which, no longer precisely or simply falling into the domain of meaning, would be
intimately linked to something like madness [la folie].
PART FIVE
Not madness [la Folie], the allegorical hypostasis of Unreason, non-sense, but the
madnesses [les folies]. We will have to account with this plural. The folies, then, Bernard
Tschumi’s folies. Henceforth we will speak of them through metonymy and in a
metonymically metonymic manner since, as we will see, this figure carries itself away; it
has no means within itself to stop itself, any more than the number of Folies in the Parc
de la Villette. Folies: it is first of all the name, a proper name in a way, and a signature.
Tschumi names in this manner the point-grid which distributes a non-finite number of
elements in a space which it in fact spaces but does not fill. Metonymy, then, since folies,
at first, designates only a part, a series of parts, precisely the pinpoint weave of an
ensemble which also includes lines and surfaces, a ‘sound-track’ and an ‘image-track’.
We will return to the function assigned to this multiplicity of red points. Here, let us note
only that it maintains a metonymic relation to the whole of the Parc. Through this proper
name, in fact, the folies are a common denominator, the ‘largest common denominator’ of
this ‘programmatic deconstruction’. But, in addition, the red point of each folie remains
divisible in turn, a point without a point, offered up in its articulated structure to
substitutions or combinatory permutations which relate it to other folies as much as to its
own parts. Open point and closed point. This double metonymy becomes abyssal when it
determines or overdetermines what opens this proper name (the ‘Folies’ of Bernard
Tschumi) to the vast semantics of the concept of madness, the great name or common
denominator of all that happens to meaning when it leaves itself, alienates and dissociates
itself without ever having been subject, exposes itself to the outside and spaces itself out
in what is not itself: not the semantics but, first of all, the asemantics of Folies.
PART SIX
The folies, then, these folies in every sense—for once we can say that they are not on the
road to ruin, the ruin of defeat or nostalgia. They do not amount to the ‘absence of the
work’—that fate of madness in the classical period of which Foucault speaks. Instead,
they make up a work; they put into operation. How? How can we think that the work can
possibly maintain itself in this madness? How can we think the maintenant of the
architectural work? Through a certain adventure of the point, we’re coming to it,
maintenant the work maintenant is the point—this very instant, the point of its implosion.
The folies put into operation a general dislocation; they draw into it everything that, until
maintenant, seems to have given architecture meaning. More precisely, everything that
seems to have given architecture over to meaning. They deconstruct first of all, but not
only, the semantics of architecture.
PART SEVEN
Let us never forget that there is an architecture of architecture. Down even to its archaic
foundation, the most fundamental concept of architecture has been constructed. This
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