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THE SPACE OF THE LACERATED 
SUBJECT: ARCHITECTURE AND 
ABJECTION
SEAN AKAHANE-BRYEN AND CHRIS L. SMITH

Introduction

In Powers of  Horror (1980),1  the psychoanalyst Julia 
Kristeva presented the first explicit, elaborated 
theory of  ‘abjection,’ which she defines as the 
casting off  of  that which is not of  one’s “clean and 
proper”2  self. According to Kristeva, abjection is a 
demarcating impulse which establishes the basis of  
all object relations, and is operative in the Lacanian 
narrative of  subject formation in early childhood 
via object differentiation. (I am a subject: me. 
That is an object: not me.) Abjection continues to 
operate post-Oedipally to prevent the dissolution 
of  the subject by repressing identification with 
that which is other, and particularly that which is 
only tenuously other: the abject. Though Kristeva’s 
theory is braided into problematic Freudian 
premises, this essay will argue that abjection 
remains operative independent of  the Oedipal 
model. The focus of  Freudian psychoanalysis has 
largely been on the anxieties of  being extracted 
from other subjects, usually the mother. It has 
concerned itself  far less with the anxieties of  
extracting oneself  from the blankets, nursery walls, 
and doors which were equally a part of  the Real of  
infancy. We follow Kristeva and Georges Bataille 
in asserting that the necessary differentiations 
which occur between selves and other subjects in 
early childhood (especially the mothers and fathers 
and psychoanalytic fixation) also—or first—play 
themselves out in the differentiations of  selves from 
objects (our blankets, nursery walls, and doors). In 
doing so, we contest the centrality of  the Oedipal 
family triangle in subject formation, and recognise 



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a more general and parsimonious model of  subjecthood implied by the 
theory of  abjection—a model in which architecture necessarily plays a 
more substantial role, as both an object and instrument of  abjection. 

the Subject ‘en Process’ 

     Though Kristeva may be described today as poststructuralist, her early 
work on abjection is in keeping with Lacan. In Powers of  Horror, abjection 
is introduced as a preface to Lacan’s account of  the genesis of  the subject. 
According to that account, object relations emerge in the mirror stage, 
when an infant mistakenly identifies with a reflection of  herself—in 
a literal mirror, or some other mimetic representation—and begins 
to imagine herself  as an object which might be viewed from another 
perspective. Kristeva accepts this, but recognises that the Oedipal model, 
even as revised by Lacan, cannot account for the whole progression of  
consciousness from an experience of  undifferentiated sensation to that 
of  a self  discerning objects and other subjects. Instead, Kristeva asserts 
that the mirror stage is a secondary repression preceded by abjection, 
a “primal” repression3  which makes difference (differentiation) itself  
possible and “sets in motion, or implicates, the entire Freudian structure.”4  
Kristeva goes as far as to say that the Freudian narrative is “exploded 
by its contradictions and flimsiness”5  without abjection to precede it. 
Nevertheless, she declines to abandon the narrative altogether, leaving 
its linear progression of  stages intact and only placing her account of  
the development of  subject/object differentiations before it in time. 
Significantly, Kristeva credits Georges Bataille as the first philosopher 
to have “specified that the plane of  abjection is that of  the subject/
object relationship (and not subject/other subject).”6  As such, the earliest 
beginnings of  the subject involve an extraction not from other subjects, 
but what will become objects:

Do we not find, sooner (chronologically and logically speaking) [than the mirror 
stage], if  not objects, at least pre-objects, poles of  attraction of  a demand for 
air, food, and motion? Do we not also find, in the very process that constitutes 
the mother as other, a series of  semi-objects that stake out the transition from a 
state of  indifferentiation to one of  discretion (subject/object)—semi-objects that 
are called precisely “transitional” by Winnicott?7 

According to Winnicott, a paediatrician and psychoanalyst, an infant still 
in a state of  indifferentiation experiences subjective “omnipotence,”8  
believing that her own desire produces what is desired. The security blanket 
is a ‘transitional object,’ an infant’s first ‘not-me’ possession which eases 



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the disillusionment of  omnipotence and mediates 
the transition from undifferentiated sensation to 
the discernment of  ‘me’ and other ‘not-me’ objects. 
The transitional object already operates symbolically, 
standing in for the “object of  first relationship”9  
(traditionally the breast). Winnicott suggests that 
the symbolic operation of  the transitional object 
belies an antecedent repression:

