth.9 (emphasis added)

The transformation of “material content into truth content,” means, among other things, that the “work”—in this case, the baroque Trauerspiel—“stands as ruin.” On the last page, Benjamin wrote, “In the ruins of great buildings the idea of plan speaks more impressively than in lesser buildings, however well preserved they are.”10 Following up on this analogy, one might see contemporary neobaroque architecture as “well-preserved” but lesser work built on the “ruins” of the rational project of modern architecture. But such a comparison, to be convincing, must first pass through an exploration of the rationalist epistemology of French philosophical theory, since, as Christine Buci-Glucksmann has put it, if the Baroque has its own “reason” in modernity, it is a reason that runs counter to Enlightenment rationality, while still operating within the general framework of French rationalist (or postrationalist) epistemology, including the psychoanalytical theory of Jacques Lacan and the philosophical corpus of Alain Badiou.

The baroque as a “Problem of Thought” William Egginton, in his admirable The Theater of Truth: The Ideology of (Neo)Baroque Aesthetics, raises the question of the baroque as a “problem of

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thought.” A problem of thought, he notes, is not yet a philosophical problem. It concerns “the relation of appearances to the world they ostensibly represent.”11 Egginton correctly locates this question in that tradition of Western modernity from the seventeenth century to the present and finds its exhaustion in the aesthetics of neobaroque—a term he substitutes, correctly in my view, for the more generic “postmodern.” Delving into the epistemology of this problem, Egginton cites Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in order to advance this definition: “modernity’s fundamental problem of thought is that the subject of knowledge can only approach the world through a veil of appearances; truth is defined as the adequation of our knowledge to the world thus veiled.”12 Explaining first that baroque “makes theatre out of truth, by incessantly demonstrating that truth can only ever be an effect of the appearances from which we seek to free it,”13 Egginton then aphoristically declares that “The baroque is theater, and the theatre is baroque.”14 For him, modern theater, from its inception as an institution in the late sixteenth century, is coterminous with the division of the world between audience and stage. This division has a counterpart in modern philosophy in the recurring questions about “the relation between truth and illusion.”15 Borrowing from Kant, he claims that the problem of modernity and the thought of the baroque persists because “the subject of knowledge only ever obtains knowledge via his or her senses, via how things appear, and hence the truth thus sought will itself always be corrupted by appearances.”16 In a similar way, we could say that modernity has also persisted as a problem ever since Kant opened the distinction between thought and knowledge.17 But if Egginton could thus be said to be following Slavoj Žižek’s injunction apropos the very problem afflicting the postmodern age (it might be over by now), it is not only possible, even urgent, to “repeat mutatis mutandis the Kantian gesture,”18 but equally imperative to take the next step and accomplish the passage from Kant to Hegel. As we shall see, it is precisely Žižek who attempts such an audacious philosophical passage, thanks to which one is able to go beyond Egginton’s reflections on the notions of “appearance” and “truth” and, along with them, the whole pre-Badiouian and even prematerialist assumptions that still seem to inform his account of the baroque. Another way to put this would be to say that the whole effort to achieve the radicalization of the object in Kant, that unfathomable X, the noumena or the Thing-in-Itself, has somehow gone missing in Egginton’s “theater of truth.” This is all the more disconcerting given the role it plays in Egginton’s previous and excellent short essay on Baltasar Gracián, titled “Gracián and the Emergence

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of the Modern Subject.”19 Here, in contrast with the theater of truth, we find a perceptive elaboration of the status of the modern subject and its ethics in the historical Baroque in line with Lacan’s psychoanalytical theory and its elaborations in Slavoj Žižek’s work. This elaboration—including Egginton’s well-placed challenge to Gilles Deleuze’s anti-Cartesianism—deserves to be incorporated into a theory of the baroque. Equally important for my own account is Egginton’s notion (which he takes from Deleuze’s book on Kafka with Félix Gauttari) of a “minor strategy” as opposed to a “major strategy,” especially as it applies to the conflictual aspects of the historical Baroque itself, not to mention exceptional cases such as the counterconquest art of the so-called “New World” or Latin-American Baroque.20 In the end, as will be seen in my review of the vast literature that has appeared in recent years on the baroque in next chapter, Egginton’s work still stands out as one of the most important contributions, valuable especially for its keen philosophical exposition of the “problem of thought” in modernity. As will be seen, my own investigation takes up where Egginton leaves off, by extending the philosophical theory of Truth into the theorization of the baroque and by grounding it in the discourse of radical philosophy. Central to the latter—indeed, to any serious contemporary philosophical discussion—is Badiou’s restoration of philosophy as “the general theory of the Event.” No less essential is the psychoanalytical theory of Jacques Lacan and what he himself termed an “antiphilosophy”—which would lead Badiou to say that “the anti-philosopher Lacan is a condition of the renaissance of philosophy. A philosophy is possible today, only if it is compossible with Lacan.”21 Both sources are central to my own effort to reformulate a theory of the Baroque alongside a critique of contemporary architecture’s turn to neobaroque aesthetic ideology.

“The Supersensible is Appearance qua Appearance” In Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Seminar XI, in the session “The Line and Light,” Jacques Lacan discusses the relation between the painter and spectator as “a play of trompe-l’oeil” and narrates the classical tale of Zeuxis and Parrhasios: Zeuxis has the advantage of having made grapes that attracted the birds. The stress is placed not on the fact that these grapes were in any way perfect grapes, but on the fact that even the eye of the birds was taken by them. This is proved by

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the fact his friend Parrhasios triumphed over him for having painted on the wall a veil, a veil so lifelike that Zeuxis, turning toward him said, Well, and now show us what have you painted behind it. By this he showed that what was at issue was certainly deceiving the eye (trompe l’oeil). A triumph of the gaze over the eye.22

I claim that a fundamental definition of the Baroque can be obtained from Lacan’s last phrase: The Baroque is the triumph of the gaze over the eye. Corollary to this definition are a number of other Lacanian notions, foremost among them jouissance and sublimation. Accordingly, I claim that the advent of the historical Baroque is also the birthplace of jouissance and that, paraphrasing Egginton above, the Baroque is jouissance and jouissance is the Baroque. This definition logically leads to the proposition that the historical Baroque is a feminine phenomenon understood within the economy put forward in Lacan’s Seminar XX, Encore, On Feminine Sexuality, The Limit of Love and Knowledge—the same seminar in which he delivered his talk “On the Baroque,” which will be discussed in a later chapter.23 Thus, Baroque is the space in which lack and excess coincide and intersect. Later, we will see how this intersection must be tied to the thought of the void and the event. Moreover, still according to this Lacanian interpretation, the Baroque would mark the historical moment in which it was discovered that the object is lost forever, and that every discovery (finding) of the object, as Freud put it, is only a rediscovery (or refinding). This is also, according to Walter Benjamin, the moment that marks the emergence of modernity, or more properly, the loss that defines modernity. As he wrote in his The Origin of German Tragic Drama, the Baroque coincides with a sense of melancholy for the loss of tradition.24 The Baroque thus coincides with both loss and melancholy. As Egginton says, it is both the “aesthetic sign of and origin of this Melancholy.”25 To define the Baroque as a triumph of the gaze over the eye is also to invoke a cluster of other related notions that Egginton has succinctly enumerated. At the dawn of the modern age, he writes, the historical Baroque expresses a distinctive aesthetic fascination with anamorphosis, mise en abîme, trompel’oeil, and coincidentia oppositorum26—all terms that reinforce Egginton’s Kantian conclusion that “The organizational logic of that age is a theatrical one, in which the space of representation is severed into a screen of appearances and the truth presumed to reside behind it, and it is this basic problem of thought that underlies the multiple strategies that baroque aesthetic production puts into play.”27 That this is an incomplete or a partial way to pose the problem of the baroque, however, is indicated by Slavoj Žižek in his comments on the same tale narrated

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by Lacan above. Citing Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit, Žižek writes, “It is manifest that behind the so-called curtain which is supposed to conceal the inner world, there is nothing to be seen unless we go behind it ourselves as much as in order that we may see, as that there may be something behind there which can be seen,”28 and he notes that “there is nothing behind the curtain except the subject who has already gone beyond it.”29 Moreover, reiterating the Hegelian distinction between substance and subject, he observes that the “nothing” behind the curtain is actually the fact that there is nothing to conceal for the subject itself. In other words, at the level of substance the appearance is simply deceiving, it offers us a false image of the Essence; whereas at the level of the subject the appearance deceives precisely by pretending to deceive—by feigning that there is something to be concealed. It conceals the fact that there is nothing to conceal: it does not feign to tell the truth when it is lying, it feigns to lie when it is actually telling the truth—that is, it deceives by pretending to deceive.30

In a subsequent session in the same Seminar XI titled “What is a Picture?” Lacan comes back to the tale of Zeuxis and Parrhasios and the problem of trompe-l’oeil by referring to Plato’s protest against the illusion of painting. He says: It is here that this little story becomes useful in showing us why Plato protests against the illusion of painting. The point is not that painting gives an illusory equivalence to the object, even if Plato seems to be saying this. The point is that the trompe-l’oeil of painting pretends to be something other than what it is. What is it that attracts and satisfies us in trompe-l’oeil? When is it that it captures our attention and delights us? At the moment when, by a mere shift of our gaze, we are able to realize that the representation does not move with the gaze and that it is merely a trompe-l’oeil. . . . The picture does not compete with appearance, it competes with what Plato designates for us beyond appearance as being the Idea. It is because the picture is the appearance that says it is that which gives appearance that Plato attacks painting, as if it were an activity competing with his own.31

This takes us directly to the problem of “appearance,” both in the basic philosophical sense and, more particularly, in the way it emerges in the passage from Kant to Hegel that Žižek develops in his recent and terrifyingly thick book, Less Than Nothing, Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. Žižek makes his argument originate in Kant’s idea of the transcendental constitution of reality: “It was Kant who introduced the difference between ontic reality and its ontological horizon, the a priori network of categories which determines

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how we understand reality, what appears to us as reality.”32 To understand the radical nature of the Kantian philosophical revolution, according to Žižek, is to understand the difference between “Schien (appearance as illusion) and Erscheinung (appearance as phenomenon).”33 In pre-Kantian philosophy, Žižek tells us, appearance was conceived as illusion, and we had to go behind it to see how things are, what reality might lie beyond it, whether Platonic or Scientific. With Kant, however, appearance loses its privileged character: It designates the way things appear (are) to us in what we perceive as reality, and the task is not to denounce them as “mere illusory appearances” and to reach over them to transcend reality, but an entirely different one, that of discerning the conditions of possibility of this appearing of things, of their “transcendental genesis”: what does such an appearing presuppose, what must always-already have taken place for things to appear to us the way they do?34

Žižek suggests that although an “insurmountable abyss” may seem to separate Kant’s critical philosophy from his idealist successors, the basic coordinates constituting Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit are already present in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Concerning the metaphysical “transcendental illusion,” for example, Žižek notes that it depends on the prior existence of illusion itself: “this illusion must first exist.” This means that “here are necessary stages in the development of philosophy, that is, one cannot directly get at truth, one cannot begin with it, philosophy necessarily began with metaphysical illusions.”35 The core of philosophy, Žižek says, is precisely this passage from illusion to its unmasking. “True” philosophy “is no longer defined by its truthful explanation of the totality of being, but by successfully accounting for the illusions, that is, by explaining not only why illusions are illusions, but also why they are structurally necessary, unavoidable, and not just accidents.”36 After sufficiently explaining that the “system” of philosophy is not a “direct ontological structure of reality,” Žižek follows Dieter Henrich’s argument in Between Kant and Hegel by saying that this system is rather “a pure, complete system of all metaphysical statements and proofs” that necessarily engenders “antinomies” (contradictory conclusions). And that one can develop a coherent and consistent system of metaphysical system by looking through the illusion, which at the end is contradictory because of the fact that any coherent and consistent system of metaphysics is “inconsistent.” Žižek concludes that: The critical “system” is the systematic a priori structure of all possible/thinkable “errors” in their immanent necessity: where we get the end is not the Truth that overcomes/sublates the preceding illusions—the only truth is the inconsistent

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Adventures with the Theory of the Baroque and French Philosophy edifice of the logical interconnection of all possible illusions . . . is this not what Hegel did in his Phenomenology (and, on a different level, in his logic)? The only (but key) difference is that for Kant, this “dialogic” process of truth emerging as the critical denunciation of the preceding illusion belongs to the sphere of our knowledge and does not concern the noumenal reality which remains external and indifferent to it, while, in Hegel, the proper locus of this process is the Thing itself.37

Now we can return to the trompe-l’oeil and the curtain. In his earlier work, The Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek had argued that in his Phenomenology, Hegel posed a challenge to Kantian philosophy and his “obsessional economy.” I quote in full the relevant passage in Hegel that Žižek partially cites: The inner world, or supersensible beyond, has, however, come into being: it comes from the world of appearance which has mediated it; in other words, appearance is its essence and, in fact, its filling. The supersensible is the sensuous and the perceived posited as it is in truth; but the truth of the sensuous and the perceived is to be appearance. The supersensible is therefore appearance qua appearance. . . . It is often said that the supersensible world is not appearance; but what is here understood by appearance is not appearance, but rather the sensuous world as itself the really actual.38

Žižek asks, “But what is hidden behind the phenomenal appearance?” His Hegelian response is “Precisely the fact that there is nothing to hide. What is concealed is the very act of concealing nothing.”39 Is the supersensible then a simple trompe-l’oeil, Žižek asks? “With Hegel, we should never immediately oppose the state of things as ‘we’ see it to the viewpoint of the erroneous consciousness. If there is deception we cannot subtract it from the Thing; it constitutes its very heart. . . . The illusion that there is something behind the curtain is thus a reflexive one: what is hidden behind the appearance is the possibility of this very illusion—behind the curtain is the fact that the subject thinks something must be behind it. The illusion, albeit ‘false,’ is effectively located in the empty place behind the curtain—the illusion has opened a place where it is possible, an empty space that it fills out—where the ‘illusory reality,’ reduplicating the external, factual reality, could find its proper place.”40 If these reflections show that the Baroque also poses philosophical problems for thought beyond those that Egginton had touched upon, they also point to his main failing. By neglecting to posit the subject in the empty space behind the curtain, Egginton’s reflections on the relation between appearance and Truth remain within the limits of Kantian epistemology. Today, however, we clearly

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occupy a post-Kantian space, in which the time of a break of the Event in the order of being is immanent to reality, and where the condition of possibility of thought is a new thought of “transcendentally constituted phenomenal reality.”41 Finally, the baroque is discussed here, first and foremost, at the intersection of contemporary radical philosophy and psychoanalytical theory. Of the three thinkers I discuss—Deleuze, Badiou, and Lacan—it should be said that Badiou, unlike the other two, never wrote anything directly about the baroque. He only made a passing reference to it in his Ethics, as we will see, in the context of his discussion of “situation” and “truth procedure” in art.42 In fact, it is rather to Slavoj Žižek, a philosophical friend of Badiou whose thought has certain undeclared affinities with the Baroque—such as his repeated references to the notion of “anamorphosis” and his idea of the “parallax view”—to whom I often refer in this book. In respect to Deleuze and Lacan, Badiou— as is well known, has called the latter his “master,” while posing a formidable challenge to the former as his philosophical rival and “friend,” notably in his Deleuze, The Clamor of Being.43 Here, Deleuzian thinking is described as “the thought of One” and the “Platonism of virtual.” At the same time, however, Badiou rescues Deleuze from the received doxa of Angelo-American academic circles, including their architecture departments, which, obfuscated by his early collaborations with his friend Félix Gauttari, have made him a champion of “free flux,” “anarchic desire and experimentation,” and so on. Badiou’s critique of this, as Louis Burchill has pointed out, “encompasses no less decisively the depiction that is (still) often proffered by English-language readers of Deleuze as refusing all systematicity, as resolutely breaking with the ‘the metaphysical tradition,’ and a completely unconcerned by questions of such a ‘classical’ ilk as those, for example, of transcendental condition or ontology.”44 In the same vein, mention should be made of two other important books that develop Badiou’s critique of Deleuze: Žižek’s Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences, and Peter Hallward’s Out of This World, Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation.45 I have benefited from these texts in making my case against critics and writers in the field of architecture who have uncritically recycled received opinions on Deleuzian philosophy. Badiou is, therefore, present on multiple levels in various philosophical arguments I have advanced in this book. Concerning my critique of architecture linked to the (neo)baroque problematic, I must make it clear that I am not concerned with the historical Baroque architecture of the seventeenth century per se, but rather with a critique of the total state of contemporary architecture that I put under the category of the “neobaroque” and its aesthetic ideology—a term that, following Egginton, must be taken entirely in negative

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sense as a sign of total decline. As I argue in the final part of this book, I consider the “artistic will” of contemporary architecture to mark a complete retreat from the intellectual and structural sources of rationalism. A last point concerns the first chapter, which, while following this introduction, is still in some sense an introductory exposé of the philosophical foundation on which my theorization of the baroque is based. It also offers an overview of variations on the theme of the baroque and neobaroque that will be taken up more fully in the later chapters.

1

Excursus: Variations on the Theme of Baroque Theory and Philosophy

In the preface to his book The Adventure of French Philosophy, Alain Badiou speaks of the second half of twentieth century as “French philosophy’s moment,” which he compares with two other foundational moments in Western philosophy: classical Greece and German Idealism, with Kant, Hegel, Fichte, and Schelling. He says that the “unity” of the French moment—like that of its German predecessor— is based on the “adventure of the concept.” This unity, he adds, is nevertheless divided between two lines of thought. On the one hand, it is the “philosophy of life” and on the other, the “philosophy of the concept,” a division he traces back to the early twentieth century.1 The line of Life begins with Henry Bergson, whose philosophy of “vital interiority” consists in “a thesis on the identity of being and thought; a philosophy of life and change.”2 This line persisted throughout the twentieth century up to and including Gilles Deleuze. On the other hand, the line of the Concept, based on the formal category of “axiomatic formalization,” goes back to Leon Brunschvicg’s work and to the philosophy of mathematics. Its main claim is “the possibility of a philosophical formalism of thought and of the symbolic.” Badiou traces its development through the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Louis Althusser, and Jacques Lacan.3 As Bruno Bosteels notes, this division is ultimately between “mathematics or organicism, geometry or biology, the set or the fold,” adding that “such would be—according to Badiou—the forms taken by the recurrent alternative that now seems to traverse the entire history of thought, up and including the contemporary moment.”4 For Badiou, the dialectical character of this unity and its division are reflected in a fundamental conflict over the question of the subject. He writes: At stake in any such discussion is the question of the human subject, for it is here that the two orientations coincide. At once a living organism and a creator of concepts, the subject is interrogated both with regard to its interior, animal, organic life, and in terms of its thought, its capacity for creativity and abstraction.

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Adventures with the Theory of the Baroque and French Philosophy The relationship between body and idea, or life and concept, formulated around the question of the subject, thus structures the whole development of twentiethcentury French philosophy from the initial opposition between Bergson and Brunschvicg onwards.5

In this study, I will return several times to this question of the subject. Here, it is important to point out that besides the problem of the subject, central to the line of the concept is the “universal aim of reason,” to which is assigned the name of “being” that expresses the very nature of thought that ultimately goes back to Parmenides’s union between Thought and Being. In this line of thinking, both psychoanalysis and Jacques Lacan loom large. As Badiou points out, at this moment in French philosophy, the whole discussion is between philosophy and psychoanalysis.6 Later on, I will argue that, based on this conflicting orientation in French philosophy, two different theorizations of the philosophical baroque may be developed, issuing either from Gilles Deleuze, or—more closely aligned with Badiou’s position—from Jacques Lacan’s “anti-philosophy.” Deleuze published Le Pli: Leibniz et le baroque (translated into English in 1993 as The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque) in 1988.7 One crucial statement in this influential text sets the tone for the critique that I will be developing in present work. Toward the end of the book, Deleuze wrote: “If the Baroque has often been associated with capitalism, it is because the Baroque is linked to a crisis of property, a crisis that appears at once with the growth of new machines in the social field and the discovery of new living beings in the organism.”8 This statement is characteristic of the organic vitalism of Deleuze’s philosophy and of the “line of Life” that, according to Badiou, represents one of the main poles of contemporary French philosophy. Although Deleuze’s attempt to associate the historical Baroque with capitalism is notable, it is, in a rather different sense, in line with Marxian-Lacanian theory that I will try to define the relation between capitalism and the Baroque. Indeed, if the Baroque, according to Deleuze, is linked to a “crisis of property,” it is hard to see such a phenomenon as unrelated to the extraction of surplus by capitalism. Similarly, the Marxian notion of “surplus value” cannot be easily disjoined from its homologous notion, within Lacanian theory, of “surplus-jouissance.” To the extent that the Baroque does reflect a crisis, it would emerge in the valorization of the entropic surplus-jouissance within capitalism, a force that in the libidinal economy of late capitalism transmutes the historical baroque sublime into “Repressive Desublimation.”9 Moreover, insofar as the link between the development of secular capitalism and the emergence of the baroque is structural, any critique of the baroque must necessarily pass through a critique of

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capitalism and its different configurations, both in terms of the historical Baroque and its transfiguration into the contemporary neo-baroque. This point will be brought to bear on the analysis (after Michel Foucault) of the “Classical Age” and the “Age of Reason” to which the Baroque belongs, as I show in Chapter 5. All this is quite at odds with Deleuze’s anti-Platonic, anti-Cartesian, and antiHegelian approach, as well as his hostility to dialectical thinking. As Badiou notes, Deleuze belongs to a category in twentieth-century French philosophy that is split over the Cartesian heritage. As he succinctly explains in the same preface cited above, In one sense, the post-war philosophical movement can be read as an epic discussion about the ideas and significance of Descartes, as the philosophical inventor of the category of the subject. Descartes was a theoretician both of the physical body—of an animal-machine—and of pure reflection. He was thus concerned with both the physics of phenomena and metaphysics of the subject. All the great contemporary philosophers have written on Descartes: Lacan usually raises the call for a return to Descartes, Sartre produces a notable text on the Cartesian treatment of liberty, Deleuze remains implacably hostile. In short, there are as many “Descartes” as there are French philosophers of the post-war period. Again, this origin yields a first definition of the French philosophical moment as a conceptual battle around the question of the subject.10

The same “conceptual battle” has yet to be waged, in the discourse of architecture, against an anti-Cartesian tendency (such as the currents issued from the “linguistic turn”), which, in assuming that questions of critical reason and subjectivity have been settled once and for all, have tended to assimilate critical philosophy with an uncritical agenda. Against them I invoke Lacan’s return to the cogito and to the questions surrounding the subject. Today, as Slavoj Žižek has noted, the “specter of the Cartesian subject” haunts academia, which is in a “holy alliance” with the powers that be to exorcise it!11 He asks rhetorically: Where is the academic orientation which has not been accused by its opponents of not yet properly disowning the Cartesian heritage? And which has not hurled back the branding reproach of Cartesian subjectivity against its “radical” critics, as well as its “reactionary” adversaries?12

These tendencies extend well into architecture departments. In locating the origins of the baroque idea in the heritage of Cartesianism, I thus anticipate that the same accusations will be leveled against the present work. Why does this heritage matter? William Egginton has Cartesianism in mind when he foregrounds the notions of “theater” and poses the philosophical

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problem of the baroque in terms of the modernist critique of “the dissociationof-sensibility.” The source of the latter is Descartes’s famous division between the two “substances” of being manifested in the “thinking substance that looks out onto the world of extended substances.”13 Egginton argues that this division is central to the problematic of modern theater, which is played out between two spaces: appearance and reality, “the space of representation and the space of spectatorship.”14 For Egginton, a similar problematic can be found in Heinrich Wölfflin, the art historian credited as being the first to rescue the baroque as a positive art-historical concept. Egginton cites Wölfflin’s famous distinction between the painterly and the “corporeal” in his Renaissance and Baroque: If the beauty of a building is judged by the enticing effects of moving masses, the restless, jumping forms or violently swaying ones which seems constantly on the point of change, and not by balance and solidity of structure, then the strictly architectonic conception of architecture is depreciated. In short, the severe style of architecture makes its effect by what it is that is, by its corporeal substance, while painterly architecture acts through what it appears to be, that is, an illusion of movement.15

Wölfflin’s distinction between the “corporeal substance” and “illusion” is essential to Egginton’s understanding of the Baroque. Egginton notes, moreover, that “the language Wölfflin uses to characterize baroque architecture is precisely the language of dissociation, the language that pits appearance against corporeal substance.”16 As we will see, this problem can only arise if one assumes that the same “corporeal substance” can exist beyond and without its appearance—a point to which I return. For our present purposes, however, it is important to stress how, according to Egginton, “the play of appearances is very much the effect of the basic spatial configuration [of Baroque architecture] because baroque space produces an effect of depth on surfaces, just as theatrical space provokes the possibility of mise en abîme, where characters inhabit characters inhabiting characters.”17

“The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass” As soon as baroque artifacts are brought into the commodity relations of the spectacle, however, Egginton’s “play of appearances” becomes an object of manipulation. A case in point is the so-called “new architecture” of the contemporary neobaroque. Its flowing forms, however inauthentic, all go back

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to the image of the flawed pearl that is at the origin of the Portuguese barroco, the jeweler’s term meaning “rough or imperfect shaped pearl.”18At its origin, the word is said to be taken “from the syllogistic term baroco, the mnemonic name invented for the fourth mode of the second figure of formal logic, or from some other sources altogether.”19 The nature of this logically flawed and imperfect pearl is reflected in the characteristically baroque attributes of “ecstatic and dizzying,” “attractive” and “repulsive,” “emotive and moving.” Their effects on the spectator are said to be “erotic” or “disorienting.”20 All these attributes might be said to apply to the “formlessness” of contemporary figures in architecture, which, as soon as they enter into the discourse of culture, take an independent course that will of course demand its own broader social analysis. It is here, however, that the usual established academic categories in art and architectural history that are often deployed to explain the baroque as a “period concept” or “style” reveal themselves to be inadequate for the task.21 In this respect, Wölfflin’s landmark Renaissance and Baroque presents an exceptional case.22 Moreover, insofar as they unanimously oppose the Cartesian cogito and its Subject as the source of “trouble” in modernity, most of the theoretical and philosophical approaches developed in the last 40 years, from phenomenology to the hegemonic postmodernism, postsructuralism, and deconstruction, are equally suspect. In this study, I adopt the position that the proper analysis of the subject of the baroque must begin by acknowledging the internal contradiction of modernity as centered on dialectical antinomies of the Cartesian tradition as the source of Subjectivity and its inherent “excesses,” especially as they manifest themselves in the domain of Cartesian vision. As Slavoj Žižek has pointed out, “The point, of course, is not to return to the cogito in the guise in which this notion has dominated modern thought (the self-transparent thinking subject), but to bring to light its forgotten obverse, the excessive, unacknowledged kernel of the cogito, which is far from the pacifying image of the transparent Self.”23 From such a perspective, the Baroque appears as the excessive kernel of the modern cogito and its obverse underside. In short, far from rejecting the Subjectivity of modernist vision, I posit the Baroque as an optic that is immanent to the latter. To follow this orientation, one must abandon any aspiration simply to supersede the “Cartesian paradigm.” One must instead approach the baroque with a special eye for the interplay of subject and object as well as for the baroque penchant for exaggeration. One way into such a path is suggested by Adorno’s complex but provocative aphorism: “The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass.”24 As Richard Leppert notes, this short aphorism mobilizes “a

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two-element constellation: eye, and magnifying glass used to improve seeing” into a single image of “a shattered lens whose shard is stuck in the eye,”25 with the result that it forces a new form of “seeing.” “Whereas the conventional usage of eye and magnifying glass combined as a tool is instrumental, in Adorno’s constellation, this usage is provoked, contradicted, and rendered paradoxical.” Hence, “seeing now is not a matter of optical mechanics but insight, the driving force behind which in this instance is pain, made more urgently by the metaphor’s strong affiliation with both somatic experience and, in essence, history.”26 I want to go further and say that the metaphor underlying Adorno’s aphorism might also be associated with Jacques Lacan’s notion of the “separation between the gaze and the eye,” in which the “gaze” is the objet petit a, the “object-cause of desire.”27 The conjunction of the “magnifying glass” with the “splinter in the eye” would thus be an immanent feature of Baroque vision, which, in the Subject’s scopic field, causes it to crack and become a split subject, the proper subject of psychoanalysis; Lacan marks this as $, and the Subject of the Baroque is thus a split subject. Futhermore, if, as Žižek notes, the core of the split Subject is already present in the Cartesian subject, then the Subject of the Baroque must also be recognized as the underlying condition—or the dialectical “exception”—for the universal vision of modernity. The subject of the baroque produces a surplus. This surplus is the “madness” in the Cartesian subject, it is its excess—what Christine Buci-Glucksmann, as we shall see later on, names the “madness of vision” or the dialectical contradiction internal to modernity. Such a perspective has the advantage of situating the Baroque in its historical context (as a term for an antagonistic vision). It also enables one to “see” behind the apparatus of Baroque vision, understanding how it rests on the principles of Cartesian vision yet at the same time shatters its dominant “geometric perspectivalism.” Martin Jay makes a similar point when he describes the “scopic regime” of modernity.28 The term itself is borrowed, significantly, from the Lacanian film theorist Christian Metz.29 For Jay, baroque vision marks the “second moment of an unease” within Cartesian “ocular” perspectivalism—after seventeenthcentury Dutch art, exemplified by Vermeer. Like the latter, Baroque vision is the repressed dimension of perspectivalism. He notes further that “if there is a philosopher correlate to the Northern art, it is not Cartesianism with its faith in a geometricalized, rationalized, essentially intellectual concept of space, but rather the more empirical visual experience of observationally oriented Baconian empiricism.”30 Citing the work of Buci-Glucksmann, he characterizes

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Baroque vision as a “dazzling, disorienting, ecstatic surplus of the monocular geometricalization of the Cartesian tradition, with its illusion of homogeneous three-dimensional space seen with a God’s-eye-view from afar.”31 Consistent with this is the dependence of the Baroque on the “materiality of the medium of reflection,” the same materiality to which Rodolphe Gasché refers with his notion of “the tain of the mirror.”32 In either case, baroque visual experience “has a strongly tactile or haptic quality, which prevents it from turning into the absolute ocularcentrism of its Cartesian perspectivalist rival.”33 As many commentators have noticed, Baroque vision is grounded in the conservative seventeenth-century Catholic Counter-Reformation culture and in the absolutist state, both of which made good use of it to manipulate the public. In both, the culture of “spectacle” is based on the recognition of “the inextricability of the rhetoric of vision,” which means that all images are signs, and that all concepts contain an irreducibly imagistic component.34 Jay appropriately mentions the Spanish Baroque historian José Antonio Maravall, to whose work I will come back in a later chapter, who warned darkly that the “phantasmagoria of baroque spectacle was easily used to manipulate those who were subjected to it.”35 It is, by the way, Maravall who argued that the category of the Baroque should be considered a “historical structure” rather than merely a stylistic category.36

A re-turn or repetition? The so-called “re-turn” of the Baroque to the scene of contemporary culture enacts a dialectics of repetition. According to Freudian-Lacanian theory, the eruption of an event in its first occurrence is experienced as a contingent trauma, an unsymbolized intrusion of the Real; it is only through its repetition that the same event is integrated into the symbolic order, and contingency is turned into necessity.37 Thus the recurring eruption of the Baroque in the tradition of modernity, from the early twentieth century to its “re-turn” today, retroactively gives meaning to an “original” event, which, in a strictly symbolic sense, never existed as such. Yet, the contemporary baroque shares one fundamental element with its first occurrence in the seventeen century: Both serve as fantasy structures for the epochs that brought them into being. The origin of opera as the Baroque art par excellence can help to understand the manifestations of the Baroque in architecture and other art forms. Historically,

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opera stood at the transition between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, marked by the rise of modern science, the growth of the middle class or bourgeoisie, and the structure of modern subjectivity theorized by Descartes.38 Through opera, architecture and the arts developed the fantasy structure of the new epoch—a good 200 years before the French Revolution and in close alliance with the rise of the absolutist state. Indeed, as Mladen Dolar perceptively notes, the intimate connection between the baroque and the concentrated power of the aristocracy, the court, and the king is particularly apparent in the way the Baroque, as he puts it, “grew up imbuing absolutism, and thus it is a miniature model of it, its homegrown fantasy.”39 In much the same way, we could say that the contemporary neobaroque also constructs a fantasy structure—not in support of a king but rather of a different system of power, which is that of neoliberal “democratic” capitalism and the culture industry. More generally, it can be claimed that each time the culture of modernity is forced to confront its innermost “fantasmatic kernel,” that is to say, the impossible excessive object gaping in its midst, it is the “Baroque” that erupts at its core. Historically, the paradox of absolutism, as Dolar puts it, “is that it is a compromise formation caught in the contradiction between form and content.”40 In form, absolutism is the embodiment of the fading feudal master, with its coupling of the sun king and state in a divine mission and its ever more elaborate court and pomp in an age of decline. In content, it marks the rise of the Enlightenment, “of autonomous subjectivity along with the unstoppable ascent of the bourgeois order, and the formation of bourgeois social, economic, and cultural structures.”41 Hence, as Dolar notes, “The revolution occurring two centuries later will only have to discard the form, to cast away the shell, since the actual battle had already been won within the very brilliance of the absolutist state.”42 Within this struggle, the Baroque stands on the side of form, providing the ideological legitimacy and the fantasy representations necessary to support an increasingly delegitimated power structure—much as the neo-Baroque does today. To the extent that the reemergence of the Baroque has something of a compulsive repetition about it, it is important, however, to underscore its difference from historical precedents in the seventeenth century—a difference in the nature and quality of the categorical imperative that underlies it. As Egginton observes, referencing Lacan’s concept of repetition, the subject of the baroque is bound to “reenact the loss of the primordial object, in the hopes of recovering a loss of jouissance.”43 Hence, the mystical experience exemplified in

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Bernini’s famous figure of Saint Teresa is conceivable only in the context of the “prohibition” that, through the symbolic law of the sociopolitical order of the seventeenth century, made access to jouissance possible. Today, however, access to jouissance is blocked, paradoxically, by what Todd McGowan describes as an excessive “command to enjoy.”44 Thus, if the Baroque culture in the seventeenth century regulated enjoyment through an injunction of prohibition by symbolic authority—if seventeenth-century society, to put it simply, was based on a “prohibition of enjoyment”—in today’s culture of the spectacle, “imaginary enjoyment” replaces enjoyment in the real. The decline of “symbolic” authority in the culture of late capitalism determines a shift in the “regime of enjoyment” from prohibition to a (no-less authoritarian) excessive command to enjoy. Thus, one salient feature of contemporary neobaroque architecture and culture is what we might call a “commanded enjoyment.” To approach the baroque in this way is to reject the linear historical narratives that still dictate a large part of the relevant literature. Thus, for example, Gregg Lambert in his The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture presents the Baroque as the symptomatic principle of the exhaustion of “modernity.” He writes that the baroque occupies the exact “middle” of modernity, “in the sense that it can be understood to recur historically precisely in the moment when one tradition of modernity exhausts its own possibilities and transitions into another, and even as the symptomatic principle of this exhaustion.”45 Such a definition, however, relies on postmodernism’s own and highly questionable notion of the modern as a historically developmental “stage.” In contrast to such readings that center on the breaks or continuities within a single historical narrative, Jacques Rancière has proposed an aesthetic and rational conception of “postmodernism”—valid as well for the neo-baroque—as the disillusioned recognition of inconsistency of the modernist paradigm, as “the weary version of anti-aesthetic spleen.”46 From Rancière’s perspective, therefore, postmodern or neobaroque aestheticism would be the name of a regression, a refusal to come to terms with the “modernist break.” As we shall see further on, a similar critique can be made of various other contemporary definitions of the baroque and neo-baroque.47

Which baroque theory? After Walter Benjamin’s landmark study of the baroque, two prominent but diametrically opposed interpretations of the baroque appeared in the second

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half of the twentieth century. The first, which, in chronological order, comes second, is Gilles Deleuze’s influential The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. This book has now become something of a cult classic and a major reference in many philosophical discussions of the idea of the baroque—including especially in the field of architectural theory, where, as already noted, it has been used repeatedly to promote the spread of neobaroque forms in the so-called “new architecture,” which will be critiqued in Part III of this work. The second interpretation is Lacan’s, which, unlike Deleuze’s, and partly because of its conceptual difficulty, has—with a few notable exceptions—escaped the attention of architectural theorists and critics.48 Lacan, who admired the early work of Deleuze, especially The Logic of Sense, never wrote a separate book on the subject of the baroque. Aside from the session dedicated to the baroque in the Seminar XX, Encore,49 mentioned above, the main place where he addresses the baroque is in his earlier Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, especially in the chapters “Marginal Comments” and “Courtly Love as Anamorphosis.”50 Since Lacan’s ideas on the baroque are less well known, a separate chapter of this book is dedicated to them. Apart from this analysis, a good part of the present study is devoted to the explication of Lacan’s orientation in critical theory. As noted above, within French philosophy, such an orientation belongs to Badiou’s “conflicting line” of the Concept, which in turn goes back to the division between Descartes and Spinoza. This division, today, takes the form of a conflict between DescartesLacan and contemporary Deleuzian “Neo-Spinozism”—although certain Spinozian themes do inflect, without determining them, Lacan’s own positions.51 Thus a Lacanian orientation in critical theory must necessarily confront certain aspects of Deleuzean philosophy52 and from this vantage point also criticize the use (or misuse) of Deleuze by architectural critics to promote the alleged “new architecture.”

“A Triumph of the Gaze over the Eye”: Baroque and anamorphosis In the introduction, I claimed that Lacan’s remark at the end of his narration of the tale of Zeuxis and Parrhasios, “A triumph of the gaze over the eye,” could be understood as describing the very essence of the baroque. I want now to support this claim in more detail. Baroque vision, as we have seen, is constituted by a

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separation or split manifested at the level of the “scopic field.” Baroque vision is this split. The first step in any discussion of the baroque vision must start with Lacan’s discovery of this division in the Subject (a notion memorably illustrated in the charming personal story when, in the company of some local fishermen, Lacan went out to sea in Brittany).53 It must then proceed to the notion most representative of this split modality of vision, anamorphosis, as Hanneke Grootenboer has done in her remarkable The Rhetoric of Perspective. For Grootenboer, “the baroque eye can be defined as an anamorphic gaze.”54 Grootenboer also mentions Buci-Glucksmann’s definition of anamorphosis as “an allegory of Vision with a capital V, an allegorical picture of Vision’s ‘longuevue,’ which functions as representative for baroque aesthetics.”55 Grootenboer goes on to vividly describe how “typical for anamorphosis as well as for all baroque forms are instability and chaotic deformations that almost but not quite become catastrophic. These apparently imbalanced compositions nevertheless remain highly structured.”56 In other words, they retain a duality that BuciGlucksmann, as we will see, describes as a fundamental “double vision.” According to Grootenboer, moreover, the dualism within the baroque form, resulting from the fact that in spite of its chaotic appearance, it is secretly structured, is a psychic structure “circumscribing the unconscious of the baroque gaze.” As he puts it, echoing Lacan’s thesis of the linguistic structure of the unconscious, if there is an unconscious in baroque anamorphosis, it must be “structured like perspective.” Central to this reading is Lacan’s capital discovery (ironically made not by an art or architectural historian but by a psychoanalyst)—more than 500 years since Brunelleschi’s “invention” of perspective and its theorization by Leon Battista Alberti (in Della pitura [On Painting], 1436)—of the “blind spot” or “lack” inherent in perspectival geometric space—an absence generated by the Gaze, such that within the scopic field, not everything is given to be seen. Of course Lacan was not interested in art criticism or in the art-historical implications of his remarks. As Joan Copjec notes, his overriding concern was with the role of the drive in the constitution of the subject’s scopic field—a role that seemed to be exemplified in Renaissance perspective.57 As the expression of a scopic drive, Renaissance perspective entangled a perspectiva artificialis (artificial perspective) with perspectiva naturalis (natural perspective).58 In Lacan’s analysis, in the structure of perspective (the two intersecting visual pyramids of the Albertian schema) the “geometral point,” which is the point of perspective where “the institution of the Cartesian subject” is located (i.e., the apex of the cone of vision

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occupied by the viewing eye)—overlaps with “the point of light” of the Gaze emanating from the outside. To put it succinctly, the Gaze erupts in Renaissance perspective. The latter places the viewer “in the picture,” as Lacan says, “I am in the picture,” as someone who, in Lacan’s words, is “photo-graphed.” Lacan: “I must, to begin with, insist on the following: in the scopic field, the gaze is outside, I am looked at, that is to say, I am a picture. . . . Hence, it comes about that the gaze is the instrument through which light is embodied and through which—if you will allow me to use a word, as I often do, in a fragmented form—I am photo-graphed.”59 Once the two triangles or cones of vision, that is, the Albertian perspective and trompe-l’oeil perspective, are analytically superimposed on each other, the result is the overlap of “image” and “picture plane” in Alberti’s theory of painting, what Lacan names the screen—“The screen is here the locus of mediation”—which enables seeing.60 Thus Lacan, more astutely than many a student of art and architecture, reads Vitruvius and Renaissance treatises on perspective from Alberti to Vignola, symptomatically as signaling the human desire already inscribed in the structure of perspective.61 Moreover, Lacan says that “in as much as the picture enters into a relation to desire, the place of a central screen is always marked, which is precisely that by which, in front of the picture, I am elided as subject of the geometral plane.”62 What must not be missed here is that it is precisely at this point that a crack has already opened in the Cartesian cogito and in the selfcentered autonomous Subject. Hence, perspective at its origin manifests itself as a “separator” between what Grootenboer nicely describes as “the appearance of reality and the reality of appearance.”63 Grootenboer explains, “There has never been just one perspective, but there have always been two. Perspectiva artificialis (or accidentale as Leonardo suggested) and perspectiva naturalis have always been distinguished as two separate sides of the same coin. Yet in art history the latter tends to be underestimated, having been reduced to the point of view. Perspectiva naturalis, ‘our’ perspective, is evidently invisible, while actually it is the primary condition of perspectiva artificialis to remain invisible.”64 One is now in a better position to understand in what sense Baroque vision can be regarded as the “triumph” of the anamorphic gaze. As noted in the introduction, the truth of picture resides in its illusion, in its deceptive image, called trompe-l’oeil. This trompe-l’oeil depicts the object in such a way that the distinction between reality and representation is beyond the viewer’s perception. “The moment we are snared by the trompe-l’oeil’s lure, we enter a realm of illusion that forces itself upon us as truth, whose artificiality we detect belatedly.”65 At the

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same time, however, the picture enacts a “taming of the gaze” for which Lacan has coined a phrase, dompte-regard, “that is to say, that he who looks is always led by the painting to lay down his gaze,” save for “expressionism,” which, as Lacan reminds his audience, is a direct appeal to the gaze.66 So “dompte-regard is also presented in the form of trompe-l’oeil.”67 Baroque vision, viewed from this perspective, can indeed become a properly philosophical vision if such a vision is grounded in what I have called a Platonic-Hegelian-Lacanian genealogical line of aesthetic thinking, which, in its most recent and radical manifestation, insists on seeing Plato and Hegel as “materialists.” Especially relevant here is Žižek, for whom “Plato is the first in a series of philosophers (Descartes and Hegel being the two main others) who fell out of favor in the twentieth century, being blamed for all our misfortune.”68 For Žižek, Lacan’s Gaze, as the objet petit a, is nothing less than “the name for the ultimate unity of opposites in Plato.” He goes on to recommend that, if in the early 1920s, “Lenin proposed that Marxist philosophers should form a ‘society of the materialist friends of Hegel’—today, perhaps, the time has come for radical philosophers to form a ‘society of the materialist friends of Plato.’” This study of “baroque theory” as a “theory of critique” (see below) is but a small contribution to this society, which echoes the “society of materialist friends” that formed around Lacan in the 1960s. Returning to the notion of anamorphosis and to elucidate further Lacan’s concept of the gaze, an exemplary case in painting is The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein (1533). In reference to this famous work, Lacan mentions the landmark study by Jurgis Baltrusaitis on Anamorphic Art, published in 1955 under the original title Anamorphosis, ou Thaumaturgus opticus,69 in the 1984 reedition, to which Baltrusaitis explicitly acknowledged the contribution of psychoanalysis.70 Lacan asks “But what is the gaze”? His reply: “In the scopic relation, the object on which depends the phantasy from which the subject is suspended in essential vacillation is the gaze.”71 Referring to Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, he further states that when I encounter the gaze, it is not as a seeing gaze, “but a gaze imagined in the field of the Other.”72 And, as if to underscore how the domain of vision has been integrated into the field of desire, he says (referring to the “geometral” mapping space as opposed to viewing): “It is not for nothing that it was at the very period when the Cartesian meditation inaugurated in all its purity the function of the subject that the dimension of optics that I shall distinguish here by calling ‘geometral’ or ‘flat’ (as opposed to perspective) optics was developed.”73 He then recommends Baltrusaitis’s book to his audience and

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refers it to Holbein’s The Ambassadors. The latter is the first documented case of anamorphotic depiction, from the Greek morphe meaning “form” and the prefix ana-, which can be translated as dis-, the term meaning “distortion” or “that which lacks a proper shape.”74 Here two ambassadors of François I are standing beside a table filled with scientific, artistic, and musical instruments of the time—all of them, we are meant to understand, symbols of the vanitas of life. The exact and clear frontal view is only disturbed by what seems to lie on the floor as an amorphous phallus-shaped object disturbing the neat organization of painting. The latter’s true nature becomes apparent only when the viewer leaves the room from the right-side door in the National Gallery where it is now hanging; viewing the painting from an oblique angle suddenly exposes the contours of that obscure object to be those of a human skull. As Lacan remarks, stressing the unexpected contrasts, This is not how it is presented at first—that figure, which the author compares to a cuttlebone and which for me suggests rather that loaf composed of two books which Dali was once pleased to place on the head of an old woman, chosen deliberately for her wretched, filthy appearance and, indeed, because she seems to be unaware of the fact, or, again, Dali’s soft watches, whose signification is obviously less phallic than that of the object depicted in a flying position in the foreground of this picture.75

In reality, as Lacan repeatedly states, the painting is “a trap for the gaze.” Holbein, he says, represents nothing less than the annihilation of the subject, “which, for us, centers the whole organization of desires through the framework of the fundamental drives.” This annihilation is the heart of the baroque vision—a destructive critical drive that aspires rightfully to the dignity of “theory.”

From “Looking Awry” to the “Parallax View” In Looking Awry, Slavoj Žižek cites the following lines from Shakespeare’s Richard II: Bushy: each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows, Which shows like grief itself, but are not so. For sorrow’s eyes, glazed with blinding tears, Divides one thing entire to many objects; Like perspectives, which rightly gaze’d upon Show nothing but confusion; ey’d awry

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Distinguished form: so your sweet majesty, Looking awry upon your lord’s departure, Finds shapes of grief more than himself to wail; Which, look’d on as it is, is nought but shadows Of what is not. Then, thrice-gracious queen, More than your lord’s departure weep not: more’s not seen; Or of it be, ‘its with false sorrow’s eye, Which for things true weeps things imaginary.76

When looked at frontally, except for the amorphous object causing confusion in the foreground, everything in Holbein’s painting is organized logically and with scientific precision. In order to make a sense of the object, one must look at the picture from at an angle, anamorphotically (from the right), to “see” the skull, the death symbol, the vanitas, while the rest of the picture becomes distorted out of its structured perspective. Žižek applies a similar metaphor of anamorphosis in his reading of Shakespeare’s lines: “Bushy tries to convince the Queen that her sorrow has no foundation, that its reasons are null.”77 At first sight, the fact that “sorrow’s eye . . . divides one thing entire to many objects” recalls the mechanism of Holbein’s painting, “like perspective which rightly gaz’d upon show nothing but confusion; ey’d awry distinguish form,” but Žižek asserts that what is accomplished here “is a radical change of terrain—from the metaphor of a sharpened glass surface to the metaphor of anamorphosis, the logic of which is quite different: a detail of a picture that ‘gaze’d rightly,’ i.e., straightforwardly, appears as a blurred spot, assumes clear, distinguished form once we look at it ‘awry’, or at an angle.”78 So with the Queen’s anamorphotic gaze, “we are obliged to state that precisely by ‘looking awry,’ that is, at an angle, she sees the thing in its clear and distinct form, in opposition to the ‘straightforward’ view that sees only an indistinct confusion.”79 Žižek explains: If we look at thing straight on, matter-of-fact, we see it “as it really is,” while the gaze puzzled by our desires and anxieties (“looking awry”) gives us a distorted, blurred image. On the level of second metaphor, however, the relation is exactly the opposite: if we look at a thing straight on, i.e., matter-of-factly, disinterestedly, objectively, we see nothing but a formless spot; the object assumes clear and distinctive features only if we look at it “at an angle,” i.e., with an “interested” view, supported, permeated, and “distorted” by Desire.”80

The affinities that this manner of “looking awry” has with Adorno’s “the splinter in the eyes” discussed above are striking. But while neither Adorno nor Žižek, for that matter, mentions the Baroque, Jacques Lacan does, and in a way that recalls Walter Benjamin’s idea of the Baroque as “allegorical perspective”.

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(I will discuss this point more in detail in a later chapter). Here, I want to claim that both phenomena mentioned above, as having their basis in anamorphic perspectival vision, are in essence already part of the phenomenon of the Baroque. Moreover, as soon as this point of view is thematized in the field of the arts (painting, sculpture, architecture, and literature), it must also be allowed to enter the discourse of philosophy, theory, the “political,” and “ideology critique.” This means that from its original birthplace in the seventeenth century, the Baroque should enter contemporary theory as a universal mode of “vision” and a way of looking at “reality.” Thus elevated to a “philosophical theory,” it can also be separated from the sedimented accumulation of meanings that have accrued to it over the last 300 years of art history. Seen in this way, within the traditions of both “immanent” and “transcendental critiques,”81 the category of the “baroque” emerges as a critical and philosophical theory in sharp contrast with its mode of entry into the contemporary discourse of architecture. Of special relevance here is the idea of the “Parallax View” advanced recently by Kojin Karatani and—in a qualified way—by Žižek.82 In his landmark Transcritique: On Marx and Kant, Karatani takes the term pronounced parallax from Kant’s early work, Dreams of a Visionary,83 in which philosophical “reflections” of the past were described as “optical delusions.” Kant’s “pronounced parallax” served to view human common sense from the view of the other, or from the position of an other’s reason outside that of the subject. As Karatani notes, “This Kantian reflection as a critique of reflection is engendered by a ‘pronounced parallax’ between the subjective viewpoint and the objective viewpoint.”84 Karatani resorts to using the example of the camera and photography, which of course did not exist in Kant’s time. Thus, while reflection is always related to seeing one’s image in the mirror, photography as an image (and as an optical delusion) looks relentlessly “objective.” “What counts then is the ‘pronounced parallax’ between the mirror image and photographic image.”85 Kant’s revolution in philosophy, Karatani suggests, lies in his shift away from the “introspective” framework of philosophy. “Here one can observe the attempt to introduce an objectivity (qua otherness) that is totally alien to the conventional space of introspection = mirror.”86 Thus, Karatani notes, the “pronounced parallax” is linked to the Kantian notion of antinomy, “which exposes the fact that both thesis and antithesis are nothing more than ‘optical delusions’.”87 In The Parallax View, Žižek extends Karatani’s term to the “parallax gap.” He points out that “parallax” is another name for the fundamental antinomy, “which can never be dialectically ‘mediated/sublated’ into a higher synthesis.”88 Žižek’s

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concern is to expand on the term by relating it to the Hegelian dialectic in order to rehabilitate the philosophy of dialectical materialism. He quotes the standard definition of the term “parallax”: “the apparent displacement of an object (the shift of its position against a background), caused by a change in observational position that provides a new line of sight.”89 The crucial point in this definition is that, as Žižek makes it clear, the observed difference is not simply a “subjective” one. “It is rather that, as Hegel would have put it, subject and object are inherently ‘mediated,’ so that an ‘epistemological’ shift in the subject’s point of view always reflects an ‘ontological’ shift in the object itself.”90 Significantly for my argument, Žižek relates this point immediately to the Lacanian doctrine, key to model of baroque vision constructed above, that the subject’s gaze is always-already inscribed into the perceived object in the guise of its “blind spot,” that which is “in the object more than the object itself,” or as he puts it more precisely, “the point from which the object itself returns the gaze.”91 Žižek cites Lacan’s statement from the Seminar XI discussed above: “Sure, the picture is in my eye, but I am also in the picture.”92 And, most significantly, he expands on and elucidates Lacan’s definition, which, interestingly enough, brings it closer to Adorno’s aphorism mentioned in the beginning. Žižek explains that “the first part of Lacan’s statement designates subjectivization, the dependence of reality on its subjective constitution; while the second part provides a materialist supplement, reinscribing the subject into his own image in the guise of a stain (the objectivized splinter in its eye).”93 It is clear from these reflections that the notion of parallax view, or better, parallax gap, is closely linked to the lineage of ideas under which the Baroque vision has been traditionally discussed. Indeed, the term parallax would seem to be, in an essential sense, a baroque idea. But more important for my purposes is the fact that, as Žižek demonstrates, it functions as a term of mediation that brings the Baroque into the philosophical discourse of materialism. As Žižek notes, “Materialism is not the direct assertion of my inclusion in objective reality (such an assertion presupposes that my position of enunciation is that of an external observer who can grasp the whole reality); rather, it resides in the reflexive twist by means of which I myself am included in the picture constituted by me—it is this reflexive short circuit, this necessary redoubling of myself as standing both outside and inside my picture, that bears witness to my ‘material existence’.”94 The baroque, I contend, is this material mediation. Furthermore, as neither Kant nor Adorno, Karatani nor Žižek ever mention the baroque by name, it is

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Lacan who, as we will see more in detail, must be regarded as the thinker of the baroque par excellence. From “anamorphic perspective” to the “splinter in the eye” to the “parallax view,” Lacan helps us to forge a doctrine of the baroque, as a mode of Vision within and against the dominant Cartesian tradition and Enlightenment reason.

The baroque and the neo-baroque: An overview In her essay titled “Becoming-Baroque,” which is devoted to the contribution of the Cuban novelist and cultural historian Alejo Carpentier to the New World Baroque, Monika Kaup characterizes the neobaroque as the “return” to or the “recovery” of the Baroque by twentieth-century intellectuals, writers, artists, and critics. What caused the “resuscitation” of the Baroque in postmodern culture, she claims, is the linking of the Baroque to the crisis of the Enlightenment and of instrumental reason.95 She explains further that “the twentieth-century crisis of the enlightenment rationality opens the way for the rediscovery of an earlier, alternate rationality and mode of thought (Baroque reason) that had been repressed and vilified as an aberration beginning in the eighteenth century and continuing through the nineteenth.”96 She further notes that idea of the modernity of the Baroque that was “rediscovered” by the writings of European and American writers in the early decades of twentieth century was a “response to the epistemological and religious crises of the Scientific Revolution and the Reformation.”97 As we will see in a later chapter, it was Buci-Glucksmann who first coined the provocative term “Baroque Reason”—which Kaup neglects to mention—based on her reading of Walter Benjamin’s works, who furthermore brought forth the aesthetics of the Baroque as the “madness of vision” and as an alternative “rationality.”98 Kaup rightly notes that the discussion of the Baroque begins with the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin, spreading in the 1920s and 1930s to the writings of Spengler, Worringer, the Catalan philosopher Eugenio d’Ors, and LatinAmerican writers and critics, namely Alejo Carpentier, Jose Lezama Lima, and Severo Sarduy, to mention the most important figures, some of whom we will revisit in later chapters. Kaup relies heavily on Gilles Deleuze’s notion of “minor strategy,” also picked up by Egginton as mentioned above, to advance the thesis about the particular case of New World Baroque. But in so doing, she puts Deleuze’s major work The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque in a simplified

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straightjacket—that of a “revindication” of the crisis of the Enlightenment project. Later, Kaup and Lois Parkinson Zamora edited a large informative compendium entitled Baroque New World, which includes excerpts by major European thinkers and art historians from the late nineteenth century to Latin-American writers and critics in the twentieth century.99 A fatal mistake by the editors in this otherwise useful book, however, is their categorization of Jacques Lacan as a “post-structuralist,” repeating a common doxa also found among other writers. Zamora previously had published his own large volume titled The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction. Here, Zamora discusses Oswald Spengler’s characterization of Cartesian mathematics in terms of the baroque style. Despite the many justified reservations one must have regarding Spengler’s work, this characterization resonates with the position I follow in this study. As Egginton aptly writes, discussing Deleuze’s alternative history of philosophy and challenging his anti-Cartesian stand, “we cannot agree that Descartes is to be disregarded in favor of models of baroque thought that are somewhat truer or closer to the mark, for Descartes’s formulation would have to be seen as responding to the same fundamental problem that provoked the thought of Spinoza and Leibniz, the painting of Velázquez and Caravaggio, or the architecture of Bernini and Neumann.”100 For Egginton, as we have seen, the fundamental problem concerns the complexity of the “theatrical space” in the baroque. In the end, according to Zamora, the neobaroque is rooted in LatinAmerican culture. But as we will see, there is a larger problem attached to the contemporary neobaroque term not exclusively limited to the counterconquest traditions of early-twentieth-century Latin-American baroque. There are two studies of the neo-Baroque that concern themselves particularly with contemporary culture. The first is Neo-Baroque, A Sign of the Times by Omar Calabrese, which first came out in Italian in 1987 and later in 1992 in English. The second is a well-informed text by Angela Ndalianis titled Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment, published in 2004.101 The latter covers an impressive amount of material and deals comprehensively with relevant literature on the Baroque through an extensive analysis of mass media, the entertainment industry, and technological culture as various instances of neobaroque aesthetics in contemporary culture. It also makes repeated references to the historical seventeenth-century Baroque in developing notions such as “polycentrism,” “seriality,” “hypertextuality,” “labyrinth,” and “trompe-l’oeil.” Both authors, Calabrese and Ndalianis, move to replace the term “postmodernism” with neobaroque as a more suitable term to explain

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the mutations in contemporary aesthetics and technological culture. In the introduction to her book, Ndalianis states In this book I argue that mainstream cinema and other entertainment media are imbued with a neo-baroque poetics. Points of comparison are identified between seventeenth-century baroque art and entertainment forms of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to establish continuous and contiguous links between the two eras. . . . It is suggested here that, as a result of technological, industrial, and economic transformations, contemporary entertainment media reflects a dominant neo-baroque logic. The neo-baroque shares a baroque delight in spectacle and sensory experiences.102

The notion that Baroque is a culture of “spectacle,” of course, is indebted to the work of the great Spanish historian José Antonio Maravall and his seminal Culture of Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure. Maravall was the first to bring up the notion of spectacle in the historical Baroque with reference to the “culture industry,” without, however, referring to Theodor Adorno. I come back to this issue in a later chapter on Adorno. It must be said from the outset, however, that the direct parallels Ndalianis draws between the seventeenthcentury Baroque and the contemporary neo-baroque are exaggerated and misplaced. They basically fail to spell out the fundamental differences between the historical Baroque and contemporary neobaroque culture—whose aesthetic effects are of a completely different order of magnitude as well as different in kind, especially as regards the psychopathological, not to say psychotic, effects on the subject. I will come back to this later on. Such misleading parallels derive from the failure of such studies to direct their analysis to the critique of the cultural logic of capitalism, which precludes any simple analogy between seventeenthcentury Baroque and today’s culture of “spectacle.” As Egginton rightly observes in his criticism of Ndalianis’s uncritical celebration of contemporary media technology, “By failing to distinguish between a critical aesthetic such as that minor strategy, and the major baroque strategy of subjection to an ever-deferred truth, Ndalianis effectively robs the Neobaroque of its disruptive potential.” Citing Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Capitalism, he remarks further, “For the very symptom of epistemological disruption she [Ndalianis] catalogues are all examples of a commercialized culture naturally selected, as it were, to construct us recipients in the image of the ideal consumer.”103 The few other books and shorts essays recently written on the subject of the baroque that are worth discussing, including Gregg Lambert’s The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture and Timothy Murray’s Digital Baroque, New

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Media Art and Cinematic Folds, will be addressed in due time in chapters of this book.104 Here, it is important to consider the vast art-historical literature on the Baroque dealing specifically with architecture and other arts—especially insofar as it conflicts with the theoretical perspective presented here. Of all these art-historical works, many of them following proper academic etiquette and in line with the groundbreaking work of Heinrich Wölfflin’s Renaissance and Baroque (published in 1888) and his later Principles of Art History (published in 1915), Robert Harbison’s Reflections on Baroque is in some way paradigmatic.105 Harbison provides extensive and often quite subtle explorations of various aspects of historical Baroque culture and art—in painting, literature, music, and architecture. It is only in Chapter 8, “Neo and Pseudo Baroque,” that he addresses the theoretical aspects of his subject matter—with disappointing results. Characteristically, after discussing Wölfflin, Harbison comes to Gilles Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque and laments that the third chapter, entitled “What Is Baroque?” does not deliver the promise that the art historian was waiting for! In different ways than other critics, architects, and writers in the discipline of architecture that I take to task in coming chapters, Harbison misses the philosophical weight of Deleuze’s work and fails in his assessment to take into account the necessary philosophical criteria needed to judge it—a failing for which, as we will see, Deleuze himself may be partly responsible. But this does not justify Harbison’s impatient simplification of Deleuze’s thesis or his lack of the most basic philosophical understanding required to read this text. He writes: “A concept is quickly introduced, the Fold, which will be obsessively reiterated but left doggedly undefined. Is it the single key which will unlock the Baroque? Is it even (this seems a real possibility) all there is to the Baroque? If we think it will be tested by references to particular cases, we are wrong.”106 In a similar tone, he goes on to say that “Deleuze certainly believes that losing the reader is productive, and having no idea where one is can be an illuminating experience. I have not located and I do not know if one can, what the primary subject of the book is.”107 The remark would be astounding if it were not abundantly clear already how ill-informed art and architectural historians can be, and how a lack of the most elementary philosophic education can leave them, sadly, even more perplexed and confused than other readers of Deleuze’s work. With this note, I bring this introductory chapter to an end.

Part One

The Philosophical Theory of Baroque

Figure 2 Ecstasy of St. Teresa. Altar, Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680), Cornaro Chapel, S. Maria della Vittoria, Rome, Italy.

