Heretical Rhapsodies

A Survey with Translations of Architectural

Theories in France from 1982 to 2004

Timothy Wilson Adams

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements

for the degree of Master of Architecture,
The University of Auckland, 2007.
 Abstract

Heretical Rhapsodies is a thesis on architectural theories that were published in

France between 1982 and 2004 and that have remained untranslated and therefore
unnoticed by the English-speaking world. These writings on architecture are either by
usually well-translated philosophers, such as Jean-François Lyotard, Luce Irigaray
and Jean-Luc Nancy, or else by theorists almost unknown to English speakers and
rarely ever translated, such as Daniel Payot, Benoît Goetz and Christian Girard. The
first aim of this thesis is to bring an important body of architectural research to light
by making an introductory survey of the field. In order to demonstrate the value of
these writings ten new translations from the French of essays or excerpts from books
are included. The second aim is to learn what we can about the particular conditions
that brought about these writings and to pose the question: who or what determines
which writings are translated? In other words, if these writings do indeed have value
why have they not been translated before? It turns out that besides a small number of
French intellectual heroes such as Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and Virilio, very little
ever gets translated into English. For example, translations from the French make up
only 0.7 % of new titles published every year in America compared with the 20-30 %
of translations for most European nations. This thesis begins in a small way to redress
this imbalance. The title of this thesis captures the mood of the last translation
included in this thesis written by the rising star of French philosophy, Alain Badiou,
in his short treatise on the theatre, Rhapsodie pour le Théâtre (Rhapsody for the
Theatre). Badiou considers all theatre to be both protected by and heretical to the
State. This perfectly captures the general mood of the French architectural theories of
the post-May ’68 period. While they are wildly enthusiastic about the creative
potential of architecture, they all form heretical attacks on what each one perceives to
be the doctrines of architecture, hence the title Heretical Rhapsodies.

ii
This thesis is dedicated to Elizabeth Cheng.

iii
 Acknowledgements

This thesis would never have been finished without the continuing
encouragement and support of my beautiful wife, Elizabeth Cheng, who despite
everything never lost faith in my abilities or in the value of my project. During the
long period of research the patience of two supervisors was tested beyond what was
reasonable, firstly Dr Ross Jenner and secondly Dr Mike Linzey. The imprint of these
two tirelessly-inquiring minds has left its mark on every page. Mention should be
made also of Gary Genosko of Lakehead University, Ontario, whose short visit
allowed me the privilege of meeting the world’s foremost Guattari scholar and who
showed great interest in my work during its early stages. Both Peggy Deamer and
Albert Refiti saw early drafts of this work and their enthusiasm for my project was
greatly appreciated. Finally Isabella must be acknowledged for being so well-behaved
despite the long absences of her father.

iv
 Contents

Abstract ..................................................................................................................................... ii
List of Figures .......................................................................................................................... vi
Introduction ...........................................................................................................................1
Introduction to François Cusset ................................................................................................12
François Cusset.........................................................................................................................18

Section 1: Unknown Essays on Architecture by Three Well-Known

French Philosophers
Introduction to Lyotard, Irigaray and Nancy ............................................................................24
Jean-François Lyotard ..............................................................................................................36
Luce Irigaray ............................................................................................................................47
Jean-Luc Nancy ........................................................................................................................53
Section 2: Two French Philosophers Who Specialise in Architecture
Introduction to Payot and Goetz ...............................................................................................57
Daniel Payot 1 ..........................................................................................................................70
Daniel Payot 2 ..........................................................................................................................76
Benoît Goetz .............................................................................................................................89
Section 3: Two Architect-Theorists
Introduction to Boudon and Girard ........................................................................................101
Philippe Boudon .....................................................................................................................112
Christian Girard ......................................................................................................................119
Section 4: An Essay on Architecture by France’s Most Controversial
Writer
Introduction to Houellebecq ...................................................................................................127
Michel Houellebecq................................................................................................................133
Section 5: Speculations on a Future Philosophy of Architecture
Introduction to Badiou............................................................................................................148
Alain Badiou….......................................................................................................................161

Conclusion .........................................................................................................................172
Bibliography .....................................................................................................................184

v
 List of Figures

Figure 1. The French audience at the Anymore conference, Paris 1999 ....................... 3
Figure 2. Chart of French theorists using the Avery database ..................................... 10
Figure 3. Minoru Yamasaki: Pruit Igoe Housing Estate .............................................. 17
Figure 4. François Cusset ............................................................................................. 17
Figure 5. Poster for Ibsen's A Doll's House, 2000 ....................................................... 24
Figure 6. Jean-François Lyotard .................................................................................. 36
Figure 7. Le Corbusier dining, c.1953 ......................................................................... 39
Figure 8. Bernini’s Saint Teresa of Avila in Ecstasy ................................................... 41
Figure 9. Le Corbusier at La Tourette, 1953 ............................................................... 44
Figure 10. Luce Irigaray .............................................................................................. 44
Figure 11. Jean-Luc Nancy .......................................................................................... 53
Figure 12. Nuremberg rally, Germany, 1934 ............................................................... 54
Figure 13. Ghelfreikh Iofan: Palace of Soviets, USSR, 1933...................................... 54
Figure 14. Oren Safdie’s play Private Jokes Public Places ......................................... 57
Figure 15. The Sphinx of the Naxians, c. 560 BC ....................................................... 62
Figure 16. Francis Bacon: Oedipus and the Sphinx after Ingres ................................. 62
Figure 17. Peter Dombrovskis: Morning Mist, Rock Island Bend, Tasmania ............. 67
Figure 18. Daniel Payot ............................................................................................... 70
Figure 19. The Great Pyramid at Giza ......................................................................... 73
Figure 20. A Greek temple........................................................................................... 73
Figure 21. Benoît Goetz ............................................................................................... 90
Figure 22. A dinner party ............................................................................................. 92
Figure 23. Khafre’s Pyramid at Giza, Cairo ................................................................ 92
Figure 24. Fall and the Expulsion from J. P. Bergomensis, 1510................................ 95
Figure 25. Piotr Kowalski: Avec un léger déplacement de la tête, 1974 ................... 101
Figure 26. Boudon's images of Pessac used by Jencks .............................................. 104
Figure 27. Boudon: cube of the geometer and cube of the architect ......................... 106
Figure 28. Rem Koolhaas: House in Bordeaux, 1994-8 ............................................ 111
Figure 29. Christian Girard ........................................................................................ 111
Figures 31 and 32. Le Corbusier: sketches 670 and 671, 1932-33 ............................ 123
Figure 33. Le Corbusier: cross-section of the Titanic................................................ 124

vi
 LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 34. Christian Girard’s house in Paris, 2003 .................................................... 126

Figure 35. Michel Houellebecq: The Possibility of an Island, 2005 ......................... 127
Figure 36. Dormitory by the Chinese photographer Wang Qingsong, 2005 ............. 132
Figure 37. Michel Houellebecq.................................................................................. 132
Figure 38. The Gare Montparnasse train station, Paris .............................................. 135
Figure 39. The Esplanade at La Défense, Paris ......................................................... 135
Figure 40. An IBM 360, 1964 .................................................................................... 139
Figure 41. An IBM PC, 1984 ..................................................................................... 139
Figure 42. Paris streets during May 1968 .................................................................. 146
Figure 43. Iranian ta‘ziyah passion play, Khunsar, 2000 .......................................... 148
Figure 44. Alain Badiou: drawing for Truth Procedure in Politics............................ 160
Figure 45. Alain Badiou ............................................................................................. 160
Figure 46. The French pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, 2006 ............. 180
Figure 47. Axonometric of the French pavilion......................................................... 180
Figure 48. Morphed portrait of François Roche and Stéphanie Lavaux .................... 182

vii
I have often envied the profession of the rhapsode, Ion;
you are obliged to learn Homer’s thought and not merely
his verses! Now that is something to envy! … The
rhapsode must interpret the poet’s thought to his audience.
Plato

viii
 Introduction

The topic for this thesis was formulated while researching the architectural
implications of the works of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Having
completed a sub-thesis on the influence of Deleuze’s The Fold on the work of the
American architect Peter Eisenman, it seemed logical to expand this project by
analysing other books by Deleuze and other architects influenced by this
philosopher. 1 Deleuze was a prolific writer and most of his books are now available in
English, while the list of architects who have made references to him gets longer by
the day: Jean Nouvel, Rem Koolhaas, Greg Lynn, Marcos Novak, and Bernard Cache
being the best known. The number of architectural examples scattered across the
Deleuzian corpus aroused a suspicion that there was, perhaps buried somewhere in his
large output, an extended piece of writing devoted to architecture that would help to
legitimate this project. So a search for the elusive chapter or essay was begun and this
soon brought up something very interesting, only it wasn’t written by Deleuze himself
but by his friend and collaborator Félix Guattari. Many of Deleuze’s most influential
works were written with Guattari, books such as Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus
and What is Philosophy? 2 Therefore there was no reason to think this would be of any
less quality. The discovery was a chapter in Guattari’s book Cartographies
Schizoanalytiques dedicated solely to architecture. 3 Although Guattari is greatly
overshadowed in fame by his friend and co-author, anyone who takes the time to read
Guattari’s works will find they are just as fascinating and applicable to today’s
problems, so the difficult work of translating this chapter was begun and this has since
been published in a refereed journal. 4 Then the question was asked: given the
importance of Deleuze and Guattari in recent architectural theory why had this

1. See Tim Adams, The Eisenman-Deleuze Fold, BArch Thesis, 1994, unpublished manuscript at the
University of Auckland. For a sketch outline of what this MArch thesis was originally going to be
like, see Tim Adams, “Schnittstellen-Diagramme”, Der Architekt (September 2000), pp. 38 - 42.
2. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert
Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking Press, 1977), A Thousand Plateaus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1988) and What is
Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill (London: Verso, 1994).
3. “L’énonciation architecturale” in Félix Guattari, Cartographies schizoanalytiques (Paris: Galilée,
1989), pp. 291- 301.
4. Félix Guattari, “Architectural Enunciation” trans. Tim Adams, Interstices, vol. 6 (2005), pp. 119 –
125.

1
 INTRODUCTION

chapter by Guattari on architecture gone unnoticed for so long? This led me to wonder
if there might be other undiscovered masterpieces of French architectural theory.
Once the search had begun the answer coming back was strongly in the affirmative.
Yes, actually there is a huge amount of interesting research being conducted on
architecture in France, some of it written by such well-known names one would have
thought it should have been translated. For example, a beautiful and sensitive essay on
Le Corbusier by someone no less famous than Jean-François Lyotard himself, in
which there is sketched out an entirely new approach to architecture based on the
intertwining of habit and habitat, or the reciprocity of bodily sensation (as an effect of
the frequency of waves) and the (frequented) environment. After that I discovered
entire books on architecture by philosophers such as Daniel Payot and Benoît Goetz, a
treatise on the nomadic concepts of Deleuze and Guattari by the architect Christian
Girard, and an entire new discipline of architectural epistemology (a scientific theory
on the construction of knowledge about architecture) called “architectecturology”
established by Philippe Boudon. I discovered a biting critique of contemporary
architecture by one of France’s most controversial contemporary writers, Michel
Houellebecq, plus a short but incredibly profound piece of writing by the philosopher
Jean-Luc Nancy and … I could go on because this search continues to uncover
fascinating untranslated works on architecture almost everyday, for example Sylviane
Agacinski the feminist activist and philosopher has written a book called Volume on
the philosophies and politics of architecture, and the writer, poet and playwright, Jean-
Christophe Bailly has written a collection of essays on architecture and urbanism
called La ville à l’œuvre (The City at Work). 5

The translation of these last two writers will have to wait because there is not
enough space for them here, I only mention them to show the surplus of brilliant
minds publishing theories on architecture in France today, with virtually none of them
being known outside of France. Or even inside France, because as strange as it may
seem to us, many French architects believe there is a lack of architectural theory in
France. For example, when Peter Eisenman and Cynthia C. Davidson’s ANY series of
travelling conferences had its penultimate round in Paris in June 1999, on the theme
of “Anymore”, hosted in the prestigious Palais de Chaillot adjacent the Eiffel Tower,

5. Sylviane Agacinski, Volume: Philosophies et politiques de l’architecture (Paris: Galilée, 1992) and
Jean-Christophe Bailly, La ville à l’œuvre (Paris: Edition de l’Imprimeur, 2001).

2
 INTRODUCTION

many locals bemoaned the “almost anti-intellectual climate” and the “gap between
architects and intellectuals” that exists today in France. 6 Christian Girard later
described the French lack of interest in theory shown at this event as shameful,
concluding that French architects said basta to theory. 7 Basta meaning “enough” as in
the Spanish phrase: ja basta por dios: “that’s enough for Christ’s sake.”

Figure 1. The French audience at the Anymore

conference, Paris 1999.

Why French architects consider themselves lacking in theory while the rest of the
world thinks the French are rich in theory, which the thesis sets out to prove is true, is
a major paradox that we will have to address. Curiously the French philosophers
Jacques Derrida and Sylviane Agacinski chose to stay away from the ANY
conference when it came to their hometown, despite both of them having participated
in the ANY series when it was hosted in far off locations. 8

6. The first comment is by Brendan Macfarlane, an expatriate New Zealand architect working in
France, and the second is by Jean-Louis Cohen, see Cynthia C. Davidson (ed.), Anymore,
(Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2000), pp. 47 and 287.
7. Cristian Girard, “Letter From Paris: French Architects say ‘Basta’ to Theory”, ANY (Architecture
New York), vol. 25-26 (2000), pp. 6-7.
8. Derrida presented the following papers in Los Angeles: “Summary of Impromptu Remarks”, see
Anyone (New York: Rizzoli, 1991) pp. 38 – 45, and in Yufuin, Japan: “Faxitecture”, see Anywhere
(New York: Rizzoli, 1991), pp. 20 – 33. While Agacinski presented the following papers in Buenos
Aires: “Incorporation”, see Anybody (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1997) pp. 31 – 36 and in
Montreal: “Architectonic Enclosure”, see Anyplace (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1995) pp.
24 – 31. All of the above edited by Cynthia C. Davidson.

3
 INTRODUCTION

So part of this thesis will demonstrate, by presenting a selection of new

translations into English, the undiscovered richness and brilliance of French writings
on architecture that have gone unnoticed over the last twenty years. A kind of
hypothetical response to correct the misconception of those who attended the 1999
ANY conference in Paris and left it thinking there were no French theories of
architecture. But a survey alone does not make a thesis. A thesis is, according to the
Oxford English Dictionary (in logic or rhetoric) a proposition stated as a theme to be
proved or maintained against attack. So underlying this seemingly random survey the
following proposition will be maintained: there exists in French a significant and
valuable body of writings on architecture from the late-twentieth century that has
totally escaped the attention of Anglo-American architectural theorists despite the
fashionable status of French thinkers in America during this time. To demonstrate the
significance and value of this body of writings a small number of examples will
therefore be presented so that English-speaking readers can judge the validity of the
proposition for themselves, and the only way to do that is to translate an adequate
sampling sufficiently well into English.

Since it is not common for an architectural thesis outside of Europe to include

translations a few comments are needed concerning translation. 9 While translation is
not the theme of this thesis it does form an essential tool in the defence of its
proposition, how else could we judge the value of hitherto untranslated research in
France? Sadly it is becoming increasingly rare for academics to investigate any
research in their field other than that which is already available in their own language.
This is perhaps an unnoticed side effect of the internet and the globalization of
information because the lingua franca of global exchange is increasingly becoming
lingua americana. 10 A perhaps commonly-held misconception is that if a work is any
good then someone else will have translated it already, therefore it is assumed to be
reasonable to refer to only those works already translated. That is an assumption that

9. Note that it is not unknown in Europe, where in general more translations are made, for a thesis on
architecture to be based on the work of translation. So for example, a PhD thesis by Didier Laroque,
Les idées de Piranèse, submitted at the Paris-Belleville architecture school in 1997, presents a new
translation from the Italian of a text by Piranesi followed by a discussion of the key concepts found
in the translation. Laroque’s thesis has since been published as Le Discours de Piranèse:
L’ornement sublime et le suspens de l’architecture (Paris: Éditions de la Passion, 2000).
10. See Richard Shusterman, “The Perils of Making Philosophy a Lingua Americana”, The Chronicle
of Higher Education, vol. 46, no. 49 (August 2000), pp. B4 – B5.

4
 INTRODUCTION

must be attacked because surprisingly little gets translated into English regardless of
the quality, and this partly goes to explain why it was so easy to find so many
previously untranslated works for this survey. To give the source for the staggering
figures listed in the abstract above, François Cusset clearly states, “no Western
country publishes fewer translations per capita than the United States” and the United
States is where the Anglophone world gets most of its translations from. 11 Cusset
gives the following shocking statistics: translations make up only 2.5 % of titles
published in America, with translations from the French forming only 0.7 %,
compared with 20-30 % of translations for European countries. At the other end of the
spectrum, but also hampering the dissemination of foreign research, are those
academics, usually older and with a background in philosophy or classics, who
denigrate all translation with the often-heard Italian proverb (which is also a joke
because of the pun) “traduttore, traditore” meaning translator traitor. They insist that
we must refer only to original texts left in their original languages, even when a
perfectly adequate translation might be available. My position is somewhere in
between these two, I believe if you have the facility to extend your field of research
by investigating foreign writings then you should do so, but never in a way that tries
to belittle those who do not know the language, hence the need for translations even at
the risk of sometimes mistranslating the original. Something will be lost in translation
that is certain, but considerably less so than if the work was entirely ignored.

The distrust of translation is in fact a distrust of language in general because

translation merely replicates the process inherent in the nature of language itself,
which is fundamentally a crossing of modalities from the inaudible to the audible,
from the invisible to the visible, and from the unintelligible to the intelligible. If the
uncertainty of translation makes us uncomfortable it is because it makes us painfully
aware that all languages are inherently vague when they are not adequately shored up
by law and enforced consensus. Without the inherent danger of vagueness between
the phōnē and the logos, between the animal cry and the human speech, there would
be no infancy, no knowledge, no politics and no history because they all depend on

11. François Cusset, “Minima Presentia: Selling Translation Rights in America”, Sites: Journal of 20th
Century/Contemporary French Studies, vol. 5, no. 2 (Fall 2001), p.352.

5
 INTRODUCTION

the passage between incommensurable modes of operation and the potential for
disagreement that unavoidably comes with this passage. 12

A little closer to our field of study, the theorist Mark Wigley has made
translation a cornerstone of his theory of philosophy and architecture. 13 One is always
being translated into the other, he claims, with the socially and politically dangerous
possibility of mistranslation being ever present and therefore constantly covered over.
Wigley himself limited his field of research almost entirely to English translations and
so cannot be blamed for thinking that there was only one French philosopher whose
writing was relevant to architecture during the 1980s. And so by concentrating his
prodigious skills of analysis and deduction chiefly on the work of one person he
thereby contributed to the American cult that gathered around the name of Jacques
Derrida, unknowingly overshadowing those philosophers who specialised in
architecture such as Daniel Payot, who for example, instead of merely implying there
was long history of the architectural metaphor in philosophy in just a few lines as
Derrida did, or focusing on just a handful of texts by Descartes, Kant and Heidegger
as Wigley does, investigates instead the entire history of Western philosophy from the
Greeks up until Nietzsche and Heidegger, carefully locating the sources of what
seems like every reference ever made to architecture and then finely unpacking the
argument of each instance in a book length enquiry. 14 Payot’s painstaking historical
survey was just the sort of careful analysis that Derrida’s and Wigley’s works on
architecture demanded but has remained totally unknown outside of France for the
lack of a good translation.

There is another aspect that needs explaining because there was, during the long
period of preparation for this thesis when the topic hardened into something more and

12. On the importance of the inherent vagueness of the passage between phōnē and logos for politics
see Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999) and for history see Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History:
Essays on the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1993).
13. See Mark Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt (Cambridge, Mass.: The
MIT Press,1997), in particular the first chapter, “The Translation of Deconstruction.”
14. Daniel Payot’s fascinating book is called Le Philsophe et L’Architect (The Philosopher and the
Architect) and will be discussed in Section 2 below. It was published in 1982 and is often referred to
by other architectural theorists in France so it is more than likely to have been known to Derrida
when he first started to write about the architectural metaphor in philosophy in the mid 1980s.