When symbolism is employed the infant is already 
clearly distinguishing between fantasy and fact, between 
inner objects and external objects, between primary 
creativity and perception. But the term transitional 
object, according to my suggestion, gives room for 
the process of  becoming able to accept difference and 
similarity. I think there is use for a term for the root 
of  symbolism in time, a term that describes the infant’s 
journey from purely subjective to objectivity; and 
it seems to me that the transitional object (piece of  
blanket, etc.) is what we see of  this journey of  progress 
towards experiencing.10 

To Kristeva, abjection is that “root of  symbolism 
in time.” It is the repression which must occur 
before anything can operate symbolically, the first 
recognition of  difference in that traumatic moment 
when that which threatens the definition of  the 
‘clean and proper body’ (le corps propre) is cast off  
(ab-jected)11 by the animal impulse to protect 
the budding cognitive edifice that is the subject. 
“Even before things are—hence before they are 
signifiable—[the not-yet-subject] drives them out, 
dominated by the drive as he is, and constitutes his 
own territory, edged by the abject.”12 The casting off  
is traumatic because in a state of  undifferentiation, 
what is abjected is necessarily also the self.

I expell myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself 
within the same motion through which “I” claim to 
establish myself. … During the course in which “I” 
become, I give birth to myself  amid the violence of  sobs, 
of  vomit. Mute protest of  the symptom, shattering 
violence of  a convulsion that, to be sure, is inscribed in 

    I expell 
myself, I spit 
myself out,  I 

abject myself 
within the same 
motion through 

which  ‘I’ claim 
to establish 

myself

“

”



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a symbolic system, but in which, without either wanting or being able to become 
integrated in order to answer to it, it reacts, it abreacts. It abjects.13 

From here, Kristeva follows Lacan to a conclusion which poststructuralist 
philosophers vehemently eschew—that the object relation is, as it was put 
by Lacan, “a means of  masking, of  parrying the fundamental fund of  
anguish.”14  A “desiring quest,”15  doomed to anguished failure, for what 
Lacan called the objet petit a, the unattainable ‘object-cause of  desire.’ In 
Kristeva’s words:

The abjection of  self  would be the culminating form of  that experience of  the 
subject to which it is revealed that all its objects are based merely on the inaugural 
loss that laid the foundations of  its own being.16 

This acceptance of  the premise of  primordial lack is a focus of  much 
criticism of  Kristeva’s philosophy.17 In contrast, poststructuralist 
philosophers and psychoanalysts such as Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, 
and (anachronistically) Georges Bataille18 generally posit a plenitude out 
of  which subjectivity is folded.19 To properly address this debate—in 
particular, to discern the extent to which the dispute is rooted in style 
of  articulation rather than in fundamental disagreement—is beyond 
the scope of  this essay. Perhaps it will suffice to say that some ‘desiring 
quest’ for that which would destroy the subject as we know it if  reclaimed 
(reunion with the mother, the world) is necessary to render abjection an 
operable concept. In fact, the theory of  abjection appears to be entirely 
consistent with at least Bataille’s conception of  subjecthood—abjection 
being, in this case, an impulse which limits our access to the plenitude 
from which we emerged:

The first labor established the world of  things, to which the profane world of  
the Ancients generally corresponds. Once the world of  things was posited, man 
himself  became one of  the things of  this world, at least for the time in which he 
labored. It is this degradation that man has always tried to escape. In his strange 
myths, in his cruel rites, man is in search of  a lost intimacy from the first.20 

Bataille and Kristeva recognise abjection and the accession to the Symbolic 
(language, discursive logic) as necessary preconditions of  culture, but also 
that the repression is not so total that it cannot be undone. Far from it, 
Kristeva argues that the subject is always ‘en process’—by which is meant 
both ‘on trial’ and ‘in process.’21  The chaos of  the undifferentiated 
Real is always lapping at the edges of  the self. “We may call it a border; 
abjection is above all ambiguity. Because, while releasing a hold, it does 
not radically cut off  the subject from what threatens it—on the contrary, 
abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger.”22 The abject clings 
to the subject, lacerating it, necessitating the constant defensive action 



