enough space, I would analyse the stratagems with which Peter Eisenman plays, and what
he has to do in his books, that is to say, in his constructions also, in order to fly like an
arrow all the while avoiding being trapped by oppositions with which he nevertheless has
to negotiate. The absence which he speaks of in Moving Arrows...is not opposed, and
above all, is not dialectically opposed to presence. Linked as it is to the discontinuous
structure of ‘scaling’, it is not a mere void. Determined by recursivity and by the internal-
external difference of ‘self-similarity’, this absence ‘produces’, it ‘is’ (without being, nor
being an origin or a productive cause) a text, better and something other than a ‘good
book’; more that a book, more than one; a text like ‘an unending transformation of
properties’: ‘Rather than an aesthetic object, the object becomes a text...’ That which
overturns the opposition presence/absence, and thus an entire ontology, must nevertheless
be advanced within the language that it transforms in this way, within which is inscribed
that which this language literally contains without containing, is found imprinted.
Eisenman’s architecture marks this ‘without’ (which I prefer to write in English),
with/without, within and out, etc. We are related to this ‘without’ of the language, by
dominating it in order to play with it, and at the same time in order to be subjected to the
law, its law which is the law of the language, of languages, in truth of all marks. We are
in this sense at the same time both passive and active. And we could say something
analogous on the subject of this active/passive opposition in the texts of Eisenman,
something analogous as well on the subject of analogies. But one must also know how to
stop an arrow. He too knows how to do it.
We might be tempted to speak here of an architectural Witz, of a new textual economy
(and oikos, after all, is the house; Eisenman also builds houses), an economy in which we
no longer have to exclude the invisible from the visible, to oppose the temporal and the
spatial, discourse and architecture. Not that we confuse them, but we distribute them
according to another hierarchy, a hierarchy without an ‘arché’, a memory without origin,
a hierarchy without hierarchy.
What there is there (there is, es gibt) is something beyond Witz, as in beyond the
pleasure principle, if at least we understand these two words, Witz and plaisir as implying
the intractable law of saving and economy.
Finally, to raise the question of the book once more: there are those who would like
sometimes to imply somewhat facilely, that the most innovative ‘theoretician’ architects
write books instead of building. It should not be forgotten that those who hold to this
dogma generally do neither one nor the other. Eisenman writes, in effect. But in order to
break with the norms and the authority of the existing economy, he needed, by means of
something which still resembled a book effectively to clear a new space in which this an-
economy would be at the same time possible and, to a certain point, legitimized,
negotiated. This negotiation takes place within time, and it needs time with the powers
and the cultures of the moment. For beyond the economy, beyond the book, whose form
still displays this encompassing mania of speech, he writes something else.
It is a topos: monuments have often been compared to books.^5 Eisenman’s ‘libretti’
are, no doubt, no longer books. Nor are they at all ‘good and beautiful’. They pass the test
of calligraphy or of the callistique, that ancient name for the aesthetic. I would not say
that they are, notwithstanding, sublime. In its very disproportionateness, the sublime is
still a human measure. Ecce Homo: end, the end of all, la fin de tout.
Jacques Derrida 327