At dawn, the cathedral, still smoking, was more beautiful than ever. The open nave, full of ashes, was an iconoclastic monument to the cultural history of the West. A work of art is not a work of art if it cannot be destroyed, and therefore be fantasized and imagined—if it can’t exist in the immaterial museum of longing and desire, if its loss doesn’t justify intense grief. Why couldn’t those who clamor for reconstruction wait not even one second to mourn? Destroyers of the planet and annihilators of life, we prefer to build on our own ecological ruins. That’s why we’re afraid to look at Notre Dame ravaged. Against this Front of Builders it is necessary to create a Front to Defend the Notre Dame of Ruins.¹

—Paul B. Preciado

Philosopher, curator and activist Paul B. Preciado wrote these strong words in April 2020, in response to the burning of the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, and not least to the instant calls for its immediate reconstruction, indeed resurrection. Instead, Preciado argues against rebuilding the cathedral, and suggests leaving it as a ruin, as another type of monument, a monument of loss, and even calls for a new popular front in defense of the ruin. Such a monument would allow to not only admire the cathedral, but also to mourn it, and to contemplate loss as artistic and aesthetic category. Furthermore, it allows for a discourse on destruction, not just the destructive tendency towards the past that we find in the most violent and future-orientated modernistic avant-gardes (be they artistic or political), but also as a monument to the current destruction of the Earth, ironically through the burning of the Earth, and the anti-monuments it creates. One might add, as well, the speed by which the calls for sudden and decisive action came from officials and politicians, and compare this to the hesitation, deferment and deliberation, even inaction, when the same officials and politicians are asked to act now to delay the burning of the Earth through the systemic and slow violence that is climate change, or, for that matter, responsiveness to the vast social inequalities and conflicts that characterise ‘the ruins of the present,’ to use Vijay Prashad’s apt description of our actuality (a world of widespread annihilation, climate catastrophe, poverty, unemployment and war).² Leaving the burned church as a ruin, then, would make it a symbol, not to the greatness of France, the west and Christianity, but rather to their crimes, in history, and as the current and future effects of this history: a counter-monument to loss, mourning, defeat and destruction.

In its invocation of the ruin as monument and testament—that is, as a container for the past—Preciado’s statement interestingly recalls ideas about ruination first presented long ago—in romanticism (the pre-modern), in modernity itself, as well as in its after life (the postmodern, itself perhaps by now a historical category), where the ruin signifies a past that can no longer be experienced directly, but only through its degraded state of ruination. It thus reminds us of not only the passing of time, and how a building loses its historical meaning when its original function is no longer possible in its depleted form, but also of our own mortality and the futility of cultural constructions (such as churches, but actually all purposeful built environments), as Denis Diderot famously wrote in his review of the 1767 Paris Salon:

The ideas ruins invoke in me are grand. Everything comes to nothing, everything perishes, everything passes, only the world remains, only time endures. How old is this world! I walk between two eternities. Wherever I cast my glance, the objects surrounding me announce death and compel my resignation to what awaits me.³

When looking at the ruin the self is thus suspended between the present and the past, between actuality, futurity and deep time, and between life, death and after life. The ruin is, in these ways, sublime and horrific, both a relic of the past, a testament, but in its ruination, also always a testament to the disappearance of the relic itself, of memory and monument, instead pointing to the eternity of, if not the world, then at least a world, in some sort of state or another… Here, it is important to note, that it is hard to define when something, a monument or building, is just in bad shape (rundown, derelict etc.), and when it is actually a ruin (and thus unusable for its designed function), as well as when it is no longer even a ruin, but simply rubble. The ruin itself is thus also not in a stable condition, but in a state of transformation always moving towards further ruination, turning to rubble and dust, which is what gives the ruin, in the words of Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle, its “suggestive, unstable semantic potential,” and the reason why, as “an aesthetic and conceptual category, it is uniquely ill-defined.”⁴

Indeed, during the Romantic period, ruin gazing was not just limited to ruins of the past, whether encountered on the grand tour of the Mediterranean, or in the wilderness of the North, (or within the depictions in the crucial work of Piranesi for that matter), but also in the curious phenomen on of artificial ruins, newly constructed sites without use value as buildings, but mainly as objects of aesthetic contemplation in parks and estates from the second half of the 18th century onwards, mostly in England and France, but with also throughout most of Northern Europe in a form of pre-modern architecture that predicts some of the basic tenets of postmodern architecture! Counter-intuitively, ruin gazing also contributes to modernism, otherwise characterised by its commitment to the new, and to the idea of progress. But just as ruination lurks in every new construct, not just as remnants of the past, but as foreboding futurity, it brings a dark side to the modernist project that is both melancholic and nihilistic, as can be seen in such opposing, if contemporaneous bodies of thought of Georg Simmel and Oswald Spengler, each drawing upon the legacy of German romanticism. For Simmel, echoing Descartes, the ruin is essentially an accommodation between culture and nature, a return to nature if you will, of the built environment, of the human trace. This suspended state is the beauty of the ruin, but, as noted above, the ruin is never stable, but constantly undergoing a process of ruination, so that, in the end, there will be no ruin left at all: “The Aesthetic value of the ruin combines disharmony, the eternal becoming of the soul struggling against itself, with the satisfaction of form, the firm limitedness, of the work of art. For this reason, the metaphysical-aesthetic charm of the ruin disappears when not enough remains of it to let us feel the upward-leading tendency.”⁵ This is why architecture is the greatest form of art in Simmel’s thought, combining the will of the spirit (upward driving) and the necessary destructiveness of nature (downward dragging); and this is why we need ruin gazing.