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of  abjection. It is both horror and a siren’s song. 
Tellingly, Kristeva observes that the abject is “edged 
with the sublime,” which “has no object either.”23 It 
is the gallows humour which underlies all humour, 
and the reason eroticism shares so much territory 
with degradation and death.24 

      To Kristeva, the spectre of  the undifferentiated 
Real is first and foremost a danger which threatens 
to bring about the death of  the properly constituted 
subject. Bataille also recognises the subject as fragile 
and contingent, but is more motivated to remind us 
that a great ocean of  ecstatic experience remains 
dammed up around us while subject/object 
relations remain ‘properly’ constituted. He reminds 
us that “[c]oitus is the parody of  crime.”25 

No Subject Without a Space it is Not

     So, contrary to what is generally meant by the 
word ‘abject’ (filthy, low, wretched), it is not hygiene, 
according to Kristeva’s definition, that determines 
what is abject. Rather, the abject is that which “does 
not respect borders, positions, rules,”26 and threatens 
the legibility of  a system. Here, Kristeva draws on 
the pioneering work of  the anthropologist Mary 
Douglas (chiefly in Purity and Danger of  1966)27 on 
pollution avoidance in ‘primitive’ cultures. Douglas 
is careful to distinguish between purification and 
hygiene (modern germ theory):

If  we can abstract pathogenicity and hygiene from our 
notion of  dirt, we are left with the old definition of  
dirt as matter out of  place. This is a very suggestive 
approach. It implies two conditions: a set of  ordered 
relations and a contravention of  that order. Dirt then, 
is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt 
there is a system.28 

… I have tried to show that rituals of  purity and 
impurity create unity in experience. So far from being 
aberrations from the central project of  religion, they 

contrary 
to what is 
generally 

meant by the 
word ‘abject’ 

(filthy, low, 
wretched), it 

is not hygiene, 
according to 

Kristeva’s 
definition, that 

determines 
what is Abject

“

”



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are positive contributions to atonement. By their means, symbolic patterns are 
worked out and publicly displayed.29 

   The insight that symbolic systems are “worked out” (not just 
“displayed”) and ritually maintained by expelling dirt lends support by 
analogy to Kristeva’s theory that subjecthood is established and shored up 
by abjection. To Kristeva, not only is there a system wherever there is dirt, 
the impulse to expel the dirt preceded and inaugurated the system. The 
corpse is the ultimate abject—just as death is the ultimate elision of  the 
subject with the world—not because it is infectious, and neither because 
it is a symbol of  death (yet), but because it “show[s] me what I permanently 
thrust aside in order to live.”30 

     Perhaps more importantly, Douglas’s work affirms the hypothesis that 
abjection is at work at every scale, across bodies and non-bodily objects:

… [A]ll margins are dangerous. … Matter issuing from [the orifices of  the 
body] is marginal stuff  of  the most obvious kind. Spittle, blood, milk, urine, 
faeces or tears by simply issuing forth have traversed the boundary of  the body. 
… The mistake is to treat bodily margins in isolation from all other margins.31 

In fact, there would seem to be nothing in the infant’s experience of  
undifferentiated sensation to categorically privilege the mother’s nipple as 
the first object of  abjection, and so as the symbolic locus of  post-Oedipal 
abjection. Abjection, then, is general to the subject’s intimacy with the 
world. This implies that architecture is a potential object of  abjection—a 
potential abject.32  The artist Victor Burgin goes as far as to describe first 
abjection as a “demarcation of  space,” and engages the dictum: “No space 
of  representation without a subject, and no subject without a space it is 
not.”33 

A Burning Cathedral

     The abjection of  space presents a troubling corollary. In reverse, it 
reveals architecture to be not only a potential abject, but also the instrument 
or vector of  abjection. Just as blood, tears and come are abject to bodies, 
traitors, scapegoats, and parvenues are abject to bodies politic. Just as shit 
and slough are flushed away and occluded by architecture, it is architecture 
again which surveils the suitably constituted subject and excludes or 
imprisons the category-transgressing other. Social and subjective abjection 
“follow the same logic, with no other goal than the survival of  both 
group and subject.”34  Unfortunately, writes Kristeva, “the absorption 
of  otherness proposed by our societies turns out to be inacceptable by 
the contemporary individual, jealous of  his difference—one that is not 



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only national and ethical but essentially subjective, 
unsurmountable.”35 The complicity of  architecture 
in this problem is perhaps obvious after Foucault, 
but it is Bataille, as ever, who cleaves to the deepest 
root of  the problem.

