The Architecture o f Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt Mark Wigley The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England Fifth printing, 1997 First M IT Press paperback edition, 1995 © 1993 M IT Press Ml rights reserved. No part o f this book may be reproduced in any form by any elec­ tronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information stor­ age and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was printed and bound in the United States o f America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wigley, Mark. The architecture of deconstruction : Derrida’s haunt / Mark Wigley. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-262-23170-0 (H B ), 0-262-73114-2 (PB) 1. Deconstruction (Architecture) 2. Derrida, Jacques—Philosophy. I. T itle . NA682.D43W54 1993 720'. 1—dc20 93-10352 CIP For Beatriz and Andrea Any house is a fa r too com plicated, clumsy, fussy, mechanical counter­ feit of the human body . The whole interior is a kind of stomach that attempts to digest objects . The whole life o f the average house, it seems, is a sort of indigestion. A body in ill repair, suffering indispo­ sition—constant tinkering and doctoring to keep it alive. It is a marvel, we its infesters, do not go insane in it and with it. Perhaps it is a form of insanity we have to put in it. Lucky we are able to get something else out of it, thought we do seldom get out of it alive ourselves. —Frank Lloyd Wright ‘The Cardboard House,” 1931. C ontents Preface x i 1 The Translation of Deconstruction 1 2 Unbuilding Architecture 35 3 The Slippery A rt o f Space 59 4 The Domestication of the House 97 5 Throwing Up Architecture 123 6 Doing the Twist 149 7 Dislocating Space 177 In-Conclusion 205 Notes 221 References 263 Index 273 P reface In 1985 the architect Bernard Tschumi called Jacques Derrida with an invitation. Architecture called on philosophy. For what? Philosophy? Not simply. The philosopher was asked if he would be interested in collaborating with an architect on the design of a section of the Parc de la Vilktte in Paris, a project that already had its own “design-philosophy” and even presented itself as being no more than this philosophy, a conceptual structure rather than a single material form. But clearly the architect thought that som ething was missing, that there was some kind o f gap in the argument that could be filled by a philosopher, an opening that could be exploited, some kind of pocket within which another discourse could be elaborated. So Derrida was invited into the space of the project, and hence the space of architecture, which is not yet to say an architectural space. The philosopher accepted the invitation and soon wrote an essay about the project entided P o int de fo lie —m aintenant Varchi- tecture in which the architect’s material is at once incorporated, rearranged, and extended, or, rather, the essay inhabits the ar­ chitect’s material; teasing, testing, tasting, but not judging. In no way presenting itself as criticism, the text, in a kind of strategic transference, assumes the form of what it describes. It both rehearses many o f the architect’s arguments and literally begins to shape itself according to the spatial logic of the architectural design in order to articulate the somewhat uneasy relationship between a certain kin d o f th in kin g and a certain kind o f space. x ii Preface Architecture appears to emerge for the first time as a distinct subject in Derrida’s writing. After twenty years, he turns to archi­ tecture— or so it would seem. The essay was first published in the architect’s 1986 collection of drawings of the project and then in the philosopher’s 1987 collection of essays, which includes other writings on architec­ ture. By then Derrida was collaborating with the architect Peter Eisenman in the detailed design of a particular section of the La Villette project. He was occupying all the spaces of that architec­ ture: legal, philosophical, technical, methodological, political, and interpersonal, to name but a few, in addition to what is traditionally considered to be the physical site and whatever might be projected onto it or from it In accepting the invitation, Derrida’s work changed the archi­ tecture it occupied in a number of ways, each of which need to be carefully traced through their various complications and im­ plications. But equally, his writing was changed by this occupa­ tion, even i f it was such a b rie f stopover in what has become an extended itinerary through so many different discourses. The perceived limits of both architecture and philosophy were dis­ turbed by a convoluted exchange that, like most designs, took the form o f an extended negotiation. Long after the design was completed, this negotiation is still going on and is opening up on several new fronts. Some of the negotiated changes were temporary and the respective institutional spaces have already been restored