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The Baroque and Jouissance: Jacques Lacan

“Was Lacan complex, tangled, Rococo, Baroque? Yes, Yes. . . . And yet of an astounding simplicity,” Philip Sollers wrote.1 “Style is the man himself,” Jacques Lacan used to say, to which a commentator quips, “not without malice.”2 The same commentator further says: Lacan was an original, he knew a few things. His art collection, including The Origin of the World [painting by Gustave Courbet], his bow ties, his twisted cigars, his oral and written style—clearly Baroque—his hideous temper, the gentleness of which he was capable, his unsurpassable erudition, his short, expensive sessions, his politeness and his demands, the surprise he provided for his analysands, his libido sciendi at all costs, his Mao collars, have left a mark.3

Thus, the “baroque style” belonged to Lacan—or he belonged to it—more deliberately and self-consciously, perhaps, than it did for the thinkers and philosophers to whom he would repeatedly refer throughout his teaching— Plato, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and others. Lacan used a “baroque style” of talking when discussing seventeenth-century Baroque and developed a provocative and distinctive “baroque theory” of a complexity unlike that of all other theories put forward before him. Lacan has not been read with care or depth in the discipline of architecture, and his theory of the baroque is practically unknown; he is quoted fashionably in fragments that betray a lack of proper understanding. Even contemporary philosophers who are well versed and indebted to Lacan’s teaching, like Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, have had nothing to say about Lacan’s idea of the baroque. Every reputed scholar who has discussed Lacan’s work with the greatest erudition has ignored or overlooked the “situatedness” of his discourse on the baroque, as if merely touching on the “baroque question” in Lacan risked plunging the writer into a black hole of fearful, primordial horror vacui before the empty space at the topological center of baroque space. Politically, of course, in the archaeology of a secular modernity steeped in a “Protestant Ethic,” which Max Weber identified

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as the “vanishing mediator” of modern secular capitalism and its ideology of liberal-democratic-industrial society, nothing could be more perverse than to want to defend the Baroque, given its links to the Counter-Reformation and to political absolutism.4 Admittedly, this is complex matter. Even from within the psychoanalytical community, almost all Lacanian scholars have avoided any direct reference to Lacan’s idea of the baroque.5 Regarding his difficult “style,” as the commentator mentioned above notes, reading Lacan requires “sympathy” and not “hostility.” In some way, “in order to truly read [Lacan] one must already be a Lacanian. By this I mean one must be already convinced that he or she will find in his teaching what cannot be found in any philosophy, however sophisticated it may be.”6 This verdict applies equally well to Lacan’s teachings on the Baroque. At the center of Lacan’s theory of the baroque is a notion that no theory after him will be able to ignore: the discovery of the doctrine of jouissance. The birth of the Baroque is linked to the birth of jouissance. Moreover, as we shall see, both jouissance and the Baroque originate within capitalism and what, in a strictly Lacanian sense, must be understood as its “discourse.” Jouissance, which from its French original has now entered the lexicon of the English language,7 is defined as a bodily substance, indeed, as the only substance in the body.8 It is thus the determining agent and factor of the so-called “baroque body,” which means that in psychoanalytical terms, “body-jouissance” is synonymous with the “baroque body.” Lacan’s discovery of jouissance and its connection with the baroque was made in the context of his late teachings on the “mathematical formalization” of topology, central to which was his rejection of any representational concept of topology. As he put it, “Topology is not there to ‘guide us inside the structure’ (it is not an image of the structure). Topology is the structure.”9 As will be discussed below, the baroque is also based on such a nonrepresentational concept of topology, which articulates in a similar way the connection to jouissance and its relationship to contemporary culture. As noted in the previous chapter, the “re-petition” of the Baroque in our time is a corollary of the process of repetition by which the subject reenacts the loss of the primordial object in expectation of recovering the jouissance that was forever lost when the subject entered into the language community. As the substance of enjoyment, jouissance is a cultural factor in the psychic life of the subject as well as its position in the social order. The latter’s actual body, we could say, is inhabited by a virtual baroque body whose defining characteristic is “excess.” The virtual baroque body thus encompasses what is more in the body than the body itself.

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Parenthetically, the “political” import of Lacan’s notion of the body is worth noting. The idea of a double body, of course, recalls the “two bodies” that kings were said to have in the ancien régime. In a reading of Ernst Kantorowicz’s classical work The King’s Two Bodies, Žižek argues that the “sublime, immaterial, sacred body” of the king, an object of fascination, was at the same time subject to the cycle of age, generation, and corruption.10 Once the symbolic network in which the king as “King” disintegrates, his “sublime body” returns to the material ordinary body, but with a symbolic body attached to it as a remainder. Explaining the perception of the king’s double body by his subjects, Žižek advances a political theory of power, according to which the king possessed a singular and irreplaceable “second” body, or “sublime body,” through which he legitimated his rule. This reading of the king’s two bodies applies equally well to the “double” body in the corpus of modernity: From its inception, the “singular and irreplaceable” body, or the “sublime body,” of modernity not only played a constitutive role in holding its symbolic network in place, but also organized its moments of rupture. From a theoretical standpoint, we can say that the “sublime body” contains an object; we will henceforth call it the “baroque object.” Since psychoanalytic theory, from Freud’s “partial object” to Lacan’s objet petit a, is the only attempt to theorize this object, in this chapter we will move from these reflections to clarify the notion of the “object” in Lacan’s theory of the baroque. Philip Sollers, whom I quoted above, was an acquaintance of Lacan. He wrote that “the Baroque is nothing but the redoubling of the form as opposed to the (necessary) naivety of the spirit of the Reformation.”11 For an explication of this comment, we should let Lacan speak for himself when he talks directly about the baroque in his earlier seminars. “On the Baroque” was the title of the May 8, 1973 session, in Seminar XX: Encore 1972–73. Significantly, the “Encore” in the title, meaning “more” or “again,” in spoken French, also sounds like en-corps, meaning “in the body.” And indeed, this seminar is a remarkable reflection on the vexing question of the body, touching on Spinoza and Heidegger and other philosophical texts in one of the most singular meditations on the subject produced in the twentieth century. It is in this seminar that Lacan identified himself with the “perverse” side of modernity when he categorically stated, “I am telling you all that [I identify with the perverse side] precisely because I just got back from the museums, and because the Counter-Reformation was ultimately a return to the sources and the baroque and the parading thereof.”12 It is also in this seminar that Lacan surprised his audience by saying that he “situated” himself on the side of the baroque. In the elliptical languages so typical of his “baroque” style, he remarked

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that, “As someone recently noticed, I am situated (je me range)—who situates me? is it him or is it me? that’s a subtlety of language [lalangue]13—I am situated essentially on the side of the baroque.”14 He further said, That is a reference point borrowed from the history of art. Since the history of art, just like history and just like art, is something that is related not to the winning side but to the sleeve (la manche),15 in other words, to the sleight of hand, I must, before going on, tell you what I mean by that—the subject, “I,” being no more active in that “I mean” than in the “I am situated.”16

Before I proceed, I want to insert a parenthetical comment here by claiming that, with Lacan, we too are situated on the side of the baroque for two interrelated reasons, both positive and negative. Negatively, as I will argue further on, because the culture industry in our time is effectively on the baroque side of modernity; and positively, because as I have argued, in order to look at reality, it is imperative that one look at it anamorphotically (anamorphically?), or “awry.” There is simply no other means of accessing “reality”: the anamorphic gaze is not only a question of method, a way to see what we otherwise would not see when we look at “reality” frontally. Rather, it is the only “wrong” way to look at reality in order to get it “right.” And this because, as Žižek would say, the texture of reality in this way will simply dissolve; there won’t be any “point of view” if it is not viewed through a “distorted” perspective. We can only look at reality awry.17 This is why Lacan repeatedly invoked Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors and why the latter functioned as an epistemic image analogous to Velázquez’s Las Meninas for his friend Michel Foucault.18 Foucault, we should recall, discussed his own painting in the context of the baroque mode of “Representation,” following the renaissance mode of “Resemblance.” But it should be clear that unlike Lacan, Foucault did not share a baroque sensibility and cannot, in any sense, be called a “thinker of the baroque.” As we shall see in the following chapter, much the same can be said about Deleuze. In the panorama of twentieth-century philosophical thinking, this position belongs uniquely to Lacan. To resume: The “baroquism” (his neologism) with which Lacan claims he “coincides” and with which he accepts to be “clothed” is based on the principle that “everything is exhibition of the body evoking jouissance.”19 To his audience, Lacan explained that he arrived at this definition after a trip to Italy where an “orgy” of churches could be seen, “but without a copulation.” Baroquism is an art deriving “from the effect of Christianity.” As cited earlier, he added that “I am telling you all that precisely because I just got back from the museums, and because the Counter-Reformation was ultimately a return to the sources and

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the baroque the paradigm thereof.”20 Not surprisingly, the cover of the original French edition of Seminar XX carries the picture of Bernini’s The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa in Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome, the very icon of high Baroque art. Indeed, as Žižek reminds us, in Seminar XX Lacan massively rehabilitated the religious problematic, in which Woman is one of the names of God.21 Lacan explains: “I will go so far as to tell you that nowhere more blatantly than in Christianity does the work of art as such show itself as what it has always been in all places—obscenity. The dit-mension [la mension du dit]22 of obscenity is that by which Christianity revives the religion of men. I’m not going to give you a definition of religion, because there is no more a history of religion than a history of art. ‘Religions’ like ‘the arts,’ is nothing but a basket category, for there isn’t the slightest homogeneity therein.”23 Lacan then goes on to give the most opaque theoretical definition for “baroque” ever written: “The baroque—he says—is the regulating of the soul by corporal radioscopy” (in the original French, “Le baroque, c’est la régulation de l’âme par la scopie corporelle”).24 On this notoriously difficult definition, he warned his audience in the same session: “You’re going to have to bust your asses to follow me here.”25 Indeed! Let me try to unpack this definition as much as I can.26 To begin with, and at a cursory level, one might interpret the notion of “regulating the soul by corporal radioscopy” along the lines of the “soul” in Aristotle’s De Anima (On the Soul), in which the word “corporal,” besides referring to the bodily affect, would refer to the Christian doctrine that the bread of the Eucharist represents the Body of Christ. On the basis of this reading, the soul has then to go through a secular scientific operation of “radioscopy,” in which the opaque object can be observed through radiant energy, through light, or in this case, through X-rays. To make sense of the session wherein Lacan’s definition of the baroque appears, of course, would require more interpretive labor than I am able to offer here. At a minimum, however, we can say that the philosophical novelty of this definition rests on two things: the first is the notion of “body-jouissance,” which departs radically from the philosophical history of the concept of “body,” including that of Lacan’s favorite philosopher, Spinoza. The second consists of Lacan’s singular answer to the body/mind dichotomy, a dilemma that has vexed Western thinking since the seventeenth century and the legacy of Cartesianism. As Suzanne Barnard remarks in her commentary on Seminar XX, the novelty of Lacan’s topological approach is that it cannot be inscribed in the Euclidean geometric frame but “must be figured through the elliptical geometric and topological means that [he] deployed in Seminar XX to trace the effects of the real in the constitution of the body.”27

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But let us probe further this notion of X-raying the body as related to Christianity. First, consider the question: Does the Baroque have a gender? The baroque is categorically connected to what Lacan named as the jouissance of the Other, the “Not-All” of the “feminine jouissance.” The ambiguity of this notion in Lacan parallels the wordplay of his friend Marcel Duchamp, in Large Glass, or The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–23), in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where, as Steven Levine perceptively notes, “the first three letters of the bride—MARiée—and of the bachelor—CÉLibataire—spell out the artist’s bi-gendered name, Marcel/Marcelle.”28 Already in Seminar XVI Lacan had commented on how seventeenth-century Roman Catholic sculpture waged a war for “the soul” of Christendom, “against the austere reputation of scared images of the Protestant Reformation.”29 Against the masculine, meaning making logic of “phallic jouissance,” Roman baroque sculptures such as Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (produced for the burial chapel of Cardinal Federico Cornaro in the Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome) exemplified the Other jouissance of the woman. In Bernini’s work, Saint Teresa is shown reclining in her billowing robe over the marble high altar, surrendering herself in a state of ecstatic ravishment to a Cupid-like angel wielding the pointed arrow as the symbol of divine love. Here the “feminine jouissance” is represented adrift in the flow of infinite signification, “a real jouissance of the body, en-corps, of which nothing final but always something more, encore, could be said.”30 If Saint Teresa is obviously “coming,” as Lacan avowed, she herself knows nothing about it. It is only psychoanalysis that knows of orgasmic temporality. Levine offers an apt Lacanian interpretation of Bernini’s Saint Teresa. By referring to the famous triangular arrow-diagram drawn in Encore (in the session “Knowledge and Truth”), representing the triad of the imaginary, symbolic, and real, with “J” in the center and the three elements of “true” (the lacking signifier of feminine jouissance), “reality,” and “semblance” on its three sides,31 Levine remarks: “The uncanny liquefaction of Bernini’s frozen marble is the sublimated sign of a surreal jouissance that spares the subject from the compulsions and frustrations of any actually attempted sexual enjoyment.”32 Levine notes further that “Lacan called this artistic exposure of the actually infrastructure of the human sexual relation an X-ray of the soul.”33 The visual and verbal excess of Christian art and mysticism, he suggests, sublimated the impasse of sexual relations in the form of scared ecstasy and martyrdom. That was what the kilometers of renaissance and the baroque paintings in our museums and churches bore witness to, until the slate was wiped clean by the modernist preoccupation with geometric relations of the

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little squares, say, of Kasimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian, whose austere axial crossing derive, respectively, from Russian Orthodox icons and the architecture of Dutch Reformed churches.34

This interpretation is the best anybody has offered, to my knowledge, to clarify the definition of the baroque advanced by Lacan as “the regulating of the soul by corporal radioscopy.” It is useful here to mention that, as Gerard Wacjman has shown, Freud, in contrast to Lacan, was not exactly “modern” in matters of art.35 Lacan’s definition has otherwise been ignored by almost all commentators on Lacan’s Seminar XX, including and especially art historians.36 A significant contribution to our understanding of Lacan’s idea of the baroque has been put forward recently by the Latin-American literary critic Severo Sarduy, who for the first time, to my knowledge, establishes a connection between the baroque and Lacan’s objet petit a. In the beginning of his “The Baroque and Neobaroque,” Sarduy acknowledges that the Portuguese barrocco, from the very beginning, “was destined for ambiguity and for semantic diffusion.”37 He then gives an expanded etymological definition of the term, as briefly noted above, as: the great irregular pearl—in Spanish barrueco or berrueco, in Portuguese barrocco—the rock, the knotted, the agglomerate density of rock—barrueco or berrueco—or perhaps the excrescence, the cyst, what proliferates, both free and lithic, tumorous, warty; even perhaps the name of a student of the Carraccis, excessively sensitive and affected with mannerism—Le Baroche or Barrocci (1528-1612); perhaps fantastic philology, an ancient mnemotechnical term of Scholasticism, a syllogism—baroco. Finally, for the denotative catalogue of dictionaries, accumulation of codified banality, the baroque is equivalent to “shocking bizarreness”—Littré—or to “eccentricity, extravagance, and bad taste”—Martinez Amador.38

After a rather long exposition of literary criticism and rhetoric as a metaphor in the work of Roland Barthes, Sarduy comes to the concluding section of his essay. In the subsection on “Eroticism,” he connects the baroque to the psychoanalytical discourse associated with the Freudian “partial object” and closes with some highly significant remarks on Lacan’s baroque doctrine and his algebraic algorithm of object petit a. Sarduy writes: Baroque space is the space of superabundance and overflow. In contrast to language, which is communicative, economic, austere, and reduced to its function—to serving as a vehicle for information—baroque language takes pleasure in the supplement, in the excess, and in the partial loss of the object. Or rather, in the search, by definition frustrated, for the partial object.39

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Furthermore, The “object” of the baroque can be specified: it is that which Freud, but specially Abraham, called the partial object: maternal breast, excrement—and its metaphoric equivalent: gold, the constitutive material and symbol of all the baroque—vision, voice, a thing which is always alien to everything men can comprehend, assimilate from others and themselves, residuum which we could describe as (a)lterity, to mark the contribution to the concept made by Lacan, who precisely calls this object (a).40

Sarduy then links this notion of the “objet a” to baroque space, arguing that what presides over the latter is the “Object (a) as residual quantity, but also as fall, loss, or discrepancy between reality (the visible baroque object) and its phantasmal image (saturation without limits, asphyxiating proliferation, the horror vacui).”41 In the subsection “Revolution,” Sarduy concludes by invoking with authority: The Baroque which, in its action of weighing, in its fall, in its “painterly” language, sometimes strident, motley, and chaotic, is a metaphor of the impugnation of the logocentric entity which until now structured it and us with its distance and its authority; the baroque which refuses all restoration, which makes metaphor of the discussed order, of the judged god, of the transgressed law. The Baroque of revolution.42

Perhaps this remarkable analysis by Sarduy can serve as a summary of Lacan’s “baroquism,” with which he wanted to be “clothed,” and in which he wished to be situated. Indeed, this seems a better place than most to start the process of entering into the discourse of the “baroque side” in Lacan, taking his “conservative” proclamation seriously and probing its consequences for a radical cultural as well as politico-aesthetic analysis. Historically, the idea of the baroque in Lacan is also linked to Kepler’s scientific worldview. In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes argued that once we were all, at one time, spherical beings lacking in nothing, but Zeus split us in two, and now we are in search of our other half. Bruce Fink, who cites this passage in his excellent commentary on Lacan, writes, “We divided beings yearn to be grafted back together, failing which, we at least find relief in each other’s arms (thanks to Zeus’s having taken pity on us and turned our private parts around us to the inside).”43 Fink remarks that “Aristophanes’s image of human as originally spherical beings also points to the sphere as the shape that was considered most perfect, most harmonious, lacking in nothing.”44 Until Kepler’s time, ancient cosmology was based on the fantasy of the perfection of the sphere and “much ‘scientific’ work was devoted to saving the truth (salva veritate) by showing how

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the apparently noncircular motion of the planets could be explained on the basis of movement in accordance with that shape of the shapes, the circle.”45 Thus, in his Seminar XX, Lacan makes the extraordinary claim that the “Copernican revolution is by no means a revolution. If the center of a sphere is assumed, in a discourse that is merely analogical, to constitute the pivotal point (pointmaître), the fact of changing this pivotal point, of having it be occupied by the earth or the sun, involves noting that it itself subverts what the signifier ‘center’ intrinsically (de lui-même) preserves.”46 Lacan further remarks, What is crucial, as some people have noticed, is not Copernicus, but more specifically Kepler, due to the fact that in his work [the universe] does not turn in the same way—it turns [not in a circle but] in an ellipse, and that already throws into question the function of the center. That towards which it falls in Kepler’s work is a point of the ellipse that is called a focus, and in the symmetrical point there is nothing. That is assuredly a corrective to the image of the center.47

Despite this, Lacan claims that the world remains, for most of us, still perfectly spherical. Lacanian “subversion” amounts precisely to this baroque worldview, a world of “baroque subversion.” The fact that despite the Freudian revolution that removed consciousness from the center of our view of ourselves, the “center” tends nevertheless to return and reestablish itself, is the ground of Lacan’s baroque. The latter’s “decentering” of the subject is, in psychoanalytical discourse, analogous to Kepler’s subversion of the center, the center toward which we tend irresistibly to return.48 Thus, as Lacan puts it, it is ultimately not the Copernican “turn” but rather the Newtonian “Fall” that is at stake in this subversion. Rather than saying “it turns,” Newton should have said “it falls.” This “Fall” establishes the fundamental “decentering” of the “objective” world, that which inaugurates our modernity, which ultimately acquires its counterpart in the “subjective” decentering that psychoanalysis discovered.49 The historical Baroque, therefore, is the “event” that coincides with Keplerian cosmology and that can also be explained with what Newtonian physics later accomplished for the object world: the awareness that the place from where we relate to the world lacks any central objective stability.

Sublimation and the baroque Lacan’s theory of the Baroque is inextricably linked to the aesthetics of Sublimation. But how can the Baroque be elevated to the dignity of the sublime? To attempt to address this question, it is imperative to put culture, and

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specifically “baroque culture,” under the discourse of sublimation. In Lacan’s eyes, all cultures are the result of sublimation, or what he calls a “fashioning” of the signifier. All cultural realizations, including ethics, come into being by a “creation ex nihilo,” by a “negative” power or will to break with what exists, the real as such. From this standpoint, both concepts of culture and the baroque cannot be understood apart from sublimation. The concepts of the sublime and sublimation both have a long history in modern thought that begins with Kant and culminates with Lacan, with Hegel and Freud in between. In this genealogy, Lacan’s epochal notion of jouissance not only overcomes Freud’s contradictory theory of sublimation but also goes beyond the inadequate efforts by Frankfurt School critical theorists like Adorno and Marcuse to amend Freud,50 to question the Kantian foundations of both. One can no longer discuss the Kantian sublime without taking into account Lacan’s jouissance. It is from this vantage point that I would like now to address “baroque culture” in the discourse of modernity. From the outset, it should be noted that, in contrast to unconscious jouissance and its domain of “erotic love” wherein rules and laws can only be held if they are simultaneously transgressed, sublimation remains a cultural dynamic through which the subject attempts to relate consciously and “rationally” to the (impossible) structure of desire.51 In Lacan’s Seminar VII of 1959–60, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, the Session X of February 3, 1960, is titled “Marginal Comments.”52 This session was an interruption of the main theme on “The Problem of Sublimation” that Lacan resumed in the next session with the famous title “Courtly Love as Anamorphosis,” which, in a later session, he refers to as the “paradigm of sublimation.” It was in the “Marginal Comments,” however, that Lacan directly addressed the question of the Baroque (before taking it up again in Seminar XX in 1973, as discussed above). In this session, Lacan presented certain ideas on art and aesthetics in connection to the Freudian notion of das Ding (the Thing)—to which he had already devoted a session—along with the concept of sublimation. The problematic of sublimation in Freud had basically remained unresolved. As Gerard Wacjman in his excellent reflection on the subject has pointed out, Freud basically had an “elevated” vision of art: “Whether one likes it or not, the Freudian notion of sublimation seems inspired and literally aspired by the chemical and alchemical origins of the term, in which the heavy matter is dissipated into ethereal gas and is purified.”53 Hence Freudian sublimation, as Wacjman puts it, floats in the Kantian notion of the sublime, in which beautiful forms of nature offer calm contemplation—an idealist vision that Lacan would definitely leave behind. In his complex and novel analysis of the concept of

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sublimation, Lacan goes beyond Freud and Kant. In “Marginal Comments,” he takes up the baroque, along with Holbein’s painting, The Ambassadors, discussed in the previous chapter. Lacan has this to say about the baroque: I believe that the baroque return to the play of forms, to all manner of devices, including anamorphosis, is an effort to restore the true meaning of artistic inquiry; artists use the discovery of the property of lines to make something emerge that is precisely there where one has lost one’s bearing or, strictly speaking, nowhere.54

Lacan conceived three kinds of sublimation, in art, religion, and science, and linked each one of them respectively to three pathological states, namely hysteria, obsessional neurosis, and paranoia. He subsequently put forward a definition of “art” modeled on “primitive” architecture and the so-called “potter’s vase” (indeed, it was from the idea of “emptiness” in the “dialectic of the vase,” as we will see below, that the discourse of sublimation originated for him). Based on this preliminary hypothesis, Lacan posited the historical seventeenth-century Baroque as an art that (in strictly psychoanalytical sense) manifested hysteric symptoms, while at the same time, incorporating elements of both “religion” and “science.” I quote Lacan at length: This Thing is accessible in very elementary examples, which are almost of the type of the classic philosophical demonstration, including a blackboard and a piece of chalk. I referred last time to the schematic example of the vase, so as to allow you to grasp where the Thing is situated in the relationship that places man in the mediating function between real and the signifier. This Thing, all forms of which created by man to the sphere of sublimation, this Thing will always be represented by emptiness, precisely because it cannot be represented by anything else—or, more exactly, because it can only be represented by something else. But in every form of sublimation, emptiness is determinative. I will point out right away three different ways according to which art, religion, and the discourse of science turn out to be related to that . . . All art is characterized by a certain mode of organization around this emptiness.55 [emphasis added].

What must be noted here is that just like hysteria, art tries to maintain a distance from the Thing by emphasizing its “emptiness.”56 As Lacan says, “The Thing is characterized by the fact that it is impossible for us to imagine it.”57 As Dylan Evans remarks, Lacan’s concept of the Thing as an unknowable x, beyond symbolization, has clear affinities with Kant’s noumena, or “thing-in-itself.”58 Moreover, while religion, unlike art, avoids this emptiness, science forecloses it.

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“In any case—Lacan claims—the emptiness remains in the center, and that is precisely why sublimation is involved.”59 In the previous session of January 27, 1960, titled “On creation ex nihilo,” Lacan referred to Heidegger’s famous “dialectic around the vase.” He recommended his audience to look at Heidegger’s “Das Ding” (The Thing), an essay written in 1949. However, this was not so much to highlight Heidegger’s approach to Being. Rather, Lacan said, I simply want to stick to the elementary distinction as far as a vase in concerned between its use as a utensil and its signifying function. If it really is a signifier, and the first of such signifiers fashioned by human hand, it is in its signifying essence a signifier of nothing other than of signifying as such or, in other words, of no particular signified.60

According to Lacan, insofar as it creates a void and the possibility of filling it, this “nothing” is precisely what characterizes the vase as such. It is an object that is made to represent “the existence of the emptiness at the center of the real that is called the Thing, this emptiness as represented in the representation presents itself as a nihil, as nothing.”61 In other words, starting with a hole, the potter creates the vase around an emptiness, like the mythical creator, ex nihilo. “The introduction of this fabricated signifier that is the vase already contains the notion of ex nihilo. And the notion of creation ex nihilo is coextensive with the exact situation of the Thing as such.”62 From here, in Session X of the same seminar, Lacan describes architecture in very similar terms as something organized around emptiness, remarking that this is the authentic impression that the forms of a cathedral like Saint Mark’s are meant to convey. “It is the true meaning of all architecture.”63 Later in the same session, as we shall see, Lacan would present high baroque art and architecture from the seventeenth century as the highest expression of this meaning. Lacan’s famous definition of sublimation appears in Session VIII of January 20, 1960, titled “The Object and the Thing.” In this session, he says: “The most general formula that I can give you of sublimation is the following: it raises an object—and I don’t mind the suggestion of a play on words in the term I use— to the dignity of the Thing.”64 We are thus given a psychoanalytical definition of sublimation, that is, “raising the object to the dignity of the Thing,” through a particularly enigmatic, brief but loaded formula, which would no doubt require a comprehensive discussion of Lacanian psychoanalytical theory to make sense of. However, even without such an extended discussion, which is evidently beyond the scope of this study, it is possible to shed some light on it.

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Here I follow Marc de Kesel’s lucid commentary on Seminar VII in his Eros and Ethics. In Lacan’s definition, we must initially bear in mind the radical distinction between “object” and the Thing (das Ding). As Lacan explained in the session of January 20, 1960, he had been amazed on a visit to his Surrealist friend, Jacques Prévert, to see empty matchboxes placed end on end around an entire room. The anecdote serves to underline how, according to Lacan, a trivial object can be “elevated” to the dignity of the Thing.65 The object, in this case, attains the level of signifier, while the Thing itself falls outside the field of signifiers. Lacan notes: “This is the case with all sublimation: the elevated ‘object’ in whose light everything else acquires sense is itself empty and senseless. This is how sublimation functions at the unconscious level.”66 As de Kesel explains, as a “creation ex nihili,” sublimation repeats the primary cut of the signifier in the real: Again, a signifier brings a difference, a lack, an emptiness into the different real onto which a new autonomously operating system can graft itself. However, this system is incapable of fulfilling the lack it has introduced into the real, and is therefore, in its turn, plagued by that real as if with an irreconcilable lack. The term for that lack is the “thing” and the sublimated object is “raised to the dignity of the thing.”67

Going back to the case of the vase—or the jar, as de Kesel calls it—that Lacan borrowed from Heidegger, a vase is a vase insofar as it gives form to the emptiness inside it. However, one must realize that, as the “essence” of a jar lies in its emptiness, this emptiness can no longer be conceived as a substance in itself to which “attributes” can then be ascribed. On the contrary, in this case, the attributes predate, as it were, the entire ontological process, so as to retroactively create the “jar.” . . . The signifying cut only retroactively turns the real into the emptiness that gives the floating corps of signifiers its stabilizing center.68

That is how Lacan, according to de Kesel, subversively reinterprets Heidegger’s famous example of a thing.69 At the end of his session of January 13, 1960, in Seminar VII, Lacan remarked: At the level of sublimation the object is inseparable from imaginary and especially cultural elaborations. It is not just that collectivity recognizes in them useful objects; it finds rather a space of relaxation where it may in a way delude itself on the subject of das Ding, colonizes the field of das Ding with imaginary schemes. That is how collectivity socially accepted sublimations operate. Society takes some comfort from the mirages that moralists, artists, artisans, designers

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Thus, collective sublimation “works,” as de Kesel puts it, not because it is what we need in order to live, but because of our unconscious fantasies. “Culture may thus have no real foundation—as the creation of a polymorphous-perverse libido it may well be built ‘on nothing’—nevertheless, it is precisely for this reason that it is more or less able to satisfy the libidinal being.”71 It is important to keep in mind that Lacan talks about sublimation in “transgressive,” even “perverse,” terms. “Culture” for Lacan, as de Kesel writes, “is not purely the means by which an individual fits himself into a society but it is also something that authorizes a mobile counter ‘dialectic’.”72 Sublimation can thus be framed in terms of a “circuit,” an “interaction” “between conforming to the norm, on the one hand, and a ‘perverse’ inversion of all norms or ‘protest’ on the other. . . . This is what connects culture and sublimation: both show that the subject’s immersion in the symbolic order leaves open a ‘free space’ that allows ‘protest’ to circulate as radical desire.” At the wider macro level, therefore, we must understand a “culture’s values as ‘objects elevated to the status of a thing,’ as signifiers that thus come to occupy the ‘extimate’ empty place around which the economy of the drive revolves and in this way keeps desire alive.”73 It is interesting to note that at a certain moment in his Seminar VII, Lacan emphasizes the contingent, “historical” nature of sublimation that he characterizes as “cultural,” rather than “collective” or “individual,” “as something through which the individual’s recalcitrant singularity carves itself ‘dialectically’ into the collective.”74 In this connection, in the January 20, 1960, session titled “Object and the Things,” Lacan stated: Note that no correct evaluation of sublimation in art is possible if we overlook the fact that all artistic production, including especially that of the fine arts, is historically situated. You do not paint in Picasso’s time as you painted in Velázquez’s; you don’t write novels in 1930 as you did in Stendhal’s time. This is an absolutely essential fact that does not for the time being need to be located under the rubric of the collectivity or the individual—let’s place it under the rubric of culture. What does society find there that is so satisfying? That’s the question we need to answer. The problem of sublimation is there, of sublimation insofar as it creates a certain number of forms, among which

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art is not alone—and we will concentrate on one art in particular, literary art, which is so close to the domain of ethics. It is after all as a function of the problem of ethics that we have to judge sublimation; it creates socially recognizable values.75

Lacan thus moves from art to the “ethics of psychoanalysis.” The latter is the main concern of Seminar VII, wherein he questions the “errors” of Kantian ethics, to which he is nevertheless indebted; he does so by claiming, in essence, that, just as the subject is able to extricate itself from accepted social norms through the historically contingent sublimation of art and creation ex nihilo, so too in the realm of ethics, the subject is able to go beyond and outside the existing ethical order to create new moral values from nothing.76 From a general point of view of culture, the baroque appears as the locus of aesthetic sublimation. Baroque art, as an artifice, is the signifier that by opening the emptiness at its center, keeps desire of the subject alive—indeed, causes the desiring subject by never letting it be satisfied, and by leaving it, as Lacan says, “dangling.” In the simplest terms, the subject is connected to its culture because through sublimation it is allowed to deal with its desire. Seventeenth-century Baroque art is the first manifestation of this desire. As a signifier, it inaugurates the cut in the real of the Thing, the void in the center. It is also a hysteric art, where sublimation prevents the individual from falling into (clinical) neurosis. A wholly different matter, as I will argue further on, is the replacement, today, of the hysterical historical Baroque with a “psychotic” neobaroque, as seen especially in its architectural manifestations.

The baroque’s matheme: Between structure and topology What “space” does the baroque enclose? How does the subject enter baroque space? What is the dialectical relation between modern subjectivity and baroque space? How does the symbolic order of the subject parallel that of Baroque space? The answers to these questions involve topology. Like the psyche in Lacanian theory, the baroque speaks topologically. Lacan used topology “to formalize a rigorous theory of the psychic apparatus, without any way or anywhere fixing an objective ‘way’ for the human subject.”77 It is with the baroque (in the seventeenth century), I claim, that the topological structure of “psychic space” comes into being for the first time. As is well known, Lacan during 1970s became deeply immersed in topological studies that had begun in the 1950s, entering into a productive dialogue with

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contemporary mathematicians. Topological exploration became the hallmark of his late teaching.78 Jeanne Lafont clarifies the relationship between topology, psychoanalysis, and structuralism, pointing out that “topology is a part of mathematics which formalizes places and shifts without measurement, but for psychoanalysis it is a writing of structure. Topology continues the project of structuralism. From Claude Lévi-Strauss’s work onwards, this trend was defined, in the sixties, by a symbolic dimension, beyond the levels of the imaginary and the real.”79 Lacan took his friend’s structural anthropology to another higher level in 1970s and thus effectively went beyond “structuralism.” In the extensive literature devoted to the explication of this late phase of Lacan’s teaching, nowhere does one find a discussion of a possible link between his topological explorations and the ideas he articulated about the baroque. Yet as Élisabeth Roudinesco reports, it was not a mathematician but a young talented painter who, drawing topological figures with Lacan during this time, acknowledged the latter’s definition of the baroque in Encore as his inspiration.80 Significantly, the session that immediately followed “On the Baroque” in Encore, on May 8, 1973, discussed above, is the October 22, 1973 session titled “Rings of strings.” Here Lacan explored the famous Borromean knots, leaving no doubt as to the strong link between his thinking on the baroque and topology. In this section, I want to establish the link between the two and clarify their instrumental roles in Lacan’s main concern, which is to describe the “analytical experience.” I begin with the thesis that the original baroque space, insofar as it is fundamentally concerned with the complex relationship between the inside and the outside (to be discussed more in later chapters when I deal with its architectural analysis), is fundamentally a topological space, which at the same time deals with the psychic economy in what structures the relationship between “exterior” and “interior.” Baroque space must therefore be analyzed in terms of surfaces, cuts, knots, holes, and voids. These elements constitute what we might call baroque knowledge, which, after Lacan, I term the “Baroque matheme.” Lacan, as Roudinesco explains, invented the word matheme in 1971 after reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. He modeled this word after the mythèmes his friend Lévi-Strauss used in anthropology. Matheme is a Greek word for “knowledge,” or mathemata, which is not about mathematics as such. Roudinesco remarks that Lacan, in fact, opposed Wittgenstein’s rigid logical procedures: “He refused to accept [Wittgenstein’s] division between the incompatibles, and instead tried to wrest knowledge from the ineffable and give it a wholly transmissible from. This form was the matheme.”81

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Significantly, in the same session in which Lacan introduced the matheme, he also invented a new term, lalangue, which I mentioned once before. This coined word, as Roudinesco notes, is a pun on the name André Laland, author of a famous philosophical dictionary. “He used the new word to denote the articulating of the desire for language (langue=language, tongue); it could also mean a ‘knowledge that unknowingly knows itself ’ and so escapes mathematical expression.”82 Lacan makes a distinction between lalangue and langue. With lalangue, Lacan positions the definite article “la” where there would be a space in written language. Without this space, la is no longer the promise that a noun is sure to follow; the predictive function of a grammar is thereby disabled, and we are left to consider how lalangue can, nevertheless, have the effect of meaning. We might say that lalangue shows us where the metalanguage of grammar does not work: the parceling of language into units of action, unit of being, and units for expressing the relation between the two.83

We are now in a better position to understand the matheme in the space of topology. But first, we should notice that there is a difference between metalanguage and topology: A metalanguage forms and validates claims regarding the meaning of a particular utterance by encouraging us to accept that “bodies” are ontologically prior to “language.” A topology of language, by contrast, provides a model of interpretation where “bodies” and “language” are coextensive precisely at the point where there is no other place for a signifier than in the analysand’s body: S(A).84

As Metzeger explains, Lalangue is the (w)hole through which language flows—not a mouth, not a phoneme, not the object little a (which is a hole in language marked by discourse) but lalangue, a (w)hole in language. Where others might suggest there is a metalanguage, a syntax, a way of substituting one part of language for another, Lacan positions lalangue, the expression of the fact that language in one dimension constructs a hole in another dit-mension (dit/say, said).85

In ordinary definitions, topology is often referred to as “rubber math” or “rubber geometry.” It deals with shapes that can be stretched, twisted, pulled, bent, and deformed in space—shapes that remain in the same state without changing their intrinsic nature, qualities, and continuous properties.86 Topology basically comes in two main forms, the topology of surface and the topology of

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knots. Historically, Johann Benedict Listing (1808–1882), a disciple of Gauss (1777–1855), coined the term “topology” to designate a “quasi mathematical discipline” defined as the “study of the qualitative laws of relation of place.”87 Listing discovered “one-sided” surfaces, the same year that Ferdinand Möbius (1790–1868) discovered the “Möbius strip.” For Lacan, it is important to keep in mind, topology is not a metaphor but a structure that refers fundamentally to the way in which we understand the appearance and construction of the subject. Before coming to Borromean knots, Lacan made use of several topological constructions of surface, including the torus, Möbius strip, Klein bottle, and cross-cap.88 More specifically, he used the Möbius strip—a single continuous surface with neither an “inside” nor an “outside,” that is, lacking categorical division—as the structure of the unconscious. In his seminal essay titled “Matheme: Topology in the Teaching of Lacan,” Jacques-Alain Miller, the editor of Lacan’s Seminars and his son-in-law, tells us how Lacan first introduced topological forms in his move from metaphor to structure when the problematic of the “real” was proposed. He quotes Lacan from Écrits, where he says, “This structure is different from the spatialization of the circumference of the sphere in which some people like to schematize the limits of the living being and his milieu: it actually corresponds more to that relational grouping that symbolic logic designates topologically as a torus (annulus).”89 And further: “If one wanted to give an intuitive representation, it seems that more than the superficiality of an area, it is to the tri-dimensional form of a torus, that one should have recourse, by virtue of the fact that its peripheral exteriority and its central exteriority do not constitute more than a single space.”90 Thus, torus, or inner tube, stands for a hole or a gap, what is known in Chinese philosophy as the “median-void,” as “a constitutive yet nonexistent space.”91 It follows, according to Miller, that if we want to delimit a space, we must situate an external point in it and then seek this exterior area in the interior, that is, the position of the “internal exclusion.” (I leave aside Miller’s complex discussion about the relation between death and the symbolic order). As Miller notes further on, “We will again encounter this structure of internal exclusion when Lacan attempts to construct his topology of jouissance, going so far as to invent a term with more impact than internal exclusion, the term extimacy, which replaces the initial prefix of intimacy with the prefix -ex.”92 In another seminal essay, Miller wrote that extimacy93 is a term that escapes the partition between interior and exterior. Lacan drew a diagram to show that the exterior is present in the innermost of the interior. In analytical experience, this

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intimacy has a quality of exteriority. “Therefore—Miller notes—paradoxically the most intimate is not a point of transparency but rather a point of opacity. . . . extimacy is not the contrary of intimacy. Extimacy says that the intimate is Other—like a foreign body, a parasite.”94 Extimacy, therefore, can be taken as equivalent to the unconscious, in the sense that, as Miller puts it, “the extimacy of the subject is the Other.”95 “In a certain way—he continues—this is what Lacan is commenting on when he speaks of the unconscious as the discourse of the Other, of this Other who, more intimate than my intimacy, stirs, me. And this intimate that is radically Other, Lacan expressed with a single word: ‘extimacy’.”96 As I will show later, it is under this term (and its conjunction with jouissance) that the baroque space must topologically be analyzed in terms of its special relation between exterior and interior. To the image of the torus, Lacan added the cross-cap (to close the Möbius strip), and the Klein bottle to symbolize a hollow surface. It took Lacan almost 25  years, as Roudinesco points out, to come to a theoretical exposition of topology, after working out his notion of matheme, which led him to formulate a new terminology in order to relate psychoanalysis to other kinds of discourse. “In order to do this, it was necessary to be able to pass from saying to showing; in other words, to introduce every member of his audience—as well as himself—to carry out an operation relating no longer to discourse but to ‘monstration’.”97 Later, in 1972, Lacan first introduced the figure of the Borromean knot in Seminar XIX, which he would take up again in “Rings and Strings” in Encore, the session of October 22, 1973, mentioned before. At a dinner party, according to Roudinesco, a young mathematician named Valérie Marchande told Lacan about the arms of the Milanese dynasty, the Borromeos. This code of arms consists of three interlinking circles standing for a triple alliance. St. Charles Borromeo, the member of the family, was a hero of the Counter-Reformation. A nephew of Pope Pius and himself a cardinal, he did charitable works during the plague of 1576, and by the time he died, Protestantism had been driven out of the north of Italy. Roudinesco reports that “the famous Borromean Islands on Lake Maggiore were conquered a century later by Count Borromeo, who gave them their name and turned them into one of Italy’s most baroque landscapes.”98 Lacan used the Borromean knot to illustrate the topological structure linking the three registers of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real as a nonhierarchical link in which, if one element is interrupted, the others collapse.99 Later, he added a fourth knot representing the symptom or sinthome. Developed in his Seminar XXII on James Joyce in 1975–76, this fourth loop—Lacan claimed—prevents the

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other loops from unraveling, which is what occurs with psychosis.100 Thus, in the case of Joyce, for example, writing was the sinthome that held together the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary.101 As Zita Marks points out, The Borromean knot, emblematic of a Milanese dynasty, but in its Lacanian formulation some centuries later, is more than a structural representation of the three alliances. Its continuing theoretical elaboration saw that alliance reconceptualized by a fourth term. The fourth term, the sinthome, an aspect of the knot but beyond it, beyond the symbolic and beyond metaphor, is the support of the subject in his or her own way of relating to jouissance; that is Lacan’s creation.102

In conclusion: In the network of “social links” that is, for Lacan, the domain of discourse, the historical Baroque can be conceptualized as the discourse of the hysteric (one of the four registers of Lacanian discourses). The Baroque, in this sense, can only speak in a topological language, through the paradoxes, contradictory meanings, and coincidentia oppositorum that define the split $ as the “void” of the transcendental subject. But as we have seen, topologically speaking, the space of the baroque is itself a “void”—indeed, in the sense Lacan discussed it following Heidegger, it is the very exemplar of emptiness. I propose to designate this notion of space algebraically by using the same signifier $. In this way, the subject, subjectivized in the topological space of the baroque, overlaps or correlates with the voided space; in other words, it is the signifier $ doubled twice over, like void on void, once as the subject and second as space. In the end, while seventeenth-century Baroque art and architecture were certainly the product of the Counter-Reformation incarnated in the image of the absolutist big Other, the commending father/king, they were also paradoxical topological sublimations. Contemporary neobaroque deviations in architecture and culture, by contrast, are much better understood as pathological psychoses, reflecting a fundamental failure in the very process of subjectivation. Moreover, as we will see, by failing to “suture” the subject, who is by definition “out-of-joint,” neobaroque buildings have a direct hand in these effects—whose ultimate causes, cultural, aesthetic, political, or technological, cannot be disjoined from the structural conditions of late capitalism.

3

The Baroque and the Fold: Gilles Deleuze

Leibniz or the Baroque. For Deleuze, the two terms are homologous. The seventeenth-century philosopher is synonymous with the Baroque. In Chapter 3 of his remarkable The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, Deleuze argues that most commentators have restricted the baroque to one genre (architecture), or have used it in the “determination of periods or places,” which has led, in some cases, “to a radical disavowal: the baroque never existed.”1 Humorously, he notes, “It is nonetheless strange to deny the existence of the Baroque in the way we speak of unicorns or herds of pink elephants.”2 In the case of the Baroque, one has to know if a concept can be invented to make it exist, because, while irregular pearls do actually exist, the Baroque can only exist if it is given a concept. All this, then, leads Deleuze to claim the fold as the Baroque’s raison d’être, and Leibniz as the baroque philosopher par excellence. Deleuze must therefore challenge those who offer “too broad a concept” for the Baroque. He cites Christine Buci-Glucksmann, an early student of his, who “proposes a much more interesting criterion” in her La folie du voir, De l’esthétique baroque (I discuss this in a later chapter devoted to her).3 Yet he finds her definition of the baroque as “an optical fold” “too restrictive.” In a footnote, he characterizes Buci-Glucksmann’s definition as appealing “to Jacques Lacan and Merleau-Ponty.”4 Deleuze conveniently relegates Lacan to a footnote and dismisses his unique thesis on the Baroque by equating it with “optical fold”—which Buci-Glucksmann characterizes in terms of “seeing” and “gazing.” Merleau-Ponty never actually spoke of the baroque as such. In fact, while Lacan did refer to Merleau-Ponty’s posthumous Visible and Invisible in his Seminar XI, he was much more indebted to Jean-Paul Sartre’s idea of the optics and the look in Being and Nothingness.5 This dismissal is especially notable in The Fold, which is replete with references to an impressive range of authors and sources. Nowhere is Lacan’s discussion of the baroque in Encore even mentioned. The latter, we should recall, had come out in French in 1975, exactly 13 years

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before Deleuze published Le pli. Any average French intellectual would have known about Lacan’s famous seminars. Hence, the fact that Deleuze fails even to include it in his bibliographical sources cannot be considered a simple scholarly oversight. Rather, as Alain Badiou noted in his otherwise sympathetic analysis of The Fold, it must be regarded as reflecting the book’s “anti-Cartesian, or antiLacanian” turn.6 The Fold, published when Deleuze retired from Paris-VIII and before he wrote What is Philosophy? with his friend Félix Gauttari, is the culmination of an impressive philosophical trajectory. It is a dazzling text, the result of a lengthy study of Leibniz, on which he worked in 1979–80 and then again, in the final year of his teaching, in 1986–87.7 Deleuze’s goal was to resituate Leibniz as a contemporary philosopher of the Baroque age. Writing at the threshold of the modern in the midst of the collapsing closed theological world of the midseventeenth century, Leibniz faced the Copernican-Galilean break and, perhaps even more challenging, the idea of infinity. As François Dosse remarks, Leibniz tried to respond to the two aspects of the problem: he gave an aesthetic response by following the distinct operations of the Baroque to infinity, and he offered an epistemological response that included the event and the verb in the monad, which was a self-enclosed unity that also contained the entire world, despite the absence of any “window to the Outside.”8

In his interpretation of Leibniz, Deleuze had to challenge a certain number of received ideas on the German philosopher. For Deleuze, Leibniz was not so much the ideologue of “the best of all possible worlds” who would cynically legitimate centralized absolutist power under the cloak of the theodicy of evil. Rather, he was the “thinker who made it possible to make the fold of the world pass once more between the folds of the soul and of matter.”9 Deleuze was determined to create a concept of the fold that followed the labyrinthine intricacies of Leibniz’s thinking. In his class at Paris-VIII, he told his students that “my hypothesis is that the baroque makes fold.”10 And further, “A soul could not develop all at once all these folds because they continue to infinity.”11 In Leibniz’s system, Deleuze rediscovered his own vitalism, his belief that, as quoted by Dosse, “the  living being is a machine. . . . [And] what contrasts with the mechanical is the machine,” whereas Dosse explains, “the machine is part of infinity while the mechanical is finite.”12 As Badiou wrote, in The Fold, Deleuze followed Leibniz in “his most paradoxical undertaking,”13 which was to establish “the monad as ‘absolute interiority’ and go on to the most rigorous analysis possible of the relations of

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exteriority (or possession), in particular the relation between mind and body.”14 According to Badiou, this constitutes the effectiveness of the concept of the fold. However, Badiou also places Deleuze’s concept into a wider frame of reference: “We can see that with the fold, Deleuze is searching for a figure of interiority (or of the subject) that is neither reflection (or cogito), nor the relation-to, the focus (or intentionality), nor the pure empty point (or eclipse). Neither Descartes, nor Husserl, nor Lacan. Absolute interiority, but ‘reversed’ in such a way that it disposes of a relation to the All, of a ‘permitting non-localized relation which bound the absolute interior’.”15 It is useful to consider Deleuze’s concept of the fold in relation to another key Deleuzian concept, that of disjunctive synthesis. The latter appears for the first time in an essay written with Gauttari on Pierre Klossowski, which later appeared in Anti-Oedipus. Jean-Jacques Lecercle, who has perceptively analyzed this concept, quotes Anne Sauvagnargues, who in her Deleuze et l’art wrote: Synthesis, for Deleuze, does not mean a return to the one, but a disjunctive differentiation that works through bifurcations and transformations, rather than through fusion and the identity of the same. Such differentiating synthesis, a synthesis without conjunction, is applied to the singular practice of writing with four hands, and changes not only the status of the text, but its construction.16

As Lecercle remarks, “It is no wonder, therefore, that we discover that the concept of the fold is Deleuze’s solution to the paradoxes created by the relation which is no relation, disjunctive synthesis.”17 Lecercle quotes Badiou’s argument in his Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (from the chapter “The Outside and the Fold”) concerning Deleuze’s ontology: “Given that thought is set in motion by disjunctive synthesis, and that it is solicited by beings who are in nonrelation, how can it be in accordance with Being, which is essentially Relation?”18 Lecercle points out that “the concept of fold is Deleuze’s answer to this paradox.”19 According to Badiou, “The concept of the fold encapsulates the intuitive trajectory that elucidates this paradox.”20 Lecercle further explains that “Badiou’s deduction, which owes much to a reading of Deleuze’s Foucault, envisages a dual topology of exteriority and limit, and folding of the limit into an inside. This process of the outside folding itself into an inside is the very process of subjectivation. The subject—the inside—is the result of an investigation of the outside—the world.”21 Before considering this concept further, however, I would like to pursue Lecercle’s elaboration of the notion of disjunctive synthesis. According to Lecercle, as it appears in both The Logic of Sense and Anti-Oedipus, synthesis has its origin in Kant, for whom synthesis “names the operation through

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which we make sense of the chaotic multiplicity of phenomena.”22 There are three syntheses: “of apprehension in intuition, of reproduction in imagination, [and] of recognition in the concept.”23 Lecercle points out that there are also three syntheses in Deleuze. They are the syntheses “of connection, of conjunction, [and] of disjunction.”24 In the first two, “two series or lines connect together in a single sequence; two separate lines or series are conjoined in fusion, like rivers.”25 In “disjunctive synthesis,” however, one “seeks to connect and separate at the same time.”26 The designation is paradoxical because the Latin prefix “dis” contradicts the Greek prefix “syn,” and, as Lecercle argues convincingly, “you cannot separate and conjoin at the same time.”27 Yet for Lecercle, “it is precisely on this new concept, on this new ‘logical’ operation [of disjunctive synthesis], that Deleuze constructs, his distinctive ontology of absolute difference, against the Aristotelian logic of subject and predicate and the Hegelian logic of contradiction.”28 According to Lecercle, “disjunctive synthesis is the logical operation that . . . a philosophy opposed to a traditional notions of identity and representation, and based instead on absolute ‘asymmetrical’ difference, needs.”29 After an analysis of the “series” on “language” and the “sexual body” in The Logic of Sense and Anti-Oedipus, Lecercle points out that disjunctive synthesis, for Deleuze and Guattari, is not “a synthesis of contradictory terms as in Hegelian sublation (Aufhebung), Rather, it reaffirms the individual and separate existence of the terms it conjoins.”30 By now we realize the importance of this concept for Deleuze, for whom, as Lecercle argues convincingly, it underwrites a philosophy of language (with its emphasis on “esoteric words, and stuttering of language, floating signifiers and the distinction between meaning and sense”), as well as an ontology (with its concern for “series and empty squares; flows and cuts; and events.”).31 Lecercle concludes that the disjunctive synthesis “provides a rationale for the practice of écriture à deux with Guattari.”32 It also explains Deleuze’s notorious hostility to the Hegelian system; “the three syntheses are Deleuze’s answer to the Hegelian dialectic, and the function of the disjunctive synthesis, which is affirmative and resists closure, is to replace and deny the third moment of the dialectic, the moment of unity of contradictory terms through sublation.”33 Regardless of the fact that these conclusions, which are more in line with the traditional characterization of Hegelian “dialectics,” have now been disputed and challenged by Slavoj Žižek, Lecercle’s comments enable us to examine more closely Deleuze’s concept of the fold as linked to his notion of the Baroque.34

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“What is Baroque?” In Chapter 3 of The Fold, titled “What is Baroque?” Deleuze breaks the confines of the historical Baroque apart to discuss its traits in a wide range of contemporary “Neo-Baroque” poetry, literature, painting, music, literature, and above all, architecture. He stretches the concept of the baroque to include artists, poets, composers, and writers from Paul Klee to Mallarmé and from Proust to Boulez and Hantai. Thus, for example, toward the end of the chapter “What is Baroque?” Deleuze mentions the famous French psychiatrist Clérambault and his “secret” taste for Islamic folds. Hence, we learn that there is also an Islamic Baroque that can be associated with drapery. Clérambault is famous for a series of photographs he took between 1914 and 1918 of Moroccan veiled women. Deleuze remarks: “If Clérambault manifests a delirium, it is because he discovers the tiny hallucinatory perceptions of ether addicts in the fold of clothing.”35 He concludes: “hems, (knots and seams being corollaries of the fold); Drapes, with their propping.”36 I will come back to drapery and the case of Clérambault in a later chapter when I discuss Frank Gehry’s architecture. Of particular interest for us are his reflections on Le Corbusier, specifically the “crypt” in the Chapel of La Tourette, realized in collaboration with the mathematician-musician Iannis Xenakis between 1956 and 1960—although it must be pointed out that Deleuze only looked to architecture’s conceptual categories to reinforce his philosophical system. As we will see later, architects and critics would reductively adopt Deleuzian notions to turn them into “design concepts,” thus reducing his philosophical system, for which, as I mentioned before, Deleuze is partly responsible. Deleuze articulates six categories of the baroque: the fold, the inside and the outside, the high and the low, the unfold, textures, and the paradigm. Of all these, perhaps the most important is the second, the inside and the outside. For Deleuze, picking up on an earlier discussion in his Foucault, it is the most distinctive baroque trait, now famously schematized in the diagram of the “Baroque House” in the first chapter of The Fold titled “The Pleat of Matter.” “Such is the Baroque trait: an exterior always on the outside, an interior always on the inside.”37 I will examine this category in detail in the next section. It suffices to say that Deleuze here develops his crucial architectural “comparison” (Deleuze disliked the term “metaphor” and would rather opt for “metamorphosis”),38 an astute but at the same deeply problematic reflection, based in part on Bernard Cache’s L’ameublement du territoire,39 which he claimed “to be essential for any theory

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of the fold,”40 of how Baroque architecture is forever confronting two principles, “a bearing principle and a covering principle,” exemplified rather dubiously “on the one hand, [with Walter] Gropius, and on the other hand, [with Adolf] Loos).”41 But one has to keep in mind that, when Deleuze talks about the arts, as Lecercle reminds us, he “is bent on finding in them the main concepts of his own philosophy.”42 This is particularly true when Deleuze comes to architectural “comparison” for his discussion of the “allegory” of “The Baroque House” and the fold. In a similar way, we might note, writers and critics within the architectural discipline, following on misleading remarks by Deleuze himself, tend to reduce the idea of the fold to a bare “metaphor,” rather than seeing it as an “exploit” or “plagiarism” in the highest affirmative sense developed by Lecercle.43 Certainly, while the distinction between “the inside and the outside” is not unrelated to the notion of topography, which is central to the concept of the fold and may well overlap with a certain “architectural problematic” coinciding with the phenomenological distinction to which I return in Part III, one must guard against any attempt merely to identify the philosophical argument of the book with an “architectural” idea. For it would be a gross simplification not to place The Fold in the context of the late-twentieth-century philosophical debate on the identity of being and thought—that is to say, within “the adventure of French philosophy,” to use Badiou’s term, the debate about the status of the subject and the notion of “event.” I return to this question later on. First, it is necessary to follow closely Deleuze’s “architectural” argument. In the beginning of the chapter “What is Baroque?” Deleuze quotes Leibniz from his Monadology as saying that Monads are neither “openings nor doorways”; they “have no windows, by which any could come in or go out.”44 This condition is represented in the allegory of the “Baroque House” through Deleuze’s now famous diagram—in whose dry rendering there is but one small Renaissance-baroque scroll (a motif the origin of which in architectural history is still unknown) connecting the vertical of the upper level to the horizontal lower level to signal the historical context of his argument. The house is divided into two labyrinthine floors. The “folds of matter” take up the first public floor, and the “folds of the soul” occupy the second. As Tom Conley remarks, “the upper room in Deleuze’s diagram is best conceptualized as a camera obscura, adorned with a suspended canvas, ‘diversified by folds,’ as if it were a living skin.”45 These folds are supposed to assure communication between matter below and the soul above. The folds of the upper floor, according to Conley, suggests a space wherein subjectivation is enacted. “The Baroque room, a space in which thinking takes place, is the site where folds and folding (the forces

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and products of thinking) can be felt and harmonized.”46 By contrast, the lower level is filled with “Masses and organisms, masses and living beings. Why then is another story needed—Conley asks—since sensitive or animal souls are already there, inseparable from organic bodies?”47 Because each soul, according to Deleuze, has to be “localized in its body.” The baroque is all about the “point of view,” and “Leibniz states that the point of the view is in the body.”48 Wölfflin describes the typical traits of the latter—in his own terms, freely borrowed from Wölfflin: “horizontal widening of the lower floor, flattening of the pediment, low and curved stairs that push into space; matter handled in masses or aggregates, with rounding of angles and avoidance of perpendiculars; the circular acanthus replacing the jagged acanthus, use of limestone to produce spongy . . . ; matter tends to spill over in space, to be reconciled with fluidity at the same time fluids themselves are divided into masses.”49 What is crucial here is that “in the baroque the soul entertains a complex relation with the body. Forever indissociable from the body, it discovers a vertiginous animality that gets it entangled in the pleats of matter, but also an organic or cerebral humanity (the degree of development) that allows it to rise up, and that will make it ascend over other folds.”50 Hence, for Deleuze, the baroque is more like a living machine for the production of “plastic forces” and relationships. He writes: “Plastic forces are thus more machinelike than they are mechanical, and they allow for the definition of Baroque machine.”51 Deleuze’s vitalism uses architectural examples—Michelangelo and Pozzo—to confirm Leibniz’s “tension is between collapse and the elevation or ascension,” which is “breaching the organized masses”: “We move from funerary figures of the Basilica of San Lorenzo to the figures on the ceiling of Saint Ignatius. It might be claimed that physical gravity and religious elevation are quite different and do not pertain to the same world.”52 But these two vectors belong together on “the two levels or floors of a single and the same world, or of the single and the same house. It is because the body and the soul have no point in being inseparable, for they are not in the least really distinct.”53 The soul, located in the body, amounts to a “projection” from the top to the bottom, Deleuze says. It conforms with Desargues’s geometry, which develops from a Baroque perspective, he adds. “In short, the primary reason for an upper floor is the following: there are souls on the lower floors, some of whom are chosen to become reasonable, [and] thus to change their level.”54 In chapter I of The Fold, Deleuze writes that “a ‘cryptographer’ is needed who can at once account for nature and decipher the soul, who can peer into the crannies of matter and read into the folds of the soul.”55 Gregg Lambert, in his

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The Non-Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, quickly takes this statement to mean an actual architectural “crypt.”56 He says, “Here we might discover the allegorical significance of baroque architecture for Deleuze, which takes the crypt as its foundation and prima principia of construction and gives a different notation to the function of a ‘key’.”57 Such analogies and overstatements are often suggested by Deleuze himself, who, as Lecercle notes, displays a strong tendency to “exploit” the arts, and in this case architecture, to confirm his philosophical system, bending them to “find” his own philosophical categories. Interestingly, when Deleuze refers to the “crypt” in Le Corbusier’s Monastery of La Tourette, with its five openings to the outside and invisible sources of light, the architectural reference becomes a philosophical concept. This is not an architectural “metaphor,” or architecture’s “transposition into philosophy,” as some writers would make us believe. In making Le Corbusier’s architectural “crypt” into a philosophical category, it is as if the architect, Le Corbusier, had already read the philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, in the same way that other references in The Fold, Mallarmé and Beckett might have read Deleuze before writing their own prose and poetry. Lambert indulges in such “architectural” overstatements when he says, “Deleuze presents the concept of the ‘Baroque’ in the same way that he might present a problem in architecture; that is, where the formal possibilities of the design are inseparable from the possibilities (and ‘incompossibilities’) enfolded within each material component.”58 This would be especially evident, according to Lambert, when “the problem of design issues from the existence of two distinct kinds of infinities that make up the universe, which Deleuze describes as two heterogeneous and irreducible types of the fold (‘entre les plis et les replis’) that run through the baroque construction.”59 Insofar as cryptography is the “art of inventing the key to an enclosed thing”—according to Lambert—Deleuze refers to the baroque lines as the problem of what is called a “crypt.”60 But Lambert adds, “However, if the crypt holds the key for deciphering both Leibniz and ‘the Baroque,’ it cannot be understood as content, or an essence, but rather as a dynamic instability produced by scission that runs between mind and body.”61 Lambert holds that for Deleuze, “Descartes was unable to reconcile the body and the soul because he was unaware of the body’s own inclination and ‘tried to find content’s secret running along straight lines and liberty’s secret in uprightness of the soul’.”62 Lambert then concludes that “Deleuze locates the principle of this scission in the monad itself, and the problem of architecture refers to complete construction of the concept from its initial premise, ‘no doors or windows.’ This unfolds the

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autonomy of ‘an interior without exterior,’ which can be figured no longer as the result of a simple opposition, but as the distinct product of two infinities that run through the living being and which separate the absolute interiority of the monad from the infinite exteriority of matter.”63 It is by this distinction, Lamberts adds, that “Deleuze locates in both Leibniz and ‘the Baroque’ a nearly schizophrenic tension between open façade and closed chamber.”64 Lambert comes back to the crypt of architecture again to state that, “But something quite striking occurs in this composite of the allegory and the secret, which corresponds to the formation of the crypt in architecture and the cipher in language, that is, the composite of écrire-dessiner (writing-designing) in the baroque artifact. In the absence of light, perception takes place in the design, and must be constructed, piece by piece, apartment by apartment. This allegory of perception corresponds to the function of the crypt as topological region in the monad and is defined by the activity of reading.”65 The critic here falls in the trap set up by the philosopher himself; so much for an “architectural” reading of philosophy. In this way, Lambert pushes the architectural analogy to the point of making it into a “philosophical” concept that has little or nothing to do with Deleuze’s text.

