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HENRI LEFEBVRE TOWARD AN ARCHITECTURE OF ENJOYMENT Toward an archiTecTure of enjoymenT also by henri Lefebvre Published by the university of minnesota Press The Urban Revolution Translated by Robert Bononno Foreword by Neil Smith Dialectical Materialism Translated by John Sturrock Foreword by Stefan Kipfer State, Space, World: Selected Essays Edited by Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden Translated by Gerald Moore, Neil Brenner, and Stuart Elden also on henri Lefebvre Published by the university of minnesota Press Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory Łukasz Stanek Toward an archiTecTure of enjoymenT Henri Lefebvre Edited by Łukasz Stanek Translated by Robert Bononno university of minnesota Press minneapolis • London This book was supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. English translation copyright 2014 by Robert Bononno Introduction copyright 2014 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401– 2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lefebvre, Henri, 1901–1991, author. [Vers une architecture de la jouissance. English] Toward an architecture of enjoyment / Henri Lefebvre; edited by Lukasz Stanek; translated by Robert Bononno. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8166-7719-1 (hc) isbn 978-0-8166-7720-7 (pb) 1. Architecture—Philosophy. 2. Architecture—Psychological aspects. I. Stanek, Lukasz, editor. II. Bononno, Robert, translator. III. Lefebvre, Henri, 1901–1991. Vers une architecture de la jouissance, Translation of. IV. Title. ]NA2500.L4513 2014 720.1—dc23 2014001742 Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer. 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 CONTENTS Translator’s Note vii Introduction. A Manuscript Found in Saragossa: Toward an Architecture xi Łukasz Stanek Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment 1. The Question 3 2. The Scope of the Inquiry 24 3. The Quest 32 4. Objections 50 5. Philosophy 60 6. Anthropology 80 7. History 87 8. Psychology and Psychoanalysis 102 9. Semantics and Semiology 117 10. Economics 128 11. Architecture 136 12. Conclusion (Injunctions) 146 Notes 155 Index 177 This page intentionally left blank TransLaTor’s noTe The title Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment is taken directly from Henri Lefebvre’s French working title, Vers une architecture de la jouissance, and, in that sense, is unproblematic. The proverbial elephant in the room makes its appearance in the form of jouissance, a word ripe (some might say rife) with connotations that has repeatedly proven problem- atic to translators of contemporary French prose. Its range of associa- tions and ambiguity is legendary, and justifications of its translation, rather than its wholesale adoption, have now become commonplace. The usual fallback position, and one I obviously do not follow here, is to leave it untranslated. One would have to examine this tactic on a case- by- case basis to explicate the underlying rationale, but the primary reason can be traced to its use in psychoanalytic texts, particularly the work of Jacques Lacan, for whom it was a core concept. The most recent and most accurate translation of Lacan’s Écrits, by Bruce Fink, “translates” it as such; it is assumed, as Fink notes in a short glossary at the end of the book, that readers of Lacan are sufficiently familiar with the term and its meanings to preclude the need for English translation. But even for Fink, in the context of Lacanian psychoanaly- sis, jouissance is a form of “enjoyment”: “I have assumed that the kind of enjoyment beyond the pleasure principle (including orgasm) denoted by the French jouissance is well enough known by now to the English- reading public to require no translation.”1 Of course, such familiarity is open to question, particularly outside the narrow circle of Lacanian psy- choanalysts and those scholars who engage regularly with his ideas. There appears to be a tacit assumption on the part of many that its appearance in French must inevitably refer back to Lacan, thereby foreclosing any vii viii Translator’s Note further attempt at interpretation. Lacanian discourse may have poisoned the well of jouissance for generations, but translators must be open to the possibility of other readings. Unfortunately, given Lacan’s significance as a thinker and the widespread distribution of his ideas, directly or indirectly, in twentieth- century scholarly writing, the term has become accepted as a common element of academic discourse, in need of no further explanation— and no translation. As a result, its use (and abuse) is widespread. It is worth considering, however, that the word predates its use by Lacan and has been employed, even by his contemporaries, in ways that are less troubled with multiple and often