Chapter 9
“. . . The gift of time” Le Corbusier reading Bataille1 Nadir Lahiji
Sometime between 1949 and 1953 Georges Bataille gave Le Corbusier a copy of his most celebrated book, La Part Maudite, essai d’economie general (The Accursed Share).2 The title page bears this inscription, in Bataille’s hand: “à Monsieur Le Corbusier, en témoignage d’admiration et de sympathie.”3 On the last page of this copy, Le Corbusier wrote “19 Nov. 1953,” which indicates the date he finished reading the book. Le Corbusier marked the text, underlined passages, and wrote commentaries on its two flyleaves. In spring 1988, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris exhibited Le Corbusier’s copy of La Part Maudite for the first time. To my knowledge, Le Corbusier never read Marcel Mauss’s monumental work, The Gift;4 but here is a gift he received from Georges Bataille, who at the instigation of Alfred Metraux became acquainted with the theory of potlatch outlined by Mauss in Essai sur le don, forme archaique de l’échange, which Mauss published in the 1925.5 Bataille’s argument in La Part Maudite owes a debt to Mauss’s work. Le Corbusier was fascinated by the chapter “Le don de rivalite (le ‘potlatch’ ”) [“The Gift of Rivalry: ‘Potlatch’ ”] in La Part Maudite, where Bataille discussed the idea of the “gift.” In his “overview” of Bataille’s text, written on the flyleaf, Le Corbusier made these remarks about the section “Theorie du ‘potlatch’: l’acquisition du ‘rang’ ” [“Theory of ‘Potlatch,’ The Acquisition of Rank”], with reference to page 92 of his copy of La Part Maudite: 119