6
 INTRODUCTION

more obvious, a nagging question that wouldn’t go away. 15 The question was “why
the French?” It would be easy to give a throwaway answer based on personal reasons
to do with particular individual and biographical factors that might lead someone to
choose such a topic … the student happened to study French at school … then
philosophy and architecture at university … leading naturally to …etc. Or perhaps
with an argument based on some kind of assumed historical determinism … the
student is merely picking up and responding to larger scale historical and political
forces … French philosophers have dominated in recent years … and so on. But I
think the question deserves to be taken more seriously to mean: is there anything
special about the French that makes them deserving of a thesis when they happen to
write on architecture. And with this approach a trap is immediately set because it can
lead to the worst kind of nationalism, to the arguments known today as “French
exceptionalism.” 16 The argument usually comes down to this, because of their long
and glorious history things are done differently (and better) in France, especially in
the cultural sphere. This trap could be avoided by saying that French theorists are no
better or worse than theorists elsewhere but that would make this topic seem rather
pointless – why not a survey of architectural theories from around the world then?
The truth is that France is something of clearing house for intellectual exchange, a
global “theoretical import-export business” to use Jean-Philippe Mathy’s phrase. 17
Essentially the French are translating the ponderous but profound post-Enlightenment
style of thought from Germany into a lighter literary and allusive French style thereby
combining profundity with joyfulness, which then finds a ready market in English and

15. Thanks largely to the probing mind of my supervisor, Dr Michael Linzey.

16. For a useful and well-balanced assessment of the supposedly exceptional nature of French thinkers,
see Michael Kelly, “French Intellectuals: The Legendary Exception” in Emmanuel Godin and Tony
Chafer (ed.), The French Exception (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), pp. 193 – 207. Kelly in
fact denies there is anything truly exceptional about French intellectuals since intellectuals of an
equivalent standard can be found in all countries. Kelly revisits the now familiar account of the
emergence of the intellectual (as a class of people who can make judgements for the masses and
determine what is ethical or not) that begins with Dreyfus case in 1898 when French writers and
academics rallied for and against Captain Dreyfus who was Jewish and charged with spying. But
what really made French intellectuals different says Kelly is that they were employed by the French
government after World War II as cultural ambassadors and sent around the world in an effort to
restore the prestige of France after its humiliation under German occupation. Hence we find Jean-
Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir visiting America in 1945 with all the trappings of movie stars,
setting the example to be followed by all the stars of French Theory to come.
17. Jean-Philippe Mathy, “The Resistance to French Theory in the United States: A Cross-Cultural
Inquiry”, French Historical Studies, vol. 19, no. 2 (Fall 1995), p. 338.

7
 INTRODUCTION

American departments of literature and cultural studies. This is confirmed by Vincent

Descombes who surmises that French philosophers after 1945 tended to study Hegel,
Husserl and Heidegger (“the three Hs”) while after 1960 they mostly studied the
“masters of suspicion” (Marx, Nietzsche and Freud). 18 Notice that all these names are
German.

Alain Badiou picking up on this mutual benefit of exchanges between the two
nations argues that France and Germany each provides what the other lacks. 19 France
has an overly long history so it is like an old person self-satisfied and thinking that
they incarnate a set of abstract principles that are universally recognised, while
Germany was for a long time simply a grouping of principalities so it is always
questioning what Germany is, and this leads Germans to ask deeper questions about
what anything is. So Germany gifts to France its genius for disciplined anxiety while
it receives in return France’s gift of historical certitude and grandeur. But this
historical and geographical virtue would fall on barren soil if France did not produce
sharp minds ready to take advantage of the situation. Anyone who looks at the
dreaded Baccalauréat, the school exam undertaken by all French students at the end
of their Lycée (secondary school) years would have to agree that French education
sets incredibly high standards. What other country for example would expect 17-year-
olds to write a four-hour exam paper on questions such as, “Must happiness be
preferred to truth?” or “Can culture be the bearer of universal values?” 20 These are
questions from the 2006 philosophy exam and philosophy is a compulsory subject for
all secondary-school students in France. Philosophy to France is therefore what rugby
is to New Zealand, they both start their players young, they both demand high levels
of participation, the competition at home is tough, and they both perform well
overseas. So the French are not inherently better scholars on average any more than
New Zealanders are inherently better rugby players (which would be an argument
based on nationality or race), but rather each country finds that they are in a
geographical and historical situation that favours certain kinds of activities and then

18. Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 3.
19. Alain Badiou, Polemics, trans. Steve Corcoran (London: Verso Books, 2006), chapter 7, “The
Power of the Open: A discourse on the Necessity of Fusing Germany and France”, pp. 117 – 132.
20. Two of the three options for the ES (économique et sociale) stream of the 2006 Baccalauréat
philosophy exam.

8
 INTRODUCTION

each responds with intensive training and a severe process of selection in order to
form an elite group who can take advantage of these environmental factors and then
export this captured advantage to the world.

One aspect of this grooming of sharp minds can be seen in the sphere of
architecture. Architectural education in France is administered by the Ministry of
Culture and architectural research is funded by the government through the civil
budget for research and development. In 1998 for example 8 million francs (NZ $2.3
million) was budgeted for architectural research. 21 This funding is distributed by the
Direction de l’architecture et du patrimoine (Department of Architecture and
Heritage) to researchers both attached to and independent from schools of
architecture. For example, Félix Guattari who was a psychotherapist by profession but
who also wanted to write about urbanism and architecture was funded in this way
between 1974 and 1976. And it is safe to assume that many of the other independent
researchers and philosophers who write on architecture in France, some of whom are
included in this survey, were also funded by the government in the same way. This is
the true strength of architectural research in France, it can draw on a pool of talent
much larger than the number of researchers located in architecture schools. So why
study French theories of architecture? The short answer is because the diversity and
richness of French architectural theories, due to all the factors just mentioned, make
them excellent models to follow for anyone working in climate where the making of
cross-disciplinary bridges between departments is encouraged, which is just the
academic environment that we find ourselves in today.

So we find on the one hand there is a huge resource of French theories of

architecture totally unknown to the Anglophone world but on the other hand there
was a near total domination (in terms of references made in architectural theory) by a
very small group of French intellectuals. Anyone who has followed the course
architectural theory during the 1980s and 90s, the period that this thesis covers, could
easily be forgiven for thinking that one of the most common features of this period
was the constant importation of French theory into architecture, perhaps following the
lead of literary criticism and cultural studies in America. A search through the Avery

21. The source for this figure is the document “Recherche architecturale et urbaine, 1998 – 2001” at
http://www.archi.fr/RECHERCHE , visited 28 March 2006.

9
 INTRODUCTION

catalogue of architectural journals for names like Virilio, Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault,
Lefebvre and Baudrillard will prove this assumption to be correct. Starting in the
early 80s there was a sharp increase in the number of articles published that made
reference to these names. But, as the graph below shows, this sharp increase of
interest in French theorists peaked around the year 2000 and was followed by a crash
– the only exception to this general rule being Derrida who had a short-lived spike
when he died in 2004 with the entries being entirely made up of obituaries. We could
conclude that French intellectuals did indeed form some kind of world dominance
(the Avery index includes journals from around the world) in architectural theory
during this period but that this dominance is now almost over. But obscured by the
small number fashionable stars of French theory in America was a far greater number
of unnoticed researchers in France that, as this thesis will show, have even more
relevance to architectural theory than the big-name stars but escaped any attention
because they did not pass through the literature departments of American universities,
the only passage available to English translation and access to an international
readership.

20

15
Virilio (79)

10 Derrida (79)

Deleuze (53)
5
Foucault (33)

0 Lefebvre (29)
1964
1967
1970
1973

Baudrillard (22)
1976
1979
1982
1985
1988
1991
1994
1997
2000
2003
2006

Figure 2. Chart of the number of articles in architectural journals

with references to French theorists using the Avery database.

10
 INTRODUCTION

Finally we should say something about the structure of this thesis, it consists of a
series of my own translations interspersed with introductory essays. Keeping in mind
the pitfalls of extracting research from its biographical, social and cultural contexts, in
which case the original intention of the work can easily be subverted for particular
new and often contrary purposes – and this is just what many French commentators
like François Cusset are now claiming happened in the case of the popularization of
“French Theory” in America – it is essential to try and situate each work in the on-
going research of each writer and to show how this is in turn situated in the larger
French intellectual scene. The order of the introductory essays and translations
roughly follows a sequence that leads from those writers who will be best-known to
an English-speaking reader of architectural theory towards those who are least known.
The only exception being the very first translation which is a small piece of writing on
architecture taken from François Cusset’s book French Theory: Foucualt, Derrida,
Deleuze & Cie et les mutations de la vie intellectuelle aux États-Unis (French Theory:
Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and Co. and the Mutations of Intellectual Life in the
United States). The reason for putting this unfamiliar writer first will soon become
obvious, it is for the sake of contextualising everything else that follows. Overlaying
this large-scale structure is the grouping into four sections under the following self-
explanatory headings: 1. unknown essays on architecture by well-known French
philosophers, 2. French philosophers who specialise in architecture, 3. architect-
theorists, 4. an essay on architecture by France’s most controversial writer and finally
5. speculations on a future philosophy of architecture. The translated texts have
indented margins to help differentiate them from the main body of the thesis. All
footnotes associated with the translations belong to the original texts unless otherwise
noted.

11
 Introduction to François Cusset

The first text translated from the French in this thesis is a short extract from
François Cusset’s recent book French Theory. 1 Cusset will be unknown to readers of
architectural theory but he is placed first because in French Theory he provides an
excellent intellectual history of the exporting of French thinkers to America, which
happens to include this short section on architecture that in many ways inversely
mirrors the project undertaken by this thesis and therefore helps us in the essential
task of contextualising the writings gathered here. Cusset charts the fortunes of the
French stars on the American campus and how their translated works were misused in
the Unites States, while here we are charting only three or four who could be called
intellectual stars (in Sections 1 and 5), but all of those included here have had part of
their intellectual labours pass unnoticed to the extent that they wrote pieces on
architecture (except Badiou, who here writes on the theatre) that were not translated
and therefore never entered the American academic scene. Nevertheless we can learn
a lot about the French from Cusset through his reflections on America because his
point of reference is always France. Before we take a closer look at this interesting
work we should know something about its author.

François Cusset has made something of a career out of writing about the
intellectual import-export business that takes place between France and America and
no one is better qualified for this than Cusset. Although he was born in France in 1969
he spent seven years living in New York where, as the director of The French
Publishers’ Agency, his job was to promote French writers in America and to sell the
publishing rights of French books to American publishers. He is now based in Paris
where he teaches contemporary French thought at the Columbia University in Paris
and various other French universities around Paris. His first book published in 2000
was called Queer Critics: la littérature française déshabillée par ses homo-lecteurs
(Queer Critics: French Literature Undressed by its Homo-Readers). Queer Critics is a
compilation of articles by English and American academic writers of the “Queer
Theory” that emerged in the 1990s, academics such as Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler,

1. François Cusset, French theory: Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Cie et les mutations de la vie
intellectuelle aux Etats-Unis (Par , 2003).

12
 INTRODUCTION TO CUSSET

Michael Warner and Jonathan Goldberg, all of them here writing about canonical
works of French literature, defiling Balzac, Diderot, Proust etc. by uncovering their
closet homosexuality. This was an important work because while gay and lesbian
studies is a well-established field in America, homosexuality is still not considered a
legitimate topic for study in France. Cusset’s next book after Queer Critics is French
Theory and with this new work Cusset greatly broadens his topic (and his potential
audience, this latter work has already received much critical attention on both sides of
the Atlantic despite it being in French) by moving out of queer theory and into French
theory in general, where instead of personally importing Anglo-American queer
theory into France his subject is the historical exporting of a select group of French
stars into America and how they became unified and packaged under to brand name
of “French theory.” Although our concern is somewhat different, being French
architectural theory which went untranslated and therefore unknown to an American
audience, Cusset’s book will help us understand why so many brilliant and thought-
provoking works have gone untranslated for so long. They were simply kept out by
the small group of intellectual stars that filled the miniscule quota of translations that
get done each year in America, and what is more, their writings didn’t appeal to the
American literature departments of the “golden triangle” as Cusset calls it of Yale,
Cornell and Johns Hopkins, the major gateway to America for the translation of
French theory, and literature departments naturally are less interested in writings that
specifically deal with a non-literary subject like architecture.

To understand the intellectual import-export that goes on between France and

America and from there to the rest of the Anglophone world, including New Zealand,
we need to know something of the intellectual climate in Paris during the last twenty
years. The major historical event in this period was the “events” of May 1968, the
student riots that led to the largest national strike in French history, which nearly
brought down the government and left an indelible mark on the collective French
consciousness. In the aftermath of May ’68 the self-named nouveaux philosophes
(New Philosophers), who strangely are rarely ever mentioned outside of France, took
the centre stage in French intellectual life. Philosopher-journalists like Bernard-Henri
Lévy and André Glucksmann who attacked left-leaning philosophers such as Derrida
and Deleuze for their Marxist sympathies. The New Philosophers claimed that all

13
 INTRODUCTION TO CUSSET

Marxism leads to Stalinist totalitarianism and the Gulag. Lévy and Glucksmann rode a
wave of popularity on the back of the neoconservatism that swept through the 1970s
and 80s effectively keeping philosophers like Derrida and Deleuze out of the
limelight. Cusset calls this period the long nightmare and he makes this phrase the
subtitle of his latest book, La Décennie: le grand cauchemar des années 1980 (The
Decade: The Long Nightmare of the 1980s). By responding to student demands in the
wake of 1968, the French government decentralised the University of Paris into
smaller and more autonomous universities labelled Paris I to Paris XII. Architectural
education was also decentralised, the famous École des Beaux Arts in Paris where for
hundreds of years the world sent its architecture students now became ten Unités
pédagogiques (teaching units, there are now twenty-three) spread around Paris, each
free to make its own decisions, therefore some like U.P. 6 were Marxist with their
goal being the reform of society while others like U.P. 4 continued with the Beaux
Arts emphasis on making beautiful drawings. New experimental campuses like the
one at Vincennes, where Deleuze, Foucault, Irigaray, Gauttari and Lacan all taught at
one time, were established in the suburbs, in part to keep the trouble makers out of
Paris where they had shown they could be a political force to be reckoned with. The
result was that the university became disorganised and sectarian and this led to what
Raymond Boudon calls the “tout-Paris intellectuals” who withdrew from their
fragmented professional surroundings and aspired to be thinker-gurus that tout-Paris
(all of Paris) would want to talk about. 2 Therefore during this period there was a
marked shift away from traditional scholarly work with a purely scientific interest
towards writing that makes tenuous and earth-shattering hypotheses in an esoteric and
idiosyncratic style, favouring aesthetics, ethics and politics in order to gain a wider
audience beyond the university. This is the kind of philosophy that fitted the purposes
of American literature departments and from there it spread to the humanities, social
sciences and cultural studies and eventually gender studies, feminism and post-
colonial theory and finally architecture.

Cusset locates the key event in this rise of French theory in America as the 1966
conference at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore attended by Roland Barthes,

2. Raymond Boudon, “The French University Since 1968”, Comparative Politics, vol. 10, no. 1
(October 1977), p 109.

14
 INTRODUCTION TO CUSSET

Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan and other future stars of the American version of
French theory. The conference was called “The Language of Criticism and the
Sciences of Man” and this is where Derrida presented his famous lecture “Structure,
Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Derrida’s topic was the
French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss whose structuralist anthropology was just
starting to become popular. Thinking that they would learn something about
structuralism Derrida instead treated the audience to a devastating critique of it. As
Cusset notes, the 1972 second edition of the book of the conference adds “The
Structuralist Controversy” to the title and thereafter “post-structuralism” was born, a
uniquely American invention because this term was never used in France.

In a chapter from French Theory headed “The University Enclave” Cusset gives
us a fascinating insight into life in the American university. What interests us here is
what it says about the French university by comparison. The American university is
separatist on all levels Cusset observes, geographically (away from the city except in
a rare instances), demographically (all students are in their 20s) and socially (peculiar
campus rituals and secret fraternity rules separate insiders from outsiders) whereas the
French university is all about continuity with urban life. American student life is a
happy interlude, a prolonged childhood while French students are engaged in politics
and regularly take part in violent street protests. As a result the transversal figure of
the public intellectual is totally absent in America where intellectuals are private
thinkers deeply ensconced within the university. Using Bill Reading’s sobering
analysis of the current “university of excellence” as his guide, Cusset lists the three
prerequisites required for the American reception of French post-structuralism.3
Firstly the new emphasis on professionalism widens the gap between the disciplines,
despite all the rhetoric to the contrary. Secondly, teaching is reduced to the perfection
of techniques for the transmission of knowledge leaving no place for the creation of
new knowledge. And thirdly, the generalist liberal arts courses become vacated in
favour of more popular specialist colleges where excellence is more easily defined.
All these factors combine to create a desperate need for theory as a new
transdiciplinary object able to cross disciplinary borders, create new knowledge and

3. See Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996)
which Cusset discusses in the section “Excellence and the Market” in French Theory, pp. 54 – 57.

15
 INTRODUCTION TO CUSSET

make the liberal arts fashionable once again. Closer to home we can see the effects of
the new “university of excellence” on architectural education in the form of a desire
for interdisciplinary research through the linking up of the various departments of
music, fine arts, dance and planning, any one of which could greatly benefit
architectural education and research while at the same time each one is becoming so
specialised that a unified theory to make any such collaboration meaningful looks
increasingly unlikely. Because we don’t produce our own transversal generalists we
need to import them or at least translate them, so we can read them for ourselves and
become a little more transversal, in other words hybridising the competencies of
diverse disciplines. This after all has historically been one of the primary roles of the
architect, think of the programmes of reform attempted by Vitruvius, Alberti, Durand,
Le Corbusier and Rem Koolhaas.

This brings us to the translated excerpt on architecture from Cusset’s book

French Theory. Here we find all of Cusset’s arguments rehearsed at a smaller scale.
French theory was in fact invented by the makers of reader’s digest versions of the
key texts packaged for easy consumption. It was, according to Cusset, a
commodification of the intellectual production initially intended for an audience
living in very different circumstances, as we saw above with the contrast between
French and American university life. The avant-garde Anglo-American architects and
critics used these key texts firstly to divorce themselves from the previous generation,
Mark Wigley getting out from under the shadow of Mike Austin or Peter Eisenman
pointing out the faults of Peter and Alison Smithson, and secondly, as an exotic and
therefore incontestable theoretical justification for their shaky projects and fuzzy
reasoning. They didn’t read the French theorists so much as quote them in new
contexts as a form of smoke screen to reasoned debate and the long and difficult
working towards consensus. We see Cusset mentioning that French architects are
stubbornly anti-intellectual and this is borne out by our previous discussion of the cold
reception that the ANY conference received in Paris in 1999. So naturally these
thinkers gravitated to warmer climates on the other Atlantic shore. They converted
their French marginalization into American stardom. The reduction of architecture to
a form of text was indeed a constant theme during this period and Cusset is right to
condemn it, it was an inevitable result of an earlier rage for applying semiotics, the

16
 INTRODUCTION TO CUSSET

science of signs, to architecture and supported by a naively literal reading of a quote

from Derrida’s Of Grammatology that there is nothing outside of the text. Derrida’s
deconstruction was indeed without any kind of architectural program and even
someone as astute as Mark Wigley couldn’t generate many clues for architects despite
writing a 278-page book on the subject, only to end by warning them of the “many
dangers in monumentalizing spacing, turning it into some kind of solid building.” 4 He
needn’t have worried because not even the masterful Peter Eisenman could bring a
collaboration with Derrida to fruition into “some kind of solid building” when invited
to do so by Bernard Tschumi in the otherwise quite solid Parc de la Villette in Paris.
The reception of French theory in architecture during the 1980s and 90s was a kind of
intellectual exercise in sustainability, an “intellectual quasi-ecology” to borrow Juliet
J. Fall’s analogy, where the principles of reduce, reuse and recycle were applied to the
raw material of French philosophy to produce the greatest possible amount of
American architectural theory with the least expenditure of architectural practice. 5

Figure 3. Minoru Yamasaki: Pruit Igoe Housing Estate, St Louis, 1950-1954,

demolished 1972-1976.

