Rethinking Architecture| A reader in cultural theory

Figure 1 Sketch by Jacques Derrida for

Choral Work project

Source: G.Bennington and J.Derrida, Jacques Derrida,

London, The University of Chicago Press, 1993

relationship with the filter (a telescope or a photographic acid bath, or a

machine which has fallen from the sky having photographed or X-rayed—

filtered—an aerial view). This would be both an interpretive and selective

filter which would allow the reading and the sieving of the three sites and

the three layers (Eisenman-Derrida, Tschumi, La Villette). As a stringed

instrument, it would announce the concert and the multiple chorale, the

chora of Choral Work.

I do not think that anything should be inscribed on this sculpture (for

this is a sculpture), save perhaps the title, and a signature might figure

somewhere (i.e. Choral Work, by...1986), as well as one or two Greek

words (plokanon, seiomena, etc.). We should discuss this, among other

things...(30 May 1986)

One will note in this passage, the allusion to the filtering of a selective interpretation that
evokes, in my letter, Nietzsche and a certain scene played out between Nietzsche and the
pre-Socratics—those same figures that seem to haunt a given passage in the Timaeus
(Democritus, for example).
So what does Eisenman do? He interprets in his turn, actively and selectively. He
translates, transposes, transforms and appropriates my letter, rewriting it in his language,

Rethinking Architecture 324