249163 Ibid., p. 88.
164 Massimo Cacciari, “The Dialectics of the Negative and the Metropolis,” in Cacciari, Archi-
tecture and Nihilism, pp. 1–96. See also Massimo Cacciari, “Notes sur la dialectique du né-
gatif à l’époque de la metropole (essai sur Georg Simmel),” VH 101, no. 9 (Autumn 1972),
pp. 58 –72. Benjamin’s study on Baudelaire can be found in “On Some Motifs in Baude-
laire,” in Benjamin, Illuminations, pp. 155–201.
165 Cacciari, Architecture and Nihilism, p. 13. See also Lombardo’s introduction, p. xxv.
166 Cacciari, Architecture and Nihilism, p. 13.
167 With Simmel what is involved is a certain coincidence rather than any causal link between
the process of rationalization in personal realtions and the increasing dominance of the
commodity system.
168 Cacciari, Architecture and Nihilism, p. 12.
169 Ibid., p. 19.
170 Letter from Benjamin to Scholem, June 12, 1938, in Gershom Scholem, ed., Walter Ben-
jamin/Gershom Scholem, Briefwechsel(Frankfurt: Suhrkampf, 1985), pp. 266–273.
171 Cacciari, Architecture and Nihilism, p. 64.
172 Tomás Llorens, “Manfredo Tafuri: Neo-Avant-Garde and History,” Architectural Design51,
no. 6/7 (1981), p. 88.
173 Dal Co, Figures of Architecture and Thought, p. 19.
174 Ibid., p. 35.
175 For a discussion of this text, see chapter 1 above.
176 Dal Co, Figures of Architecture and Thought, p. 42.
177 Manfredo Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture, trans. Giorgio Verrecchia (London:
Granada, 1980), p. 141; translated from Teorie e storia dell’architettura (Bari: Laterza,
1968).
178 In particular, Tafuri raises a number of objections to Giedion’s interpretations of the plans
of Sixtus V for sixteenth-century Rome. Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture, pp.
151–152; see Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradi-
tion (1941; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 75–106.
179 Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture, p. 151.
180 Ibid., p. 172.
181 Ibid., p. 229.
182 Tafuri, moreover, does not go into the question of whether this form of criticism also has
an ideological content. See Llorens, “Manfredo Tafuri: Neo-Avant-Garde and History,”
p. 85.
183 Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, p. ix.
184 Frederic Jameson, “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology,” in Joan Ockman, ed., Ar-
chitecture, Criticism, Ideology(Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1985), p. 65.
185 Jameson sees a reason here for including Tafuri’s work under the same heading as that of
Adorno and Barthes. I disagree with him, at least as far as Tafuri’s affinity with Adorno is
concerned. Like Patrizia Lombardo, I think that Benjamin’s writings shed much more light
on Tafuri than do those of Adorno. Not only is there textual evidence for this (Tafuri refers
much more to Benjamin than to Adorno); it is also something that Tafuri has stated in in-
terviews, such as the one with Françoise Véry, published in Architecture—Mouvement—
Continuité in 1976 and quoted in Hélène Lipstadt and Harvey Mendelsohn, “Philosophy,
History and Autobiography: Manfredo Tafuri and the ‘Unsurpassed Lesson’ of Le Cor-
busier,” Assemblage, no. 22 (December 1993), pp. 58–103. Moreover, the subliminal in-
fluence of Cacciari on Tafuri is indisputable, and Jameson seems somewhat too hasty in
treating Cacciari’s “negative thought” as though it were comparable with Adorno’s “neg-
ative dialectics.” Cacciari explicitly acknowledges that he adheres to a “Marxism without
dialectics,” and this makes his stance fundamentally different from that of Adorno. Fur-
thermore, Cacciari considers that negative thought will continue to be functional within the
future development of capitalism, while Adorno, as I intend to show in the following chap-
ter, continued to cherish a hope—even if a slender one—that his negative dialectics would248