4. See Mark Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt (Cambridge, Mass.: The
MIT Press,1997), p. 207.
5. See Juliet J. Fall’s review of François Cusset’s French Theory in Foucault Studies, no. 2 (May
2005), p. 155.

17
 Immaterial Architecture

By François Cusset

Translated by Tim Adams

Architecture’s participation in several domains makes it quite unique. 1

Caught between functionalism and utopia it only gains the right to the city
because it is between these two horizons, once projects are built they are
divorced from the discourse that inspired them, while at the same time it has
to deny that it is purely utilitarian because, as
Hegel already noted, “architecture is whatever
there is in a building that cannot be reduced to
utility”. A combination of art and technology, of
functional strata and ideological layers,
architecture involves historical and collective
issues that have always made its relationship to
theoretical (and political) discourse a sine qua
non, a necessary alliance much older than the
one recently invented by dialectically bringing
together fine arts and aesthetic philosophy.
Figure 4. François Cusset
Architecture’s encounter with French theory was
therefore inevitable and considered worthy of attention by all the principal
authors ― one thinks of course of the complete works of Paul Virilio who as
early as 1963 co-founded the Architecture Principe collective (and
magazine), but also the works of Jean Baudrillard theorizing the Pompidou
Centre in dialogue with Jean Nouvel, and even the reflections of Foucault on
space and power. 2 But the encounter was far more cautious in France where
architectural educators like the architects themselves have for a long time
been suspicious of theory, as demonstrated by the existence of Le Moniteur,
a professional magazine that is stubbornly anti-theoretical, and by the

1. The source for this translation is François Cusset, French theory: Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Cie
et les mutations de la vie intellectuelle aux Etats-Unis , 2003), pp. 257 – 261.
2. Translator’s note: See Jean Baudrillard and Jean Nouvel, The Singular Objects of Architecture, trans.
Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002) and Michel Foucault, “Space,
Knowledge, and Power” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin Books,
1991), pp. 239-256.

18
 CUSSET

frontispiece of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris that even unashamedly

calls for the burning of all books. In contrast, the prolonged liaison beginning
at the start of the 1980s between American architecture and French theory,
and Derrida’s deconstruction in particular, illustrates two aspects of this on-
going borrowing of useful French-made theories: firstly a sophistic textual
bias that had the effect of dematerializing architecture and even inspiring a
kind of architecture that had no desire to be built, and secondly a surprisingly
reciprocal impregnation of two types of enunciation: architecture made
deconstructive and theory suddenly reflecting on urban and spatial questions.
The reason for this is once again historical: when French theory crossed the
Atlantic the previous critical and political functions of architecture that had
dominated from the period of Le Corbusier’s utopianism up until the
Situationist’s psychogeography had already disappeared, and it landed on
American shores just when a depoliticized “Postmodern” architecture had
overthrown the more political modernist tradition – although this function
which can still be resurrected for special occasions, which happened during
the debates surrounding reconstruction of the World Trade Center and the
finally selected project by Daniel Libeskind.

The critic Charles Jencks even gave an exact time and place for this fall
of architectural modernism: it happened on July 15, 1972 at 15:32 hours,
when a building by the architect Minoru Yamasaki was demolished in Saint-
Louis, a building typical of the purist functionalism and industrial rationality
of the mid-century architecture of German exiles like Walter Gropius and
Mies van der Rohe but also of the American master Frank Lloyd Wright.
This was the same year that the architect Robert Venturi published Learning
from Las Vegas, a manifesto glorifying the chaos of neon lights and kitsch
glitter in the capital of gambling. The postmodernism of Aldo Rossi, Michael
Graves and Ricardo Bofil, which launched the hybrid architecture of the
seventies, reversed the precepts of the preceding utopian minimalism by
privileging ostentation and irony, a melange of every historic style from
rococo to mannerism combined with futurist forms and materials. Instead of
the modernist glass and concrete box, the playful parody of references to pop
culture and the favouring of the arabesque and the asymmetrical at the
expense of the straight line.

This resulted in a new relationship between space and the building that
was in many regards literally textual; historic periods were quoted on the
façade (just what the Bauhaus got rid of with the curtain wall), styles were

19
 CUSSET

multiplied thus putting the very idea of style into question, and the
economical use of what was strictly necessary was replaced by an art of
expenditure, everywhere garish colours contradicting the underlying form,
desiring only to make aesthetic deviations from modernism, employing the
same irony that would treat a telephone directory as a work of literature.
When theorized in the university analogies were made between the new
postmodern architecture to those disciplines in which similar theoretical
discourses were emerging, anything from literary criticism to film studies.

Besides the all-conquering postmodernism some singular styles did

emerge during the 1980s among those in the profession who were famous for
their conceptual audacity and formal rigour ― the Dutchman Rem Koolhaas,
the Anglo-Iraqi Zaha Hadid and the American Frank Gehry. It is around this
new avant-garde that a theoretical practice of architecture was crystallized,
assisted by conferences and collective projects and strongly backed up by
French texts, those of Baudrillard, Virilio and Derrida especially. French
authors had already provided the texts for the preceding period when Henri
Lefèbvre and Guy Debord where widely read in architecture schools, having
been anthologised by Baudrillard and Hubert Tonka in the magazine Utopie
for an industrial design congress. But this time theory was no longer a tool, it
became the virtual horizon for architecture to the great displeasure of the
popular press, where architectural critics such as Paul Goldberger in the New
Yorker and Ada Louise Huxtable in the New York Times denounced the new
power of the “parasite-thinker” over the “demiurge-architect”, or else
mocked this “moment of supreme idiocy that deconstructs and self-
destructs” in the words of Vincent Scully.

Derrida’s texts soon become the key reference for this theoretical
turmoil that shook up schools of architecture and quite a few practices as
well. With no programme other than the critique of functionalism and the
inherent causality of architectural production, diffuse principles of a
deconstructionist (or deconstructivist) architecture were elaborated in round-
table discussions that aimed to be “non anthropocentric” and “post-
humanist”, to play with the fragmentation of space and to use every project
to show that any totality was impossible. By privileging notions of
displacement and contamination, replacing planning with the conceptual
“event” ― not entirely compatible with the building of projects ― and by
dramatizing the latent conflict between the contradictory requirements of a
building (notably by making certain formal motifs of a building penetrate

20
 CUSSET

through walls) and more concretely, by forming the first truly

interdisciplinary architects. Henceforth graduates are now expected to be
both technicians and theoreticians, practitioners and critics in order to
overcome the aporia of a profession condemned to serve the forces of
conservatism, insofar architecture must always reflect the dominant social
structures and norms, while on the other hand there is still a nostalgia for the
great social engagements of the post-war era when the modification of space
was seen as a way of changing the world. The introduction of theory into the
program of design courses and the summaries of specialist journals (like
Abstract) happened around 1987-1988 just when the use of computers and
computer graphics was becoming widespread in architecture and the rooms
set aside for computer use were being called laboratories. The principal
promoters of this new architectural theory, often architects who also taught at
universities, were Peter Eisenman, the founder of the Institute of
Architecture and Urban Studies in New York and the editor of the journal
Oppositions, the French-American Bernard Tschumi (head of the
architecture school at Columbia), his counterpart Anthony Vidler at the
Cooper Union school in New York, the Derridian Mark Wigley, the co-
founder of the journal Zone Sanford Kwinter, the avant-garde critic Jeffrey
Kipnis and his seniors, James Wines and Charles Jencks, and even the
venerable Philip Johnson ― who made the transition from being a modernist
critic and architect of the 1950s to being a defender of postmodernism and
finally the impresario of the new trend as curator of the 1988 exhibition and
lecture series “Deconstructivist Architecture” at the Museum of Modern Art
in New York, which the American press exaggeratedly announced as the
birth of a new movement.

In addition to this there were a few projects realized but these were
more experimental works than liveable spaces, such as the “indeterminate
facade” of the SITE research group in Houston, or the equally strange
column that didn’t touch the ground in the entrance lobby of the Ohio State
University by Peter Eisenman. Eisenman was even invited by Bernard
Tschumi to team up with Derrida for a project in the Parc de la Villette that
would try to turn Plato’s concept of “chora”, extracted by Derrida from
Plato’s Timaeus, into architecture ― a project that would never be built but
would eventually produce, which was typical for the period, a collectable
book. 3 It was, thanks to the naively literal reading of Derrida, mostly a

3. Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman, Chora L Works (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1997).

21
 CUSSET

matter of using theoretical tools to approach all existing buildings or projects

as a language: the literary tropes of metalepsis or metonymy and the genres
of fable or parable supplied the new discourse and furnished its framework
with the intertext of various literary and philosophical references,
denouncing the various “metaphysics” (of architecture, of the house, of
centred structures) in a para-Derridian gibberish ― to such an extent that
James Wines regretted that “contemporary buildings rarely have the type of
sociological and psychological content expressed by, for example, a piece of
writing by Beckett, a picture by Magritte or a film by Chaplin.” 4 Peter
Eisenman went even further by suggesting that his readers “treat the texts
and the book as a whole as objects, and to read the houses … as texts.” 5 But
it is Mark Wigley who imagines with the most acuteness the implicit
“contract” between the text and the building, deconstruction and architecture,
whereby theory is furnished with spatial metaphors and the language of
stability, while building in exchange receives a philosophical guarantee of
being conceptually a “dislocation of space”. Revisiting Derrida’s early
works, particularly those on Husserl and geometry, Wigley showed how
deconstruction was intrinsically architectural in its arguments and its
vocabulary as well as in its original project, but that architecture also
constituted its “Achilles heel”, what it could not survive – therefore
subverting the simplistic view that Derrida’s philosophy could simply be
“applied” to architecture. 6

Although more of a practitioner than a theorist ― as evidenced by his

New York practice and the completion of the Parc de la Villette ― Bernard
Tschumi nonetheless measures his practice against the benchmark of a
diverse theoretical and literary body of works. Starting from his key concept
of “disjunction” taken as a project for architecture, he compares this to
Foucault’s concept of “madness” and Lacan’s “transference” and
“dissociation”, and even to Georges Bataille’s motif of “transgression”, and
summons support from texts by Blanchot and early Sollers, citing concepts
from literary theory (from defamiliarization to destructuration) and even
acknowledging in a footnote that “to make buildings that work and make

4. James Wines, De-architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1988), p. 14.

5. Peter Eisenman (ed.), Houses of Cards (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. v.
6. Mark Wigely, The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida's Haunt (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1993).

22
 CUSSET

people happy is not the goal of architecture but, of course, a welcome side
effect.” 7

The ANY (Architecture New York) series of lectures and publications

launched in 1988 and projected over ten years is a perfect example of this
general trend: it produced a large number of journals and magazines, it
brought together innovative design, international finance, and the
participation of Derrida, Rem Koolhaas and Frank Gehry, but in the end it
only reached an elitist audience, had a small following and made little impact
on the profession. By detotalising the building in the manner of Derrida, or
by invoking Deleuze to propose an architecture of the “fold” and the “flux”,
or by applying Deleuze’s distinction between “smooth” and “striated” space,
the theoretical fashion of the 1990s that nonetheless did leave behind some
traces in architectural education, has not led to any kind of renewal of the
engagement with the political issues once associated with modernist
architecture, nor has it helped practitioners to realise their projects. But it did
quite literally make architecture experience its own limits ― by way of
unrealised impossible forms, buildings as historical narratives, and the
unanswered questions posed by the intervention of new technologies.

7. Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), pp. 174-178, pp. 65-
80 and p. 267, note 6 respectively. [Translator’s note: These page numbers and footnote correspond
to two essays in the book: “Madness and the Combinative” and “Architecture and Transgression”.]

23
 SECTION 1
UNKNOWN ESSAYS ON ARCHITECTURE BY
THREE WELL-KNOWN FRENCH PHILOSOPHERS

Figure 5. Poster for the Shared Experience production of Ibsen's A Doll's House, 2000,
photo by Francesca Woodman.

Introduction to Lyotard, Irigaray and Nancy

Since it is wise to start with the known before proceeding to the unknown, the
first three thinkers from France presented here will be most well-known among those
in our survey of untranslated writings on architecture. Since they belong to the small

24
 INTRODUCTION TO LYOTARD, IRIGARAY AND NANCY

network of intellectual stars of the import-export business that Cusset has analysed in
his book French Theory, what fascinates us most with these works is watching a
familiar set of concepts and ways of thinking being turned towards our own subject of
architecture. So in the case of Lyotard we can see how his well-known postmodern
way of doing philosophy, one that rejects the construction of a totalising theory in
favour of the mapping of multiple forces and desires in a combination of styles – part
academic, part novelistic, part philosophical – is now applied to an essay on the
architect Le Corbusier. So we find a little biography, a little theory, a little history of
philosophy, some personal anecdotes and so on. And similarly in the case of Irigaray
we see her disruptive “philosophy in the feminine” at work again but now in the area
of dwelling and finding a place to live. The third well-known French philosopher
included in this section is Jean-Luc Nancy who is well-known for taking Derrida’s
deconstructive approach and turning it to more socially and politically relevant topics,
such as today’s most pressing need to rescue the idea of community and the concept
of freedom. So here we see Nancy turning his focus to Benoît Goetz’s book La
Dislocation: Architecture et philosophie (The Dislocation: Architecture and
Philosophy) in this short preface he wrote for it.

Returning to the first philosopher in this section, Jean-François Lyotard. The fact
that Lyotard single-handedly brought a much needed rigour to what was a rather
woolly concept first popularised by Charles Jencks in his book The Language of Post-
Modern Architecture, is a matter of historical record. 1 And Lyotard’s book The
Postmodern Condition is still, over 20 years later, the best source for anyone wanting
to know just what postmodernism is. That almost everyone now knows
postmodernism is the incredulity towards metanarratives (or grand narratives) is
entirely due this work. That Lyotard wrote short and insightful essays on knowledge,
communication, the libido, modern and postmodern art, literature, music, film, time
and memory, space, the city, landscape, the sublime and politics is also well known.
As any philosophy dictionary will tell you, Lyotard was one of the world's foremost
philosophers and a key figure in twentieth-century French philosophy. Charles

1. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff

Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1984). The concept
was made popular by an architectural critic Charles Jenks in his hugely successful book, The
Language of Post-Modern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1977).

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 INTRODUCTION TO LYOTARD, IRIGARAY AND NANCY

Jencks’ semiotic version of the post-modern in The Language of Post-Modern

Architecture, as a dual-coding simultaneously for the elite and the masses, always
seemed facile in comparison with Lyotard’s version of the postmodern that goes
straight to the heart of the matter. Modernism is the myth of unending progress
legitimated by the discourse of science says Lyotard. In the 1960s this edifice began
to collapse and the blind faith in progress and science was seen to be misplaced. If
modernism was the creation of a totality then postmodernism was the war against this
totality.

Lyotard led a double life, the young Lyotard was a fierce Marxist agitator for the
Socialisme ou Barbarie (Socialism or Barbarism) group having been politicised by his
time teaching in French-occupied Algeria. Lyotard later lost faith in Marxism and
returning to philosophy revisited his passion for art, all the while maintaining his
concern for social justice. This is what makes his writing on aesthetics so interesting.
There is the passionate belief that creativity is a way towards justice and his
monographs on artists and writers like Duchamp, Monory, Buren and Malreaux are
some of the most engaging philosophies of art ever written. But the fact that Lyotard
wrote a short essay on Le Corbusier full of genuine love and admiration for the Swiss
genius is quite a surprise because most postmodernists and feminists alike make Le
Corbusier, who was the figurehead of modernism, their prime target. That the most
effective theorist of postmodernism harboured a deep admiration for the greatest hero
of modernism can seem hard to fathom. But a careful reading of “Answering the
Question: What is Postmodernism?”, the appendix to The Postmodern Condition, will
show that in Lyotard’s complex and subtle thinking there are in fact two
postmodernisms. There is the usual sense that Jencks gives it, the reaction against
modernist doctrines and the return of everything that modernism had repressed,
namely bright colours, decorative ornamentation and historicism, with the declared
aim of creating popular works of beauty. Then there is another postmodernism which
continues with avant-garde experimentation that was such a feature of modernism,
only this time without the desire for totalities. This experimental art strives for the
unsettling sublime and not the satisfaction of beauty. So we can see how Lyotard
could be both a promoter of this second kind of postmodernism and a passionate

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 INTRODUCTION TO LYOTARD, IRIGARAY AND NANCY

admirer of Le Corbusier, at least the experimental Le Corbusier of his later projects

like the convent at La Tourette and the multimedia Poèm électronique.

The title of Lyotard’s essay is the Latin word conventus (from which we get the
English word convent) which is the past participle of convenire, meaning “to come
together” or “to assemble”, so conventus means assembled or brought together. A
convent means both the community assembled for a religious life and the assembled
buildings meant to house this community. And this is what Lyotard’s essay is about,
the coming together of people and buildings through love. In this short piece of
writing Lyotard suggests a radical new way of conceiving the relationship between
architecture and the human. This new conception that he calls “undulatory
mechanics” is based on the view that all sensations are wave-like. Light, sound, heat,
energy, they are all the effects of certain frequencies of waves passing through a
medium. A sensation is merely the transmission of one wave form into another as the
frequencies are internalised by the nervous system. The house too is nothing but
another complex series of frequencies only less variable than the first. Lyotard gives
us a materialist physics and physiology where everything resonates together and
vibrations can jump across the boundaries of what is usually considered to exist on
separate planes. Through a series of striking puns that also work in English
translation, Lyotard tears down the ontological curtain between the organic and the
inorganic, between the human and the architectural, so there is a passage between the
internal frequency of sensations and the external frequentation of a place, between the
internalised habits of behaviour and the externalised habitation of a home. Once this
boundary is pierced we can then say that architecture is erotic, a union of bodies
brought together in love, an intense habitation.

The earliest Greek meaning of erōs (love) was the chance encounter with the
missing half. Since every individual is only one half of a former primordial unity so
each half constantly searches for its lost complement and will only be happy when the
bodies of the two halves are pressed together. In a footnote to his article on Greek
erōs the French classicist Jean-Pierre Vernant recalls this ancient account of erōs:

According to Aristophanes’ account, each human being was originally completely

spherical or ovoid in form … a sort of primordial Orphic egg in miniature. Each had
four hands, four legs, two faces ― one in front and one in back of the head, two sets of

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 INTRODUCTION TO LYOTARD, IRIGARAY AND NANCY

genitals fixed on the outside, one on each side, like Eros-Phanes. To punish these
beings for their arrogance, Zeus decided to cut them in two down the middle … to
unite sexually is to reunite the fullness of the one …. In this way we regain that state of
being at one with our partner, to reconstitute by embracing our other half, the matrix,
the egg whose division produced us. 2

And the Architecture of the polis (the politically unified community) has always
been erotic in this sense to the Greeks. 3 Erotic love also had a central place in the
Stoic conception of the polis. 4 True architecture says Alberto Pérez-Gómez responds
to human desire and therefore is an ethical action which must always be singular and
circumstantial. “It always seems miraculous and unique,” he says, “a transformative
experience that is, significantly, analogous to our encounter with beauty in works of
art.” And he further elaborates that, “regardless of culture, age, wealth, and social
status, humans suffer a lack, which is also a gift. Unlike other animals on our planet,
we have an essential linguistic being that keeps us ‘apart’ from the world. Throughout
our lives we constantly look for ‘something,’ something that is missing and that might
complete us ― be it in the physical presence of another, the acquisition of
knowledge, or the experience of art and architecture.” 5 This loving frequentation of
architecture, like the fleeting chance encounter between lovers, requires a far more
intimate and therefore ethical engagement with architecture than we are accustomed
to. This will also help us to better understand the essays of Irigaray and Nancy that
follow.

The second translated work in this section is by Luce Irigaray, the leading
philosopher of sexual difference. She is often called a leading feminist philosopher
but she dislikes this term. In a recent discussion she said, “I have never designated
myself or my work as ‘feminist’. I do not very much like words that end in ‘-ism’ or
‘-ist’. In my opinion, they are too dogmatic or formalist. I have, rather, talked about

2. Jean-Pierre Vernant, “ONE … TWO … THREE: ERŌS” in David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler,
Froma I. Zeitlin (ed.), Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek
World (Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 471, n. 12.
3. See Paul W. Ludwig, Eros and Polis: Desire and Community in Greek Political Theory (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2002).
4. See Malcolm Schofield, The Stoic Idea of the City (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999)
especially chapter 2, “City of Love.”
5. Albert - , Built Upon Love: Architectural Longing After Ethics and Aesthetics
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), pp. 4 and 6.

