JD All the questions we have raised so far point to the question of doctrine and that can
only be placed in a political context. How is it possible, for instance, to develop a new
inventive faculty that would allow the architect to use the possibilities of the new
technology without aspiring to uniformity, without developing models for the whole
world? An inventive faculty of the architectural difference which would bring out a
new type of diversity with different limitations, other heterogeneities than the existing
ones and which would not be reduced to the technique of planning? At the ‘Collège
International de Philosophie’, a seminar is held where philosophers and architects
work together because it became evident that the planning of the ‘Collège’ also has to
be an architectural venture. The ‘Collège’ cannot take place if one cannot find a place,
an architectural form for it which bears resemblance to what might be thought in it.
The ‘Collège’ has to be habitable in a totally different way from a university. Until
now, there has been no building for the ‘Collège’. You take a room here, a hall there.
As architecture, the ‘Collège’ does not exist yet and perhaps never will. There is a
formless desire for another form. The desire for a new location, new arcades, new
corridors, new ways of living and of thinking.
That is a promise. And when I said that the ‘Collège’ does not exist as architecture yet, it
might also mean that the community it requires does not exist yet and therefore the
place is not being constituted. A community must accept the commitment and work
so that architectural thinking takes place. A new relationship between the individual
and the community, between the original and the reproduction is emerging. Think of
China and Japan, for example, where they build temples out of wood and renew
them regularly and entirely without them losing their originality, which obviously is
not contained in the sensitive body but in something else. That too is Babel: the
diversity of relationships with the architectural event from one culture to another. To
know that a promise is being given even if it is not kept in its visible form. Places
where desire can recognize itself, where it can live.
POINT DE FOLIE—MAINTENANT L’ARCHITECTURE
PART ONE
Maintenant,^1 this French word will not be translated. Why? For reasons, a whole series of
reasons, which may appear along the way, or even at the end of the road. For here I am
undertaking one road or, rather, one course among other possible and concurrent ones: a
series of cursive notations through the Folies of Bernard Tschumi, from point to point,
and hazardous, discontinuous, aleatory.
Why maintenant? I put away or place in reserve, I set aside the reason to maintain the
seal or stamp of this idiom: it would recall the Parc de la Villette in France, and that a
pretext gave rise to these Folies. Only a pretext, no doubt, along the way—a station,
phase, or pause in a trajectory. Nevertheless, the pretext was offered in France. In French
we say that a chance is offered but also, do not forget, to offer a resistance.
PART TWO
Jacques Derrida 305