Rethinking Architecture| A reader in cultural theory

(Axel Boer) #1

totalization, the still too-historical configuration, so that it would be open
to a general decipherment. And nevertheless I thought that, without giving
any assurance on this subject, that some detached and enigmatic
metonymy, rebelling against the history of the three sites and even against
the palimpsest, should ‘recall’ by chance if one encountered it, something,
the most incomprehensible of all, of the chora. For myself, today, that
which I find the most enigmatic, which resists and provokes the most, in
the reading which I am undertaking of the Timaeus is (we can talk about
this again later), the allusion to the figure of the sieve (plokanon, a work
or braided cord, 52e), and to the chora as sieve (sieve, sift, I also love
these English words). There is in the Timaeus a figural allusion which I do
not know how to interpret and which nevertheless seems to me decisive. It
speaks of something like movement, the shaking (seiesthai, seien,
seiomena), the tremor in the course of which a selection of the forces or
seeds takes place; a sorting, a filtering in the very place where,
nevertheless, the place remains impassive, indeterminate, amorphous, etc.
It seems to me that this passage in the Timaeus is as errratic, as difficult to
integrate, as deprived of origin and of manifest telos as that piece we have
imagined for our Choral Work.
Thus I propose the following approximate ‘representation’,
‘materialization’, ‘formation’: in one or three examples (if there are three,
then each with different scalings), a guilded metal object (there is gold in
the passage from the Timaeus, on the chora, and in your Cannaregio
project) to be planted obliquely in the earth. Neither vertical, nor
horizontal, an extremely solid frame that would resemble at once a web, a
sieve, or a grill (grid) and a stringed musical instrument (piano, harp,
lyre?: strings, stringed instrument, vocal chord, etc.). As a grill, grid, etc.,
it would have a certain


Jacques Derrida 323
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