Simmel’s ideas of culture turning back to nature is not only a realisation of the mortality of people and their projects, their epochs, achievements and utopias, but also an indication of things to come in a different sense, namely that of ‘nature,’ or the environment fighting back, resisting or revenging humans’ attempted control, that is, cultivation of the land and beyond (geo-planning, industrialisation, mining etc.) of so-called nature: In return, the Earth literally screams, as Jussi Parikka, among others, has noted, reacting to the pain of mining and fracking under its surface, industrial farming and production on it, and fossil fuel emissions above, leaving to a feverish state of sickness, that shouldn’t simply be described as the anthropocene, but rather, with Parikka: The Antrobscene.⁶ That is, our world in ruins…

Spengler, on the other hand, sees ruins, and indeed ruination, as the inevitable outcome of imperial civilisations, from Rome to the 3rd Reich. Although the Nazi regime would take great inspiration from Spengler’s ideas of decay and othering, his view was one of inevitable demise, the fall of all empires, and at the time of writing, what he saw as ‘the decline of the West,’ which as also become the English translation of his treatise.⁷ But whereas the romanticist ruin gazing of Diderot and Simmel, as well as that of many classical and early modernist artists, was a relationship between the viewing subject and the object of the ruin, that reminded the subject about their spirit and body, their presence and demise, life and afterlife, Spengler posited ruin gazing in another relation to identity, and to what he termed ‘culture’ and ‘civilisation,’ with culture being an organic entity and civilisation inorganic. Culture is directed inwards, towards the people and the nation as one essential cultural identity, finding its highest form in specific architectural constructs and visual regimes; civilisation is outward bound, towards the colonialisation of other lands and people, creating an empire that will inevitable crumble and fall, just as Rome perished, so shall the West, and more concretely Germany. Therefore ruin gazing becomes the gaze of the other, of the barbarians at the gate looking at the ruins of the West! This is what inspired both Adolf Hitler and his architect Albert Speer. But unlike Spengler, they believed the German people to be historically young, and thus able to forge a new empire (1000 years), precisely by identifying and annihilating the other, the barbarians at our gates and in our midst. Simultaneously, there was an urge for destruction, not only of others, but also in terms of their own grandeur. In this sense, the architectural constructions of Speer were not only conceived as monumental and full of grandeur, but also to look beautiful as (future) ruins: to die young is to stay pretty.

What is specific about Spengler’s weird theories of national culture, and thus racial purity, was however, that it “writes world history in terms of space, not time, replacing the Hegelian tripartite scheme with a study of eight autonomous world cultures.”⁸ These various world cultures, what he called Kulturkreise, were fundamentally different, and could be categorised and defined, be it as Faustian (the occident), classical, or magic/Arab, and so on. Each culture has its own essence, its own soul, as well as its ascent, peak and decline. This is also what makes Spengler our contemporary, perhaps, polemically stated, even more so than Simmel – his followers weren’t not only the Nazis, who actually also rejected huge parts of his ideas, but rather the contemporary west (not as declined, but possibly as former). Spengler’s ideas are indeed those of the clash of civilisations, as Samuel P. Huntington and his ilk would have it, and most certainly the basis of contemporary national-(neo)liberal European politics of the EU and its border regimes: Europe and its others.

Can we thus see the current national identity politics in Europe, and moreover this culturalisation of politics as a response to processes of ruination in Europe, historically, environmentally, culturally and politically. That is, the ruins of modernity, industrial and physical as well as intellectual and thus political? Certainly, the great postmodern theorists of the late 20th century saw postmodernism as nothing but the reckoning with the wreckage, the ruins of modernity— just think of Baudrillard’s musings on the Berlin wall (anorexic ruins), Lyotard’s writing of the ruin, or even Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archeology. More contemporarily, and in terms of architecture so beloved by both Simmel and Spengler, we can invoke Tom Edensor’s work on abandoned industrial sites as (post)modern ruins, but also Owen Hatherley’s hilarious and magisterial account of the non-romantic ruination that is contemporary public-private building projects that are not even post-modern (and thus possibly ridiculously sublime), but merely pseudo-modernist.⁹ These are, then, not only the ruins of modernity and its aesthetics and politics, but also the ruins of post-modernity, here understood as the cultural logic of neoliberalism, and its onslaught on the solidity, support systems and infrastructures of societies and the social itself over the last 40 years, making the ruins of the present, as formulated by Prashad, the historical outcome of the neoliberal project of economic deregulation and social deconstruction and ecological devastation: the ruins of neoliberalism, and the rise of antidemocratic politics that lies in its wake, as Wendy Brown has suggested.¹⁰

