(the Parc, the institution) be structured as a reassembling system. The red point of folies
is the focus of this dissociated space.^3
PART FIFTEEN
A force joins up and holds together the dis-jointed as such. Its effect upon the dis- is not
external. The dis-joint itself, maintenant architecture, architecture that arrests the
madness in its dislocation. It is not only a point: an open multiplicity of red points resists
its totalization, even by metonymy. These points might fragment, but I would not define
them as fragments. A fragment still signals to a lost or promised totality.
Multiplicity does not open each point from outside. In order to understand how it also
develops from inside we must analyse the double bind whose knot the point of folie
tightens, without forgetting what can bind a double bind to schiz and madness.
On the one hand, the point concentrates, folds back towards itself the greatest force of
attraction, contracting lines towards the centre. Wholly self-referential, within a grid.
which is also autonomous, it fascinates and magnetizes, seduces through what could be
called its self-sufficiency and ‘narcissism’. At the same time, through its force of
magnetic attraction (Tschumi speaks here of a magnet which would ‘reassemble’ the
‘fragments of an exploded system’), the point seems to bind, as Freud would say, the
energy freely available within a given field. It exerts its attraction through its very
punctuality, the stigmè of instantaneous maintenant towards which everything converges
and where it seems to individuate itself; but also from the fact that in stopping madness, it
constitutes the point of transaction with the architecture which it, in turn, deconstructs or
divides. A discontinuous series of instants and attractions: in each point of folie the
attractions of the Parc, useful or playful activities, finalities, meanings, economic or
ecological investments, services will again find their place on the programme. Bound
energy and semantic recharge. Hence, also, the distinction and the transaction between
what Tschumi terms the normality and deviation of the folies. Each point is a breaking
point: it interrupts, absolutely, the continuity of the text or of the grid. But the inter-ruptor
maintains together both the rupture and the relation to the other, which is itself structured
as both attraction and interruption, interference and difference: a relation without relation.
What is contracted here passes a ‘mad’ contract between the socius and dissociation. And
this without dialectic, without that Aufhebung whose process Hegel explains to us and
which can always reappropriate such a maintenant: the point negates space and, in this
spatial negation of itself, generates the line in which it maintains itself by cancelling itself
(als sich aufhebend). Thus, the line would be the truth of the point, the surface the truth
of the line, time the truth of space and, finally, the maintenant the truth of the point
(Encyclopédie, $256–7). Here I permit myself to refer to my text, Ousia et grammè^4
Under the same name, the maintenant I speak of would mark the interruption of this
dialectic.
But on the other hand, if dissociation does not happen to the point from outside, it is
because the point is both divisible and indivisible. It appears atomic, and thus has the
function and individualizing form of the point only according to a point of view,
according to the perspective of the serial ensemble which it punctuates, organizes and
subtends without ever being its simple support. As it is seen, and seen from outside, it
simultaneously scans and interrupts, maintains and divides, puts colour and rhythm into
Jacques Derrida 315