confused interpreta- tions. In French, the word has a lengthy pedigree; its earliest use has been traced to the fifteenth century, where it is intended primarily as a form of usufruct.2 In the sixteenth century it began its association with what we may call “pleasure,” initially the pleasure of the senses generally and then, around 1589, sexual pleasure. Littré in his majestic, though now somewhat superannuated, dictionary of the French language traces the verb from which it is derived, jouir, to Latin gaudere. Other than its nontranslation in psychoanalytic contexts, it has been variously ren- dered as “pleasure,” “enjoyment,” “contentment,” “satisfaction,” “bliss.” The emphasis so often found on sexual pleasure and on orgasmic relief is misplaced; while jouissance can certainly have this meaning, its semantic range is much broader, and sexual release is not its primary meaning, as a glance at any large French monolingual dictionary will reveal. In fact, it is the sense of overall “well- being” that the verb jouir designates: “to experience joy, pleasure, a state of physical or moral well- being procured by something.”3 The release should be seen as one that is organic rather than purely orgasmic, one that covers a panoply of sensual and psychic satisfactions. (Moreover, since when has it been decided that “sexual pleasure” must be limited to the moment of orgasm, to the exclusion of all that precedes and follows, or that sexuality must be so instrumental, resolutely directed toward the achievement of a goal?) There are pros and cons to each of these potential translations, and each would have to be examined in the context in which it was made. But the question remains: how does Henri Lefebvre employ the term here, in this book, in the context of architectural space? Every translation is an act of interpretation.4 This inevitably entails the elucidation of meaning— the evaluation of a word’s connotational and denotational elements within a microcontext of some sort (the sentence Translator’s Note ix or paragraph, generally). In fiction what a word connotes may hold more weight for the translator than the various senses found in a dic- tionary entry. But with certain text types, nonfiction especially, we are most concerned with a word’s denotation, the class of objects that theo- retically fall within its scope of reference. The characteristic that indi- cates that a word is a technical term (as jouissance would be for Lacanian psychoanalysis) is its restricted scope of reference. That scope can be relatively large or relatively small, but it is not unlimited, does not ex- tend to the limits of general language as a whole. The language of the sciences, law, or finance are prime examples of such restricted scope. To leave a word untranslated is to imply that it is so uniquely bound up with a culture that it is untranslatable (croissant or baguette, for exam- ple) or to signify that it is a term of art employed as intended by special- ists in a given field, usually for historical reasons (voir dire in the field of law, for example). Jouissance, of course, has escaped the cage of Lacanian psychoanalysis and been used with an equally complex range of associa- tions, primarily psychoanalytical, by other scholars, but its appearance in an English context is intended to isolate and identify its pedigree in Lacanian psychoanalysis. To have left the word untranslated would have been to have made such an assumption, whereas it is used, as Lefebvre’s text demonstrates, “to lay out a broad field of investigation . . . often . . . within and against a whole family of concepts such as bonheur, plaisir, volupté, and joie” (see the Introduction). There are a number of overriding factors in the use of “enjoyment” as a translation for jouissance: its inclusion in the title of the book and the weight that must be assigned to this, and its recurrence throughout the text in various and wide- ranging contexts. While Lefebvre was familiar with Lacan’s work, nothing in Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment indi- cates his employment of the word in the sense(s) used by Lacan— in other words, as a psychoanalytic “term of art.” “Pleasure” as a translation of jouissance is a possibility, but the French language has a perfectly ade- quate word to express that concept, le plaisir, and its translation is rela- tively unproblematic. More important, as Łukasz Stanek notes in his Introduction, Lefebvre changed the title from Vers une architecture du plaisir, which had been suggested by Mario Gaviria, to Vers une architec- ture de la jouissance. There was, therefore, no justification for its use here as a translation of Lefebvre’s jouissance. Additionally, given the nature of Lefebvre’s text and his theorization of space, a more active word was
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