The inside and the outside Before The Fold, two years after Foucault’s death, Deleuze had published his Foucault (1986).66 This text is illuminating in many respects and might even be regarded as the urtext for Deleuze’s later ideas on Leibniz and the Baroque. Characteristically, Deleuze’s free and indirect style makes Foucault’s thoughts Deleuze’s own, and he never acknowledges any separation between his own thinking and that of his “philosopher friend.”67 Of special relevance to The Fold would be the chapters entitled “Topology: ‘Thinking Otherwise’” and “Foldings, or the Inside of Thought (Subjectivation).” Right at the beginning of this section, Deleuze discusses Foucault’s book on The History of Sexuality and his return to the aesthetics of the Greek life; his reflections on the relation of power with the outside an “absolute relation” as opposed to the “non-relation” that is thought; and what he calls Foucault’s submitting “interiority to a radical critique.”68 The central question, for Deleuze, is if there is “an inside that lies deeper than any internal world, just as the outside is farther away than any external world?”69 The answer is that the outside is “moving matter” animated by folds and foldings that

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make up an inside: “They are not something other than the outside, but precisely the inside of the outside.”70 The fold is also key to “subjectivation,” since “the most general formula of the relation to oneself is affect of self by self, or folded force. Subjectivation is created by folding.”71 Folding is related to “doubling” and “memory” here. It is an “absolute memory” that “doubles the present and the outside and is one with forgetting.”72 It is where the fold as memory merges with unfolding as forgetting; both are coextensive. Deleuze argues that Foucault, in his effort to surpass intentionality as the relation between consciousness and its object, converted phenomenology into epistemology. This surpassing, after Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, tended toward a folding of being that led to ontology. It was less obvious, he says, “in what way this folding of Being, the fold of Being and being, replaced intentionality.”73 He mentions Merleau-Ponty’s idea of “flesh,” where (unlike with Sartre) intentionality seems to give way to the fold of being, and where “an Outside, more distant than any exterior, is ‘twisted,’ ‘folded’ and ‘doubled’ by an Inside that is deeper than any interior, and alone creates the possibility of the derived relation between the interior and the exterior. It is even this twisting which defines ‘Flesh,’ beyond the body proper and its object.”74 In Merleau-Ponty, however, “Intentionality is still generated in a Euclidean space that prevents it from understanding itself, and must be surpassed by another, ‘topological,’ space which establishes contact between the Outside and the Inside, the most distant, the most deep.”75 It was in this sense, presumably, that Foucault, according to Deleuze, reproached Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger for “going too quickly,” and for not giving due notice to surrealist writer Raymond Roussel, for example, or the painter René Magritte, and in another sense Alfred Jarry, in whose work the “hallucinatory theme of Doubles and doubling that transforms any ontology” is central.76 By the end of the book, Deleuze is ready to provide a general topology of thought as the folding of the outside into the inside. Thought in Foucault, he argues, is thought that always comes from the outside, like a throw of the dice, and within the element of “unthought.” “To think is to fold, to double the outside with a coextensive inside.”77 Moreover, “every inside-space is topologically in contact with the outside-space, independent of distance and on the limits of ‘living’.”78 Therefore, Foucault is a “topologist,” Deleuze declares. He no longer owes anything to Heidegger, because he understands the doubling of the fold, Deleuze asserts. “If the inside is constituted by the folding of the outside, between them there is a topological relation: the relation to oneself is homogeneous to the

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relation with the outside and the two are in contact, though the intermediary of the strata which are relatively external environments (and therefore relatively internal).”79 We learn from Deleuze that Foucault’s work links up with other great works that have taught us what it means to “think.” In this case, through different agencies for Foucault, according to Deleuze’s reading, force tends toward the outside; this outside has now become “intimacy” and “intrusion.” It is this relation to the outside that establishes a relation to the self that produces new modes of subjectivation. Chapter 7 of Badiou’s The Clamor of Being, titled “The Outside and the Fold,” is devoted to a critical commentary on “The concept of the fold” and Deleuze’s reading of Foucault as a “topologist” of the inside and the outside.80 Badiou reads The Fold book against the background of Deleuze’s anti-Cartesianism. He takes Deleuze to task for the path he might have taken (but did not) through the problematic of the subject and the question of being-thinking that goes from Descartes to Hegel, “who sets for philosophy in its entirety the program of ‘thinking in the Absolute not only as substance, but also, and at the same time, as subject’.”81 In contrast to Deleuze’s reading of Foucault, Badiou notes how the latter’s famous “diagram of forces” is invariably a “pure inscription of the outside” that does not entail any interiority. “We pass from a simple disjunctive logic of exteriority to a topology of the outside as the locus of the inscription of forces that, in their reciprocal action and without communicating between themselves in any way, produce singular exteriorities as a local figure of the outside.”82 Contending all along that Deleuze is the thinker of the One in spite of himself, and sharply separating his own (Badiou’s) thought of the “multiple” from Deleuze’s “multiplicity,” and distinguishing his own reading of Mallarmé from Deleuze’s (remember that Deleuze argued in The Fold that Mallarmé is basically a baroque poet), Badiou suggests that the most interesting intuition in Deleuze’s thinking is of the fold as “limit.” He writes, “But what is simultaneously the movement of a surface and the tracing of a limit, if not, precisely, a fold?” “If you fold a sheet of paper, you determine a traced line where the folding takes place, which, although it certainly constitutes the common limit of the two subregions of the sheet, is not, however, a tracing on the sheet, black on white.”83 He concludes that this is the profound moment of the intuition “when limit is thought as fold,” and exteriority is reversed into interiority, “the limit is no longer what affects the outside, it is a fold of the outside.”84 Not only does this mean that “thinking coincides with Being when it is a fold (the construction of a limit as a fold) whose living essence is the fold of Being,” but also “that there

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is a fold of the outside (that the outside folds itself) ontologically signifies that it creates an inside.”85 For Badiou, the “forceful originality” of Deleuze’s doctrine of the fold resides in its political consequences. Accepting that the fold is identified with memory and is immanent to what is already there, and that “everything new is an enfolded selection of the past,” he writes, “The extreme—or, one might say, maximal—attention that Deleuze gives to the most radically new forms of art and psychiatry, of science and the movement of different politics, cannot lead us to ignore that, under the jurisdiction of the One, the thought of the new plunges the latter into that part of it which is its virtual-past.”86 It is in this sense that Badiou cannot follow Deleuze when, at the end of The Fold, he states that we are still discovering new ways of folding, new kinds of “envelopment,” and that we remain Leibnizian “because what always matters is folding, unfolding, refolding.”87 But are we all now Leibnizian? Badiou asks rhetorically, suggesting the answer is far from settled among philosophers. What are the consequences and implications of being so? Architectural theorists, however, have chosen to close this question, assuming that it is settled, so that they can exploit a philosophical debate for various architectural (mis) appropriations. I come back to this problem in Part III.

Interlude I: Theorization of Baroque as “Event”

Since to think the thought of the “Baroque” is to elevate it to a philosophical concept, the first step is to ask: Under what definition of truth can such a concept exist? William Egginton, whose work on the baroque we have already discussed, sees the truth of the baroque as a “problem” that has entangled modern epistemology since the seventeenth century—and that has thus far remained unresolved. This problem has to do with the relation of “appearance” to the world, and this involves a particular paradox. For where “the subject of knowledge can only approach the world through a veil of appearance truth is defined as the adequation of our knowledge to the world thus veiled.”1 [emphasis added]. He further explains, “The Baroque puts the incorruptible truth of the world that underlies all ephemeral and deceptive appearances on center stage, making it the ultimate goal of all inquiry.”2 At the same time, however, the truth thus sought always gets corrupted by appearances and therefore remains a problem. Egginton thus offers the novel term the theatre of truth to describe the paradox at the heart of the Baroque. He writes: “The structure of truth, for the Baroque, is theatrical. But this theatrical nature of truth produces profound problems, problems that the baroque theater makes its business to explore.”3 In another formulation of the same paradox, Egginton writes, “The Baroque makes a theatre out of truth, by incessantly demonstrating that truth can only ever be an effect of appearances from which we seek to free it.”4 As elegant as Egginton’s attempt is to develop an appropriate philosophical concept for the Baroque, it is nevertheless unsatisfactory insofar as it remains locked in a modern epistemology that turns around the dichotomy between truth and appearance, or, in Kantian terms, between the phenomenal and the noumenal. The difficulty of such an approach lies in its emphasis on knowledge, not Truth—which it naively tends to equate. As we will see later, the truth of the baroque is plural and cannot be embedded in a single truth. Badiou’s unique place among contemporary philosophers comes from his focus on the problem of Truth against what he calls the Sophists’ conception

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of truth as bodied forth “in the veiling of its offering.”5 Peter Hallward, in his excellent book on Badiou, highlights the singularity of his oeuvre by surveying the problem of truth in philosophy today and contrasting it with Badiou’s position. He writes, “The most familiar conceptions of truth define it in terms of coherence, correspondences, or confirmation.”6 Each conception has names associated with it. A coherence model is framed “in terms of the ultimately harmonious integration of discursive ‘regularities’ (to use Foucault’s term) with a specific context or location,”7 while a correspondence or realist theory of truth sees it as “a function of the relation between an assertion and extralinguistic reality it describes or refers to.”8 Hallward explains: “Since there is no reason why such assertion should exhaust the full truth ‘out there’ in reality, ‘one definitive aspect of correspondence theories is that what it takes for a sentence to be true might well transcend what we are able to know’.”9 Hallward quotes Michael Dummett, who has characterized realism as “the belief that statements of the disputed class possess an objective truth value, independently of our means of knowing it: they are true or false in virtue of reality existing independently of us.”10 Dummett himself advocates “antirealism,” which corresponds to confirmation conception of truth. “Antirealism demands a direct proof or demonstration before accepting a statement as true. Antirealism thereby implies the possibility of statement that is neither true nor false.”11 Badiou’s conception of truth cannot be reduced to these alternatives. For Badiou, “A truth sets its own conditions, more rigorous than those of any correspondence, coherence, or confirmation. Truth is not Knowledge, but neither is it independent of us. It is we who make truth, but precisely as something that exceeds our knowing.”12 (emphasis added). For Badiou, there is no truth in general; “there are only particular truths in particular situations. But precisely as the truth of its situation, each truth, in its essential inconsistency, is an exposure of the ‘Sameness’ of being.”13 Further, “A situation counts its elements, and its state counts groups of these elements as one: only a generic procedure, by contrast, exposes the truth of what is counted in a situation, that is, its inconsistent being. Generic procedures reveal that which is counted, or presented, ‘in the indifferent and anonymous equality of its presentation’.”14 Ultimately, Hallward shows that for Badiou, “truth is a matter of acts rather than words, of axioms rather than definitions; truth is very exactly ‘the conjunction [noude] of though and being,’ but this conjunction is neither essentially temporal nor grammatical; it escapes the supervision of ‘anthropological rules, the logical rules of language or culture’.”15

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This brief and necessarily incomplete explication of truth in Badiou’s work takes us to his singular definition of philosophy, which I propose to transpose to the Baroque. However, I should here acknowledge my unavoidable limitations in addressing Badiou’s complex and difficult work from the perspective of a nonspecialist. For my understanding, I have worked my way through the commentaries by the prominent Badiou scholars, notably Peter Hallward, Sam Gillespie, Bruno Bosteels, Ed Pluth, Oliver Feltham, and Ray Brassier, among others.16 In any case, I am not here offering an exhaustive discussion of Badiou’s philosophy. Rather, I have a more limited objective of highlighting some aspects of Badiou’s work that might be directly related to a theorization of the Baroque. For this purpose, I make no apology for short-circuiting my way through specialized terms, categories, and concepts. For Badiou, philosophy “is a general theory of events,” or more broadly, “philosophy is the general theory of being and event, as linked by truth.”17 In what follows, I propose to transpose the terms of Badiou’s philosophy and define the baroque as event. But since philosophy, according to Badiou, is the theory of events, it is important to understand what it entails. In his Condition, under “Definition of Philosophy,” Badiou writes: Philosophy is prescribed by conditions that constitute types of truth or generic procedure. These types are science (more precisely, the matheme), art (more precisely, the poem), politics (more precisely, politics in interiority, or a politics of emancipation) and love (more precisely, the procedure that makes truth of the disjunction of sexuated potions). Philosophy is the place of thought where the “there is” (il y a) of these truths, and their compossibility, is stated. To achieve this, philosophy constructs an operational category, the Truth, which opens up an active void in thought. . . . Philosophy, as discourse, is thus an activity that constructs a fiction of knowledge and a fiction of art in superposition to one another.18

“Philosophy thinks only thought,” Badiou says, but under its own abovementioned “conditions.” These conditions are the “truth procedures” of philosophy. Moreover, the relation of philosophical Truth to truths (i.e., scientific, political, artistic, and amorous) is a relation of seizing.19 “By itself the philosophical category of truth is empty. It operates but presents nothing. Philosophy is not a production of truth, but an operation carried out on the basis of truths.”20 And since the central category of philosophy is empty, it is “essentially subtractive.”21

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In Badiou’s system, therefore, philosophy itself has no claim to truth outside of its conditions. Nevertheless, there is an order of priorities: “Philosophy is in no way ‘first’ or foundational with respect to its conditions.”22 For Badiou, such conditions “must all be fully fulfilled for there to be philosophy.”23 In his Manifesto for Philosophy, written after his seminal Being and Event, Badiou explains: There are four conditions of philosophy, and the lack of a single one gives rise to its dissipation, just as the emergence of all four conditioned its apparition. These conditions are: the matheme, the poem, political invention and love. We shall call the set of these conditions generic procedures. . . . According to these same reasons, the four types of generic procedures specify and class all the procedures determined thus far which may produce truths (they are but scientific, artistic, political, and amorous truths). We can therefore say that philosophy requires there to be truths within each of the orders in which they may be invoked.24

The general logic for gathering these heterogeneous truths together is to assemble them in a relation of “compossibility.”25 Thus, philosophy, as Hallward notes, “does not determine the general or transcendent criteria of truths”; rather, quoting Badiou, “the most singular and most characteristic effort of philosophy is that of the compossibilization [of its conditions].”26 Furthermore, “Philosophy demonstrates the ‘Compossibility’ of its current conditions. In more evocative terms, philosophy arranges a liaison or rendez-vous with truth.”27 Badiou: “philosophy is the madman [maquerelle] of truth. And just as beauty is a requirement of the woman encountered, but is not at all required of the madman, so too are truths artistic, scientific, amorous, or political, but not philosophical.”28 I will come back to the notion of “compossibility” in relation to the Baroque below. Here, it should be added that philosophy faces “disaster” when it begins to get “fascinated,” or in Badiou’s technical term, “sutured,” to one of its conditions. In his Ethics, Badiou states that “I shall call ‘truth’ (a truth) the real process of a fidelity to an event: that which this fidelity produces in the situation.”29 He gives several examples of this fidelity. One is the French Maoists between 1966 and 1976, who practiced a fidelity to the entangled events of the Cultural Revolution in China and to the events of May 1968. Another is “contemporary” music’s fidelity to the Viennese composers of the early twentieth century. In either case, “a truth is the material course traced within a situation, by the evental supplementation. It is an immanent break. ‘Immanent’ because a truth proceeds in the situation, and nowhere else—there is no heaven of truth. ‘Break’ because what enables the truth-process—the event—meant noting according to the

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prevailing language and established knowledge of the situation.”30 In chapter 5, in the section titled “Return to the event, fidelity and truth,” Badiou gives sustained definitions for the three dimensions of event, fidelity, and truth and says that they have several essential “ontological” characteristics. It is at this point—a rare occasion in his work—that Badiou mentions Haydn and the “baroque style” in a way that is consistent with the notion of the Baroque as event. Before we get to it, however, we have to first follow Badiou’s exact and systematic definition of the three dimensions noted above: First, “the event, which brings to pass ‘something other’ than the situation, opinions, instituted knowledge; the event is a hazardous [hasardeux], unpredictable supplement, which vanishes as soon as it appears”; Second, “the fidelity, which is the name of the process: it amounts to a sustained investigation of the situation, under the imperative of the event itself; it is an immanent and continuing break”; Third, “the truth, as such, that is, the multiple, internal to the situation, that the fidelity constructs, bit by bit; it is what the fidelity gathers together and produces.”31

In his explanation of the essential “ontological” characteristics of these three dimensions, Badiou says that the event is both situated and supplementary, and hence “detached” from the rules of a situation. As an example, he cites the emergence of the “classical style” in Haydn. This emergence, he holds, “concerns the musical situation and no other, a situation then governed by the predominance of the baroque style. It was an event for this situation. But in another sense, what this event was to authorize in terms of musical configurations was not comprehensible from within the plenitude achieved by the baroque style; it really was a matter of something else.”32 What makes the connection, then, between the event and that “for which” it is the event, is the void [vide]. Badiou explains, “at the heart of every situation, as the foundation of its being, there is a ‘situated’ void, around which is organized the plenitude (or the stable multiples) of the situation in question.”33 He goes on: Thus at the heart of the baroque style at its virtuoso saturation lay the absence [vide] (as decisive as it was unnoticed) of a genuine conception of musical architectonics. The Haydn-event occurs as a kind of musical “naming” of the absence [vide]. For what constitutes the event is nothing less than a wholly new architectonics and thematic principle, a new way of developing musical writing from the basis of a few transformable units—which was precisely what, from within the baroque style, could not be perceived (there could not be knowledge of it).34

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Therefore, Badiou further explains, a situation “is composed by the knowledge circulating within it, the event names the void inasmuch as it names the nonknowledge of the situation.”35 In this respect, citing Badiou, Hallward writes, “We know that it is ‘the event [that] reveals the void’ of a situation, and ‘a truth always begins by naming that void’.”36 Moreover, whether “revealed or hidden, the void as such remains universally included in every part of situation, and for that very reason remains unpresentable, ungraspable. The evental site is not itself void but that element of the situation which is located ‘at the edge of its void’.”37 Badiou gives a well-known political example that can help the reader to better understand his thesis. He says that Marx is the name for a political thought, because it was Marx who coined the term “proletariat” to designate the central void of early bourgeois societies. “For the proletariat—being entirely disposed, and absent from the political stage—is that around which is organized the complacent plenitude established by the rule of those who possess capital.”38 Elsewhere, in Being and Event, Badiou gives the example of the French Revolution as an event. He notes that it belongs to the “situation” called the eighteenth century. As an event, it forms “a one out of everything which makes up its site; that is, France between 1789 and, let’s say, 1794.”39 These would include the General Estates, the sans-culottes, the members of the Convention, the guillotine, and so on. As Ed Pluth puts it, we can say that “the event itself would be this thing called ‘the French Revolution’ while the evental site would be the happenings, the organizations, the writings, the turmoil, and so on—all of which, considered together, are certainly present in eighteenth-century France.  .  .  . Thus, the question is whether this event called the ‘French Revolution’ belongs to and is presented in the situation of eighteenth century France.”40 According to Badiou, however, “if there exists an event, its belonging to the situation of its site is undecidable from the standpoint of the situation itself.”41 One more example—one that is particularly useful for understanding the slippery notion of “evental site”—is Arnold Schoenberg’s invention of 12-tone music. The relevant situation is the condition of musical composition in earlytwentieth-century Europe, with its various composers and different styles of composition. As Pluth notes, Schoenberg’s invention was characterized by a trait, a tonality in music that set his compositions apart from all others. “If Schoenberg’s work make up an evental site,” Pluth argues, “Badiou would need to hold that the [Schoenberg’s] compositions themselves are not properly presented in the musical situation of their day. It is however the case that this thing called ‘twelve-tone music’ is presented as a whole (maligned by some,

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celebrated by others). But the compositions themselves, if they are elements of an evental site, cannot be held to be presented in the situation.”42 Pluth concludes that “An evental site marks, therefore, a kind of division within the situation. Such a site is a subset, it contains its own elements, but these elements are not properly part of the situation in which the site itself is presented.”43 As Badiou would put it in his Ethics: “The fundamental ontological characteristic of an event is to inscribe, to name, the situated void of that for which it is an event.”44 In an interview with Badiou on his book Ethics, Hallward poses a question concerning “the autonomy of truth” in relation to Badiou’s remarks about Haydn and Schoenberg and asks: “What kind of relationship is there, for example, between the truth of a scientific or an artistic discovery and the technical means of its formulation and distribution? What relation is there between an artistic— let’s say musical—truth, and the (culturally specific) system of tonality which ensure that the truths of Hayden and Schoenberg—to take examples from your L’éthique—are always truths for certain listeners?”45 In his lengthy answer, Badiou reiterates his thesis that philosophy does not create truths “but plays a certain—I didn’t say the only role—in their identification and in their compatibility, their compossibility, the evaluation of their time. . . . We know that the identification of art itself, as art as distinct from anything else, is the achievement of philosophy.”46 He further reflects on the “interconnected juxtaposition” of truth-procedures: “Truth-procedures do not exist as unilaterally unconnected, as entirely independent of each other, each following their own path. They are constituted in a network, they cross each other. Part of the problem is a matter of knowing, for example, the points of connection between scientific procedure, its successive breaks, its discoveries, and the rules of political protocol.”47 Toward the end of his answer, Badiou reflects on his concept of culture and remarks that, in the end, “culture, to the extent that it can be thought or identified by philosophy, is a singular interconnected configuration of truth-procedures.”48 While the above presentation is only a narrow cut into certain aspects of Badiou’s philosophy, it is sufficient to draw certain conclusions regarding my proposition of the baroque as event. At the dawn of modernity, the historical Baroque heralded a new culture, which, following Badiou, we can now describe as an “interconnected configuration of truth-procedures.” The seventeenthcentury situation in which the event of the historical Baroque emerged centered on a void, a hole, determined by a fundamental loss of the object. As a result of this loss or lack, the event of the Baroque and the epoch of modernity that followed were marked by a new melancholy. What Lacan calls the “split

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subject $,” and which Žižek defines with a Hegelian term as the “void of selfrelating negativity,” was a new configuration of the subject generated by this new melancholy. The truth of the baroque was plural, split into the separate but interconnected domains of art, science, politics, and love. The “compossibility” of art, science, politics, and love constitutes the concept of the Baroque. On a politicoreligious level, the baroque corresponds to absolutist monarchy and the Counter-Reformation; on a scientific level, to Kepler and the discovery of an infinite universe; on an artistic level, to what we might call, inverting Egginton’s notion above, the “truth of the theater.” Opera, the Baroque art par excellence, moves within the truth of theater. Finally, in the domain of love, the Baroque marked the discovery of jouissance and of feminine sexuality. This is what Lacan (re)discovered, as discussed in the previous chapter. The enigma of this (re)discovery, an event in itself, leads to the ultimate definition of the Baroque as that which is undecidable in its truths.

Part Two

Modernity, Madness, and the Baroque Criticism

Figure 3 Las Meninas, or The Family of Felipe IV. Ca. 1656. Oil on canvas. 3.18  2.76 m., by Velázquez, Diego Rodriguez (1599–1660), Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain.

4

Cogito and the Baroque in the Age of Reason: Reading Foucault

An inquiry into the meaning of the Baroque must first begin with the cogito, the Western project of reason and its own philosophical underpinnings: the exclusion, but also inclusion, of madness in the constitution of modern subjectivity. It must be remembered that, as Žižek notes, “madness” is inherent in the entire history of modern philosophy from Descartes onward, from which it persistently tries to separate. The separation of reason from the “excess” of madness is at the foundation of Cartesian subjectivity, which, still according to Žižek, becomes visible for the first time with psychoanalysis.1 Within the discourse of modern philosophy, the Baroque represents the excesses of reason, which can be studied only because our age is the age of psychoanalysis. This is the double bind that conditions any analysis of the “re-turn” of the Baroque in contemporary culture. Indeed, insofar as the age of the baroque belongs to the age of reason, or to what Michel Foucault named the “Classical Age,” to talk about the Baroque means facing the problematic of Western thought. It means analyzing the other of reason, as defined first of all in Cartesian philosophy. There is no denying that Descartes has fallen into disrepute in academic circles in the last four decades. As Kyoo Lee puts it, In this fashionably “anti-Cartesian” era, when the word Cartesianism immediately and misleadingly evokes the fossilized image of dry scientism or reductive theoreticism, the question of how Descartes the rationalist follows his own threefold dream—his logico-poetic vision that is fantastically absurd and private as well as rigorously disciplined and largely sharable—should interest any thinker, Cartesian or non-Cartesian, insomniacs or sleepyhead.2

In psychoanalysis, as we have seen, only Lacan’s antiphilosophy rehabilitates Descartes, and in doing so, makes visible what modern philosophy tries to disavow, namely the dangerous kernel of modern subjectivity that must be kept

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at a distance.3 This thesis will guide the inquiry in this chapter, the focus of which is the dimension of madness in the original Baroque as well as in the innermost constitution of the modern subject. More specifically, what follows is an attempt to locate the concept of the Baroque in a larger philosophical discourse around the notion of the subject, from Kant’s “antinomy of reason,” or that which sets a limit to reason from inside, to “Baroque Reason,” or the reason of the Other, as Christine Buci-Glucksmann calls it. This notion implicates the constitutive excess of madness, which, beginning with the seventeenth century, grounds the universality of “reason-in-general” in the Western system of thought. We begin with examination of Foucault’s highly debated History of Madness. This dazzling 700-page tour de force, which first appeared in 1961, was titled Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique. The complete English translation came out in 2006 with the simpler title History of Madness.4 The book was famously disputed by Jacques Derrida in an oral presentation made two years after its original appearance and later published as “Cogito and the History of Madness.”5 Five years after Derrida’s critique, Foucault replied to him in a paper entitled “My body, this paper, this fire,” added as an appendix to the 1972 French edition of his book and now included in the English edition.6 In his reply, Foucault basically challenged Derrida’s reading of Descartes. Before we review this debate, it is useful to consider Foucault’s ideas on the Baroque as they emerge in this seminal work. Foucault mentions the “Baroque” only twice. The first time is while discussing the “truth of madness” as “interior to reason.” Here, he locates what he calls the “triumph of madness” in its multiple manifestations in literature and art, at the end of sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, in works that endeavor to master this reason but that also recognize the presence of madness that Foucault calls the “games of a Baroque Age.”7 The second mention of the Baroque is in the context of his discussion of trompe-l’oeil. He writes: Equilibrium begins in madness, but madness hides that equilibrium in a cloud of illusion and feigned order, camouflaging the rigor of the architecture beneath a cleverly arranged violent disorder. This unexpected vivacity, this wind of madness that suddenly shakes gestures or words, breaks the mood or blows through the curtains when the fabric is in fact stretched tight, is a typical instance of the Baroque trompe-l’oeil. Madness is the great trompe-l’oeil in the tragic-comic structure of pre-classical literature.8

In both cases, the reference to the Baroque is consistent with his statement later on that “a rational grip on reason is always possible and necessary, precisely because

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madness is non-reason.”9 We need not lament the short treatment of the Baroque in Foucault’s text. One has to only extrapolate its meaning from his work, like a negative definition of the mentality that within the secular and modern “reasonin-general” made the “alternative” Baroque “reason” possible—a mentality that I argue is basically our own contemporary discourse. Later, in The Order of Things, Foucault comes back to the Baroque when he discusses the Classical age and the shift from “Resemblance” to “Representation.” He begins with his novel discussion of Diego Velázquez’s 1656 painting Las Meninas, which marks the moment when the Classical age “was to reply by the analysis of the representation.”10 Modern thought, he remarks, was a reply to this by way of the analysis of meaning, and signification, things, and words, he points out, were destined to be separated from each other. He wrote: This [transformation] involved an immense reorganization of culture, a reorganization of which the Classical age was the first and perhaps the most important stage, since it was responsible for the new arrangement in which we are still caught—since it is the Classical age that separates us from a culture in which the signification of signs did not exist, because it was reabsorbed into the sovereignty of the Like; but in which their enigmatic, monotonous, stubborn, and primitive being shone in an endless dispersion.11

Trompe-l’oeil becomes critical in this regard, since “at the beginning of the seventeenth century, during the period that has been termed, rightly or wrongly, Baroque thought ceases to move in the element of resemblance. Similitude is no longer the form of knowledge but rather the occasion of error, the danger to which one exposes oneself when one does not examine the obscure region of confusions.”12 Here, Foucault quotes the first lines of Descartes’s Regulae: “It is frequent habit, when we discover several resemblances between two things, to attribute to both equally, even on points in which they are in reality different, that which we have recognized to be true of only one of them.”13 Foucault comments: The chimeras of similitude looms up on all sides, but they are recognized as chimeras; it is the privileged age of trompe-l’oeil painting, of the comic illusion, of the play that duplicates itself by representing another play, of the quid pro quo, of dreams and visions; it is the age of deceiving senses; it is the age in which the poetic dimension of language is defined by metaphor, simile, and allegory.14

It is worth noting that during the same time that Foucault published Les Mots and des choses in 1966, Foucault’s friend, Jacques Lacan, was giving his Seminar XIII, in which he also discussed Las Meninas from an entirely different perspective—the

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point of view of his theory of the “gaze” and his analysis of the Baroque, which he based, as we have seen, on Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors. Here, however, I want to focus on the debate between Foucault and Derrida mentioned above. In History of Madness, Foucault devoted no more than three out of 700 pages to Descartes, which, as commentators have been quick to remind us, were not even included in the abridged version of the book. Yet these were precisely the pages Jacques Derrida picked up on in his criticism of Foucault’s thick tome. Foucault’s general thesis is that the age of reason reduced madness to silence. By uncovering the history of mental illness, from leprosy to the psychiatric hospital, Foucault showed how the Enlightenment concealed and repressed this history through what Roy Boyne calls “a denial of otherness, of difference”—a denial that “is, effectively, the absolutist project, unconsciously designed along lines of complete domination.”15 Foucault’s work thus aimed for a return of the repressed, a return of the Other, and its right to be different. From this standpoint, Descartes’s quest for absolute certainty in order to establish the rule of reason through methodological doubt excludes madness; it dismisses otherness. Foucault quotes the famous passage in the Meditations on First Philosophy, where Descartes asks: How could it be denied that these hands or this whole body are mine? Unless perhaps I were to liken myself to madmen, whose brains are so damaged by the persistence vapors of melancholia that they firmly maintain they are kings when they are paupers, or say they are dressed in purple when they are naked, or that their heads are made of earthenware or that they are pumpkins, or made of glass.16

Descartes could not doubt the solidity of his own body, like those who think they are made out of glass, otherwise he would be mad himself. But neither could he rely on sense-perception from the outside or the illusion of dreams. Yet according to Foucault, “the impossibility of providing a certain criterion for distinguishing a dream from waking reality, of proving that we are not dreaming right now, gives Descartes a justification of doubt which is much less problematic than the hypothesis of madness.”17 Madness is totally a different thing, Foucault says. For Descartes, “I who think cannot be mad.” But “when I think I have a body, can I be certain that my grasp on the truth is stronger that that of the man who believes his body to be made of glass?” Foucault asks.18 In Descartes, the question of madness can be dispensed with entirely, according to Foucault. The problem of dream can function as “the principle reason for doubt.” The distinction between dreaming and wakefulness does not mean that Descartes

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must abandon his quest for certainty about himself. As he famously wrote in his First Meditation, “whether I am awake or asleep, two and three added together are five, and a square has no more than four sides. It seems impossible that such transparent truths should incur any suspicion of being false.”19 Descartes described three sources of doubt: errors of the senses, the uncertainty of dreams, and the illusions of madness. For Foucault, the truth of the first two resides in the nature of the objects of thought. The case of madness, however, is different because it resides in the subject who thinks he or she is sane. Foucault writes: Madness is an altogether different affair. If its danger compromises neither the enterprise nor essential truth that is found, this is not because this thing, even in the thought of the madman, cannot be untrue, but rather because, I, when I think, cannot be considered insane. When I think I have a body, can I be certain that my grasp on the truth is stronger than that of the man who believes his body to be made of glass? Assuredly, say Descartes, “such people are insane, and I would be thought mad if I took anything from them as a model for myself.” It is not the permanence of truth that ensures that thought is not madness, in the way that it freed it from an error of perception or a dream; it is an impossibility of being mad which is inherent in the thinking subject rather the object of his thoughts.20

What Descartes’s philosophical exclusion of madness reveals, according to Foucault, is that “it is the subject who is wellspring of truth. We are not here talking of the subject as a body; bodies can malfunction, the brain can be invaded by dark vapors. . . . Rather, we are speaking of the subject as intellect, as thought, as the sources of sovereign truth. It is this subject, the rational subject, which will become the defining figure of the post-Renaissance world.”21 Thus, Madness has been banished. While man can still go mad, thought, as the sovereign exercise carried out by a subject seeking the truth, can no longer be devoid of reason. A new dividing line has appeared, rendering that experience so familiar to the Renaissance—unreasonable Reason, or reasonable Unreason— impossible. Between Montaigne and Descartes an event has taken place, which concerns the advent of a ratio. But the advent of a ratio in the Western world meant far more than the appearance of a “rationalism.” More secretly, but in equal measure, it also meant the movement whereby Unreason was driven underground, to disappear, but also take root.22

In short, as Boyne points out, the significance of Descartes’s thought for Foucault’s exploration of madness is that his pursuit of certainty proceeds by

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way of “a dismissal of otherness,”23 namely the hypothesis that the condition of madness might have any relevance for the rational mind. For Foucault, Descartes’s argument is typical of the West’s project of reason, which, in refusing to question the rule of reason, does away entirely with the notion of difference and the reason of the Other. But, Foucault asks, “was Descartes’s dismissal of madness necessary? In terms that some have seen as radically recasting the First Mediations, he asks: Would it not possible to rethink the First Meditation, but this time to argue through madness? Might not a different certitude emerge on its other side?”24 These considerations explain why Foucault is considered by some to be a sort of contemporary Descartes and his Histoire de la folie a radical version of the Cartesian system. Even so, there are two notable absences in Foucault’s work, both of which famously complicated Descartes’s First Meditation, namely the idea of God and the idea of “Evil Genius” (malin génie).25 We will get to this debate shortly. If Foucault was seeking another language of reason beyond reason in which madness would find a voice, it was precisely this “Utopianism” that Jacques Derrida attacked in his “Cogito, and the History of Madness.” His critique of Foucault focuses on Descartes’s supposed exclusion of madness, and the assumption that there is only one form of reason, reason-in-general, whose concomitant is the exclusion of unreason.26 Derrida argued rather that madness is internal to reason and that reason itself is not a historically determined structure but a category that cannot be exceeded, hence that “any attempt to work against reason will always be contained by reason, or reason-in-general.”27 For Derrida, one has to proceed with the assumption that both classical reason and classical madness are determined by reason in general. Moreover, Derrida tries to show that “there can be no privileged space outside of reason, no higher reason, no other reason, no unreasonable reason outside of the confines of reason itself.”28 Derrida thought that Foucault overstated the antipathy between reason and madness, by showing that Descartes in his Meditation, in fact, dealt with madness inside thought.29 As we can see, at issue in the debate between Foucault and Derrida is the interpretation of the cogito. In this regard, it is well to keep in mind Žižek’s own intervention in this debate, since it is relevant to the link I want to establish between the Baroque and the cogito through psychoanalytical theory. Foucault’s reply was that Derrida’s analysis was conducted entirely within the limits of philosophy, unable to go to its outside. Actually, as Žižek points out, Derrida’s negation of the “hors text” was, in some sense, redoubled: “What Derrida does is not only ‘deconstruct’ philosophy, demonstrating its dependence on the external Other; even more so, he ‘deconstructs’ the attempt to locate a sphere outside

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philosophy, demonstrating how all anti-philosophical efforts to determine this Other remain indebted to frame of philosophical categories.”30 While both Derrida and Foucault share the underlying premise that the cogito is inherently related to madness, their approaches are very different. Foucault grounds the cogito in an exclusion of madness, whereas Derrida—as Žižek puts it—thinks that “the cogito emerges through a ‘mad’ hyperbole (universalized doubt), and is marked by this excess: before it stabilizes itself as res cogitans, the self-transparent thinking substance.”31 Thus, if Foucault believed that Descartes built his model of the cogito through a discursive or methodical construction of the power relations between reason and madness, for Derrida, “far from excluding madness, Descartes pushes it to an extreme: universal doubt, where I suspect that the entire world is an illusion, is the greatest madness imaginable.”32 Hence, again, madness is not external to philosophy, but strictly internal to it, as a hyperbolic moment or excess that grounds philosophy. “The latter is perhaps nothing but a reassurance against the anguish of being mad at the point of greatest proximity to madness.”33 But, of course, as Žižek notes, this excess of madness is universal and not historical; it is the excessive moment that grounds all philosophy in all its historical forms. Every philosophy tries to control and repress this excess, just as Descartes tried to “domesticate” this radical excess with his res cogitans, the man as a “thinking substance.” In “My body, this paper, this fire”—his reply to Derrida—Foucault goes to great lengths to fault the latter’s “careless” reading of Descartes. His target is evidently Derrida’s famous phrase “il n’y a pas d’hors texte.” He writes: “It might well be asked how an author as meticulous as Derrida, and one so attentive to texts, managed not only to allow so many omissions, but also to operate so many displacements, interventions and substitutions.”34 Beyond such complaints, it is clear that we are confronted here with two different practices, two rival reading strategies. For Foucault, texts are part of “discourse” formations and dispositifs in which they are interlocked with extratextual mechanisms and practices of power and domination. As one commentator, contrasting these two different strategies, writes, In [Foucault’s] stinging final attack on Derrida’s method, we can see the extreme tension between “textuality” and “discursivity” as rival reading strategies. While Derrida feels that the text must be relentlessly “deconstructed,” so that its network of “traces” can be better exposed as trapped within the “prisons-house” of logocentrism, Foucault take the position that a text can be best read against its context, that is, as part of a larger set of discursive practices that inform the episteme of its specific spatio-temporal configuration.35

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Žižek, however, wishing to go beyond a crude polarity of inside versus outside the text, examines Derrida’s criticism more carefully. He reminds us, once again, that for Derrida, madness is inscribed in the history of the cogito. This inscription occurs at two basic levels: first, in the “shadowy double” that can always be found in the philosophy of subjectivity from Descartes to Kant, Schelling, Hegel, up to Nietzsche and Husserl; and second, in the history of the cogito itself as a transcendental principle. As Derrida puts it in his brilliant “two-stage” analysis of Descartes, The act of the Cogito and the certainty of existing indeed escapes madness the first time; but aside from the fact that for first time, it is no longer a question of objective, representative knowledge, it can no longer literally be said that the Cogito would escape madness because it keeps itself beyond the grasp of madness, or because, as Foucault says, “I who think, I cannot be mad”; the Cogito escapes madness only because as its own moment, under its own authority, it is valid even if I am mad, even if my thoughts are completely mad. There is a value and a meaning of the Cogito, as of existence, which escape the alternative of a determinate madness or a determinate reason. . . . Descartes never interns madness, neither at the stage of natural doubt nor at the stage of metaphysical doubt. He only claims to exclude it during the first phase of the first stage, during the nonhyperbolic moment of natural doubt.36

Derrida further adds, “as soon as Descartes has reached this extremity, he seeks to reassure himself, to certify the Cogito through God, to identify the act of the Cogito with reasonable reason.”37 In this Foucault-Derrida debate, Žižek ultimately takes the side of the philosopher Derrida. “In spite of the finesse of Foucault’s reply,” he says, “he ultimately falls into the trap of historicism.”38 Foucault, according to Žižek, in his objection to Derrida’s “il n’y a pas de horstexte” is missing the mark when in his paper he says: It is part of a system, a system of which Derrida is today the most decisive representative, in its waning light: a reduction of discursive practice to textual traces; the elision of events that are produced there, leaving only marks for a reading; the invention of voices behind the text, so as not to have examine the modes of implication of the subject in discourse; the assignation of the originary as said and not-said in the text in order to avoid situating discursive practices in the field of transformation where they are carried out.39

It is Derrida, however, who, according to Žižek, is closer to thinking externality than Foucault. Whereas for the latter “exteriority involves a simple historicist reduction which cannot account for itself,” what Derrida achieves is the much

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more difficult task of thinking philosophy’s inherent excess, its “ex-timate” core. These, then, are the true stakes of the debate: “ex-timacy or direct externality.”40 In 1991, at an event for the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Foucault’s History of Madness, Derrida was invited to give a talk. In his lecture titled “‘To Do Justice to Freud’: The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis,” he came back to the old debate in “fidelity” and “professed admiration” for his friend.41 This time he chose to discuss Foucault’s text not in the context of the classical age, but with a concern for the relevance of the book for “today,” “The Age of Psychoanalysis.” Picking up gaps in the text concerning the questionable position of Foucault on Freud, Derrida talked about a certain “problematization” of “psychoanalysis itself,” of “Freud himself,” and the “contemporaneity” of both to us, today. Like he did with Foucault’s reading of Descartes, Derrida questioned his reading of Freud. More importantly, he cited Lacan as saying that “neither Socrates, nor Descartes, nor Marx, nor Freud, can be ‘surpassed’ insofar as they led their research with this passion for unveiling whose object is truth.”42 Regarding the problematization of psychoanalysis and the question of “contemporaniety,” Derrida quoted Foucault’s famous distinction between the classical age and our own: If contemporary man, since Nietzsche and Freud, finds deep within himself the site for contesting all truth, being able to read, in what he now knows of himself, the signs of fragility through which unreason threatens, seventeenth-century man, on the contrary, discovers, in the immediate presence of his thought to itself, the certainty in which reason in its pure form is announced.43

As we have seen, the seventeenth-century notion of the Baroque is not unrelated to an imperative “pure form” of reason that is, however, already contaminated by the certain unreason of madness. Equally, if not more, relevant for our purpose is Derrida’s distinction between “psychology,” “psychiatry,” and “psychoanalysis,” whereby if a “positive psychology” masked the experience of unreason, losing “all relation to a certain truth of madness, that is, to a certain truth of Unreason, psychoanalysis, on the contrary, breaks with psychology by speaking with the Unreason that speaks with Madness no longer in the context of the classical age— which only determined madness as Unreason in order to exclude or confine it—but toward an ‘eve of the classical age,’ which still haunted it.”44 For Derrida, “In order to do ‘justice’ to Freud means giving him credit for figuring all those who, like in a gallery of heralds of good tidings, announce the very possibility of Foucault’s book. Among them, he mentions Nietzsche, more frequently Nietzsche and Artaud, Van Gogh, sometimes Nerval, and from time to time,

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Hölderlin. Their excesses, ‘the madness in which the work of art is engulfed,’ is the abyss out of which opens ‘the space of our enterprise’.”45 It is significant that in such later works as Discipline and Punish and the History of Sexuality, Foucault seems to acknowledge Derrida’s critique to the point of admitting that “there is no outside,” and that “liberated” man himself is generated by dispositifs that control and “regulated him,” and that “madness is also generated by the very discourse that excludes, objectivizes, and studies it.”46 Even more tellingly, after his debate with Derrida, Foucault suppressed the original preface to the first edition of Histoire de la folie, repudiating the optimism it displayed in claiming “to know madness itself, to investigate madness without repeating the original exclusion and betrayal of madness by post-Cartesian reason.”47 One might therefore conclude this review of the Foucault-Derrida debate by citing Boyne’s sound judgment about the whole episode. He says, Madness however, is the contemporary Western taboo that we do not even know how to disobey. As the possibility of communicating across the divide between reason and madness recedes further and further away from us, we are less likely to find an understanding of the meaning of our culture. To know who and what we are, in this ordered post-Enlightenment epoch, it is even a liability, and an evidence of instability, if we recognize the depths beneath us.48

The Baroque “subject”: Between madness and reason As I discussed in “Interlude I,” to take a proper measure of the Baroque, it must be translated into philosophical discourse and elevated to the dignity of a philosophical idea. The attempt I made above to locate the problem of the historical baroque in the age of reason within the Foucault-Derrida debate on the cogito is a step in this direction. Yet this attempt must now be complemented by bringing the question of the Baroque to the problematic of the subject in a critique of Cartesian subjectivity that will be central to the conceptualization of the Baroque as excess. Who is the subject of the baroque? What rational subject does baroque madness solicit or “interpellate”? To answer these questions, neither Foucault’s dispositifs of discursive power-knowledge networks, nor Derrida’s idea of aporetic textuality (il n’y a pas de hors-texte) is adequate. Both fall short of addressing explicitly the question of the subject, although Foucault did begin to address this question toward the end of his career.49

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From their debate, it would seem that the first elementary step to bring out the subject in the baroque is to return to the cogito. Historically, as we have seen, the emergence of the Baroque is simultaneous with the discourse around madness and the excesses of reason. Both tell us something about the elusiveness of the Cartesian subject: elusive both because it is unconscious and—as Walter Benjamin noted—because it is “melancholic.” Indeed, if there is something that may be said to characterize the Cartesian subject, it would be an antagonism between the cogito, that is, the transparent subject of self-consciousness, and the unconscious, that is, the opaque Other that undermines and subverts the agency of this transparent consciousness.50 This theoretical determination, as we have seen, derives from Lacan’s psychoanalytical theory of the subject and his return to Descartes. Psychoanalytical theory, we could say, renders visible the unconscious inherent in Baroque madness, which has remained repressed in both philosophical discussions and in academic art-historical interpretations that lack a theory of subject. In his Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan asserts that the psychoanalytical subject is the Cartesian cogito, which must however by now rethought in modern Freudian terms: I will now dare to define the Cartesian I think as participating, in its striving towards certainty, in a sort of abortion. The difference of status given to the subject by the discovered dimension of the Freudian unconscious derives from desire, which must be situated at the level of the cogito.51

Thus, compared to Foucault (if it were not an anachronism, we might say after Foucault) whose archaeology of the silence of madness is told against or outside the order of transparent reason that excludes it, Lacan makes the madness of reason speak from within the Cartesian cogito. For Lacan, the very same selftransparent subject of reason is, paradoxically, the subject of the unconscious— an affirmation that, as we will see, is a good deal more complex than it might appear at first glance. I want here to follow Žižek’s intricate analysis of this thesis in Tarrying with the Negative, wherein he uses the fundamental principles of idealism’s philosophy of subjectivity in Kant and Hegel to shed light on the inaugural radicality of Descartes’s discovery of the substanceless “I think,” the mad cogito, as well as on his reduction of the latter to mere res cogitans, or the “substance that thinks.” Elsewhere, Žižek suggests that the Cartesian subject emerges out of the “death of man” and that “transcendental subjectivity” is a version of philosophical antihumanism52—a claim that recalls Foucault, in the

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last pages of The Order of Things, when he was still sympathetic to psychoanalysis, announcing the disappearance of “man” from the human sciences “like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea”—a phrase eagerly picked up by postmodern enthusiasts—but the logical implications of which he failed to pursue.53 For Žižek, the question of subjectivity “has nothing to do with the notion of man as the highest creature in the ‘great chain of being,’ as the final point of the evolution of the universe: modern subjectivity emerges when the subject perceives himself as ‘out of joint’, as excluded from the ‘order of the things’.”54 Central to modern subjectivity is the idea of excess, the excessive gesture or hubris, which grounds the universal order. Foucault had already discussed this ambivalent notion in the preface to History of Madness, where he traced it back to ancient Greek dialectical thought. For Foucault, the Greek approach to hubris was a model of nonexclusionary reason. He wrote, The Greeks had a relation to a thing they called . . . (Hubris). The relation was not solely one of condemnation [of hubris as arrogance]: the existence of Thrasymachus, or that of Callicles, is proof enough of that, even if their discourse comes down to us already enveloped in the reassuring dialectics of Socrates. But the Greek Logos had no opposite.55

Later in “Madness, the Absence of an Oeuvre,” he noted, “It will be said not that we were distant from madness, but that we were in the distance of madness. In the same way that the Greeks were not distant from hubris because they condemned it, but rather were in the distancing of the excess, in the midst of the distance at which they kept it confined.”56 In ordinary language, as Boyne reminds us, hubris means contempt, arrogance, or courage. He points out that Foucault’s use of the word in relation to the Greek figures, “indicates that what is at issue here is an opposition to reason in the name of power and egoism.”57 Žižek, however, uses this term quite differently to describe a subjective imbalance, a deviation, or an excess that is the driving force of the subject. Hubris, he argues, is the name for “pathological abject,” clinamen, a “deviation from the universal order that sustains this very universal order. . . . The problem of the subject is that of imbalance excess, hubris, deviation, that sustains the order itself.”58 This notion becomes relevant if we consider that, according to Žižek, Descartes for the first time opened a crack in the ontological consistency of the universe by tying absolute certainty to the punctum of “I think,” which, as we have seen, was based on the possibility of deception or illusion famously ascribed by Descartes hypothetically to an evil genius (Le malin génie).59 However, according to Žižek, Descartes very quickly patches over this crack by reducing his cogito to

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res cogitans. It is only with Kant’s transcendental turn, according to Žižek, that the inherent paradoxes of “self-consciousness” are exposed. Here, the subject in the most radical sense is represented as “out of joint,” as lacking its own place— an existential condition that Lacan would designate through the “barred” S ($) and the term matheme.60 If the Cartesian subject, according to Žižek, remains within the limits of what Foucault called the “Classical episteme”—an epistemological field regulated by the problematic of representation and based on the close connection between sign and signified, at the same time, the cogito is not merely a sign external to reality, but an “autonomous agent” or part of reality that constitutes the objective world around him/her. “In Descartes’s final vision of the universe—Žižek argues—cogito is therefore just one among many representations in an intricate totality, part of reality and not yet (or, in Hegelese, only “in itself ”) correlative to the whole reality.”61 Given this, Žižek asks what then constitutes the break of Kant’s “I” of “transcendental apperception” with Descartes’s cogito? According to Kant, Descartes falls prey to the “subreption of the hypostasized consciousness:” he wrongly concludes that, in the empty “I think” which accompanies every representation of an object, we get hold of a positive phenomenal entity, res cogitans (a “small piece of the world,” as Husserl put it), which thinks and is transparent to itself in its capacity to think. In other words, self-consciousness renders self-present and self-transparent the “thing” in me which thinks. What is lost thereby is the topological discord between the form of “I think” and the substance which thinks, i.e., the distinction between the analytical proposition on the identity of the logical subject of thought, contained in “I think,” and the synthetical proposition on the identity of a person qua thinking thing substance.62

From here, Žižek directly moves to do what he typically does best, that is, to psychoanalytically “render visible” the philosophical “ex-timate” (a complex Lacanian neologism that can be roughly translated as “excluded interiority,” or, the “presence of exterior in the interior”),63 or the innermost core implicit in a philosophical argument that philosophy keeps at a distance. In this case, it is the Kantian break with the cogito that Lacan revived in his famous distinction between the “subject of enunciation” and the “subject of the enunciated” that Žižek recognizes quite precisely in Kant’s critique; for “The Lacanian subject of the enunciation ($) is also an empty, nonsensical logical variable (not a function), whereas the subject of the enunciated (the ‘person’) consists of the fantasmatic ‘stuff ’ which fills out the void of $.”64 Hence, according to Žižek, the status of the Kantian “I” of transcendental apperception is that “of a necessary and

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simultaneously impossible logical construction” that is not filled with “instituted experiential reality” of what Lacan would call that which coincides with the Lacanian real. Descartes’s error, Žižek says, was to confuse this experiential reality with a logical construction as a real-impossible. In order to appreciate Kant’s reasoning, Žižek tells us, one has to look to Lacan’s formula of fantasy ($a): “I think only in so far as I am inaccessible to myself qua a noumenal thing which thinks. The thing itself is originally lost and the fantasy object (a) fills out its void. . . . The act of ‘I think’ is thus ‘transphenomenal.’ It is not an object of inner experience or intuition, yet it is not a noumenal thing either, but rather a void left by a lack.”65 Žižek continues his reading of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason by emphasizing the clear contrast between Descartes and Kant and concludes that “in Kant, this coincidence of thought and being in the act of self-consciousness in no way implies access to myself qua thinking substance.” Hence “the paradox of self-consciousness [in Kant] is that it is possible only against the background of its own impossibility: I am conscious of myself only insofar as I am out of reach to myself qua the real kernel of my ‘being’ as the ‘I’ or ‘it’ which thinks.”66 The upshot of all this is simply that the transcendental subject ($) is already a void, which marks an originary lack (of an inaccessible X). Lacan’s term for the latter is the objet petit a, the fantasy object that fills out the void of the thing lost in the subject.67 In closing this chapter, I wish to advance the idea that if, as I have already suggested, the Baroque “subject” is precisely the void created by the loss of a transcendental and inaccessible object—the objet petit a—the “madness” of the Baroque is what cannot be logically articulated or stated as such. Following Foucault, who conceived madness as “excluded language” or “the absence of an oeuvre,” one could say that the Baroque, insofar as what it expresses cannot be said, is both “excluded language” and an integral part (the unconscious other) of the general discourse of reason. Can it be said, by the same token, that the “Baroque is the absence of oeuvre”? In any event, it must be studied both within the project of rationality embedded in Descartes’s cogito, and in terms of Lacan’s barred subject $. As Hassan Melehey puts it in his Writing Cogito, “Those who cannot think rationally are not allowed to speak; rational thought is defined as that which produces coherent and unitary speech, and hence Foucault’s characterization of madness as ‘the absence of work [l’absence d’oeuvre].’ ”68 Thus, in terms of the two main conflicting lines in the French philosophy according to Alain Badiou, the Baroque belongs less to the line of “life” and “vitalism” of Deleuze, and more to the line of “concept” of modern rational (Lacanian) subjectivity—a point that I develop more fully in the following chapters.

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Baroque Reason and the Madness of Vision: Reading Buci-Glucksmann

In his Seminar XI, Lacan devoted a session to “The Split between the Eye and the Gaze,” in which he paid tribute to his philosopher-friend Maurice MerleauPonty, who reportedly said that in the spectacle of the world “we are beings who are looked at.” For Lacan, this meant that the world “appears to us allseeing”—and he proceeded to set out his intricate and elusive concept of the gaze.1 A prominent scholar on the baroque, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, has focused much attention to the idea of “all-seeing world” in her The Madness of Vision.2 Shifting from visibility to what she calls “seeingness,” she develops the idea of “seeing vision” where, as in [Baltasar] Gracián’s infinite torsion, “one requires eyes on the very eyes, eyes to see how they see.”3 Buci-Glucksmann argues that the seeing of vision is the Baroque world, which thus becomes the name for an excess of vision—which she contrasts with the ideal dimension of knowledge. Some years later, in La folie du voir. Une esthétique du virtuel, she extends her exploration to “the contemporary, technological neo-baroque of a global madness of vision,”4 a subject to which we will turn shortly. In her previous book, Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity, BuciGlucksmann opens by quoting the Spanish baroque writer Francisco de Quevedo and closes by reflecting on the figure of Salome and Lacan’s theory of feminine sexuality and the Baroque.5 In between, Benjamin, along with Baudelaire, takes pride of place as two baroque thinkers, alongside Pascal but not Leibniz. The entire argument of Baroque Reason revolves around a certain conceptualization of the baroque’s affinities with postmodern discourse, with its so-called regress away from the subject, the center, or the totality of modern discourse and toward an other. As Buci-Glucksmann points out toward the end of the text, At the very moment when “classical science” established itself—a science which, from Galileo to Descartes and even Pascal, was highly critical of the power of

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Adventures with the Theory of the Baroque and French Philosophy metaphor—poetry and theatre were asserting the claims of universal metaphor. For a time, the world as representation organized by ratio coexisted with the world as hieroglyph, when the famous “metaphor dispute” broke out at the height of the century of classicism. The relations between image and ratio were fixed in terms that are highly revealing for the archaeology of the modern.6

“Baroque reason,” Buci-Glucksmann concedes, is a provocative if not actually a “perverse” conjunction, as Bryan Turner notes in his introduction to her book.7 How can the “baroque” be reconciled with “reason”? How can the “irrationality” of the baroque be at the origin of the archaeology of modern reason? Was not baroque culture the product of a crisis of the seventeenth-century absolutist state and its centralizing politics? Was it not a product of the CounterReformation? Did it not oppose liberalism, Protestantism, and industrial capitalist modernity, as Max Weber suggested in his influential Protestant Ethics and Spirit of Capitalism?8 Weber, we should recall, argued that the Calvinist spirit of asceticism, its ethics of work and parsimoniousness, went hand in hand with capitalism’s drive for order and discipline.9 For Weber, “modern industrial capitalist society was the historical product of instrumental reason whose cultural and psychological origin lay in protestant asceticism, which in the early Calvinist sects developed a specific ‘calling’ to discipline, self-restraint, and world mastery.”10 “Self-regulation” and the “denial of luxurious consumption” were its paramount virtues. The same fundamental paradox of “baroque reason” is at the heart of Max Horkheimer’s and Theodore Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment.11 BuciGlucksmann’s analysis of aesthetic modernity is therefore couched in terms of this dialectic and its critique of capitalist “instrumental reason” in Adorno and Benjamin as well as Antonio Gramsci, who is granted special scrutiny.12 In a finely argued archaeology of modernity, Buci-Glucksmann traces the figure of the Angelus Novus through sexuality and the feminine in Baudelaire and in the ideas of a “feminine utopia,” transgression, and Baroque space in Benjamin’s Trauerspiel. At the center of her problematic, ultimately, it is the difference between reason and desire: the feminine as an allegorical figure of modernity represents the Other, and the Baroque aesthetics of reason as the reason of Otherness. Buci-Glucksmann’s reflections on desire develop, in the last part of her book, through the figure of Salome. It is here that she touches on Lacan’s theory of feminine sexuality and his definition of the Baroque, which, as we will see below, will be the main focus of the subsequent Madness of Vision. Buci-Glucksmann asks, quoting Nietzsche, “why has civilization not become female?”13 Based on

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Nietzsche’s view of woman as “night” or “nothing,” she suggests that the night Nietzsche associates with women might be the night of desire and jouissance. It is “a night of the baroque” that “concerns that non-representable nothing which has perpetually haunted Western Philosophy as its ‘Oriental’ Other, its limit, and its difference.”14 Thus, “by a kind of heretical-mystical and then baroque conversion, Nietzsche’s feminine void, his ‘nothing,’ becomes ‘all’: an infinity of ecstatic delight [jouissance], a plethora of forms.”15 Buci-Glucksmann takes as an example the “rush of angels” in baroque paintings and ceiling frescoes, who “force us to look up, to lift our eyes, to desire the impossible spiral of an ascending desire foredoomed to the earthly representation of appearances.”16 If “civilization has not become feminine,” according to Buci-Glucksmann, it is because its “erotic of nothing”17 was “kept too long in the toils of nothing,” as a “persistence of absence.”18 Since then, she argues, women have never ceased to oscillate between “the nothing of nothingness and the nothing of jouissance, between non-representable nothing which eludes form (shapelessness, chaos, lack, matter, matrix), and the nothing of the ‘female side of God’ (Lacan), the super-jouissance [more accurately ‘surplus-jouissance’ in Lacanian terminology] allotted to woman ever since Teiresias.”19 At this point, Buci-Glucksmann comes to her characterization of the baroque as a “theatricization of experience” or a “theatricization of the sensible world,” which “bespeaks a veritable ‘hermeneutics of desire’ (to use an expression of Michel Foucault) where the stenography of drives subjects bodies to energetic thought which does not allow itself to be enclosed merely within the model of representation.”20 It is through exploring the “allegory of the feminine” as the voice of the Other in literature and philosophy that Buci-Glucksmann turns to twentieth-century figures of the baroque, ending with Lacan. If the notion of “baroque reason” is “provocative,” she offers her explanation: “for those who identify reason with its ‘long chain,’ Cartesian or other, for whom it seems impossible that a ratio should be stylistic or rhetorical, that it should be permanently at the grips with its theatricization and dramatization, that it should act itself out in ‘bodies’.”21 She further notes that “the reason of the unconscious and the reason of utopia present themselves to be interpreted. The baroque signifier proliferates beyond everything signified, placing language in excess of corporeality.”22 Hence the importance of Lacan’s definition of the “baroque body” (“everything is bodily exhibition evoking jouissance”) and as “regulation of the soul through corporeal radioscopy”—in Seminar XX—as figures, according to Buci-Glucksmann, of feminine jouissance. “For in the baroque affinity between

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woman and Eros, she recognizes herself—I recognize myself—as the work of a difference alien to the metaphysics of identity.”23 Besides these cursory reflections on Lacan’s thesis on feminine sexuality, it is in her second book on baroque vision that Buci-Glucksmann addresses Lacan’s ideas on the Baroque in a more comprehensive way. In an autobiographical note at the beginning of Madness of Vision, she writes: Between abyss and clarity, between blinding tears and blinding love, in the grammar of baroque impulses in which form aims for its dissolution and dead object aims for its continuance within jouissance, I was born. And, if the library and ruins are truly the great metaphors of the baroque, I was born baroque between two books in my father’s library, Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil and Hafez’s Divan [the famous 14th-century Persian poet known as Khwaja Shamsu-Din Muhammad Hafiz-e Shirazi, simply know as Hafiz, who praised the joy of love, liked wine and detested religious hypocrisy]. From the West to the East, I found the same floral understanding of the feminine—the rose as a poetics and metaphor of the sex—the same suffering in love, the same it is thus, inscribed with the outlay of desire.24

If there is a writer whose scholarship is intertwined with a “passionate attachment” to her subject matter, filled, in her words, with “baroque impulses” or baroque ecstasy—rare in traditional academic scholarship—it is Buci-Glucksmann. She says that the phrase “it is thus” is the object of her book, “The Thing,” which is not without affinities with the famous Lacanian “Thing” adopted from Freud. As we have seen, central to her characterization of the baroque are vision and seeing, in which the voice comes under the jurisdiction of vision. She says, “Let Being be Vision, let the effect of beauty produce something like ‘the effect of truth,’ such as the baroque reinvents it in a space forevermore occupied by a ‘science of seeing’.”25 The baroque is thus a science of vision preoccupied with Emanuele Tesauro’s rhetorical figure il mirabile: “the long-suffering of the eye, the duplicity of the Voice (scream) and of Vision in writing, the eternally unstable reciprocity between a solar, seeing gaze and another gaze that is ‘blinded by blood’ and exhausted by tears.”26 Buci-Glucksmann’s poetic language makes a free and eclectic use of the notion of the “gaze,” which at times loses the meaning it has for Lacan as the objet petit a. The gaze, for Buci-Glucksmann, is sometimes conflated with Merleau-Ponty’s discourse on “vision,” which is often cited alongside Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.27 In Chapter 2, entitled “The work of the Gaze,” she reads Lacan through Merleau-Ponty,28 paying homage to both. Yet one might object here that it is

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the differences between the philosopher and the psychoanalyst, and the latter’s radical discovery of the invisible blind spot in Renaissance perspective, that are most important and that cannot be reduced to a phenomenological notion of being, or “flesh of the world” in Merleau-Ponty’s parlance. In a yet more autobiographical tone, Buci-Glucksmann mentions the Arabic word for eye, Aïn, as “the eye in the mirror of phantasms” in Arab philosophy [perhaps she discovered this in her paternal library], “resting within the vibrant ambiguity of vision.”29 She then moves quickly to “opera,” the “primitive stage of the baroque,” as “the site where Vision and Voice meet, ‘musicalize,’ echo each other to form a speaking nothingness, a dramaturgy of passion.”30 She goes on to give a definition that shows her indebtedness to Lacan: “And thus a rhetoric in which law and its transgression, order and its variations, code and its extreme dissonances, are united in lalangue, itself a rediscovery of jouissance, a pleasing drive that always leads to its own destruction, to luxuriating mise en abyme of its elements.”31 When she comes to Leibniz as a baroque thinker and his “ontology” of vision, she writes, “To Be is to See: with this, the baroque eye positions itself from its very beginning within a new category of seeing that ascribes an epistemological and aesthetic capacity, an ontological optikon, to the gaze. Because the eye is truly the miembro divino that Gracián spoke of, a ‘member’ that ‘allows a certain universality that resembles omnipotence.’”32 Further down in the same chapter, she claims that “Vision becomes Gaze (Regard)” and adds that “by virtue of this scopic energy, Vision is an operation, an act that generates a multiplicity of perspectives, the division of the visible, the invention of an aesthetic within a rhetoric that will stage it and control its effects in order to better convince and seduce.”33 She then adds—a little too quickly—that “it no longer refers to Eidos, which is a dialectic and a Platonic type of knowing. The baroque is antiPlatonic.”34 Here too, however, one might object that every anti-Platonism is already, in some sense, Platonic. Nor is Lacan’s interpretation of the baroque in any way construable as being anti-Platonic. On the contrary, as I try to show in this study, baroque morphogenesis must be grounded in a certain rationalism, for which Plato is, or should be, a founding reference, particularly as regards the restoration of Truth in Badiou’s strictly Platonic meaning of the term. Nonetheless, Buci-Glucksmann is insightful when she discusses the “baroque eye.” She points out that the historical Baroque as “an understanding of seeing and play of appearances arose from the science of perspective and optics within the discipline of natural science.”35 More importantly, she reminds us that “the

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baroque eye, with its attention to multiplicity and discontinuity, is distinguished precisely by its infinite production of images and appearances, and its emerges at the moment when the Counter-Reformation and modern science strangely intersect—as opposed to the Fifteenth-Century Eye, when optics and perspective were still tied to moral and religious interpretation.”36 And in the later chapter she notes that in seventeenth-century Baroque, as “distinct from a homogeneous, geometrical and substantionalist Cartesian space, the open, serial, baroque spatiality in the process of becoming and in a metamorphosis of forms, derives from recovery, coexistence, the play of light and forces, the engendering of beings from the undulating line and the ellipse.”37 Referring to the painters and architects of this time, she cites Michel Serres’s remark that for Leibniz, “to construct is to see.” Indeed, seeing and creating, she argues, “coalesce in the mind of the great architect and divine mathematician at a point of light without shadow, in a ‘madness’ that becomes wisdom: ‘God produces diverse substances according to the different views he has of the universe.’”38 To put Buci-Glucksmann’s analysis in context, it is useful to consider Martin Jay’s seminal “Scopic Regimes of Modernity.”39According to Jay, there has been not one “scopic regime” in Western modernity since the Renaissance but at least three main competing and contested modalities of vision. The dominant one is what he calls “Cartesian Perspectivalism.” This regime, theorized by Alberti in his treatise on painting, was based on three-dimensional and rationalized geometric space rendered on a two-dimensional flat surface. As Jay points out, Cartesian perspectivalism was essentially an intellectual concept of space “in league with a scientific world view that no longer hermeneutically read the world as a divine text, but rather saw it as situated in a mathematically regular spatiotemporal order filled with natural objects that could only be observed from without by the dispassionate eye of the neutral researcher.”40 The second regime is associated with Baconian empiricism and subverts the first from the inside. It manifests itself in the Dutch seventeenth-century “art of describing” that Svetlana Alpers sees exemplified in Vermeer’s paintings—works that come with a “nonmathematical impulse” indifferent to hierarchical and proportional systems of Renaissance art, which, as Jay remarks, “casts its attentive eye on the fragmentary, detailed, and richly articulated surface of a world it is content to describe rather than explain.”41 The third model of vision is the Baroque. For Jay, this regime of vision is not a style or a period, as it was for Wölfflin, but rather an ahistorical scopic drive, which has coexisted within the other two modes but has remained repressed. It is here

