the domus. Whence the exceptional tenacity, which arose from the (artificial)
reconstitution of flesh. Does that remain a constant temptation, after Nazism? At any rate
the untameable has to be controlled, if the big monad is to be competent and competitive.
Everything must be possible, without remainder, with a bit of ingenuity. But that’s just it,
the domus isn’t ingenious enough, the extermination betrays too much hybris, there has to
be a more rational and open way of operating. More operational, less reactively earthly.
Secrecy must not surround the destruction of the secret. Communication and culture
accomplish this destruction, and much better. Timbre will get analysed, its elements will
be put into a memory, it will be reproduced at will, it may come in useful. The important
thing is not that the result is a simulacrum: so was tragedy. The important thing is to
dominate—not even that, to treat—everything that was rebellious to the domus, as much
as possible. As to what’s left, it is condemned to extinction, denied, vernichtet.
And I wanted to say this too. Well, we say to ourselves (who, ‘we’?), well, at least in
the ghetto we shall go on. As far as it is possible. Thinking, writing, is, in our sense, to
bear witness for the secret timbre. That this witnessing should make up an oeuvre and
that this oeuvre might be able, in a few cases, at the price of the worst misunderstanding
(méprise), of the worst contempt (mépris), to be placed on the circuits of the mediated
megalopolis, is inevitable, but what is also inevitable is that the oeuvre promoted in this
way be undone again, deconstructed, made redundant (désoeuvrée), deterritorialized, by
the work of thinking some more, and by the bewildering encounter with a material (with
the help not of god or of the devil, but of chance). Let us at least bear witness, and again,
and for no one, to thinking as disaster, nomadism, difference and redundancy. Let’s write
our graffiti since we can’t engrave. That seems to be a matter of real gravity. But still I
say to myself: even the one who goes on bearing witness, and witness to what is
condemned, it’s that she isn’t condemned, and that she survives the extermination of
suffering. That she hasn’t suffered enough, as when the suffering of having to inscribe
what cannot be inscribed without a remainder is of itself the only grave witnessing. The
witness of the wrongs and the suffering engendered by thinking’s différend with what it
does not manage to think, this witness, the writer, the megalopolis is quite happy to have
him or her, his or her witnessing may come in useful. Attested, suffering and the
untameable are as if already destroyed. I mean that in witnessing, one also exterminates.
The witness is a traitor.
NOTE
1 In English in original. (Translators’ note.)Rethinking Architecture 264