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List of contents
PART I: PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHTS ON PORNOGRAPHY 1. Visibility of the invisible: Pornography and utilitarianism 2. Profanation and pornography 3. The society of pornography 4. Pornography and the society of spectacle PART II: BADIOU AND THE PORNOGRAPHIC PRESENT 5. The fetish of democracy 6. The reign of the image and the phallic fetish of our time 7. The brothel and the Chief of Police PART III: THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE PORNOGRAPHIC AGE 8. Appearance and Schein 9. Building between nudity and clothing 10. Digital tattooists, or, the new criminals 11. The obscene surplus of drapery 12. Veiling and unveiling 13. Pornography and exhibition-value PART IV: ARCHITECTURE AND POLITICAL TRUTH: CRITIQUE OF PORNOGRAPHIC CAPITALISM 14. Utilitarianism, happiness, and the use of pleasure 15. Philosophy and happiness 16. Political truth, ideology, and the camera obscura 17. Architecture, capitalism, and the pornographic apparatus
About the author
Nadir Lahiji is an architect. He is most recently the author of Architecture, Philosophy and the Pedagogy of Cinema (Routledge, 2021), Architecture or Revolution: Emancipatory Critique after Marx (Routledge, 2020), and An Architecture Manifesto: Critical Reason and Theories of a Failed Practice (Routledge, 2019). His previous publications include, among others, Adventures with the Theory of the Baroque and French Philosophy and the co-authored The Architecture of Phantasmagoria: Specters of the City.
Summary
In this book, Nadir Lahiji adopts Alain Badiou’s thesis from The Pornographic Age to demonstrate that contemporary architecture is in absolute complicity with the pornographic present. The book is aimed at architecture students at higher graduate and post-graduate levels.
Additional text
"It seems a cliché to say that we live in pornographic times. But Nadir Lahiji probed beyond this cliché and has given us a concrete assessment of what the descent into pornography has cost us as a society. As he shows with his typical lucidity and profundity, the pornography of our age has eliminated the very space in which we could come together. Lahiji has written a stunning account of what the pornographic invasion has cost us."
Todd McGowan, University of Vermont, USA
"More than a critique, Nadir Lahiji’s book is a fierce condemnation of contemporary architecture, not only for being wholly complicit with the regime of images that characterizes our current age—a regime that Alain Badiou has identified as essentially pornographic—but for providing its structural support."
Alex Ling, Western Sydney University, Australia
