Formless Ways in and out of Form

The papers in this volume challenge the concept of form and aim to set out, explore and develop different theories and examples of ‘the formless’. In so doing, they raise questions of form, and notions of formlessness (as distinct from something called ‘the formless’). The starting point for many of the contributors is Georges Bataille’s highly influential article entitled ‘informe’ (‘formless’). Here, in a context where art, philosophy and anthropology were merging, Bataille tried to question the idea of formlessness as simply applying to things without form. This book, through a diversity of articles in various domains, asks how and why ‘the formless’ is such a dominant idea from the nineteenth century onwards and it asks the question: ‘what is formless?’

The Editors: Patrick Crowley is Lecturer in French at University College Cork. He has published articles on contemporary writers such as Eugène Savitzkaya and Pierre Michon, as well as on Julia Kristeva and Paul Ricœur.
Paul Hegarty is Lecturer in French at University College Cork. He is the author of Georges Bataille (2000) and Jean Baudrillard (2004), as well as articles on noise, contemporary theory and architecture.