     Bataille problematised architecture by writing 
on the prison (among other typologies). But 
Bataille’s prison has nothing to do with Foucault’s 
Panopticon, and is instead, in Denis Hollier’s 
words, “an ostentatious, spectacular architecture, 
an architecture to be seen.”36 The prison is both 
the display of  the general condition of  the human 
subject and the “generic form of  architecture 
… primarily because man’s own form is his first 
prison.”37 Hollier writes:

The greatest motive for Bataille’s aggressivity towards 
architecture is its anthropomorphism. The article 
“Architecture” describes it as an essential stage in the 
process of  hominization, as a sort of  mirror stage 
that might be called in a parody of  Lacan’s title “the 
architecture stage as formative function of  the We, 
man’s social imago.” In this sense, even though he 
seems to denounce the repression exercised over man 
by architecture, Bataille is really intervening against 
the catachresis requiring that man only take form 
with architecture, that the human form as such, the 
formation of  man, be embedded in architecture.38 

That is, Bataille’s animus towards architecture 
is rooted in his fundamental revolt against the 
operation of  abjection in the accession of  the 
subject to culture. Architecture is at once formative 
of  the subject/society and that through which the 
subject/society generates its norms. In the cited 
article, Bataille describes architecture in general:

It is clear, in any case, that mathematical order imposed 
upon stone is really the culmination of  the evolution 
of  earthly forms, whose direction is indicated within 
the biological order by the passage from the simian to 
the human form, the latter already displaying all the 
elements of  architecture. Man would seem to represent 

       Man 
would seem 

to represent 
merely an 

intermediary 
stage...between 

monkey and 
building

“

”



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merely an intermediary stage within the morphological development between 
monkey and building.39 

     The declination to acknowledge the distinction between living bodies 
and buildings is not merely a provocation. If  the prison is the generic form 
of  architecture, the cathedral must be the most profuse and comprehensive 
imposition of  “mathematical order … upon stone,” and the culmination 
of  the “morphological development” encompassing humanity and 
architecture. Considering the cathedral in the context of  what Bataille 
calls the ‘general economy’ of  mediaeval European life reveals a mode of  
abjection which cuts across stone and flesh.

      A salient characteristic of  the Gothic cathedral at its highest development 
was its fractal scalelessness, or the quality of  being governed at every scale 
by the same repertoire of  geometric rules, such that a singular order could 
be observed in the smallest baldachin as in the tallest tower—an order 
exhibiting only a tenuous, grudging relationship with the dimensions of  
the human body. Every detail from the general arrangement of  the plan to 
the profile of  mullions might be derived procedurally, through the scaling, 
tessellation, rotation, and superimposition of  polygons believed to be 
numinous. In principle, a single module (such as a square defining the 
width of  a choir) could underlie the whole cathedral, rotations or divisions 
of  which would determine the size of  every element. So comprehensive 
and predictable was this craftlore that the historian François Bucher 
suggests, “to exaggerate one might say that a single finial preserved from 
a crumpled tower could suffice for a reasonably close reconstruction of  
the total structure, provided its position within the system were known.”40 
Except for logistical purposes, it was not necessary until the moment of  
construction to assign a measure to the module of  the cathedral, which 
in theory could be infinitely large and infinitely detailed. With no change 
whatsoever to the logic of  its design, a cathedral could be expanded to 
absorb any surplus.

    What Bataille finds objectionable in the cathedral is only an exaggeration 
of  the bad faith he finds in all architecture—indeed in all work, or what 
he calls ‘Icarian’ projects. These are organised teleological acts which 
result in the ‘deferral of  living to later’ (la remise de l’existence à plus tard). 
According to Bataille, Icarian projects circumscribe us in closed, ‘restricted’ 
economies which blind us to the Real of  the ‘general economy.’ Restricted 
economies are the economies of  accountancy; posed in the zero-sum 
terms of  equilibrium, of  profit here equated with loss there. They are also 
the economies of  much psychoanalysis founded on the corresponding 
notions of  a stable subject, developmental progression, and primordial 



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loss. The remit of  the general economy is wider 
than the field of  traditional economics:

Economic science … restricts its object to operations 
carried out with a view to a limited end, that of  
economic man. It does not take into consideration 
a play of  energy that no particular end limits: the 
play of  living matter in general, involved in the 
movement of  light of  which it is the result. On the 
surface of  the globe, for living matter in general, 
energy is always in excess; the question is always posed 
in terms of  extravagance. The choice is limited to how 
the wealth is to be squandered.41 

Figure 1: Jan van Eyck,  
Saint Barbara (1437)

Saint Barbara, out of 
scale with the building 
site behind her, is enlarged 
to indicate her numinous 
importance. The measure 
of the human body is 
incidental to the scheme 
of the cathedral, which 
is perpetually under 
construction.



