‘Choral Works’. In characteristic fashion Derrida plays on this term and draws out its
various ‘differals’ of meaning.
ARCHITECTURE WHERE THE DESIRE MAY LIVE
JD Let us consider architectural thinking. By that I don’t mean to conceive architecture
as a technique separate from thought and therefore possibly suitable to represent it in
space, to constitute almost an embodiment of thinking, but rather to raise the question
of architecture as a possibility of thought, which cannot be reduced to the status of a
representation of thought.
Since you refer to the separation of theory and practice, one might start by asking oneself
how this working separation came about. It seems to me that from the moment one
separates Theorem and Pratem, one considers architecture as a simple technique and
detaches it from thought, whereas there may be an undiscovered way of thinking
belonging to the architectural moment, to desire, to creation.
EM If one is going to envisage architecture as a metaphor and thereby constantly point to
the necessity of the embodiment of thinking, how can it be reintroduced into thinking
in a non-metaphorical way? Possibly not necessarily leading to an embodiment, but
which remain along the way, in a labyrinth for example?
JD We will talk about the labyrinth later. First of all, I would like to outline how the
philosophical tradition has used the architectural model as a metaphor for a kind of
thinking which in itself cannot be architectural. In Descartes, for instance, you find the
metaphor of the founding of a town, and this foundation is in fact what is supposed to
support the building, the architectonic construction, the town at the base. There is
consequently a kind of urbanistic metaphor in philosophy. The ‘Meditations’, the
‘Discourse on Method’ are full of these architectonic representations which, in
addition, always have political relevance. When Aristotle wants to give an example of
theory and practice, he quotes the ‘architekton’: he knows the origin of things, he is a
theorist who can also teach and has at his command the labourers who are incapable of
independent thought. And with that a political hierarchy is established: architectonics
is defined as an art of systems, as an art therefore suitable for the rational organization
of complete branches of knowledge. It is evident that architectural reference is useful
in rhetoric in a language which in itself has retained no architecturality whatsoever. I
consequently ask myself how, before the separation between theory and practice,
between thinking and architecture, a way of thinking linked to the architectural event
could have existed. If each language proposes a spatialization, an arrangement in
space which doesn’t dominate it but which approaches it by approximation, then it is
to be compared with a kind of pioneering, with the clearing of a path. A path which
does not have to be discovered but to be created. And this creation of a path is not at
all alien to architecture. Each architectural place, each habitation has one precondition:
that the building should be located on a path, at a crossroads at which arrival and
departure are both possible. There is no building without streets leading towards it or
away from it; nor is there one without paths inside, without corridors, staircases,
passages, doors. And if language cannot control these paths towards and within a
building, then that only signifies that language is enmeshed in these structures, that it
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