powers of ‘attraction’. All of this answers to a programme of transfers,
transformations or permutations over which these external norms no longer hold the
final word. They will not have presided over the work, since Tschumi has folded them
into the general operation.- Yes, folded. What is the fold? The aim of re-establishing architecture in what should
have been specifically its own is not to reconstitute a simple of architecture, a simply
architectural architecture, through a purist or integratist obsession. It is no longer a
question of saving its own in the virginal immanence of its economy and of returning
it to its inalienable presence, a presence which, ultimately, is non-representational,
non-mimetic and refers only to itself. This autonomy of architecture, which would
thus pretend to reconcile a formalism and a semanticism in their extremes, would only
fulfil the metaphysics it pretended to deconstruct. The invention, in this case, consists
in crossing the architectural motif with what is most singular and most parallel in other
writings which are themselves drawn into the said madness, in its plural, meaning
photographic, cinematographic, choreographic, and even mythographic writings. As
The Manhattan Transcripts demonstrated (the same is true, though in a different way,
of La Villette), a narrative montage of great complexity explodes, outside, the
narrative which mythologies contracted or effaced in the hieratic presence of the
‘memorable’ monument. An architectural writing interprets (in the Nietzschean sense
of active, productive, violent, transforming interpretation) events which are marked by
photography or cinematography. Marked: provoked, determined or transcribed,
captured, in any case always mobilized in a scenography of passage (transference,
translation, transgression from one place to another, from a place of writing to another,
graft, hybridization). Neither architecture nor anarchitecture: transarchitecture. It has it
out with the event; it no longer offers its work to users, believers or dwellers, to
contemplators, aesthetes or consumers. Instead, it appeals to the other to invent, in
turn, the event, sign, consign or countersign: advanced by an advance made at the
other—and maintenant architecture.
(I am aware of a murmur: but doesn’t this event you speak of, which reinvents
architecture in a series of ‘only onces’ which are always unique in their repetition, isn’t it
what takes place each time not in a church or a temple, or even in a political place—not
in them, but rather, as them, reviving them, for example, during each Mass when the
body of Christ, etc., when the body of the King or of the nation presents or announces
itself? Why not, if at least it could happen again, happen through (across) architecture, or
even up to it? Without venturing further in this direction, although still acknowledging its
necessity, I will say only that Tschumi’s architectural folies make us think about what
takes place when, for example, the eucharistic event goes through [transir] a church, ici,
maintenant [here, now], or when a date, a seal, the trace of the other are finally laid on
the body of stone, this time in the movement of its disappearance.)
PART TEN
Therefore, we can no longer speak of a properly architectural moment, the hieratic
impassibility of the monument, this hyle-morphic complex that is given once and for all,
permitting no trace to appear on its body because it afforded no chance of transformation,
permutation or substitutions. In the folies of which we speak, on the contrary, the event
Jacques Derrida 311