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that Jay refers to Buci-Glucksmann’s La folie du voir and says that “it is precisely the explosive power of baroque that is seen as the most significant alternative to the hegemonic visual style we have called Cartesian perspectivalism.”42 He cites the description of “the dazzling, disorienting, ecstatic surplus of images” of the Baroque43 and goes on to briefly discuss the historical and philosophical context that gave rise to such an exhilarating “madness of vision” that defies “clarity or lucidity or legibility.” Here, it is important not to forget, as Peter Wollen has correctly observed, the historical specificity of the sensibilities both Jay and Buci-Glucksmann describe, as against the postmodern tendency to see it as just an available visual mode. Wollen writes, “Understanding the social, political and ideological humus which nourished the Baroque can help us to understand the context within which the neo-Baroque (and the post-modernism) is flourishing today.”44 Jay’s notion of “scopic regime”—which he would go on to develop in greater detail in his encyclopedic Downcast Eyes—is a valuable tool to analyze the predicament of the present-day neobaroque visual disorder—a point to which I come back in later chapters when I discuss contemporary architecture. In “On the Baroque Paradigm,” the final chapter of The Madness of Vision, Buci-Glucksmann returns to her initial reflections on Benjamin and Baudelaire explored in Baroque Reason and offers an assessment of the “neobaroque.” Significantly, she says that as “an idea, a paradigm,” in Benjamin’s terms, “the baroque as Origin is reflected in a historical and transhistorical conceptual construct that can be removed from its own phenomenality.”45 She remarks that Benjamin had explored the unconscious of vision in The Arcades Project, and that Baudelaire himself “was split between his prehistory—baroque allegory—and posthistory—Jugenstil.” The same holds for “the unconscious of the neobaroque that forms modern style, art nouveau, with its symbolist prefiguration.”46 Today’s neobaroque is the subject of her “Livre Troisième: Une esthétique du virtuel,” which describes the “new madness of vision” in terms of what she calls the plane of “Technological Immanence.” Examples of twentieth-century art and architecture, video and installation art, and contemporary architecture enliven the discussion, which leaves, however, both Merleau-Ponty and Lacan behind, embracing instead the work of Gilles Deleuze. The “virtual” takes center stage in both its philosophical meaning as well as its reduced “technological” application—a problem I discuss in later chapters. The account starts with the aesthetic of the “image-crystal” in modernism and moves to an analysis of the “image-flux” of today’s postmodern (or neobaroque). Her discussion revolves around a set of notions, mainly “glass,” “mirror,” “light,” “shadow,” “surface,”

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“screen,” “time,” and above all, “crystal.” These are all examined under two main aesthetic modalities or forms of abstraction of the virtual and the event. In modernism, Worringer’s 1907 Abstraction and Empathy figures prominently, as it does for Deleuze too in his The Logic of Sensation (on Francis Bacon) as well as in A Thousand Plateaus. Marcel Duchamp’s “large glass” serves to elaborate on the ideas of Modernist “abstraction” and “glass.” In her various explanations for the “image-crystal” she points out that Wölfflin was the first to coin the term “crystalline abstraction,” which she vividly describes as a “modality of event, of time and image, sent back to an aesthetic of the virtual like a force.”47 Crystalline abstraction is a “mental cartography” and it is precisely this mental cartography of the power of art that Worringer developed at the moment “abstract art” emerged across an aesthetics opposition (between virtual and event) that has not lost its actuality. In the section “Les cristaux baroques de l’inflexion” [the inflection of baroque crystals], Buci-Gluckmann’s discussion of “virtual” turns philosophical. It is linked to Deleuze’s notion of “inflection,” which, insofar as the image is open, conjugates virtual spaces without the potential plan of symmetry of crystals. Indeed, in The Fold, ‘the curved variable line destroys all symmetry. . . . From here in the turbulence and the vortex of inflections, the plane of projection becomes something that,’ quoting Deleuze, ‘admits neither symmetry nor the privileged plan [of projection]’.”48 The object becomes “objectile,” the subject “subjectal” in the fixed point of view. Such a Leibnizian interpretation of the baroque presupposes new aesthetic and scientific parameters that paradoxically slide into the baroque, figural art, or the “informal.” “In point of fact,” she argues, “The Fold seems to ignore all theories of image, to set aside all rhetorical ‘manner’ and reject the ‘void’ on behalf of the baroque textures with its folding and unfolding to infinity.”49 She quotes Deleuze from The Fold where he pointed out that “Rene Thom’s transformation refers in this sense to a morphology of living matter, providing even elementary events: The Fold: the crease; the dovetail; the butterfly; the hyperbolic, elliptical, and parabolic umbilicus.”50 Thus, she notes, “in powering actualization up to its differential, the baroque reveals all its power of creation of differentiation,” and goes on to point out that these statements in The Fold “resonate with Difference and Repetition on the internal relation between line and virtual”51 sketches out a new paradigm of abstraction that is cartographic and diagrammatic, and in which the diagram is an “abstract machine in which art does not commence in a phenomenology founded on flesh and perception, but rather in the ‘victorial abstract space’ of architecture.”52

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The aesthetics of “image-flux” occupies the larger part of Buci-Glucksmann’s “Third Book.” She begins by saying that “from the baroque’s omni-sight in the virtual, from its panopticisms and interfaces, one is led to the birth and development of a new madness of vision [nouvelle folie du voir] on a world-wide scale.”53 In this way, she claims, in the “grand optics” of the “world-eye,” the gaze has been transformed. “It is no longer anamorphic, taken in the break of ‘figurability’ in the baroque body. Pushing desublimation of art to its extreme, the virtual is actualized in flights of the ‘meta-gaze,’ all in a permanent flux of information, which doubles the real, metamorphosing or destructing it.”54 In this context, she considers it imperative to “interrogate the sliding of Deleuzean image-crystal to an image-flux, where it would deploy the parameters and matrices of a fluid time marked by neo-baroque technologies.”55 In this time, it is without a doubt, she says, the forceful artistic dreams of the West, which compels Bruno Taut or Mies van der Rohe or Philip Johnson to employ glass and screens to achieve transparency and to mirror the architecture of the Baroque. “Without forgetting Duchamp’s The Large Glass, the anamorphic and entropic mirrors of Smithson, or Dan Graham’s Pavilion.”56 Also, she says, “in this historic moment marked by the passage of a culture of the object to a culture of flux, screens and folds, it is necessary to return to an ‘archaeology of the virtual,’ thought after the model of the archaeology of the modern by Benjamin.”57 She argues that this is because the “network society” does not reproduce time in a nonchronological “a-present.” It pulverizes time by exacting a “machinic time” of manipulations and simulations in “world-wide[mondialisée] tele-presence.” “In this optics, the time machine in art implicates a passage from an image-crystal analyzed by Gilles Deleuze to an image-flux proper to screens and their becoming, which engenders a constellation of images and times, a time of ‘infra-light,’ more close to crystal liquid that stops crystalline modernism.”58 Under “From crystalline time to virtual time,” Buci-Glucksmann again makes architectural references Bruno Taut’s glass pavilion, to the Mies and Johnson glass houses, and the “literal transparency” of glass, and remarks “But as long as Bruno Taut, this architecture of glass and reflections will characterize Mies van der Rohe’s projects for a skyscraper (1914) and the Barcelona ‘German Pavilion’ (1929), as well as the Seagram Building (1958) in New York. Because at the same time that Duchamp created The Large Glass, Mies projected an undulating glass skyscraper, which remained only as a project. But the glass chain would not be interrupted as much as the construction of the Barcelona Pavilion in 1929 resumed the ‘crystalline monad’ and its principal phantasm: a neutral and

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purified eye, vampirized by the exterior, which will haunt all twentieth-century architecture.”59 According to Buci-Glucksmann, the virtual machine “breaks this glass eye, accomplishing or dislocating it.”60 And while it maintains on the surface the same world-wide [mondialisé] phantasm of the panopticon of time, like “distended topographies,” “the crystal-eye turns into a world-eye, a screeneye that becomes a membrane and second skin fitted to virtual folds.”61 We cannot further delve into Buci-Glucksmann’s discussion. Suffice to say that toward the end of the section entitled “An Icarian Poetic,” she recapitulates in outline the aesthetics of today’s “new madness of vision” under the general category of aisthesis. The “technology of immanence,” she holds, has widened the primacy of vision into a dominant mode of speculative sense-perception that coincides with the Aristotelian idea of sensorium. “Optic or haptic, gesture or concept, interior and exterior are conjugated in the passage of art which is the passage of the sensible, in as much as it is a topology and not solely an architectural body.”62 Furthermore, the new aesthetics of the virtual mark the appearance of “a second baroque and digital skin open to the ephemeral of time as proper to the image-flux and its ‘presentism’ as to its becoming. . . . Fold, unfold, and refold of images, ultra-rapid and machinic through and through, are a new manner of being in time.”63 As insightful as these comments are, Buci-Glucksmann’s analysis remains entirely within a Deleuzean perspective, and nowhere does it place vision or the “image-flux” of contemporary technology within a wider discourse of ideology that is the sine qua non of any analysis of the contemporary neobaroque—as it is, for example, for William Egginton. The consequences and implications of this failure are the subject of Part III, which focuses specifically on architecture and the neobaroque.

Figure 4 The chess-playing automaton of Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, 1769.

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Theology and the “Baroque Room”: Reading Benjamin

The modern and secular Baroque is indissolubly linked to its source in theology. At its center lies the ill-humor melancholy that Benjamin explored in The Origin of German Trauerspiel [Mourning Play].1 Melancholy is the essence of “Baroque Ethics,” as Gillian Rose calls it.2 It underlies the rational Protestant spirit of capitalism and the absolutist state as described by Max Weber.3 It is what connects Lutheran and Calvinist worldly asceticism to the Counter-Reformation and to the baroque world as its ethical ground. As Rose writes, “In the counterReformation, Protestantism has become melancholy and mournfulness in the face of the world without salvation.”4 Benjamin, according to Rose, disturbingly read in this transformation the very spirit of Fascism in the twentieth century as having its sources in the baroque mournfulness. Its dominant figure is Allegory. Rose endorses Benjamin’s view on the unintended sources of Fascism in the historical Baroque: If Protestant salvation gives rise to the ethics of worldly asceticism and its unintended outcome, the spirit of capitalism, then Counter-Reformation Protestant and Catholic loss of salvation gives rise to the Baroque ethic of worldly aestheticization and its unintended outcome, the spirit of Fascism. To Baroque melancholy, the world is allegorical, the phantasmagoria or personification of soulless things. . . . In the capital of the nineteenth century, Paris, these two genealogies, the Protestant and the Baroque, form a constellation, for the sovereignty of the commodity fetish, expanded form of capitalism, becomes the allegorical personification of soulless things. Baudelaire’s melancholy lyric is the new Baroque ethics of the commodity fetish, while the Fascist total mobilization of war is its eschatological consummation.5

Rose is not alone in connecting Baudelaire with the Baroque. As we have seen, Christine Buci-Glucksmann established a similar link in Baroque

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Reason, where she described Benjamin’s lifelong fascination with the poet of modernity (writing to his friend Adorno that “I have my Christian Baudelaire carried to Heaven by purely Jewish angels.”)6 Baudelaire is particularly present in the “unfinished” archaeology of the modernity that is The Arcades Project as well as in other historical-social-critical essays on fashion, the flâneur, the prostitute, the feminine myth. He is also the central figure of Benjamin’s reflections on commodification and the “shock” of interruption it inaugurated. “This interruption that shock produces in the flow of time is nothing other than spleen,” Buci-Glucksmann says.7 She quotes Benjamin in “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire”: “Spleen is that feeling which corresponds to catastrophe in permanence.”8 Hence “Spleen inaugurates a time that is ‘outside history, as is that of mémoire involontaire’. This is why, unlike in the baroque where death and the abyss were objectified, death is internalized in Baudelarian spleen.”9 As Benjamin noted in “Central Park,” “Baroque Allegory sees the corpse only from the outside. Baudelaire sees it also from the inside.” In this way, BuciGlucksmann concludes, “the Baroque becomes Modern.”10 Returning to Rose’s analysis of Baroque melancholy and politics, she informs us that, as both state and religious authority became concentrated in the hands of the prince, so the historical seventeenth-century Baroque became more and more the embodiment of absolute power. I would say that the contemporary neobaroque stands in a similar relationship to neoliberal capitalism and its own political theology, each promoting a similar worldly aestheticism. Systems need their “ornamentation,” in which, as Rose writes, “every scrupulous action is justified in a world where signification has been separated from salvation. This excess of signification is baroque ornamentation, worldly aestheticization.”11 Moreover, “the violence of the aestheticized politics which ensues when the redemption does not obtain was the stasis, ‘the pile of debris,’ which preoccupied Benjamin.”12 According to Rose, a deep concern with the ethics of the Baroque is a permanent feature of all of Benjamin’s mature writings, from The Origin of German Tragic Drama to The Arcades Project and the Artwork essay to the “Theses on the Concepts of History.” Moving from these considerations, I would like, in this chapter, to consider briefly what we might call Benjamin’s “political theology” as a step toward a theory of the “Baroque Room” based on the latter’s notion of the “interior.” What follows might be considered as preliminary remarks for the idea of the “topology of the interior” in baroque space, which I take up in later chapters. First, however, it is necessary to examine in what way theology is at the basis of Benjamin’s work.

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For this purpose I go to Boris Groys’s recent Introduction to Antiphilosophy, in which he devotes a chapter to Benjamin and the problem of theology.13 Groys’s discussion of Benjamin and theology is useful and interesting, even if some of his conclusions are questionable. The book’s central thesis is that Benjamin’s political discourse is not so much philosophical as it is theological. “This does not mean that Benjamin took a ‘reactionary’ attitude toward philosophy and the whole secularized culture of modernity that philosophy influenced,” but rather that he “described the entire modern world as a place not of production but of reproduction, and hence not of waiting for truth, but of loss of truth, since to produce truth means losing it.”14 Earlier, Groys makes a distinction between philosophy and theology regarding the question of “truth.” “Love of Truth,” “of wisdom” or “Sophia,” is the domain of philosophy—even when it must acknowledge that in striving for truth, it cannot possess it.15 Theology, by contrast, “presupposes that the truth has always already shown itself, that union with truth has always already revealed and proclaimed.”16 For Groys, this means that Benjamin’s discourse is “simultaneously theological and topological,”17 insofar as theology, unlike philosophy, is topologically “determined,” “since it always already knows at what place and time truth has appeared.”18 Groys also stresses the notion of reproduction in Benjamin’s thought. He points out that “Benjamin ascribed to the market—and the mass commodity culture borne by the market, which he understood in the diagnosis of modernity. By describing mass culture that operates not with the original but with the copy as the true culture of modernity, he was able, without directly expressing this, to see advanced science and avant-garde art, based on evidence, creativity, production, innovation—in other words, on the values of philosophy—as purely and simply irrelevant.”19 Instead, Benjamin understood modernity “as the epoch of total reproduction of culture, and hence of its total theologizing. His political strategy, in the conflict between theology and philosophy, consists in linking theology with mass culture in opposition to philosophy.”20 Moreover, Benjamin’s theology “after the end of philosophy” is a “theology beyond theology,” beyond theology “in the age of religion.” It is a theology in the age of capitalism and the culture of reproduction, of the original and the copy, destruction of aura, and so on.21 Whatever we may think of this argument, it is certainly true that Benjamin was one of a very few European intellectuals (the other one being Ernst Bloch) to merge theology with Marxism. With this note, I now come to the notion of the “baroque room.” I advance the thesis that the “theological topology” constitutes an interior space that

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would exemplify the fundamental notion of “interiority” in the Baroque space. Preliminary to this thesis, I make a transposition from the allegorical narrative of “Thesis I” in Benjamin’s “Theses on the Concept of History.” In this widely quoted and much interpreted thesis, Benjamin wrote: There was once, we know, an automaton constructed in such a way that it could respond to every move by a chess player with a countermove that would ensure the winning of the game. A puppet wearing Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent on all sides. Actually, a hunchback dwarf—a master at chess—sat inside and guided the puppet’s hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophic counterpart to this apparatus. The puppet, called “historical materialism,” is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the service of theology, which today, as we know, is small and ugly and has to keep out of sight.22

For the origins of this allegory, exemplifying as it does the fundamental notion of “interiority” in Baroque space, we refer to Michael Lowy, who suggests Edgar Allan Poe’s “Maelzel’s Chess Player,” an essay about an automaton, which was known to Benjamin. The name “Turk” was given to the chess-playing automaton, which was presented in 1769 to the Empress Maria Theresa in the Viennese Court by Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen. After his death in 1804, it traveled the world and eventually ended up in the United States, where it was shown by the inventorcum-entrepreneur John Nepomuk Maelzel.23 Mladen Dolar, in his remarkable A Voice and Nothing More, notes that the chess automaton was a Turkish puppet holding a hookah in one hand and making the moves with other. It involved a complicated system of “mirrors, entrapments, and contraptions which permitted the alleged hunchback to move around and remain invisible while the inside of the machine was displayed to the audience before the game started.”24 According to Dolar, the automaton became quite famous, beating reputed chess players like Napoleon before meeting its own end in a fire in Philadelphia in 1854. Maelzel had made a name for himself as the inventor of the first metronome in 1816, which Beethoven used for his Eighth Symphony (1817), and was also known for making the latter’s hearing aid.25 Dolar notes that Poe’s “Maelzel’s Chess-Player,” written in 1836, was a characteristic example of “research journalism” based on Dupinlike detective “ratiocination” (a reference to Poe’s story “The Purloined Letter”). Dolar writes, “When Johann Nepomuk Maelzel made his American tour with the alleged chess automaton in 1883s [?], Poe attended several presentations, noting meticulously all the peculiarities of the case, which in his opinion demonstrated,

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by empirical observation and deductive reasoning, that the presumed ‘thinking machine’ was basically a hoax. Poe argued that ‘there must be a ghost in this machine, a ghost in the shape of a human dwarf chess player’.”26 As Lowy writes, the reference is of more than anecdotal interest; it is rather philosophical. If Poe argued that “the operations of the Automaton are regulated by mind, and by nothing else,” then “Poe’s ‘mind’ becomes, in Benjamin’s thesis, theology or, in other words, the messianic spirit, without which historical materialism cannot ‘win the game’ and the revolution cannot triumph.”27 In Benjamin’s concept of history, “theology” meant both remembrance (Eingedenken) and redemption (Erlosung) as two principal notions in the construction of the “concept of history.”28 As the hidden dwarf in the allegory, theology, which could only act as concealed in the “interior” of historical materialism, is for Benjamin, who does not conform to this rule, rather visible. Lowy notes, however, that theology for Benjamin gains its strength not from “the ineffable of the divine Being, as might be thought from its etymology, but from its service in the struggle of the oppressed.”29 More precisely, theology serves to “re-establish the explosive, messianic, revolutionary force of historical materialism—reduced to a wretched automaton by its epigones.”30 For Slavoj Žižek, who titled one of his books after this allegory,31 “theology” for Benjamin basically designates the agency of the signifier.32 He notes a “contradiction” in the structure of Benjamin’s thesis. It is between the first part of the thesis and its interpretation in the second part, which, according to him, no “hermeneutic” method of interpretation is able to bring out. That is, in the interpretive part, the historical materialism (the puppet) “enlists the service of theology,” whereas in the allegory itself, theology (the hunchback dwarf) guides the puppet by strings from within. Žižek writes: This contradiction is of course the very contradiction between allegory and its meaning, ultimately between signifier and the signified, which pretends to “enlist the services” of the signifier as its instrument but finds itself quickly entangled in its network. The two different levels thus traverse one another: the formal structure of Benjamin’s allegory functions in exactly the same way as its “content,” theology in its relationship to historical materialism, which pretends simply to enlist its services but becomes more and more entangled in its strings because—if we may permit ourselves this Vorlust, this forepleasure—“theology” designates here the agency of the signifier.33

Transposing Benjamin’s allegory, one might imagine a Baroque counterpart to this device, the puppet of “historical materialism” replaced with that of the

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Baroque; such a transposition would mean that for the puppet called baroque to win the game, it has to enlist the service of theology. The game, of course, is not against the “instrumental rationality” of modernism or Protestant ethics. The allegory has a secret double structure, a mystery, or a contradiction. The puppet, called the baroque, pulls the strings of its master, theology, to enlist its service in what amounts to a radical epistemological break constituting an antinomy, in the Kantian sense of the word, that is our modernity coextensive with the advent of the baroque theology. Thus reconfigured, the automaton, this curious mysterious machine with its multiple mirrors, can be seen as a metaphor of the “baroque room.” According to Rose, Benjamin has occupied this room all his life, from Berlin to his exile in Paris. Extending the metaphor, every room in the multistory edifice of modernity has to make space for this stuffy, uncomfortable “baroque room,” linked with all other rooms through intricate labyrinthine passages. Here, theology and the baroque are linked in a complex topology in whose empty center, as in a Möbius strip, God resides. While there is no evidence that he ever read Benjamin, we know that Jacques Lacan, in his theory of the Baroque, as we have seen, equated God with “female jouissance.” Like Benjamin, who scandalously united the “ex-timate” kernel of Marxist history with theology, Lacan linked Marxian “surplus value” with the economy of “surplus-jouissance.” For both, the “thought of baroque modernity” was theological, while each approached the latter with different ends—for Lacan, a modern science of psychoanalysis; for Benjamin, a theory of history. Thus, Benjamin can be considered as one of Lacan’s “silent partners” in the twentieth century.34 As an emblem of “interiority,” the metaphorical “baroque room” is concretely manifested in the Paris arcades. The transposition might seem counterintuitive, given that the iron and glass structures of the arcades are often seen as precursors of the twentieth-century modernity of Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and others, based on the notion of transparency. But as Susan BuckMorss noted in her seminal The Dialectics of Seeing, The covered shopping arcades of the nineteenth century were Benjamin’s central image because they were the precise replica of the internal consciousness, the unconscious of the dreaming collective. All of the errors of bourgeois consciousness could be found there (commodity fetishism, reification, the world as “inwardness”), as well as (in fashion, prostitution, gambling) all of its utopian dreams. Moreover, the arcades were the first international style of modern architecture, hence part of lived experience of a worldwide, metropolitan generation.35

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A further link between the “baroque room” and the Paris arcades in the context of the “internal consciousness” can be traced to Benjamin’s preoccupation with Leibniz and his notion of Monad, as well as kabbalistic mysticism. As Peter Fenves notes in his essay on the common style between Leibniz and Benjamin, during his intense study of Kabbalistic texts and his meeting with Spinoza in Amsterdam, Leibniz discovered a technical term to which everything else is reducible: monad.36 And “monad is the word around which Benjamin’s own langue particulière comes to revolve. If, as he proposes, ‘whenever a dialectical process carries itself out, there we have something to do with a monad’.”37 Like the monad, the “baroque room” is an interior space with no window to the outside. Similarly, as Fenves notes, The Arcades Project revolves around the windowless unaffected interiority of the monad. The image of this paradisiacal condition, as Leibniz famously notes, is the absence of windows—an absence that materializes itself in nineteenth-century Paris in panoramas, theaters, and arcades, the windows of which, as Benjamin notes, look upward but not outward.38

For Benjamin, “Monads have absolutely no windows through which anything could enter or leave.”39 “The interest of the panorama is in seeing the true city— the city indoors. What stands within the windowless house is the true. Moreover, the arcades, too, is a windowless house. The windows that look down on it are like logs from which one gazes into its interior, but one cannot see out these windows to anything outside (What is true has no windows; nowhere does the true look out to the universe).”40 So the arcades are the architectural metaphor of “the true,” the truth of the “baroque room” that has no window to the outside, an absolute “interior” appearing to itself, like an allegorical signifier. If there is a “perspective” in this baroque room, it must certainly be an anamorphic one. Moreover, it would be an allegorical form—as Grootenboer noted, correcting Panofsky—representing “truth” through its own “rhetoric.”41 A similar perspective guided the poet Hölderlin in his “Remarks on Antigone,” which, as Fenves notes, centered on “a  perspective that not only tends to go wrong but also detaches itself from vantage points sanctioned by the order of law,”42 like Antigone who rebelled against the legal order of her time and paid a dear price. Hölderlin’s statement— curt, surprising, and infinitely ambiguous—that “Sophocles is right” exemplifies the “awkward perspective” of an anamorphic or “ ‘ leftish point of view . . . that cannot get its bearings, achieve a stable stance, and set itself on the right course.’

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The rightness of Sophocles thus lies in the ‘leftishness’ of his perspective,”43 a critical perspective that, in order to be right, must go awry. Such is the baroque method par excellence. It is the method adopted by Žižek in “looking awry,” in his critique of ideology and culture, from the position of the political Left, a method that produces a radical critique starting from the “right-side” view, which paradoxically yields a “leftist” point of view. According to Žižek, there is simply no right course of criticism to take on contemporary society and culture if it is not looked at from the “right” side of the picture (as in Holbein’s The Ambassadors at the National Gallery in London, which must be viewed from the right-side door). Paradoxically, however, it is from the “leftist” political point of view that all rational organization of the “right,” sanctioned by the established order and the law, begins to go “wrong” and crumble.44 Benjamin was one baroque thinker in the twentieth century who, along with Ernst Bloch, adopted a Marxian view within a Messianic theological tradition of modernity. He achieved a “leftish” point of view by looking awry at reality through the optics of the “windowless monad.” We are left to live in the ruins of the architecture of “the true,” the windowless house of the arcades and its allegory, which I have named the “Baroque Room.”

7

Culture Industry and the (Neo)Baroque: Reading Adorno

The Baroque is a name for the dialectical contradictions immanent in modernity. To put it simply, it is a name for the paradoxical unity of “kitsch” and “high” art. To properly understand its reemergence in contemporary neobaroque culture— the “re” of its emergence is because, as a repressed element in the “scopic regime” of modernity, it is lawfully bound to re-turn—requires a dialectical theory of culture. In such a theory, “cultural” criticism of the neobaroque would be grounded in a critique of the contemporary “permissive” capitalist society with which the neobaroque is in politicoaesthetic and sociohistorical collusion. In this society, moreover, culture in its “determinate being” must be conceived theoretically through the negative term “failure,” as we will see below. This is the legacy of the Frankfurt School theory of the culture industry, which has lost none of its validity, relevance, and even urgency for our time. For an analysis of the neobaroque, the term culture industry should not be understood as a term for its analytical “application,” but rather in a unity with it in its negative affirmation or theoretical supplement. Both must be viewed as two unitary parts of the “project of negation” of the dominant culture. Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s celebrated essay “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” in Dialectic of Enlightenment1 was followed by other essays on American mass culture, stemming from the years of exile in California.2 The term itself, as Jameson points out, was less a theory of culture than a theory of industry, “a branch of the interlocking monopolies of late capitalism that makes money out of what used to be called culture. The topic here is the commercialization of life.”3 Within such a schema, as J. M. Bernstein comments, culture has defiantly become an industry, “obeying the same rules of production as any other producer of commodities. Cultural production is an integral component of the capitalist economy as a whole.”4 Thus “culture is no longer the repository of a reflective comprehension of the present in terms of a redeemed future; the

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culture industry forsakes the promise of happiness in the name of the degraded utopia of the present. This is the ironic presentation of the present.”5 Paradoxically, therefore, “the critical theory of the culture industry is not primarily a ‘cultural critique’. Rather, it is a critique of the commodity format in its most recent social manifestation.”6 As we will see below, these are also the features of the culture industry’s functionalization of the aesthetic, which also affects autonomous art. But, as is well known, a vast literature exists today debating Adorno’s notion of the “culture industry.” It is not necessary to join this debate for the purposes of this study. Suffice it to note the relevance of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s theory for a critique of the contemporary (neo)baroque as an industry, one that best corresponds to the so-called “New Spirit of Capitalism.”7 Moreover, as with the original historical baroque associated with Protestant ethics in the “old” spirit of capitalism in the Counter-Reformation, the cultural industry of the (neo)baroque is associated with a political theology, albeit a different one, as we will see. An analysis of contemporary (neo)baroque culture might therefore start by positing a connection between theories of the neobaroque and the theory of the culture industry. This pairing has interesting implications for the analysis of both, with the critique of one reflecting back on the critique of the other. Hence, the re-turn of the baroque to contemporary theory and culture, I argue in this chapter, necessitates revisiting the conceptual terms of the culture industry. Architecture here is a special case insofar as it is the major instrument (beyond the discursive field of philosophy) for the return of the neobaroque in contemporary postmodern culture. This is not to say that architecture is in any way a sign of the success of this culture. It is rather a sign of its repeated failure, a failure that manifests itself most pointedly, perhaps, in the importation of philosophical discourse into architecture, a phenomenon that reflects, in turn, the failure of architecture’s own project of modernity. The view of failure adopted here is Adorno’s in Minima Moralia: If we define reality as the world of exchange value, but define culture as whatever refuses to accept the domination of that value, then, to be sure, such refusal lacks impact so long as things remain the same. However, since the notion of free and just exchange is actually the real lie, then whatever denies it is de facto a voice for truth: in the face of the lie of the commodity world, the voice denouncing it becomes a corrective, even if it is itself a lie. That culture has failed until now is no justification for reinforcing its failure.8 (emphasis added)

Adorno’s axiom of “failure” here comes with a theoretical paradox. It is because of it that the analysis of the postmodern neobaroque enables two things

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simultaneously: a critique of the failure of both culture and architecture, which has to negate any justification in order to reinforce itself; and a theory of critique of that same culture founded on the terms of Baroque theory. Thus, the present study offers a critique of baroque culture while also propounding a theory of the baroque as an alternative “scopic regime” serving retroactively as the auto-critique of the cultural logic of the contemporary “baroque design” industry. Baroque reason, like the reason of the enlightenment as opposed to “instrumentalized reason” for Adorno and Horkheimer, is its own antidote. To the extent that the Baroque is the “scandalous” side of modernity that cannot be abolished or banished, it must be affirmed and opposed at the same time, by its own reason as the reason of the Other. This explains why the theory of the baroque has become a common reference for so many contemporary thinkers, from Roland Barthes to Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze—with Jacques Lacan, however, holding a special and as yet insufficiently acknowledged place as the Baroque’s foremost theorist. The proposed conjunction between the baroque and the culture industry is based on two premises: First, that any analysis of the Baroque must be based on a critique of the discourse of capitalism and its internal cultural contradictions; secondly, that inherent in the term Baroque and in the ideas associated with it, as we have seen, is a certain contamination of “high” and “low” art and culture. Within this framework, I will argue that two admittedly quite different moments of the baroque—the seventeenth century and the late twentieth and early twentyfirst century—nevertheless display similar characteristic traits: Both exemplify a “mass society,” both are ruled by a “society of spectacle,” and both are influenced and shaped by “media.” Buci-Glucksmann’s phrase discussed earlier, the “theatricization of existence,” is an apt definition of the baroque applicable to both societies.9 The historical analysis of these common traits must firmly be based on the principles of the redemptive philosophy of history in historical materialism that we have learned from Walter Benjamin’s last writings.10 That is the idea of historicity, and its novel interpretation as the “unhistorical kernel of history,” as repetition, against the reign of historicism, the ruling doctrine of history as progress by the victors.11 This philosophical stand validates the deployment of a dialectical critique of culture in the analysis of the (neo)baroque. More specifically, it suggests a return today, in the form of a symptom, of the failed repressed ideals of the historical “Baroque sublime” of the seventeenth century. In this sense, today’s reemergence of the baroque is a repetition, or a new version, of an original historical moment

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(in the seventeenth century), which retroactively changes the coordinates of the analysis of the Baroque.12 J. M. Bernstein describes the culture industry in much the same way, arguing that “if the surface logic of the culture industry is significantly different from the time of Adorno’s writing, its effects are uncannily the same. Adorno saw clearly the trajectory of the culture industry and the threat it posed. That his most pessimistic prediction have come to pass makes his writing on culture industry uncomfortably timely.”13 Indeed, it could be argued that the effects of the neobaroque in contemporary culture uncannily reinforce the expanded “surface logic” of the culture industry, validating even more Adorno’s “pessimistic predictions.” Yet Adorno’s argument has since been supplemented, if not actually challenged, in the cultural discourse of psychoanalysis, and the latter’s insights must be incorporated into an expanded discussion of the culture industry. This has already been achieved in large part by Slavoj Žižek, whose proximity to Adorno does not prevent him from differing with him on the question of “mass culture,” and whose Lacanian approach has helped to rectify the shortcomings of the so-called “Freudo-Marxian” cultural work of the Frankfurt School.14 The analytical power of the concept of the culture industry emerges as the most cogent dialectical approach to the (neo)Baroque within the contradictions in the internal logic of contemporary capitalism—its strength being especially apparent when compared with other, often conflicting, theories of baroque criticism. Among the major historical studies of the seventeenth-century baroque, however, one well-known and important work must be singled out. The great Spanish historian of the Baroque, José Antonio Maravall, in his landmark Culture of the Baroque: An Analysis of a Historical Structure, without naming Adorno, loosely employs the term “culture industry” in his analysis of the seventeenth-century baroque.15 In the chapter titled “A Mass Culture,” Maravall identifies the features of “bad taste” or kitsch and a commingling of elements of “low culture” and “high culture” as being characteristic of baroque culture par excellence. In a key passage, he writes: Thus before the economic conditions extensively imposed the kitsch cultural industry, political and social conditions were already encountering new possibilities for group interest, possibilities consisting in making use of the incipient manifestations of what we might at least call cultural manufacturing, which was capable of producing in quantities greater than those necessary for maintaining a critical, creative, and original culture (because here quantity fundamentally enters into account). The problem, then, concerned the way to

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form an opinion that the masses would receive of that which would be suitable for mass reception. Kitsch in the baroque correlated to what there was of technique of manipulation: the same thing, therefore, that made it a guided culture.16

The “technique of manipulation” in this passage, as we will see later, is of course the hallmark of the culture industry Adorno described. The baroque, in Maravall’s view, is an epoch of interesting contrasts, “individualism and traditionalism, inquisitive authority and unsteadying freedom, mysticism, and sensualism, theology and superstition, war and commerce, geometry and capriciousness.”17 These are not “multi-secular” cultural characteristics influencing one country shaping another, Maravall remarks. Rather, baroque culture emerged “from the historical situation.”18 By the same token, we could argue that the emergence of postmodernist (neo-)baroque in contemporary culture is the result of a “historical situation” tied to certain economic conditions. Maravall further writes, “In sum, the baroque is nothing but a complex of cultural media [medios] of a very diverse sort that are assembled and articulated to work adequately with human beings, such as they and their groups are understood in the epoch whose limits we marked off, so as to succeed practically in directing them and keeping them integrated in the social system.”19 Obviously, as Maravall points out, the means of mass communication in the seventeenth-century historical baroque were not the same as the technological means of today. Rather than radio or television, there were books, spectacles, commercialized theatrical presentations, paintings, songs in vogue, posters, programs, lampoons, and “then the aspects characterizing the possible kitsch products in the seventeenth century would have to be even more different than what was seen later.”20 According to Maravall, it is impossible to ignore the element of kitsch or bad taste in the arts and culture of the baroque as distinct from other cultural forms. As he puts it, “Until a short time ago, every so-called baroque style was identified with a style of bad taste. But it was simply that, for a series of social reasons, kitsch emerged, and then even work of high quality was produced simultaneously and in competition with works of those other levels of culture for the common people [vulgo].”21 Maravall’s analysis is illuminating: As the Kitsch of our time, the popular [vulgo] baroque was not a counterculture of a popular [popular] tradition (it could not be farther from it), nor properly speaking a substitute for culture; however this expression can be used in market term, keeping in mind its consumption possibilities. It was rather a culture of low quality that might become a pseudo-culture or a pseudo-art. It might even be called a bad culture, but always sufficiently similar to high culture for it to

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be designated with the same word: they fulfilled, ultimately, the same or similar function because they responded to a demand of the same nature.22

The central thesis that guides my own analysis of our own contemporary neobaroque is the following crucial passage in Maravall’s analysis: Furthermore (and perhaps this helps to explain why it is so difficult to discover what the baroque was, specifically in terms of the greatness of its cultural works), there is scarcely a baroque work of high quality—from Bernini’s Santa Theresa to Poussin’s Pastoral, to Calderon’s La vida es sueno—that escapes being touched by kitsch elements. Everything that belongs to baroque emerges from the necessities of manipulating opinions and feelings on a broad public scale.23

Maravall supplements his remarks by citing a source: “It has been said that the ‘age of Bernini,’ ‘could effect a great cinematographic theater,’ it is because a cinematic image traversed the entire world view of the individuals of the baroque. It informed the universal conception of a ‘changing reality,’ which was the principal observation of all the epoch’s manifestation.”24 To discover a “cinematographic” character in the Baroque means analyzing retroactively the artistic traits of an entire period from the vantage point of twentieth-century cinema, constructing an evolutionary line culminating, for example, in the work of Alfred Hitchcock as one of the twentieth century’s greatest authors of the filmic baroque. As Peter Wollen, in his reflection on Maravall, has aptly pointed out, as a culture of spectacle, the baroque is also “intrinsic to the nature of absolutism.” “Absolutist regimes needed spectacle in order to counteract the divisive and centrifugal tendencies obscured by the doctrine of undivided centralism and the concentration of all power and sovereignty at the single apex of the monarchy.”25 Wollen further remarks that baroque spectacle was indeed a tool of propaganda in the hands of the monarch and reminds us that artists like Bernini and Velázquez “were essentially court artists, crucial high-level functionaries at the center of the court itself as well as personal friends of their masters, and both of them, besides painting and sculpture and architecture, carried out other ceremonial functions as well, organizing the decoration of palaces, royal pageants, performances, firework displays, and so on.”26 Bernini was even involved in writing a libretto and music for operas and in designing stage sets and machinery.27 “In some ways these elaborate multimedia spectacles were the true heart of the Baroque and, though transitory, more important at the time than the more lasting works on which their reputation depends today.”28 It is important to emphasize also that the link Maravall draws between the Baroque and kitsch, as Wollen points out,

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depends on the “stunning effects of emotional involvement” created in these first examples of mass-produced public art. That the accusation of being in “bad taste” was thrown at the Baroque from the start is thus not surprising. Equally unsurprising is that any “reevaluation of the Baroque will inevitably bring with it an associated re-evaluation of kitsch, in a kind of return of the repressed of modernism. Ornament, spectacle, emotional exploitation: these are all features of the Baroque and kitsch.”29 An important conclusion that can be drawn from Maravall’s historical observations is that the Baroque, at the time of its birth in the seventeenthcentury culture, is already in every sense postmodern and neobaroque, including in the current negative sense, which is synchronously contemporaneous with it. Seen in this way, the (neo)baroque stands for the collapse of the hierarchical relation between the terms of high and low art, through which each term, mass art and autonomous high art, is always-already infected by and dialectically intertwined with the other. This leads us to the question of “mass culture” and the relation between “low” and “high” in the discourse of “postmodernity” today. The Frankfurt School term culture industry, for which Adorno has so often, in recent times, been one-sidedly and unreasonably castigated, was in fact originally meant to substitute for the term “mass culture.” The culture industry engages the same phenomena designated by the term “mass culture,” namely “the forms of artistic and cultural production with a mass reception in the twentieth century: cinema, radio, print media, canned music, television.”30 In a later essay titled “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” Adorno wrote: The term culture industry was perhaps used for the first time in the book of Enlightenment, which Horkheimer and I published in Amsterdam in 1947. In our drafts we spoke of “mass culture.” We replaced that expression with “culture industry” in order to exclude from the outset the interpretation agreeable to its advocate: that it is a matter something like culture that arises spontaneously from the masses themselves, the contemporary form of popular art. From the latter the culture industry must be distinguished in the extreme. The Culture industry fuses the old and familiar into a new quality. In all its branches, products which are tailored for consumption by masses, and which to a great extent determine the nature of that consumption, are manufactured more or less according to plan. . . . This is made possible by contemporary technical capabilities as well as by economic and administrative concentration.31

Adorno adds further that “the culture industry intentionally integrates its consumers from above. To the detriment of both it forces together the spheres

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of high and low art, separated for thousands of years. . . . The masses are not the measure but the ideology of the culture industry, even though the culture industry itself could scarcely exist without adapting to the masses.”32 I want here to insert the suggestion that, in conjunction with Maravall’s analysis, Adorno’s considerations make the historical Baroque into a crucial moment in history when that long span of a “thousand years” of separation was broken, presumably for the first time. Of course, we know that historically modernity also and already is infected by the elements of “mass culture,” as Andreas Huyssen informs us by tracing the dichotomy of “mass culture” and modernity back to the midnineteenth century, and arguing that “when we locate the origin of modern mass culture in the mid-19th century, the point is therefore not to claim that the culture of late capitalism ‘began’ in 1848. But the commodification of culture did indeed emerge in the mid-19th century as a powerful force.”33 As mentioned previously, Adorno’s notion of the culture industry is also directly relevant to the debate over “high” and “low” in postmodernism, or between high modernism and mass culture. In a famous letter to Walter Benjamin dated March 18, 1936, Adorno expressed his reservations about Benjamin’s seeming embrace of mass cultural forms in the Artwork essay: Les extrêmes me touchent, as they do you—but only if the dialectic of the lowest has the same value as the dialectic of the highest, and not if the latter is simply left to decay. Both bear the stigmata of capitalism, both contain elements of change (but never, of course, simply as a middle term between Schoenberg and the American film). Both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which, however, they do not add up.34

As J. M. Bergstein notes perceptively, this passage expresses “the division of high and low art as a division reveals the fate of particular and universal in contemporary society. That division, which spells domination, is again, only perceivable from the perspective of ‘integral freedom,’ the speculative unity of particular and universal, high and low.”35 When Adorno stated that “culture industry” is the purposeful integration of its consumers from above, that it forces a “false reconciliation” of high and low art separated for thousands of years—a reconciliation that damages both through the engineering of culture industry—he was expressing a “judgment in advance on postmodernist culture.”36 I contend that it is also, at the same time, a judgment avant la lettre on the contemporary neobaroque. It is claimed that postmodernism went after a reunification of high and low art as a ‘democratic’ reaction to the elitism of high modernism. This claim is questionable. As Bernstein puts it, “There has

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been dovetailing of culture industry and high art; however both moments of this inward collapse, that is both alterations in the culture industry and high art, can most plausibly be regarded as a false reconciliation of their difference, and hence a false reconciliation of universal and particular.”37 The collapse of difference, on the other hand, between culture industry and practical life, and the alleged controlling movement of postmodernism, results in the aestheticization of empirical reality. Hence, in a sense, Bernstein can claim that “the culture industry in its postmodern phase has achieved what the avant-garde always wanted: the sublation of the difference between art and life. And this must signal a kind of ‘end of art’.”38 It is appropriate to conclude this short chapter with some general considerations on the characteristic traits of the historical Baroque. According to the synchronic reading advanced above, the invention of opera at the beginning of the baroque period, for example, can be regarded as “cinema” before the advent of cinema. Hence, Buci-Glucksmann’s definition of the Baroque as a “theatricization of existence”39 is a potent term that might be expanded to include “cinematographic effects.” In a similar vein, the baroque is inherently linked to categories of “crisis” and “catastrophe” and, more recently, the notion of “risk society” in the conditions of late capitalism, as characteristic symptoms of uncertainty. In the work of Walter Benjamin, such characteristics are also related to what he called, following Karl Schmidt, a “state of exception,” about which Giorgio Agamben has written in a most authoritative way. We must remember that in his famous interpretation of the Trauerspiele, Benjamin relied on the allegories of ruin, labyrinth, library, and artifice. Bryan Turner notes that for Benjamin, “the ruin, a sign of the transient character of human endeavor, was the primary allegory of the melancholic mentality of the baroque; the ruin was a statement of the inevitable passage of time, of our inability to escape from it.”40 These are all general aspects that convey the complexity of baroque culture across time and up to the present as a “theatricization of social reality.” In each case, “the literary or philosophical devices which might capture the fragmented, fractured, ruined nature of modernity also happen to be the dominant philosophical devices of the baroque period which, above all, was acutely aware of two things: the artificial, socially constructed nature of reality (its hyperreality) and the precarious, catastrophic, uncertain and hazardous nature of all human existence.”41

Part Three

Architecture and the Theory of the Baroque

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The Misadventure of Architecture with French Philosophy

For four decades, the specter of French philosophy has haunted architectural discourse in the academy—with decentering effects. These effects have been institutionally transmitted from the protected enclave of the academy out into the domain of practice, resulting in an architecture of excess that feeds and abets contemporary culture. This notion of excess must not be confused with the psychoanalytical principle of the “excess” of life, which Žižek characterizes as the principle that life is not “just life”: “Humans are not simply alive but are possessed by the strange desire to enjoy life in excess, passionately attached to a surplus that derails the ordinary run of things.”1 Excess in this latter sense has a relation to the word hubris in the original Greek meaning of the term, as Michel Foucault discussed it, as we saw, in History of Madness. Within the discourse on “Reason-Unreason,” it is akin to the “madness” that Western reason has always seen as a threat. As Foucault noted, “the Reason-Unreason relation constituted for Western culture one of the dimensions of its originality: it accompanied it long before Hieronymus Bosch, and will follow it long after Nietzsche and Artaud.”2 Foucault notes further: “It will be said not that we were distant from madness, but that we were in the distance of madness. In the same way that the Greeks were not distant from hubris because they condemned it, but rather were in the distancing of that excess, in the midst of the distance at which they kept it confined.”3 This madness, it should be noted, is also constitutive of any philosophy that tries unsuccessfully to distance itself from psychoanalysis.4 Now, however, contemporary culture is not in fact trying to distance itself from architectural hubris, nor is architecture, in turn, distant from this culture— it does not pose any threat whatsoever to it. On the contrary, this culture euphorically props up architecture to break from what it perceives as a restrictive regime of reason, aspiring instead to a state of “madness” that is contrary to its essential social function, a madness that only a genuine work of art could aspire

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to. The hubris of contemporary architecture is thus completely different from Foucault’s idea of madness. It aims at “derailing the ordinary run of things”— but in an opposite direction. A better word for this sort of excess, although not synonymous with it, would be surplus—the surplus that capitalism valorizes.5 Contemporary architecture produces an aesthetic surplus aligned with, and not divergent from, the cultural logic of capitalism. Capitalist dynamics valorizes this aesthetic surplus for profit. Intellectually as well as institutionally, the essential scaffolding for the hubris of architecture has been the entry of French theory into architectural discourse, what I call the “misadventure with French philosophy.” Starting in the mid-1970s, from an entrenched and essentially defensive position driven by an anxiety for intellectual and institutional legitimacy, architectural writers and critics made a series of attempts to champion contemporary French philosophy under the guise of “high theory.” Over the last four decades, this has led architectural theory to “suture” itself to French philosophy. I use the notion of “suture” in its specific technical meaning in French philosophical and psychoanalytical theory, to which I will come back in Chapter 12.6 During this period, architectural theory was put under the jurisdiction of philosophy. But this “philosophy,” imported into the architectural circle in the academy, was a barely recognizable reductive version of its source. In the following chapters, I interrogate architecture’s philosophical misadventure through the notion of “antiphilosophy,” which I explicate in more detail later. I also, in a separate chapter, draw the outlines of a possible “adventure” with the serious side of the French theory. First, however, it is necessary to expose the misguided attempt “to do theory” with French philosophy during the period in question. Here, I am mainly concerned with the transfer into architectural theory of the philosophical concept of the Baroque implied in Deleuze’s notion of the “fold.” I challenge this appropriation not only because it is reductionist, but also because it excludes a richer approach to the idea of the Baroque that does indeed exist in Deleuze’s work, and because it disfigures it into an instrumental and manipulative approach to design practice. The effort expended in Part I and Part II of this book to do justice to the concept of the Baroque by placing it in a broad cultural, philosophical, historical, and psychoanalytical context should clear the ground for a critique of its reductive importation into architectural discourse. As we shall see, this is mainly the work of writers who, for lack of a better term, we might call hyper-Deleuzeans, who, based in part on the example of Deconstructivism before them, have used Deleuze as a cover for a shameless abandonment of radical political theory.

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If, as I am convinced, architectural discourse must make one more effort to rigorously engage the serious side of radical French philosophy today, it can only be for the purpose of advancing a project of radical critique within the discipline, a critique that is only possible if it is absolutely separated from the convenient conventions that have previously marred the undertaking. On political as well as philosophical grounds, the experiment with French philosophy during the period under consideration has failed. Its main result has been the aestheticization of theory. This failure is a symptom of a larger malaise confounding the work of architectural theory and criticism. The failure, I suggest, comes from violating a protocol that must be strictly adhered to in reading philosophy, that is not to “suture” architecture to philosophy. This “suturing” has been the common structural mistake in every attempt to take up concepts and categories from Derrida to Deleuze, and from a host of others in between, usually grouped under the rubric “poststructuralism” (a misnomer in a French context). This trend has enjoyed great popularity in the American academy and elsewhere, precisely because of its distance from classical Marxism, and in spite of the fact that the work of this group of French philosophers was in part a reinterpretation of, if not in confrontation with, Marxism.7 It must be acknowledged, nevertheless, that by the 1980s, an anti-Marxist counterrevolution had taken place in France—supposedly in reaction to the success of Marxism in Parisian circles in the 1960s—whose targets included the two most prominent students of Louis Althusser, Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière. French theory arrived in American universities and in architectural departments wrapped in this implicit antirevolutionary aura. Its denial of the cultural strategies of capitalism was accordingly minimized and downplayed to the point of fundamentally altering its meaning. As François Cusset writes in his influential French Theory: The problem with disregarding the genealogy of capitalism or the critique of market domination in the works by Deleuze, Lyotard, or even Paul Virilio, or with splitting Derrida’s critique of logocentrism from the political context of France’s late 1960s, is that one risks having these works speak the very language of late capitalism. One risks mistaking them for what they clearly denounced: the promotion of relativism, of fluctuating the non-referential values, that is, a praise of the new virtual, global, financial capitalism.8

What Cusset describes as a “risk” was in fact a predictable result of the changing circumstances of American universities, which, as Bill Reading describes them

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in the “university in ruins,” drove a new consensus wherein “the university too has to comply with the new dogmas of self-regulation, of a paradigmatic Internet network, and of the ultimate free market.”9 In a section of his book titled “Immaterial Architecture,” Cusset points out that the entry of the French theory into architectural discourse was in some ways overdetermined by the attention French thinkers had paid, early on, to architecture, from Henri Lefebvre to Guy Debord and Situationists International, and from Jean Baudrillard to Paul Virilio, Michel Foucault, and, indirectly, François Lyotard. One effect of this was a series of direct engagements by Baudrillard with the architect Jean Nouvel,10 and by Derrida with US architectural theorists like Peter Eisenman, as will be shown below. Interestingly, the encounter of French theory with architecture in the United States, as Cusset remarks, happened at a time when within the academy in France, there was widespread distrust of architectural theory, if not indeed of theory and philosophy in general. In many ways, the situation in France was the opposite of the sustained intellectual engagement with theory that dominated American schools in the 1980s, which reached its climax with the deconstructivist discourse based on Derrida’s work. In the United States, as Cusset writes, “the texts of French theories reached American shores just as a depoliticized, ‘postmodern’ architecture was replacing the more political, modernist tradition.”11 This, of course, did nothing but further encourage the abandonment of critical political discourse within the architectural discipline. From the vantage point of the thesis I am advancing here, the failed project of architecture’s engagement with French philosophy was due to the singular failure to take “the adventure of the concept” seriously. Following Alain Badiou, we might identify this failure as a new form of “postmodern sophism.” Sophism, in a nutshell, is the noisy attempt to elevate architecture to the level of a “philosophical theory.” In the ranks of architectural critics in the academia, we can identify the same postmodern sophists that Badiou found within philosophy. As we have noted, working against this trend, Badiou sought to return philosophy to a politics of truth in contrast with “all other predominant ‘postmodern’ political and philosophical mantras.”12 Although his thought must still be located within the specific French context, Badiou—as Žižek noted— served as a necessary corrective to the still predominant identification of “French” thought with “deconstructionism”—this empty signifier into which Anglo-Saxon theoreticians throw authors like Lacan, who would turn over in their graves if informed of this insertion), presenting us with thought that clearly

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eludes all received classifications; he is definitely not a deconstructionist, nor a post-Marxist, and is clearly as much opposed to Heidegger as to the “linguistic turn” of analytical philosophy.13

Instead, in his Manifesto for Philosophy, Badiou targets contemporary (post) modern sophists. He writes, We are attending a second anti-platonic requital, for contemporary “philosophy” is a generalized sophistry, which is moreover neither without talent nor without greatness. Language games, deconstruction, feeble thinking, irremediable heterogeneity, differends and differences, the ruin of Reason, the promotion of the fragment and discourse in shreds: all of these argue in favor of a sophistic line of thinking and place philosophy at an impasse.14

For Badiou, sophistry is the reduction of truth to an effect of language. Tracing modern sophists back to Wittgenstein and his Tractatus, Badiou writes, “Modern sophists attempt to replace the idea of truth with the idea of rule. Such is the most profound sense of Wittgenstein’s otherwise inspired undertaking.”15 And further: “This question of sophistry is very important. The sophist is from the outset the enemy-brother, philosophy’s implacable twin. Philosophy today, caught in its historicist malaise, is very weak in the face of modern sophists. Most often, it considers the great sophists—for there are great sophists—as great philosophers.”16 In the field of architecture, the first of postmodern sophists—although not “great” by philosophical standards—were the deconstructionists, critics, and architects who followed Derrida before jumping on the bandwagon of Deleuze’s philosophy. They not only sacrificed truth but soon also even relinquished thought, initiating a reactionary movement that ultimately divorced architecture from the discourse of politics. The uncontested leader of this apolitical architectural nonthinking was Peter Eisenman, who notwithstanding his claim to the contrary, began the movement to betray the radical progressive thought of the soixante-huit generation. As for the prodigious Derrida, his entrée into the field of architecture via “dialogues” with Eisenman—which came to an unhappy end—marked a low point in his philosophical career. It is not my intention, nor is this the place, to narrate the full story of architecture’s relationship with deconstruction and its dismal failure. Douglas Murphy has already done this very well in the chapter titled “Iconism” in his book The Architecture of Failure.17 “Iconism” was followed by “virtualism,” with a new generation of architectural sophists substituting Deleuze for Derrida, but

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with more hubris. I cite here a fine passage about Eisenman’s invoking the name of Derrida while at the same time rejecting him as a “source of authority”: The audacity here is impressive; ranging from naivety to disingenuousness. How are we to understand the statement that Eisenman does not seek to derive authority from making appeals to Derrida’s name? If no authority is being sought, why would he need Derrida as a foil at all? It would seem that what is going on is that Eisenman is appealing to the proper name “Derrida,” the “famous philosopher,” in order to avoid having to describe his own architectural motivation in simple terms of taste. Derrida here functions as a symbol of protected knowledge—in a gesture that reeks of the worse kind of elitism, his name functions purely to add gravitas to Eisenman’s work.18

In other words, Eisenman is in need of a “sophistication” that Derrida willingly provides. Sadly, as Murphy explains in painstaking and painful detail, Derrida, in a later conversation with Eisenman, recommends Benjamin’s “Experience and Poverty,” and its reflections on glass, in contrast with Eisenman’s misreading of “trace” in relation to aura, and so on. The story goes on.19 The upshot: Derrida voluntarily entered in dialogue with an architect and this left him exposed, rightly, to the accusation of naively abetting a reactionary position aimed at distancing architecture from political critique. This whole episode deserves a more careful critical study to bring out more fully the meaning of its failure. Compared with Derrida, the misappropriation of Deleuze’s ideas of the baroque is even more egregious. It concerns a group of Deleuze followers whose work exemplifies sophistry in Badiou’s sense. As I will argue later on, they represent the “antiphilosophers” of architecture. They are easily rebutted in the best tradition of Plato, who, in his academy, combated the sophists of his time, mainly Gorgias and Protagoras, but as Badiou points out, such a rebuttal should be based on a critique in their own terms.20 The philosophical thought of architecture, if it should restore the Truth of its discourse, needs to wage a similar battle with contemporary postmodern sophists. those whom I call in this study “hyper-Deleuzeans.” They are the self-styled “avant-gardes” of academia, neoconservatives disguised as “radicals,” whose readings of Deleuze exemplify the “vulgar Deleuzeanism” of French theory after it migrated to the American academy.21 Their “practice of theory” is perhaps best described as academic theoretical narcissism. Its irreducible opposite is the theory of radical critique, grounded in a systematic, political, and philosophical questioning of architectural theory and practice. The problems with the proponents of Deleuze’s philosophy in architecture are multiple. In developing a theoretical version of the baroque, they align

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practice with the ideological imperatives of culture. Uncritical appropriation is the hallmark of this enterprise.22 A selective and facile reading turns a body of critical philosophy into an affirmative programmatic “prescription” for design practice, at the same time that it omits the origins of this philosophical body of work in radical critique. Underlying such misappropriations is an ideology of theory that has become increasingly doctrinaire over the last four decades. With aggressive and pretentious claims, it appeals to the long-running hegemony of poststructuralist theory since the 1980s to buttress a “new architecture” whose purportedly “novel” tectonics are more than ever integrated into the spectacle of the contemporary culture industry. This “new architecture,” which I rename “neobaroque,” is legitimated by institutions of high culture that trade in aesthetic use-value. I take this manifestation of the neobaroque to signify a perversion in the original philosophical idea of the Baroque. It is the prevailing contemporary form of practice that, as we will see, is best exemplified by Frank Gehry. The “new architecture” of the neobaroque deploys a regressive aesthetics in an effort to elevate design to an untenable status of “high” art through institutional sanction. The cultural authorities that legitimate this practice are themselves part of a new managerial class whose business is at the heart of the “New Spirit” of capitalism.23 “Neo-Spinozism” provides the needed “philosophical” legitimacy. As Kiarina Kordela notes, it derives from and includes within its broad reach some aspects of Deleuze’s philosophy.24 If the historical Baroque in the seventeenth century was an “authentic” manifestation of society at the time, contemporary neobaroque design has everything inauthentic about it. It is essentially fake. Moreover, if the Baroque throughout history has signified a recurring negative moment that subverts the universal claims of culture and modernity, the return of the (neo)baroque is a symptom (in psychoanalytical sense of the term) of unresolved, ignored, or repressed contradictions. If neobaroque ideology is in service to the cultural logic of neoliberal capitalism, it also draws much of its force from the techno-aesthetic-digital image industry of the so-called “postindustrial-post-Fordist” consumer society. Here, the issue is not only the tendency to read and misread Deleuze in terms of an aesthetic ideology of seductive academic jargon that underpins the neobaroque. It is also the fact that there are certain elements inherent in Deleuze’s philosophy that lend themselves to such misappropriations. According to Žižek, “There are, effectively, features that justify calling Deleuze the ideologist of late capitalism.”25 If such is the case, far from being “subversive avant-gardes,” the architectural

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followers of Deleuze are simply junior ideological fellow travelers, eager to “translate” the philosopher’s work uncritically into a building practice, diluting whatever radical critique might still be present, and indeed is present, in the letter of Deleuze’s work. This comes with political consequences. Much like Derrida’s work, Deleuze’s philosophy, and his idea of the Baroque in particular, while requiring critical scrutiny on the high ground of philosophical debate, must also be rescued from its problematic misappropriation in the architectural field. Let me conclude this chapter by pointing out that if, today, the critique of architecture within the context of capitalism has become démodé or old fashioned, it is because the liberal-Left ideological establishment—to which “hyper-Deleuzeans” of all sorts belong—has hijacked the radical Left critique. In the following chapters, I confront this dominant trend through a political critique of aesthetic ideology in contemporary culture and architecture. From such a perspective, it will be seen that in serving the politicoeconomic and cultural order of neoliberalism, euphoric “hyper-Deleuzeans” have, inadvertently or not, come to occupy the empty center of the political ontology opened up by the conspicuous absence of the critical project of the Left. In the next chapter, I focus on some of the occupants of this empty center and on the architectural establishments within and outside the discipline, as well as various institutions of high culture, that support them. My aim is not just to provide a scholarly review of the (neo)baroque trend in architecture but also to intervene politically in the discourse of contemporary architecture and culture. I will thus attempt to practice a genre of “theory” recently coined by Žižek as “struggling theory,”26 aimed at bringing radical social theory back into the field of architectural design.

9

Digital Neobaroque and the Hyper-Deleuzeans of Architecture

The recent mutation in the formal structures of contemporary architecture, sanctioned by the institutions of high culture, has been euphorically celebrated as a “New Architecture” and imagined as a sensational break from the immediate past. This aggressive claim to “newness” is largely the invention of champions of Deleuze’s philosophy in architecture. We might call them—unkindly—“hyperDeleuzeans” and take them to task for misappropriating Deleuze’s concept of the fold, which I discussed previously. In this chapter, I want to return to that particularly problematic practice of directly “applying” philosophy to building theory—a practice at which hyper-Deleuzeans are particularly adept. But first, it is important to clarify who is being targeted in this chapter. In contrast to the pretentious claim to “newness,” we might classify the recent figurative turn in the “New Architecture” more simply, and truthfully, as a late version of postmodern “neobaroque.” Neobaroque here is meant in a broad sense to designate a large part of contemporary design practice influenced by the imperatives of the culture industry. This is quite different from the way Deleuze used it in The Fold (I will come back to this) and is not meant to indicate a period “style” or as an affirmative art-historical category. Rather, the neobaroque stands for a distorted version of historical Baroque forms. As we will see, much is at stake in being able to make and sustain this distinction. The neobaroque implies a disorientation, or better, a disorder in the state of contemporary architecture. As a diagnostic term, it signals a pathological state afflicting the “body” of architecture. Psychological diagnostic manuals would refer to it as “body dysmorphic disorder”—a nosological term referring to an “imagined ugliness disorder.”1 In relation to the architectural “body,” this disorder does not of course have any particular clinical causes. It is rather a symptom of a general malady in the state of contemporary culture, a malady that I claim requires psychoanalysis for its interpretation.

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In the discourse of the hyper-Deleuzeans, dysmorphic disorder, interestingly enough, was given fashionable and fancy aesthetic-philosophical names. Initially, it was called “formlessness” or informe, borrowing from Bataille, as observed by Rosalind Krauss and Eve-Alain Bois.2 By the time it migrated into architectural discourse, this term, however, had lost most of its critical force. At times, the Kantian sublime was invoked to explain it. Later, the fold or folding were used to give it a philosophical legitimacy, especially by a younger generation of the architects and critics disenchanted with the “older” master narratives and fascinated by Derrida’s philosophy and “critical practice.” This new appreciation of Deleuzeanism in architecture echoed a widespread trend that rejoiced at the fact that Japanese “paper folders,” origami artists, appreciated The Fold much as Australians surfers did.3 Against this background, the term neobaroque, beyond the pathological disorder, takes on special meaning, especially in its claim to the “new” that I want to examine.