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     Bataille insists that because in general, energy and wealth are always in 
excess, some share of  it must be consumed without profit, or ‘sacrificed’ 
according to his use of  the term. The fundamental problem of  political 
economy then, is how to sacrifice the surplus so that living is not deferred 
to later. For Bataille, this requires the removal of  the surplus from 
circulation in the realm of  exchange values—an extravagant consumption 
which is a means to no end, which burns brightly like “the sexual act … in 
time,” like a “tiger in … space.”42  This ‘useless’ consumption nevertheless 
has the use value of  briefly restoring intimacy with the Real. In fact, a 
failure to sacrifice the surplus leads to ruination:

These excesses of  life force, which locally block the poorest economies, are in fact 
the most dangerous factors of  ruination. Hence relieving the blockage was always, 
if  only in the darkest region of  consciousness, the object of  a feverish pursuit. 
Ancient societies found relief  in festivals; some erected admirable monuments 
that had no useful purpose … Their existence in excess nevertheless (in certain 
respects) has perpetually doomed multitudes of  human beings and great quantities 
of  useful goods to the destruction of  wars.43 

     The cathedral is one of  many modes of  sacrifice available to society, 
some more ruinous and ethically bankrupt than others. The enormous cost 
of  a cathedral cannot all be held against its account, since some portion 
of  that spectacular consumption was necessary to avoid even worse 
ruination. (Better a cathedral than a crusade.) Perhaps this is why Bataille 
does not attack the cathedral head-on as an instrument of  theocracy,  but 
instead uproots it, and all architecture with it, by locating the problem 
in something like abjection. Fundamentally, what is objectionable is the 
repression of  the sovereignty of  the subject exercised by its idealism, its 
presumption of  an a priori ideal form for matter. As Hollier emphasises, 
this is only an ossification of  the anguished relation human subjects already 
have to abjects, as architecture is ‘anthropomorphic.’ Architecture, like all 
symbolic practices, is a “frock coat”44  of  form and meaning thrown over 
the unassimilable Real. But the cathedral is particularly egregious because it 
is totalising (claims total moral authority) and monist (establishes a system 
of  infinitely regressive geometries capable of  assimilating all matter, all 
difference, at any scale). In this sense, the cathedral is the Icarian project 
par excellence. A canon of  Seville is said to have uttered, in 1402, “We shall 
build so large a cathedral that those who see it in its finished state will 
think that we were mad.”45 

     Not by accident, one of  the events which turned Bataille towards 
contemplating the limits of  human experience was the shelling of  Notre-
Dame de Reims, where he received baptism in the summer of  1914 amid 



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a crowd of  soldiers.46 (He would later recognise 
his conversion as bad faith.) German artillery 
arrived within range of  Reims and soon after, 
on the 20th of  September, the cathedral burned. 
By then Bataille and his mother had evacuated 
Reims, ‘abandoning’47  his blind, paralytic father to 
apparent doom. Bataille recalls the “filthy, smelly 
state to which [his father’s] total disablement 
reduced him (for instance, he sometimes left shit 
on his trousers).”48  The abjected real father, as it 
were, put the lie to the Name-of-the-Father. “Still,” 
remembers Bataille, “I believe he faced up to it, 
as always.”49  Joseph-Aristide Bataille’s immanent 
sovereignty, it might have seemed to his son, was 
analogous to a perpetually burning cathedral—a 
cathedral in the grip of  a violent sacrifice which put 
the lie to the Word of  the Father, which left only a 
Father with shit on his trousers.

     The ghost of  his father was no doubt on 
Bataille’s mind when he fixated on the man with 

Figure 2: Hans Bellmer, the 
Woman at the Cathedral, 
1948, reprinted by 
permission. 

