Topie Impitoyable: The Corporeal Politics of the Cloth, the Wall, and the Street / Les politiques corporelles du vetement, du mur et la rue

This new book begins where the previous one, Weaponized Architecture: The Impossibility of Innocence, ended….That book started with the hypothesis that architecture is inherently violent because of the way it dissects space and because of the resulting spatial organization of bodies. Architecture is a social discipline, and therefore this violence always ends up as an instrument of politics, whether it’s done consciously or not. ~Léopold Lambert

What is a body? This book is more attached to raising the question than in offering a definitive answer. Instead, Lambert proposes to make more complex certain commonplaces located at various degrees of proximity to the body’s material assemblage, allowing a better integration of the surrounding objects, atmosphere and other bodies and proposing a political reading of their relationship to the body, whether deliberate or accidental. From the hoodie that Trayvon Martin wore when he was killed in the suburbs of Miami Gardens, Florida, to the streets of New York City during Occupy Wall Street and the apartheid wall in Palestine, this book moves through a series of episodes that illustrate how bodies and objects of all sizes are enmeshed in deeply entangled political relationships.