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 INTRODUCTION TO LYOTARD, IRIGARAY AND NANCY

the liberation of woman or more generally, about the liberation of humanity, that is to
say of the human as such.” 6 Irigaray was born in Belgium in 1932 and first studied
literature and philosophy at the University of Louvain, followed by a doctorate in
linguistics at the University of Paris X at Nanterre and another doctorate in
philosophy at the University of Paris VIII at Vincennes. 7 She also became a
practicing psychoanalyst after attending Jacques Lacan’s seminars and joining his
École Freudienne de Paris (Freudian School of Paris). Her work in linguistics
showed how meaning derives from individual differences in gender and the
environment and this led to the second doctorate which was later published as
Speculum of the Other Women, which established her reputation as a philosopher.
This work criticises Freud, and by implication Lacan as well, for their patriarchy and
“phallocentrism”, and because Speculum was considered “irreverently heretical” by
members of Lacan’s group it led to her removal from the group and from Vincennes
University where she had been teaching from 1970 to 1974, such was the power of
the Lacanian orthodoxy at the time. The damage to her career and her reputation was
substantial and it wasn’t until the 1980s that she regained her standing as one of the
leading French philosophers of the twentieth century.

Starting with Speculum of the Other Woman Irigaray takes the entire Western
tradition to task for creating a culture of a single subject that is always masculine and
therefore the only place left for woman was being the other or the mirror of this
masculine subject. And this is why the feminine is always associated with the body
and the sensible in order to raise the masculine to the level of reflection, the Idea and
the transcendental. Irigaray’s tactic is therefore to cultivate the difference between
men and women and promote a culture of two subjects so that women can find their
own intelligence and men find their own corporality and not depend on each other for
these concepts in an unbalanced and unfair exchange. An apparently contradictory
concept that she uses to elevate the place of women is the “sensible transcendental.” 8

6. Luce Irigaray, “Luce Irigaray’s Questions (to Andrea Wheeler)”, Paragraph, vol. 25, no. 3
(November 2002), p. 114.
7. For the best available biography of Luce Irigaray see Katherine Stephenson, “Luce Irigaray” in Eva
Martin Sartori and Dorothy Wynne Zimmerman (ed.), French Women Writers (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1994), pp. 229 – 242.
8. For Irigaray’s use of the term sensible transcendental see Luce Irigaray, The Ethics of Sexual
Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (London: Athlone Press, 1993), pp. 82 and 129.

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 INTRODUCTION TO LYOTARD, IRIGARAY AND NANCY

It is never entirely clear what Irigaray means by this but Margaret Whitford has
provisionally defined it as “a condensed way of referring to all the conditions of
women’s collective access to subjectivity.” 9 Patriarchal society has reserved the
divine for the masculine, the only exception being a de facto divinity of the virgin
mother since she gives birth to the Son of God. So the sensible transcendent is the
access to the purely feminine divine.

Both Elizabeth Grosz and Andrea Wheeler have found Irigaray’s philosophy
useful to conceptualise a feminine architectural theory. 10 In November 2000 Irigaray
was invited to give her views on architecture at the Architectural Association in
London. 11 This was followed up by an interview with Andrea Wheeler in which she
further discussed her views on architecture. 12 Here Irigaray gave surprisingly precise
advice for architects: they should design dwellings with separate apartments for each
occupant, each with their own bedroom and living room to strengthen the individual’s
singularity and this will in turn she claims help to establish a stronger community.
Women must find a way of building that comes from their own nature, a cultural and
spiritual nature appropriate to them, and the architect must allow for these different
genders and worlds within one dwelling. Man builds by cutting himself off from
nature and turning nature into raw material, and they do the same with human nature,
so woman must learn to “reach building herself, woman has to preserve and cultivate
her nature also in an autonomous and decided manner. She has to discover how to
pass from her material or bodily nature to a cultural or spiritual nature appropriate to
her.” Irigaray defines this as meaning that, “she has to discover how to live, to love,
to speak, to think in accordance with her own nature.” Irigaray concludes with the
warning, “could an architect build houses for others if he, or she, is not capable of
building his or her self? Unfortunately this dimension, the most important dimension
in building, is often neglected, and even forgotten.” 13

9. Margaret Whitford, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 47.
10. Elizabeth Grosz, “Women, Chora, Dwelling” in Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion:
Essays on the Politics of Bodies (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 111 – 124 and Andrea Wheeler,
“Love in Architecture”, Paragraph, vol. 25, no. 3 (November 2002), pp. 104 – 114.
11. Luce Irigaray, “How Can We Live Together in a Lasting Way?” in Luce Irigaray, Key Writings
(London: Continuum, 2004), pp. 123- 132.
12. Andrea Wheeler, “About Being-Two in an Architectural Perspective: Interview with Luce
Irigaray”, Journal of Romance Studies, vol. 4, no. 2 (2004), pp. 91 – 107.
13. Ibid. p. 97.

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 INTRODUCTION TO LYOTARD, IRIGARAY AND NANCY

Luce Irigaray’s writing from 1983 translated below is called “Where and How to
Dwell?” It flouts the usual phallocentric academic style and so denies any
universalising of the particular. It seems instead to be a private memo intended for an
absent lover, as if Irigaray somehow absent-mindedly got her papers mixed up and
sent an erudite philosophy paper to her perplexed lover and vice versa, making its
appearance in the pages of an academic journal seem like a mistake. In this love letter
Irigaray presents us with the painful transgression of the personal into the public. “I
am here now and we have just spoken,” notice that she doesn’t say we are now
speaking but rather we have just spoken. “How to exist?” She continues therefore
without directly saying anything. “Where and how to dwell? In which house? In
which bodies? During what times of the day? With what relationship to the divine?
What political activities or engagements?” 14 A less dogmatic text than this would be
hard to imagine. Instead of unbending measures it demands a response and its highly
poetic nature guarantees that each response will be different. But Irigaray’s line of
questioning also brings about a shift in scale from the body to the house and then to
the cosmos and therefore it creates the potential for a singularising event that would
unexpectedly link all the scales together. She leaves the unitary masculine subject
behind in order to find women’s multiplicity, and from the shards and fragments of
woman she remaps herself in a different world. The challenge for today’s architects is
to make their own selves fluid enough to respond to this becoming-divine of the
woman in the sensible transcendental, all the while leaving enough room for both
sexes and both worlds.

The final well-known philosopher in this section is Jean-Luc Nancy. Nancy has
risen in popularity over recent years, despite undergoing a heart transplant and
surviving cancer in the late 1980s, by writing a seemingly endless series of extremely
erudite and timely books, such as The Inoperative Community (1983), The Birth to
Presence (1993), The Muses (1994), and Being Singular Plural (1996). 15 These cover
a huge range of interests from philosophy to theology to aesthetics and politics and all

14. Luce Irigaray “Où et comment habiter?”, Les Cahiers du Grif, no. 24 (March 1983), p. 139. See the
translation below on pp. 47 - 52.
15. The dates refer to the French publications. Here we will only be discussing his best known work
The Inoperative Community.

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 INTRODUCTION TO LYOTARD, IRIGARAY AND NANCY

involve intriguing new readings of Kant, Nietzsche, Hegel, Heidegger and Bataille.
Jacques Derrida’s last book, On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy (2000) is a 377-page
homage to his friend’s philosophy and this was a kind of passing of the baton to his
younger protégé which has done a lot to help popularise Nancy’s work. Like Derrida,
Nancy “deconstructs” the texts he examines by starting out from a meticulous
commentary of concepts from a wide range of texts by a particular author and then
finding what wasn’t said or what was avoided, and then very laboriously developing a
tentative new proposition about the problem that was avoided. This can make reading
both Derrida and Nancy rather daunting because their writing makes no concession to
the reader who may be less familiar with the works under discussion.

As an example of Nancy’s socially and politically-relevant deconstructive style

we will take a brief look at The Inoperative Community, the book that made Nancy a
key figure in Continental philosophy, and launched the concept of community as a
topic worthy of philosophical debate, inspiring books on very similar themes by
Maurice Blanchot and Giorgio Agamben. 16 This work starts out as a wide-ranging
commentary on Georges Bataille’s concept of community by picking out, collecting,
and elaborating on cryptic passages scattered throughout Bataille’s 12-volume
Oeuvres Complètes. Then after 23 pages of close reading Nancy leads us to the limit
of Bataille’s thinking, the paradox at which Bataille stopped and gave up, the
dilemma between the sovereign subject and the community, or between the isolation
of lovers and artists and the fusion of the group. For Bataille, as for all of us Nancy
says, a thinking of the subject prevents a thinking of the community. What Bataille
failed to see was the possibility of an ecstasy of sharing between a shared sovereignty
and a sharing community because he failed to see that existence is already
coexistence, that being singular is also being plural to use the language of Nancy’s
later work, Being Singular Plural. Bataille remained committed to the polar opposites
of ecstasy and community, between the festival of fascist orgy and the equality and
justice of communism. Nancy then begins to add his own insightful thoughts; the
community he says cannot arise from and objectify itself in community works: in

16. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Conner, Lisa Garbus et al, (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1991), Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans.
Pierre Joris (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1988) and Giorgio Agamben, The Coming
Community, trans. by Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

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 INTRODUCTION TO LYOTARD, IRIGARAY AND NANCY

sites, buildings and crowds, it can only genuinely occur in the interruption of work, in
the unworking (désoeuvrée) of work, hence the title of the book is “inoperative
community” (communauté désoeuvrée). In the same way that lovers make good use
of their spare time, “lovers expose above all”, writes Nancy, “the unworking of
community. Unworking is what they show in their communal aspect and intimacy.
But they expose it to the community, which already shares their intimacy. For the
community, lovers are on its limit, they are outside and inside, and at this limit they
have no meaning without the community...” 17

The key idea of The Inoperative Community involves the difficult concept of
singularity. Instead of what Nancy calls the “immanent” concept of community
(immanent because it considers man to be the producer of his own essence) founded
on a totalising, exclusionary myth of national, racial and religious identity, where the
individual figure is either organically fused with the group (which denies the
existence of anything foreign) or else is a detached atom standing out from a chaotic
and formless ground (which leads to violence against whatever is foreign), he
proposes a more inclusive and fluid concept of community where the individual is a
singularity, in other words a being-in-common or being-with (Nancy borrows concept
of “being-with” or Mitsein from Heidegger’s Being and Time). Singularity is one of
the most fashionable concepts in French philosophy today. 18 And it is a concept that
always seems to arise whenever a philosopher and an architect come together, as
when Félix Guattari sat down for a discussion with the Japanese architect Shin
Takamatsu in Kyoto in 1989, or when Jean Baudrillard interviewed Jean Nouvel at
the Paris-La Villette architecture school in 1997. 19 In most cases the term seems to be
used whenever the dilemma between the unique and the universal, or between the
creative individual and the dumbing down of the masses is to be avoided. So Gehry’s
Guggenheim museum at Bilbao (always the paradigm example for architectural
singularity) is not seen as an oversized piece of sculpture by a uniquely creative

17. The Inoperative Community, p. 40.

18. See Peter Hallward, “The Singular and the Specific: Recent French Philosophy,” Radical
Philosophy, no. 99 (January/February 2000), pp. 6 – 17, where Hallward finds this concept is used
in various ways by Sartre, Deleuze, Levinas, Baudrillard and Badiou.
19. See Félix Guattari, “Singularization and Style: Shin Takamatsu in Conversation with Félix
Guattari”, Parallax, vol. 7, no. 4 (2001), pp. 131 – 137, and Jean Baudrillard and Jean Nouvel , The
Singular Objects of Architecture, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2002).

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 INTRODUCTION TO LYOTARD, IRIGARAY AND NANCY

genius but rather as a catalyst of a chain reaction that crystallises architecture for a
great number of creative people who are then inspired to make their own “singular
objects.” But we are left guessing what singularity is per se other than the escape
from a dilemma, and Nancy’s discussion by not clearly stating just what singularity is
also leaves us guessing.

The clearest description of this concept is found elsewhere, in Giorgio

Agamben’s follow up to Nancy’s book, Agamben’s The Coming Community. The
first two pages of this book are more valuable for an understanding of singularity than
all the other discussions put together. Using his vast knowledge of 20th-century
German, contemporary French and Scholastic philosophy, Agamben says that a
singularity is a quodlibet being. Quodlibet is a Latin adjective usually translated as
“whatever” but in Scholastic philosophy it means “such that it always matters that it
is this one and not another of the same class.” A singularity is a being such as it is,
which furthermore has an irreducible relationship to desire and to love.

The Whatever in question here relates to singularity not in its indifference with
respect to a common property (to a concept, for example: being red, being
French, being Muslim), but only in its being such as it is. Singularity is thus freed
from the false dilemma that obliges knowledge to choose between the ineffability
of the individual and the intelligibility of the universal…. In this conception,
such-and-such being is reclaimed from its having this or that property, which
identifies it as belonging to this or that set, to this or that class (the reds, the
French, the Muslims) – and it is reclaimed not for another class nor for the simple
generic absence of any belonging, but for being-such, for belonging itself. 20

So Agamben says that when we love someone our love is not directed to a
particular collection of atoms or body parts nor to a universal subject of history but to
the loved one such as they are along with all of their predicates: being red, being
French, being Muslim, being short, being gentle, being flawed in certain likeable
ways and so on. “The lover wants the loved one with all of its predicates, its being
such as it is. The lover desires the as only insofar as it is such – this is the lover’s

20. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. by Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 1 – 2.

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 INTRODUCTION TO LYOTARD, IRIGARAY AND NANCY

particular fetishism.” 21 And all singularities have this original relationship to desire, a
movement like Plato’s erotic anamnesis says Agamben, not from the object to another
object or another place but from the object towards its own taking place. This
captures better than anything else the sentiments that are expressed by all those who
lovingly describe a work of architecture as a “singular object” or a “singularity.”

Now to introduce the last translation in this section, Jean-Luc Nancy’s short
essay on architecture entitled Species of Space Thought. This forms the preface to
Benoît Goetz’s book The Dislocation: Architecture and Philosophy, excerpts of
which are included in Section 2 below. Here Nancy revisits some of his themes from
The Inoperative Community. The history of space has largely been the history of the
territorial expansion which he says is now coming to an end. The entire planet has
been colonised down to the smallest dimension of electronic information. The two
major models for mastering space, the ecstatic festival of fascism and the supposedly
just and equal community of communism have both imploded under the weight of
their own territorial ambitions. This unworking (désoeuvrée) of global expansion
through the mastery of space is obviously not something to regret, as we know from
our previous discussion on The Inoperative Community this unworking is the
opportunity for a genuine inclusive and fluid community of coexistence. The
unworking or interruption of space is intensive space with no dimensions. It is the
space of thought and this picks up one of Goetz’s key concepts that architecture is a
transcendental condition or “ethical substance” of thinking and so philosophers need
to take architecture itself seriously and not treat it as a metaphor or an ideal. And this
is just what Nancy does with Species of Space Thought. Nancy doesn’t go much
further than that. We will have to pick up where Nancy leaves off when we examine
the contents of the book that Nancy here introduces when we discuss Goetz’s book La
Dislocation: Architecture et Philosophie in the next section.

21. Ibid. p. 2.

35
 Conventus

By Jean-François Lyotard

Translated by Tim Adams 1

Le Corbusier was 70 years-old when he built La Tourette, the convent on

the hills above Lyon. 2 He had already built the church of Ronchamp on the
southern slopes of the Vosges in 1953. “I tried to give people what they most
of all need today: peace and quiet.” At the age of 78 Le Corbusier went down
to the beach at Roquebrune for his usual summer swim. Some other swimmers
had to rescue him. He died in a hut on the beach.

We say that love creates union and also that union brings the elements of
a building together. The buildings constructed by Le Corbusier in particular
are perhaps in the nature of love. I want to know why this is so. In any case, it
is not unity. Le Corbusier never stops fighting against
the massive homogeneity of edifices for which he
takes the pyramid, the symbol of imperial strength, to
be the model. Simple geometric plans, the same
windowless facades on all sides, tons of stone
weighing heavily on the ground of life. The Empire
hides its secrets in a labyrinth of galleries, hollowing
out an inaccessible crypt. The secret of the Empire is
that it is death. All this crushing of time and space
Figure 6. Jean-François Lyotard
forever watched over by the mummified sovereign in
his funerary chamber! All around the valley, the desert, the hubbub of the
villages and cities, the rhythmic flow of water, the coming and going of the
seasons, all is indifferent to the permanent monument. The Emperor wants us
to have only those things that reinforce the unchanging evidence of his
authority, but only what is dead is immortal and never compromised.

1. The source for this translation is Jean-François Lyotard, Misère de la philosophie (Paris: Éditions
Galilée, 2000), pp. 199 – 208. Originally written for the 1994 Milan Triannale and first published in
Italian in the catalogue: I racconti dell’abitare (Triennale de Milano: Abitare-Segesta Cataloghi,
1994).
2. Jean Petit (ed.), Un couvent de Le Corbusier, Les cahiers forces vives (Paris: Minuit, 1961).

36
 LYOTARD

For Le Corbusier we could say this monumental unity is the temptation

of architecture. By succumbing to the desire to eternalise oneself in the edifice
the architect erects a grave, in other words that which is uninhabitable. To live
is to vibrate in phase with one’s surroundings. Le Corbusier builds with the
hypothesis of an undulatory mechanics that defies the logic of Empire. In
place of the project where everything is thought out and weighed in advance,
the free plan, in place of the crushing load-bearing walls, pilotis and
suspended gardens, and against the asphyxiation of the organs subsumed by a
much greater mass, the easy breathing of their variable interdependence.
Imperial architecture is always a strategy, it wages war against space. Le
Corbusier’s “free plan” is a peace plan.

I do not know if one can inhabit love. We do know that between living
and liking there is an analogy. Habitare derives from habere, habitus, a way
of life. We inhabit a place, an environment where our way of life forms itself,
by frequenting it. It is a question of frequency, which is a variable of
vibration, the number of times per unit of time that a pulse of an undulatory
movement passes along the axis of its propagation. The red and the blue, the
sharp and the flat, are determined by a difference in frequency of the
vibrations of light or air that constitute them. Our fields of sensation, whether
visual, sonorous, olfactory, or tactile, are the effects of waves. What is the
“grain” of skin? It is the frequency of the minute projections felt by the fingers
moving across it. All our senses feel pulsations, they twitch. We sense
because our receptive membranes vibrate in phase with an incident wave.
“Sensation” designates both what can feel and what one feels. The
“Stimmung” 3 is said to be a relation of the soul to the environment. Vibrations
pass between our body and a field. It is not that they are indistinct. The body
obtains the frequencies of the waves of light, air, and matter: it translates them
in its vibratory system to itself, making them visual, sonorous, and tactile by
propagating the nervous pulsations to the appropriate organs.

3. Translator’s note: From the German, Stimme: voice, so Stimmung is literally voicing but it means
“mood”, “atmosphere” or (musical) “tuning.” It is not easily translated because in the Romantic
period of German literature it came to mean the soul’s congruence with nature while in the
Empfindsame (sentimental) late-Romantic period it became associated with melancholy due to the
absence of nature and love in the city. See Eda Sagarra and Peter Skrine, A Companion to German
Literature: From 1500 to the Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1997).

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 LYOTARD

To inhabit is also to sense but on a larger scale. To have a knife ready at

hand in the kitchen drawer, a favourite book left open beside the bed and
through the window a sky, bright or dark, calm or stormy, all manner of things
that speak to us. To speak for the sky, the knife and even the book, isn’t that to
say it is in phase with your corporal rhythms. We don’t listen to these voices
when we inhabit ― only when in the attic or the cellar precisely because we
do not live in those places. The house that I inhabit also inhabits me, I do not
need to listen to it, we ourselves “let hear”. At four o'clock in the morning I go
down stairs, I cross the floor bypassing the furniture, I pass through a doorway
and go to the fridge to get a glass of milk ― all without ever turning on a
single light. Where I can be a sleepwalker without tripping, that is my house.