What is new in the “New Architecture”? Žižek once made a comment about a “minimum structure of historicity” that would be needed to counter historicism. This structure, he claimed, “resides in what Adorno called ‘the power of the New to bind us [die verbindlichkeit des neuen]’.”4 He writes: “When something truly New emerges, one cannot go on as if it did not happen, since the very fact of this innovation changes all the coordinates. After Schoenberg, one cannot continue to write musical pieces in the old Romantic tonal mode; after Kandinsky and Picasso, one cannot paint in the old figurative way; after Kafka and Joyce, one cannot write in the old realist way. More precisely: of course, one can do it, but if one does it, these old forms are no longer the same. They have lost their innocence and now look like nostalgic fake.”5 Developing this point, Žižek says that if it is still possible to compose in a tonal mode after Schoenberg, the price one pays is a decline in taste: “This is why there is an irreducible element of kitsch in twentieth century tonal composers such as Rachmaninov—something of a nostalgic clinging to the past, something fake, like the adult who tries to keep alive the naïve child within.”6 Žižek’s point holds equally well for architecture, where already by the second decade of the new century an “irreducible element of kitsch” can be observed after the authentic “modernist break” affected by architects such as Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe with the nineteenth-century regime of representation. After this break, and throughout

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the twentieth century, of course, many still went on to design buildings in the old “figurative way,” but their work would almost always border on kitsch. The claim of the hyper-Deleuzeans is that new forms, derived mainly from new digital technology, are neither the “old” abstraction nor a return to “figuration.” This claim seems highly questionable precisely because the neobaroque, while advertised and marketed as high “art,” shares the coexistence of kitsch and high art characteristic of the historical baroque. The difference is what we might call a second degree of representation. Neobaroque figuration affects a double folding, kitsch on kitsch, if you will. Still, some might argue that this “new figuration” is not the “old” figurative mode of nineteenth-century representation. But the historicity of this “newness” is nothing but a historicist figuration and thus an anachronism. In reality, much of what is marketed as “New” returns us to the old problem of “representation” versus “figuration,” image and icon against the iconoclastic abstraction of modernism. As Gérard Wajcman has written, modernism centered on interrogating the logic of representation. Philosophically, its central problem was: “How to aim to find access to the world in some other way than through image? How to aim at the world, at the real, without at the same time interposing the screen of representation?”7 In challenging such a break, contemporary postmodern theory, of which the theoretical discourse of the hyper-Deleuzeans is but a recent manifestation, places itself in an anachronistic position. Its advocates, who perceive modernism as a “failure”—and not as defeat or a deadlock— consequently falsify the whole historical-societal project of modernism, all but completely ignoring its sociopolitical and critical discourse that had persisted, in some form or another, up to the late 1960s. There is a specific subjectivity attached to this break, or counterbreak, with the “modernist break,” that must be counted as pre-Kantian. Regarding “abstraction,” for example, Robert Pippin notes perceptively how in modernism “ ‘Abstraction’ in [a] Hegelian sense does not mean abstraction of ‘everything that was not intrinsic to art as such,’ but abstraction from dependence on sensual immediacy, and so a kind of enactment of the modernist take on normativity since Kant: self-legislation.”8 Concurring with Michael Fried’s notion of “objecthood,” Pippin further notes: There was no failure of modernism, nor exhaustion by the end of expressionism. Rather, there was (and still is) a failure to appreciate and integrate the self— understanding reflected in such art (the same kind of failure to appreciate modernism, or the same kind of straw-men attacks, in what we call

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postmodernism). The aftermath—minimalism, “literalism,” op and pop art, postmodernism—can be understood better as evasions and repressions than as alternative.”9 (my emphasis)

One may turn to Žižek for further clarification of these remarks: “One can only agree with Pippin’s endorsement of Michael Fried’s rejection of modernism and postmodernism as consecutive ‘stages’ of historical development, ‘postmodernism’ is rather the name for a regression, for a refusal to follow the consequences of the modernist break.”10 In this precise sense, of course, the advocates of the “New Architecture” would vehemently deny the attribution of “postmodern.” In grafting the philosophical concepts of the Baroque onto the formal structure of their “new” architecture, they purport to be going beyond the historicist and stylistic relativism of postmodernism, as well as that of their immediate predecessors, the “deconstructivists.” However, such claims are only partly credible. While rejecting the historicist pastiche and free form of earlier stylistic postmodernism, the New Architecture, in both theory and practice, remains strongly linked to a postmodernist historicist discourse—and on this account is justifiably referred to as “neobaroque.” But more importantly, what is truly historicist in the discourse of the New Architecture is the way it aestheticizes present empirical reality, conceived teleologically as a historical end point, if not indeed a utopia of the present that verges on pure ideology. Žižek, again, makes clear the conceptual implications of this stance when he questions the “idle talk” of postmodernism: To put in Badiou’s term, there is no postmodern Event: postmodernism is not an Event proper, but, at its most basic, a reactive formation, a way of betraying the modernist break, of re-integrating its achievement into the dominant field. The apparent “radicality” of some postmodern trends should not deceive us here: this—often spectacular—“radicality” is there to fascinate us with its deceptive lure, and thus to blind us to the fundamental absence of thought proper.11

Similar considerations apply to the apparent “radicality” of the hyper-Deleuzeans and their postmodern neobaroque spectacle. Thus, the exuberant and arrogant claims in defense of the New Architecture would not yet make an event in Badiou’s sense, but only a pseudo-event, conspicuous in the lure of its sensuous, but deceptive, immediacy. What is actually at stake here are the sensorial effects that Susan Buck-Morss describes, after Walter Benjamin, as anaestheticization.12 Similarly, postmodernism’s character as a “reactive formation” reflects its true nature as a regression from the modernist break inaugurated in the early

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twentieth century. This regressive posture in the theory and practice of the hyper-Deleuzeans and their professed “radicality” is just a camouflage to hide an absence of political thought proper. But who exactly are the hyper-Deleuzeans? What is wrong with their “philosophical” position? They are critics, theorists, and architects13 who, in the last three decades, have propagated what Badiou characterizes as a “superficial doxa of an anarcho-desiring Deleuzianism.”14 They are the champions of “desire,” “flow” and “free flux,” “surfing,” and “anarchic experimentation.”15 Politically, they are a perfect match for what Badiou calls a new capitalism, a capitalism worthy of Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring machines, a capitalism that by itself generates a collective understanding of a new kind, which provokes the rising up of a hitherto subjugated constituent power, a capitalism that bypasses the old power of states, a capitalism that proletarianizes the multitude and makes the workers of the immaterial intellect out of petit-bourgeois.16

Some of our hyper-Deleuzeans in the academy might be familiar with the work of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, whose understanding of contemporary capitalism aligns precisely with the “postmodern capitalism” to which Badiou refers, in which all agency devolves to the “general intellect” of the collectivity.17 Badiou explains: Such, roughly, but accurately, is Negri’s position. But such, more generally, is the position of all those who are fascinated by the technological changes and continuous expansion of capitalism over the last thirty years and who, dupes of the dominant ideology (“everything is changing all the time and we are chasing after the memorable change”), imagine they are witnessing a prodigious sequence of History—whatever their ultimate judgment on the quality of this sequence.18

Within the field of architecture, hyper-Deleuzeans are technologically intoxicated designers or theorists who manipulate the digital-image repertoire of contemporary capitalism for formal-aesthetic experimentation. The “radicality” of hyper-Deleuzeans on the “liberal Left” must not be confused with anticapitalism of the radical Left; it is rather more closely aligned with Negri’s and Hardt’s conceptualization of contemporary capitalism. Deleuze himself, it should be noted, in contrast with such postmodern readings and in line with Foucault’s teachings, remained all along a consistent modernist thinker. His analyses of literature and even of architecture are all grounded in a modernist critique of representation. We may recall here

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that Foucault in The Order of Things had sketched the emergence out of the Renaissance of two modern epistemai, the classical Age of Reason and the “truly modern” episteme in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.19 As Jean-Jacques Lecercle notes, implicit in this periodization is a conception of language and literature at the moment of modernism as based on critique of representation.20 As Lecercle points out, Deleuze’s work is basically consistent with this Foucaultian picture of modernism.21 But the hyper-Deleuzeans in architecture passed over the sophisticated early works of Deleuze, such as Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, and his two volumes on cinema, preferring to focus obsessively on his collaborative books with Félix Gauttari, the playful, extravagant and fashionable Anti-Oedipus and Thousand Plateaus. From these two texts, they extracted various notions of “rhizome,” “smooth” and “striated” space, “line of flight,” “plane of immanence,” “face and faciality,” and so on and treated them as purely aesthetic terms to be exploited and prescriptively “applied” to design. They followed a similar approach with The Fold, reading it literally in an antiphilosophical fashion as if it were a “ready-made-manual” for the production of “folded” luxury objects. In a perceptive essay titled “Architectural Deleuzism,” Douglas Spencer effectively unmasks the ideological pretense of what he calls the self-styled avantgarde of “Deleuzoguattarians,” exposing their professed “political” stand.22 In this well-constructed oppositional essay against the New Architecture, Spencer raises several important points that deserve careful attention. Spencer defines architectural “Deleuzism” as the tendency to purge Deleuze from any traces of criticality and to use his writings strictly as “a prescriptive repertoire of formal maneuvers.”23 Spencer writes: Indeed, for the “new architecture,” the term “new” operated as a convenient conflation of two senses of the term: one identifying it as succeeding the old (deconstructivism or postmodernism), the other as an orientation toward a philosophy of invention itself, putatively derived from Deleuze. At this point philosophy was conjoined to an exercise in academic marketing; the new as invention conflated with the new as the rebranding of an architectural “avantgarde.”24

Spencer finds an affirmation of the spatiality of contemporary capitalism in the forms of space and strategy legitimated by “Deleuzogauttarians,” in spite of and contrary to their claims. The paradigm of spatiality developed in a post-Fordist economy grounded in communication media, networking, flexibility, and the so-called “immaterial labor” are models that are theorized through notions such as

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“complexity theory,” “self-organization,” “emergence,” “fractal theory,” “catastrophe theory,” “swarm,” “morphogenesis,” and so on, some of which are the ones celebrated in the political writings of Hardt and Negri who, as noted above, follow in the line of Deleuze’s political philosophy. Spencer specifically takes to task the theoretical line advanced by Greg Lynn in an issue of Architectural Design Profile titled Folding in Architecture, featuring writings and works of Alejandro ZaeraPolo of Foreign Office (FOA) and Reiser + Umemoto, and Patrik Schumacher of Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA), among others. It is important to point out that these are the figures who, along with other theorists like Sara Whiting, Robert Somol, and Jeffrey Kipnis, to name only a few, have been persistently hostile to the project of the Left in architecture. As Spencer writes: Where Deleuzism in architecture originally undertook, then, to establish its autonomy from linguistically oriented concerns of poststructuralism, it subsequently sought to distance itself too, as part of its affirmation of the new— indeed, affirmation of affirmation—from any obligation to engage with critique. Through their alliance with the ‘post-critical’ position emerging, around the same time, in US architectural discourse . . . it articulated its opposition to critique as a matter both extrinsic to the ‘proper’ concerns of architecture, and as a counterproductive form of ‘negativity’.”25

The case made by Deleuzean Zaera-Polo against criticality is a sad case of an intellectual deficit in knowledge if not an outright ideological hubris. Spencer cites Zaera-Polo in a particularly telling passage: I must say that the paradigm of the “critical” is in my opinion part of the intellectual models that became operative in the early 20th century and presumed that in order to succeed we should take a kind of “negative” view towards reality, in order to be creative, in order to produce new possibilities. In my opinion, today the critical individual practice that has characterized intellectual correctness for most of 20th Century is no longer particularly adequate to deal with a culture determined by processes of transformation on a scale and complexity difficult to understand. . . . You have to be fundamentally engaged in the processes and learn to manipulate them from the inside. You never get that far into the process as a critical individual. If we talk in terms of the construction of subjectivity, the critical belongs to Freud a Lacan [sic], what I called “productive,” to Deleuze.26

Thus Zaera-Polo repudiates the radical philosophical discourse of the “negative” to which Deleuze himself based much of his work—work that hyper-Deleuzeans are happy to cite so long as it is accompanied by a suitable debunking of the Left. In this regard, I want to cite Deleuze from his Foucault, originally published in

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French in 1986. Subscribing to Michel Foucault’s line of posing triple questions about new modes of subjectivation as to “What can I do, What do I know, What am I,” Deleuze writes: The events which led up to 1968 were like the “rehearsal” of these three questions. What is our light and what is our language, that is to say, our “truth” today? What powers must we confront, and what is our capacity for resistance, today when we can no longer be content to say that the old struggles are no longer worth anything? And do we not perhaps above all bear witness to and even participate in the “production of a new subjectivity?”27

Further on, Deleuze writes: To read some analyses, you would think that 1968 took place in the heads of few Parisians intellectuals. We must therefore remember that it is the product of a long chain of world events, and of a series of currents of international thought, that already linked the emergence of new forms of struggle to the production of a new subjectivity, if only in its critique of centralism and its qualitative claims concerning the “quality of life.” On the level of world events we can briefly quote the experiment with self-management in Yugoslavia, the Czech Spring and its subsequent repression, the Vietnam War, the Algerian War and the question of networks, but we can also point to the signs of a “new class” (the new working class), the emergence of farmers’ or students’ unions, the so-called institutional psychiatric and educational centers, and so on. On the level of currents of thought we must no doubt go back to Lukács, whose History and Class Consciousness was already raising questions to do with new subjectivity; then Frankfurt school, Italian Marxism and first sign signs of “autonomy” (Tronti); the reflection that evolved around Sartre on the question of the new working class (Gorz); the group such as “Socialism or Barbarism,” “Situationism,” “the Communist Way” (especially Félix Gauttari and “micropolitics of desire”).28

Thus we see to what extent Zaera-Polo and others in the same camp are willing to go to distort Deleuze in their drive to expunge all traces of the history of critical thought and the 1960s resistance movement to which he belonged. Returning to Spencer’s argument about the political blind spot of ZaeraPolo and other “Deleuzogauttarians” like Patrick Schumacher of Zaha Hadid Architects, particularly notable is their use of concepts such as “micropolitics” and “assemblage.” Spencer notes: The apparent politicization of architectural practice entailed by [such terms] has in fact served, first and foremost, to redefine the “political” so that it is now

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subsumed within the same concern for “material organization,” complexity and fluidity that have always been the focus of FOA’s theory and practice. . . . At the same time, the progressive potential of such concepts as “micro-politics,” Zaera-Polo has claimed, is best sought through architecture’s engagement with the market, since it is today “the most important medium of power distribution within the global economy.”29

Finally, one should mention the parallel Spencer draws between the organizational spatial paradigms of “architectural Deleuzism” and the managerial techniques of operational system of networking and “self-organization” of contemporary capitalism as theorized recently by Luc Boltansky and Eve Chiapello in The New Spirit of Capitalism. One of their key arguments is that “the orientation of contemporary managerial theories towards de-hierarchized and networked forms of organization originates, in fact, not in the production process, but precisely in a critique of capitalism which is then appropriated by capitalism.”30 According to Boltansky and Chiapello, Autonomy, spontaneity, rhizomorphous capacity, multitasking . . . conviviality, openness, to others and novelty, availability and creativity, visionary intuition, sensitivity to differences, listening to lived experience and receptiveness to a whole range of experience, being attracted to informality and the search for interpersonal contacts—these are taken from the repertoires of May 1968.31

What was directed against capitalism was later co-opted by capitalism. Spencer finds the same managerial ideology at work in the writings of Schumacher and Zaera-Polo, whose combined effects have been to achieve first of all, via a recasting of Deleuze and Gauttari’s “conceptual personae” of the fold and smooth space as affirmative figures prescriptive of a particular ethos of practice—a process of valorization that is oriented with reference to the contemporary condition of fluidity and mobility. To the language of network, fields, swarms and self organization, with which Deleuze and Guattari’s terms appear to accord in their commitment to “openness” and “complexity.”32

Spencer convincingly demonstrates the coincidence between the latest generation of corporate management culture and the characteristic tropes deployed in the recent New Architecture by the self-styled Deleuzean avantgardes. Such parallels are far from accidental. Spencer notes: The organizational models employed within the most advanced section of business presents, for Schumacher, a movement from the rigidly segmented

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and hierarchical work pattern of the Fordist era towards those that are “de-hierarchized” and based upon flexible network. Architecture, using such “Deleuzian” formal tropes as “smoothness” and “folding,” he argued, might make itself “relevant” by entering into a dialectic with “new social tropes” with which business organization and management theory are already engaged, thus allowing “architecture to translate organizational concepts into new effective spatial tropes while in turn launching new organizational concepts by manipulating space.”33

Schumacher’s arguments are characteristic of the new wave of managerial thinking in architecture—a culture of business that is most notable for its complete disavowal of architecture’s connection to any living political reality. It is therefore useful to end this chapter by citing Deleuze again, discussing Leibniz’s notion of the baroque and the politics that always underlies it. When asked by the interviewer about the relation of the baroque to painting, sculpture, and architecture, Deleuze responded with these words: Certainly, and the baroque was itself linked to a political system, a new conception of politics. The move toward replacing the system of a window and a world outside with one of computer screen in a closed room is something that’s taking place in our social life: we read the world more than we see it. Not only is there a social “morphology” in which textures play their part, but the baroque plays a part in town-planning and rural development. Architecture has always been a political activity, and any new architecture depends on revolutionary forces, you can find architecture saying “We need a people,” even though the architect isn’t himself a revolutionary. Through its relation to the bolshevik revolution [sic] constructivism links up with the baroque. A people is always a new wave, a new fold in the social fabric; any creative work is a new way of folding adapted to new materials.34 (emphasis added)

When Deleuze says that “the baroque was itself linked to a political system, a new conception of politics,” he is of course talking about the seventeenth-century historical Baroque, but there is no reason to assume that the contemporary neobaroque is immune to such forces. The only difference, perhaps, is that while the historical Baroque, according to Deleuze, depends on revolutionary forces that say “We need a people,” the hyper-Deleuzeans are more inclined to say “We need a wealthy corporation to sell our fancy images to.” And one can imagine them eagerly citing Deleuze to the effect that “any architecture depends on revolutionary forces” and adding, “Yes, indeed, we alone are those forces”!

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Against the “Architectural” Reading of The Fold

In The Fold, Deleuze makes several architectural claims. He says: “Up to now Baroque architecture is forever confronting two principles, a bearing principle and covering principle’ (on the one hand, Gropius; and on the other, Loos).”1 Deleuze’s thesis, as I will argue, actually corresponds better with the culture of modernism than with the historical period of the Baroque. By problematically conflating and confusing two distinct architectonic operations in two different phases of modernity, Deleuze is both astute and misleading, if not mistaken. In a footnote, he cites Bernard Cache’s as yet unpublished L’ameublement du territoire as his source.2 Indeed, as already noted, Deleuze takes Cache as the source for his theory of the “fold.” I come back to Cache and his remarks on the baroque below. As a matter of historical record, however, the so-called thesis of the “two principles,” as separate entities, cannot be attributed to the original Baroque architecture. The putative separation of the “bearing principle and covering principle,” and various ways of them coming together, is really only applicable to the historical transformation that took place in the early nineteenth century in France, with J.-N. L. Durand’s theory of architecture and the emergence alongside a nascent consumer society of a cultural discourse around architecture—a discourse within which and out of which Deleuze’s thinking is formed. Before we consider this issue more closely, however, it is important to pause for a moment and reflect on Deleuze’s use of architecture in his work and especially in this most important among his philosophical essays. I contend that Deleuze here is reading architecture from a philosophical perspective, driving at a “philosophy of architecture,” one that presupposes a hierarchy whereby philosophy thinks and architecture is thought, as an object of philosophical speculation useful to the creation of “concepts.” As Deleuze and Guattari said in What is Philosophy? “We had never stopped asking this question previously, and we have already had the answer, which has not changed: philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts.”3 It is in the same book, by the way,

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that they also claim that “art begins not with flesh but with the house. That is why architecture is the first of the arts.”4 Further on, they mention the “frame” as a defining architectural feature, suggesting that “not going beyond form, the most scientific architecture endlessly produces and joins up planes and sections. That is why it can be defined by the ‘frame,’ by an interlocking and differently oriented frame, which will be imposed on the other arts, from painting to cinema.”5 Here we find a more extensive reference to Cache (whom Deleuze had already cited in The Fold, to which I will come back)and his idea of architecture as the first art of framing. Cache, they write, “is able to list a certain number of framing forms that do not determine in advance any concrete content or function of the edifice: the walls that are cutoff, the window that captures or selects (in direct contact with territory), the ground floor that wards off or reifies . . . the roof that envelops the place’s singularity.”6 Throughout this text, it becomes apparent that Deleuze and Guattari are developing a series of “architectural metaphors” for philosophical concepts, in a manner not inconsistent with the general tendency in the West, as Kojin Karatani remarks, to deploy such metaphors to stabilize an otherwise unstable philosophical system.7 Deleuze’s philosophy of architecture thus falls in the tradition of the West. In a similar way, for example, Hegel had written about architecture as the first “symbolic” art, stressing, as Deleuze does with the “frame,” the conceptual order wherein “architecture refers to all the elements of a building that are not based on utility.”8 The frame, in fact, is a recurring metaphor in Deleuze’s writing on cinema and painting as well as architecture. Architecture for Deleuze is thus a field in which the philosopher claims a certain jurisdiction for a system of thought. Essentially, it becomes a means, or better a pretext, for the development of a philosophical concept of the Baroque, which operates on a distinctly different and independent, nonarchitectural register. In this respect, it must be stressed that contrary to the claims of hyper-Deleuzean enthusiasts, the creation of “concepts” is not the province of architecture. This is partly because architecture cannot be simply divided into the separate realms, with the “bloc of sensations” by way of “percepts and affects” belonging to “art,” as opposed to the realm of “concepts” that belongs to philosophy. At the same time, it is not at all self-evident that the “thought” of architecture, in respect to the question of Truth, is of the same order as the “thought” of philosophy. The parallelism of architecture and philosophy is even less evident than that between literature and philosophy in Deleuze, which Jean-Jacques Lecercle has

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insightfully analyzed.9 The problematic architecture and its “exploitation” is altogether a different matter in the philosopher’s oeuvre. Just as Deleuze is free to impose his thought on architecture to advance a philosophical argument, hyperDeleuzeans within architecture, in a reverse move, exploit the philosopher’s concepts for their own ends, making them directly applicable to a theory and building practice centered on the “bloc of sensations” created through an aesthetics of “percepts and affects” and to perversely give themselves a “philosophical” cachet. The claim of “equality” between architecture and philosophy must be interrogated here. Does it designate the free interaction between two autonomous and independent fields, or rather the subservience of one to the other and a mutual exploitation for narrowly conceived disciplinary aims? I reiterate the thesis I am advancing all along: For architecture, the only legitimate use of categories of critical philosophy is that they have to serve a project of critique rather than as a fancy-style manual. When nonphilosophers—in this case, architects, artists, critics, and architectural historians—read The Fold, one can already hear their sighs of relief when, upon reaching “ Chapter 3: What is Baroque?” they are made to understand what exactly the “baroque phenomenon” is without having to burden themselves with the whole philosophical weight of learning Deleuze. The latter gratifies them by covering all the manifestations of the Baroque, from architecture to the visual arts and twentieth-century music up to the contemporary avant-gardes. But nowhere does the hypothetical nonphilosopher reader confront what was, as we have seen, for Deleuze and other thinkers like Alain Badiou, the major problem of French philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century, namely the question of the subject within the “conflicting line” I traced in Badiou’s argument. But returning to the architectonic principle of the baroque; whether the stated “two principles” come originally from Cache or from Deleuze’s interpretation of his text matters little.10 In either case, it amounts to a misleading statement for couple of reasons. First, based on the literal translation of the allegory of “the baroque house” that Deleuze expounded in Chapter 1 of The Fold, it assumes that the works of Gropius and Loos, and for that matter presumably a large part of modern twentieth-century architecture, fall into the category of the Baroque. Significantly, Deleuze cites the treatment of light in the lower-level crypt in Le Corbusier’s Abbey of La Tourette as an example of architectural baroque, but he does it again according to the philosophical notion of monad and the relation between the inside and the outside in Leibniz, as if Leibniz had read Le Corbusier, or Le Corbusier had advance knowledge of Deleuze reading Leibniz.

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Again, this is an example of the way the philosopher likes to exploit architecture, legitimately or not, to achieve and confirm his philosophical “concepts,” which are his province. Deleuze writes, “Finally, the architectural ideal is a room in black marble, in which light enters only through orifices so well bent that nothing on the outside can be seen through them, yet they illuminate or color the decor of a pure inside.”11 And then, rhetorically, he asks, “(Is not the Baroque manner, such as this, that inspired in the Abbey of La Tourette?) The Leibnizian monad and its system of light-mirror-point of view-inner decor cannot be understood if they are not compared to Baroque architecture.”12 Interestingly, however, I must mention in passing, Le Corbusier was adamantly against every manifestation of the Baroque in architecture. While Deleuze’s theory of “two principles” is more or less a correct account of a central issue in modern architectural tectonics, his comments on Gropius give the misleading impression that he somehow embodies only one pole of the dichotomy (the “bearing principle”), as opposed to Loos’s representing the “covering principle.” But then, Deleuze goes on to explain the relationship between the two principles as follows: Conciliation of the two will never be direct, but necessarily harmonic, inspiring a new harmony: it is the same expression, the line, that is expressed in the elevation of the inner song of the soul, through memory or by heart, and in the extrinsic fabrication of material partitions, from cause to cause. But, justly, what is expressed does not exist outside its expression.13

One is never quite sure in what mode one is meant to understand Deleuze’s architectural considerations. Clearly, however, these comments are in a broad sense metaphorical, their meaning deriving chiefly from within the context of “the baroque house” of Leibnizian philosophy. It is also worth mentioning here that it is curious that Deleuze would not exploit his own more radical and novel concept of “disjunctive synthesis” in his analysis of the relationship between the “two principles”—opting instead for what seems to be a less convincing and traditional formal synthesis. But leaving this issue aside, let us consider the two principles strictly in terms of modern architectural thinking since the nineteenth century after Durand. This may help us clarify the distinction between the historical Baroque and the contemporary postmodern neobaroque, since, when Deleuze mentions the term neobaroque in The Fold, he does not make any such distinction. I want to start by looking more closely at Bernard Cache’s writing, which has been the major reference for both Deleuze himself and for his followers in the field of architecture.

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In Chapter 4 in his Earth Moves, titled “Apesenteur” [Weightlessness], Cache begins by saying that all landscape can be described as hills and valleys that, geographically speaking, can be defined as presupposing “the choice of gravitational vector.”14 He then says that reading a landscape in relation to “inflection” leads us to an “experience of weightlessness.” In making the dubious statement that weightlessness was aesthetic before it became technological, he refers to Wölfflin’s essay on “Renaissance and Baroque,” in which, according to Cache, Wölfflin explained the “baroque universe as having to do with a gravitas.”15 Cache explains: This affect is as corporeal as it is spiritual: the heaviness of limbs as well as the preoccupations of the mind. More precisely, Wölfflin detects two elements in baroque experience: on one hand, the heavy consistency of the flesh, and on the other, the pathetic thrust of the subject who needs all his strength to resist crumbling under the weight of his limbs: “The functioning of motor organs is deficient, the mind only masters the body imperfectly.”16

According to Cache, physics teaches us that “the weight of the body is the product of two variables: mass and acceleration.”17 It is the inertia of the body and the acceleration of gravity. As we are accustomed to gravity as an invariable, Cache claims that Wölfflin, in contrast, points to the variation of this gravitational vector “that is due to the incongruence between muscular force and the inertia of the flesh.”18 He then comes to the concluding remarks that “the baroque age will then have exhibited this sort of vacillation in the possible connection between inertia and gravity.”19 He immediately adds that a misunderstanding must be cleared up. But it is precisely in his attempt to clear up a misunderstanding that Cache adds a new confusion between the original baroque experience and its contemporary variation. He writes, “If we go back to the baroque experience today, it is not in the name of an eclecticism that would be the sign of our postmodern age. It is rather that our very contemporary experience gives this historical one an acute meaning, for we are now once again being exposed to variations of the gravitational vector.”20 So for Cache, in our contemporary postmodern epoch, we have an original and authentic baroque experience, one that was not available at its origin in the historical Baroque in the seventeenth century. He deploys fashionable “catastrophe theory” to support his intellectual exercise: Thus catastrophe theory is first of all a description of the deformation extrinsic singularities in a field of potentiality whose surface continually bends before a given vector. But one could just as easily decide to immobilize the surface while

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varying the orientation of the vector. Thus it is for technological and scientific reasons that we are led back to the baroque experience. But soon these reasons will also be economic and sociological, for the industrial production of certain molecules in space is already under consideration.21

No wonder our hyper-Deleuzeans of architecture came to admire Cache’s sophisticated discussion, finding in it the perfect reference for formal design through current digital technology that deploys many terms such as vector, surface, inflection, curves, and so on for their outlandish “novel tectonic” forms. Without going into the full detail of contemporary discussions on the science of biogenetics and morphogenesis, the notions that have been manipulated in design discipline, we need only to mention that we are led to believe that the contemporary scientific and technological experience has once again enabled us to have an “authentic” experience of the original baroque sensibility; that a contemporary absolute experience of “weightlessness” is a renewal or the repetition of historical weightlessness in the original Baroque. This is of course a pure anachronism. Contrary to Cache, in spite of the intellectual exercise of catastrophe theory, fractal theory, and so on, our contemporary experience of “weightlessness” as such is inauthentic. In any case, Deleuze’s idea of the Baroque is much indebted to Cache and to the notion of weightlessness he finds in Wölfflin, to which is added, however, Leibniz’s monad. In The Fold, Deleuze states: Baroque architecture can be defined by this severing of the façade from the inside, of the interior from the exterior, and the autonomy of the interior from the independence of the exterior, but in such condition that each of the two terms thrusts the other forward. Wölfflin states as much in his own way (“It is precisely the contrast between the exacerbated language of the façade and the serene peace of the inside that constitutes one of the most powerful effects that Baroque art exerts upon us”), although he may be misled in thinking that the excess of inner decoration ends up by jostling the contrast, or that the absolute inside in itself is peaceful.22

We are again confronted with a curiously ahistorical definition, which raises the question of how to frame the architectonic specificity of the postmodern neobaroque. Is there a historical continuity between the tectonics of the Baroque and of the neobaroque? Is there a common sensibility shared by both? Is the experience of the neobaroque a phenomenon on a par with its historical precedent? To draw a radical distinction between the two, as I have been arguing all along, it is of course necessary to avoid conflating them based on surface similarities.

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A general thesis regarding the logic of modern architectonics should be considered since Durand at the turn of the nineteenth century. A unitary Structure of One divides itself into Two. A binary logic dictates this division. The term structure itself, it must be remembered, is a term for architectural metaphor (from Latin struere, to build) that can be taken as “differential signifier” that separates the inside from the outside by investing them with value and meaning, which by definition constitutes a disequilibrium that produces a surplus. After Durand’s theory of architecture, this binary logic became universal; that is, the division between the so-called “two principles”: the “bearing principle” and “covering principle.” As already noted, Deleuze’s two principles of “bearing” and “covering” may be traced to the generalization of this binary logic with its variable forms of mediation or more or less abstract cultural negotiation in the “art of building.” Where does “meaning” take place in this mediation? It occurs in the zone of undecidability, in the space which is neither inside nor outside, precisely in the zone where the “surplus meaning” is generated. This binary logic may be supported by a philosophical argument Slavoj Žižek has developed. He has noted recently, in a roundabout way, the essential and inescapable duality inherent in any attempt to think the structure: Everything hinges on this crucial point: the predominant deconstructionist/ historicist “democratically materialist” anti-philosophy extols multiplicity and abhors “binary logic,” seeing in the Two just a mirror redoubling of the One. (This is why anti-philosophers like to criticize Hegel’s succession of multiplicity, opposition, and contradiction from the beginning of his “logic of sense” as the exemplary case of gradual subordination of the multiple to the One.) Materialist dialectic knows that multiplicity without the Two is just the multiplicity of Ones, the monotonous night of a plurality in which all cows are black. What the anti-philosophical extolling of multiplicity is missing is the noncoincidence of the One with itself, the noncoincidence which makes the One the very form of appearance of its opposite: it is not only that the complexity of its situation undermines every One—much more radically, it is the very oneness of the One which redoubles it, functioning as the excess over the simple one.23

We will return to the notion of antiphilosophy later. Our main point here is simply to underscore that the modern binary logic in the architectonic Structure of the One is the expression of the division between Inside and Outside, which, as we have seen, Deleuze philosophically but ahistorically attributed to the Baroque. A fundamental incommensurability resides between the Inside and the Outside. As Žižek writes:

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The incommensurability between outside and inside is a transcendental a priori—in our most elementary phenomenological experience the reality we see through a window is always minimally spectral, not as fully real as the closed space we are in.24

Significantly, when the French topologist René Thom, the inventor of “catastrophe theory” (fashionably adopted in architecture discourse), discussed the idea of the “fold” in the singularity of the point, dividing the line into two, he had a similar phenomenological experience in mind. As Fredrik Stjernfelt explains, The next simplest is what René Thom called a fold, which makes possible the articulation of a wall: that which is neither inside nor outside. In this way, the fold is an articulation of the indecision already present in architecture: raised in concrete it becomes a monument of formal strength and indecision at the same time; the room under the fold is neither inside nor outside, or is both, depending on the point of view.25

A fundamental difference separates the postmodern neobaroque from the historical Baroque. The binary logic in the neobaroque architecture exasperates the inherent duality of the structure to the point of abolishing—as Žižek indicated in the above quote—the very zone of undecidability on which it is necessarily based. We thus have the sartorial logic of the “covering principle” standing on its own, simply superimposed and totally separated from the “bearing principle,” without any complex mediation existing between them. This is perhaps best seen in the fashionably obsessive concern for how the “architectural” expression of “the envelop” can lend an aestheticized sensuous immediacy, an excess surplus value as a cultural commodity bound to the imperatives of the contemporary culture industry. As Žižek puts it sharply: As has been often remarked, postmodernism can be said to be the deregulation of architecture—for a radical historicism where, in a globalized pastiche, everything is possible, anything goes. Pastiche works like “empty parody”: a radical historicism within which the whole of the past is equalized in a synchronicity of the eternal present.26

We will see in the next chapter how Frank Gehry’s work offers a particularly emblematic example of these trends—trends that, as I have tried to argue in this chapter, exist in a line of continuity with the general principle of tectonics inherited from Durand and the nineteenth century and that sharply distinguish the neobaroque from the historical baroque, despite claims to the contrary advanced by the hyper-Deleuzeans and indeed, to some extent as well, by Deleuze himself.

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The Draped Neobaroque: Is it Possible Not to Love Frank Gehry?

An unspoken rule of academic and professional etiquette in architecture today is the injunction to love Frank Gehry.1 Esteemed in the art world and by avantgarde figures from Carl Andre to Richard Serra, venerated in high cultural institutions such as the Guggenheim, admired by the critical establishment, softspoken, from a humble but dramatic background, with relatives lost at Auschwitz, and having been forced to change his family name from Goldberg to Gehry in order to escape anti-Semitism in his youth, Gehry presents an almost irresistible picture of the creative individual’s triumph over adversity.2 Who can really be against an architect admired by prominent art and architecture critics from Kurt Forster to Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, the subject of a collaborative feature film with famed director Sidney Pollack—Sketches of Frank Gehry—where Gehry comes across as a loving, warm, mild-mannered character. Who can be really against an architect who is adulated as celebrity around the world, winner of half a dozen prestigious international awards? Is it really possible not to love Frank Gehry? If you are in love with idolatry in our permissive culture and architecture and are fascinated with it, then you must love Frank Gehry. But, discontent with this new idolatry must render this injunction a problematic one. In order to understand the phenomenon of Frank Gehry as a construction that is in some sense more amazing even than his architecture, it seems necessary first of all to question the discourse of adulation—not to say idolatry—that has been built around it, including the rhetorical and political dispositifs on which it is based and the acting personalities and critical establishments involved. In what follows, I attempt to scrutinize and deconstruct the cultural-architectural discourses underpinning the construction of “Gehry.” If there is one contemporary architect that could be singled out as exemplifying the architectonic logic and ideology of what I have called in

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previous chapters the postmodern neobaroque, it is Gehry. In spite (but also undoubtedly because) of the fact that he himself remains intellectually illiterate and hostile to philosophical discourse, Gehry is the master, and idol, of hyperDeleuzeans. In many ways, his architecture embodies the dialectical opposites of “high art” and kitsch inherent in the historical Baroque and is even more central—as I argued earlier—to the culture industry today. In spite of his professed affinities to the Minimalist artists of his time, Gehry’s late architecture is the case of kitsch (not in the sense of Clement Greenberg) in contemporary culture—and a paradigmatic example of Adorno’s claim that “high art” in the epoch of a reigning culture industry is not only impossible but also potentially reactionary. Every such attempt to elevate architecture is misguided at its best and reactionary at its worst. In the face of this situation, the question is not, as some prominent critics have asked, whether Gehry’s architecture poses dilemmas endemic to the tradition of modernity between, on the one hand, “formal logic,” and on the other, “functional conceit”; or between an “abstract language of pure geometric forms” and a “sensuous psychological language”; or between so-called “rationalism” and “expressionism”; or between Le Corbusier and Adolf Loos on the one hand, and Bruno Taut and Hans Scharoun on the other; or between the “spectacle” and “use.”3 All these dichotomies are merely “signifiers” with differential values that produce a surplus. It is only this “surplus” that must be the object of analysis.4 The dichotomies themselves must be conceived as antonyms in a Kantian sense, or as instances of what Žižek has called the “parallax view” that cannot be one sidedly dissolved into one or the other term of a polarity whose historical source, as I will discuss below, dates at least to the nineteenth century. Outside such an historical framework, the “antagonistic” tensions reflected in them are flattened out, and their dialectical contradictions lose all their subversive force.

Figure 5 The Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain, by Frank Gehry.

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Figure 6 Walt Disney Concert Hall, from Grand and First Streets, Los Angeles, California, by Frank Gehry.

It may be useful here to recall how Gehry’s early architecture, the Santa Monica house, for example, where an old-fashioned single-family house was submitted to an anamorphic distortion with a modernist “supplement,”5 already presented itself as an “imaginary resolution” of antagonistic forces. The prevailing “aesthetic” analysis of such effects, however, is bound to remain ineffectual as long as the discourse of the political and the radical philosophy on which it is based—from Rancière to Badiou and Žižek—is excluded from it, and as long as the conjunction between aesthetics and politics is divorced from an analysis of the cultural logic of capitalism.

Drapery: Clothing the neobaroque One word explains Gehry’s evolving architectonic logic under the category of the neobaroque—drapery. Drapery is the extreme expression of the “binary logic” of the modern architectural system, in which the “covering principle,” or what is called dressing or clothing—previously named skin, style, or ornament— is categorically detached from the “bearing principle.” This ultimate condition stages an absolute incommensurability between the inside and the outside without mediation. Surfaces assume the role of signifiers whose meanings can only come from the outside, from the Other that in Lacanian theory structures the symbolic order. As soon as the surface or skin is in a relation of expressive correspondence with the inside but detached from it, it can be sculpted as an envelope to provide an aesthetic surplus for the “enjoyment” of the Other. This operation has ethicopolitical consequences to which I come back later. But first, we must pose this question: How does the term drapery relate to the Baroque idea in the first place? Significantly, Deleuze in The Fold invokes drapery while discussing the “Islamic Baroque” and in reference to the work of the famous French psychiatrist

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Gaëtan G. Clérambault. It should be mentioned in passing that Clérambault was repeatedly acknowledged by Lacan as “his only master.” In what follows, I will try to clarify the logic behind the correspondence between drapery and the term “Islamic Baroque” by locating the analysis of its meaning in a wider historical context of modernist architectural theory as developed most clearly by Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand. Anchoring to my analysis in psychoanalytical theory, I see Gehry’s architectonic drapery within the (admittedly provocative) conceptual machinery of the “Islamic Baroque,” suggesting that drapery in this sense constitutes the “sartorial superego” of Frank Gehry’s architecture. I adopt this novel term from Joan Copjec’s seminal essay of the same title, to which I come back below.6 Who was Clérambault? He was a psychiatrist “who was mad about fabric and woolens.”7 As Lacan’s biographer Élisabeth Roudinesco reports, during the Great War, Clérambault “joined the Moroccan army, where he began his study of Arab Draping, the art and manner of pleating and folding fabrics, knotting them, causing them to fall voluptuously alongside of the body, according to the ancestral custom.”8 While he was in Morocco between 1914 and 1918, recovering from his war wounds, Clérambault took a great quantity

Figure 7 Veiled Woman (Femme drapée), photography by Gaëtan G. Clérambault, 1918. Print on baryte paper, 17.9  12.5 cm. Inv. PP0164255. Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, France.

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Figure 8 Veiled Woman (Femme drapée), photography by Gaëtan G. Clérambault, 1918. Print on baryte paper, 17.9   12.7 cm. Inv. PP0164266. Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, France.

of photographs—up to 40,000—of Moroccan women. He learned Arabic and studied Arabic dress. One should remember that this was at the height of what some call the “golden age” of French colonialism, a time when Le Corbusier was also obsessed with Algerian women and prostitutes; he would take them to his hotel room in Algiers to draw them obsessively, clothed or in the nude.9 After his return to France, Clérambault gave a series of lectures from 1923 to 1926 at the École des Beaux-arts. “As a renowned psychiatrist and spellbinding teacher, Clérambault thrived in the atelier mode of the École; his were the most popular courses offered. The subject of these courses was—drapery.”10 These lectures were never published.11 As Copjec remarks, drapery was not only used to reinterpret classical sculpture, but “classical sculpture was also being used to interpret Moroccan drapery—to reinvent it for the West.”12 To understand the photographs of Clérambault, Copjec cites the psychiatrist’s own explanation that “a draped costume must be defined by the scheme of its construction.”13 Copjec takes this statement to be an expression or a revolution in the definition of “type” in modern architecture, to which I will return. Here, an obvious point should be made that Clérambault’s photography is a case of fetishistic obsession. As Copjec writes, “In the photographs of Clérambault, however, the enjoyment of the Other is only affirmed; it is not turned to Clérambault’s, the beholder’s, advantage. For

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these photographs are, like all fetish objects, ‘marked with the seal of uselessness’. The whole point of the construction of the fetish is to satisfy the Other, not oneself. The fetish, then, must be ‘rigorously of no use’ to the pervert, who makes no claims on any rights to enjoyment and who busies himself with them only for the sake of Other.”14 At the end of the chapter “What is Baroque?” Deleuze makes his first reference to Clérambault and writes: In this way the psychiatrist Clérambault’s taste for the fold of Islamic origin, and his extraordinary photographs of veiled women—true paintings that resemble those of Helga Heinzen nowadays—amounts, despite what has been said, to much more than a simple personal perversion. So does Mallarme’s Shawl, or the poet’s wish to edit a fashion journal. If Clérambault manifests a delirium, it is because he discovers the tiny hallucinatory perception of ether addicts in the folds of clothing. It falls upon formal deduction to straddle many diverse materials and areas. It will have to distinguish: simple and composite Folds; Hems (knots and seams being corollaries of the fold); Drapes, with their proppings. Only then will ensure material textures and, finally, Agglomerations or Conglomerations (felt made by fulling and not by weaving). We will see to what extend this deduction is properly Baroque or Leibnizian.15

In the footnote to this passage, Deleuze makes the reference to La Passion des étoffes chez un neuropsychiatrie, G. G. de Clérambault as his main source and, significantly, adds: A reader might be led to believe that these photos of overabundant folds refer to pages chosen by Clérambault himself. But the postcards at the time of the colonial empire also reveal these systems of folds, which dictate all the clothing of Moroccan women, including that of the face: an Islamic Baroque.16 [emphasis added]

Deleuze does not further elaborate on Clérambault’s case and the relation between the notion of the fold and drapery. For this we have to turn to Copjec’s text. As is reported, in 1926, the authorities at the École des Beaux-Arts interrupted Clérambault’s lectures on drapery. As a result, he wrote a letter to his superiors in which he reiterated the originality of his project. He stressed that his teaching “aimed not merely at a comprehension of the drapery but also at an exact rendering of the Fold!”17 Thus it can be said that drapery as a special case of the fold in the notion of “Islamic Baroque” is the veil that, like a principle of “facelessness,” kept the curiosity of the colonial West for Moroccan women going. Hence the “sartorial superego” whose direct implications for the analysis

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of Gehry’s architecture are discussed later. Joan Copjec, who is not herself an architectural theorist, has nevertheless insightfully mapped the origins of this notion in architectural theory in an analysis that remains unparalleled in its originality and sophistication, as well as being useful for understanding the architectural logic of Gehry’s late work as a prime case of the neobaroque. Modern architectural theory in France was strongly shaped by Jean-NicolasLouis Durand at the end of the eighteenth century and in the early nineteenth century. A student of Étienne-Louis Boullée, for 40 years he taught the principles of modern architecture at the most prestigious school in France, the École Polytechnique.18 Besides teaching and building, Durand dedicated himself to theoretical work. He published his Recueil et parallèle des édifices de tout genre in 1877, and a two-volume work titled Précis des leçons d’architecture appeared in 1802 and 1805. The latter served as a textbook at the École Polytechnique. As noted by Sergio Villari, “Durand shared the political and moral outlook of the Idéologues.”19 The École Polytechnique was in fact the first of the écoles spéciales in France that was created by the Convention. “Destined to have a brilliant future, this school was the revolutionary teaching institution that, more than any other, represented the culture of the Idéologues in those years. The Décade philosophique, littéraire et politique, the group’s official propaganda organ, constantly followed the events and evolution of the École.”20 In line with the function and purpose of the École, Durand revolutionized the pedagogy and course of studies in architecture. In an inaugural speech for the new academic year in 1799, S. Gayvernon, apropos of one of Durand’s courses, remarked: “The instructor will demonstrate that architecture is not an art of imitation; will show, on the contrary, that it has not and never could have had any purpose other than public and private utility, and the happiness and the preservation of society in all the different branches that compose it.”21 He further added, “The means of this art (which are at the same time its precept) are convenience, economy, solidity, salubriousness, comfort, simplicity, and lastly symmetry, forms which alone derive the ornaments proper to the products of this art.”22 Subsequently, one must define the field of architecture as a discipline: “Whether one consults the faculty of reason or examines the monuments, the evident result is the same: the purpose of architecture has never been only pleasure, nor architectural decoration its object. Public and private utility, the happiness and preservation of individual and society are . . . the purpose of architecture.”23 To these generally well-accepted “protofunctionalist” principles of Durand’s theory and teaching at the École Polytechnique, Copjec adds a novel

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interpretation in relation to Clérambault, on which I will draw extensively for my analysis of drapery in Gehry’s architecture. Copjec initially notices the rupture that was introduced at the beginning of the nineteenth century in the new notion of building type that Durand inaugurated. This notion marked a radical departure from the hitherto dominant and influential body of teachings by Jacques-François Blondel, who, in his Cours d’architecture had defined architectural characters in terms of such visual qualities as “Light, elegant, delicate, rustic, naive, feminine, grandiose, audacious, terrible, dwarfish, frivolous, licentious, uncertain, vague, barbaric, cold, poor, sterile, or futile,” and so on. Durand’s contrasting classification was instead strictly functional; buildings would be divided into “amphitheaters, aqueducts, triumphal arches, baths, bazaars, bellowers, libraries . . . colleges . . . granaries, grottoes . . . villas, markets . . . pagodas, palaces . . . light houses.”24 As Copjec aptly remarks, the shift from a physiognomic character of sensuous sensibility to an entirely different criterion of classification by use marked a revolutionary change, in which a building’s “symbolic value” became subordinated to its function. From this point on, as Copjec correctly observes, “style” and “ornament” increasingly come to be seen as having a secondary expressive task analogous to that of clothing. In Durand’s “structuralist” teachings, in other words, architecture enters the binary logic of language in which, as Ferdinand de Saussure would show (before Lacan would himself transform Saussure’s model) there is only an arbitrary relation between the signifier and signified.25 As Copjec notes, Clérambault would follow this functionalist approach by focusing on the construction and articulation of clothing while downplaying the “symbolic power of cloth.” “Clothing style (Moroccan, Greek, Roman) had for him, it is clear, no existence apart from the structure of clothing’s technical composition. Drapery is defined as what it does.”26 For Clérambault, the interest of his Moroccan photographs was primarily in the “unity of utility and construction” they displayed. “Those in which bodily form has completely disappeared retain their enigmatic quality, for what is thus obscured in these cases is the very prop on which the drapery’s purpose hangs.”27 The revolution brought on with the notion of type was in no way limited to building use, however. Later, as Copjec points out, Le Corbusier extended it beyond architecture to a new definition of man himself. In L’architecture vivante, Le Corbusier argued that “from the point that the type becomes a man, we grasp the possibility of a considerable extension of the type. [This is] because the mantype is a complex form of a unique physical type, to which can be applied a sufficient standardization. According to the same rules one will establish for this physical type an equipment of standard habitation.”28 Hence, as Copjec

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notes, while buildings began to be reclassified according to use, man was also undergoing a similar reclassification. Sensation had ceased not only to provide the basic facts about buildings, they had also ceased to be seen as the basic facts of the mind that considered these buildings. The rise of the industrial regime initiated a privileging of “the industrious character of the human species” that resulted in utility’s becoming a psychological as well as an architectural principle.29

This fundamental redefinition of architecture and human nature also occasioned a basic rethinking of the question of “clothing.” In his The Psychology of Clothing, J. C. Flugel famously put forward his principle of “the great masculine renunciation,” by which he meant that in the field of fashion, man surrendered his role to woman.30 However, as Copjec points out, the “corollary” to this renunciation was to stake an even more important claim for man. “In sartorial matters,” Flugel wrote, “modern man, because of his devotion to principle of duty, has a far sterner and more rigid conscience than modern woman.”31 So, then, “what is the logic for this encounter between ethics and dress?”32 Copjec perceptively asks, and how does one explain this “superego in the sartorial field”? Instead of function and use, Flugel draws a connection between duty and dress. “Though it is clear that the equation of man’s plain and uniform costume (his functional attire) with his stern and rigid conscience hinges on our accepting use and duty as equivalent, it is also clear to us that duty has an ethical sense that use does not, at least not necessarily.”33 Having made the claim that an ethics of clothing must proceed in parallel with function, Flugel makes clear that their ultimate function must be “to secure the maximum of satisfaction in accordance with the ‘reality principle’ ”—in other words, according to Copjec, the principle of maximum pleasure. It is necessary here to clarify the relation between the pleasure and the reality principle in psychoanalytical theory. The pleasure principle and reality principle are “two principles of mental functioning” of which Freud writes in his metapsychology. According to Freud, as Dylan Evans points out, the psyche is at first regulated by the pleasure principle, “which seeks to experience satisfaction via a hallucinatory cathexis of a memory of prior satisfaction.”34 But the subject soon finds out that hallucination does not relieve its needs and therefore is forced, as Freud writes, “to form a conception of the real circumstances in the external world.”35 The reality principle basically modifies the pleasure principle. Laplanche and Pontalis define the pleasure principle, “which, according to Freud, govern mental functioning: the whole of psychical

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activity is aimed at avoiding unpleasure and procuring pleasure. Inasmuch as unpleasure is related to the increase of qualities of excitation, and pleasure to their reduction, the principle in question may be said to be an economic one.”36 Against this, Evans explains, the mental functioning of the reality principle “forces the subject to take more circuitous routes to satisfaction. Since, however, the ultimate aim of the reality principle is still the satisfaction of drives, it can be said that ‘the substitution of the reality principle for the pleasure principle implies no deposing of the pleasure principle, but only a safeguarding of it.’ ”37 Lacan, however, questioned the naïve conception of “reality” as an objective given. Confirming that in Freud, the “reality principle is still ultimately in the service of the pleasure principle,” he argued that “the reality principle is a delayed action pleasure principle.”38 Thus, Lacan crucially challenged the idea that we can ultimately distinguish between reality and fantasy. As we know, he opposed the pleasure principle based on what for Freud was “beyond the pleasure principle,” namely the “death drive,” which Lacan redefined as jouissance.39 As Evans explains, pleasure for Lacan was meant to “safeguard of a state of homeostasis and constancy which jouissance constantly threatens to disrupt and traumatize.”40 Now advancing further with Copjec’s reading of Durand’s Précis des leçons d’architecture, she “stumbles” (her word) over a statement that is “impossible to disregard”; that “in all times and in all places, the entirety of man’s thoughts and actions have had their origin in two principles: the love of well-being and the aversion to every sort of pain.”41 Copjec offers a novel critical reading of this passage and asks if the construction of architecture, for Durand, has its origins in the “principles of pleasure and pain,” or rather in the principle of use? Durand’s economic answer is that it has its origins in both, and proceeds to erect the principle of modern architecture on the same principle of utilitarianism formulated by the British writer Jeremy Bentham. Durand was far from dismissing the precept of pleasure in architecture, Copjec points out. Moreover, “contrary to all criticism that we have heard about the failure of functionalism, or modernism, to consider the importance of pleasure, it would be more accurate to say that pleasure was from the beginning taken as fundamental—as long as it could be used.”42 She then draws an important conclusion from this: “Durand did not start out from the proposition that pleasure is usable; he began his Précis instead with the assumption that use is pleasurable.”43 (emphasis added). Durand’s argument is, Copjec claims, that since we seek pleasure, we surround ourselves with useful things. These useful things are things that provide us with pleasure.

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Bentham’s defense of utility is based on the same principle. The maximization of pleasure and aversion of pain becomes a duty in Bentham’s utilitarian philosophy. At this point in her critique, Copjec brings Lacan’s seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis into the discussion. Lacan had developed the most sustained attack on this “despotism” of utility.44 She first recalls utilitarianism’s close alliance with colonialism and its role in justifying the “extensive benevolence” of industrial nations in their “civilized mission” around the world, to dispense “charity and humanity,” and with imperialism’s vision, best illustrated perhaps in the “International Style,” to panoptically “house the world under the same roof.” Lacan’s treatment of utilitarianism allows us to see it not as a minor English philosophy concerned with distribution of goods, but rather “as the clearest articulation of a revolution in ethics that unseated Aristotelian ethics in the nineteenth century.”45 Copjec draws our attention to an important point in the seminar, where Lacan, as she puts it, “allows us to see at work beneath utilitarianism’s proposition that use is pleasurable a second proposition: Pleasure is usable.”46 She argues that “the belief that man is basically and infinitely manageable turned the utilitarian into an engineer, a designer of machines that would quadrate man’s pleasure with his duty.”47 In architectural terms, this means that while the designer of the “machine for living” [Le Corbusier] was arguing that buildings must be tailored for man’s use, he was simultaneously saying that man himself could be tailored by building. The social Project of functionalism (Le Corbusier’s “revolution of architecture”) was, like that of utilitarianism, based on the notion that man was fundamentally ruly. Le Corbusier’s utopian words accurately state the precondition of functionalism’s utopian agenda: “the possibility of a considerable extension of the type.”48

Copjec stresses the radical implications of Lacan’s critique as more than just a critique of utilitarianism but also a critique of today’s conventional “liberal” arguments against functionalism. As she puts it, “Lacan does not begin by adding qualities, filling out the picture of man, but rather by noting that man is, in a manner, less than utopians realize. What makes him less is the fact that he is radically separated from, and cannot know, what he wants.”49 From this, Copjec proceeds to lay out Lacan’s alternative definition of the psychoanalytical definition of subject—an issue that need not detain us here except insofar as it implies a form of subjectification based in part on Freud’s “death drive,” “beyond pleasure principle,” and beyond any utilitarian definition of the subject seeking his

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“own good.”50 Indeed, Copjec argues that Freud’s notion of the “superego” derives from the collapse of (the pleasure principle’s) utilitarian logic. Freud’s theory of the death drive aimed rather to define, in Copjec’s words, the “sadistic source of our moral law,” in which “pleasure is, then, of no use in securing commitment to moral law.”51 According to this view, “moral order is established not in obedience to some reasonable or compassionate command to sacrifice our pleasure to the state, but because we recoil before the violence and obscenity of the superego’s incitement to jouissance, to a boundless and aggressive enjoyment.”52 The ethics of utilitarianism is thus based on the simultaneous assertion of the principle of maximization of happiness and of a sadistic superegoic moral law, against which the ethics of psychoanalysis was founded. Architectural functionalism reflected the inherent split in utilitarianism. Clérambault’s photographs display the utilitarian fantasy itself: “The fantasy, as we have said, is ultimately supported by the supposition that there is an Other who enjoys a certain and useless pleasure. We might say, then, that this useless pleasure is useful ‘in securing and sustaining the utilitarian effort’.”53 From these considerations derives, according to Copjec, utilitarianism’s characteristic “symptom,” which is the disavowal of the Other. Copjec relates this to the fantasy of the erotic and despotic colonial cloth. For, on the margin of the utilitarian resuscitation of useless enjoyment and all but functional cloth, on the borders of the whole cloth of greatest happiness, there emerged a fantastic figure—veiled, draped in cloth—whose existence posed as threat, impinged on our consciousness.54

One of the persistent Western and colonial fantasies was, of course, to remove the veil that covered the colonial Other. But “what was capital in this fantasy was the surplus pleasure, the useless jouissance that voluminous cloth was supposed to veil and the colonial subject, thus hidden, was supposed to enjoy.”55 Copjec then asks, “Isn’t this fantasmatic figure of the veiled colonial subject a kind of objectified, sartorial form of superego?”56 As noted above, Clérambault’s photographs of Moroccan women are fetishistic and, like all fetish objects, they are marked by uselessness (before capitalism’s valorization of it, of course). They are meant to satisfy the Other. This demonstrates the split in the utilitarian fantasy: the useful functional cloth and those that rigorously deny its usefulness. Copjec: “By not converting the Other’s supposed enjoyment into an image useful to utilitarianism, by laying the two alternatives side by side, the photographs taken by Clérambault expose what the fantasy obscures:

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its strict dependence on the supposition of the Other’s obscene enjoyment. Not an enjoyment that can be controlled by use, but one threateningly outside the bounds of utility.”57 This lengthy account of Copjec’s analysis suggests a tentative conclusion: In a wider historical context of the history of modern theories of architecture, from Durand to Le Corbusier, up to and including Frank Gehry’s obscene enjoyments, architecture has always displayed the split in the utilitarian fantasy whereby not only is use pleasurable, but also pleasure is usable. This notion is at the root of the modern definition of the subject as a principally utilitarian subject, and it defines one of the central internal conflicts in the tradition of modernism. But where Durand and Le Corbusier both stressed the first part of the equation, Gehry’s architecture, I submit, is almost all about the second idea that “pleasure is usable.” If we transpose the photographs of Clérambault’s drapery to the making of drapery itself in Gehry, the same superegoic logic will hold. Gehry’s work, in other words, is strictly speaking the symptom of Le Corbusier. That is to say, what was repressed in Le Corbusier (his functional useful cloth) returns in Gehry (his functional useless clothing). In this sense, Gehry is a fetishistic architect whose utilitarian fantasy verges on perversion. This is so within the extreme of the same utilitarian fantasy we find in high modernism. His architectonics is utilitarianism that has deteriorated into a “sartorial superego.” They are meant for the Other and to be enjoyed by the Other. For whose gaze is Frank Gehry’s voluptuous architecture built? To whose “enjoyment” is it directed? Towards what big Other of the symbolic order does it ultimately point? I suggest that Le Corbusier and Frank Gehry are in fact the two sides of the same coin in modern architecture. The one believed obsessively that use is pleasurable, and the other believes, equally obsessively, that pleasure is usable. In different ways, both are the apologist of utilitarianism in Lacan’s expanded sense of the term. And if I do not deny my own preference for the “social concerns” of Le Corbusier, naïve as they were, I am more concerned with the disavowed function that hides behind the artistry of Gehry’s “sartorial superego.” For the “uselessness,” the excess of Gehry’s architectonic drapery is more than ever utilitarian insofar as it carries a “surplus-jouissance” that is valorized in the cultural logic of contemporary capitalism. Moreover, it converts this surplus-jouissance into an obscene enjoyment, of which we have all become the voyeurs. A radical alternative to these versions of architectural modernity can only be formulated if an alternative conception of the subject, that is, the psychoanalytical

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subject, enters into the discourse of the discipline, but we are far from this possibility today. Lacan’s seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis is not likely to become part of architecture’s core curriculum any time soon. Meanwhile, all we can do is continue to submit contemporary architecture, with its divided utilitarian fantasies, to the most rigorous and ruthless criticism.

