To go after [architecture]: not in order to attack, destroy or deroute it, to
criticise or disqualify it. Rather, in order to think it in fact, to detach itself
sufficiently to apprehend it in a thought which goes beyond the theorem—
and becomes a work in its turn.^10The authors of these essays are all key thinkers who have made substantial contributions
to twentieth-century Western thought. Yet they come from a range of backgrounds.
While many have worked within the specific discipline of philosophy, others have less
clearly defined affiliations. Often inter-disciplinary in their approach, they demonstrate
the value of transgressing ‘professional’ boundaries in their approach to architecture no
less than to other disciplines. Such transgressions remain potentially problematic, a point
that Derrida acknowledges. On the one hand, Derrida supports the need to ‘contaminate’
architecture, ‘to put architecture in communication with other media, other arts’.^11 On the
other hand, he is very suspicious of the ‘over-easy mixing of discourses’. It is necessary
to acknowledge ‘multiplicity’ and ‘heterogeneity’—the ‘specificity of discourses’—in
order to avoid a general homogenization.^12 One must remain alert, as Derrida advises, to
the special conditions of architecture, the ‘consistency’ of architecture, ‘the duration,
hardness, the monumental, mineral or ligneous subsistence, the hyletics of tradition’.^13
The materiality on which architecture is founded cannot be ignored.
At the same time it could be argued that the processes of universalization and
differentiation are dialectically related, and that the one anticipates the other in a
mechanism of reciprocal presupposition. In other words, the very immersion of
architecture in the seemingly homogenizing morass of inter-disciplinarity is precisely
what guarantees and augments its own individuality. Far from denying the specificity of
architecture, it actually promotes it.
Transgression remains an important characteristic of the works included in this
volume. The works are necessarily transgressive, in that they have been written by
authors whose disciplines—according to the traditional view—lie ‘outside’ architecture.
This is not to say, however, that the limits or boundaries of architecture are to be ignored,
and that any sense of specificity or difference is to be erased. Transgression does not
deny the principle of limit. Indeed transgression can be defined only in relation to a limit,
and likewise a limit is not a limit unless it can be transgressed. As Foucault observes:
The limit and transgression depend on each other for whatever density of
being they possess: a limit could not exist if it were absolutely
uncrossable and, reciprocally, transgression would be pointless if it
merely crossed a limit composed of illusions and shadows.^14According to Foucault, transgression is precisely that which exposes the limit as limit.
The moment of transgression is that which illuminates the limit in a lightning-like flash.
Transgression is an action which involves the limit, that narrow zone of a
line where it displays the flash of its passage, but perhaps also its entire
trajectory, even its origin.^15