It only needs my resonance to the vibrations of all the bodies within it for
it to be my house. I need only its resonance to my rhythms for me to be its
inhabitant. It works even if this agreement between the frequency and the
frequentation, between the house and me, goes beyond us, ahead of us. It is as
if each had for a long time been trying to make itself like the other without
knowing it. The habitat and the habit encircle themselves with a passing
breath, even when they are only recently acquainted. It is an after effect that
takes hold of the frequentation. Duration too is put in phase. Habitation
creates its key.

If the architect wants us to inhabit what they construct they must allow
for the agreement of frequencies, as I have said, between the inhabitant and
the edifice. They must leave open the possibility of their loving frequentation.
This has its risks and perils because, as even Monsieur Teste will agree, no
one can plan the event of an identical encounter. This is why the plan of Le
Corbusier must remain “free”. But how can we understand this liberty? At the
bare minimum, as I have said, the edifice will not be conceived as a heavy
mass but always as a complex combination of vibrations with different
frequencies. Because, if I am not mistaken, architecture is erotic.

Jacques Lucan has written some pages, to which I owe nearly everything
that follows, where he elaborates the “primal scene” of the architect Le
Corbusier. 4 A repeated scene as is the rule, how else would we know it was
primal? The first finds its theatre on the Acropolis, the second on the Piazza

4. Jacques Lucan, “Acropole: Tout a commencé là”, in Jacques Lucan (ed.) Le Corbusier, 1887-1965:
une encyclopédie (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1987), pp. 20-25.

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 LYOTARD

dei Miracoli at Pisa. Suddenly the young Le Corbusier, who lies dormant
within Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, hallucinates on the true union of bodies,
the one that generates habitable volumes. If the Acropolis is so beautiful, that
is to say if the soul within the body desires to inhabit it with so much fervour,
it is not because some Pythagoras has carefully measured up the plan, it is
because it has been inhabited intensely.

The gods had a feast there. And the edifices that we see and visit,
distributed one could say at random on the plateau of the sacred hill, are the
remains of their meal. The contingency of their disposal in truth obeys a logic
that I will call frequentation. “Watch … in an ordinary small restaurant, two
or three customers who are having coffee and talking,” to borrow from Lucan
a passage taken from Precisions, first published in 1930, “The table is still
covered with glasses, with bottles, with plates, with the bottle of oil, the
saltshaker, pepper mill, napkins, napkins ring etc. Look at the inevitable order
that relates these objects to each other; they have all been used, they have
been grasped in the hand of one or other of the diners; the distances that
separate them are the measure of life. It is an organized mathematical
composition; there isn’t a false point, a hiatus, a deceit.” 5

Figure 7. Le Corbusier dining, c.1953.

5. Translator’s note: Jacques Lucan, “Acropole: Tout a commencé là”, p. 22 and Le Corbusier,
Precisions on the Present State of Architecture and City Planning, trans. Edith Schreiber Aujame
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), p. 9.

39
 LYOTARD

Thus it is the situs that allows for habitus. Such is the aura of what is
ancient: the house is the trace of a previous habitation. This is also the true
meaning of a plan ― one that unites and separates a knife and a glass on the
table after a meal. On the Attic hill or on the Tuscan plane, the union of
edifices does not have anything of the centralist unity that governs the
pyramid, it obeys “an inevitable order” of an intense archaic frequentation.
This is why the arrangement of the Acropolis or Pisa cannot reveal itself to a
clear and distinct direct view, it demands, according to the Lucan’s beautiful
expression, “a skewed vision”.

And your house, do you stare at it? And your partner, do you look at
them face on like a pyramid! You surround them in little glances, some too
distant, some too close, they similarly surround you. What is the right distance
between the mouth of Marcel and the cheek of Albertine? The double
envelopment of the beloved and the lover, the house and the inhabitant, is
scandalous only to a thought that treats space partes extra partes. A non-
Euclidean geometer, an undulatory mechanist sees in this monster the effect of
a resonance between two or more fields of waves. Then there arises a hard and
supple form, the table after dining, the bed after making love.

Le Corbusier himself proposes that “The Parthenon appears (because it

falls outside the axis).” In architecture it is a matter of apparitions, of
morphogenetic catastrophes. Likewise the kitchen knife on the table of
Cezanne under the skewed gaze of women, and the erect member of a faun on
the walls of Pompeii appear by projecting outside their axes. Dare I suggest
that the freedom granted to the plan by Le Corbusier belongs to the
“independent organs” (“posts, outer coverings, curved partitions, stairways”
notice what these words promise to the innocent Pavillion Suisse of the Cité
universitaire…) ― is this free pleasure of organs born under the sign of Liber,
the Roman god of all pleasures? This would I know betray the not quite
conscious thought of the architect and subordinate it to an all too singular
culture of Eros. How could one place Ronchamp and La Tourette with that
which celebrates all kinds of liaisons?

Nevertheless extreme spiritual energy in its violence bears comparison

with sexual passion. From the Canticle of the Canticles to Bernini’s Saint
Theresa in Rome, a long tradition of writings and images place the ecstasy of
the soul inhabited by God on the same level of intensity as an orgasm. The

40
 LYOTARD

communion in love in its extreme form explodes the regulating structures of

the body and the spirit all together. This is why anguish is always a
component of these delights.

Figure 8. Detail of Giovanni Lorenzo

Bernini’s Saint Teresa of Avila in Ecstasy,
Cornaro Chapel, Church of Santa Maria
della Vittoria, Rome, 1645 - 1652.

Certainly the “free plan” does not carry the disorder as far as these
passions in the norms admitted by architecture. But it demands nonetheless
the decomposition of reasonable appearances. “Limpid and pure prisms”, Le
Corbusier’s projects for the City of Geneva serve the function of analyzing the
space into elementary volumes like diffracted light liberating its pure colours.
And next the architect adds, “I compose atmospherically”. The union of
“primary” spatial elements occurs by means of putting them into a respiratory
phase. This is what Le Corbusier calls “the incidence of the plan”. In Latin
this free gathering is designated a conventus [assembly].

I borrow once again from my generous source Jacques Lucan, this time
Le Corbusier’s letter from his first trip to Pisa in 1911: “One day I struggled
over elementary geometry hungry for knowledge and power. In their mad
course, the red, the blue and the yellow became white. I am crazy for the
colour white, the cube, the sphere, the cylinder and the pyramid and the circle
all united on a large empty expanse. The prisms stand up, balance themselves,

41
 LYOTARD

regulate themselves rhythmically, they begin to work.” 6 The prismatic

analysis of the apparent volume reveals the simple geometric volumes that are
their elementary constituents. Cezanne was also working towards this
abstracted stereometry. Just as daylight contains all the primary colours, so
does habitable space contain all these volumes. The cube, the sphere and the
pyramid of course, placed in a row, etc. define some of the elementary ways
in which the spatial field closes in on itself and offers some shelter. They are
the molecules of stereometry. The problem then is to arrange them according
to their respective valences so that the mass of the edifice forms a body that
vibrates. The white that Le Corbusier dreams of is the chorus of these simple
vibratory volumes assembled without constraint. The choir is free, like the
plan of the architect, because it makes the differences between voices heard in
their blending.

Between 1956 and 1958 Le Corbusier worked with Varèse in Brussels

where together they created the Philips Pavilion and the Poèm électronique. “I
strive”, writes Varèse, “to capture the most extreme differentiation of colours
and densities for the listener.” 7 His music relies on “the movement of
sonorous masses without relationships between them.” 8 Without relationships
fixed by the rules of harmony and melody, as is the case for the edifices on the
Acropolis. Electronic music is for Varèse the “liberation of sound” just as
concrete volume is a liberation for Le Corbusier. The house, writes Le
Corbusier, is a “machine for living” because the machine goes further in the
analysis of the differential elements and in their free composition than any
other project conceived by man. The Poèm électronique is a machine for
inhabiting sound space.

It is no coincidence that Varèse takes the molecular machinism that

generates a crystal as the model for his poetic. 9 It is the same process that
causes the “movement of prisms” in Le Corbusier’s vision about white. A
year after Brussels, Pierre Boulez recorded Hyperprism. I will not develop this
motif any further, whether directly or indirectly Le Corbusier’s project
connects with a diffuse poetic at the beginning of the century in writing and in
the arts ― which was perhaps given a more precise formulation by cubists
such as Max Jacob, Reverdy, or Braque ― in which the work is separated

6. Jacques Lucan, “Acropole: Tout a commencé là”, p. 22-23.

7. Edgar Varese, Écrits, (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1983), p. 99.
8. Ibid., p. 157.
9. Ibid., p. 159.

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 LYOTARD

from all subjective projects, all expression and all allusion to any given
reality. It is, wrote Jacob, as bright and as naked as a jewel. For this Jewish
and Christian poet such crystalline hardness is what divine love demands of
the soul.

Here we see the convent of La Tourette: convent, that is conventus. Out

of his love for Jesus, Saint Dominique founded the holy order that was divided
between two extremes: the ecstatic communion with the mystical Rhine and
the jealous fury against the false Christians of the Inquisition. A division of
love against itself, for nothing comes closer to heresy than the mystical and
nobody is nearer the devil than the Inquisitor.

Nothing is sheltered from passion other than the ignorance of all

dwelling. But Le Corbusier will give the wise Dominicans the house of love
which their convent life demands, a complex combination of subtle volumes
whose vibrations echo to the rhythms of community rule. All that I have
advanced on the subject of the resonance of frequencies between habitat and
inhabitant is eminently well illustrated here, since it not only encourages well-
being but grace as well.

The cells are modest, without excess in their hardship, one bed, one table,
a window to the hills on the horizon. Nothing is superfluous to the self-denial,
everything is for study, for meditation, for reverie. The common rooms, the
library, the refractory, and the wide access ramps to the chapel suggest to the
collective only the bodily rhythms that support their fervour. Thus the large
glass wall that Xenakis designed with sequences of rectangular elements looks
like a score for a piece of serial or aleatory music, which the sun reinscribes
by projecting it on the floor. Or equally the slope that descends towards the
sanctuary inflected by small indentations, very similar to the stairs to the
stables at the Ducal Palazzo in Urbino, appropriate for slowing down one’s
step and thus reducing one’s speed. The immense metallic portal that gives
access to the chapel pivots like a revolving door but its axis is off centre. The
side alters where individual priests come to celebrate the low mass (Jean
XXIII forbad it) align themselves in continuous steps one after the other like a
keyboard on different levels, a sort of organ rostrum placed crosswise. And
three light wells with contrary orientations splash their paint brushes over the
dark room, all is intimacy, the rhythm of the hours, the seasons and the clouds.

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 LYOTARD

The life of the brothers is made rhythmical by monastic rule, it must bend
to its presence. Getting up, going to bed, meals, work, recreation, time for
isolation and gathering: the holy Hours directs daily gestures as much as the
offerings do. The architect can only obtain a more agile space to this harsh life
so that the house, in its multiple organs, resounds with the various moments of
prayer. The simple forms in which the concrete is poured ― the primary
volumes which dream of Pisa ― make a sort of discreet counterpoint like the
monody of plain-chant. Sometimes a surprising line of dissonance comes to
jostle the concert of volumes and voices, or an invitation is joyously thrown in
the face, to face of God, by an architectonic syncopation: the hat of the steeple
beside its head.

Figure 9. Le Corbusier at La Tourette, 1953.

One day during the break after a meal, a brother who had participated in
the site meetings with Le Corbusier guided me through the convent while
coaxing me to reveal my foolish thoughts. We walked calmly. This was his
home, he lived here. “Look”, he said, “at these kind of troughs for the sun
(reversed canopies? I don’t know what they are called) that Le Corbusier
placed under the most exposed windows to temper the variations of light
entering the interior. And at the ends of the long corridors he took care to off-
centre the windows in order to break the monotony of their placements.
(Another detail my guide pointed out.) The glazing that lights these galleries

44
 LYOTARD

the architect placed at head height so the exterior is accessible to the gaze
without disrupting the internal life.” This holy man knew more about the body
than a phenomenologist, and on the perception of volumes more than an
architectural graduate. Le Corbusier’s love of the effect of planes and for the
“apparition” naturally accorded itself the Dominicans’ love of Jesus. La
Tourette is the order and disorder that reigned on the Apostle’s table after the
Last Supper.

I have said nothing about the chapel. It is vast, rectangular, rectilinear in

plan and elevation, a bare ceiling like the first basilicas, all in concrete, a nave
with axial symmetry distributing the pews on both sides face-to-face as is the
rule. A lateral indentation nevertheless creates a place for a secondary altar,
and the steps of the main altar are not disposed symmetrically. This cubist
sanctuary is lit by a thin opening between the top of the gable walls and the
roof. And from a skylight in the roof behind the altar falls a beam of epiphany.
The arrangement is admirable: the soul accepts its incarceration, it awaits to
be touched by the ray of grace, it hopes and prays. Composed entirely by
touch and annunciation. Never has concrete been as subjected as it is here to
the imploration of a divine frequentation. Comparable to the small stone-made
Romanesque churches of Saintonge, Auvergne or Émilie. In the 12th century
Hugo of Saint Victor compared them to zithers. Works of sound or rock, they
reveal by sensible means the divine word. Art is not religion, it is the
“dissimilar similar”. 10 Dissimilis similitudo, this could be a description of Le
Corbusier’s free plan. Is not his poetry of vibratory volumes a kind of
theology?

To end with a confession. These pages were written by trusting my

affective memory alone; my modest documentation of La Tourette was
inaccessible to me at the time. But above all, while working on this small text
I found myself led in an unforeseen direction. I have tried to show, for better
or worse, that living is an affair of love. To the contrary I set out to explain
that love is always being torn between the presence and the absence of its
object, where there is no rest. That it is a threshold figure. No doubt my
project was too simple, it was too much like a negative theology.

10. Hugo de Sancto Victore, Commentaria in Hierarchiam coelestem S. Dionysii Areopagitaei, in

Jacques-Paul Migne (ed.), Patrologia Latina (Paris: Migne, 1854), vol. 175, p. 949.

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 LYOTARD

The fable of Diotima in The Banquet holds more wisdom. 11 The gods put
on a great feast to celebrate the birth of Aphrodite. Poros, the resourceful one,
leaves drunk and falls asleep in the garden. Penia, the careful one, has been
waiting by the door. She passes by the garden and is then impregnated by the
thoughtless drunkard. The child that is born of this unfortunate rape is called
Eros. I leave it to you to connect the moral of the story with Le Corbusier’s
view about the Acropolis. Just one clue ― the conventus always arrives at the
end of a meal.

11. Plato, “The Banquet, A Dialogue of Plato Concerning Love. The Second Part” in The Symposium,
trans. W. Hamilton (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1951), 203b ff.

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 Where and How To Dwell?

By Luce Irigaray

Translated by Tim Adams

So here today in Paris, on Thursday the Twenty-first of August, Nineteen

Hundred and Eighty, I begin writing you something about passion. 1 Having
just returned home exhausted from a trip abroad where I felt outside of
everything. Nowhere at home ― not under the sky, by
the sea, nor during evening walks by the sea. But there
were remains. A house filled with noises, sterile
agitation and futile worries. People who bumped into
each other, intruded upon each other’s space, who
spoke but said nothing, neither fully awake nor fully
asleep, and they leave you exhausted: hopelessly left in
suspense.

The hours passed and nothing happened, only Figure 10. Luce Irigaray
everything became imperceptively uniform and boring,
like an amorphous dream. I needed to rush home, to be near it, to see it, to
listen to it, to feel it move, so my body could recover a little.

I am here now and we have just spoken. How to exist? Where and how to
dwell? In which house? In which bodies? During what times of the day? With
what relationship to the divine? What political activities or engagements?

It was breakfast. You left to go to work and we parted. You gave me

something to keep me busy for the day. I asked you to. I needed you to give
me definition. I escape from myself in you. From the world as well. I cannot
remain in the world. I am there and I am not there. I don’t escape from you,
from me, from us towards some Other, no. I don’t believe so ― unlike
Thérèse (but between you and me, who or what does she believe in?). It’s not

1. The source for this translation is Luce Irigaray “Où et comment habiter?” Les Cahiers du Grif, no.
24 (March 1983), pp. 139–143.

47
 IRIGARAY

that. I don’t go to some One or to some Thing, like her. I extend myself and,
sometimes, overflow everything that is finite: every place, every time, every
framework.

This will not be my finitude ― my love. It can’t always be known even

to myself. These continuous deadlines that constrain me to abandon myself
without reason. To obey that which happens to me without name and without
face. Beyond all presence. Without knowing if it’s good or bad, a gift or
something stolen, God or the devil (as Thérèse would have said). With what,
with who, do I participate when such events (but which ones exactly?) weave
me into their fabric, their destiny, their taking place. In a radical expropriation
and expatriation of what I am or want to be here, now. Thus I to write you ―
about passion.

I promised you that I would. I called upon you to witness this promise. I
need you to oblige me – to hold me somewhere, to hold me to something. I
entrust you this task. I entrust myself to you so you will oblige me. To live
here and now, and go beyond.

Therefore fatefully I am going to disobey you. What I offer you today,

grasp it if you can. Otherwise oblige me again tomorrow.

But I do not know what I am nor to what or to who, exactly, I am

responding, corresponding or belonging. But I want to live faithfully. Oblige
me to that.

And the unforeseeable suffering or joy, I will try to accept it without

question or reason why, as you have said. Going through these excesses to my
daily becoming, lets me live ― with you.

Yes, with you. Do you hear me? As I listen to you. And we are at present
so inexorably linked that no one and nothing can separate us.

Except death. But it’s everywhere. Unless succumbing to our own, which
already unites us. For when I was fully attentive to you, I accepted it. Tied to
you by it and through it. I conceded to you, and your birth, by this threshold,
or by this mortal mourning. Sometimes I could not find the patience to suffer
your mortality, and your dereliction, your constant forgetfulness, your quick

48
 IRIGARAY

changes of mind, your yes/no, your going to-and-fro, didn’t they make me the
gate keeper of our two solitudes? I believed so, I will always believe so.

No, not always. When you speak to me, your mouth restores me. A
simple address to me, or does it make me become you? Both. Sometimes one,
sometimes the other. One in the other. But I heard you have listened to me,
whereas I only believed what you said, that I alone gather you towards me and
that separated you from me. Today, our situation is this: you have rendered us
inseparable.

By listening to me.

If I don’t trust you, I wonder if there was, in this gesture, the fear of
death. Of your death. You absorbed me or you returned in me to protect you
from it. When I have been bad to myself, I think that you have mortally
abandoned me. That the risk is doubled because you are in me. Doubled? Or
made infinite? Overflowed by a peril beyond my life. I can save nothing
without you, outside of you.

And you? Deprived of your death? Lost in the incommensurable, in the

infinitude?

Not knowing anymore who or where you are – you. How to pass from
here to there, from you to you in it, from you towards me.

But you speak to me. You say something to me. Thus you exist and I am
at least something to you. Someone? I believe so. But still too confused about
you. You once told me what you are, and you said what I am. You speak of
my love. Do you understand?

And yours? Therefore mine. Are they not today undivided? United,
already, and for eternity? What does that mean?

And how to exist? Where and how to Dwell? In which bodies? In which
house? From now we are bonded in our flesh, but to which place, to which
times, to which economy and politics can or should we belong? Without
forgetting our relation to the divine, to my birth, to what I name ― for lack of
a better term ― the sensible transcendental.

49
 IRIGARAY

And what do you call the transcending and how do you reach it? Is the
alliance between two possible? Do you believe so? As you have required me
to do.

For me, I confide in you the edges of my inability to be situated. Which I

need to transgress. Imposed by and in affection of ― my skin from the outside
and the inside. Thus not only my skin. Nor only my face. As naked as they
may be. No.

I demand you to inhabit the invisible as well. This strange night which
you penetrate to reveal that we are no longer who we thought we were. Look
at yourself and find me in your darkness. Bring us outside. Is it infinite? Yes.
One life is not enough. So much the better. But let us not deceive ourselves.

This access demands that the remainder is left in its place.

I reverse everything? The essential becomes the remainder? Apparently.

It has always been this way. And for centuries you have wanted to save the
remainder. Only the remains. Always sending back to tomorrow or yesterday
what matters the most.