Contemporary idolatry: Gehry and his critics In societies in which modern forms of capitalist production and consumption prevail, the phantasmagoria of commodity fetishism has turned reality into an idol, continuing in the same direction of religion in a presecular world. Architecture, particularly in its neobaroque form exemplified in Gehry’s work, is a perverse example of the resurgent forms of idolatry of a hypercommodified world. All too often, aesthetic criticism becomes deferential—what Guy Debord called “lateral critique” and French writer Serge Halimi a “journalisme de révérence.” Is this idolatry not the highest expression of contemporary ideology? As Boris Groys in his Art Power remarks, “The struggle against the power of ideology traditionally took the form of struggle against the power of the image.”58 Critical Enlightenment thought tried to get rid of magical images; it sought to destroy or deconstruct them, and to replace them with rational concepts. Groys points out that Hegel’s announcement of the “death of art” and the dawning age of the concept was in fact a “proclamation of victory of the iconoclastic Enlightenment over Christian iconophilia.”59 Modern art consequently gained its power by appropriating iconoclasm’s gesture: “The modern artwork positioned itself as a paradox-object in this deeper sense—as an image and as a critique of the image at the same time.”60 Against this trend, however, the postmodern neobaroque marks a return of iconophilia in an age dominated by the culture industry and the intensified power of digital capitalism. It signals the latest and perhaps terminal stage of the same commodity fetishism Charles de Brosses had written about in 1760 in Du culte des dieux fétiches,61 which Marx had analyzed in the opening chapters of Capital and that Debord, 100 years later, theorized in The Society of the Spectacle. In Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque, Evonne Levy devotes a fine chapter to “Rhetoric versus Propaganda,” in which she describes the Jesuit architecture of the Counter-Reformation, such as S. Ignatius in Rome, as an early model of propaganda replacing rhetoric as the primary function of art, as well as art

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history, in the West. She describes the subsequent evolution of the discipline of art history as an idolatrous glorification of the object. Art history is an idolatrous practice insofar as it cannot do without its Golden Calf: as a discipline it is incapable of seeing the calf not as an object. The twentieth-century museum, with its galleries filled with objects separated from the altars of their original gods, is sufficient evidence of art history’s glorification of its object.”62 . . . In making the image the god, is art history not a modern form of idolatry? For what is idolatry if not the worship of the thing itself rather than the thing represented? Has art history not labored mightily to focus on the object, at the expense of that which lays behind, under, and over it? Our eyes are filled with the glow of Golden Calf.63

Of course, in the context of the historical seventeenth-century Baroque, religion was the main element of propaganda and of “rhetorical persuasion,” as Levy calls it. Jesuit Baroque architecture, supported and abetted by the Society of Jesus, marked an obsessive pursuit of religious images that would eventually lead to the iconoclastic reaction of the Enlightenment. Our own contemporary idolatry is different, tied as it is to the fetishism of commodities, the phantasmagoria of individual freedom, and the “dictatorship of visibility” made possible by a media-saturated society.64 To draw a rough parallel, we could say that what the Jesuit Baroque architect was for the seventeenth century, Frank Gehry is today for the institutions of high culture. Instead of the Society of Jesus, we have the Guggenheim; instead of the Counter-Reformation doctrine, an equally dogmatic neoliberal folklore; and, reinforcing both, the practice of art history as form of positive image worship. One particular example can serve to illustrate this, while also underscoring the function of what I have called the uncritical transfer of philosophical notions to architectural discourse: In Frank Gehry: The City and Music, Jeremy GilbertRolfe claims “friendship” with the architect and presents the book itself as the result of a “collaboration.” The position of the “critic” thus clouded beforehand, the book’s objectivity already preemptively disarmed, the reader is thus intended to remain in suspense as to whether the text is written by the critic or together with the architect who, we are led to believe, is well versed in and knowledgeable of the complex “philosophical” concepts discussed in the book. The position of the critic, in short, is reminiscent of the “embedded” reporters within the US army during its occupation of Iraq! Frank Gehry: The City and Music, is an excellent case of the work of criticism as idolatrous “propaganda” in the sense Levy discussed. Instead of unveiling

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the veil, or revealing what is underneath the draperies of Gehry’s architecture, Gilbert-Rolfe merely proceeds to multiply even further the layers of veils, veiling the veil instead of exposing or demystifying it. The veil as media, which would have delighted Roland Barthes as the sign of mystery to be deconstructed and demystified, remains instead untouched in this work of criticism. Throughout the process of “criticism” that Gilbert-Rolfe enacts, however, the voluptuous and intoxicated body of Gehry’s architecture remains as inaccessible as an exotic feminine body, to be enjoyed in an excess of jouissance by none other than the critic himself! Along the way, Gilbert-Rolfe, whose intelligence is not in question here, engages in the amateurish philosophical exercises that have, by now, become de rigeur in the so-called “high philosophical” genre of criticism fashionable in today’s affirmative and purely aestheticized architectural discourse. Admittedly, in the postmodern habit of heaping concepts upon concepts on the shoulders of a designer whose work cannot possibly sustain them, and in ransacking philosophy as a “grab-bag” of notions in the same way “po-mo” designers did in the 1970s with stylistic forms, Gilbert-Rolfe’s still presents itself as an extreme case. His intellectual acrobatics are breathtaking. Let me cite some of them. In his “Introduction,” Gilbert-Rolfe calls into question the link between Gehry’s work and the 1980s fashion of deconstruction. Perhaps rightly, he states that Gehry, “like Jacques Derrida,” and unlike Peter Eisenman, does not consider architecture to be a “critical act.” Instead, we are told that Gehry began his early work in the tradition of Russian Formalism’s school of literary criticism following his main proponent, Victor Shklovsky, and the idea of “defamiliarization,” but that he later abandoned it to turn to “deferral and flow” in the poststructuralist fashion. We are then told that such deferral and flow, in Gehry’s case, lead first to “an inverted Heidegger,” and later, in another direction, toward Gilles Deleuze. In the midst of such momentous intellectual shifts, however, Gilbert-Rolfe tells us that it is the “lightness” of Los Angeles that is the determining factor in Gehry’s work. This is the principle “that all reality is an image before it is a thing. The real can only simulate the image, by which it has already been overpowered.”65 By Chapter 2 of this “collaborative” text, devoted to Gehry’s projects for Berlin, the architect has become a devout Deleuzean. The “fold” through which “capitalism triumphs through weakness” now dominates the body that “finds itself in other forms,” leading it to a state of “liquidity,” and to “gaseousness.” However, we are told that Gehry had been interested in liquidity all along, specifically in the body that “lives in the body of water: the fish.”66 Here,

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Gilbert-Rolfe detects a deep connection with Deleuze, who “on more than one occasion . . . divided philosophy and therefore thought in general into the solid, the fluid, and the gaseous—three conditions of bodies, bone, blood, air—skin something between solid and fluid, at once articulated but continuous.”67 He then cites Deleuze’s cinema text in this regard and adds, “Gehry and Deleuze do not allow the body to be solid for very long on any given occasion, and one notes that there may be fluid or gaseous movement, whereas movements with solidity, or made by it, draw on the other two for analogy or inspiration.”68 Had Deleuze read, or least seen, Gehry on his way to developing his philosophical “concepts,” and had the architect, in turn, read Deleuze in “giving form” to the philosopher’s concepts? We are not told. In any case, the real raison d’être for Gehry’s Deleuzeanism “is that in Deleuze, the body is never there as a whole, but as a possibility constituted by a meeting between the outside, a contextual event irreducible to its cause and effects but involving an act of recognition.”69 It is useless to discuss or challenge the discussion of Deleuze by GilbertRolfe here. These citations are evidence enough of the absurd misappropriation of philosophical discourse that characterizes the intellectual looseness and irresponsibility of a hyper-Deleuzean’s instrumental readings in general. It is in Chapter 3, however, that Gilbert-Rolfe sets out his core argument. The chapter is devoted to discussing Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Here the critic speaks about “skirts” in relation to the body and tells us that this implicates Gehry in the notion of “ectoplasm,” used first by Gottfried Semper. We find out that there are strong parallels and affinities between Semper and Gehry on a wide range of issues, from “surface” to “ornament” and “clothing.” As the noted art historian Michael Podro said about Semper, “Clothes . . . both bring out and correct the form of body, ‘they clothe the naked form with an elucidating symbolism’.”70 It is with great dismay that Gilbert-Rolfe goes on to note that writers as eminent as Karsten Harries and Mark Wigley have failed to draw an association between Gehry and Semper, despite the fact that “Semper’s critical fortune may explain Gehry’s.”71 He concludes, The idea of ornamentation implies a whole that has been supplemented. But in Gehry’s work, the idea of ornament has been displaced into the skin itself, into which the ectoplasmic emphasis of the building also displaces, from the inside to the outside, the idea of structure.72

There follows a rapid architectural history lesson from the nineteenth century to the present, in which ornamentation gives way to transparency, which gives

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way to blankness, against which Gehry’s work reacts. With the same method one has come to expect in this type of reverential discourse, where partial truths serve to omit the most important questions, he notes, “First there was a skin that embellishes but also conceals, then the elimination of concealment and the exteriorization of the interior—the outside only an expression of and passage to inside—and now an architecture whose exterior has another relationship to the interior: neither embellishing nor reflecting, it stands apart from what it enfolds.”73 This is indeed how I have characterized negatively the phenomenon of the postmodern neobaroque, except of course that Gilbert-Rolfe sees it as a positive development. No matter; the Disney Concert Hall, he informs us, is philosophical through and through. Here, after being Deleuzean just a moment ago, Gehry’s approach to the site is “Heideggerian,” yet also not without a touch of Hegel and Kant! How could we be so ignorant as not to notice our highly “philosophically” educated architect among us! In the Disney Concert Hall, Gehry rearranges Heidegger’s model in his treatment of the site. . . . A site, then, that from Heidegger’s point of view has been ripped away from man by an uncontrolled and malevolent technology. If Gehry is Hegelian in bringing forth something from nothing, and Kantian in developing a project that works as a thing in itself, in concentrating in the Disney Concert Hall on a retrieval of the site—a re-presentation of it that gives it value by giving it meaning—he is Heideggerian: his buildings are attached to their context through being detached from it.74

As if this is not enough, Gilbert-Rolfe in the remaining pages of his chapter comes back again to Derridian and Deleuzean associations with Gehry on the notion of “grid” in relation to “ground.” He writes, “It is possible that what one gets when one does without the grid is fold, mention of which suggests the book of that title about Leibniz and the Baroque by Deleuze, philosopher of the surface without depth. Folding means moving in and out without discontinuity or rupture. Gehry sees the fold as providing a space or receptacle, comparable to the fold in the mother’s garment where she holds her baby.”75 Reading the hyperDeleuzean critic saying all kinds of simplistic things about Deleuze’s Leibniz and the Baroque is mentally exhausting. In the concluding chapter of the book, devoted to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, not to lose the last opportunity, the critic comes back again to his tired “philosophical” themes, deploying once again Deleuzean philosophy. Unsuspecting viewers must be thankful for the critic’s ability to show us on what formidable an arsenal of philosophical concepts Gehry’s work is based. The

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book ends with a final Deleuzean flourish on the distinction between “organic” and “inorganic.” Gilbert-Rolfe writes: As has been said, Gehry makes buildings that facilitate rather than critique. They facilitate a program designed for inhabitants who define living as neither entirely mechanical nor brutish. And the buildings are, some would say, like their inhabitants, “machinic assemblies.” This is a term coined by Deleuze and Guattari to describe a process, at once neither and both organic and mechanical, in which one programme is always interfering with the next in—as in the following example from an essay that applies the term to the question of vision itself—a process of territorialisation, deterritorialisation, and reterritorialisation: “the mouth, tongue, and the teeth ‘find their primitive territoriality in food’ as Deleuze and Guattari put it. . . . ”76

But if Gilbert-Rolfe’s practice of criticism uses a massive amount of “critical” and “philosophical” ammunition essentially to idolize his subject, what is it about Gehry’s architectonics and design strategy that this critic/collaborator is not talking about? What is really behind the “affective” but voluptuous masses that our architect cum artist repeatedly deploys in serial acts of self-plagiarism? For an answer to this question, we might turn to Hal Foster and Anthony Vidler, whose work is distinguished by an effort to read the present situation—and the phenomenon of Frank Gehry in particular—in a broader historical context. Both have focused on the connections between recent forms of so-called iconic practice and their resemblances with that of paradigmatic example of a political icon, at once sculpture and architecture, that is the Statue of Liberty. In the case of Gehry, the parallel is indeed striking. Foster insists on the artistic dimension involved in Gehry’s fusion of architecture and sculpture. He mentions Carl Andre, a Minimalist sculptor said to have influenced Gehry, who once discussed the Statue of Liberty in relation to modern sculpture. For Foster, however, Gehry’s hybrids are regressive “for they reverse the history of medium.” Foster writes: “for all the apparent futurism of the CATIA design [Computeraided three-dimensional interactive application], these structures are akin to the Statue of Liberty, with a separate skin hung over a hidden armature, and with exterior surfaces that rarely match up with interior spaces.”77 However, “this comparison might not be fair to the Statue of Liberty, for it involves an innovative interplay between structure and skin, whereas Gehry allows his skin to dominate his structure.”78 In a similar vein, in “Skin and Bones: Folded Forms from Leibniz to Lynn,” Vidler comprehensively addresses the modernist and functionalist skin/bone

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Figure 9 Statue of Liberty with head assembled/scaffolding. Photography by Gontrand Fernique. Location: Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division, New York Public Library.

dichotomy in terms of the inside/outside as well as a condition of subjectivity and with particular reference to contemporary design practice and the claims to “technobiologism” and “anarchitecture” of blobs, surfaces, skins, and envelopes—especially in the case of Greg Lynn’s obsessively folded forms based on the Deleuzean/Leibnizian discourse of the baroque. Vidler’s critique is straightforward, as applicable to Lynn as it is to Gehry: the presumption to generate forms “from the outside, as envelope and skin, subjected to mathematically generated ‘force fields’ results in a profoundly de-subjectivized design process that ‘removes the humanistic subject from all individual considerations’.”79 The resulting “inside,” moreover, “would not be shaped by occupation or by any other attribute than its profoundly residual character—like the fortuitous insides produced, say, by the external necessities to fashion a shape like that of the Statue of Liberty.”80

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Figure 10 Head and torch of Statue of Liberty and metallic structure to build the body—half constructed. Photography by the artist, Gontrand Fernique. Location: Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division, New York Public Library.

Despite the fancy philosophical jargon deployed in its defense and justification, today’s neobaroque architecture is but another case of what Adolf Loos, a hundred years ago, named the “Potemkin City.” And as Foster remarks, one need not be advocating “modernist transparency of structure (that was mostly a myth anyway, even with purist architects like Mies van der Rohe)” to be opposed to a “computer-driven version of a Potemkin architecture of conjured surfaces.”81 I call these “conjured surfaces” the “digital neobaroque.”

Interlude II: Postrationalism and the Theorization of the Baroque as Real

In the session entitled “On the Baroque” of his Seminar XX, Lacan spoke about Christianity and its effect on “everything” from body and soul to art. It was here that Lacan asserted his own deep affinity with a “baroquism” in which, as he put it, “everything is exhibition of the body evoking jouissance.” This provocative assertion recalls the famous definition he gave of the Baroque as “the regulating of the soul by corporeal radioscopy.”1 In this interlude, I would like to return to Lacan’s thought on the Baroque to establish its affiliations with a specific tradition of French scientific epistemology—a tradition that goes back to Jean Cavaillès, Gaston Bachelard, George Canguilhem, and Alexandre Koyré—to which Lacan’s thinking belongs. In this epistemology, a central role is played by the “logic of formalization” that operates in what Badiou called the “line of concept,” as opposed to “the line of life.” My aim here is to secure a concept of the Baroque that is separate and distinct from Deleuze’s vitalist interpretation—which, as discussed in previous chapters, has been reductively adopted within architectural discourse. More specifically, and in order to root such an idea of the Baroque in Lacan’s “split between the Eye and the Gaze,” I want to foreground the latter’s notion of the “real” and argue that the historical Baroque coincides with the discovery of jouissance. The Baroque is the birthplace of jouissance. Lacan’s Baroque “reason”—or the “reason” of the Baroque—is coextensive with the loss of the object and the consequent emergence of the melancholy characteristic of modern subjectivity. With the historical Baroque, we can say that the subject entered the scopic field as the split subject $, the subject marked by an essential lack. Henceforth, the subject becomes the subject of fantasy in which the object petit a is “the object-cause of desire” in Lacanian algorithm. To conceptualize the infinite universe of the Baroque, Lacan’s later teachings focused on the “topological space” of the real, where for the first time, the division between the inside and the outside is positively problematized.2

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Lacan’s place in the cultural and philosophical context of his time comes under the category that has recently been reconstructed by Tom Eyers in his important study Post-Rationalism: Psychoanalysis, Epistemology, and Marxism in Post-War France.3 Eyers uses postrationalism to describe the research around the journal Cahiers pour L’Analyse, arguably the most influential intellectual circle in the second half of the twentieth century. Eyers’s text enables a better understanding of structuralism and, in particular, the way the group around Cahiers developed and expanded a more qualified or “weak” reading of the movement’s basic assumptions. The hallmark of this version of structuralism was that it did not efface the subject. Eyers’s reading of the Cahiers is a development of his earlier and equally important Lacan and the Concept of the “Real”, to which I come back later.4 Eyers’s interpretation, in short, enables us to appreciate Lacan’s singular definition of the Baroque as both grounded in French scientific rationality and sharing with “postrationalism” a concern for the subject as the driving force in the development of Lacan’s psychoanalytic thinking. I therefore begin with a brief description of the circle around the Cahiers and then move to discuss Eyers’s reconstruction of it. This is the last step in my attempt at theorization of the Baroque in this study. It was in 1966, at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in the Rue d’Ulm in Paris, that an influential group of intellectuals was formed around the journal Cahiers pour L’Analyse. The journal was run by a student-led editorial collective called “Cercle d’Épistémologie,” which published 10 volumes between 1966 and 1969. A selection of the original essays has recently been translated into English and published for the first time in two volumes entitled Concept and Form.5 The second volume includes contributions and interviews that cast light on many of the original ideas debated by the group during this period. With excellent introductions by editors Peter Hallward for volume one and Knox Penden for volume two, this collection makes clear the role played by the Cahiers in shaping some of the most important ideas of contemporary French philosophy. Indeed, as the editors note, the Cahiers was in many ways the source of the entire philosophical movement that would come to be known, in the Anglophone context, simply as structuralism and later as poststructuralism.6 One of the chief goals of the Cahiers pour l’Analyse was to defend the tradition of Enlightenment French eighteenth-century rationalism against “a certain phenomenological romanticism which was focused more on interiority or feeling” that had become popular in 1950s and early 1960s in French intellectual thought.7 The Cahiers was formed around two powerful figures, Louis Althusser

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and Jacques Lacan. Among their “students” were Jacques-Alain Miller, JeanClaude Milner, François Regnault, and Alain Badiou. At the center of the circle was an ambitious intellectual project to bring together Marx and Freud, philosophy and psychoanalysis, where the previous attempts by the Frankfurt School had failed.8 As Slavoj Žižek, in his contribution to the second volume on the notion of “Suture,” points out: “Although references to many great names abound in the Cahiers—Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, Derrida, Canguilhem . . . —what makes this particular journal a nodal point is the encounter of psychoanalysis and Marxism, or, in terms of proper names, the encounter of Lacan and Althusser.”9 This encounter took the form of intensive debates over the ideas of “structure” and “science,” the problem of the “subject,” and the notions of “lack” and “absent cause,” variably going back to Althusser’s reading of Marx and/or to Lacan’s reading of Freud. The project was grounded in the “philosophy of concept,” “formalization,” and “matheme,” but it is significant that alongside it, Jacques Rancière and Jacques-Alain Miller, among others, had also established, starting in 1964, the student-run journal Cahiers Marxistes-Léninistes, which, in line with Althusser’s courses in “Theoretical Training,” “was designed to complement the creation of well-attended ‘theoretical schools’ for transmission of Marxist science.”10 May 1968 interrupted the publication of the journal, and by the late 1970s a “backlash against anti-humanism and la pensée 68”11 had all but eclipsed the debate around philosophy, psychoanalysis, and political theory that had agitated the group in the mid-1960s. Central to the latter had been “la formation théorique” or “Theoretical Training” advanced by Althusser, which, by opposing “the passion of the concept” (Michel Foucault’s term) to the presumably less rigorous Lefebvrian notion of “lived experience,” sought to “provide that theoretical supplement required to develop the more general ‘philosophy,’ left undeveloped both by Marx and his followers, that would secure the science of historical materialism.”12 It is significant that the work of Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, and Slavoj Žižek, today, alongside that of a “younger” generation representing the “new French philosophy,” would seek to restore the rigorous theoretical ideas first developed by the Cercle d’Ulm. All of them, including Rancière (who distanced himself from the Cahiers project but went on to develop a philosophy in the spirit of May 1968), have made major contributions to the development of contemporary radical philosophy while having little truck with the fashionable poststructuralist and deconstructivist trends of the 1980s and 1990s, which, as various commenters have noted, really had no doctrine of the

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subject, in Lacan’s sense, as distinct from a general ontology of being. In different ways, each of them carried on the tradition of French rationalism through a “philosophy of concept” that Althusser and Lacan promoted, in line with Jean Cavaillès, Gaston Bachelard, and Georges Canguilhem, among others. As Peden notes, that tradition is best exemplified by Canguilhem, who wrote: To work a concept [travailler un concept] … to very its extension and comprehension, to generalize it through the incorporation of exceptional traits, to export it beyond its region of origin, to take it as a model or on the contrary to seek a model for it—to work a concept, in short, to progressively to confer upon it, through regulated transformations, the function of a form.13

Like Althusser, Lacan placed great stock in the “concept” and its relation to “practice.” As Peden notes, the concept qua concept was central to Lacan’s teachings around 1964, out of which came The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. For Lacan, “the concept is to be conceived as a mode of praxis,”14 and to the question “What is a praxis?” he would answer, “it is the broadest term to designate a concerted human action, whatever it may be, which places man in a position to treat the real by the symbolic.”15 Whereas “religion seeks, science finds.”16 The finding of the real “can only be transcribed on the basis of an impact of formalization,” but only as long as the latter “is regarded as something equally practical and conceptual.”17 In his Post-Rationalism, while reconstructing the critical issues animating the group around Cahiers, Eyers offers the most comprehensive discussion of “formalization” in relation to Lacan’s notion of the real. “Postrationalism” here refers to the conjunction of French rationalist epistemology, especially that of Bachelard, Canguilhem, and Koyré, with French structuralism, through Althusser and Lacan. As Eyres explains, postrationalism tried “modestly” to articulate the connection between Lacan and Althusser with the French epistemological tradition, a tradition “that simultaneously affirms and transcends its basis in Cartesian rationalism.”18 As he puts it, the essential concern of this school of thinking was the realization that “the self-certainty of the cogito that, for Descartes, remains after radical doubt has vanquished all other certainties is itself challenged by post-rationalism, with the result that the ‘subject’ is placed in question, is interrogated as the unstable product, rather than center, of processes of structuration and of knowledge formation”19 (emphasis added). Hence the term postrationalism designates a problematic that goes beyond the stale binary of rationalism versus empiricism common to most histories of philosophy. So for example, under the influence of postrationalism’s critique of

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the ideals of clean, “conceptual rationality that motored prior epistemological attempt to ground science,”20 Althusser’s rigid division between science and ideology would later be recognized as “impure” and “unstable.” What is most interesting for my purposes here, however, is Eyers’s description of the “different modes of formalization” generated by Lacan’s structural reading of Freud. “For Lacan, the Real is that which marks an ‘impasse in formalization,’ [Lacan’s term], and thus the formalization of knowledge encounters an internal limit that is, nonetheless, its condition of possibility.”21 A better idea of this complex notion of formalization was offered by Badiou during an interview in 2007: I believe that if all creative thought is in reality the invention of a new mode of formalization, then that thought is the invention of form. Thus if every creative thought is the invention of a new form, then it will also bring new possibilities of asking, in the end, “what is a form?” . . . Like Plato, who first thought this, thinking is the thinking of forms, something that he called ideas but they are also the forms. It is the same word, idea. It is different from Aristotle’s thought where thinking is the thinking of substance. His paradigm is the animal. For Plato, it is mathematics. Mathematics holds something of the secret of thinking. . . . This is the first point. I think I hold a fidelity to this idea, but, at the same time, the heart of the most radical experience is politics. Politics itself, in a sense, is also a thinking through forms. It is not the thought of arrangement or the thought of contracts or good life. No. It is a thinking of form.22

Eyers mentions that Lacan in his 1966 seminar on “The Logic of Fantasy” gave the most sustained definition of his concept of objet petit a, or the objectcause of desire, “a concept that, in its subversion of dichotomies of virtuality and actuality, of form and content, would prove difficult to integrate within Althusser’s reconstruction of Marx.”23 This notion of the object played a crucial role in the Cahiers’s theoretical debates, as Eyers points out, “torn between the relative autonomy and permanence of structure, and the necessary contingency of the irruption of the subject.”24 Similarly, in regard to “formalization”—which basically meant a mathematicization of empirical reality—Eyers takes up the notion of “suture,” the subject of an important essay by Jacques-Alain Miller. For Miller, suture “names the relation of the subject to its chain of discourse,” reflecting “the general relation of lack to the structure.”25 Assuming structure to be synonymous with the symbolic chain of signifiers in Lacan, Eyers explains that “suture, the stitching of the subject to the signifiers is . . . ‘the general relation of lack to the structure’,”26 insofar

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as the subject is precisely what is lacking from the structure; it is the lack itself on which the structure is based. One important conclusion from this discussion of suture is that for Lacan, “the existence of objet petit a, and the register of the Real more generally, results in a fundamental asymmetric instability in the subject/Other relation, such that their intrication is guaranteed in ways resistant to any symmetrical mediation.”27 Eyers is keen to stress the affinities between Lacan and the rational scientific epistemology of Bachelard as the basis on which “post-rationalism could build its model of concept, a model distantly inspired by Cartesian rationalism but critical of its founding assumptions.”28 At the heart of this model is the problem of the “subject” in relation to “structure” and the division between subject and object, and hence the question of subjectivity and subjectivation in relation to the object or “subjection to the object” as a theoretical rather than empirical object of knowledge. In Bachelard’s epistemology of science, Eyers remarks, “the subject, far from imposing itself on the object of knowledge as the only possible site of certainty, is in fact subject to the object as it is its master; if the object might change upon its inscription in a scientific process, so must the subject.” This “dialectical tension between subject and object,” Eyers adds, is “only the first of a number of complications that Bachelard addresses to rationalist certainty.”29 Without attempting a full analysis of Eyers’s complex and intricate idea of postrationalism, it is important to note that his reconstruction of the rationalist tendencies in French structuralism raises many issues that are still very much the concern of contemporary critical theory. Badiou and Rancière both figure in the continuum of postrationalism, as does the work of François Laruelle and his notion of the real. The real, Eyers notes, “is aberrant; it sticks out knowledge in a way that renders philosophy, at least as it was classically formulated, inadequate to its demand.”30 Eyers concludes by emphasizing the continuing relevance of this project today: Just as I noted, at the outset, the division between thought and being as marking the beginning of philosophy itself, so here does the at least partial irrecuperability of the Real to strategies of formalization announce the beginning, not the end, of a critical philosophical practice. Post-Rationalism accounts for the errancy of the Real not by an outright rejection of philosophy’s founding assumptions, as in Laruelle, but via a progressive incorporation of nonphilosophical materials— mathematical, psychoanalytical, political—into a concern for formalization, and a capacious regard for objects that mark the limits of formalization—limits, finally, that do not announce the end of the project of formalization so much as they signal its radicalization, its touching of the Real.31

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One area in which formalization touches the real is topology. Baroque space, as I mentioned above, is topological. Here I would like to advance the view that Baroque space is a “spatialization of the Real.”32 Baroque space implicates the subject and participates in the constitution of its psychic space. The register of the real in Lacanian theory is in a spatial relation with the two other registers of the symbolic and the imaginary that Lacan formulated as a Borromean knot. In his earlier Lacan and the Concept of the “Real”, Eyers shows that the real is, in Lacan, simultaneously “inside” and the “outside” the symbolic, and that this topological structure has its epistemological counterpart the relation between knowledge and the subject. The dichotomy of inside/outside is fundamental to any conception of baroque space, including Foucault’s and Deleuze’s ideas of the fold and the diagram, as Badiou makes clear in his Deleuze: The Clamor of Being. To better understand the spatiality of the real, Eyers relates the inside/ outside dichotomy to Kant’s distinction between a “boundary” and a “limit.” For Kant, limits are “mere negations that affect a magnitude insofar as it does not possess absolute completeness,” while boundaries are “always presuppos[ing] a space that is found outside a certain fixed location, and that encloses that location.”33 The distinction is relevant to Kant’s notion of constitutive limits in human knowledge. As Eyers puts it, “the benefit, for Kant, lay in distinguishing between on the one hand mathematical and scientific limits—such knowledge is never, by definition, complete for Kant—and on the other hand metaphysical boundaries, existing on the border between the knowable and unknowable.”34 Kant’s notion of space was of course different from Lacan’s considerably more complex psychoanalytical conception—one that, as Eyers point out, “supersedes the philosophical distinction between epistemology and ontology.”35 Yet “Kant’s insistence that things-in-themselves were necessarily existent and yet unknowable to human reason serves as a useful analogue to the ways in which Lacan sought to understand the Real.”36 According to Eyers, the real for Lacan is not “absolutely outside the subject’s knowledge as it is an internal condition for the emergence of the subject of the Imaginary and the Symbolic as such.”37 Thus, for example, the subject as the product of narcissism (introjection and projection of the other), and the domain of the real as it is manifest in jouissance, Eyers writes, are encountered as internal limits. “Contra Kant, Lacan’s concern here is unquestionably situated at the very constitution of the subject; if it were posed in more traditionally philosophical terms, the argument could be counterposed as ontological against the limit Kant seeks to maintain in the field of epistemology.”38

Interlude II: Postrationalism and the Theorization of the Baroque as Real

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To account for the spatiality of the real and the symbolic, Lacan related psychoanalysis to mathematics and topology. Eyers cites Alexandre Leupin, who refers to how Lacan’s “pre-topological” account of psychic space as an “intuitive geometry” gave way to “a topology that can overcome the imaginary aspects of the schemas to ground them in the logic of the symbolic order.”39 Similar considerations can be found in Lacan: Topologically Speaking, whose editors define topology as a “qualitative mathematics” (sometimes called “rubber math” or “rubber geometry”). Topology, as they put it, “deals with how different shapes can be stretched, pulled, twisted, bent, deformed, and distorted in space without, at the same time, changing their intrinsic nature. It is a study of continuous properties.”40 Hence, topology for Lacan is much more than a metaphor; rather it is a precise way to model the “construction and appearance of the subject.”41 Lacan made use of several topological constructions, including the torus, the Möbius Strip, the Klein bottle, the cross-cap, and Borromean knots. Thus, Lacan rejected the common notion of the signifier having a dualistic structure and replaced it with a triadic formulation wherein language is topological and “it is the very cuts of surface that produces differential dimensionalities.”42 Lacan’s famous definition of the signifier as what represents the subject for another signifier “introduces a new space within which to think the subject. Topology, therefore, is concerned with lines, holes, and spaces, how they are connected, how they function, albeit in contradictory ways.”43 It is therefore about the “interplay of surfaces, ‘empty spaces,’ cuts, holes, gaps, and rims, with lacks, desire, jouissance, subjectivity.”44 One of the most common topological constructions in Lacan is the Möbius strip, which is typically used to represent the objet petit a, and which, as David Nasio notes, provides the cross-cap from which the “cuts” in the subject are obtained.45 Lacan used the cross-cap to describe the continuity—both spatial and psychic—between the inside and the outside. Much the same could be said about the space of the Baroque, which shares with psychoanalysis a common concern with the relation between inside and outside. Indeed, no serious thought of Baroque space can fail to take into account Lacan’s topological notion of the real. It is here, moreover, as Eyers observes, that we can discern the influence of “French rationalist philosophy of science . . . in particular his tacit endorsement of the epistemology of Alexandre Koyré.”46 Eyers quotes Ann Banfield on Koyré’s epistemology: For there to be science—i.e., Galilean science— in Koyré’s account, theory must bring about the formalization or mathematicization of the empirical.

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That is, science is defined by the conjunction of two factors: the empirical and the mathematical, i.e. a mathematical writing. . . . The past participle “mathematicized” suggests an achievement of the theory of science. But there is not just an historically occurring mathematciuzation of the empirical, as an imposition of form on matter. Koyré’s claim . . . also involves the assumption of a prior condition permitting this mathematicization: the empirical is discovered to be “mathematicizable”—representable in a formal writing—where the adjective “mathematicizable” designates in a quality inherent in the empirical.47

Hence, by tacitly endorsing Koyré’s thesis, Lacan also embraced Galilean physics, “a Physics that foregrounds mathematics as its language and that provides a crucial break between scientific and other forms of knowledge.”48 Eyers cites Lacan on “Science and Truth”: “Science’s position—he wrote—is justified by a radical change in the tempo of its progress, by the galloping from its inmixing in our world, and by the chain reactions that characterize what one might call the expansions of its energetics. . . . Koyré is my guide here.”49 Lacan’s belief that the real is “woven out of numbers,” according to Eyers, means that “the Lacanian model of formalization that emerges from the encounter with Koyré is concerned precisely with the status of the amenability of this numerical Real to mathematical capture.”50 In this short and incomplete interlude (since a full treatment of these issues would require a book-length study) I hope to have established, at least, that any new theorization of the Baroque must engage Lacan’s complex notion of the real, and that anything less than this is bound to be a mediocre enterprise.

Part Four

Postrationalism and the Adventure with French Philosophy

12

Desuturing Architecture: Philosophy and Antiphilosophy

In this chapter, I come back to one of the concerns I stated in the introduction relating to the way philosophy has been brought into the discourse of architecture. I characterized this transfer as a “suturing” of architecture to philosophy (mostly French). I further identified followers of Deleuze who brought his concept of the Baroque to architecture theory as “sophists” practicing a form of antiphilosophy. In this chapter, I would like to focus more closely on this pervasive issue in architectural theory and to consider how architecture might “desuture” itself from this antiphilosophy so that it can begin to think within the definite space of “compossibility” that—following Badiou—constitutes its multiple “truths.”1 This act of desuturing, the meaning of which I discuss below, is the sine qua non if architecture is to (re-)turn to itself and reengage with its constitutive reflexive thought, as the thought of the Real as part of radical emancipatory project. Such a pensée architecturale is possible only within the multiple conditions that constitute its actuality. I use the term conditions here in contrast with another term popular among architectural theorists: foundations. Advocates of French philosophy in architecture, I argue, while ignoring its multiple conditions— to which it has occasionally and inordinately “sutured” itself—have instead taken philosophy as the foundation for theory. Abandoned to this foundation, architecture has suspended its relation to all the other conditions that constitute its “compossibilities.” It is this abandoning of itself to philosophy as its foundation that I call the antiphilosophy of architecture. Against this suspension, I argue, architecture must, emphatically, pull itself from the immediate grip of philosophy as a foundation while remaining open to its effects as a condition for a new kind of theory. The obvious and immediate question is: In what mode of thought might architecture properly invoke philosophy? This question is different from the opposite one, within philosophy, of what role to assign to architectural

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metaphors—a subject of much reflection on both sides in the last four decades.2 The problem for architects is rather how to do theory while avoiding a “philosophy of architecture.” The latter—to put it in Kantian terms—takes philosophical thought not as one of architecture’s conditions of possibility, but as an aggressive legitimization of particular forms of institutional practice. The fatal consequence of this approach is the tendency to seek legitimacy from the exigencies of a dominant political order—a delegation of responsibility that is typically expressed through an apolitical or worse, antipolitical stance. In fact, the political (as much as the aesthetic, for Jacques Rancière) cannot but be one of the primary conditions of architectural thought. The political in this sense is nothing less than a synonymous word for “theory” as the opposite of ideology. The crossing from ideology to the political constitutes the work of theory and the object of any “theoretical training” in Althusser’s sense. Here, architectural theorists might learn from the way radical philosophers have engaged with literature, cinema, opera, and other visual arts.3 As Jean-Jacques Lecercle notes, when contemporary radical philosophy attempts to read “literature,” its basic assumption is that—certain exceptions notwithstanding—literature already thinks on its own. The idea of a “philosophy of literature” is anathema in such readings, since it presupposes a hierarchy whereby philosophy thinks, and literature is merely an object of philosophical speculation,4 as a region under the jurisdiction of philosophical “concepts,” or as a mere pretext for the development of philosophical ideas that are independent of it. In short, in reading literature, radical philosophers do not “suture” literature to philosophy. They do not construe what is reflexively immanent in the literary text itself as a foundation of the possibility of thinking. This fundamental lesson has been widely ignored in the discipline of architecture. In fact, the reverse of the above “hierarchy” is tenaciously maintained, with architecture granting philosophy not only jurisdiction over itself, but the right to think for it. Confusing “foundation” with “condition,” architectural theory has simply taken philosophy as its ground, abandoning itself to its foundation, mistaking speculative philosophical “concepts” for categories that might guide building practice. A more legitimate way to think philosophically in architecture is to treat philosophical concepts as conditions for constructing a project of critique. We might call such an approach, however provisionally or tentatively, a transcendental critique of pure architecture.5 Its main target would be architectural theory’s failure to grant architecture the right to think on its own, by keeping it under the jurisdiction of a philosophy that

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would do its thinking for it. This grand experiment with French theory has failed and must be reversed. It is this failed experiment that I name antiphilosophy. We get a better sense of the reasons for this failure by examining the notion of suture in Badiou’s writings. As we saw above in the “Interlude II,” the term “suture” entered the debate in the Cahiers pour l’Analyse in conjunction with the terms subject and structure. Commenting on Jacques-Alain Miller’s key text in the Cahiers entitled “Action and Structure,” wherein he makes the distinction between “structuring” and “structured” modality, Hallward writes: The distinction only becomes significant, however, to the degree that the structure includes a reflexive element, “an element that turns back on reality and perceives it, reflects it and signifies it, an element capable of redoubling itself on its own account.” . . .This element introduces a gap or absence into the structuring process, something that the structure ‘misses.’ On the level of what is structured or lived, this absence is generally covered over by imaginary or ideological representations of fullness and coherence.6

The lack in the structure, of course, cannot be represented but is covered by an element, which as Hallward says, “takes the place of the lack.” Hence, as he puts it, “Every structure must incorporate some such placeholder for the lack it includes, which serves to ‘sew up’ or ‘suture’ the lack, and by thus assigning it a place, absorbs it into an imaginary continuum.”7 Thus, in relation to Miller’s famous “Suture (Elements of the Logic of the Signifier),” Hallward argues that “from one link to another of the signifying chain, a signifier represents, places or ‘sutures’ (i.e., treats-as-identical or counts-as-one), for another signifier, that essential lack of self or place which is all that can be represented of the subject qua subject.” Hence “suture names the relation of the subject to the chain of its discourse” by treating its absence or lack of place as a lack of place, that is, by subsuming it “in the form of a placeholder [tenant-lieu].”8 As is well known, the status of the subject (or lack thereof) in relation to the structure was one of the central concerns of “structuralism” and the context from which the notion of suture was first developed. As Žižek explains, the founding gesture of structuralism was “to assert the differential, self-referential nature of structure in its formal purity, purifying it of all ‘pathological’ imaginary elements.”9 The question that followed was, “After this purification, is there a subject to this structure? The predominant answer, at the time, was a resounding no. Even ‘post’-structuralist deconstruction, with all its emphasis on gap, rupture, difference and deferral, etc., conceived the subject simply as the culmination of

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the metaphysics of self-presence, an entity whose self-identity was something to be dismantled (by demonstrating how its condition of impossibility is also its condition of possibility, how the subject’s identity is always-already deferred, how it has to rely on the very process that undermines it, and so on).”10 Žižek counterpoises a principle of “reflexivity.” He writes, To put it succinctly, “suture” means that external difference is always an internal one, that the external limitation of a field of phenomena always reflects itself within this field, as its inherent impossibility to fully become itself. . . . Suture means that, precisely, such self-enclosure is a priori impossible, that the excluded externally always leaves its traces within—or, to put it in the standard Freudian terms, that there is no repression (from the scene of phenomenal selfexperience) without the return of the repressed.11

This very brief reflection on the complex notion of suture that occupied the entire Cahiers project should be adequate to illustrate the importance and relevance today of the latter’s theoretical research, as summed up nicely in Hallward’s conclusion: As for what remains significant about this revolutionary project today, the least that can be said is that the verdict no longer appears as clear-cut as it did to jaded proponents of la nouvelle philosophie in the late 1970s and the liberals who followed them in the 1980s and 90s. . . . But after decades dominated by the myriad forms of a backlash against radical politics (liberalism, deconstruction, “ethics”, historicism, cynicism . . .), many younger thinkers and activists are at least more receptive now to the basic problem that “theoretical training” was meant to solve in the 1960s: how might we think and work towards radical change in conditions of economic inertia, political complacency and popular disempowerment, compounded by the absence of an appropriately oriented political organization? Today’s answer to this old question may depend on a different account of the relation between structure and subject, drawing on a more dialectical conception of the former and a more assertive (if not “revolutionary”) conception of the latter.12

In Manifesto for Philosophy, Badiou has recently taken the notion of suture into a different direction related to the four “conditions” of truth in philosophy. Summing up briefly, for Badiou, truth is not the same in every domain of human life; rather, “truth procedures” may be related to the “generic” conditions found in science, art, politics, and love.13 These four conditions establish the space within which the “compossibility” of philosophy is constructed. A suspension of philosophy can occur when “instead of constructing a space of compossibility

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through which the thinking of time is practiced, philosophy delegates its function to one or other of its conditions, handing over the whole of thought to one generic procedure.”14 Badiou calls this type of situation a suture. “Philosophy is placed in suspension every time it presents itself as being sutured to one of its conditions.”15 With this “platonic gesture,” Badiou defends philosophy against those he calls the modern sophists. Badiou is the first to recognize that sophists are formidable opponents. Counting Jean-François Lyotard among them, he takes issue with the latter’s statement in The Differend: Phrases in Dispute that “philosophy as architecture is ruined.”16 Against such general statements, he asks: “Is it however possible to imagine a philosophy that is not in the least architectonic?”17 For Badiou, Philosophy is always the breaking of a mirror. This mirror is the surface of language, on which the sophist sets everything that philosophy treats in its act. If the philosopher claims to contemplate himself on this sole surface, he sees his double, the sophist, suddenly spring forth from it and can thus take himself for the sophist.18

Sophistry, for Badiou, is a kind of “antiphilosophy.” He identifies Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Lacan, and Saint Paul as four major antiphilosophers.19 Lacan, we will recall, was the first to use the term “antiphilosophy” to refer to all philosophies coming after Hegel. He said: “I rise up in revolt, so to speak, against philosophy. What is sure is that it is something finite and done with, even if I expect some rejects to grow out of it. Such growths are common enough with finite things.”20 Interestingly, however, Badiou is quite sympathetic to Lacan here, arguing that “the anti-philosopher Lacan is a condition of the renaissance of Philosophy. A Philosophy is possible today only if it is compatible with Lacan.”21 In a similar spirit, Žižek has recast Lacan as a philosopher to be read alongside Descartes, Kant, and Hegel. In Tarrying with Negative, he writes: In short, what is today practiced as “Philosophy” is precisely different from attempts to “deconstruct” something referred to as the classical philosophical corpus (“metaphysics,” “logocentrism,” etc.) One is therefore tempted to risk the hypothesis that what Lacan’s “antiphilosophy” opposes is this very philosophy qua antiphilosophy: what if Lacan’s own theoretical practice involves a kind of return to philosophy?22

Both Žižek and Badiou oppose philosophy in this sense to sophistry. Just as Plato wrote Protagoras and Gorgias to battle the sophists of his time, so today

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we must restage our own fight for philosophy against sophistry. For Badiou, the latter includes fashionable ideas of the end of philosophy, and the idea of Truth. Today, he laments: We are attending a second anti-Platonic requital, for contemporary “philosophy” is a generalized sophistry, which is moreover neither without talent nor without greatness. Language games, deconstruction, feeble thinking, irremediable heterogeneity, differends and differences, the ruin of Reason, the promotion of the fragment and discourse in shreds: all of these argue in favor of a sophistic line of thinking and place philosophy at an impasse.23

As Bosteels notes, “Badiou finds elements of sophistry in most anti-philosophical discourses.”24 In his “Definition of Philosophy,” Badiou notes: This relation to the sophist inwardly exposes philosophy to a temptation whose effect is to split it in two again. For the desire of finishing off the sophist once and for all thwarts the seizing of truths: “Once and for all” inevitably means that Truth annuls the randomness of truths, and that philosophy unduly declares itself a producer of truths. Whereby being-true comes into the position of doubling the act of Truth.25

For Badiou, to battle against the antiphilosophy of the modern sophists, philosophy must desuture itself from the four “conditions” mentioned above. This does not mean simply doing away with sophistry. For the sophist is the one who reminds us that the category of Truth is void. Hence sophists have an essential ethical function. As Bosteels explains, “on the one hand, the role of the modern sophist consists of alerting the philosophers to the contemporaneity of their discourse.” He quotes Badiou: The great Modern sophistics, linguistic, anesthetizing and democratic, exercising its dissolving function, examines impasses and draws the picture of what is contemporary to us. It is just as essential for us as the libertine was to Blaise Pascal: it alerts us to the singularities of the time.26

On the other hand, “the function of the sophist is not just stylistic or aesthetic but also ethical in nature. Were it not for the verbal jousting matches with their rhetorical double that remind them of the emptiness of their conceptual operators, philosophers might believe themselves capable of producing some substantive truths of their own, whereas truths can only come to them from the outside, namely, from the non-philosophical practices such as science or art or politics that are the material condition of philosophy.”27

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I have dwelt at length on Badiou’s critique of antiphilosophy and sophism to clarify how these terms might be understood in an architectural context, where sophism and antiphilosophy are—I believe—just as pervasive as in Badiou’s own field. As I hope it is clear from my reflections above, I take the numerous fashionable and casual inroads of architectural theory into French philosophy over the last few decades to be examples of antiphilosophy in Badiou’s sense of the term. But antiphilosophy involves more than just muddled or weak thinking. As I have already suggested, inherent in the process of suturing are a whole series of subtle reversals and concealments that isolate and enclose to give an appearance of self-sufficiency. In this regard, Žižek’s comments are relevant: Anti-philosophy . . . conceives suture as the mode in which the exterior is inscribed in the interior, thus “suturing” the field, producing the effect of selfenclosure with no need for an exterior, effacing the traces of its own production. In this way, traces of the production process, its gaps, its mechanisms, are obliterated, so that the product can appear as a naturalized organic whole.28

This same process is apparent in what I have described as the suturing of architecture with French philosophy as a foundation for doing theory in the discipline. What is at stake is the relation between internal and external of the architecture field in which the traces of its production are obliterated. As Žižek puts it, “ ‘suture’ means that the external difference is always an internal one, that the exterior or limitation of a field of phenomena always reflects itself within this field, as its inherent impossibility to fully become itself.”29 Yet, as we have seen, the claim that this reflexive thought cannot attain “self-enclosure” is exactly what the antiphilosophy of architecture has denied. And sophistry, considered seriously as a worthy foe in the same way Badiou does, is the principal means to this denial. Žižek’s own reading of sophistry in the context of Plato’s philosophical debates is relevant here. In the Sophist—Žižek claims—“Plato deals with the problem of non-being, trying to outline a third way between two extreme alternatives: Parmenides’s assertion of the unconditional One, and Gorgias’s sophistic playing with the multiplicity of non-being. Plato describes sophistry as the appearance-making art. Imitating true wisdom, sophists produce deceptive appearances. In their empty ratiocination and search for rhetorical effects, they talk about things that do not exits, that are not.”30 But, Žižek asks, “How can one talk about non-being, making it appear as something that is?” “To formulate this question, Plato is compelled counter Parmenides’s opposite thesis, whereby ‘it is impossible

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that things that are not, are.’ ” “Plato’s answer is to define Not-Being not as the opposite of Being (i.e., not as excluded from the domain of Being), but as a difference within the domain of Being.”31 From this insight follows the whole structuralist project of defining the signifying order as a “system of differences.” Žižek: “Although Plato comes close to articulating this self-referentiality in his Parmenides, he lacked the structuralist concept of differentiality which defines the signifying order.”32 It is also the basis for Plato’s (and Badiou’s, and Žižek’s) continuing and difficult—in the sense of relentless because never able to claim a decisive victory—battle against sophism. To conclude: The hyper-Deleuzean suturing of architecture to philosophy amounts to an anti-philosophical aestheticization of theory against the political and ethical foundations of the discipline. The business of “appearing-making” that Plato described as sophistry continues to be the basis for this denial, as is what Žižek—or Manfredo Tafuri, for that matter—describes as the obsession with the rhetorical “self-referential abyss of language” as a way to block off the outside from the inside. To the limited extent that such zero-degree aesthetic language games might be resisted through more and better “theoretical training” in Althusser’s sense, this would only be possible by redirecting the reading of philosophy toward the destruction of idolatry and toward the construction of a radical project of critique. The latter stands poles apart from the customary practice of taking from philosophy prescriptive “concepts” to use in the act of “building theory.” More fundamentally still, following the Cahiers pour l’Analyse and its radical restoration in the project of contemporary French philosophy in the service of political emancipation, I believe that “theory” today must be reconceived as politics against ideology. Any lesser conception of a renewed theory is bound to make it into another legitimizing act of the affirmative ideologicalaesthetic operations that make up, in Badiou’s words, the “image brothel” of democratic-liberal capitalism. Central to such a program, in my view, is recognizing that architecture, in its misadventure with French philosophy, has had a missed encounter with the Cahiers pour l’Analyse. It is here, in the project of a postrationalism that Tom Eyers has shown is both relevant and urgent to overcome the irrationalism dominant in contemporary positivistic thought,33 that architectural theory can begin to remake itself, and that a new adventure with French philosophy on the Left can begin.

13

Capitalism, Idolatry, and Critique of Neobaroque Ideology

In the first chapter of this book, I opposed the historical event of the Baroque— in Badiou’s sense—against the pseudo-event of the neobaroque today. In the following chapters, I used Lacan’s psychoanalytical theory to develop a concept of the Baroque that is distinct from the various “period-style” descriptions in art-historical literature, descriptions on which much of Deleuze’s interpretation of the baroque depends. Underlying my theorization is a refusal to consider the historical Baroque merely as an aesthetic category. To separate Baroque theory from aesthetics is to put it under the jurisdiction of ethics, in both the sense of Lacan’s “Ethic of Psychoanalysis”—in Sublimation and Jouissance—and of Badiou’s thesis on ethics—in the truth of event and four domains of truth (politics, art, science, and love).1 At the same time, it is to recognize the contemporary neobaroque as an aestheticization of empirical reality that should, as an ideological formation, be subject to ideologycritique. Implicit in the distinction between the Baroque and the neobaroque is a methodological separation between the Baroque as coextensive with the discovery of jouissance (and as such, neither aesthetic nor ideological) and the valorization of jouissance by contemporary capitalism through the neobaroque as an aesthetic and ideological category. The neobaroque is an ideological aspect of late capitalism, and the “new architecture”—more than the digital entertainment industry discussed by Angela Ndalianis—is the main vehicle for its transmission and diffusion.2 Hence also, while following Egginton’s strategies of relating the historical Baroque and modernity’s problematics of sensibility and thought, I would insist on the need to distinguish between the Baroque and the neobaroque, and between ethics and aesthetics. Thus, while I endorse Egginton’s call—unique in all recent critical writing on the subject—for a critique of neobaroque ideology within contemporary capitalism, I differ on the way the Baroque itself is conceptualized

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by Egginton along essentially Kantian lines. Instead of Egginton’s novel idea of “the theater of truth,” which implies “dissociation between appearances and the truth they hide,” as he puts it,3 I conceive the truth of the baroque in the “theater of desire” and its “compossible” multiple conditions. In other words, as I argued in the preceding chapters, I pose the question of the Baroque not in terms of a Kantian problematic between truth and appearance but rather in terms of the postrational epistemology of recent French thought as reconstructed by Tom Eyers. With these prefatory remarks, I turn now to the main focus of this concluding chapter: to define the ideology of the neobaroque. My remarks address the “new architecture” as a form of neobaroque ideology—an ideology that its advocates in the academy, as we saw, have concealed behind a fashionable and seductive “philosophical” mystification that needs to be exposed. The first question, therefore, regards the “ideology-theory” on which any critique of the neobaroque must be based. Before writing the chapter on the “The Fetishism of Commodity and Its Secret” in Capital, volume 1, Marx had already developed a crude outline of his theory of commodity fetishism in “Toward a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” (1843), a work that was partly inspired by his readings of Charles de Brousse’s investigation of “fetish-gods” in Du Culte des dieux Fétiches ou Parallèle de l’ancienne Religion de l’Egypte avec la religion actuelle de Nigrité (1780).4 Here, Marx claimed that “criticism of religion” was to be “the premise of all criticism,” and—echoing Feuerbach’s Critique of Christianity—that “Man makes religion, religion does not make man.”5 “Religion—according to Marx— is the self-conscious and self-regard of man who has either not yet found or has already lost himself.”6 It is “the fantastic realization of the human essence inasmuch as the human essence possesses no true reality.”7 The considerations that come next are better known, if not always fully understood: Religious suffering is the expression of real suffering and at the same time the protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of heartless world, as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is opium of the people. The abolition of religion as people’s illusory happiness is the demand for their real happiness. The demand to abandon illusion about their condition is a demand to abandon a condition which requires illusions. The criticism of religion is thus in embryo a criticism of the vale of tears whose halo is religion.8

Hence “the immediate task of philosophy which is in the service of history is to unmask human self-alienation in its unholy forms now that it has been unmasked

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in its holy forms. Thus the criticism of heaven turns into criticism of earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.”9 As Jan Rehmann points out, Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right was not, strictly speaking, an essay on religion but an appeal to the Young-Hegelian philosophers to give up their fixation on religion, to overcome the restriction of their criticism to the domain of religion. . . . In this vein, [Marx] called upon the critical philosophers to stop their obsession with pulling apart the “holy form of human self-estrangement,” and to proceed to a critique of the “vale of tears, the halo of which is religion,” to unmask selfalienation no more in the sacred forms, but in their secular forms.10

In his remarkably informative work Theories of Ideology, Rehmann traces the trajectory of the young Marx’s critique of religion to his mature critique of “fetishism” and of the “religious-like” inversions that show up in law, politics, and the economic alienation of bourgeois society. Interestingly, it was on this same trajectory that Benjamin penned an extraordinary fragment titled “Capitalism as Religion.”11 In this piece, Benjamin wrote that “a religion may be discerned in capitalism—that is to say, capitalism serves essentially to allay the same anxieties, torments, and disturbances to which the so-called religions offered answers.”12 In contrast to Max Weber’s view of capitalism as a formation merely conditioned by religion, Benjamin argued that capitalism was “an essentially religious phenomenon”—not merely the secularization of the Protestant ethic, but a parasitic development from Christianity in the West: “[This must be shown not just in the case of Calvinism, but in other orthodox Christian churches], until it reaches the point where Christianity’s history is essentially that of its parasite—that is to say, of capitalism.”13 According to Benjamin, the religious structure of capitalism is that of “a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed. In capitalism, things have a meaning only in their relationship to the cult.” Capitalism has no specific body of dogma, no theology. “It is from this point of view that utilitarianism acquires its religious overtones.”14 Such a “concretization of the cult,” such an emphasis on “the permanence of the cult,” makes capitalism “a cult sans rêve et sans merci [without dream and mercy].”15 As Benjamin put it, “Capitalism is a religion of pure cult, without dogma.”16 Hence a third characteristic of capitalism as a religion: the pervasiveness of guilt. Capitalist religion is all about guilt and not atonement. “The nature of the religious movement which is capitalism

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entails endurance right to the end, to the point where God, too, finally takes on the entire burden of guilt, to the point where the universe has been taken over by that despair which is actually its secret hope.”17 For Benjamin, capitalism is a particularly heartless and destructive religion. He identifies Nietzsche as the philosopher who expressed the cult of capitalist religion most clearly, in his conception of the superman: “This man is superman, the first to recognize the religion of capitalism and begin to bring it to fulfillment.”18 As Rehmann notes, Benjamin’s characterization of capitalist religion as a “cult” is a significant “ideological-theoretical finding: this ‘religion’ does not primarily function through a set of ‘ideas’ on the level of an ‘orthodoxy,’ but rather on the level of material practices, an ‘orthopraxis,’ an ensemble of ‘normalizing’ practices and rituals.”19 Here, Marx’s critique of fetishism is linked—through Benjamin—to the theological critique of idolatry and to what Rehmann calls the “structural sin” of an “idolatrous system, an institutional dance around the ‘golden calf ’ and its hegemonic values.”20 Transposing these considerations to the theme of the neobaroque, we might say that in the new religion of contemporary capitalism, the “cult” of architecture functions as an ideological “interpellation” of the subject. New architectural idols of “high art” work effectively to further a deceptive and reactionary reenchantment of the world. In effect, the idols of neobaroque architecture do not simply mark a return to an architecture of pure ideology; they also signal, through their secular forms, the renewed religious essence of contemporary society. If Boris Groys, as we saw, argued that the iconoclastic Enlightenment, which had triumphed over the Christian iconophilia, was supposed to have driven it out once and for all from the tradition of radical secularism—with Hegel’s famous “art is the thing of the past,” announcing this victory21—today’s neobaroque culture industry brings iconophilia back onto the scene of culture. Architecture’s all-encompassing scope, moreover, makes it the most efficient means to transmit and disseminate the cult practices of the new and libidinal economy of consumer capitalism. Any attempt to carry out an ideology critique of this phenomenon must, I suggest, move not only from Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, but also from his theory of religion, as developed, extended, and elaborated in Benjamin’s critique of capitalism as a set of cultic practices. The digital image industry of the neobaroque, here, is obviously the central dispositif of this new and pervasive iconophilia, where neobaroque idols directly participate in and abet the phantasmagoria of late capitalism, and where the master architects of our time work effectively to immortalize the order of this culture.

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For all its obtrusiveness as perhaps the most visible material manifestation of contemporary consumer capitalism, the architecture of the neobaroque remains, however, and for some reason, beyond the radar of cultural critics and philosophers. Thus, while prominent thinkers have developed stimulating and sophisticated reflections on the ideological impact of music, literature, cinema, opera, theater, and other art forms, architecture has been excluded from the list. To take one example, Philip Lacoue-Labarthe’s potent term for Wagner’s music, “Musica Ficta” has now come to designate the dominant ideological mode in modern culture—with philosophers seemingly in some tacit agreement on the supremacy of music over culture and ideology. In similar terms, for example, Žižek praised Adorno’s famous analysis of Wagner for combining, as he put it, the “highest musicological analysis” with a Marxist reading of the musical work of art as a “cipher for social antagonisms.”22 Like Adorno, the late LacoueLabarthe examined the work of the German composer and coined a new term, “musicolatry,” to underscore Wagner’s continuing influence today. LacoueLabarthe’s analysis stressed the fact that, as he noted, as nihilism has taken hold in the wake of Wagner, music, with even more powerful techniques than those Wagner himself invented, has continued to invade our world and has clearly taken precedence over all other art forms including the visual arts—that the fact “musicolatry” has taken up where idolatry left off is perhaps a first attempt at an answer.23

Whether or not one agrees with Lacoue-Labarthe’s anti-Wagnerianism, even for some of his harshest critics (like Badiou, who in his Five Lessons on Wagner subjects it to the most serious critique), it is hard to refute the latter’s notion of “musicolatry” and the contention that music has become one of the main ideological idols of the contemporary world. Between Lacoue-Labarthe’s thesis that the Wagnerian apparatus is a vehicle—albeit a problematic one—for the aestheticization of politics, and Badiou’s understanding of “the transformation of music into an ideological operator, which in art, always involves constituting a people; that is, figuring or configuring a politics,”24 there is ample room to develop a similar critical perspective on the architecture of the neobaroque and its nefarious role in contemporary culture and politics. Alongside “musicolatry,” to describe the latter’s role as one of the main cultural dispositifs of capitalist religion, we might thus coin the equally awkward neologism “architectolatry.” Today, both stand in great need of an iconoclastic gesture.

Epilogue: The Missed Encounter of Architecture with Postrationalism

The rational foundation of modernity and the project of the Enlightenment are in crisis. The neobaroque culture industry’s reenchantment of the world—or as Lukács would say, reification—marks a complete retreat from the Enlightenment project. As Ray Brassier notes succinctly in his Nihil Unbound, Enlightenment and Extinction: The disenchantment of the world understood as a consequence of the process whereby the Enlightenment shattered the “great chain of being” and defaced the “book of the world” is a necessary consequence of the coruscating potency of reason, and hence an invigorating vector of intellectual discovery, rather than a calamitous diminishment. . . . The disenchantment of the world deserves to be celebrated as an achievement of intellectual maturity, not bewailed as a debilitating impoverishment.1

Brassier further remarks that so much twentieth-century philosophy is regrettably complicit with such an anti-Enlightenment tide. The project of post-Rationalism is one of a few major philosophical enterprises in the second half of the twentieth century that works against this obscurantist tendency. As theorized in this study on the basis of Lacan’s psychoanalytical doctrine of jouissance, Baroque’s “reason” coincides with the rise of Rationalism and the dialectics of the Enlightenment. Lacan explicitly located his work within that tradition, which is now under assault in contemporary postmodern neobaroque culture generally and in the architecture of late capitalism in particular. Much of this study was aimed at the uncritical importation of French philosophy into architectural discourse over the last four decades. I characterized this as a misguided, simplistic, and reductive effort that surrendered architectural thought to the jurisdiction of “philosophy,” to the detriment of both. At the same time, however, I argued that architecture can and must reconnect with radical French philosophy with the one legitimate purpose of building a project of radical critique that is able to extend the ideology-critique of architecture in contemporary society. Any other attempt to establish linkages to philosophy,

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in my mind, is misguided. In fact, it may be argued that the discourse of architecture missed its encounter with post-Rationalism—twice. The first time was in the mid-1960s, when the intellectual circle around the Cahiers pour l’Analyse was formed in Paris. At this time, the most progressive architectural circle was in Italy, where radical Left intellectuals like Manfredo Tafuri and his colleagues gathered around Mario Tronti and Massimo Cacciari, the Operaist movement, and the journal Contropiano.2 Unfortunately, this Italian circle remained oblivious of the whole “philosophy of concept” that was developing at the École Normale Supérieure around Althusser and Lacan and the renewal of ideology-theory that was occurring with the reflections on subject and structure. Cacciari was busy with his Heidegger and Nietzsche with his ruminations on “negative thought,” while Tafuri was trying to sort out his definition of ideology as “false consciousness” in Marx’s German Ideology and not with the theory of commodity fetishism in Capital. Tafuri followed his compatriot Tronti, and both were mired in an intellectual localism that seemingly misread Lacan because of his reading of Gilles Deleuze—or at least that is what transpires from Tafuri’s “Introduction: the Historical ‘Project’ ” in The Sphere and The Labyrinth. In 1966, Aldo Rossi published his The Architecture of City, largely indebted to the “weak Structuralism” of Claude Lévi-Strauss and French geographers. Throughout the 1970s and onward, the post-Rationalist project remained unknown in the work of this intellectual circle. The history of this missed encounter has yet to be written. The second missed opportunity is more depressing. Beginning in the early 1980s, in the guise of poststructuralism and deconstruction, French theory migrated to the other side of the Atlantic, there to be robbed of its radical critical edge in the American academy. François Cusset’s critique of this importation need not be rehearsed here.3 Within the misnamed “poststructuralism,” the so-called French “post-Marxists” retained a faint echo of Marxist “ideologytheory” but replaced the latter with other operational terms, some like “apparatus” (dispositif), borrowed from Foucault.4 Reduced and radically simplified versions of both deconstruction and poststructuralism were applied in architecture to generate “theory” that dismissed the whole project of ideology-critique. By the 1990s, a second wave of French theory had invaded architectural discourse in the form of a breathtakingly simplistic and naïve half-reading of Deleuze. It was this second wave that provided intellectual legitimacy for neobaroque architecture, with the theorists of the Liberal Left arrogantly dismissing ideology-theory and ideology-critique. This self-proclaimed “avant-garde,” including some former “radicals,” represents the reactionary front in architecture departments today.

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They have offered up architecture to the culture industry and a neoliberal agenda. They represent the anti-Enlightenment tide in the discipline. The importance of post-Rationalism, as Tom Eyers shows convincingly, is that it refocuses on the theory of ideology, and it does so by confronting precisely what blocks the production of rational scientific knowledge and demystifies the reenchantment of today’s obscurantists. It is only in this sense that within architecture, the intellectual Left not only can but must take up radical French philosophy. I believe that the project of post-Rationalism—as Eyers describes the theoretical work of the Cahiers—is the legacy in critical theory that is most pressing on our attention today. Its post May 68 continuation, through its “logic of failure,” as Peter Starr has magisterially written in his Logics of Failed Revolt: French Theory After May ’68, is the inheritance of the Left. Notwithstanding Žižek’s sophisticated critique of Althusser’s theory of ideology, with which we must reckon,5 the project of rational scientific knowledge articulated by Althusser and Lacan has not yet exhausted its radical potential. This is especially evident today in the works of Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, as well as those of Žižek himself. As Eyers notes in the concluding paragraph of his Post-Rationalism, it is a project that remains very much alive today: Just as . . . the division between thought and being marking the beginning of philosophy itself, so here does the at least partial irrecuperability of the Real to strategies of formalization announce the beginning, not the end, of a critical philosophical practice. Post-Rationalism accounts for the errancy of the Real not by an outright rejection of philosophy’s founding assumption, as in Laruelle, but via a progressive incorporation of nonphilosophical materials—mathematical, psychoanalytic, political—into its bounds, making of philosophy a theoretical practice that combines both a concern for formalization, and a capacious regard for objects that mark the limits of formalization—limits, finally, that do not announce the end of other project of formalization so much as they signal its radicalization, its touching of the Real.6

Notes Foreword 1 See Peter Bürger, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 2 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, 158, 235. For an alternate reading of Dürer’s engraving as a kind of protomodernist moment, see also Gabriel Josipovici, Whatever Happened to Modernism? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). 3 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 268, 331. 4 See José Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque. An Analysis of a Historical Structure, trans. Terry Cochran (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 5 Helen Hills (ed.,), “Introduction: Rethinking the Baroque,” in Rethinking the Baroque (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), 3. 6 See Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott (London and New York: Verso, 2006). 7 See, especially, the edited collections The Political Unconscious of Architecture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011); The Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014); and Architecture Against the Post-Political: Essays in Reclaiming the Critical Project (London and New York: Routledge, 2014).

