Despite appearances, this religious or political memory, this historicism, has not
deserted architecture. Modern architecture retains nostalgia for it: it is its destiny to be
a guardian. An always-hierarchizing nostalgia: architecture will materialize the
hierarchy in stone or wood (hylè); it is a hyletics of the sacred (hieros) and the
principle (arché), an archihieratics.- This economy remains, of necessity, a teleology of dwelling. It subscribes to all the
rules of finality. Ethico-political finality, religious duty, utilitarian or functional ends:
it is always a question of putting architecture in service, and at service. This end is the
principle of the archi-hieratical order. - Regardless of mode, period or dominant style, this order ultimately depends on the fine
arts. The value of beauty, harmony and totality still reigns.
These four points of invariability do not adjoin. They delineate the chart of a system from
the angles of a frame. We will not say only that they come together and remain
inseparable, which is true. They give rise to a specific experience of assembling, that of
the coherent totality and continuity of the system. Thus, they determine a network of
evaluations; they induce and inform, even if indirectly, all the theory and criticism of
architecture, from the most specialized to the most trivial. Such evaluation inscribes the
hierarchy in a hyletics, as well as in the space of a formal distribution of values, But this
architectonics of invariable points also regulates all of what is called Western culture, far
beyond its architecture. Hence the contradiction, the double bind or antinomy which at
once animates and disturbs this history. On the one hand, this general architectonics
effaces or exceeds the sharp specificity of architecture; it is valid for other arts and
regions of experience as well. On the other hand, architecture forms its most powerful
metonymy; it gives it its most solid consistency, objective substance. By consistency, I do
not mean only logical coherence, which implicates all dimensions of human experience
in the same network: there is no work of architecture without interpretation, or even
economic, religious, political, aesthetic or philosophical decree. But by consistency I also
mean duration, hardness, the monumental, mineral or ligneous subsistence, the hyletics of
tradition. Hence the resistance: the resistance of materials as much as of consciousnesses
and unconsciouses which instate this architecture as the last fortress of metaphysics.
Resistance and transference. Any consequent deconstruction would be negligible if it did
not take account of this resistance and this transference; it would do little if it did not go
after architecture as much as architectonics. To go after it: not in order to attack, destroy
or deroute it, to criticize or disqualify it. Rather, in order to think it in fact, to detach itself
sufficiently to apprehend it in a thought which goes beyond the theorem—and becomes a
work in its turn.
PART NINE
Maintenant we will take the measure of the folies, of what others would call the
immeasurable hybris of Bernard Tschumi and of what it offers to our thought. These
folies destabilize meaning, the meaning of meaning, the signifying ensemble of this
powerful architectonics. They put in question, dislocate, destabilize or deconstruct the
edifice of this configuration. It will be said that they are ‘madness’ in this. For in a
polemos which is without aggression, without the destructive drive that would still betray
a reactive affect within the hierarchy, they do battle with the very meaning of
Jacques Derrida 309