But in hell love does not stop burning. The consummation is infinite. The
fire destroys without really belonging to the hearth. If it was situated there the
flames would be relit and live forever, transported outside this place, from
their place, they lick or irradiate only the edges. The skin and its openings that
they thus make blind.

At the centre, the more animate the flame, the brighter it becomes. The
more it increases, the less you suffer from its heat. Crossing a certain
threshold, you are located in the flash. And that lasts. Time passes without you
knowing it. The past and the future flow together, confusing repetition and
reproduction. The instant and eternity are fused together.

Not by turning away from or returning to it. It is no longer a matter of

returning but of arriving in the middle. Of what? Of everything. You run back
and forwards through all mediations, and where are you located? In medio.
It’s all the same. It’s enough to think that the medium begins and ends in the
middle.

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 IRIGARAY

But between the true and the false, this is what you always forget ― that
which holds itself between and allows for contradictory pairs.

And if this in between covers the whole range? What do you say then?
Where do you locate yourself? Which procedure do you invent to escape the
world, and go beyond? Because the horizon is just another envelope that
continues on forever. The angels, for example, come and go through this
apparently outer veil.

Do you still understand me? Or do you decipher beneath my skin the

messages written in sympathetic ink?

Thus I will appear through you. And when you transport yourself
elsewhere, will you forget where the announcement came from? Am I visible
to you from where you read me?

Lost in your labyrinth, you look for me without realizing that this maze is
constructed from my flesh. You have turned me inside out, and where you
look for me in this inversion you cannot find me. You are lost inside me and
far from me. You have forgotten that I had an interior as well. Not without
light. And if you engage yourself inside out, or return to me, you return to
your first night.

Where I keep memory of your flesh, of ours. But where you lose it.

Are you not born facing the light of day?

And have you not constituted your soul through clarity and the negation
of night? Even your God, haven’t you imagined that He is linked to a
perceptible light which you have already brought into your world? And not
from a place beyond the qualities of your truth?

Except ― invisible. Again in the shadow. Your shadow. And even closer
to the sun – for example. Too sensible, too immediate for what you consider
divine?

Lost in this maze of folded membranes, do you build universes of

concepts that lack immortal roots? What are the risks? Your threads will
destroy them. And your cities of transparencies are beautiful. How can I live

51
 IRIGARAY

there? Am I not higher or lower than their structure? They impose themselves.
They do not fit. And must we not make ourselves indefinitely inside out for
this architecture? How can we belong there? We are tenuously linked. You
cannot emerge from a place where you withhold yourself and prevent yourself
from becoming more.

You were a wall and to meet you it was necessary to pierce this wall. I
met it many times and it exhausted me. Meanwhile I applied myself to
destroying the wall ― my good friend is gone. And my work occupied me so
much that I did not recognize it. I worked to ease an aching heart ― and you
have gone. I was left bodily exposed. And windows, I didn’t have any. I
busied myself in the shadows to be in the world of another ― and in my
house, I didn’t build it and I didn’t keep it. I gave everything away so I didn’t
have any place to receive you.

Nor time to welcome you.

I thought that I was everything to you. But this everything, did someone
not open it – inside out? And I didn’t know where to stay when you moved
away. Where to remember. Even if I only ever thought to you.

52
 Species of Space Thought

By Jean-Luc Nancy

Translated by Tim Adams

That we are now living in an epoch of space has been known for the last
forty years – Foucault was one of the first to declare this in the sixties. 1 This
phenomenon is usually contrasted with the historical era that preceded it and
gradually faded out in the second half of the twentieth century. There is no
doubt that this century has been marked by a suspicion towards, and a
distancing from, the obviously explosive history that was the preceding
century. But it is not so certain that it is enough to simply diagnose the
succession and the substitution of a spatial model for a temporal one. There
are more complex and deeper reasons behind the schema of space or spacing
that we cannot in fact separate from our current horizon.

The history that unfolds itself in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the
Industrial Revolution is also a history of the conquest of space: the spread of
colonisation, American independence and
progress, the redefining of the territorial
boundaries of Europe – accompanied by
emigrations associated with the fist two
phenomena, and at the same time the accelerated
technological mastery of nautical and terrestrial
distances (due to the combination of steam, the
propeller and the connecting rod), undersea and
aerial communications that would soon become
electronic, and the urban and trans-urban spaces
Figure 11. Jean-Luc Nancy
of transportation. All of our roads, railways,
networks and cities took on their contemporary appearance during this era.

1. The source for this translation is Jean-Luc Nancy, “L’espèce d’espace pensée”, the preface to Benoît
Goetz, La disl -
Luc Nancy , 2001), pp. 11-13. See excerpts from Goetz’s book in
Section 2 below. I thank Dr Ross Jenner for bringing the existence of this fascinating preface to my
attention.

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 NANCY

The surface of the planet lost its terrae incognitae: maps lost their white
spaces; Timbuktu, Lassa, the centres and the deserts were all penetrated. All
expeditions to the outer reaches successfully reached their destinations, even
extending to a conquest of interplanetary and interstellar space that no longer
moves to the same rhythm or involves the same stakes: no longer revealing
the secrets of the earth but instead coordinating extensive lines of
transmission, surveillance and the mutual threat between the economic and
political powers.

Therefore in a way this period of history brought about the saturation of

global space to such an extent that some have considered announcing the “end
of history” as the consequence of this complete occupation of space; as if the
historical momentum that strives to the increase the extent of the so-called
“known world”, and that had survived for so long, had now come to an end.
Once space – our space where we effectively live, that spreads out before us
as we walk, look around and reach out – had become completely known, there
was a subsidence in the awareness of conquest, expansion and discovery that
had in the end become confused with the self-awareness of the West. Perhaps
it is not by chance then that the two most terrible tremors of the century, that
of Fascism and Communism, each corresponded to a kind of will to spatial
power. On the one hand the principle of a “vital space” that was meant to be
deployed by a “thousand year reign” of a master race, and on the other hand
the mastery and exploitation of an extended immensity by an industrial
conquest which was no longer restricted to industrial ends. In ways that are of
course quite different, these two imperial spaces went up in smoke or sank
into the mud. Both their spaces imploded.

Figure 12. (left) Nuremberg rally: Hitler Honours Fallen Putschists, Germany, 1934.
Figure 13. (right) Ghelfreikh Iofan: Palace of Soviets, USSR, 1933.

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 NANCY

But in a way it is the entire space of nature and humanity that has
imploded. Completely conquered in all of its dimensions (the four dimensions
of Euclidean space-time, the n-dimensions of non-Euclidean space, and the
infinitely big and infinitely small dimensions of mass, force and velocity),
spaces have stopped being an extensible volume through which one can
traverse, or more precisely, through which the explorer formerly championed
expansion.

Extension stopped being expansive. It became intensive – vectored,

condensed and compressed forces, powers of particles or minute fibres,
billions of bits of information or packets of energy that are almost nothing in
terms of space-time – but with this also comes disorientation: tightening on
itself, space lost its tendency for magnitude and for work. It no longer shows
itself as a place of deployment and crossing, of passage, of process and
journey. In a way it is no longer precisely dimensional: the earth is now only a
point, and a point has no dimensions.

The anguished consciousness of this contraction also generates a thought

about space – that is to say that this thought is both the anguish itself and the
struggle against it, the departure of another history, which is to say, another
spacing. This is where it seems to me that our experience and our
interrogation of space begins today, and Benoît Goetz is the privileged witness
and analyst of this. His guiding or fundamental thought could be sketched out
something like this: that which questions space, that which calls to it and
desires it, is nothing other than what is itself without space. It is thought itself.
Understood as a mental operation or as presence to self, the res cogitans has
nothing to do with the res extensa. On the other hand, understood as relation
to the world, as experience, as inquietude, as taste or as emotion of sense,
thought does not exist according to any other dimension than the one which
emerges from itself, from a placing outside: going through, amplitude,
traversed, advanced. After all, the path and the way are among the most
tenacious images of the act of thinking.

Images? It is precisely a matter of understanding that in these topoi, these

places where thought thinks about matters concerning itself and its own
performance (truth, meaning, destination, knowledge, experience, style)
constitute its own extension: its working or its movement, its pace, its
progression or its rest, its way of living or deserting (being itself is lived or
deserted, occupied or displaced etc.). It is not a “metaphor” that leaves the

55
 NANCY

actual thing to one side, just as “metaphor” means “transport” it is a passage

from one place to another. Thought only thinks metaphorically, by and as
transportation, displacing between places or by deranging places: dislocation
and collocation, allocation, assignation, opening and making distinctions, the
enlargement of the point of view and the accommodation of the view, the
determination of terms, the delineation of frontiers and passages between
them. One could be tempted to say that thought is always locative: always in a
place, always in place and taking place, but never as propriety since its
property is in transit and in the change of view. (And if one wants to make a
joke of this by introducing a metaphor of nonsense then they will not be
mistaken: there is no thought that doesn’t touch upon nonsense and is not
measured against it.)

That which thinks is thus a thought that speaks of splace (esplace), the
necessary reopening of space and places after the time of their conquest and
their implosion.2 This is not a nostalgic dream for more liveable and
sheltering places; it is a way of trying to grasp where we are at in our
disorientation and dislocation, a way of trying to grasp ourselves as fully
displaced, in full flight or full errancy. Not to stop ourselves and set up new
roots, permanent residencies in native soils; but to give rise to new partitions –
divisions, dimensions, bearings – by way of exposing ourselves to ourselves.

2. Translator’s note: The French word esplace used here, and also by Goetz in La Dislocation, is a
neologism made by combining espace (space) with place (place). I have followed Alain Badiou’s
translators by using “splace”. See for example “Selections from Théorie du sujet on the Cultural
Revolution”, trans. Alberto Toscano et al. Positions vol. 13, no. 3 (2005), pp. 635 – 648.

56
 SECTION 2
TWO FRENCH PHILOSOPHERS WHO
SPECIALISE IN ARCHITECTURE

Figure 14. Scene from Oren Safdie’s play Private Jokes Public Places, directed by Alisa
Palmer, the Tarragon Theatre, Toronto. September 2004.

Introduction to Payot and Goetz

As we saw in the introduction, the 1980s and 90s was a period when it seemed
that French theorists were dominating the world of architectural theory. With the help
of Mark Wigley in New York among others, Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction was a
major topic for discussion with many books and journals dedicated entirely to
discussing architecture and deconstruction. 1 Besides Derrida there was also Paul

1. For examples of books on the subject see: Andreas Papadakis (ed.), Deconstruction Omnibus
(London: Wiley-Academy, 1989), Geoffrey Broadbent (ed.), Deconstruction: A Student Guide
(London: John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 1991) and Peter Brunette and David Wills (ed.) Deconstruction
and the Visual arts: Art, Media, Architecture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). For

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 INTRODUCTION TO PAYOT AND GOETZ

Virilio, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre and Jean Baudrillard, all of
who were steeply rising in terms of the number of references being made to them in
architectural journals during this time. 2 All of them wrote occasional short pieces
loosely around the subject of architecture, and sometimes these could even have
lasting effects or introduce a concept into the language of architectural criticism like
Baudrillard’s ten-page article “The Beaubourg-Effect: Implosion and Deterrence” in
the journal October about the Pompidou Centre in Paris, or Foucault’s five-page “Of
Other Spaces” in the journal Diacritics that introduced the term heterotopia into
architectural language. 3 But none of the above mentioned intellectuals dedicated
themselves to the sustained effort of writing a book-length study entirely devoted to
the subject of architecture as did the two philosophers included in this section: Daniel
Payot, who wrote the 236-page-long Le Philosophe et l’architecte: sur quelques
déterminations philosophiques de l’idée d’architecture (The Philosopher and the
Architect: On Some Philosophical Determinations of the Idea of Architecture) and
Benoît Goetz who wrote the 191-page La Dislocation: architecture et philosophie
(The Dislocation: Architecture and Philosophy). 4 Two reasons perhaps why these
larger works were not translated and therefore never made it into libraries and
bookstores on the other Atlantic shore, reasons already put forward in the
introduction, was that due to the perceived financial risks very little of any French
writing gets translated into English and so the handful of intellectual stars like
Derrida, Baudrillard and Virilio had already filled this small quota, and secondly
French theory entered America (the main source for English translations) through the
literature departments of universities who needed transversal and generalist “tout
Paris” intellectuals to help them with their interdisciplinary projects and to make the

whole journals dedicated to deconstruction see; “Deconstruction in Architecture”, Architectural

Design, v.58, no.3-4, (1988), “Reconstructions, Deconstruction”, Architectural Design, v.59, no.9-
10, (1989), “Deconstruction II”, Architectural Design, v.59, no.1-2. (1989) and “Deconstruction
III”, Architectural Design, v.60, no.9-10, (1990).
2. See “Figure 1. Chart of the number of articles written on French theorist in architectural Journals” on
p. 10 above.
3. Jean Baudrillard, “The Beaubourg-Effect: Implosion and Deterrence”, October, vol. 20 (Spring,
1982), pp. 3-13, and Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces”, Diacritics, vol. 16 (Spring 1986), pp. 22-
27.
4. Daniel Payot, Le Philosophe et l’architecte: Sur quelques déterminations philosophiques de l’idée
d’architecture (Paris: Editions Aubier Montaigne, 1982) and Benoît Goetz, La Dislocation:
Architecture et Philosophie (Paris: Les Editions de la Passion, 2001).

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 INTRODUCTION TO PAYOT AND GOETZ

liberal arts fashionable once again, but were naturally less interested in works on
subjects not entirely literary.

To start with Daniel Payot, he was born in 1952 and is a professor of the
philosophy of art and the chancellor of the Marc Bloch University, Strasbourg II
(where Jean-Luc Nancy is also a professor of philosophy) where he teaches
contemporary philosophy and the philosophy of art. Le Philosophe et l’architecte
(The Philosopher and the Architect) was his 1980 PhD thesis which became his first
book when it was published two years later. This work is both a detailed and wide-
ranging examination of the use made of architecture in the writings of the major
philosophers from Plato in the 5th century BC up until Heidegger in the 20th century,
and we will discuss this work in more detail below. This book was followed in 1992
by Des villes-refuges: témoignage et espacement (Refuge Cities: Witnessing and
Spacing) which is a history of asylum cities that provide sanctuary for persecuted
minorities and heretics on the run from the church, protecting the innocent from
murderous purges. 5 Derrida calls this book, along with a text by Levinas, one of the
“beautiful texts in French [that] have been devoted to this Hebraic tradition of the city
of refuge.” 6 This work was followed in 1997 by Effigies: la notion d’art et les fins de
la resemblance (Effigies: The Notion of Art and the Ends of Resemblance) which is
an ethical analysis of aesthetics showing how the historical emergence of the concept
of art was legitimised within a context of the assumed adequacy of resemblance,
making it possible to represent the community of the art’s producers and consumers
in effigy. The de-legitimising of resemblance that took place in modernism was also
the dissolution of the universe of the religious effigy. Picking up on Jean-Luc
Nancy’s concept of inoperative community, Payot concludes that the failure of art to
adequately represent the community shows that the community can no longer be
conceived of as a work or a symbol but can now only be a risky and tenuous
happening, a finite singularity. 7 Therefore the problem facing today’s art is: can it
save, without the principles of resemblance upon which art was originally based,

5. Daniel Payot, Des villes-refuges: témoignage et espacement (La Tour d’Aiges: Éditions de l’Aube,
1992).
6. Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes
(London: Routledge, 2001), p. 18.
7. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Conner, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland
and Simona Sawhney, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).

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 INTRODUCTION TO PAYOT AND GOETZ

some kind of link between finite existence and the image, and if the community can
only be gathered together by an art that is addressed to it, what kind of community
emerges from an art that prohibits representation? Like all of Payot’s works, Effigies
combines a close reading of all the most relevant texts, it covers a vast range of
history, and it produces profound and startling conclusions. Payot has since written a
series of insightful philosophical speculations on art, many dealing with the writings
of the German critic Walter Benjamin and the German Philosophers Theodor Adorno
and Martin Heidegger. 8 Payot continues periodically to turn his attention back to his
original project of revealing the architectural implications of philosophy, such as in
1999 when he wrote the article Le jugement de l’architecture (The Judgement of
Architecture) for the journal Le Portique, and since this is such an interesting essay it
is also included in translation below. 9

The conclusion to Payot’s The Architect and the Philosopher included below
cannot do justice to the entire book but it does give a hint of the range and depth that
this book demonstrates on every page, which incidentally has had quite a strong
following in France given the number of times it is quoted by other French
architectural theorists. 10 Having discussed in detail many philosophers, writers and
theorists (including Valéry, Hegel, Vernant, Vitruvius, Rykwert, Laugier, Plato,
Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Heidegger and Nietzsche) Payot is well
qualified to make his conclusions. Philosophers throughout the long history of
Western philosophy, he says, have desired to be like architects and often used
architecture as a metaphor for thinking because architecture represents both the
agreement or sympathy with the first instance (without which everything would seem
derivative and secondary) and the presence to self of self-sufficiency (without which
all signifying, all speech would appear alienated from its source). Here we need to be
aware that the word architecture comes from the combination of archē and technê,

8. See for example La statue de Heidegger: art, vérité, souveraineté (Berfort: Circé, 1998) and Après
l’harmonie: Adorno et quelques autres (Berfort: Circé, 2000).
9. Daniel Payot, “Le jugement de l’architecture”, Le Portique: Revue de philosophie et de sciences
humaines, no. 3 (1999).
10. For a small sample of the many references made to Payot’s The Architect and the Philosopher see
Philippe Boudon, Sur l’espace architectural (Paris: Éditions Parenthèses, 2003), p. 77, Christian
Girard, Architecture et concepts nomades (Brussels: Pierre Mardaga, 1986), p. 77 and Benoît Goetz,
La Dislocation: Architecture et Philosophie (Paris: Les Editions de la Passion, 2001), pp. 26, 87 and
172.

60
 INTRODUCTION TO PAYOT AND GOETZ

usually taken to mean “master builder” but that interpretation entirely misses the fact
that these two words are possibly the two most over-determined words in all of
classical Greek. Archē means: origin, first principle of the universe (which for Thales
of Miletus is water, for Anaximander is the apeiron or “indefinite substance”, for
Anaximenes air etc.), sovereignty, empire, command, the magistrates, and the office
of the magistrates. Technê means craft, art, skill, technique, and is sometimes
interchangeable with epistêmê (when epistêmê is taken to mean “knowing how to do
something”) and sometimes opposed to epistêmê (when epistêmê is taken to mean
“pure knowledge”), in which case technê in relation to epistêmê can mean either the
inseperability of theory and practice or its placing in opposition, something of a
perennial dilemma for the theory and practice of architecture. 11 So rather than simply
meaning “master builder” architecture (combining archē and technê) conveys a
semantically rich nexus of meanings centred on the idea of origin and first principles.

It is because architecture represents the production of something self-sufficient

and self-explanatory, that is without any of the problems associated with more clearly
representational arts such as writing and philosophising, that it can be taken to be the
origin, truth, logos (full speech), and presence, Payot’s four terms of the philosophical
idea of architecture. And for the West all these things are synonymous with ancient
Greece, where everything Western had its birth, including science, mathematics,
philosophy, and architecture. Payot complicates this story with a double origin, the
second origin being Egypt. Egypt is represented as an enigma in the form of the
sphinx that makes a riddle for Oedipus to solve: “What goes on four legs in the
morning, on two legs at noon, and on three legs in the evening?” Oedipus solved the
riddle with the answer: “A man, who crawls on all fours as a baby, walks on two legs
as an adult, and walks with a cane in old age” thereby killing the sphinx.

11. For the meanings of the Greek terms archē and technê see Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott,
A Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958).

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 INTRODUCTION TO PAYOT AND GOETZ

Figure 15. (left) The Sphinx of the Naxians, c. 560 BC, The Delphi Museum, Greece.
Figure 16. (right) Francis Bacon: Oedipus and the Sphinx after Ingres.