Introduction 1 As we will later see, this ethic of the subject in modernity is an “ethic of desire” as established in the psychoanalytical theory by Jacques Lacan; see his The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960, ed. JacquesAlain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1992). 2 See Badiou and Žižek, Philosophy in the Present (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2009), 26. Badiou explains that by “thought” he means “the subject insofar as it is constituted through a process that cuts through the totality of established knowledge, or, as Lacan puts it, the subject insofar as it makes a hole in knowledge,” ibid. He further remarks “That the process of universal or truth—they are one and the same

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Notes thing—is transversal relative to all available instances of knowledge means that universal is always an incalculable emergence, rather than a describable structure. By the same token, I will say that truth is intransitive to knowledge, and even that it is essentially unknown,” ibid., 28. This notion comes from Gilles Deleuze, who used it first in his The Logic of Sense and later with Félix Gauttari in Anti-Oedipus. For the best exposition of this notion in Deleuze philosophy, see Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, with an introduction by Georg Steiner (London and New York: Verso, 1985), 55. See Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), 226. See Peter Hallward, Badiou, A Subject to Truth, foreword by Slavoj Žižek (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 6. See Tom Eyers, Post-Rationalism, Psychoanalysis, Epistemology, and Marxism in Post-War France (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). I will comprehensively discuss this circle in the last part of this study. As is mentioned by Eiland and Jennings, it is disturbing that the same Professor Franz Schultz at Frankfurt University who withdrew his support of Benjamin’s habilitation treatise, according to an eyewitness, “took part in the book burning in Frankfurt main square in 1933, at the very moment that the most prominent Jewish literary critic of the Weimar Republic went into forced exile,” in Walter Benjamin, ibid., 224. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, ibid., 182. Ibid., 235. Also see the fine analysis of this passage by Eiland and Jennings, ibid., 230–31. William Egginton, The Theater of Truth, The Ideology of (Neo)Baroque Aesthetics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 2. Ibid., 2. Ibid. Ibid., 39. Ibid., 38. Ibid., 2. See Alain Badiou, Conditions (London: Continuum, 2008). Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with Negative, Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993); see “Introduction.” See William Egginton, “Gracián and the Emergence of the Modern Subject,” in Rhetoric and Politics: Baltasar Gracian and the New World Order, ed. Nicholas Spadacini and Jenaro Talens. Hispanic Issues 14 (1997). See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka, Towards a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan, with a foreword by Reda Bensmaia (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota, 1986).

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21 See Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. and ed. with an introduction by Norman Madarasz (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 84. As Madarasz in his “translator notes” concisely explains, “The concept of the ‘compossible’ stems from Leibniz who held that in God’s understanding there exists a virtual force field of logic completely unlike the space-time field. God’s understanding is said to contain a multiplicity of contradictory, mutually destructive worlds, whose possibility for co-existing is termed ‘compossibility.’ As with another concept that Badiou takes on, the Principle of the Indiscernible, compossibility could not exist in actuality, hence God’s choice of the ‘best of all possible worlds’ in which Man is to live,” ibid., 157. 22 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1977), 103. 23 See Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, book XX, Encore 1972-1973, trans. Bruce Fink (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1998). 24 See Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, ibid. For an excellent psychoanalytical analysis of melancholy, see Justin Clemens’s Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2013). 25 Egginton, ibid., 132. 26 Ibid., see the “Conclusion.” 27 Ibid., 127. 28 See Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1989), 196. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 196–97. 31 Lacan, ibid., 112. 32 Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing, Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London and New York: Verso, 2012), 9. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., 10. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., 11. 38 See Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 89, also Žižek in The Sublime Object of Ideology, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spiritibid., 193. 39 Žižek, ibid. 40 Ibid. Žižek at this point in his text quotes Hegel: “in order that there may yet be something the void —which, though it first came about as devoid of objective Thing must, however, as empty in itself, be taken as also void of all spiritual relationship and distinctions of consciousness qua consciousness—in order, then, that in his complete void, which is even called holy of holies, there may

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Notes yet be something, we must fill it up with reveries, appearances, produced by consciousness itself. It would have to be content with being treated so badly for it would not deserve anything better, since even reveries are better than its own emptiness.” Ibid., 194. For more, see Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing, ibid., Ch. 4; and his more recent Absolute Recoil, Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical materialism (London and New York: Verso, 2014), especially Ch. 2, “From Kant to Hegel.” See Alain Badiou, Ethics, An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. and intro. Peter Hallward (London and New York: Verso, 2001). I come back to this book below. Alain Badiou, Deleuze, The Clamor of Being, trans. Louis Burchill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesotan Press, 2000). Louis Burchill in ibid., xiii. Slavoj Žižek, Organs Without Bodies, on Deleuze and Consequences (New York and London: Routledge, 2004) and Peter Hallward, Out of This World, Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (London and New York: Verso, 2006).

Chapter 1 1 See Alain Badiou’s “Preface to the Adventure of French Philosophy” in The Adventure of French Philosophy, ed., trans., and intro. by Bruno Bosteels (London and New York: verso, 2012). Badiou identifies the “moment” of which he is talking between the appearance of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and Gilles Deleuze’s (with Félix Gauttari) What is Philosophy? Between the two, Badiou names the figure of Bachelrad, Merleau-Ponty, Lévi-Strauss, Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan, and he includes himself in this list. As Bruno Bosteels points out, Michel Foucault had already in the “Introduction” to Georges Canguilhem, On the Normal and the Pathological, written about this division between, on the one hand, the “philosophy of experience, of sense and of subject,” and on the other hand, a “philosophy of knowledge, of rationality and of concept.” As Foucault wrote, “On the one hand, one network is that Sartre and Merleau-Ponty; and then another is that of Cavaillès, Bachelard and Canguilhem. In other words we are dealing with two modalities according to which phenomenology was taken up in France, when quite late—around 1930—it finally began to be, if not known, at least recognized,” ibid., xiii. See also, the introductions by Peter Hallward and Knox Peden respectively in volumes I and II of Concept and Form, ibid. See also a very clear exposition of the divided line above by Giuseppe Bianco in “Experience vs. Concept? The Role of Bergson in Twentieth-Century French Philosophy,” The European Legacy 16, no. 7 (2011), also, Knox Peden, “Descartes, Spinoza, and the Impasse of French Philosophy: Ferdinand Alquié versus Martial Gueroult,” Modern Intellectual History 8, no. 2 (2011).

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2 Badiou, ibid., liii. 3 Badiou, ibid. Bruno Bosteels, in his excellent commentary to Badiou’s book above, remarks that “The choice here is between conceiving of thought as fundamentally arising from within the depths of all-encompassing life (vitalism), or conceiving of thought as a cut that interrupts or breaks with the vital flux in favour of the strict assemblage of concepts (Formalism). Ultimately, however, the issue is not so much which reading is the correct one—the vitalist or formalist—but, rather, what the implications are of choosing one over the other,” see “Translator’s Introduction,” in ibid., xii. 4 Bosteels, ibid., xiv. 5 Badiou further traces this line and writes: “To deploy Kant’s metaphor of philosophy as a battleground on which we are all the more or less exhausted combatant: during the second half of the twentieth century, the lines of battle were still essentially constituted around the question of the subject. Thus, Althusser defines history as a process without a subject, and the subject as an ideological category, Derrida, interpreting Heidegger, regards subject as a category of metaphysics; Lacan creates a concept of the subject; Sartre or Merleau-Ponty, of course, allotted an absolutely central role to the subject. A first definition of the French Philosophical moment would therefore be in terms of the conflict over the human subject, since the fundamental issue at stake in this conflict is that of the relationship between life and concept,” ibid., liii–liv. 6 Ibid., lii. Badiou further points out that “Origins, operations, style and literature, psychoanalysis: four means by which to attempt to define contemporary French philosophy,” ibid. 7 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, forward and trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 8 In Deleuze, ibid., 110. 9 The term “repressive desublimation” comes from Herbert Marcuse, see his One-Directional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991) and Eros and Civilization, A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966). For my remarks about the “valorization” of “surplus-jouissance” I rely on the excellent study by Fabio Vighi, On Zizek’s Dialectics, Surplus, Substance, Sublimation (London and New York: Continuum, 2010). I will expand on my remarks above in later chapters. 10 Badiou, ibid., liv. 11 See his “Introduction: A Specter is Haunting Western Academia,” in The Ticklish Subject: The Absence Center of Political Ontology (London and New York: Verso, 1999). Žižek names this “holy alliance”: the New Age obscurantist (who wants to supersede the Cartesian paradigm towards a new holistic approach) and the postmodern deconstructionist (for whom the Cartesian subject is a discursive fiction, an effect of decentered textual mechanism); the Habermasian theorist of communication (who

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Notes insist on a shift from Cartesian monological subjectivity to discursive intersubjectivity) and the Heideggerian proponent of the thought of being (who stresses the need to ‘traverse’ the horizon of modern subjectivity culminating in current ravaging nihilism); the cognitive scientist (who endeavours to prove empirically that there is no unique scene of the Self, just pandemonium of competing forces) and the Deep Ecologist (who blames Cartesian mechanistic materialism for providing the philosophical foundation for the ruthless exploitation of nature); the critical (post-)Marxists (who insists that the illusory freedom of the bourgeois thinking subject is rooted in class division) and the feminist (who emphasizes that the allegedly sexless cogito is in fact a male patriarchal formation). (Ibid., 1) Žižek thus excludes none in academia, which must also include the orientation and the state of the academic thinking in architecture.

12 Ibid., 1. According to Žižek, two things result from this anti-Cartesianism: 1. Cartesian Subjectivity continues to be acknowledged by all academic powers as a powerful and still active intellectual tradition. 2. It is high time that the partisans of Cartesian subjectivity should, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet the nursery tale of the specter of Cartesian subjectivity with the philosophical manifestos of Cartesian subjectivity itself. (Ibid., 1–2) 13 See William Egginton, The Theater Of Truth, the Ideology of (Neo)Baroque Aesthetics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 14. 14 Ibid., 11. 15 Quoted in Egginton, ibid., 15. 16 Ibid., 15. 17 Ibid. 18 For this etymology, see Gregg Lambert, The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture (London and New York: Continuum. 2004). Also see John Rupert Martin, Baroque (New York: Harper and Row, 1977). Lambert cites Severo Sarduy as having said that “every essay on the Baroque opens by considering the origins of the term itself,” and adds to it that “as if the term could be described as a proverbial bone in the throat of traditional baroque criticism,” 1. 19 Martin, ibid., 11. As Lambert explains, this type of strained syllogism runs as follow: “If every A = B and some C does not equal B; then, some C does not equal A,” ibid., 1. 20 To give this determination in the meanings of baroque concept is to reconfigure all other meanings and definitions associated with it in the history of culture, art, architecture, and literature, inclusive of the expression of “mood” or “temperament,” or as a category of mind, or a term for “humor,” or a stylistic term of differentiation or historical period concept, or for that matter, as a term

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in reference to its opposite pair—Classical, Renaissance, Mannerism, Rococo, etc. Therefore, the universality of baroque is buried and remains repressed in deep constitution of the modern psyche only to return and erupt in the affective, convulsive, and ecstatic bodies of the “hysterics” and “psychotics” in modern subjectivities—in short, in the “pathological” bodies of the moderns—celebrated as such by the Surrealists. For more about the general history of baroque criticism, see Lambert, The Return of the Baroque, ibid. See Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, trans. Kathrine Simon (Ithaca: Cornel University Press, 1966). Without exception, especially in the fields of visual art and architecture, everybody refers to the first exposition and definition of the baroque by Wölfflin in this text at the same time that they occasionally offer a reserved criticism of his formalism and his “metahistoricism.” Lambert follows this academic ritual and lists Wölfflin’s major characterization of the baroque as “the supplementing of a linear style, which produced a sense of movement; a hierarchical sense of transience through the mixing of light and shadow (chiaroscuro); monumentality—a love for the grand, the massive, the colossal, the sublime and overpowering; the multiplication of surfaces, contours, and fold,— both to allude to a greater portion of space than what is visible, and to produce movement (often dizziness in the witness or spectator) by the suppression of right angles, or linear contours; finally, a preference for movement in place of repose, often in a vertical direction, which is technically produced by creating a sense of height, a sudden rapturous movement accompanied by a feeling of vertigo,” The Return of the Baroque, ibid., 18. See Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology (London and New York: Verso, 1999), “Introduction: A Specter Is Haunting Western Academia . . .” 2. Žižek puts all the dominant “academic powers” who enter into a “holly alliance” to exorcise precisely this Cartesian specter, from, as he says, New Age obscurantist, to postmodern deconstructionist, to Habermasian theorists of communication, to Heideggerian proponents of the thought of being, to cognitive scientist and the Deep Ecologist, to critical (post-) Marxists, and to the feminist. And then he rhetorically asks, “where is the academic orientation which has not been accused by its opponents of not yet properly disowning the Cartesian heritage? And which has not more ‘radical’ critics, as well as its ‘reactionary’ adversaries?,” 1. In this regard, also see Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), especially chs 1 and 2. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (Norfolk: Verso, 1974), 50. Theodor Adorno, Essays on Music, selected, with introduction, commentary, and notes by Richard Leppert, new translation by Susan Gillespie (Berkeley: University California Press, 2002), 64.

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26 Leppert, ibid., 64–65. 27 See Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1978), see especially the section, “Of the gaze as Objet Petit a.” 28 See Martin Jay, “Scopic Regime of Modernity,” in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988). Also see Martin Jay’s massive encyclopedic study, Downcast Eyes, The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 29 Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). Under “Scopic Regime of Cinema,” Metz wrote that “What defines the specifically cinematic scopic regime is not so much the distance kept, the ‘keeping’ itself (first figure of the lack, common to all voyeurism), as the absences of the object see.” As I will discuss, the baroque vision can be put in under the cinematographical term. 30 Jay, “Scopic Regime of Modernity,” ibid., 13. 31 Ibid., 10–11. 32 See Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). 33 Jay, ibid., 17. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., 20. 36 See Egginton, ibid., ch. 1. Egginton mentions that Maravall considered the Baroque to be an international phenomenon. 37 See Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1989). 38 For my reflections, I am following the excellent discussion by Mladen Dolar’s “If the Music be the Food of Love” in Opera’s Second Death by Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar (New York and London: Routledge, 2002). 39 Dolar, ibid., 7. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., 7–8. 42 Ibid., 8. 43 Egginton, “Gracian and the Emergence of the Modern Subject,” in Rhetoric and politics: Baltasar Gracian and the New World Order, ed. Nicholas Spadacini and Jena Talens. Hispanic Issues 14 (1997), 162. 44 For my use of the term “the society of enjoyment” and the other concepts associated with it, I am indebted to Todd McGowan’s The End of Dissatisfaction? Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004). 45 Gregg Lambert, The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 147. Lambert’s definition is based on his reading of

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Octavia Paz, who said, “Modernity is a polemical tradition which displaces the tradition of the moment, whatever it happens to be, but an instant later yields its place to another tradition which in turn is momentary manifestation of modernity,” 140. Lambert’s book, which is written from a Deleuzean stand, has many gaps. His treatment of the notion of the baroque in Jacques Lacan is from a second-hand source from the work of Christine Buci-Glucksmann, and therefore superficial and cursory. See Jacques Rancière, “Aesthetic, Inaesthetics, Anti-Aesthetic,” in Think Again, Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, ed. Peter Hallward (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 229. This essay is a critique of Badiou’s idea of “Inaesthetics.” Besides the recent Lambert’s text above, see Omar Calabrese, Neo-Baroque, A sign of the Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). Harold Segel, Baroque Poem, ibid.; and Robert Harbison, Reflections on Baroque (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). For an example, see Erik S. Roraback, “A Gateway to a Baroque Rhetoric of Jacques Lacan and Niklas Luhman,” in Prague English Studies and the Transformation of Philologies, ed. Martin Procházka and Ondrej Pilny (Prague: Karolinum Press, 2012); and Erik Roraback, “Re-Framing Modernity; Or, A Literary and Philosophical Baroque,” Parallax IV, no. 1 (Fall 2006). Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, boo XX, Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge 1972-1973, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998). Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986). See A. Kiarina Kordela, Surplus: Spinoza and Lacan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007). As I have mentioned before, for my criticism of Deleuze I follow Badiou’s Clamor of Being, Slavoj Žižek’s Organs Without Bodies, On Deleuze and Consequences, and Peter Hallward’s Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation. For a defense of Deleuze against Badiou, see Jon Roffe, Badiou’s Deleuze (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2012). Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of psychoanalysis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 73. In order to illustrate his discovery of notion of the gaze, Lacan has a charming “true” story to tell his psychoanalytical students in his seminar. When in his youth, and as an intellectual, he used to go out on the sea in Brittany on the boat with a bunch of fishermen living a harsh life to make money. One day, one of them, by the name of Petit-Jean, pointed out to him a floating can, a sardine can, on the surface of water under the sun and told Lacan “You

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59

Notes see that can? Do you see it? Well, it does not see you!” Lacan is bothered by this joke and did not find it amusing, but he says it was an interesting question. “To begin with, if what Petit-Jean said to me, namely, that the can did not see me, had any meaning, it was because in a sense, it was looking at me, all the same. It was looking at me at the level of the point of light, the point at which everything that looks at me is situated—and I am not speaking metaphorically,” ibid., 95. For this, see the excellent work of Hanneke Grootenboer, The Rhetoric of Perspective, Realism and illusionism in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still-life Painting (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 110. I am indebted to this work for the analysis of perspective related to anamorphosis that I discuss in this chapter. Grootenboer is among few exemplary “art historians” who is not limited to the traditional method of art history by taking on theory and philosophy in her discussion of the Dutch painting. Ibid., 111–12. Ibid., 112. See Joan Copjec’s excellent essay, “The Strut of Vision: Seeing’s Corporeality Support,” in Her Imagine There’s No Woman, Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002). In this essay, Copjec takes Jonathan Crary to task for his shortcoming in his Techniques of Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, for accepting uncritically the misreading of the film theory of Lacan’s Semina XI on the Gaze, and for not making a proper distinction between Renaissance perspective and Cartesian optics concerning the notion of embodiment and the inclusion of the “body” of the observer itself in the field of vision. In this respect, she correctly reminds us of the necessary distinction that must be made between Euclidean geometry and “projective geometry.” In Renaissance perspective, it is the latter that brings corporeality in the field of vision as opposed to the abstract geometry of vision residing in the Cartesian mind/body duality. For an elaborate discussion of theory of “Perspective” see the excellent study by Grootenboer, ibid. Also see the landmark study by Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, trans. John Goodman (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995). Damisch in his monumental work is deeply influenced by Lacan. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, ibid., 106. Joan Copjec asks “What finally is the purpose of the Renaissance perspective, what does it seek to do?” and provides this answer: “It seeks to capture in the scopic pereceptum the percipiens. Here, Lacan does not refer only to the appearance of the eye of the viewer in the scene, but also to the appearance of the gaze in the visible world. In the normal course of things, the gaze is not visible, for the subject separates himself from it in order to see.” Copjec, ibid., 195. She further notes, “A minimal difference or otherness dislocates the painting from itself, some distortion or anamorphosis delaminates,

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peels the painting away from itself. Against all the false wisdom of the standard textbooks, from Panofsky on, wherein Renaissance paintings are described as attempts to represent distance by creating the illusion of a deep three-dimensional space on flat surface, Lacan is saying that these paintings demonstrate rather the existence of that pure distance which separates the perceiving subject from herself.” Ibid., 195–96. 60 Ibid., 107. 61 As Lacan writes, Art is mingled in science here. Leonardo de Vinci is both a scientist, on account of his dioptric construction, and an artist. Vitruvius’s treatise on architecture is not far away. It is in Vignola and in Alberti that we find the progressive interrogation the geometral laws of perspective, and it is around research on perspective that is centered a privileged interest for the domain of vision—whose relation with the institution of the Cartesian subject, we cannot fail to see. (Ibid., 86)

62 63 64 65 66

67

It must be mentioned that Lacan repeatedly refers to the reading of his friend Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s works, the posthumous Visible and Invisible and his previous Phenomenology of Perception, as the background for his discussion of the Gaze. Significantly, Merleau-Ponty arrived at Freud’s work and the question of the unconscious only late in his philosophy, mainly in Visible and Invisible. There was some common ground between the two friends. As Joan Copjec writes, Merleau-Ponty insisted that vision not be divorced from carnality. “In MerleauPonty’s signature notion of the ‘flesh,’ one can plainly discern the ‘uncolonized’ or ‘inhuman’ dimension of the drive, which tears holes in the tamed or socialized body. Lacerating the project surface of the body-ego image and causing the field of vision to be haunted by what remains invisible in it, by the impossible to see,” Copjec, ibid., 1930–94. But as Copjec points out, Lacan took a different position. “Aligning himself on this issue more with Sartre than with Merleau-Ponty, he emphasizes the way the Other’s gaze destabilizes our reality, causing it to tremble at its base. When the gaze appears, vision is annihilated,” ibid., 195. Ibid., 108. Grootenboer, ibid., 3. Ibid., 124. Grootenboer, ibid., 4. The translator of Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts explains the term dompteregard: “The sense of the verb dompter is ‘to tame,’ ‘to subdue.’ . . . Lacan has invented the phrase dompte-regard as a counterpart to the notion of trompe-l’oeil, which has of course passed into English language,” ibid., 105, n.1. Lacan, ibid., 111.

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68 Žižek, ibid., 40. 69 This edition is titled Anamorphoses, Les perspectives Depravées – II (Paris: Flammarion, 1996). Referring to the work of Roland Barthes and Jean-François Lyotard, among others, Baltrusaitis extensively quotes from Lacan’s Seminar XI and writes, “La psychoanalyse s’y intéresse résolument. On a pensé que la forme du vautour que Freud a décelée dans les plis de la robe de Sainte Anne de Léonard de Vinci en était une. Lacan s’est beaucoup occupé de sa fonction comme structure exemplaire avec l’éspace géométral faisant paraître le fantasme,” 299. 70 Jurgis Baltrusaitis, Anamorphic Art, trans. W. J. Strachan (New York: Harry Abrams, 1977). 71 Lacan, ibid., 83. 72 Ibid., 84. 73 Ibid. 74 Grootenboer, ibid., 101. 75 Lacan, ibid., 88. 76 Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 10. Here is the response of the Queen that Žižek quotes: Queen: It may be so; but yet my inward soul Persuades me it is otherwise: howe’er it be, I cannot but se sad, so heavy sad, As, though in thinking on no thought I think, Makes me with heavy nothing faint and shrink. Bushy: ‘Tis nothing bit conceit, my gracious lady. Queen: ‘Tis nothing less: conceit is still deriv’ed From some forefather grief; mine is not so, For nothing that begot my something grief: ‘Tis in reversion that I do possess; But what it is, that is not yet known; what I cannot name; ‘tis nameless woe, I wot.’ (Ibid.) 77 78 79 80 81

Ibid., 10. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 11–12. This term has its affinity with the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and, in particular, to Adorno’s way of writing philosophy. Simon Jarvis in his study of Adorno has succinctly explained this term: “ ‘Immanent’ means ‘remaining within’. An immanent critique is one which ‘remains within’ what it criticizes. Whereas a

Notes

82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95

96 97 98

99

100 101

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‘transcendent’ critique, a critique from outside, first establishes its own principles, and then uses then as a yardstick by which to criticize other theories, immanent critique starts out from the principles of the work under discussion itself. It uses the internal contradictions of a body of work to criticize that work in its own term.,” in Adorno, A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1998), 6. The term “transcendental critique” goes back to Kantian philosophy, which requires a more lengthy discussion. See specifically, Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006). See Kojin Karatani, Transcritique: On Kant and Marx (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2005). Ibid., 1–2. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 3. Žižek, The Parallax View, ibid., 4. Ibid., 17. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. See Monika Kaup, “Becoming-Baroque: Folding European Forms into the New World Baroque with Alejo Carpentier,” CR: The New Centennial Review 5, no. 2 (2005). Ibid., 108. Ibid. Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity (New York: Sage publications, 1994), and a long-overdue translation of her The Madness of Vision, On Baroque Aesthetics, trans. Dorothy Z. Baker (Athens: Ohio State University, 2013). Also see the French edition of her La folie du voir, Une esthétique du virtuel, which includes her previous two books into one volume with an added chapter titled “Une esthétique du virtuel” (Paris: Galilée, 2002). See Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup, eds., Baroque New Worlds, Representation, Transculturalization, Counterconquest (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010). Egginton, ibid., 22. See Omar Calabrese, Neo-Baroque, A Sign of the Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); and Angela Ndalianis, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004).

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102 Ndalianis, ibid., 5. 103 Egginton, The Theater of Truth, ibid., 82. 104 Gregg Lambert, The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture (London and New York: Continuum, 2004); and Timothy Murray, Digital Baroque, New Media Art and Cinematic Fold (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 105 See Robert Harbison, Reflections on Baroque (London: Reaktion Books, 2000). 106 Harbison, ibid., 219. 107 Ibid.

Chapter 2 1 2 3 4 5

6 7

8

9

10

Philippe Sollers, “Lacan,” in lacanian ink 39, 2011. See Anaëlle Lebovits-Quenehen, “Lacan, The Devil,” in lacanian ink 39 (2011), 15. Ibid. See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). On this issue, please see my “The Baroque Idea: Lacan contra Deleuze, and Žižek’s Unwritten Book!,” International Journal of Žižek Studies 5, no. 2 (2009). Online journal, www.zizekstudies.org Ibid., 14. The word “enjoyment” is used as the translation of the original French jouissance, but it does not cover all the senses signified in the French word. All other multiple significations of the term should be clear in the context it is used. The literature on the notion of jouissance is vast. For a useful and quick explanation, see the entry “Jouissance” in Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London and New York: Routledge, 1996); also see Dylan Evans, “From Kantian Ethics to Mystical Experience: An Exploration of Jouissance,” in Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, ed. Dany Nobus (London: Rebus Press, 1998). Also see Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1992). Jacques Lacan, “L’étourdit,” in Autres écrits, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Le Seuil, 2001), 483, quoted by Alexandre Leupin in Lacan Today: Psychoanalysis, Science, Religion (New York: Other Press, 2004), xxxiii–xxxiv. Slavoj Žižek, For They Know not What They Do, Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London and New York: Verso, 1991). For a discussion of this point in Žižek, see the critical study on his work by Matthew Sharpe, Slavoj Zizek, A Little Piece of the Real (Burlington: Ashgate, 2004).

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11 Sollers, ibid., 93. 12 Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge 19721973, Encore, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: N. N. Norton, 1998), 116. 13 Lacan, ibid., 106. Suzanne Barnard gives a concise definition of this Lacanian neologism lalangue: Lacan understands llanguage—as the (m)Other tongue—to the language of the being that ex-sists in Other jouissance. This jouissance can be heard in the “body” of language—the letter of the body—just as it was first heard in the tone and rhythm of the mother(’s) tongue. This jouissance also is associated with what we might call the “navel” of the unconscious, that is, the absent origin of the unconscious beyond which interpretation and knowledge cannot reach.

14

15 16 17 18

19 20 21

22

This definition can be found in Reading Seminar XX, Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality, ed. Suzanne Barnard and Bruce Fink (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 184. Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, ibid., 106. “In French,” as the translator of Lacan, Bruce Fink, reminds us, “je me range, could equally well mean ‘I situate myself ’ or ‘I am situated’ (by someone else),” N. 9, ibid. The translator notes that “la manche is a rubber (or round), as in the card game of bridge, or a sleeve; la manche is the English Channel,” ibid. Ibid. Žižek, Looking Awry, An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture, op. cit. Lacan recommended his training psychoanalyst to read Foucault’s work, mainly The Birth of Clinic and The Order of Things. For a discussion of Foucault’s book and his analysis of Las Meninas in the context of the baroque idea see Lambert, The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture, op. cit. Ibid., 113. Ibid., 116 See Slavoj Žižek, “The Real of Sexual Difference,” in Reading Seminar XX, Lacan’s Major Work on love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality, ed. Suzanne Barnard and Bruce Fink (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002). In this study, I am indebted to monumental work of Žižek, upon which I draw massively for my understanding of Jacques Lacan and my theoretical approach. Bruce Fink, translator of the Seminar XX, explains that “mension is a neologism, combining the homonyms mansion (from the Latin mansio, ‘dwelling,’ which in French was the term for each part of theater set in the Middle Ages) and mention (‘mention’, ‘note’, or ‘honors’, as in cum laude). It is also the last part of the word ‘demention’.”

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23 Lacan, op. cit., 113. 24 Ibid. See also the original French text, Encore, Livre XX, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975), seminar of May 8, 1973, 105. 25 Ibid., 109. 26 For my discussion, I will follow Steven Z. Levine’s astute commentary in his Lacan Reframed (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2008). 27 Suzanne Barnard, “Introduction” to Reading Seminar XX, ibid., 18. 28 See Levine, Lacan Reframed, ibid., 111. 29 Ibid., 113. 30 Ibid., 118. 31 See “Knowledge and Truth,” Chapter VIII in Seminar XX, ibid. 32 Levine, ibid., 121. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., 122–23. 35 For this point, see Gérard Wajcman, “Desublimation,” in lacanian ink 29 (2007). Wacjman explains that Freud’s point of view on art was limited: he was only in phase with art and the theory of art, if not his time—if one understands by that the time of his maturity—at least at the summit of Parnassus. It must be said that in matters of art, Freud was not exactly what one would call a modern. One might even have trouble believing that, from the points of dates, he was the exact contemporary of the cinema, which was born with psychoanalysis in 1895 (and about which he said nothing), of cubism (Les Demoiselles d’Avignon dates from 1907), of Kandinsky and of the abstract which emerges in 1910, of Malevitch’s Carré noir sur fond blanc or Duchamp’s readymade (the Roue de bicyclette dates from 1915) or even, in music, in Vienna, his own city, of Schoenberg (the Pierrot lunaire is dated 1912). (Ibid., 90) 36 Levine touches on the so-called “baroque style’ of Lacan’s oral speech by pointing out that Lacan openly embraced baroque excess as his personal emblem in Encore. His alliterative and assonant manipulation of language constituted a formal fashioning of the verbal signifier that mimed the overtly theatrical display of the baroque style. . . . Lacan was specially keen on pushing his public speech, like Bernini’s soft stone, to a point of communicative excess where the artistic sublimation of the failure of the sexual relationship might be felt to release a compensatory visceral remnant of unrepressed, wholly unreasonable jouissance. (Ibid., 121–22) 37 Severo Sarduy, “The Baroque and Neobaroque,” in Latin America in Its Literature, ed. César Fernández Moreno (New York: Holms and Meier, 1980), 115, reprinted in Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup, eds., Baroque New

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38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52

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World, Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010). Lambert has discussed Sarduy’s book on Barroco published in 1975 in a chapter of his book The Return of the Baroque, ibid. Sarduy, ibid., 115. Ibid. Ibid., 130. Ibid. Ibid., 132. Bruce Fink, Lacan to the Letter: Reading Écrits Closely (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 149–50. Fink, ibid., 150. Ibid. Lacan, Encore, Seminar XX, op. cit., 42. Ibid., 43. For more of this, see Fink, Lacan to the Letter, op. cit. As Marc de Kesel in his excellent book, Eros and Ethics, Reading Jacques Lacan’s Seminar VII (Albany: Sunny Press, 2009) points out, Lacan conceived the movement inside the psychic apparatus in terms of the model of Newtonian gravitational forces found in the universe, in terms of the decentering of our “objective” world. Psychoanalysis in general is the “subjective” counterpart of this “objective” decentering. In particular, “one can say that Lacanian psychoanalysis is the ‘subjective’ counterpart of the revolution which, with Einstein, has been accomplished on the ‘objective’ level by Newtonian physics.” Ibid., 297. But more crucially, psychoanalysis further radicalizes this “subjectivity” by stripping the Cartesian subject of its fixed kernel and by placing it outside the subject’s reach as something “extimate.” It is important to also keep in mind that, as de Kesel, referring to the work of Guy Le Guafey, L’éviction de l’origin, points out, that Newtonian physics still has a “voluntaristic God” as the ultimate guarantor for his system, whereas Einstein’s relativity theory is a physical model that does away with this guarantor. For this point, see Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment, Six Essays on Woman and Causality (London and New York: verso, 1994), especially part I. For more of this, see de Kesel, ibid. See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992). See Gérard Wajcman, “Desublimation,” in lacanian ink, 29 (2007), 92. Lacan, The Seminars of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ibid., 136. Ibid., 120–30.

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56 For my extended discussion on these notions (das Ding, sublimation), I follow closely the excellent analysis by de Kesel of Lacan’s seminar in his Eros and Ethics, ibid. 57 Lacan, ibid., 125. 58 See Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London and New York: Routledge, 1996). Evans point out that das Ding is entirely outside language, and outside the unconscious as opposed to Freud’s “thing-presentation,” which can be found in unconscious as a linguistic phenomenon. Further, “The pleasure principle is the law which maintains the subject at a certain distance from the Thing. . . . making the subject circle around it without ever attaining it,” ibid., 205. 59 Lacan, ibid., 130. 60 Ibid., 120. Lacan adds that “Heidegger situates the vase at the center of the essence of earth and sky. It unites first of all, by virtue of the act of libation, by its dual orientation—upward in order to receive and toward the earth which it raises something. That’s the function of the vase,” ibid. 61 Ibid., 121. 62 Ibid., 122. 63 Ibid., 135–36. 64 Ibid., 112. 65 For a full discussion of this, see Wajcman’s “Desublimation,” ibid. I discuss the notion of “desublimation” fully in my forthcoming “Building and Sublimation.” 66 De Kesel, ibid., 180. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid., 181. 69 De Kesel explains further that for Heidegger The jar is essentially not as an object made by a sovereign subject (as modernity has thought since Descartes), but stems from a “Seinsgeschick.” With this term he refers to being as an occurrence, as a happening that can never be reduced to a closed totality (as is supposed in the classical metaphysics’ idea of Substance). This is why the being of the jar must be located in its emptiness, in its void. . . . Without going into Lacan’s “forced” interpretation of Heidegger, one can at least say that he organizes his subversive reading of Heidegger from the viewpoint of his “primacy of the signifier.” That the jar should be thought as a “fashioning of the signifier,” is something Heidegger would never say. (Ibid., n. 44, 314) 70 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ibid., 99. 71 De Kesel, Eros and Ethics, ibid., 187. 72 Ibid., 189.

Notes 73 74 75 76 77 78

79 80

81 82 83 84 85 86

87

88 89 90 91 92 93

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Ibid. Ibid., 191. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ibid., 107. For an extended discussion of this, see de Kesel, ibid. Jeanne Lafont, “Topology and Efficiency,” in Lacan: Topologically Speaking, ed. Ellie Ragland and Dragan Milovanovic (New York: Other Press, 2004), 9. For a comprehensive history of this relationship, see Élisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan (New York: Columbia University, 1977), especially ch. 28, “Mathemes and Borromean Knots.” Lafont, “Topology and Efficiency,” ibid., 3. Roudinesco reports that the painter François Rouan met Lacan in 1972. He was working on a series of pictures called The Exists from Rome, or Gates, which used the “braiding” technique. Lacan was in the painter’s studio and was fascinated by this technique, which Lacan called “painting on strips.” Lacan gave his Encore seminar to Rouan, in which he “discovered not only the Borromean knots, which he had never heard before, but also a phrase that struck him with great force,” which is the famous definition of the baroque Lacan gave in Encore, see ibid., 380. Roudinesco, ibid., 360. Ibid., 361. David Metzger, “Interpretation and Topological Structure,” in Topologically Speaking, ibid., 142. Metzger, ibid., 139. Ibid., 142. For this definition and more, see the “Introduction” to Lacan: Topologically Speaking, ibid. Also see Stephen Barr, Experiments in Topology (New York: Dover 1964). See Nathaniel Charraud, “Topology,” in A Compendium of Lacanian Terms, ed. Huguette Glaowinski, Zita Marks, and Sara Murphy (London and New York: Free Association books, 2001), 204. See Bruce Fink’s seminal study, The Lacanian Subject, Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). Jacques-Alain Miller, “Matheme: Topology in the Teaching of Lacan,” in Lacan: Topologically Speaking, ibid., 31. Miller, ibid. See Roudinesco, Lacan, ibid., 363. Miller, “Matheme: Topology in the Teaching of Lacan,” ibid., 32. See Jacques-Alain Miller, “Extimitée,” in Lacanian Theory of Discourse, Subject, Structure and Society, ed. Mark Bracher et al. (New York and London: New York University Press, 1994). Miller, ibid., 76.

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95 96 97 98 99

Ibid., 77. Ibid. Roudinesco, Lacan, ibid. Ibid., 463–64. For more, see Zita M. Marks, “Borromean Knot,” in A Compendium of Lacanian Terms, ibid. 100 See Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire Livre XXIII, Le sinthome (Paris: Editions du Seuile, 2005). 101 Marks, “Borromean Knot,” ibid., 40. 102 Ibid., 41.

Chapter 3 1 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, forward and trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1993), 33. 2 Deleuze, ibid. 3 According to François Dosse, Buci-Glucksmann, who published her book on the Baroque in 1986, discussed baroque aesthetics with Deleuze at the time that he was working on his book The Fold. He reports his interview with BuciGlucksmann, in which she said, “We talked about the baroque of the continues, meaning the model of the Leibnizian fold, Bernini, Italy, the concept, and what I had worked on: the baroque of the void, the rhetoric of the baroque in Naples, Venice, and Spain,” in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Gauttari, Interesting Lives (New York: Colombia University Press, 2010), 453. According to Dosse, Deleuze’s death put an end to their conversion. 4 Deleuze, ibid., n. 16, 147. 5 See Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956), in particular the chapter “The Look.” 6 See Alain Badiou, “Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque,” in Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, ed. Constantin V. Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), reprinted in Alain Badiou, The Adventure of French Philosophy, ed., trans. and intro. Bruno Bosteels (London and New York: Verso, 2012). 7 For this information, see Dosse, ibid., ch. 24. 8 Ibid., 450. 9 Ibid., 451. 10 October 28, 1986, quoted in Dosse, ibid., 452. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Badiou, “Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque,” ibid., 61.

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14 Ibid. 15 Badiou, ibid. 16 Quoted in Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 16. Also see, Anne Sauvagnargues, Deleuze et l’art (Paris: OUF, 2005). 17 Lecercle, Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature, ibid., 26. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 See Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 81–82. I must point out here that my reading of Deleuze is “framed” by my reading of Badiou’s critical analysis of his work; see the useful introduction to the translation of the Badiou’s book for the history of the rivalry between these two prominent philosophers. 21 Lecercle, ibid., 26. 22 Lecercle, ibid., 16. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 17. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. Lecercle further explains that “the concept first appears in the seventh series of The Logic of Sense, where Deleuze, reading Lewis Carroll, develops his theory of portmanteau words (the term is Carroll’s own: Deleuze calls them ‘esoteric words’). Portmanteau words, we remember, are the result of the contraction of two distinct words in into one, as when a Victorian portmanteau, a kind of suitcase, was folded,” ibid. 29 Ibid., 19. 30 Ibid., 20. 31 Ibid., 21. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 For Žižek’s enormous challenge to the commonplace interpretation of Hegel, see his Less Than Nothing, Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London and New York: Verso, 2012); also see his most recent Absolute Recoil, Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism (London and New York: Verso, 2014). 35 Deleuze, The Fold, ibid., 38. 36 Ibid. 37 Deleuze, The Fold, ibid., 35. 38 See Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Badiou and Deleuze read Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010).

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39 This book was later translated into English, Bernard Cache, Earth Moves, The Furnishing of Territories (Cambridge: The MIT, 1995). 40 Deleuze, The Fold, ibid., n. 2, 144. 41 Deleuze, ibid. 42 See Lecercle, ibid., 198. 43 See Lecercle, ibid. 44 Deleuze, The Fold, ibid., 27. 45 See Tom Conley, “Folds and Folding,” in Gilles Deleuze, Key Concepts, ed. Charles J. Stivale (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), 176. 46 Conley, ibid. 47 Ibid., 10. 48 Ibid., 49 Deleuze, The Fold, ibid., 4. 50 Ibid., 11. 51 Ibid., 8. 52 Ibid., 11. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid., 3. 56 Gregg Lambert, The Non-philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, ibid., 40. 57 Lambert, ibid., 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid., 42. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid., 48. 66 See Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, forward by Paul Bové (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1988). 67 On this point, see “Translator’s Preface: Portraiture in Philosophy, or Shifting Perspective” by Louise Burchill in Badiou’s Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, ibid. 68 Deleuze, ibid., 96. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid., 96–97. Deleuze refers to Foucault’s The Order of Things and continues to say, “If thought comes from outside, and remains attached to the outside, how come the outside does not flood into the inside, as the element that thought does not and cannot think of? The unthought is therefore not external to thought but lies at its very heart, as that impossibility of thinking which doubles or hollows out the outside” ibid., 97.

Notes 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80

81 82 83 84 85 86 87

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Ibid., 104. Ibid., 107. Ibid., 110. Ibid., 110. Ibid. Ibid., 112. Ibid., 118. Ibid., 118–19. Ibid., 119. In his book, Badiou, as mentioned above, in its provocative take on Deleuze’s entire philosophy, caused an intensive controversy and debate as to whether or not it presented a “faithful portrait of the matter.” The translator of his book, Louise Burchill, discusses this matter and points out that in fact what Badiou did with Deleuze’s philosophy is exactly what Deleuze himself claimed to have done in his reading of other philosophers: the operation in which one “approaches the author from behind” and “forces the latter to give birth to a philosophical ‘offspring’ that is indeed his, although singularly different from the ‘official’ progeny,” xvi. Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, ibid., 80. Ibid., 86. Ibid., 89. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 91. Deleuze, The Fold, ibid., 137.

Interlude I 1 William Egginton, The Theater of Truth, The Ideology of (Neo)Baroque Aesthetics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 2. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., 51. 4 Ibid., 2. 5 In Alain Badiou’s Conditions (London: Continuum, 2008), 18. 6 Peter Hallward, Badiou, A Subject to Truth, forward by Slavoj Žižek (University of Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 153. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. Hallward here is quoting Penelope Maddy from his Realism in Mathematics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 16. 10 Ibid.

220 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26

Notes Ibid., 154. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 154–55. Peter Hallward, ibid.; Ed Pluth, Alain Badiou (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2010); Sam Gillespie, The Mathematics of Novelty, Badiou’s Minimalist Metaphysics (Melbourne: re.press, 2008); Bruno Bosteels, Badiou and Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 20011); Oliver Feltham, Alain Badiou, Live Theory (London: Continuum, 2008); Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound, Enlightenment and Extinction (New York: Palgrave, 2007). For my knowledge of event and void in Badiou’s work, I have mainly benefited from Hallward’s comprehensive discussion. See also the collection edited by Peter Hallward, Think Again, Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2004). Also, the early reflections on Badiou’s work by Slavoj Žižek in his The Ticklish Subject, The Absent Center of Political Ontology (London and New York: Verso, 1999), with which Hallward takes issue in his abovementioned book. Quoted in Hallward, ibid. Badiou, Condition, ibid., 23. This chapter in Badiou’s book must be read in conjunction with the previous chapter titled “The (Re)Turn of Philosophy Itself,” ch. 1. For more on the four conditions of philosophy, see different chapters in Conditions. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 13. For the concept of “subtraction” in Badiou, see “On Subtraction” in Conditions, ibid. Also see Hallward, ibid. Hallward, ibid., 245. Quoted in Hallward, Ibid. See Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. ed., with an introduction by Norman Madarasz (Albany: State University New York Press, 1999), 35. As Norman Madarasz in his introduction usefully notes, “The Concept of the ‘compossible’ stems from Leibnitz who held that in God’s Understanding there exists a virtual force field of logic completely unlike the space-time field. God’s understanding is said to contain a multiplicity of contradictory, mutually destructive worlds, whose possibility for co-existing is termed ‘compossibility.’ As with another concept that Badiou takes on, the Principle of the Indiscernibility, compossibility could not exist in actuality, hence God’s choice of the ‘best of all possible worlds’ in which man is to live,” in Manifesto, ibid., note iii, 157. In Hallward, ibid., 245–46. Hallward comments that “The condition of a truly contemporary philosophy have been marked out, in their various domains, by Cohen, Lacan, Celan, and activists inspired by mobilizations ranging from May 68

Notes

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

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to the [Palestinian] Intifada: ultimately, Badiou writes, ‘our time will be represent table as the time in which these events, in thought, took place’,” ibid., 246. Ibid., 245. Quoted in Hallward, ibid. Alain Badiou, Ethics, An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London and New York: Verso, 2001), 42. Ibid., 42–43. Ibid., 67–68. Ibid., 68. Ibid. Ibid., 68–69. Ibid., 69. Hallward, ibid., 117. Ibid. For more on the meaning of “situation” and the terms “edge of the void,” “the evental site” and for all other specific terminologies used by Badiou, readers should consult Being and Event; also see Hallward, ibid., and Ed Pluth, ibid. Badiou, Ethics, ibid., 69. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005), 180. Ed Pluth, Alain Badiou (London: Polity, 2010), 63. Badiou, Being and Event, ibid., 181. Pluth, ibid., 64. Ibid. Badiou, Ethics, ibid., 69. In ibid., 138. Ibid., 139. Ibid., 139–40. Ibid., 140.

Chapter 4 1 See Slavoj Žižek’s “Introduction: Cogito as Shibboleth,” in Cogito and the Unconscious, ed. Slavoj Žižek (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998), 2. 2 See Kyoo Lee, Reading Descartes Otherwise: Blind, Mad, Dreamy, and Bad (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 119. 3 Žižek, ibid. Žižek writes: What one has to do, is to bring to light the philosophical implications of psychoanalysis, that is, to translate, to transpose psychoanalytic propositions

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Notes back into philosophy, to “elevate them to the dignity of philosophical propositions”: in this way, one is able to discern the ex-timate philosophical kernel of psychoanalysis, since this transposition back into philosophy explodes the standard philosophical frame. (Ibid., 2)

4

5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

One has to attempt, as I try to do in this study, to apply the same method of inquiry to the Baroque concept within the discourse of reason through the psychoanalytical concepts in order to render visible its innermost core that philosophy disavows. Michel Foucault, History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalaf, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalaf (London and New York: Routledge, 2006 and 2009). This English edition is the translation of 1972 edition published by Gallimard with the title Histoire de la folie a l’âge classique. Earlier, an abridged edition had been published in English, titled Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Random House, 1965, [Vintage Books, 1973]); this was the translation of the abridged edition by Foucault in French in 1972. See Jacques Derrida, “Cogito and History of Madness,” in Writing and Difference, trans and intro. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978). See Foucault “My body, this paper, this fire,” Appendix II of 1972 edition, in History of Madness, ibid. Foucault, History of Madness, ibid., 35. Foucault discusses the Hieronymus Bosch paintings The Ship of the Fools, The Cure of Madness, The Temptation of St Antony, and others. See Roy Boyne, ibid., for the critical analysis of Foucault’s discussion of these paintings. Ibid., 40. Ibid., 243. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 43. Ibid. Ibid., 51. Ibid. Ibid. Boyne, ibid., 33. Quoted in Foucault, History of Madness, ibid., 44. The complete passage in original text reads as follows: But perhaps, although the sense sometimes deceive us when it is a question of very small and distant things, still there are many other matters which one certainly cannot doubt, although they are derived from the very same senses: that I am sitting here before the fireplace wearing my dressing gown, that I feel this sheet of paper in my hands, and so on. But how could one deny that these

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hands and that my whole body exists? Unless perhaps I should compare myself to insane people whose brains are so impaired by a stubborn vapor from the black bile that they continually insist that they are kings when they are in utter poverty, or that they are wearing purple robes when they are naked, or that they have a head made of clay, or that they are ground, or that they are made of glass. But they are all demented, and I would appear no less demented if I were to take their conduct as a model for myself. (Meditation on First Philosophy, trans. Donald A. Cress [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1979], 14) 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

Boyne, ibid., 37. Foucault, ibid., 45. Quoted in Boyne, ibid., 38. Foucault, ibid., 45. Boyne, ibid., 46. Foucault. Ibid., 47. Ibid. Ibid., 48. See Roy Boyne, Foucault and Derrida, The Other Side of Reason (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990). I will come back to this text below. For a more comprehensive discussion of Derrida’s response, see Boyne, ibid. Boyne, ibid., 60. Ibid., 67. See more of this in Boyne, ibid. See “Interlude 2: Cogito in the History of Madness,” in Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London and New York: Verso, 2012), 327. Ibid. Ibid., 329. Ibid. Also see Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” ibid., 59. Foucault, History of Madness, ibid., 573. Quoted in Boyne, ibid., 75. See Derrida, “Cogito and History of Madness,” ibid., 55–56. Ibid. Ibid. Foucault, ibid., 573. Žižek, ibid., 333. Žižek recites the anecdote that “when Foucault was asked from what position he was speaking, he employed the cheap rhetorical trick claiming that this was a ‘police’ question, ‘who are you to say that’—but he combined this reply with the opposing claim that genealogical history is an ‘ontology of the present,’” ibid. I explain the technical Lacanian tern “ex-timate” below that Žižek has used.

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41 See Jacques Derrida, “ ‘To do Justice to Freud’: The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis,” in Resistances of Psychoanalysis, trans. Peggy Kamuf, PascalAnne Brault, and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). We will come to this text later. 42 Derrida, ibid., 75. 43 Quoted in Derrida, ibid., 84. 44 Derrida, ibid., 82. 45 Ibid. 46 Foucault, ibid., 332. 47 Boyne, ibid., 76. 48 Ibid., 77. 49 See Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–82, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2005). 50 For this, I am following Žižek’s argument in his “Introduction: Cogito as Shibboleth,” ibid. 51 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 141. 52 Žižek, “Introduction: Cogito as Shibboleth,” ibid. 53 See Foucault, The Order of Things, ibid. He wrote: As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps is nearing the end. If those arrangement were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the mermen do not more than sense of possibility—without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises—were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the see. (Ibid., 387) 54 Žižek, “Introduction: Cogito as Shibboleth,” ibid., 4. 55 Foucault, History of Madness, ibid., XXIX. 56 Ibid., 543. It is interesting to note that Derrida, in his critique of Foucault, was quite sympathetic to this notion of the madness as the “absence of oeuvre.” He wrote, “The expression ‘to say madness itself ’ is self-contradictory. To say madness without expelling it into objectivity is to let it say itself. But madness is what by essence cannot be said: it is the ‘absence of the work,’ as Foucault profoundly says,” Derrida, “Cogito and the History of madness,” ibid., 43. In this regard, Boyne writes, “Thus the experience of madness is not in the book. It is registered only by a certain depth of feeling, a pathos, a longing for madness that simultaneously desires satisfaction and embraces the frustration guaranteed by the fact that language is reason’s tool,” in Boyne, Derrida and Foucault, ibid., 57–58. 57 Boyne, Derrida and Foucault, ibid., 61.

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58 Žižek, “Introduction: Cogito as Shibboleth,” ibid., 5. 59 See Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993). Chapter 1, “I or He or (the Thing) Which Thinks.” Žižek opens this chapter with a brilliant analysis of the film Blade Runner in order to illustrate the point of cogito in film noir, which he then follows with the analysis of Kant’s point of the subject. 60 Ibid., 12. 61 Ibid., 13. 62 Ibid. 63 See the landmark analysis of the term by Jacques-Alain Miller, “Extimité,” in Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure and Society, ed. Mark Bracher et al. (New York and London: New York University Press, 1994). Miller writes, “This expression ‘extimacy’ is necessary in order to escape the common ravings about a psychism supposedly located in a bipartition between interior and exterior,” ibid., 75. Further, “Extimacy is not the contrary of intimacy. Extimacy says that the intimate is Other—like a foreign body, a parasite,” ibid., 76. Miller points out that “if we use the term ‘extimacy’ in this way, we can consequently make it be equivalent to the unconscious itself,” ibid., 77. 64 Ibid., 14. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid., 15. Žižek further writes: I cannot acquire consciousness of myself in my capacity of the “thing which thinks.” In Blade Runner, Deckart, after learning that Rachael is a replicant who (mis)perceives herself as human, asks in astonishment: “How can it not know what it is?” We can see, now, how, more than two hundred years ago, Kant’s philosophy outlined an answer to this enigma: the very notion of selfconsciousness implies the subject’s self-decenterment, which is far more radical than the opposition between subject and object. (Ibid.) 67 See Slavoj Žižek’s The Parallax View (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006), ch. 1. 68 See Hassan Melehey, Writing Cogito, Montaigne, Descartes, and Institution of the Modern Subject (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997).

Chapter 5 1 In Jacques Lacan’s The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. JacquesAlain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1978), the session of February 19, 1964, 75. Lacan made the statement in reference to his friend, Maurice Merleau-Ponty: “I mean, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty points out,

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2

3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13

Notes that we are beings who are looked at, in the spectacle of the world. That which makes us consciousness institutes us by the same token as speculum mundi,” ibid. See Christine Buci-Glucksmann, The Madness of Vision: On Baroque Aesthetics, trans. Dorothy Z. Baker (Athens: Ohio State University, 2013), in original French La folie du voir, published in 1986. She adopted the term “all-seeing world” from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968). Buci-Glucksmann, who frequently cites Jacques Lacan in support of her argument, also cites Merleau-Ponty’s above book and also refers to the latter’s essay “Eye and Mind.” This has prompted commentators to equate the argument of Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the “spectacle of the world,” in which we are looked at—mentioned by Lacan in his seminar—with that of the notion of gaze. In this respect, as we have seen, Gilles Deleuze, who cites Buci-Glucksmann’s text in his The Fold, dismisses it as being of concern to Lacan and Merleau-Ponty and not to him. This is to fail to notice Lacan’s response to Jacques-Alain Miller’s question at the end of the seminar about the “subversion of Cartesian space” and whether it is in proximity to his philosopher–friend after reading his Visible and Invisible. He categorically denied that his thesis has anything to do with his reading of that text. In this regard, as I have mentioned previously, one has to notice that Lacan’s idea of the gaze has more affinities with Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and his notion of “The Look.” Buci-Glucksmann, The Madness of Vision, ibid., xviii. As she described it in the “Author’s preface” in the English edition of The Madness of Vision, ibid. The quotation by Quevedo reads, “Nothing for me is disenchanting. The world has cast a spell on me,” in Baroque Reason, ibid., 37. Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason, ibid., 134–35. See the “Introduction” to Baroque Reason by Bryan Turner, ibid. Turner provides a useful background for Buci-Glucksmann’s analysis with his sociological discussion about the debate between modernity and postmodernity in recent years and discussion of Max Weber in tracing the genealogy of capitalist modernity and the religious discourse of Protestantism. See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), originally published in 1930 by Allen and Unwin. See Turner’s excellent discussion in his “Introduction,” ibid. Ibid., 12. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1999). See Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Gramsci and the State (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1981). Buci-Glucksmann, Baroques Reason, ibid., 129.

Notes 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

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Ibid., 129. Ibid., 130. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 131. Ibid., 131. Ibid., 133. Ibid., 139. Ibid. Ibid. This is in “Prelude,” titled “A ‘Je ne Sais Quoi. . . ,’,” in The Madness of Vision, ibid., xix–xx. Ibid., xx. Ibid. The translator of The Madness of Vision in a footnote refers to Martin Jay’s argument in his Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), to which I will come above, usefully points out that as “Martin Jay reports, Lacan ‘critically appropriated Merleau-Ponty’s chiasmic ontology of the visible and invisible, which he redescribed in terms of ‘the eye’ and the ‘gaze’.” She nevertheless correctly adds, “Just as for Merleau-Ponty, the visible preexists the advent of the seeing subject, so for Lacan the gaze preexists subject’s eye. However Lacan rejects Merleau-Ponty’s ‘search for a primordial voyeur, anterior to the split between the eye and the gaze’.” Ibid., 128–29. The word voyance in French means “clairvoyance,” which the translator of Buci-Glucksmann renders as “vision.” For example, in Chapter 3, titled “Seeingness; Or, the Eye of the Phantasm,” Buci-Glucksmann quotes Lacan’s passage from Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis wherein Lacan says “I must, to begin with, insist on the following: in the scopic field, the gaze is outside, I am looked at, that is to say, I am a picture. That is the function that is found at the heart of the institution of the subject in the visible,” ibid., 36, in Lacan, ibid., 106. She does not reproduce Lacan’s famous diagram, in which the notion of the “gaze” is in the center of his discovery of the “blind spot” in Renaissance perspective. Further, Buci-Glucksmann quotes Lacan again where he talks about the “function of painting” and makes remarks about his friend: I would stress that it is in setting out from painting that Maurice MerleauPonty was particularly led to overthrow the relation, which has always been made by thought, between the eye and the mind. What he has sown in a quite admirable way, beginning with what he calls, With Cezanne himself, those little blues, those little browns, those little whites, those touches that fall like rain from the painter’s brush. (Ibid., 37, see also Lacan, ibid., 110)

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29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

49 50 51 52

Notes There are other passages in her book where Buci-Glucksmann repeatedly cites Lacan from his Feminine Sexuality on his definition of the Baroque that I do not reproduce here as I have already discussed them in the chapter on Lacan above. Ibid. Ibid., xxi. Ibid. As the translator explains, the concept of lalangue in Lacanian theory is related to the “union of libido and signifier in language, the side of language that that is itself a form of jouissance.” See also Bruce Fink, The Lacan Subject, Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). Buci-Glucksmann, The Madness of Vision, ibid., 2. Ibid., 5. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 29. See Martin Jay, “The Scopic Regime of Modernity,” in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988). Ibid., 9. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 16. Ibid. Peter Wollen, “Baroque and Neo-Baroque in the Age of the Spectacle,” in Point of Contact 3 (April 1993), 175. Buci-Glucksmann, The Madness of Vision, ibid., 101. Ibid. Buci-Glucksmann, La folie du voir, ibid., 206. (all translations from French in this section are mine). Ibid., 219–20. I have modified my translation of Deleuze from original translation of The Fold. See also Gilles Deleuze, The Fold, Leibniz and The Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 17. Ibid., 220. Deleuze, ibid., 16. Buci-Glucksmann, La folie du voir, ibid., 223. Ibid. Here she cites in her support Stan Allen’s “Painting and Architecture: Conditional Abstraction,” in Journal of Philosophy and the Visual Arts, no. 5 (1995), on Abstraction. She also cites the famous argument by Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky on “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal.” She writes, “This phenomenal transparency is an effect of global organization of abstract structure, like a mirror-like without a mirror. Perhaps an ultimate crystal, hence impure,

Notes

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

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which would discover in abstract energy of inflections a power of fractalization in manner of Leibniz.” Ibid., 224. Ibid., 227. Ibid. Ibid., 228. Ibid., 230. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 236. Ibid., 235–36. Ibid., 236. Ibid., 259. Ibid., 268.

Chapter 6 1 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, intro. George Steiner (London and New York: Verso, 1977). 2 See Gillian Rose’s seminal essay “Walter Benjamin—Out of Sources of Modern Judaism,” in The Actuality of Walter Benjamin, ed. Laura Marcus and Lynda Nead (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1998). 3 See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). 4 Rose, ibid., 99. 5 Rose, ibid., 102. 6 Quoted in Buci-Glucksmann, ibid., 74. 7 Ibid., 76. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 76–77. 10 Ibid., 77. 11 Rose, ibid., 95. 12 Ibid. By “the pile of debris,” Rose here is referring to Benjamin’s phrase in his “Theses On the Concepts of History,” which I will discuss later. 13 See Boris Groys, Introduction to Antiphilosophy (London and New York: Verso, 2012). 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 92. 16 Ibid., 93. 17 Ibid., 94.

230 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26

Notes Ibid., 95. Ibid., 96. Ibid., 97. Groys goes further into a discussion of art after Duchamp to make his case on reproduction in Benjamin. He distinguishes between two different topologies: those of the sacred and profane. The latter one is “diasporic” copy of reproduction, in his words. In relation to Duchamp, appropriation, and pop art, Groys remarks that in order to establish their works, “which are ‘original’ copies, as original, by giving them a new position in the museum context. The diasporic copy is thus not a copy with a second status. The situation seems rather to be that in the profane, diasporic space we are involved in an endless play of difference, which at least at first sight deconstructs the opposition between original and copy by offering the opportunity of producing originals by way of copying.” Ibid., 103. And further, he writes that “whether a diasporic copy is described as a copy or as an original is thus not a question of knowledge, but rather an acknowledgement—a question of political, or rather theological-political, decision. We can expect from the diasporic copy or at least hope from it, that it is different, that it departs from the original, that it shows the face of the Other, the new, the unexpected,” ibid., 103–04. He then points out that, of course, Benjamin did not posit the departure from the original “but rather its faithful reproduction,” ibid. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 4—1938-1940, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 389. See Michael Lowy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” (London and New York: Verso, 2005). See Mladen Dolar’s excellent text A Voice and Nothing Else (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006), 6. See Dolar, ibid., for this historical information. Ibid., 5. Dolar notes in the footnote that, as it turned out, when the machine was finally examined in 1840, there was enough space for a normal adult person and no need for a dwarf, a hunchback, or a child, despite appearances. The idea of a human dwarf inside is almost as old as the automaton itself. . . . The automaton finished its days in a fire in Philadelphia in 1854. (189–90)

27 28 29 30 31

Lowy, ibid., 26. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 28. See Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003).

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32 Žižek, The Sublime of Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1989), 136. 33 Žižek, ibid., 137. 34 I am using this phrase after the title of the book edited by Slavoj Žižek, Lacan, The Silent Partners (London and New York: Verso, 2006). 35 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectic of Seeing, Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1989), 39. 36 Peter Fenves, “Of Philosophical Style—from Leibniz to Benjamin,” in Boundary 2, Benjamin Now, Critical Encounters with The Arcades Project, ed. Kevin McLaughlin and Philip Rosen, vol. 30, no. 1 (Spring 2003). Fenves writes, Since everything is reducible to—and reduced in—monads, they function as representations of everything in an abbreviated manner. Disobeying his own prohibition on technical term, Leibniz adopts a wholly unfamiliar word as a privileged name for primary being. Access to the order of monadic reduction and representation depends, however, on a faculty entirely different from that in which phenomena are perceived. Benjamin finds a name to such a faculty: Unvernehmen. ‘Primordial perception’. (78) 37 Fenves, ibid., 87. 38 Ibid., 86. Fenves insightfully goes on to say that “The counterpart to this materialization, today, one might add, may be Microsoft, for all its emphasis on miniaturization, from its name onward, wants nothing so much as endless expansion by means of ever more inevitable ‘windows’,” 86–87. I will come back to this point in a later chapter. 39 Quoted in Fenves, ibid., 86. 40 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, and London,1999), 531. 41 See the last chapter of Grootenboer’s The Rhetoric of Perspective, ibid. 42 Peter Fenves, op. cit., 1. 43 Ibid., 2. 44 For more on this, see Žižek, For They Know not What They Do, Enjoyment as a Political Factor, ibid.

Chapter 7 1 See Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Philosophical Fragment, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

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2 See the collection The Culture Industry, Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. and intro. J. M. Bernstein (London and New York: Routledge, 1991). This collection includes the famous polemical piece Adorno wrote in critique of Walter Benjamin’s Artwork essay titled “On the fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” which already contains the theory of “culture industry” before his piece in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Also see David Jenemann, Adorno in America (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 3 Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism, Adorno or the Resistance of the Dialectic (London and New York: Verso, 2007), 144. 4 J. M. Bernstein, “Introduction,” in Adorno, Culture Industry, ibid., 9. 5 Ibid. 6 Gerhard Schweppenhauser, Theodor W. Adorno: An Introduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 147. 7 By this term I am referring to the title of the book by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London and New York: Verso, 2005). 8 Quoted in Gerhard Schweppenhauser, Theodor W. Adorno: An Introduction, ibid., 42–43. 9 Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason, The Aesthetics of Modernity (London: Sage, 1994). 10 See Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003). 11 The term “unhistorical kernel of history” belongs to Slavoj Žižek in his interpretation of Kierkegaard’s notion of “repetition,” see Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). 12 See the informative introduction by Bryan S. Turner to Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason, ibid. 13 See the excellent “Introduction” by J. M. Bernstein to The Culture Industry, ibid., 26–27. 14 I am basically referring to the Lacanian psychoanalytical philosophy in Slavoj Žižek’s writings; for an example, see the first chapter in his The Metastases of Enjoyment, Six Essays on Woman and Causality (London and New York: Verso, 1994). 15 See José Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque. An Analysis of a Historical Structure, trans. Terry Cochran, forward by Wlad Godzich and Nicholas Spadaccini (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 16 Maravall, ibid., ch.r 3, “A Mass Culture,” 88. 17 Ibid., 12–13. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 58.

Notes 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

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Ibid. Ibid., 85. Ibid. Ibid., 90. Ibid., 178. Peter Wollen, “Baroque and Neo-Baroque in the Age of the Spectacle,” Point of Contact 3 (April 1993), 175. Ibid. See ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 175–6. Schweppenhauser, Theodor W. Adorno, An Introduction, ibid., 145. See Adorno, The Culture Industry, ed. J. M. Bernstein, ibid., 98. Ibid., 99. See Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide, Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 18. Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 1928-1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 130. J. M. Bernstein, “Introduction” to Culture Industry, ibid., 7. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 22–23. Ibid., 24. See Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason, ibid. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 8.

