is ‘on the way’. ‘On the move towards language’ (Heidegger), on the way to reaching
itself. The way is not a method, that must be clear. The method is a technique, a
procedure in order to gain control of the way, in order to make it viable.
EM And what is the way, then?
JD I refer once more to Heidegger who says that ‘odos’, the way, is not ‘methodos’, that
there is a way which cannot be reduced to the definition of method. The definition of
the way as a method is interpreted by Heidegger as an epoch in the history of
philosophy starting with Descartes, Leibniz and Hegel and concealing its nature of
being a way, making it slip into oblivion whereas in fact it indicates an infinity of
thinking: thinking is always a way. If thinking doesn’t rise above the way, if the
language of thinking or the thinking system of the language is not understood as meta-
language on the way, that means that language is a way and so has always had a
certain connection with habitability and with architecture. This constant ‘being on the
move’, the habitability of the way offering no way out entangles you in a labyrinth
without any escape. More precisely it is a trap, a calculated device such as Joyce’s
labyrinth of Daedalus.
The question of architecture is in fact that of the place, of the taking place in space. The
establishing of a place which didn’t exist until then and is in keeping with what will
take place there one day, that is a place. As Mallarmé puts it, ‘ce qui a lieu, c’est le
lieu’. It is not at all natural. The setting up of a habitable place is an event and
obviously the setting up is always something technical. It invents something which
didn’t exist beforehand and yet at the same time there is the inhabitant, man or God,
who requires the place prior to its invention or causing it. Therefore one doesn’t
quite know where to pin down the origin of the place. Maybe there is a labyrinth
which is neither natural nor artificial and which we inhabit within the history of
graeco-occidental philosophy where the opposition between nature and technology
originated. From this opposition arises the distinction between the two labyrinths.
Let us return to the place, to spatiality and writing. For some time something like a
deconstructive procedure has been establishing itself an attempt to free oneself from
the oppositions imposed by the history of philosophy such as physis/teckne,
God/man, philosophy/architecture. Deconstruction therefore analyses and questions
conceptual pairs which are currently accepted as self-evident and natural as if they
hadn’t been institutionalized at some precise point, as if they had no history. Because
of being taken for granted they restrict thinking.
Now the concept of deconstruction itself resembles an architectural metaphor. It is often
said to have a negative attitude. Something has been constructed, a philosophical
system, a tradition, a culture, and along comes a deconstructor and destroys it stone
by stone, analyses the structure and dissolves it. Often enough this is the case. One
looks, at a system—Platonic/Hegelian—and examines how it was built, which
keystone, which angle of vision supports the building; one shifts them and thereby
frees oneself from the authority of the system. It seems to me, however, that this is
not the essence of deconstruction. It is not simply the technique of an architect who
knows how to deconstruct what has been constructed, but a probing which touches
upon the technique itself, upon the authority of the architectural metaphor and
thereby constitutes its own architectural rhetoric. Deconstruction is not simply—as
its name seems to indicate—the technique of a reversed construction when it is able
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