Such forms of neoliberal ruination are not evenly distributed, of course, neither geographically nor socially, with a major difference between the centers of the empires (doomed to fail or not) and their peripheries, their colonies. As opposed to the romantic and nostalgic ruins of imperial states, whether clawed back by nature, or pillaged by barbarians crashing the gates, the effects of empires, and their decline and detraction, that is, the postcolony, are experienced more in terms of ruination as an act historical, submerged, but continuous and constant, as trauma— than in the form of actual ruins and memorials, in terms of what Ann Laura Stoler has, with a postcolonial approach to ruins and ruination, described as ‘imperial debris.’¹¹ At stake here are less the objects left behind, but rather the after shocks and afterlives of their violent meanings and effects. Often, of course, the traces are invisible, with no ruins and memorials (indeed, memorialisation is an unwanted figure here), but is materially rubble or debris, but with its presence continuously felt through trauma and haunting. It is thus less about analysing the ruin as an object, but rather as a verb: to ruin. This also indicates an ongoing activity, not just a historical relic:

Imperial projects are themselves processes of ongoing ruination, processes that bring ruin upon, exerting material and social force in the present. By definition, ruination is an ambiguous term, being an act of ruining, a condition of being ruined, and a cause. Ruination is an act perpetrated, a condition to which one is subject, and a cause of loss. These three senses may overlap, but they are not the same. Each has its own temporality.¹²

In contrast to the romantic tradition, ruins are not the sign of the passing of time, and culture inevitable returning to nature, and in opposition to the fascistic imagination of ruination brought on by the enemies at the gate, imperial ruination is fully cultural, political and colonial, perpetrated by one righteous people onto other lesser people and foreign, fertile lands (also known as ‘terra nullius’). These violent acts may or may not leave visible traces (actual ruins), and their effects may be experienced both immediately and with delay. Finally, it is a cause of loss in the sense of trauma rather than contemplation and suspension. These different temporalities also suggest a continuum of ruination, a condition of active ruination, rather than a process of disappearance and forgetting:

To think with ruins of empire is to emphasize less the artifact of empire as dead matter or remnants of a defunct regime than to attend to their reappropriations, neglect, and strategic and active positioning within the politics of the present (so not post-colony as its over, but as afterlife).¹³

This allows one to consider the ruin of Notre Dame, as well as its slick newly re-opened reconstruction in a new light, as a monument to both design and crime, to fallen empires and entangled postcolonies, to the nation and its others, to the church and its victims. The destruction of the church, then, is not posited as an accident to be corrected, but as exposure, cracking open the lines of representation and depresentation already inherent in the ruin and its many unstable readings and meanings, and allowing for another view, just as does the open navel of the church of Notre Dame. The ruins of the cathedral may still be a testament to its medieval greatness, but no longer to its completeness, and through its current openings and cracks, attests to the fallibilities of its discourse, and to historicity of its reign. It also shows, however, the precariousness of our present ruins, as it was not thousands of years of wear and tear that brought it down, nor was it destroyed by barbarians at the gates, or from the banlieues of Paris, but rather from the enemy within and all around contemporary societies, neoliberal governance, contracting and production: the fire was caused by bad wiring, that is, some kind of negligence in the profit-driven speed and strictures of contemporary construction work. A less epic form of destruction perhaps, but with no less striking results and enduring destructive influence. These are the ruins that we live in, and where we must explore ‘the possibilities of life in capitalist ruins,’¹⁴ as Anna Tsing reminds us (in the light of climate catastrophe), where, as Preciado phrases it, “the last of a world that ends, and the first of another world that begins.”¹⁵

Footnotes

1. Paul B. Preciado, “Notre Dame of Ruins,” Artforum (April 21, 2019), https://www.artforum.com/slant/paul-b-preciado-on-the-notre-dame-fire-79492, accessed February 4, 2025. ↑

2. Vijay Prashad, “In the Ruins of the Present,” in Curating After the Global: Roadmaps for the Present, ed. Paul O’Neill, Simon Sheikh, Lucy Steeds, and Mick Wilson, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2019, pp. 47– 67. ↑

3. Denis Diderot, “Salon of 1767,” in Diderot on Art, vol. II, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995, pp. 198–199. ↑

4. Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle, Ruins of Modernity, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010, p. 6. ↑

5. Georg Simmel, “The Ruin,” (1911) The Hudson Review, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Autumn, 1958) p. 348. ↑

6. Jussi Parikka, The Anthrobscene, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. ↑

7. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, (Der Untergang des Abendlandes, 1918), London: Arktos, 2021. ↑

8. Hell and Schönle, Ruins of Modernity, p. 177. ↑

9. See Tim Edensor, Industrial Ruins, Oxford: Berg, 2005, and Owen Hatherley, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, London: Verso, 2011. ↑

10. Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West, New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. ↑

11. Ann Laura Stoler (Ed.), Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. ↑

12. Stoler, Imperial Debris, p. 11. ↑

13. Ibid. ↑

14. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015. ↑

15. Preciado, “Notre Dame of Ruins.” ↑