Chapter 8 1 See Slavoj Žižek, “I Do Not Order My Dreams,” in Opera’s Second Death, ed. Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 107. 2 Michel Foucault, “Preface to the 1961 edition,” in History of Madness (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), xxix. Foucault explains that the Greeks had a relation to a thing they called “hubris”: “The relation was not solely one of condemnation: the existence of Thrasymachus, or that of Callicle, is proof enough of it, even if their discourse comes down to us already enveloped in the reassuring dialectics of Socrates. But the Greek Logos has no opposite,” ibid. 3 Ibid., 543. 4 For an exposition of “madness” as a link between philosophy and psychoanalysis, see Slavoj Žižek, “Introduction: Cogito as a Shibboleth,” in Cogito and the Unconscious, ed. Slavoj Žižek (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998).

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5 The word “excess” is not exactly synonymous with “surplus” in the technical meaning of the latter used in philosophical and psychoanalytical theory as well as in the Marxian theory of “surplus value,” which convey a transcendental dimension in Kantian sense, as the thing that is not given to sensible intuition. 6 I mainly use the term “suture” in specific sense that Alain Badiou has used in Manifesto for Philosophy, trans., ed., and intro. Norman Madarasz (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999). Also see Jacques-Alain Miller, “Suture (Element of the Logic of the Signifier)” in Concept and Form, Key Texts from the Cahiers pour l’Analyse, 2 volumes edited by Peter Hallward and Knox Peden (London and New York, Verso, 2012). Also, Slavoj Žižek, “ ‘Suture,’ Forty Years Later,” in Concept and Form, vol. 2, ibid.; see also the introduction to Volume 1 by Peter Hallward, “Theoretical Training,” ibid. For the use of the word “Condition,” I follow Badiou’s sense of the word. For my expansion of the idea of “condition” in Badiou, I follow the excellent essay by Alenka Zupancic, “The Fifth Condition,” in Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, ed. Peter Hallward (London and New York: Continuum, 2004). In later chapters, I extensively discuss these words in the above texts. 7 See the recent useful book by Simon Choat, Marx Through Post-Structuralism, Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze (London: Continuum, 2010). 8 See François Cusset, French Theory, How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed The Intellectual Life of the United States (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), XVI. Cusset adds that “praising the autonomy of the signifier for itself, the death of the subject for itself, or general economy of floating signs and drifting symbols detached from any stable standard, only gives food for thought to management gurus, postmodern sociologists, and the intellectual lobbies of a ‘self-controlled,’ society,” ibid. 9 Ibid. Bill Readings’s groundbreaking text, which came out in 1997, has not lost its force. He powerfully critiqued the institution of the contemporary university under the empty jargon of “academic excellence” by technocratic managements, which is in fact the abandonment of the original ideas of the university as “university of culture” as was first instituted in Germany with Humboldt University in Berlin. For more, see Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 10 See Jean Baudrillard and Jean Nouvel, The Singular Object of Architecture, trans. Robert Bonnono, forwarded by K. Michael Hays (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). 11 Cusset, ibid., 242–43. 12 See Slavoj Žižek, “Foreword,” in Peter Hallward, Badiou, A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota press, 2003), xi. 13 Žižek, ibid. As Bruno Bosteels in his introduction to Badiou’s Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy (London and New York: Verso, 2011), points out, for Badiou these

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sophists would include Wittgenstein, Derrida, Vattimo, Lyotard, Rorty, or Barbra Cassin, 16. Alain Badiou, Manifesto For Philosophy, trans., ed., with an intro. Norman Madarasz (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 135. Badiou, ibid., 117. Ibid., 116. See Douglas Murphy, The Architecture of Failure (London: Zero Books, 2012). Ibid., 106. See ibid., 108. I follow Badiou in his Manifesto for Philosophy, ibid. See Plato, Complete Work, edit., John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997). Also see the acclaimed Plato’s Republic, A Dialogue in 16 Chapters by Alain Badiou (New York: Colombia University Press, trans. Susan Spitzer with intro. by Kenneth Reinhard, 2012). See François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the intellectual Life of the United States, trans. Jeff Fort (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). Significantly, among Deleuze’s early important books, Difference and Repetition and the Logic of Sense are not mentioned in architectural discourse. Instead, only those works that Deleuze coauthored with his friend Félix Guattari after he met him in 1969, mainly A Thousand Plateaus and later his seminal text, The Fold: Leibniz and The Baroque, have been referred to. I am referring to the title of comprehensive work by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London and New York: verso, 2005). See A. Kiarina Kordela, $urplus: Spinoza, Lacan (Albany: State university of New York Press, 2007). See Slavoj Žižek, Organs Without Bodies, On Deleuze and Consequences (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 184–85. In this respect, more problematically, as Eyal Weizman in his Hollow Land, Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London and New York: Verso, 2007), informs us, Deleuze’s texts he coauthored with his friend Félix Guattari, along with other poststructuralist and deconstruction literature, were studied by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) to guide their urban warfare against Palestinians. Weizman writes: “Headings such as Difference and repetition—The Dialectic of Structuring and Structure; ‘Formless’ Rival Entities, Fractal Maneuver; Velocity vs. Rhythms; Wahhabi War Machine, Post-Modern Anarchist; Nomadic Terrorists, and so on, employed the language of French Philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Gauttari,” 200. Weizman reports on his interview with Shimon Naveh, the co-director of the Operation Theory Research Institute in the IDF, who said that he read the work of the architect Bernard Tschumi: When I asked him, “why Tschumi?!” (in the annals of architectural theory a special place of honor is reserved to Tschumi as a “radical” architect of the left)

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Notes he replied: “The idea of disjunction embodied in Tschumi’s book. Architecture and disjunction became relevant for us. . . . Tschumi has another approach to epistemology; he wanted to break with single-perspective knowledge and centralized thinking. He saw the world through a variety of different social practices, from a constantly shifting point of view. ” I then asked him, if so, why does he not read Derrida and deconstruction instead? He answered, “Derrida may be a little too opaque for our crowd. We share more with architects; we combine theory and practice. We can read, but we know as well how to build and destroy, and sometimes to kill.”

But regarding this, we must be careful; as Žižek remarks, we must not conclude “the nonsensical accusation that Deleuze and Gauttari were theorist of militaristic colonization—but the conclusion that the conceptual machine articulated by Deleuze and Guattari, far from being simply ‘subversive,’ also fits the (military, economic and ideologico-political) operational mode of contemporary capitalism,” see Slavoj Žižek in Mao On Practice and Contradiction (London and New York: Verso, 2007), 27. It is an historical irony and unfortunate turn as Deleuze and Gauttari both were quite sympathetic to the Palestinian cause around the 1980s, during the time that A Thousand Plateaus was being prepared for publication. For the details of the involvement, see the massive work by François Dosse, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Intersecting Lives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), ch. 14. 26 For this term, I follow Slavoj Žižek in his In Defense of the Lost Causes (London and New York: Verso, 2008).

Chapter 9 1 For this term, see Bruce Fink, Lacan to the Letter, Reading Écrits Closely (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2004). 2 See Yves-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formlessness, A User’s Guide (New York, Zone Books, 1997). 3 See Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2010). 4 See Slavoj Žižek, “From Purification to Subtraction: Badiou and the Real,” in Think Again, Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, ed. Peter Hallward (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 175. 5 Žižek, ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Quoted in Alenka Zupancic, “The Fifth Condition,” in Peter Hallward, ibid., 198. Also see Gérard Wajcman, L’objet du Siècle (Paris: Verdier, 1998).

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8 Robert Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectivity, On the Kantian Aftermath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 304. 9 Ibid., 301. 10 Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London and New York: Verso, 2012), 255. 11 Žižek, ibid. He further writes: “Suffice it to recall recent trends in the visual arts: gone are the days of simple statues or framed paintings—what we see now are the frames themselves without paintings, dead cows and their excrement, videos of the inside of the human body (gastroscopy and colonoscopy), the inclusion of odors in the exhibition, and so on so forth. . . . Perhaps this gives us one possible definition of postmodern art as opposed to modernist art: in postmodernism, the transgressive excess loses its shock value and is fully integrated into established art market,” ibid., 255–56. 12 See Susan Buck-Morss’s analysis of Walter Benjamin’s Artwork essay, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered,” in October 62(Fall 1992). Also see Neil Leach, The Anaesthetics of Architecture (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999). 13 Among those critics, writers, and architects in the academy who would be in the rank of the hyper-Deleuzeans, a partial list would include Greg Lynn, Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Sara Whiting, Robert Somol, Jeffrey Kipnis, and Patrik Schumacher. There are numerous less informed or less indoctrinated in various academic institutions who would also fit this list. 14 See Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, ibid. 15 For more on this brand of Deleuzeanism in the larger context of French theory, which is packaged more in the American academy, see François Cusset, French Theory, How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Company Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, trans. Jeff Fort (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 16 See Alain Badiou, The Birth of History, Times of Riots and Uprising (London and New York: Verso, 2012), 10–11. 17 See the three volumes of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Multitude, War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Books, 2004); Commonwealth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009). 18 Badiou, ibid., 10–11. 19 For my reflections, I am following Jean-Jacques Lecercle in his Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). 20 Lecercle writes that a concept of representation can be constructed around five characteristics, which I abbreviate here as 1) Representation by a “difference between representative and represented. They do not belong to the same order

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Notes of being”; 2) Representation by the separation “between representative and represented: there is no contiguity or continuity between them”; 3) “Replacement,” “the representative is present in the absence of the represented”; 4) “Hierarchy,” “The representative and the represented are not only separated, but differently valued”; 5) The fifth and last characteristic “is generalization, or abstraction, of the representative from the represented,” ibid., 124. For more of this, please see Lecercle ibid., ch. 5. See Douglas Spencer, “Architectural Deleuzism: Neoliberal space, control and the ‘univer-city’,” in Radical Philosophy (July–August 2011). I am indebted to this essay for developing my critique of the contemporary “New Architecture.” Spencer, ibid., 9. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 11. In the footnotes, Spencer gives the sources and information useful to cite here: See, for example, Robert Somol and Sara Whiting, “Notes Around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism,” Perspecta 33, and Mining Autonomy, 2002, and “Okay Here’s the Plan,” Log (Spring/Summer 2005); George Baird, “ ‘Criticality’ ” and Its Discontent,” Harvard Design Magazine 21 (Fall 2004/Winter 2005); Jeffrey Kipnis, “Is Resistance Futile?” Log (Spring/ Summer 2005); Reinhold Martin, “Critical of What? Towards a Utopian Realism,” Harvard Design Magazine 22 (Spring/Summer 2005). “Postcritical” writings have often taken Koolhaas’s well-known reservations about the possibility of a crucial architecture as an explicit reference point. See Rem Koolhaas and Reinier de Graaf, “Propaganda Architecture: Interview with David Cunningham and Jon Goodbun, Radical Philosophy 154 (March/April 2009), pp. 37-47,” ibid., n. 7, 20. Quoted in ibid. It seems that our liberal Deleuzean architectural critics badly need to educate themselves and take introductory seminars not only in history of psychoanalytical thoughts in the twentieth century but also in contemporary critical philosophy and the intellectual history of radical political Left movements. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, forward by Paul Bové (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 115. Ibid., n. 45, 150. Spencer, ibid., 14. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 12. Also see Luc Boltansky and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliot (London and New York: Verso, 2007), 97. Spencer, ibid., 13. Ibid. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 157–58.

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Chapter 10 1 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 35. 2 A book in English by Bernard Cache appeared in 1995, titled Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories, trans. Anne Boyman and edited by Michael Speaks (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1995). It was cited as a translation of an unpublished manuscript written in 1983 under the title Terre meuble. It is not clear if this is the same manuscript that Deleuze referred to in his footnote mentioned above. 3 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Colombia University Press, 1994), 2. 4 Ibid., 186. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 187. 7 See Kojin Karatani, Architecture as Metaphor, Language, Number, Money (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995). 8 Quoted in François Cusset, French Theory, How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 242. 9 See Lecercle, Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature, ibid. 10 In Cache’s book mentioned above, one does not find any statement concerning the “two principles” that Deleuze mentions. 11 Deleuze, The Fold, ibid., 28. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 35. 14 Cache, ibid., 44. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 44–45. 17 Ibid., 45. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 47. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Deleuze, The Fold, ibid., 28–29. 23 See Slavoj Žižek, “An Answer to Two Questions,” in Adrian Johnston, Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations, The Cadence of Change (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2009), 192. 24 See Slavoj Žižek, “The Architectural Parallax,” in Living in the End Times (London and New York: 2010), 258.

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25 Fredrik Stjernfelt, “The Points of Space,” in Fold and Folding in Architecture, ibid., 37. 26 Žižek, ibid., 250.

Chapter 11 1 For the title of this chapter, I am inspired by the title of a chapter in Slavoj Žižek’s Organs Without Bodies, On Deleuze and Consequences, “Is it Possible Not to Love Spinoza?” (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). 2 See Kurt W. Forster, Frank Gehry (Bonn: Cantz, 1999) for positive comments made by these artists. Gehry in fact entered into dialogue and collaboration with some of the Minimalist artists of his time. 3 See Anthony Vidler’s introduction to his edited book, Architecture Between Spectacle and Use (Williamston: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2008). I believe that the critique of Hal Foster (on which the above book is based), as novel and serious as it may be in invoking Guy Debord’s The Society of Spectacle and his famous statement about the accumulation of “Image” and “Capital” that Foster has inversed, is also inadequate. See his “Image Building” in Vidler, ibid. 4 I examine this issue in more detail in my forthcoming book, Building Sublimation: The Surplus Object of Architecture. 5 See Slavoj Žižek’s analysis in his “The Architecture Parallax” in Living in the End Times (London and New York: Verso, 2010), reprinted in The Political Unconscious: Re-opening Jameson’s Narrative, ed. Nadir Lahiji (Surrey: Ashgate, 2011). 6 See “The Sartorial Superego,” in Joan Copjec, Read My Desire, Lacan against the Historicism (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994). I follow extensively this highly sophisticated and important essay for my argument. 7 Quoted in Copjec, ibid., 65. Also see Catherine Clément, The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Colombia University Press, 1983), 55. 8 See Élisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan and Company. A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925-1985, trans. and foreword by Jeffrey Mehlman (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), 105. She further informs us that “In order to gauge the importance of his efforts, his ethnographic endeavors should be associated with his accomplishment in psychiatry. The passion for fabrics, hems, pleats, ruffles, in a word the fetishized love of the adorned body of the (preferably Arabs) female illuminates in retrospect the other passion, the one Clérambault bore for erotomania, that is, for the madness of an insane love which he himself had lived in secretly ‘marrying’

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the wax figurines that served as his models in his study of the art of draping,” ibid., 107. And more significantly, “At a time when French clinical practice was completing its dismemberment of Charcot’s teaching, Clérambault rechanneled the archaic passion of hysteria into the psychotic register, thus participating in that tendency of modernity through which the—exacerbated—feminine was to regain its patents of nobility,” ibid. See Stanislas Von Moos, “Les femmes d’Alger,” in Le Corbusier et La Méditerranée (Marseille: Editions Paranthèses, 1987). Copjec, ibid., 71. Copjec mentions two addresses made to the Société Ethnographique by Clérambault (which were published) that “provide important clues to the historical dimension of his fascination with fabrics,” ibid. About the ethnographic ambition of Clérambault, Copjec cites a contemporary defender who said that Clérambault “was the first to consider that flowing folds of clothes as the signature of a race, a tribe. He conducted his research on Assyrian tunics, Greek chlamys, Roman Toga, Arab cloth,” ibid., 72. Ibid. She adds, “But this superficial description of the relation between an interest in drapery and advance of colonialism not only leaves much about this relation and about Clérambault’s photographs unexplained, it also simplifies the notion of origins that operated in this context,” ibid., 73–74. Quoted in ibid., 74. Ibid., 115. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 38. Ibid., no. 27, 148. Copjec, ibid., 116. As Copjec informs us, “Fold was capitalized in that curious way Clérambault had of allowing ordinary words to pop up in upper case),” ibid. See Sergio Villari, J.N.L. Durand (1760-1834), Art and Science of Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1990). Villari, ibid., 34. Ibid. Quoted in Ibid., 35. Ibid. Ibid., 36. Villari remarks that, “This ‘reduction’ of the disciplinary corpus brought with it a conceptual reconfiguration of architecture that shattered the sensibilities of all those who considered architecture the noblest of the arts—first and foremost Napoleon. Durand took an ironic tone about the noble presumptions concerning a ‘subject that in well-to-do society is dealt with the more readily the less one knows about it.’ To those who believed that the adoption of scientific method of the study would bring about the sterility or even vulgarization of the subject, he

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26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

Notes proposed surprisingly: ‘Either society is made for an architecture and architects, or architecture and architects for society; is there anyone worthy of the name of architect who can remain in doubt even for an instant about the answer to such question?’.” Villari further points out that “This unusual perspective and historically prescient questioning of the social role of the architecture would torment the conscious of European architecture for a long time. . . . The growing aversion of the Emperor to the intellectuals who inspired that culture is well known. The Ideologues, exiled or liquidated by the Tribunal, quickly disappeared from the national political scene. . . . Like them, Durand was politically and morally opposed to both the Napoleonic regime and the Restoration, and paid for this with silence and isolation,” ibid., 36–37. Copjec, ibid., 75. On this point, see Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, The Title of the Letter, A Reading of Lacan, trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992). It should be mentioned here that Lacan reserved his admiration with criticism on this text. Ibid., 77. Ibid., 78. Quoted in ibid. Ibid. 79–80. See J. C. Flugel, The Psychology of Clothing, 3rd edn (London: The Hogarth Press, 1950). Quoted in Copjec, ibid., 81. Ibid. Ibid. See Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 161. Quoted in ibid. See J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 322. Evans, ibid. Quoted in Evans, ibid. For more on this, see Evans, ibid., 148. Ibid. Copjec, ibid., 82. Also see Durand, Précis des leçons d’architecture, ibid., 6. Copjec, ibid., 82. Ibid. Copjec mentions Jacques-Alain Miller, who used the term “despotism” for this principle of utility, and cites his seminal essay “Jeremy Bentham’s Panoptic Device,” in October 41 (Summer 1987).

Notes 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

Copjec, ibid., no. 29, 249. Ibid., 85. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 87. Ibid. Ibid., 94. Ibid., 92. Ibid., 115. Ibid., 106. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. 115. See Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2008), 9. Groys, ibid. Ibid. See Sven Lütticken, “Idolatry and Its Discontent,” New Left Review 44 (March– April, 2007). Levy, Ibid. Ibid., 71. See Lütticken, “Idolatry and Its Discontent,” ibid. Gilbert-Rolfe, ibid., 9. Ibid., 59. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 60. Ibid., 80. Ibid., 81. Ibid., 83. Ibid. Ibid., 84. Ibid., 85. Ibid., 126. See Hal Foster, “Master Builder,” in Design and Crime, and Other Diatribes (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 37. Ibid. See Anthony Vidler, Warped Space. Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 228. Ibid., 229. Foster, ibid., 38.

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Interlude II 1 Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge 1972– 1973, Encore, The Seminars of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1998), 116. 2 For more on this, see Ellie Ragland and Dragan Milovanovic, eds., Lacan: Topologically Speaking (New York: Other Press, 2004). 3 See Tom Eyers, Post-Rationalism, Psychoanalysis, Epistemology, and Marxism in Post-War France (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 4 Tom Eyers, Lacan and the Concept of the “Real” (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2012). 5 Peter Hallward and Knox Peden, eds., Concept and Form: Key Texts from the Cahiers pour l’Analyse, Volume One, and Concept and Form: Interviews and Essays on the Cahiers pour l’Analyse, vol. 2 (London and New York: Verso, 2012). 6 Peter Hallward in his “Introduction: Theoretical Practice” to the first volumes cites François Dosse as saying that structuralism must be recognized as “the single most symptomatic, most ambitious and most radical manifestation of the structuralist project of the 1960s,” Concept and Form, vol. 1, ibid., 2–3. Further, Dosse writes: “The Cahiers pour l’Analyse in the sacred ENS on the rue d’Ulm was the most symptomatic emanation of the structuralist flavor of the sixties, in its unbounded ambitions, in its most radical scientific experiments, in its most elitist appearance as an avant-garde/popular dialectic that claimed to speak in the name of the world proletariat, and which is used to legitimate the most terrorist and terrifying of theoretical practice. . . . It was this unharmonious mixture that inspired an entire generation of philosophers.” (François Dosse, History of Structuralism vol. 1, trans. Deborah Glassman [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977], 238),” n. 6, 3. “Dosse describes the broad Althusserian project as enabling a ‘practical combination of an often mad political voluntarism—a desperate activism—and the notion of the subjectless process that resembled a mystical commitment’ (299tm),” ibid. Hallward adds that the Cahiers must be also recognized as the “most significant collective participation of the some of the theme that would soon be associated with ‘post-structuralism’—an emphasis on precisely those aspects of a situation that remained un- or under-structured, on absence, lack, displacement, exception, indetermination, and so on,” ibid., 2–3. 7 See “The Chain of Reason: An Interview with Alain Grosrichard,” in Concept and Form, vol. 2, 223. 8 See Knox Peden, “Introduction: The Fate of the Concept,” in Concept and Form, ibid. Peden writes: “Like Althusser, Lacan had a specific investment in thinking the relationship between the ‘concept’ and ‘practice’. Indeed, concepts qua concepts were central to this period of his teaching, as signaled by the title of the seminar, delivered in 1964, that had the most proximate impact on the Cercle d’Épistémologie [Editorial Collective]: The Four Fundamental Concepts

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of Psychoanalysis. There Lacan makes clear that the concept is to be conceived as a mode of praxis: ‘what is Praxis?’, he asked. ‘It is the broadest term to designate a concerted human action, whatever it may be, which places man in a position to treat the real by the symbolic’ (S 11, 6),” ibid., 11. Further, “As Lacan famously remarked: ‘the real can only be inscribed on the basis of an impasse of formalization’ (S 20, 93),” ibid. Slavoj Žižek, “ ‘Suture,’ Forty Years Later,” in Concept and Form, vol. 2, ibid., 147. Hallward, ibid., 22. Hallward writes that “The most urgent priority, as Althusser had repeatedly insisted, was the ‘theoretical training [formation]’ of a new revolutionary generation, one whose grasp of Marxist Science would reverse the disastrous revisionist steps taken by the older generation and return the party [PCF] to its proper course,” ibid. Hallward further quotes Althusser on the notion of “theoretical training”: “By theoretical training, we understand the process of education, study and work by which a militant is put in possession—not only of the conclusion of the two sciences of Marxist Theory (historical materialism and dialectical materialism), not only of their theoretical principles, not only of some detailed analyses and demonstration, all its principles and all its conclusion, in their indissoluble scientific bond. We literally understand, then, thorough study and assimilation of all the scientific works of primarily importance on which knowledge of Marxist theory rests.” Ibid., 23, see also, Louis Althusser, Philosophy and Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, ed. Gregory Elliot, trans. Warren Montag et al. (London: verso, 1990), 39–41. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 29. Further, Hallward writes that, “conceived along rigorously Althusserian lines, the journal was designed to complement the creation of well-attended ‘theoretical schools’ for the transmission of Marxist science.” Ibid., 22. In this project, Hallward points out, the most “urgent priority,” Althusser insisted, was the “theoretical training.” See Knox Peden, “Introduction: the Fate of Concept,” in Concept and Form, vol. 2, ibid., 6. Ibid., 10. Quoted in ibid., 10–11. Ibid. Ibid. Eyers, ibid., 4. Ibid. Ibid., 7. Ibid. Quoted in Paul M. Livingston, The Politics of Logic, Badiou, Wittgenstein, and the Consequences of Formalism (New York and London: Routledge, 2012), 9; see also,

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23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

Notes Alain Badiou, The Concept of Model, trans. Tzuchien Tho and Zachary Luke Fraser (Victoria: re-press, 2007). Livingston in a footnote explains that “Formalization is then the activity of reflection on firms, whether this be understood simply as reflection on what was ‘already there’ in some sense or as a process of invention of the new on the basis of what has come before. Formalism is, then, the result of this process of reflection on forms including (but not limited to) their capture in explicit symbolism and the determination of rules connecting them. This broad sense of formalization and reflection, and formalism as its result, should be distinguished from a narrower sense of ‘formalization’ in which it means the imposition of form, for instance, in a given social community. The latter, narrower sense is what is more often referred to in discourses about the ‘formalization’ of social life and communities, including processes of regularization, technicization, and the imposition of quantitative and statistical techniques of measurement and evaluation. It is a direct consequence of these definitions that forms, formalism, and formalization (in any of these senses) cannot be restricted to any particular domain of human life (for instance, the construction of ‘formal systems’ narrowly conceived), but are always already operative in each and every context of conceptual thought and discursive action.” ibid., n. 6, 317–18. Eyers, ibid., 13. Ibid. Quoted in ibid., 32. Ibid. Ibid., 42. Ibid., 52. Ibid. Ibid., 203. Ibid. This term is Eyers’s in his Lacan and the Concept of the “Real”, ibid, that I discuss below. Eyers, ibid., 62–63. Ibid., 63. Ibid. Ibid., 64. Ibid. Eyers further reflects that the ways Kant posited “the difference between boundaries and limits to knowledge bear on Lacan’s complex figuration of the internality and externality of the Real to the Symbolic and the imaginary” and quotes Kant in length as having said that: At the beginning of this note I made use of the metaphor of a boundary in order to fix the limits of reason with respect to its own appropriate use. The sensible world contains only appearances, which are still not things in

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themselves, which latter things (noumena) the understanding must therefore assume for the very reason that it cognizes the objects of experience as mere appearances. . . . How does reason proceed in setting boundaries for understanding? . . . That which is to set its boundaries must lie completely outside it, and this is the field of pure intelligible beings. For us, however, as far as concerns the determination of the nature of these intelligible beings, this is an empty space. (Ibid.)

38 39

40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50

Eyers emphasizes in this passage the notion of an “empty space” that he relates to Lacan’s “pre-topological, institutive geometry,” ibid., 65. Ibid., 65. Ibid., 67. Also see Alexandre Leupin, “Introduction: Voids and Knots in Knowledge and Truth,” in Lacan and Human Sciences, ed. A. Leupin (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991). See Ellie Ragland and Dragan Milovanovic, Lacan, Topologically Speaking, ibid., xx. They further explain that “various topological operations are somewhat analogous to traditional, Euclidean mathematics in the operations of squaring, adding subtracting, equivalence, and so forth. We sometimes find that in three-dimensional space, intersections (i.e., singularities) may develop; but in four-dimensional space they disappear. This is quite apparent, for example, in projective geometry and the cross-cap,” ibid. Ibid. Ibid., xxv. Ibid. Ibid. See Juan-David Nasio, “Objet a and the Cross-cap,” in ibid. Eyers, Lacan and the Concept of the “Real,” 69. Ibid. Also see, Ann Banfield, “Introduction: What do Linguists Want?” in J.-C. Milner, For the Love of Language, trans. Ann Banfield (London: Macmillan, 1999). Ibid., 60–70. Ibid., 70. Ibid.

Chapter 12 1 I use the term “compossibility” in the sense Badiou uses it in his Manifesto of Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999). Badiou used this term in relation to his idea of “truth procedure” related to the “conditions” of philosophy. In the chapter on “Condition” in the above book, Badiou says this:

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2

3

4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Notes “The first philosophical configuration that proposes to dispose these procedures— the set of these procedures—in a unique conceptual space, thus showing that in thought they are compossible, is the one that bears the name Plato, ‘let no one enters here who is not a geometer,’ prescribes the matheme as a condition of philosophy.” Ibid., 34. In defining this term in the specific sense Badiou uses, the translator of his text, Norman Madrarasz, explains: “The concept of ‘compossible’ stems from Leibniz who held that in God’s Understanding there exists a virtual force field of logic completely unlike the space-time field. God’s Understanding is said to contain a multiplicity of contradictory, mutually destructive worlds, whose possibility for co-existing is termed ‘compossibility’. As with another concept that Badiou takes on, the Principle of the Indiscernible, compossibility could not exists in actuality, hence God’s choice of the ‘best of all possible worlds’ in which Man is to live,” ibid., 157. Concerning the “metaphor of architecture” in philosophy, see in particular Kojin Karatani, Architecture as Metaphor, Language, Number, Money, trans. Sabu Kohso, ed. Michael Speaks (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1995) and Daniel Purdy, On the Ruins of Babel, Architectural Metaphor in German Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011). See particularly Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). As I discussed above, in the case of architecture, Deleuze did not follow the protocol, that is, trying to find in architecture what he wanted to find for his philosophical system. For this argument, see Jean-Jacques Lecercle, ibid. Among other things, this project of critique entails a Kantian gesture and would begin to discuss the “impurity” of architecture within its multiple conditions. I take up this project in my forthcoming Building Surplus: Architecture in Discourse of Capitalism. Peter Hallward, “Introduction to Volume One: ‘Theoretical Training’,” in Concept and Form, vol. 1 (London and New York: Verso, 2012), ibid., 44–45. Ibid., 45. Ibid., 50. Žižek, ibid., 147. Ibid., 147–48. Ibid., 157. Ibid., 55. Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, ibid., 45. Ibid., 61. Ibid. Quoted in ibid., 28. See also Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

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17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 143–44; also in Conditions, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2008), 25. 19 See Bruno Bosteels in “Translator’s Introduction” in Alain Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy (London and New York: Verso, 2011). As Bosteels mentions, bedside putting Jean-François Lyotard definitely in the rank of contemporary antiphilosophy sophists with his idea of the “language game,” Badiou sometimes, perhaps confusedly, puts Althusser, Foucault, and Derrida in this rank; see Alain Badiou, Pocket Pantheon: Figures of Postwar Philosophy, trans. David Macey (London: Verso, 2009). I follow Bosteels’s excellent introduction for drawing the relation between “antiphilosophy” and sophists in Badiou’s discourse. 20 Quoted in Bosteels, ibid., 7; see Jacques Lacan, “Monsieur A” in Ornicar? 21–22 (Summer 1980), 17. 21 Badiou, Manifesto For Philosophy, ibid., 84. Also see Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel in the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London and New York: Verso, 2012), 18. Žižek comments on Badiou’s statement by saying: “Who is antiphilosopher to whom? Badiou somewhere speculates that Heraclitus is the antiphilosopher to Parmenides, the sophist to Plato (although they temporarily and logically precede him), Pascal to Descartes, Hume to Leibniz, Kierkegaard (and Marx?) to Hegel, and even Lacan to Heidegger. However this picture has to be complicated: is Kant thought—or even entirety of German Idealism with its central motif, the primacy of practical reason over theoretical reason—not the antiphilosophy to classical metaphysics in its last great mode) of Spinoza and Leibniz)? Or is Sade—in Lacanian reading—not the antiphilosopher to Kant, so that Lacan ‘avec’ means to read a philosopher through his antiphilosopher? And is Hegel’s true antiphilosopher not already the Late Schelling? Or, a step even further, is Hegel’s uniqueness not that he is his own antiphilosopher?,” ibid., n. 17, 18. 22 See Salvoj Žižek, Tarrying with Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 3–4; also see Bosteels, ibid., 7. 23 Ibid., 135. 24 Bosteels, ibid., 25. Bosteels quotes Badiou from his Logics of Worlds as saying, “every anti-philosophy is a virtual accompanying of sophistry,” ibid. 25 Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, ibid., 144. 26 Bosteels, ibid., 28. 27 Ibid., 28–29. 28 Slavoj Žižek, “ ‘Suture’: Forty Years Later,” in Concept and Form, ibid., 156. 29 Ibid., 157. 30 See Žižek, “ ‘Suture’: Forty Years Later,” ibid., 149. 31 Ibid.

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32 Ibid. Žižek adds that the first one to formulate this concept of differentiality is of course Ferdinand de Saussure, “who pointed out that the identity of a signifier resides only in the sheaf of differences (features which distinguish it from other signifiers): there is no positivity in a signifier, it ‘is’ only a series of what it is not,” ibid., 149–50. 33 In this respect, see the trenchant analysis of Étienne Balibar in his “Irrationalism and Marxism,” in New Left Review 107 (1978).

Chapter 13 1 I base my argument on Jacques Lacan’s Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter ( New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1992), and Alain Badiou’s Ethics, An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London and New York: Verso, 2001). For an excellent analysis of Lacan’s Seminar, see Marc de Kesel’s Eros and Ethics, Reading Jacques Lacan’s Seminar VII (Albany: Sunny Press, 2009). On Badiou’s notion of ethics, see particularly Peter Hallward, Badiou, A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 2 See Angela Ndalianis, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (Cambridge: The MIT press, 2004). 3 See William Egginton, The Theatre of Truth, The Ideology of (Neo)Baroque Aesthetics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). 4 For this information and more, see Jan Rehmann, Theories of Ideologies, The Power of Alienation and Subjection (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014), specially Chapter 2, “Ideology-Critique and Ideology-Theory according to Marx and Engels.” 5 Karl Marx, “Toward a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in Karl Marx, Selected Writings, ed. Lawrence H. Simon (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 28. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. Rehmann in the abovecited work makes a textual analysis of this passage and makes a note of the distinction between the phrase “the sigh of the oppressed creature” and “opium of the people” in Marx’s “twofold definition.” Rehmann remarks that, “read in this way, one approaches a dialectical understanding of religion as a field of contradictions which contains potentially activating and paralyzing dynamics. The task of critical theory would then be to take sigh of the oppressed seriously and enlighten it in a way that it overcomes the illusionary forms in which it was expressed,” 27. Rehmann concludes that “In fact, there is

Notes

9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

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no marker in the text that indicates a linguistic opposition between the ‘sigh’ and ‘opium’. The sharp opposition between a political strategy based on ‘scientific’ analysis and a ‘utopian’ and illusory protest was indeed a recurring theme in Marx’s polemics with competing socialist and communist circles at the time,” ibid. Ibid., 28–29. Rehmann, ibid., 28. See Walter Benjamin, “Capitalism as Religion,” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996). Ibid., 288. Ibid. Ibid., 289. Ibid. Ibid., 288. Ibid., 289. Ibid. Rehmann, ibid., 41. Ibid. See Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008). See Slavoj Žižek’s “foreword” to Theodore Adorno’s In Search of Wagner (London and New York, 2005), viii. See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta (Figures of Wagner), trans. Felicia McCarren (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 115. Alain Badiou, Five Lessons on Wagner, with an afterword by Slavoj Žižek (London and New York: Verso, 2010), 9.

Epilogue 1 Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound, Enlightenment and Extinction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 2 For a discussion of this circle, see Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Project of Autonomy, Politics and Architecture Within and Against Capitalism (New York: Buell Center and Princeton Architectural Press, 2008). Also see Pier Vittorio Aureli, “Manfredo Tafuri, Archizoom, Superstudio, and the critique of architectural ideology,” in Architecture and Capitalism, ed. Peggy Deamer (London and New York: Routledge, 2014). 3 See François Cusset, French Theory, How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

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4 See Simon Choat, Marx Through Post-Structuralism, Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze (London: Continuum, 2010). 5 See especially Slavoj Žižek’s “The Specter of Ideology” in his edited book, Mapping Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1994). Also see Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1989). 6 Tom Eyers, Post-Rationalism: Psychoanalysis, Epistemology, and Marxism in PostWar France (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 203.

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Index Note: locators followed by “n” indicate notes section. abstraction crystalline 100 of modernism 133 Pippin on 133 Abstraction and Empathy (Worringer) 100 academic theoretical narcissism 128 Adorno, Theodor 17–18, 94, 112–20, 132, 208 n.81 analysis of Wagner by 193 on “high art” 150 The Adventure of French Philosophy (Badiou) 13 aesthetic sublimation 51 Age of Reason 136 Alberti, Leon Battista 23–4 Althusser, Louis 3, 13, 125, 171–3 The Ambassadors 25–6, 40, 47, 82 anaestheticization 134 analytical experience 52 Anamorphic Art (Baltrusaitis) 25 anamorphic gaze 23 anamorphosis 11, 23 Anamorphosis, ou Thaumaturgus opticus (Baltrusaitis) 25 ancien régime 39 Andre, Carl 149, 167 antinomy of reason 80 Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Gauttari) 59, 60, 136, 198 n.3 “anti-philosophy” 6, 14 antirealism 70 Arab Draping 152 The Arcades Project (Benjamin) 99, 105, 110 architectural crypt 64 Architectural Deleuzism 136, 139 Architectural Design Profile 137 architectural functionalism 160 architecture desuturing 181–8

digital neobaroque of 131–40 “formlessness” of contemporary figures 17 hyper-Deleuzeans of 131–40 misadventure with French philosophy 123–30 neobaroque and 3 new 22 post-Rationalism and 194–6 The Architecture of City (Rossi) 195 architecture of excess 123 The Architecture of Failure (Murphy) 127 Aristophanes 44 Aristotle 41 Artaud, Antonine 87, 123 Art Power (Groys) 162 axiomatic formalization 13 Bachelard, Gaston 170, 173 Badiou, Alain 1, 3, 4, 58, 92, 125–6, 135, 143, 172, 196 conception of truth 70 critique of Deleuze 11 definition of event 73 definition of fidelity 73 definition of philosophy 71 definition of truth 73 on Deleuze’s thinking 67–8 “French philosophy’s moment” 13 on sophistry 127–8, 185–7 Baltrusaitis, Jurgis 25 Banfield, Ann 177 Barnard, Suzanne 41 Baroque 124 capitalism and 14 coincidentia oppositorum 2 concept of 1 definition of Buci-Glucksmann 57 dualism within 23 Egginton on 4–6, 7

264 as event 69–76 jouissance and 38 knowledge 52 matheme 51–6 melancholy 105 vs. neobaroque 3 origins of 15 overview 30–3 par excellence 30 philosophical criticism 4 problem of thought 4–6 re-turn of 19–21 as singular universal event 3 space 52 subject of 88–92 sublimation and 45–51 theorization of, as Real 170–8 Trauerspiel (Mourning Play) 4 vision 18–19, 22–3 Baroque House 62 Baroque New World 31 “baroque object” 39 baroque reason 30, 80, 93–4, 114 Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity (BuciGlucksmann) 93, 104–5 baroque room 104–11 interiority and 109 internal consciousness and 110 Baroque style 37 “baroque subversion” 45 “baroquism” 40, 44 barroco 17 Barthes, Roland 43, 164, 208 n.69 Baudrillard, Jean 126 “Becoming-Baroque” 30 Being and Nothingness (Sartre) 25, 57, 200 n.1 Benjamin, Walter 21, 89, 105–11, 114, 128, 134, 191–2 allegorical perspective of Baroque 27 Baroque space 94 Groys on 106 on melancholy 7, 104 on modernity 106 monads 110 political theology 105–6 Rose on 104–5 theology concept 108

Index unconscious of vision 99 will to art 2–3 Bentham, Jeremy 158–9 Bergson, Henry 13 Bergstein, J. M. 119 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 21, 41–2, 117 Bernstein, J. M. 112, 115, 120 Between Kant and Hegel (Henrich) 9 The Birth of Clinic (Foucault) 211 n.18 Blondel, Jacques-François 156 “body dysmorphic disorder” 131 “body-jouissance” 38 Bois, Eve-Alain 132 Boltansky, Luc 139 Borromean knots 52, 55 Borromeo, St. Charles 55 Bosch, Hieronymus 123 Bosteels, Bruno 13, 71, 186, 200 n.1, 201 n.3, 234 n.13, 249 n.19 Boullée, Étienne-Louis 155 Boyne, Roy 82, 83 Brassier, Ray 71, 194 The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even 42 Brunschvicg, Leon 13 Buci-Glucksmann, Christine 4, 57, 104–5, 114 aesthetic modernity 94 anamorphosis definition 23 baroque eye 97–8 Baroque reason 30, 80, 94 on concept of gaze 96 on de Quevedo 93 image-flux 101–2 madness of vision 18 theatricization of experience 95, 114 Buck-Morss, Susan 109, 134 Cacciari, Massimo 195 Cache, Bernard 61–2, 141, 145–6, 239 n.2 Cahiers Marxistes-Léninistes 172 Cahiers pour l’Analyse 3, 171, 183, 188, 195, 244 n.6 Calabrese, Omar 31 Calvinism 191 Canguilhem, George 170, 172–3, 200 n.1 Capital (Marx) 162, 190, 195 capitalism 189–93 Baroque and 14

Index critique of 14–15 cultural logic of 124 digital 3, 162 neoliberal 129 neoliberal “democratic” 20 “New Spirit” of 129 postmodern 135 secular 14 symbolic authority and 21 utilitarianism and 191 “Capitalism as Religion” 191 Carpentier, Alejo 30 Carroll, Lewis 217 n.28 Cartesian cogito 17 Cartesianism heritage of 15–16 legacy of 41 Cartesian “ocular” perspectivalism 18, 98 “Cartesian paradigm” 17 Cartesian rationalism 173, 175. See also rationalism “catastrophe theory” 137 Catholic Counter-Reformation culture 19 CATIA (computer-aided threedimensional interactive application) design 167 Cavaillès, Jean 170, 173 Cercle d’Épistémologie 3, 171 Chiapello, Eve 139 Christianity 41–2, 170, 191 The Clamor of Being (Badiou) 67 Classical Age 79, 81 classical Marxism 125 Clérambault, Gaëtan G. 61, 152–4, 156, 160 cogito 84–5 coherence model 70 coincidentia oppositorum 2, 56 colonialism drapery and 241 n.12 French 193 utilitarianism and 159 “commanded enjoyment” 21 commodification of culture 119 complexity theory 137 compossibility 72 Concept and Form 171 Conley, Tom 62–3 contemporary idolatry 162–9 contemporary neobaroque 16–17

265

Contropiano 195 Copjec, Joan 23, 152–6 corporeal substance 16 counterconquest art 6 Counter-Reformation 38, 39, 55, 113 Cours d’architecture (Blondel) 156 Critical Enlightenment 162 criticality 137 Critique of Christianity (Feuerbach) 190 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant) 5, 9, 92 cross-cap 55 crystalline abstraction 100 cultural logic of capitalism 124. See also capitalism cultural production 112 culture(s) commodification of 119 industry 112–15 Lacan on 50 neobaroque 113 sublimation and 46 “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” 112 “Culture Industry Reconsidered” 118 Culture of the Baroque: An Analysis of a Historical Structure (Maravall) 32, 115 Cusset, François 125–6, 195 “Das Ding” (The Thing) (essay) 48 De Anima (On the Soul) (Aristotle) 41 Debord, Guy 126, 162 de Brosses, Charles 162, 190 Décade philosophique, littéraire et politique 155 deconstructivism/deconstructivists 124, 134 de Kesel, Marc 49–50, 213 n.49 Deleuze, Gilles 1, 3, 6, 13, 33, 57–68, 124, 125, 129, 164, 195 architectural crypt 64 Badiou’s critique of 11 Cartesian heritage and 15 on categories of Baroque 61 on Clérambault and his Islamic folds 61 on disjunctive synthesis 59 on Foucault 65–6 inflection 100

266

Index

need for cryptographer 63–4 notion of “minor strategy” 30 on relationship between capitalism and Baroque 14 study of the baroque 22 Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (Badiou) 11, 59, 176 Deleuzeanism 132 Deleuze et l’art (Sauvagnargues) 59 “Deleuzogauttarians” 136 Derrida, Jacques 80, 82, 84–92, 125–7, 164, 172 de Saussure, Ferdinand 156 Descartes, Rene 20, 31, 81–92, 173, 185 dialectical materialism 29 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno) 94, 112 The Dialectics of Seeing (Buck-Morss) 109 Difference and Repetition (Deleuze) 100, 136, 235 n.22 The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (Lyotard) 185 Digital Baroque, New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (Murray) 32–3 digital capitalism 3, 162. See also capitalism digital neobaroque, of architecture 131–40 Discipline and Punish (Foucault) 88 disjunctive synthesis 1, 59–60, 144 “dissociation-of-sensibility” 16 doctrine of jouissance 38 Dolar, Mladen 20, 107 dompte-regard 25 d’Ors, Eugenio 30 Dosse, François 58 “double” body concept 39 doubt, sources of 83 Downcast Eyes (Jay) 99 drapery 151–62 and colonialism 241 n.12 defined 156 Moroccan 153 Dreams of a Visionary (Kant) 28 Duchamp, Marcel 42, 100 Du Culte des dieux Fétiches ou Parallèle de l’ancienne Religion de l’Egypte avec la religion actuelle de Nigrité (de Brousse) 162, 190

Dummett, Michael 70 Durand, Jean-Nicolas-Louis 141, 144, 148, 152, 155, 161 Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories (Cache) 145, 239 n.2 École Normale Supérieure (ENS) 3, 171 École Polytechnique 155 Écrits 54 The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa 41, 42 “ectoplasm” 165 Egginton, William 4–5, 7, 69, 189–90 on Baroque architecture 16 on Baroque’s theatrical nature of truth 69 Cartesianism and 15–16 on modern theater 16 play of appearances 16–17 on reemergence of the Baroque 20 on theatrical space 31 Eighth Symphony 107 Eiland, Howard 2 Eisenman, Peter 126–8, 164 Enlightenment 20, 163, 192, 194 Eros and Ethics, Reading Jacques Lacan’s Seminar VII (de Kesel) 49, 213 n.49 “eroticism” 43 “Ethic of Psychoanalysis” 189 Ethics, An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (Badiou) 11 The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 159, 162 Euclidean geometry 206 n.57 Euclidean mathematics 247 n.40 Evans, Dylan 47, 157–8 event, definition by Badiou 73 evental site 74 evil genius (malin génie) 84 ex nihilo 48 “Experience and Poverty” 128 expressionism 2, 150 expressive correspondence 151 extended substance 16 extimacy 54–5 Eyers, Tom 171, 188, 190, 196 Feltham, Oliver 71 “feminine jouissance” 42, 95–6 Feuerbach, Ludwig 190

Index fidelity, definition by Badiou 73 Fink, Bruce 44 Five Lessons on Wagner (Badiou) 193 Flugel, J. C. 157 The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (Deleuze) 22, 30, 33, 57–68, 131, 136, 141–8 architectural crypt 64 cryptographer, need of 63–4 historical Baroque 61–5 subjectivation 66 topology of thought 66 Folding in Architecture 137 Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Foucault) 80 Formalism 201 n.3, 246 n.22 Forster, Kurt 149 Foster, Hal 167 Foucault, Michel 15, 40, 79–92, 123–4, 126, 135–8, 172, 176, 195, 200 n.1, 222 n.4, 222 n.7, 224 n.56, 233 n.2 Foucault (Deleuze) 65, 137 Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Seminar XI (Lacan) 6, 89, 93, 96, 173, 227 n.28 “fractal theory” 137 France anti-Marxist counterrevolution in 125 École Polytechnique in 155 French Revolution 74 modern architectural theory in 155 radical thinking in 3 Frankfurt School 118, 172, 208 n.81 Frank Gehry: The City and Music (Gilbert-Rolfe) 163 French colonialism 153. See also colonialism French rationalism 173. See also rationalism French Revolution 20, 74 French structuralism 175 French Theory (Cusset) 125 Freud, Sigmund 39, 43, 46, 157–60, 172, 174, 207 n.61, 212 n.35, 214 n.58 Freudian-Lacanian theory 19 “Freudo-Marxian” cultural work 115

267

Fried, Michael 133–4 functionalism 158–60 Galilean physics 178 Gasché, Rodolphe 19 Gauttari, Félix 58, 59, 136 Gayvernon, S. 155 gaze and eye notion 18 Gehry, Frank 61, 129, 148, 149–69 “geometric perspectivalism” 18 German Ideology (Marx) 195 Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy 149, 163–7 Gillespie, Sam 71 Gorgias 128 Gorgias (Plato) 185 Gracián, Baltasar 5 “Gracián and the Emergence of the Modern Subject” 5–6 Gramsci, Antonio 94 Great War 152 Greenberg, Clement 150 Grootenboer, Hanneke 23 Groys, Boris 106, 162, 192, 230 n.21 Guggenheim Museum 150, 166 Halimi, Serge 162 Hallward, Peter 3, 11, 70, 71–2, 75, 171, 183–4 Harbison, Robert 33 Hardt, Michael 135, 137 Harries, Karsten 165 Hegel, G. W. F. 8–9, 25, 142, 162, 166, 185, 190–2, 199 n.40, 249 n.21 Heidegger, Martin 48–9, 66, 195, 214 n.69, 249 n.21 Henrich, Dieter 9 hermeneutics of desire 95 historical materialism 108–9 historicity 114 History of Madness (Foucault) 80, 82, 87, 90, 123, 222 n.4, 233 n.2 The History of Sexuality (Foucault) 65, 88 Hitchcock, Alfred 117 Holbein, Hans 25–7, 40, 47, 82 Horkheimer, Max 94, 112 hors text 84 hubris 123 hyper-Deleuzeans, of architecture 131–40

268 “An Icarian Poetic” 102 idolatry 189–93 illusions vs. corporeal substance 16 metaphysical 9 transcendental 9 image-crystal 100 image-flux 101 “imaginary enjoyment” 21 immaterial labor 136 inflection 100 The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction (Zamora) 31 intentionality 66 interiority 107 baroque room and 109 internal consciousness 110 internal exclusion 54 Introduction to Antiphilosophy (Groys) 106 “Islamic Baroque” 151–2, 154 Israeli Defense Force (IDF) 235 n.25 Jameson, Fredric 32 Jarry, Alfred 66 Jarvis, Simon 208 n.81 Jay, Martin 98 Jennings, Michael 2 Jesuit Baroque architecture 163 Johnson, Philip 101 jouissance 20–1, 158, 160, 164, 170, 176 Baroque and 38 defined 38 Joyce, James 55, 132 Jugenstil 99 kabbalistic mysticism 110 Kafka, Franz 132 Kandinsky, Wassily 132 Kant, Immanuel 5, 8–9, 59, 91, 166, 185, 249 n.21 antinomy of reason 80 on boundary and limit 176, 246 n.37 noumena 47 Kantorowicz, Ernst 39 Karatani, Kojin 28, 142 Kaup, Monika 30–1 The King’s Two Bodies (Kantorowicz) 39

Index Kipnis, Jeffrey 137, 237 n.13 Klee, Paul 61 Klein bottle 55 Klossowski, Pierre 59 Kordela, Kiarina 129 Koyré, Alexandre 170, 173, 177–8 Krauss, Rosalind 132 Kyoo Lee 79 Lacan, Jacques 3, 4, 6–7, 13, 158, 172 “anti-philosophy” 6, 14 baroque par excellence 30 baroque style 37 capital discovery 23 on cultures 46–7, 50 defining Baroque 7, 41 dompte-regard 25 on extimacy 54–5 gaze and eye notion 18, 25 psychoanalytical subject 89 on sublimation 46–50 “surplus-jouissance” 14 on topology 51–2 trompe l’oeil perspective 24 Lacan: Topologically Speaking 177 Lacan and the Concept of the “Real” (Eyers) 171 Lacanian doctrine 29 Lacanian psychoanalysis 213 n.49 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philip 193 La folie du voir, De l’esthétique baroque (Buci-Glucksmann) 57 La folie du voir, Une esth é tique du virtuel (Buci-Glucksmann) 93, 99 Laland, André 53 lalangue 53, 228 n.31 Lambert, Gregg 21, 32, 63–5 L’ameublement du territoire (Cache) 61–2, 141 langue vs. lalangue 53 La Passion des étoffes chez un neuropsychiatrie, G. G. de Clérambault 154 Laplanche, J. 157 L’architecture vivante 156 Large Glass 42, 101 Laruelle, François 175, 196 Las Meninas (Velázquez) 40, 81 “lateral critique” 162

Index Latin-American Baroque 6 Lecercle, Jean-Jacques 59–60, 136, 142, 182 Le Corbusier 64, 132, 143–4, 150, 153, 156, 159–61 Lefebvre, Henri 126 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 62, 140, 143, 146, 166–8, 199 n.21, 248 n.1, 249 n.21 Le Pli: Leibniz et le baroque (Deleuze) 14, 58 Leppert, Richard 17–18 Les Mots and des choses (Foucault) 81 Less Than Nothing, Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (Žižek) 8 Leupin, Alexandre 177 Levine, Steven 42 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 13, 52, 172, 195 Levy, Evonne 162–3 Lima, Jose Lezama 30 Listing, Johann Benedict 54 The Logic of Sense (Deleuze) 22, 59, 60, 100, 136, 198 n.3, 217 n.28, 235 n.22 Logics of Failed Revolt: French Theory After May‘68 (Starr) 196 Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (Žižek) 26 Loos, Adolf 150, 169 Lowy, Michael 107, 108 Lynn, Greg 137, 168, 237 n.13 Lyotard, François 126 Lyotard, Jean-François 185, 208 n.69 machinic time 101 Madarasz, Norman 220 n.25 ‘mad’ hyperbole 85 madness 82–4 madness of vision 18 The Madness of Vision (BuciGlucksmann) 93, 94, 96 Madrarasz, Norman 248 n.1 Maelzel, John Nepomuk 107 “Maelzel’s Chess-Player” 107 Magritte, René 66 Manifesto for Philosophy (Badiou) 72, 127, 184 Maravall, José Antonio 19, 32, 115–17

269

Marchande, Valérie 55 Marks, Zita 56 Marx, Karl 162, 172, 174, 190 Marxism 172 classical 125 materialism defined 29 dialectical 29 historical 108–9 matheme Baroque 51–6 defined 52 “Matheme: Topology in the Teaching of Lacan” 54 McGowan, Todd 21 median-void 54 Meditations on First Philosophy (Descartes) 82–4 melancholy 1, 104 Baroque 105 Melehey, Hassan 92 mental cartography 100 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 37, 57, 66, 93, 96–7, 207 n.61 metalanguage vs. topology 53 metaphysical illusions 9 Metz, Christian 18 Metzeger 53 Mies van der Rohe 132 Miller, Jacques-Alain 54–5, 172, 174, 183 Milner, Jean-Claude 172 Minima Moralia (Adorno) 113 Möbius, Ferdinand 54 Möbius strip 54–5, 109, 177 modernism 141, 158 Foucaultian picture of 136 Fried’s rejection of 134 Pippin on 133–4 Wajcman on 133 “modernist break” 21 modernity emergence of 7 problem of thought in 4–6 “scopic regime” of 18 modern sophists 185 monad 110 Monadology (Leibniz) 62 Moroccan drapery 153 Murphy, Douglas 127–8

270

Index

Murray, Timothy 32–3 “Musica Ficta” 193 narcissism 176 Nasio, David 177 Ndalianis, Angela 31–2, 189 Negri, Antonio 135, 137 neobaroque 131, 149–69 architecture and 3 clothing the 151–62 contemporary idolatry and 162–9 critique of 189–93 culture 113 defined 1 forms 22 vs. historical Baroque 3 as ideology 2–3 new architecture, as form of 190 overview 30–3 as pseudo-event 3 neobaroque 132, 144 Neo-Baroque, A Sign of the Times (Calabrese) 31 Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (Ndalianis) 31 neoliberal capitalism 129. See also capitalism neoliberalism 130 “Neo-Spinozism” 22, 129 “new architecture” 16, 22, 129, 131, 132–40, 189–90 New Spirit of Capitalism 113 The New Spirit of Capitalism (Boltansky and Chiapello) 139 Newtonian gravitational forces 213 n.49 “New World” 6 Nietzsche, Friedrich 94–5, 123, 185, 192, 195 Nihil Unbound, Enlightenment and Extinction (Brassier) 194 nonmathematical impulse 98 The Non-Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (Lambert) 64 noumena 47 Nouvel, Jean 126 Novus, Angelus 94 Operaist movement 195 optical delusions 28

The Order of Things, An Archeology of the Human Sciences (Foucault) 81, 136, 211 n.18, 218 n.70 Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (Žižek) 11 The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Benjamin) 2, 7, 104 Out of This World, Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (Hallward) 11 paradox of absolutism 20 parallax defined 29 gap 29 view 11, 27–30 The Parallax View (Žižek) 28 Parmenides (Plato) 188 “partial object” 39, 43 passionate attachment 96 pathological psychoses 56 Paz, Octavia 205 n.45 Penden, Knox 171 perspectiva artificialis (artificial perspective) 23–4 perspectiva naturalis (natural perspective) 23–4 “phallic jouissance” 42 phenomenal appearance 10 Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty) 207 n.61 The Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel) 8–9 Philadelphia Museum of Art 42 philosophical criticism, of Baroque 4 philosophy, Badiou on 71–2 “philosophy of life” 13 Philosophy of Right (Hegel) 190 “philosophy of the concept” 13 Picasso, Pablo 132 Pippin, Robert 133–4 plastic forces 63 Plato 3, 8, 25, 44, 128, 185, 187–8, 249 n.21 play of appearances 16–17 Pluth, Ed 71, 74–5 Podro, Michael 165 Poe, Edgar Allan 107–8 political absolutism 38 Pollack, Sidney 149

Index Pontalis, J.-B. 157 positive psychology 87 postmodern capitalism 135. See also capitalism postmodernism 21, 134 Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Capitalism (Jameson) 32 “postmodern sophism” 126 postmodern sophists 127 post-Rationalism 3, 170–8 architecture and 194–6 importance of 196 obscurantist tendency and 194 Post-Rationalism: Psychoanalysis, Epistemology, and Marxism in Post-War France (Eyers) 171, 173 poststructuralism 125, 171 Précis des leçons d’architecture (Durand) 155, 158 Prévert, Jacques 49 Principle of the Indiscernible 199 n.21 Principles of Art History (Wölfflin) 33 problem of thought 4–6 “prohibition of enjoyment” 21 projective geometry 206 n.57 proletariat 74 pronounced parallax 28 Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque (Levy) 162 Protagoras 128 Protagoras (Plato) 185 “Protestant Ethic” 37–8 Protestant Ethics and Spirit of Capitalism? (Weber) 94 Protestantism 104 Protestant Reformation 42 pseudo-thought 3 psychoanalysis 213 n.49 Lacan’s antiphilosophy and 79 problematization of 87 psychoanalytical theory 89 The Psychology of Clothing (Flugel) 157 qualitative mathematics 177 radical secularism 192 Rancière, Jacques 21, 125, 151, 172, 182, 196 rationalism 150, 171 Cartesian 173, 175

271

French 173 postrationalism and 173 rise of 194 Reading, Bill 125, 234 n.9 realism 70 reason of the Other. See baroque reason Recueil et parallèle des édifices de tout genre (Durand) 155 Reflections on Baroque (Harbison) 33 Reformation 30 Regnault, François 172 Regulae (Descartes) 81 Rehmann, Jan 191–2 Reiser + Umemoto 137 Renaissance 136, 206 n.57, 206 n.59 and Baroque 145 paintings 207 n.59 Renaissance and Baroque (Wölfflin) 16, 17, 33 repressive desublimation 14, 201 n.9 The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture (Lambert) 21, 32 Richard II (Shakespeare) 26–7 risk society 120 Rose, Gillian 104–5 Rossi, Aldo 195 Rouan, François 215 n.80 Roudinesco, Élisabeth 52, 152 Roussel, Raymond 66 rubber geometry. See qualitative mathematics; topology Russian Formalism 164 Saint Paul 185 Sarduy, Severo 30, 43–4, 202 n.18 “sartorial superego” 152, 154 Sartre, Jean-Paul 25, 57, 200 n.1 Sauvagnargues, Anne 59 Scharoun, Hans 150 Schmidt, Karl 120 Schoenberg, Arnold 74, 132 Schultz, Franz 198 n.8 Schumacher, Patrick 137, 138–40, 237 n.13 Scientific Revolution 30 scopic drive 23 “scopic regime” of modernity 18, 98–9, 112, 114 Seagram Building 101 self-regulation 94

272

Index

Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Lacan) 22, 46, 51 Seminar XX, Encore, On Feminine Sexuality, The Limit of Love and Knowledge (Lacan) 7, 22, 39, 43, 45, 46, 170 Semper, Gottfried 165 sensorium 102 Serra, Richard 149 Shklovsky, Victor 164 similitude 81 sinthome 55–6 Situationists International 126 Sketches of Frank Gehry 149 “Skin and Bones: Folded Forms from Leibniz to Lynn” 167 “the society of enjoyment” 204 n.44 Society of Jesus 163 The Society of the Spectacle (Debord) 162 Sollers, Philip 37, 39 Somol, Robert 137, 237 n.13 sophism 126, 188 Badiou on 187 defined 126 postmodern 126 sophistry as appearance-making art 187 Badiou on 127–8, 185–7 Plato on 188 space, Baroque 52 spectacle culture 32 Spencer, Douglas 136–9 The Sphere and The Labyrinth (Tafuri) 195 spleen 105 Starr, Peter 196 Statue of Liberty 167–9 Stjernfelt, Fredrik 148 structuralism 52, 171, 183 “struggling theory” 130 subject Baroque vision and 23 vs. substance 8 subjectivation 56, 66 subject of Baroque 88–92 sublimation aesthetic 51 Baroque and 45–51 cultures and 46 Freud’s theory on 46

The Sublime Object of Ideology (Žižek) 10 substance corporeal 16 extended 16 vs. subject 8 thinking 16 “surplus-jouissance” 14, 95, 109, 161 “surplus-value” 14 Symposium (Plato) 44 synthesis 59–60 Tafuri, Manfredo 195 Tarrying with the Negative, Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Žižek) 89, 185 Taut, Bruno 101, 150 Technological Immanence 99 The Theater of Truth: The Ideology of (Neo)Baroque Aesthetics (Egginton) 4–5 theatrical space, in Baroque 31 theatricization of existence 114, 120 theological topology 106–7 Theories of Ideology (Rehmann) 191 theory of radical critique 128 Theresa, Maria 107 thinking substance 16 Thom, René 148 thought, defined 1 A Thousand Plateaus (Gauttari and Deleuze) 100, 136 topology Baroque and 38 Borromean knot and 55–6 forms of 53–4 of jouissance 54 Lacan on 51–2 Listing on 54 mathematical formalization 38 vs. metalanguage 53 of thought 66 torus 54, 55 tout court 1 Tractatus (Wittgenstein) 52, 127 transcendental constitution of reality 8–9 transcendental illusion 9 Transcritique: On Marx and Kant (Karatani) 28

Index Trauerspiel (Mourning Play) 4 trompe l’oeil 7–8, 24–5, 81 Tronti, Mario 195 true philosophy, defined 9 truth Badiou’s concept 70 definition by Badiou 73 unconscious jouissance 46 utilitarianism architectural functionalism and capitalism and 191 colonialism and 159 Copjec on 160 ethics of 160 Lacan’s treatment of 159 Utopianism 84

160

Velázquez, Diego 40, 81 Vermeer, Johannes 18, 98 Vidler, Anthony 167–8 Villari, Sergio 155 Virilio, Paul 126 Visible and Invisible (Merleau-Ponty) 57, 207 n.61 “vital interiority” 13 vitalism 201 n.3 A Voice and Nothing More (Dolar) 107 void of self-relating negativity 76 von Kempelen, Wolfgang 107 “vulgar Deleuzeanism” 128

273

Wajcman, Gérard 46, 133 Weber, Max 37–8, 94, 104, 191 Western culture 123 What is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari) 58, 141, 200 n.1 Whiting, Sara 137, 237 n.13 Wigley, Mark 165 “will to art” (kunstwollen) 2 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 52, 127, 185 Wölfflin, Heinrich 16, 30, 33, 63, 145 Wollen, Peter 117 Writing Cogito, Montaigne, Descartes, and Institution of the Modern Subject (Melehey) 92 Xenakis, Iannis

61

Zaera-Polo, Alejandro 137–9, 237 n.13 Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) 137–8 Zamora, Lois Parkinson 31 Žižek, Slavoj 5–6, 7–11, 89–92, 123, 126, 129, 132, 134, 147–8, 150, 172, 183, 187 baroque method par excellence 111 on Benjamin’s allegory 108 Cartesian cogito 17 on Derrida’s view of madness 85–6 on madness and philosophy 79 on materialism 29 metaphor of anamorphosis 27 on subjectivity 90