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249 O nly a few months before finishing this book, I found, in a private archive, Henri Lefebvre’s unpublished manuscript with the title “Vers une architecture de la jouissance” (Toward an Architecture of Jouissance). The history of this 225-page manuscript requires additional study; what is clear by now is that it was commissioned and written within the framework of a larger research project in 1973, thus one year before the publication of The Production of Space, but never published, since the head of the project considered it unsuitable for the project’s purpose. The manuscript is divided into twelve chapters. It begins with identifying architecture as its main research object and proceeds to discuss a range of themes, with special focus on the relationships between buildings and monuments in the first chapter; the questions of power, revolution, and subversion in chapter 2; and the discussion of the body and the relationship among jouissance, pleasure, desire, and pain in chapter 3. At this point the focus of the manuscript extends from a specific investigation of architecture to a more general research on spaces of jousissance, and in chapter 4 Lefebvre refutes several possible objections to this change of perspective. Chapters 5 through 11 discuss the contribution of various disciplines to the research on the space of jouissance, among them architecture. Finally, in chapter 12, Lefebvre discusses architecture as a specific level of social practice, that of image, immediacy, and the irreducible, but also the level on which the possibilities of everyday life emerge, and thus the proper level on which new projects are conceived. It is not possible here to provide a fair account of this rich text, full of architectural examples, discussions with authors that extend the set of references Afterword Toward an Architecture of Jouissance 250 Afterword known from other works of Lefebvre, accounts of his personal memories, and links to the theory of the production of space and to the architectural discourse and practice of the early 1970s. The manuscript can be read as an initiation of research on architecture by means of Lefebvre’s theory, and it suggests that such research should be developed according to five postulates: first, the assumption of the relative autonomy of architecture in respect to other social practices; and yet examined, second, as a social practice in relationship to others; third, a special attention to the practices of the body; fourth, an application of transdisciplinary concepts that, fifth and finally, allow for a contextualization of research in architecture within a broad transdisciplinary study of social space. Only if we think of architecture within the general transformations of society, labor, and the everyday, but in relative autonomy from them, can the “forgotten, erased place of architectural work . . . be defined,” writes Lefebvre.1 Instead of condemning the architectural object as an effect and instrument of overwhelming social forces and “rather than repeating that nothing can be done because of capitalism, which commands and co-opts,”2 he encourages us to think of architecture as irreducible to the mode of production, state, and social relations: Lefebvre suggests a dialectical understanding of the conflict between a specifically architectural imagination and the forces aimed at instrumentalizing it. This dialectics reaffirms the double perspective in Lefebvre’s research on architecture discussed in this book: architecture as a practice of the architect interacting with other actors within the general division of labor, and architecture as a means of addressing the practices of dwelling that mediate between the times and scales of urban society. Architecture as understood from these perspectives opens the way toward a concrete utopia that, in contrast to scenarios of unhindered growth, “is negative”: It takes as a strategic hypothesis the negation of the everyday, of labor, of the economy of exchange, etc. It also negates the sphere of the state [l’étatique] and the primacy of the political. It takes jouissance as its starting point and aims at a concept of new space, one that can be based only on an architectural project.3 This project must depart from the body—the individual body and the social body— and counter its fragmentation in the division of labor and its identification with a spectacular image referring to other images. From within this negation Lefebvre envisages an architecture as a spatial “pedagogy” of the body and its rhythms: an architecture of jouissance understood as a formation of senses. Jouissance is thus a transdisciplinary concept that cannot be confined...

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