The woman and cathedral 
are equals in the 
composition, but this time 
because the cathedral 
is foreshortened. 
The cathedral and 
woman are elided, both 
constituted through the 
force of abjection imposing 
itself on the hypergraphic 
horror vacui of the Real.



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shitty breeches in Salvador Dalí’s painting, The Lugubrious Game, seeing 
in him an emasculation fundamental to the human condition.50 André 
Breton and the Surrealists (including Dalí himself) were disgusted by and 
rejected the interpretation, exposing themselves to criticism by Bataille 
as being ‘Icarian’ themselves. To Bataille, their surrealism only served to 
exchange one restricted economy for another which happened to privilege 
creative inspiration in dreams. Bataille’s revolt was more total, and general 
to abjection.

Base Materialism 

     Thankfully, Bataille points us to a “loophole”51 in the Symbolic which 
promises to restore the sovereignty of  the subject, if  only momentarily. 
It is a narrow path “traced by the painters,”52  which might also apply to 
architects:

Nothing is more common than for a painter to accept the reduction of  his being 
to painting.

Living in a world in which to paint is one possible function, he chooses it as his 
limit. […] From this moment he defines this means as an end, for he must deny 
his servility. […]

Nevertheless, it is not as futile as it seems at first.

This domain of  means at least offers a loophole. All traditional means are 
asserted as a law which one can possibly breach, and this painter, attached as 
he is to his scorn for what painting is not, finally comes out of  by means of  a 
negation of  the limit he wanted to uphold. At this moment his passion ceases to 
be painting, and becomes liberty …53 

A sovereign architecture ought to be, in Hollier’s words, a “Bastille in no 
way different from its own storming.”54 The paradox may be a rhetorical 
simplification. (We recall that the Native American potlatch is “at once a 
surpassing of  calculation and the height of  calculation.”)55 A sovereign 
architecture, though still an Icarian project, is an architecture which 
‘negates the limit the architect wants to uphold.’ It is a cathedral which 
perpetually burns, a wall which perpetually crumbles, just as the abject 
perpetually clings to and tears at the frayed edges of  the subject.

     In the Oedipal narrative of  subject formation, the revolt begins with 
a matricide (the objectification of  the mother) and culminates in a single 
event, the patricide. But to Bataille and Kristeva, revolt is a part of  the 
constant deconstruction and reconstruction of  the subject. Revolt serves 
to subvert and perhaps reform the symbolic order it ruptures through, 
and is the implicit goal of  art which exploits the potential of  non-sense 



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and non-meaning—including, as Hollier observes, 
Bernard Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette. Tschumi 
writes, “Good architecture must be conceived, 
erected and burned in vain. [our italics] The greatest 
architecture of  all is the fireworker’s: it perfectly 
shows the gratuitous consumption of  pleasure.”56

    Both Bataille and Kristeva prescribe revolt—a 
confrontation with the abject, which Bataille spoke 
of  in terms of  ‘low’ or ‘base materialism,’ and which 
Imogen Tyler described critically as “affirmative 
abjection.”57Neither Bataille nor Kristeva were the 
first to observe that the accession to culture entailed 
a concomitant denial of  our base material, or to 
suggest its (temporary) undoing. Hollier observes:

In April 1929, Emmanuel Berl published his 
pamphlet, The Death of  Bourgeois Thought. 
The Death of  Bourgeois Morality followed 
a few months later. Its conclusion, entitled ‘Defence 
of  materialism’, proposed a materialism that 
deserves Bataille’s label of  base materialism, a 
materialism of  an aggressive vulgarity which Berl 
presents as the proletarian weapon par excellence, 
the only ideological weapon of  any weight against the 
bourgeoisie.58 

But Bataille in particular was aware that this weapon 
of  the proletariat cuts both ways. Every explicit 
attempt at affirmative abjection either fails as it were 
to consummate its revolt, ultimately reinforcing the 
symbolic order it was designed to subvert, or simply 
reverses the hierarchy to establish another. Abject 
art, so-called, usually succumbs to the first pitfall. In 
response to an exhibition of  such artworks, Hollier 
asks, “What is abject about it? Everything was very 
neat; the objects were clearly art works. They were 
on the side of  the victor.”59  The problem is not 
of  course that the artworks were insufficiently 
repulsing, but that in exhibiting them, they were 
constituted as objects rather than abjects, and 
inscribed in a particular closed political economy. 
Presumably the artworks were to be viewed from a 

      ... a 
cathedral 

which 
perpetually 

burns, a 
wall which 

perpetually 
crumbles

“

”



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distance rather than licked.

