dissipated, the fury? That is not a member of the domestic organism, that is banished into
its entrails.
Even more than the city, the republic or even the flabby and permissive association of
interests and opinions called contemporary society—it is strange that, even more than
with any of these states of assembling the diverse, the domus gives the untameable a
chance to appear. As though the god-nature which cultivates it were doubling himself
with an anti-god, an anti-nature, desperate to make the bucolic lie. The violence I am
speaking of exceeds ordinary war and economic and social crisis. Conversely, and in
spite of their generality, or because of it, crisis and war do not become desperate unless
they are infiltrated with the breath and the asphyxia of the domestic. Even if the houses
have long been ruined, it is enough to activate the memory of a lost domain and legend (a
living common space, the myth of a pure common origin) for the political and economic
community to parade and parody itself as a gens, as a domus mocked. So then conflict,
crisis change into stasis and seditio, as though they were affecting some domestic habitus
that had been thought abandoned. The undominated, the untamed, in earlier times
concealed in the domus, is unleashed in the homo politicus and economicus but under the
ancient aegis of service, Dienst. It’s necessary, one might say, that shareable matter be
densified to the narrow scale of domesticity for anti-matter to deliver its hatred from each
body. Homo re-domesticus in power kills in the street shouting ‘You are not one of ours.’
He takes the visitor hostage. He persecutes anything that migrates. He hides it away in his
cellars, reduces it to ashes in the furthest ends of his lowlands. It is not war—he
devastates. Hybris break apart the domestic modus. And the domestic remodelling will
have served to unleash hybris.
The ruin of the domus makes possible this fury, which it contained, and which is
exercised in its name. But apart from this case, the case of evil, I find it hard to think that
in general the emancipation of singularities from out of domestic space-time favours, on
its own, freedom of thought. Perhaps thinking’s lot is just to bear witness to the rest, to
the untameable, to what is incommensurable with it. But to say witness is to say trace,
and to say trace is to say inscription. Retention, dwelling. Now all memory makes a work.
So that at the very moment when thought bears witness that the domus has become
impossible, and that the façade is indeed blind, it starts appealing to the house and to the
work, in which it inscribes this witnessing. And the fact that there are many houses in the
megalopolis nowadays does not mean that there are no longer any works, nor any works
to be produced. It means that works are destined to be left idle, deprived of façades,
effaced by their heaping up. Libraries, museums: their richness is in fact the misery of the
great conglomerates of council flats. The domus remains, remains as impossible. My
common place. But impossible is not only the opposite of possible, it is a case of it, the
zero case.
We wake up and we are not happy. No question of remaking a real new house. But no
question either of stifling the old childhood which murmurs at our waking. Thinking
awakens in the middle of it, from the middle of very old words, loaded with a thousand
domesticities. Our servants, our masters. To think, which is to write, means to awaken in
them a childhood which these old folk have not yet had. That does not happen without a
certain lack of respect, assuredly, but not without respect either. You go on, untameable,
but with care. Forced to it. You go on, but the past in words awaits there in front of you.
It mocks us. And that does not mean that you advance backwards, like Benjamin’s angel.
Rethinking Architecture 260