Andrew Benjamin
Australian Andrew Benjamin (b. 1952) is one of relatively few philosophers from the
English speaking world who have engaged with the continental tradition. He has
published extensively on the work of Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, Walter
Benjamin, Julia Kristeva and Jean-François Lyotard. Andrew Benjamin belongs to an
emerging group of contemporary thinkers who have pursued what might be termed an
‘aesthetic turn’ in philosophy, echoing the earlier ‘literary turn’. Here he recognizes the
interdependency of philosophy and the visual arts, and architecture especially.
‘Philosophy can never be free of architecture.’ To this end he has engaged in a vigorous
exploration of the interaction between these two traditionally quite distinct fields with a
view not to denying the specificity of the individual disciplines, but rather to exploring
how each may inform the other.
The essay, ‘Eisenman and the Housing of Tradition’, is part of this project. By
bringing together Descartes, a philosopher who thinks ‘architecturally’, and Peter
Eisenman, an avant-garde architect who is at once theorist and practitioner, Benjamin
seeks to explore the question of tradition and the way in which it is ‘housed’. He exposes
some of the tensions in the thought of Descartes who had pursued the question of the
‘break’ with tradition via an architectural metaphor—as a ‘refounding’ of philosophy. As
Benjamin argues, in Descartes’ terms an absolute ‘break’ with tradition is impossible.
Rather it is a question of recognizing ‘the reinscription of a repetition within an attempt
to break down the repetition of tradition’. Thus Benjamin formulates an understanding of
the project of the avant-garde in terms of a ‘reworking’ of the past, not dissimilar to
Freud’s concept of ‘Nachträglichkeit’ (‘working through’). Eisenman’s work, Benjamin
argues, must be seen as an overcoming of the complacency of tradition, an ongoing
struggle open to a plurality of possibilities where ‘becoming triumphs over being’. Above
all, it ‘opens up the need to think philosophically beyond the recuperative and nihilistic
unfolding of tradition’. The interdependancy of architecture and philosophy is thereby
affirmed. Benjamin concludes by observing that from now on what is required of both
philosophy and architecture are ‘works with open doors’.
EISENMAN AND THE HOUSING OF TRADITION
J’ai sans doute mal lu l’oeuvre de Derrida, mais mal lire c’est finalement
une façon de créer, et c’est en lisant mal que j’arrive à vivre dans la réalité
et que je pourrais travailler avec lui.
Peter EisenmanLocating architecture would seem to be unproblematic. Architecture houses. It is at home
in—and provides a home for—philosophy, aesthetics and those discourses which are
thought to describe it. And yet it is precisely the generality as well as the singularity of
these claims that makes such a description or location problematic. In each instance
something remains unquestioned. The assertion—even the argument—that architecture