Conclusion

    It may be that affirmative abjection is definitionally futile. Culture cannot 
be sustained outside the symbolic order, and a project to escape project is 
still a project. But we infer from Bataille that architecture may be incited to 
do, at the very least, a little more. Doesn’t its deep complicity in fact render 
it a singularly suitable instrument for material political action attenuating 
the cruelties of  abjection—if  only because it is most guilty?

    Drawing further on Bataille, we pose an alternative inflection to the 
project of  affirmative abjection. Lacan suggested that the conscious 
subject is structured as text, just as the structuralists established the 
intellectual habit of  reading buildings as texts. Whereas a text might 
be persuasive, teleological, or metaphorical, a document is, in theory, 
according to Hollier, “aggressively realist,”60  something which “cannot be 
invented.”61  Documents expose “the radical incongruity of  the concrete: 
all at once, the most ordinary beings resemble nothing at all, cease to be 
in their places.”62 

     A building which is a document would be one which declines to wear 
its frock coat—one which aggressively negates symbolic operation, so that 
what is formless, different, or meaningless cannot be appropriated, cannot 
be commodified. (A cathedral, we might say, is absolved of  symbolic 
operation when it burns.) Such a building, so designed (or ignited) as 
to frustrate its own operation as an instrument of  abjection, might be a 
venue for sacrifice, for the “gratuitous consumption of  pleasure.”63  But 
unlike the Parc de la Villette, which may be analogous to the avant-garde 
non-sense poetry Kristeva once championed (but has since cooled on), a 
building which is a document would not so much carve meaning out of  
its signifying containers (a kind of  Surrealist project), but rather expose 
the wounds of  abjection which it already bears. A building which is a 
document might be a space for the kissing of  bared wounds.

Endnotes

1. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of  Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by 
Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, [1980] 1982.

2. (propre) “Usually, in expository prose, the context removes the ambiguities 
that poetic language thrives on. Kristeva is not averse to using polysemy to 
her advantage, as other French theorists like Derrida and Lacan have also 
done. The French word propre, for instance, has kept the meaning of  the 



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Latin proprius (one’s own, characteristic, proper) and 
also acquired a new one: clean. At first, in Powers 
of  Horror, the criteria of  expository prose seemed 
to apply, but in several instances I began to have 
my doubts about this. When I asked Kristeva which 
meaning she intended the answer was, both.” Leon 
S. Roudiez, translator’s note to Powers of  Horror, by 
Julia Kristeva (New York: Columbia University, 
[1980] 1982), viii.

3. Kristeva, Powers of  Horror, 10.

4. Ibid, 33.

5. Ibid, 32.

6. Ibid, 64.

7. Ibid, 32.

8. Winnicott, D. W., Playing and Reality (London: 
Routledge, [1971] 2010), 15.

9. Ibid, 12.

10. Ibid, 8.

11. Kristeva, Powers of  Horror, 13. Abject: ab-ject, 
from the Latin roots ab (away) and iacio (to throw).

12. Ibid, 6.

13. Ibid, 3.

14. Lacan, Seminar of  1956-57, quoted in Kristeva,  
Powers of  Horror, 33.

15. Ibid, 35.

16. Ibid, 5.

17. The problematic gendering of  Kristeva’s 
model of  abjection has also been criticised. See 
for example: Tyler, Imogen. “Against Abjection.” 
Feminist Theory 10, no. 1 (2009): 77–98. doi: 
10.1177/1464700108100393.

18. “There is something anachronistic in associating 
Bataille [1897–1962], a writer who died even 
before people started to talk about structuralism, 
with poststructuralism.” Denis Hollier, Against 
Architecture: The Writings of  Georges Bataille, trans. 
Betsy Wing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, [1974] 



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1992), ix.

19. The spatial aspects of  the philosophies of  Kristeva, Deleuze and 
Guattari are compared in: West-Pavlov, Russell. Space in Theory: Kristeva, 
Foucault, Deleuze. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009.

20. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, trans. 
Robert Hurley, vol. 1, Consumption (New York: Zone Books, [1967] 2007), 
57.