and their furniture rearranged to accommodate familiar assumptions, but other spaces are, as they say, just not the same. Spurred by this event, a vigorous discourse has developed around the question of “deconstruction and architecture” involv­ ing many names from both inside and outside the traditional institutional lim its of architecture and philosophy. Just as a num­ ber of architectural theorists have turned to “deconstructive” theory, theorists of deconstruction have increasingly turned to “architecture.” A m u ltip licity o f exchanges have taken place: conferences, exhibitions, essays, special issues o f journals, books, reviews, interviews, newspaper articles, editorials, debates, letters to the editor, published correspondence, dissertations, research grants, fellowships, architectural projects, architectural criticism, x iii Preface interdisciplinary collaborations, academic appointments and dis­ appointments, and various forms of censorship. In these ongoing transactions, more aspects of the respective institutions have been consolidated than have been displaced, and even then some of those displacements have themselves been subsequently institutionalized according to the all too familiar economy of domestication. But still, I think a lot of important work has been done. The philosophers have had a lot to say to the architects and the architects have had a few surprises for the philosophers. Everyone has had to think again, and then again. The effects of this rethinking are considerable, if not obvious. It is not possible to sift through all this material here, tracing the elaborate weave o f heterogeneous trajectories to adequately address the question of “deconstruction and architecture.” My only concern w ill be to trace some of the preconditions for this engagement, conditions that both made it possible and pro­ duced the sense of an event inasmuch as they are variously brought to the surface, suppressed, or displaced. Immediately, it must be noted that this discourse, which began with the question of deconstruction and architecture and has developed in recent years into other questions in which the word “deconstruction” plays no role, did not simply emerge out of the public event of Derrida’s involvement in a specific design project On the one hand, several projects of reading Derrida’s work within architectural discourse were already highly developed and would become increasingly nuanced. On the other hand, the question of architecture did not simply emerge in Derrida’s work with his first essay “about” architecture. His writing already de­ pended on a certain thinking of architecture that even surfaces in the word “deconstruction.” So it is necessary to step back, to retrace some steps and identify the role of architecture in Der­ rida’s writing before his apparent turn to it The earlier texts need to be reread to locate the architecture that is written into them and cannot be detached, the architecture that makes those texts possible and, indeed, makes the eventual turn to architec­ ture possible, even if that turn ignores or transforms it At the very least, this involves patiently tracing an intermittent subtext inscribed within Derrida’s texts and following its indis­ tinct and often circuitous trajectories. It requires a close atten- XIV Preface tion to the letter of those texts, citing, reciting, repeating, and rehearsing them—not by following their more obvious lines of argument, but by locating one of the threads that passes between them and unpicking it see what it holds together, exploring the unique way in which the visible pattern and strength of Derrida’s writing is maintained by this rarely visible and seemingly tenuous architectural thread. To step back into Derrida’s work to address this question will be, at the same time, to step back into the writings of Martin Heidegger, not only because Heidegger is perhaps the most rigorous thinker of the relationship between philosophy and architecture, but also because Derrida’s work is itself an incessant stepping back into Heidegger, and perhaps more than anything else, it is a stepping back into Heidegger’s account o f the neces­ sity of such a stepping back, an account that is itself presented in architectural terms. And this return to Heidegger needs to be made precisely when it might seem riskiest, given the current reexaminations of his association with National Socialism. But these revisions make the return even more necessary here and now because, as I have argued elsewhere, the question of archi­ tecture is implicated in them at every turn.1 Finally, and more personally, this book is another kind of stepping back inasmuch as it is a reworking of my doctoral thesis entitled ‘Jacques Derrida and Architecture: The Deconstructive Possibilities o f Architectural Discourse,” which is a reading o f the architectural argument embedded within Derrida’s work before he addressed architecture as such.