The problem for Western architecture, Payot concludes, is therefore: how to exit
Egypt because Oedipus did not really solve the riddle or kill the sphinx. The riddle
was merely transformed into the apparent certainty of architecture but this certainty is
tested to the limit every time a philosopher identifies with the architect. One of the
most interesting things about Payot’s book is its ability to locate the most remarkable
cases of such identification, a good example of this being his reading of Descartes. As
everybody knows, Descartes famously says in the Discourse on Method that just as
buildings undertaken by a single architect are more harmoniously proportioned than if
designed by a committee, so a solitary thinker using their reason alone can make a
better philosophy than one in continuous dialogue with others. His method he says is
to rebuild the shaky house of philosophy on the firmer foundations of the cogito (the
certainty that am I thinking). 12 Every French schoolgirl and schoolboy knows that
much. But in his letters Descartes goes much further. He replies to one of his sternest
critics, the Jesuit, Pierre Bourdin:

12. René Descartes, Discourse on Method and the Meditations, trans. F. E. Sutcliffe (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1987), pp. 35 and 53.

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 INTRODUCTION TO PAYOT AND GOETZ

Throughout my writings I have made it clear that my method imitates that of an

architect … I took this as the bedrock on which I could lay the foundations of my
philosophy. My critic [Pierre Bourdin], by contrast, is like a jobbing bricklayer, who,
because he wants to be regarded as a professional expert in his town, has a grudge
against an architect who happens to be building a chapel there, and looks for every
opportunity to criticize his work. But being so ignorant that he cannot grasp the point
of anything the architect does, he only dares to attack the first and most obvious stages
of the work. Thus he notices that the architect started by digging a trench, and
removing not just the sand and loose soil but bits of wood and anything else that is
mixed up with the sand, so he could get down to a firm base on which to lay the
foundations of the chapel. 13

Descartes continues with this metaphor for several pages, all the while belittling
his critic as a mere tradesman compared to the great architect that he is. Readers of
Jacques Rancière’s The Nights of Labour will cringe at this put down of the jobbing
bricklayer because they will know the story of the nineteenth-century joiner/floor-
layer Louis-Grabriel Gauny who wrote like a philosopher on his nights off when not
burdened by the stereotypes placed on him by society. 14 Descartes’ strategy behind
his life-long identification with the architect is here exposed in all its naked power. If
the thinker is also the architect of their production then their product must have some
of the same self-sufficient qualities of the architect’s product, and speech will take on
the solidity of stone. If others cannot see the origin, truth, logos and presence of your
product it is because they are mere tradesmen to your architect and are therefore not
looking at it in the proper light. The argument appears to be a good one, we all feel
the realism of Descartes little scene where the lesser talented person will out of
jealousy try to pull down the work of their more talented neighbours. But this self-
evident certainty granted to the production of the architect overburdens their task with
a weight it cannot carry. Every building they make must thereafter double as a
guarantor of philosophical certainty. If a building is to be the embodiment of human

13. Quoted by Daniel Payot, Le Philosophe et l’architecte: Sur quelques déterminations philosophiques
de l’idée d’architecture (Paris: Editions Aubier Montaigne, 1982) pp. 111 – 112. The English
translation used here is from René Descartes, “Reply to Objections 7”, The Philosophical Writings
of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), p.366.
14. Jacques Rancière, The Nights of Labour: The Worker’s Dream in Nineteenth-Century France,
trans. John Drury (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989).

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 INTRODUCTION TO PAYOT AND GOETZ

intellectual endeavour it must be allowed to partake in all the vagueness and

uncertainty of life itself and not be forced into the limited role granted to it by
philosophy.

The Architect and the Philosopher being from 1982 is the earliest work included
in this survey and such is the quality of Payot’s thinking on architecture it warrants us
taking a look at his more recent work, so the second work included in the translations
of Section 2 is also by Daniel Payot, this time a complete article from 1999 entitled
Le jugement de l’architecture (The Judgement of Architecture). This reflects Payot’s
more recent interest in Walter Benjamin. Here again we find startlingly new
conclusions drawn logically from well-known texts, this time Kant’s Critique of
Judgement and Benjamin’s famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction.” The argument in a nutshell is this, aesthetic judgement is indeed
subjective but this does not mean that it is worthless because the subject, the “I”,
when it judges aesthetically never judges for itself but always stands in for the group,
for every other I in a similar situation. We never experience delight for ourselves
since it is always tested against the delight of hypothetical others who form the
horizon for our judgement. So for example, if I say the film I saw last night was good
or else it was bad, it is a purely subjective judgement but when I say it I am standing
in for others who share my kind of taste for films, and I say it so that this hypothetical
group will know whether or not to waste their time and money going to see the film
for themselves. Now, argues Payot, this causes severe problems for the judgement of
architecture, because if we concede that this art is by nature communal then the group
is already there so it cannot be our horizon, we cannot stand in for someone who is
already there. Therefore there can be no judgement of architecture.

This impossibility of architectural judgement is not something that studio tutors

would want students to know about, although strictly speaking architecture in the
sense of being inhabited by the community only happens once the building has been
realised so it might still be possible to judge a singular work of architectural
conception. Anyway this does not invalidate architectural criticism, says Payot, rather
it means that it must always confront the unavoidable fact of the community, it must
always presuppose the community in every work of architecture. And this is when
Walter Benjamin’s famous description of architecture as something perceived by the

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 INTRODUCTION TO PAYOT AND GOETZ

masses in a state of absent-minded habitual and tactile distraction can seem so

pertinent. According to Benjamin it is by unconsciously changing our habits that we
adjust to modernisation and technological change, not by contemplating these
changes from a safe distance. This is where architecture can have a revolutionary
impact on the community by forcing its collective habits to change in ways that allow
it to make better use of new technologies. To return to our cinema example, take the
arrival of the multiplex cinema. This is a new building typology that forces cinema
goers to change the way they move through a theatre, they must now be able to
navigate through multiple small theatres and deal with multiple overlapping session
times. But once they have unconsciously habitualised themselves to the new
architecture and the new temporal order, they can then make better use of the
increased range of films now made available due to advances in film production and
distribution.

The second French philosopher who specialises in architecture in this section is

Benoît Goetz. Goetz is a senior lecturer in philosophy at the Paul Verlaine University
of Metz. Together with Jean-Paul Resweber he established the journal Le Portique,
Philosophie et Sciences Humaines (The Portico, Philosophy and Human Sciences,
portico here referring to the stoa in Athens where the Stoic philosophers would meet).
Le Portique was the source of the Payot’s article The Judgement of Architecture
discussed above. Goetz makes regular contributions to this journal on subjects
ranging from Gilles Deleuze, the animal, drugs, Benjamin, Nietzsche, Freud, to the
sublime. La Dislocation: Architecture et Philosophie (The Dislocation: Architecture
and Philosophy) is Goetz’s first book and was published in 2001 with a second
edition published in 2002. 15 Jean-Luc Nancy wrote a short piece on architecture
called L’espèce d’espace pensée (Species of Space Thought) as the preface to this
work and a discussion and translation of this was included in Section 1 above. The
dislocation of the title refers to the Fall from Paradise that Goetz sees as the universal
condition of architecture, not as a biblical or historical event in some far off time but
a continuous condition of space and architecture.

15. Benoît Goetz, La Dislocation: Architecture et Philosophie (Paris: Les Editions de la Passion, 2001).

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 INTRODUCTION TO PAYOT AND GOETZ

Joseph Rykwert has already brought to our attention the perennial theme of the
primitive hut running throughout the history of architecture from Vitruvius right up
until Gropius and Le Corbusier in his well-known book On Adam’s House in
Paradise. 16 And Stanley Tigerman has generalised the Fall as a permanent state of
exile in The Architecture of Exile, and shown how this exile is represented in Jewish
temple architecture and is the general condition of life for postmodern Americans. 17
But Goetz turns the theme of dislocation into something more fundamental than the
nostalgia for a lost origin or the lack of belonging in Jewish and American
postmodern architecture. First of all Goetz states that there was no Adam’s house in
the Garden of Eden (as Rykwert himself admits, the Bible never mentions it) because
prior to the expulsion from paradise there could not have been any division of places
nor any inside or outside. Paradise lacks nothing so every space in it, Goetz says, is
equivalent to all other spaces, paradise is in other words an indivisible field of
immanence without otherness and without limit. The Expulsion, the first dislocation,
creates the first division of inside and outside. Adam and Eve must leave Eden so
now the world is fragmented for the first time between Eden and not-Eden and this
first division is constitutive of architecture so only after the Fall can Adam build the
first house. The Expulsion from Paradise is also the fracturing or singularisation of
spaces, space is “architectured”, and this architecturality of space is the precondition
for architecture. So rather than a one-off event, dislocation is something that never
stops taking place.

As a side note on paradise, the Australian architect and theorist Richard Blythe
visited Auckland University on September 9, 2006, and gave a lecture about his work
with the Terroir architectural group. He began by showing a slide of a photograph by
Peter Dombrovskis of Tasmanian wilderness called “Morning Mist, Rock Island
Bend” (see below). Blythe confounded the audience by describing this stunningly
beautiful image of what seems like virgin forest and river untouched by humans as
being as artificial and constructed as any garden, and asked the question: why do we
romanticise it and see it as a wilderness? In his article “On Wilderness” he gives his

16. Joseph Rykwert, On Adam’s House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural
History (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1972).
17. Stanley Tigerman, The Architecture of Exile (New York: Rizzoli, 1988).

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 INTRODUCTION TO PAYOT AND GOETZ

reasons for taking this surprising stand. 18 During the 1970s images like this one
gained world-wide attention when efforts were made to stop the construction of dams
for hydroelectric power stations in the southwest wilderness areas of Tasmania. The
image is constructed Blythe argues because it gives the false impression that this area
was uninhabitable when in fact it had been home to forestry workers and fishermen
for 200 years, who were then systematically weeded out in order to make the area
conform to these images so as not to disappoint tourists brought to the area by these
images. So, his argument goes, this weeding of human habitation makes this
wilderness just as artificial as any garden that also requires regular weeding. But with
the knowledge of Goetz’s concept of dislocation we know that this wilderness is
architectural. It is quite clearly full of dark interiors and highly fragmented. It would
only take someone like Frank Lloyd Wright to see through the romantic paradise that
enshrouds it, and extend its pre-existing architectural qualities with a construction.
Perhaps Richard Blythe and the Terroir group could do this, and if they did, Goetz’s
theories could be very useful to them.

Figure 17. Peter Dombrovskis: Morning Mist, Rock Island Bend, Tasmania.

18. Richard Blythe, “On Wilderness”, Archis, no. 6 (2002), pp. 51 – 53. This is also the source for the
image included here.

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 INTRODUCTION TO PAYOT AND GOETZ

This is how Goetz thinks from architecture rather than reflecting on it. For
Goetz architecture is not an object to be encountered in some pre-established
philosophical field, it is the field of thought itself. So instead of confining architecture
to aesthetics and academic problems of form and style, Goetz’s strategic shift in
thinking makes architecture become what he calls an “ethical substance”, a physics of
space touching the very heart of existence because existences cannot be disposed and
dislocated without there first being an architecturalisation of space that makes the
world a place of heterogeneous spaces with multiple insides and outsides. So by
thinking from architecture Goetz arrives at: an architectural physics of space (the
theme of the 2nd chapter of his book), an architectural ethics (chapter 3), a political
theory of places (chapter 4), and a noetics, the spatial condition of thought (chapter
5). Throughout there are periodic sub-chapters on Le Corbusier and Heidegger, the
“monstrous couple” as Goetz calls them. Because thought cannot be both nowhere
and everywhere at once as if still in paradise, thought must be placed somewhere, it
therefore depends on certain preconditions of space, so every great thinker also
invents a singular way of dwelling, they “make the world” in different ways and this
is above all, claims Goetz, what makes their thought essentially different. Heidegger
makes the world differently from how Levinas makes the world for example.

In a recent 2006 conference presentation entitled Le Corbusier et “la synthèse

des arts” (Le Corbusier and “The Synthesis of the Arts”) Goetz returns to his
discussion of Le Corbusier. Here he defends the unfashionable and denigrated idea of
totality. We may recall from our discussion in the introduction that in the aftermath of
May ’68 the New Philosophers like Bernard-Henri Lévy and André Glucksmann
tainted the philosophical concept of totality with the totalitarian politics of Stalin.
Goetz now claims that despite the suspicion that is now attached to the term (and
surprisingly he includes his own concepts here by adding, “contrary to the success of
themes like fragmentation, dispersion and dislocation”) there is no architecture that
does not create a totality by trying to synthesise heterogeneous materials, forms,
colours, dimensions, textures, interior design, structure, finance, urban design and so
on. 19 That the ideas of synthesis and totality have been out of favour for so long has

19. From a Quicktime video of Benoit Goetz, Le Corbusier et “la synthèse des arts”, a seminar
presented during a conference at the École normale supérieure, February 7, 2006, available at
http://www.diffusion.ens.fr/index.php?res=conf&idconf=143, viewed 13 February, 2007.

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naturally not been very helpful to a profession that is so dependant upon them. Here it
would be useful to revisit Deleuze’s concept of the “open totality”. 20 Because if we
take the whole itself to be constantly changing and without limit then opening up to
the whole is not finding a larger finite closure as is normally assumed with the
traditional microcosm-macrocosm analogy. Opening to the whole is opening to a
larger opening of the “open whole.” So if we say that architecture is inherently the
task of making a totality out of the synthesis of the arts, sciences and building trades,
then this need not imply that it reduces those elements to fit the whole in any way
because it is a “disjunctive” Deleuzian synthesis not a Hegelian synthesis, an open
totality not a finite totality. Goetz the philosopher continues to make architecture the
theme of his profound and eloquent thinking. He is quite possibly the most important
architectural theorist in France today and when his important work is finally
translated in full, it will no doubt get the kind of international following it deserves.

20. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam
(London: Continuum, 2005), pp. 9 - 11 and 205 – 206. For a further discussion of this term also see,
Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1995), pp. 62 – 64.

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 The Philosopher and the Architect
(Excerpts)

By Daniel Payot

Translated by Tim Adams

Conclusion: Oedipus and “Archaism”

On several occasions we have compared the progression of this work to a

journey. 1 One may, perhaps more precisely, think of it as a wandering voyage
of discovery: territories were visited and explored, and then revisited several
times along the way. No doubt it is still necessary to mark out, by lightly
tracing over them, the places that were discovered by such an itinerary.

Eupalinos, or The Architect set us on our way. 2 This fiction about

Socrates in the afterlife desiring to be both the philosopher and the artist-
builder he had given up in life, opened up a perspective
on the entire philosophical tradition that perhaps merits
closer examination: if so many great philosophers have
played the role of Socrates in Valéry’s dialogue, what
does this tell us about what it is in architecture, which
it seems to do so well, that makes it the source of a
frequent and important fascination or desire for
Western thought? For the majority of philosophical
texts that refer to the art of building it was their
consistent use of architectural metaphors that gave us
Figure 18. Daniel Payot
our first lead. Then we asked what do these parallels,
these desires, or these images signify, and where can we situate the identity or
the resemblance that they authorize?

1. The Source for this translation is Daniel Payot, Le Philosophe et l’architecte: Sur quelques
déterminations philosophiques de l’idée d’architecture (Paris: Editions Aubier Montaigne, 1982),
pp. 205 – 209.
2. Translator’s note: Paul Valéry, “Eupalinos, or The Architect”, Dialogues (The Collected Works of
Paul Valéry, vol. 4) trans. William McCausland Stewart (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1958), pp. 64-150.

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While responding to these questions a recurring theme kept returning

throughout our investigation: the philosophical idea of architecture is one of
production and, so long as we take note of its diversity, it corresponds to or
centres around what can largely be specified by four terms: the origin (or
archē), the truth, logos (or full speech) and presence. Architecture then comes
to designate that which is erected or imposed immediately, as that which
begins or inaugurates, and thereafter even signifies or reveals more purely, by
being placed more closely to it, the transmission or sending of words and
meaning: as the art of presence and origin rather than representation or effect.
In this way architecture came to constitute one of the “models” of
philosophical presentation, organizing true speech and ordering discourse.
Archi-tecture is the unity of the two dimensions that philosophers desire to be
governed by: the agreement or sympathy with the first instance, without which
their approach would remain insignificant, and the presence to self or self-
establishment, without which their signifying would always appear derived or
alienated from the self.

We discovered that this general determination attributes the idea of

architecture to “Greece” – thought by the West in modern times to be the
country of beginnings, essences, self belonging and transparent language; as
the place of origin for speculation and organicity, of the homoiosis
[adequation] and the archē [beginning, origin, power, sovereignty]. The unity
of the archē and the “tecture”, the very thing that architecture enunciates, thus
seems to relate back to the beginnings of conceptual thought, rediscovers or
perpetuates it and orders its possible renewals. It is here that we find – to use
one of the myths or figures that in the Hegelian text is the opening of Spirit
and truth to their Western realization – the “Apollonian” dimension that most
philosophical and theoretical texts since Vitruvius have granted to
architecture; or further still, these texts grant all contemporary will to build the
heroic gesture of Oedipus. Architecture belongs to what the West itself
inaugurates, it puts the sphinx to death and finally solves the riddles posed by
the divinities during its period of infancy. The idea of architecture serves as an
aid to thinking the foundation of a tradition, the opening up of a world,
knowing how to finally prove its coherence and its unity, its order, being
capable of self-discovery and self-possession with the clarity of language and
with an adequate thought, a mastery of their own image and their own effects
by means of speculation.

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This could have been the end of our journey: once the philosophical
references to architecture, in which the will builds itself as architecture by
means of philosophy, were shown to belong to this conception of order as
speculative and self-establishing organization, as a disposition governed by
identity. In which case we would have approached the idea of architecture
from the simple understanding of metaphysics, where the visionary indication
or revelation of a discourse for which foundation, self-assurance and reason
are its essential dimensions and ends.

In fact we were strongly drawn towards this conclusion. But there

seemed in fact to be something quite different at work, which thereafter
proves to be equally important: the fact that philosophical discourse in search
of its own foundations and its own assurances lands several times on an
entirely different shore – one that, thinking of Hegel again, was sometimes
called “Egypt”.

We have indeed several times rediscovered, principally in the modern

history the idea of architecture, echoes of what the Aesthetics: Lectures on
Fine Art defines as “symbolism properly speaking”, the impossibility of
ordering discourse to sufficiently assure itself of its own principle of
construction. What becomes clearly evident, due the difficulties faced by the
construction of a world of identifiable essences and the finally unravelling
network of pathways to the origin, “tecture” becomes a failing of the
knowable archē as the source of truth, so that what was intended to be an
inaugural instance can henceforth only be presented as the impregnable object
of an always disappointed desire. It now seems to be an effect of an artistic
illusion, the labyrinth or the crypt, the inorganicity of architecture, the
infantilism of building, that Hegel linked to the pre-speculative, to the still
incomplete presence to self, the still disrupted or uncertain habitation of the
world, the unsettling of thought essentially obsessed by death that it cannot
master, suddenly resisting any metaphysical recovery. The edifice suddenly
came to show that the power to build reiterated above all the ineffectiveness
of the builder to sustain their own provenance and their own world.

In the end, in place of an affirmed archē the Oedipian power of building

rediscovers its own “archaism”: in other words the beginning, of course, but
also the uninhabitable “place” where instead of reassembling the word it is
instead lost or dispersed, where the origin at the beginning is already clouded
over and where truth remains estranged from itself – and from us; not in some

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very distant past that could then be revived or regretted – but which the
present continuously rediscovers, that it strives to order but cannot possess.

And it seemed remarkable that the philosophical idea of architecture

places us in front of this sort of “double beginning” that thought undergoes
when faced with the question of its own construction: as if architecture
equally testifies to our Hellenism or “Oedipism” – both constructed on this
extreme edge, which nevertheless seems to mark the limits of their power of
identification and homologation, resistant to the overall aim of self-
establishment, returning to haunt or to worry its exercise with the enigmas that
Oedipus no doubt left unsolved. The idea of architecture perhaps brings us
back to this gap and this distance between “Egypt” and “Greece” – between
the pyramid and the temple, between the labyrinth and the theatre – which
constitutes and orders Western space.

Figure 19. (left) The Great Pyramid at Giza

Figure 20. (right) Greek Temple.

These formulations are neither geographical nor historical properly

speaking. Our objective was not to form propositions concerning the history
or sources of Western civilisation. Rather we found in the chosen texts many
instances where questions were dressed in the names of symbolic countries
and edifices. We grouped these questions into two sets of interrogations – the
first, constituting the constant and fundamental framework of our work, was
around the issue of truth, its necessity and sometimes its absence or unreality;

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the second was around the word, its reception and hypothesized modalities,
often made risky by several of the texts due to a hushing or dispersion of the
voice.