21. ‘Process’ is an English loan word (see note 2).

22. Kristeva, Powers of  Horror, 9.

23. Ibid, 11, 12.

24. On laughter and the Kristevan  Abject:  John Limon, Stand-up Comedy 
in Theory, or, Abjection in America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 
2000), 73–75.

25. Georges Bataille, “The Solar Anus,” in Visions of  Excess: Selected Writings, 
1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl et al. (Minneapolis: 
University of  Minnesota Press, 2008), 5.

26. Kristeva, Powers of  Horror, 4.

27. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An analysis of  concept of  pollution and 
taboo. London: Routledge, [1966] 2009.

28. Ibid, 44.

29. Ibid, 3.

30. Kristeva, Powers of  Horror, 3.

31. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 150.

32. For example, the symptoms of  abjection in architecture have already 
been theorised in terms of  the erotic and unheimlich by architectural theorist 
Anthony Vidler’s discussion of  Roger Callois’ theory of  “dark space” 
and “legendary psychasthenia.” Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: 
Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 173. 

33. Victor Burgin, In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture 
(Berkeley: University of  California Press, 1996), 52. 

34. Kristeva, Powers of  Horror, 68.

35. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: 
Columbia University Press, 1991), 2.

36. Denis Hollier, Against Architecture: The Writings of  Georges Bataille, trans. 
Betsy Wing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, [1974] 1992), x.

37. Hollier, Against Architecture, xii.



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38. Ibid, xi–xii.

39. Georges Bataille, “Architecture,” in Encyclopædia 
Acephalica, eds. Robert   Lebel and Isabelle Waldberg, 
trans. Ian White et al. (London: Atlas, 1995), 35. 
The passage originally appeared in the journal 
Documents (no. 2, May 1929), co-founded and later 
solely edited by Bataille.

40. François Bucher, “Medieval Architectural 
Design Methods, 800–1560,” Gesta 11, no. 2 (1972): 
41, doi:10.2307/766593.

41. Bataille, The Accursed Share I, 23.

42. Ibid, 12.

43. Ibid, 24. 

44. Georges Bataille, “Formless,” in Visions of  
Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, 
trans. Allan Stoekl et al. (Minneapolis: University of  
Minnesota Press, 2008), 31. This passage originally 
appeared in Documents no. 7,  (December 1929).

45. Quoted in the frontmatter of: Erlande-
Brandenburg, Alain. The Cathedral: The Social and 
Architectural Dynamics of  Construction. Translated by 
Martin Thom. Cambridge: Cambridge University 
Press, [1989] 1994.

46. The cathedral was the subject of  Bataille’s first 
published text, written some time before 1920 when 
he apostatized. See: Hollier, Against Architecture, 
14–19 (in which the text is reproduced).

47. Georges Bataille, Story of  the Eye, trans. Joachim 
Neugroschal (New York: Penguin Classics, [1928] 
2014) 78.

48. Ibid, 72-73.

49. Ibid, 78.

50. Georges Bataille, “The Lugubrious Game,” in 
Visions of  Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. 
Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl et al. (Minneapolis: 
University of  Minnesota Press, 2008), 24–30.

51. Georges Bataille, “André Masson,” in The 
Absence of  Myth, (London: Verso, 2006), 180.



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52. Bataille, “Architecture,” 36.

53. Bataille, “André Masson,” 179–180.

54. Hollier, Against Architecture, xi.

55. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: Essay on General Economy, trans. 
Robert Hurley, vol. 2, History of  Eroticism (New York: Zone, 1993), 47.

56. Bernard Tschumi, “Fireworks” [1974], extract from A Space: A Thousand 
Words, (London: Royal, 1975). Cited in: Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and 
Disjunction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 262.

57. Tyler, “Against Abjection,” 77-78.

59. Denis Hollier, “The Use Value of  the Impossible,” in Bataille: Writing 
the Sacred, ed. Carolyn Bailey Gill (London: Routledge, 1995), 147.

59. Denis Hollier quoted in: Martin Jay, “Force Fields: Abjection 
Overruled,” Salmagundi no. 103 (Summer 1994): 244.

60. Denis Hollier, Absent Without Leave: French Literature under the Threat of  
War, trans. Catherine Porter, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 
1997), 141.

61. Ibid, 140.

62. Ibid, 139.

63. Tschumi, “Fireworks,” 262.