To speak, as we have just done it, of a region always reassembled and

reworked by the “double beginning” of its own tradition evidently does not
answer these questions. But we only wanted to show that the philosophical
idea of architecture is one of the places where they are found even if it does
not constitute their resolution – but are they resolvable? And due to the
frequency of architectural metaphors and the desire of theoretical or
philosophical discourse to order themselves on the model of architecture,
throughout the Western tradition their constant problem is: how and why to
make an exodus from “Egypt”?

From the same perspective we also noticed that when philosophical

thought confronts its essential questions it sometimes assigns them a
vocabulary belonging to art. The emphasis on order, constitution and
foundation and the work of construction and consolidation, terms often used,
attempt to metaphorically turn thought into one of the arts. And this is
certainly no surprise given that the Latin world translates technē (or “tecture”)
as ars and thus brings us back to the same theme of production, that is self-
assured, competent, suited to its own end, to the order that it contributes to or
that it expresses, and to the joint, to what connects, that which creates
solidarity or socializes.

Architecture is placed in these various ways as an art, and even as a

privileged artistic figure of a complete and coherent presence – and can
therefore become the mirror for speculative liaisons. But architecture can no
longer be just one ars among others when speculation uses it to rediscover its
own image because here it also comes up against the trace or the “hieroglyph”
of a de-liaison, of a misidentification, an expenditure that no longer lends
itself to the mastery of the speculative. Must it not force us then to reconsider
the body of the artistic metaphors (and architectural ones in particular) by
which the philosophical text thinks its own exposition – and then perhaps
designate what in this exposition is always beyond its control but nevertheless
inhabits its beginnings? It is from this perspective that this work, which
simply aimed to uncover some of the philosophical determinations of the idea
of architecture, will perhaps appear to be a first step towards the clarification
of a double question: what is the relation between what we call “art” to what

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was named in chapter VIII the gap in (and of) the homoiosis (in and of the
“truth”)? 3 And how to rethink the reference to art, so frequently rediscovered
in the philosophical texts when they try to identify their own essence, once it
becomes questionable?

Let us finish then by imagining that these questions are those of a

peripatetic Socrates in search of what motivates the absent yet exemplary
artist who goes by the name of Eupalinos, wondering in the Elysian fields that
are becoming labyrinthine or like (since it also concerns the tradition of
writing and the book) the library of Babel. There is, by chance, in one of its
innumerable galleries an object that remains an enigma to him, a trace without
an owner, concealing its origin – and he chooses to see in it the sign or
promise of an Ariadne.

3 Translator’s note: Chapter VIII of The Philosopher and the Architect is entitled “The Temple and the
Echo” and deals mainly with Heidegger’s reading of architecture, in particular the use made of the
Greek temple in the essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” where Heidegger contrasts his own
concept of truth as aletheia (unveiling, disclosure or the happening of truth at work) with Aristotle’s
concept of truth as homoisis (an adequate representation of an absent original). Heidegger asks what
is the temple supposed to be a representation of, it portrays nothing, yet truth is set to work there
because the “temple-work, standing there, opens up a world and at the same time sets this world
back again on earth.” Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New
York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 42.

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 The Judgement of Architecture
By Daniel Payot

Translated by Tim Adams

One of the difficulties facing criticism is that it must always connect and
that it has to do this precisely where the dimension of liaison is no longer in
evidence. 1 This is perhaps why the problems facing criticism can reveal not
only the difficulties but also the opportunities inherent in modernity as a
whole, and not just theoretical modernity.

We know that to criticize is to examine: krinein, to judge, and to match a

predicate to a subject, a quality to a substance, etc. But criticism is also a
gestural activity; it takes hold of an object and it looks for values and
meanings, and between the two it establishes close and distant connections. A
critique of criticism should always recognize the fact that criticism is never
simply concerned with the presence of a thing or a work, nor is it ever simply
a critic who judges or a penetrating subjectivity, but is above all a gesture that
the critic makes with regard to the thing or the work, or what the thing of
work invites them to make. Therefore the problem is: where does the
possibility for the liaisons that the critic must make come from? Where can
the possibility for legitimizing the critic’s gesture be found?

And here a kind of withdrawal takes place: we need to attach the activity
of judgement to “something” that can itself attach a quality to an object; but to
what is this gesture connected, or what connects to it? The critic acts in the
name of a transcendental authorization that they can never make fully explicit,
about which they can even be totally unaware, but which is nevertheless the
basis for the gesture – rendering it possible, inaugurating it and giving it
meaning. The multiplicity of liaisons produced by the act of judgement is
preceded by a most often unspoken “it is possible to connect” or indeed by a
“you have the right to connect” (and perhaps even more fundamentally by a
usually implicit “you must connect”); these are the in-junctions that open and

1. The source for this translation is Daniel Payot, “Le jugement de l’architecture”, Le Portique: Revue
de philosophie et de sciences humaines: 3 (1999).

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render the critical junctions effective but which generally remain exterior
(except when critical discourse questions the precise reasoning behind
criticism, its foundations and its authority, in other words when it exceeds its
immediate exercise and concerns itself with its own limits).

Therefore when, for example, criticism talks about things, works of art,
or architecture, it is also speaking about itself in the sense that it responds to
the problem of its own legitimacy. Since it speaks and criticizes at the same
time it must have solved the problem of what gives it the authority to judge:
criticism in so far as it criticizes must always make its judgements as if the
validity (the predication) needed to do so was already established elsewhere.

This is perhaps why there is really no criticism that is absolutely

negative: even when something is linked to a negative attribute, even when
the predication is pejorative, criticism as such is therefore inexorably positive,
at least in regard to itself; it must have already assured itself of its own right to
judge. Therefore it seems possible to support the thesis of an essential and
constitutive positivity of all criticism.

This hypothesis seems completely at odds with what we so often hear

today: that judgement has become so difficult that we may have even lost this
faculty altogether; that art criticism, and architectural criticism in particular,
have become decadent, mute and little more than pointless gossip. Our critics
no longer teach us anything. Obviously these assessments seem to contradict
the tentative suggestion made above: if criticism was as positive as all that it
should always be able to make judgements without too much difficulty.

But perhaps there is a way of answering this dilemma that may at first
seem provocative but will nevertheless lead to a solution. It would be to reply
that the problem of criticism today – the biggest problem it faces besides the
too easy and too frequent diagnosis of “decadence” ― will find its cause in
the very positivity that constitutes criticism: it is because criticism cannot
avoid being positive that it is so poorly considered today. If the critic is indeed
more hesitant, timid, powerless and mute, it is not because they have run out
of things to say about works of art and architecture – on the contrary, in
general we know much more about them now than during those earlier
periods of history when criticism seemed to flourish and have an immediate
impact – nor is it due to the models, rules, canons, and laws, upon which
criticism was founded, being applied to particular cases which interested it.

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Rather it is because criticism itself no longer knows what meanings to give the
positivity that constitutes it, which can only be avoided by denying any role
for critic, which thereafter cannot be filled. The problem would then be the
inalienable remainder and burden of positivity, whose persistence becomes
more obvious the less confident criticism becomes of finding external criteria
able to guarantee its legitimacy in a “transcendent” normativity.

In a certain sense this difficulty is a consequence of “reflective”

judgement. Kant defined it in these terms: “Judgement in general is the faculty
of thinking the particular as contained under the universal. If the universal (the
rule, principle, or law) is given, then the judgement which subsumes the
particular under it is determinant….If, however, only the particular is given
and the universal has to be found for it, then the judgement is simply
reflective.” 2 Because it must formulate itself prior to any concept of the
beautiful being given, aesthetic judgement can only be reflective; it is not
preceded by the presentation of a principle by which it would then only need
to select particular things to order to declare them beautiful. The exercise of
reflective judgement is immediately confronted by an absence, by a primary
non-given: it has to evaluate while lacking the measure for evaluation, it is
unable to refer to a previous principle that alone would guarantee and give
assurance to judgement.

Nevertheless, this could be considered to be not the most difficult

problem since despite the irreducible distance opened up between the need to
formulate a judgement and the failure to present the principle behind its
formulation, judgement can still get by with analogies and substitutions and
the use of the “as if”, with reflection to be precise. Since, according to Kant,
judgement does not collapse when it fails to present its principle of evaluation,
it instead discovers the means for its survival; it presents things as particular
cases of a general law by means of which it becomes possible to make a
judgement legitimate and universal (although not objective). Certainly
determinant judgement always appears more certain since it refers to
previously applied rules – and is indeed “objective”, that is to say it does
know something about its object, which is not the case for aesthetic
judgement, which being “subjective” translates the state of the subjectivity
that judges and this is not a property of its object. But this apparent handicap

2. Emmanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, Introduction, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 18.

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creates the possibility that judgement evaluates itself, a possibility not offered
by the determinant judgement since its exercise of judgement is ordered
according the application of laws or norms. Reflective judgement is subjected
to the test of having to present itself to itself (hence the term “reflective”), a
test that places it in a moment of peril (the critical moment where the
evaluation evaluates itself and the examiner is summoned to the examination
of their right to examine), but according to Kant emerges from this test the
victor. In the end its legitimacy is even more strongly established since it was
not given in advance and since it had to win this for itself. But how does this
work?

In Kantian terms the answer to this question is: by means of “common

sense” as the following two extracts will define:

Were judgements of taste (like cognitive judgements) in possession of a

definite objective principle, then one who in his judgement followed such a
principle would claim unconditioned necessity for it. Again, were they devoid
of any principle, as are those of the mere taste of sense, then no thought of any
necessity on their part would enter one’s head. Therefore they must have a
subjective principle, and one which determines what pleases or displeases, by
means of feeling only and not through concepts, but yet with universal
validity.

Now, for this purpose, experience cannot be made the ground of this common
sense, for the latter is invoked to justify judgements containing an ‘ought’ (ein
Sollen). The assertion is not that every one will fall in with our judgement, but
rather that every one ought to agree with it. Here I put forward my judgement
of taste as an example of the judgement of common sense, and attribute to it
on that account exemplary validity. Hence common sense is a mere ideal
norm. With this as presupposition, a judgement that accords with it, as well as
the delight in an Object expressed in that judgement, is rightly converted into a
rule for every one. For the principle, while it is only subjective, being yet
assumed as subjective universal (a necessary idea for every one), could, in
what concerns the consensus of different judging Subjects, demand universal
assent like an objective principle, provided we were assured of our
subsumption under it being correct. 3

The expression “a subjective principle” perhaps summarizes most of the

problems usually formulated about criticism. Unless one proposes, like

3. Ibid., § 20, p. 82 and § 22, pp. 84-85. The emphasis is Kant’s.

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Baudelaire, that “to be in focus, in other words to justify itself, criticism must
be partial, passionate, political, that is to say it must adopt an exclusive point
of view” 4, it seems in fact inevitable to agree with Kant that subjectivity is, in
the act of judgement, preceded by a principle of determination. If that was not
the case the enunciated critique could not claim any “necessity”, it would only
be the expression of an immediate sensible state and therefore entirely
individualistic: criticism would then consist entirely of a discursively
enunciated set of personal feelings, emotions and affects without any
pretension to universality. Then, Kant suggests, this would not be criticism:
the statement would not be predicated and the proposition would not be,
strictly speaking, a judgement. But since the enunciating subjectivity is not
completely confined to the immediacy of its affects and confronts other
dimensions it finds the resources for a gesture of attribution and
determination. It is because the subjectivity that judges refers to such a
principle that the judgement can take the form of a duty or a requirement.
Because it is no longer simply the expression of a particular subject it can then
claim the universality of the impersonal, the neutrality or generality of a
principle.

Now the principle in this case cannot be objective: determination in

aesthetic matters cannot be made by a concept; or the principle dimension that
precedes judgement, that informs it and gives it its predicative status is not the
type of liaison that constitutes the unity of a given diversity prior to the
encounter with the object of judgement. Aesthetic judgement is not a
knowledge judgement. Furthermore the principle does not belong to an order
that would be exterior to subjectivity, it is only ever located in it. Then how
can it still be a principle? Does not its subjective constitution remove all
pretension to legislate from it? What in fact is its necessity if it cannot be the
“unconditioned necessity” of determinant judgements? And in what sense can
it be universal?

The main thrust of Kant’s argument consists of sustaining the idea of a

dimension which must be subjective (since it is a matter of relating to
something which does not have any concept, and the method of this relation is
no longer simply feeling) and which nevertheless allows for a determination

4. “The Salon of 1846”, Charles Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. P. E.
Charvet (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 50. To do it justice let us quote the end of the
sentence, a further examination of which would lead to other considerations: “…it must adopt an
exclusive point of view, provided always the one adopted opens up the widest horizons.”

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“with universal validity”, being “assumed as subjective universal” (otherwise

we cannot maintain the proposition that they are judgements properly
speaking when we do not have any concept for them). It is therefore necessary
that this universality be found in the only domain established here, in other
words in feeling, sensation and subjectivity. The “common sense” is such a
communication of feelings that, instead of leaving each person in the
particularity of their sensible experience, constitutes an “ideal norm” that each
person can claim, and in the name of which they “could, in what concerns the
consensus of different judging Subjects, demand universal assent like an
objective principle.”

Despite these explanations it is still quite difficult to put aside the

scepticism we no doubt have about the sense of uselessness we feel whenever
“taste and preferences” are discussed. The predominant subjectivism today is
largely a form of nihilism: the right to feel and to like whatever one wants is
certainly recognized but this often comes at the cost of rejecting any principle
whatsoever, which is to say any judgement as well. That is why it is important
not to stop with the Kantian affirmations about the existence of such a
principle or such an ideal norm; it is necessary to rediscover Kant’s
explanation of the mechanism of common sense:

For where any one is conscious that his delight in an object is with him
independent of interest, it is inevitable that he should look on the object as one
containing a ground of delight for all men. For, since the delight is not based on
any inclination of the Subject (or any other deliberate interest), but the Subject
feels himself completely free in respect of the liking which he accords to the
object, he can find as reason for his delight no personal conditions to which his
own subjective self might alone be party (an die sich sein Subjekt allein
hängte). Hence he must regard it as resting on what he may also presuppose in
every other person; and therefore he must believe that he has reason for
demanding a similar delight from every one. Accordingly he will speak of the
beautiful as if beauty were a quality (Beschaffenheit) of the object and the
judgement logical (forming a cognition of the Object by concepts of it);
although it is only aesthetic, and contains merely a reference of the
representation of the object to the Subject; ― because it still bears this
resemblance to the logical judgement, that it may be presupposed to be valid for
all men. 5

5. Emmanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement § 6, pp. 50-51.

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It is obvious here that common sense does not mean consensus. It is not a
matter of proposing that the whole world will in the end agree to share the
same assessment because the whole world applies a common criterion to
everything – that would make aesthetic judgement become a determinant
judgement again, and would therefore contradict everything that went before.
The argument here is a lot more subtle because it is exclusively reflexive.
There is nothing other than the delight that I feel in the presence of the object,
nothing other than a subjective pleasure. And nothing else will intervene in
what follows it: everything takes place in the domain of subjectivity. But this
is not an immobilized totality, an arrested identity; on the contrary it is a
power of reflection. The above quote describes the process of this reflection:
the delight felt by the subject is independent of his particular interest or any
individual inclination; if I feel pleasure in front of this object it is not because
it responds to a craving that I had prior to encountering it that its presence
then fulfils. The presentation of the object is not preceded by a will or a desire
that would have rendered its presentation desirable or necessary. The object
does not occur for my satisfaction, quite simply it occurs and it satisfies me by
coming from elsewhere, from a region not previously circumscribed by me,
independent of any predetermined end. The thing happens to me, it does not
happen for me. And this is why it does not only occur to me. The delight that I
feel is not the satisfaction of a craving or a will that would be mine
exclusively. I am not satisfied because the thing responded to my
expectations, in fact I did not have any expectation regarding it. It is rather
that I am then in the position of responding: I respond by feeling pleasure that
will then be translated into the form of a judgement (of the type: “this thing is
beautiful”), to the free presentation of something independent of all ends. This
presentation is primary. And since it gives me pleasure despite it being
independent of my desires and my expectations, I can suppose that it will give
others the same pleasure, and even that it will satisfy all others since this
pleasure will always be independent of the particular desires and expectations
of individuals.

We need to pay special attention here to the precision and even at times
to the apparent complication of the expressions chosen by Kant. The subject,
he writes, “must regard [his delight] as resting on what he may also
presuppose in every other person; and therefore he must believe that he has
reason for demanding a similar delight from every one” (Critique of
Judgement: p. 51). This “must” is not strictly speaking a constraint but rather
a kind of logical invitation; it is a concession, but one that sometimes, without

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taking anything away from its pleasure, introduces the subject to a distribution
of its delight. The delight is founded, which is what the text says, it is
preceded by a principle; but this foundation is not in me, although this
principle is subjective it is not in me. It is in the relation that is established,
without me willing it, between the presentation of the thing and the way that
this presentation affects me. But since I do not decide for myself the way in
which it affects me, and since it is rather the presentation itself that decides, I
can “suppose” an affection, an identical reception in any other, and therefore
“attribute” to all the others the delight that I felt from the presentation of this
thing. These two verbs – to suppose and to attribute – complete the device of
reflection: in the end something is projected, and it is only at that very
moment when I launch my pleasure beyond the strict limits of my
individuality that an operation takes place that is rigorously a judgement. I
never judge alone: I judge when the I that judges expands to the dimensions of
“every I”, when I am the one that will be able to be every I in the same
situation. The one who judges, therefore, is common, and judgement proceeds
from the community that is in me, that I shelter in some way and that I then
liberate.

I liberate the community in me since the delight that I feel from the
presentation of something is not for my interest alone. Reflection is in fact a
double movement: on the one hand delight is strongly related to something
(no pleasure without movement, without the relation of pleasure to something
other than to itself, so it must in the end make an account, form a judgement),
on the other hand this first relation is projected (by attribution or supposition)
onto other subjects. And it is not enough – otherwise it would be the
presupposed principal of complete explanation – that the delight be related to
my interest alone for the final projection to be possible, but for the community
that awakens in me. Since the pleasure is not related to me alone it can be
supposed to belong to all: as soon as there can be an effective relation of the
delight independent of an exclusively individual interest, this delight belongs
by right to all, the negative (a pleasure exempt of interest) immediately
converts into a positive (a shared pleasure), and judgement can take place (the
formulation of the judgement: “this thing is beautiful” then has the form of an
objective judgement – it seems to say something about the very thing itself –
although it rests only on a subjective foundation; but this foundation is really a
principle, and the enunciated products that follow are really universals: as if
the subjective universal of common sense spoke for itself, in a way that is
both correct and illegitimate, in the objective form of the judgement).

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It is obvious that this way of understanding aesthetic judgement poses a

formidable problem for architectural criticism. But the way this difficulty is
usually accounted for is doubtless insufficient. When for example someone
says, leaning heavily on the few passages in the Critique of Judgement that
mention architecture, that the presentation of the architectural work, in
contrast to the presentation of pictorial, musical or sculptural works, cannot be
separated from interest and inclination and is therefore unable to give rise to a
disinterested delight in the subject, so architecture cannot be the occasion for
this projection of the delight by which, as we saw, common sense expresses
itself. The specifically architectural affect would always be too interested to
correspond to the processes of aesthetic reflection as described by Kant, who
in fact had to resort to other forms of art in order to describe it. And therefore
the conclusion is: either a “Kantian” critique of architecture is possible, but it
will never consider an architectural work to be a disinterested aesthetic
presentation like a painting or a symphony, as an unforeseen event
independent of any previously formulated end, but it will consider that which
is not specifically architectural (the façade, or more generally the building
reduced to its exterior representation, uninhabited we could say, literally
outside of its use); or else that criticism will treat architecture as such, but then
it will only be able to account for its use, function, purpose, and its responding
to a need, and therefore it will cease being “Kantian”.

Not all of this is absolutely false. But the fact remains that the
architectural thing is no more reducible to my interest, to my inclination than
any other artistic work. The delight that the presentation of an architectural
work provokes in me is never just my delight alone, and the pleasure that I
feel is no more immediate than the one that I feel when presented with a
pictorial, musical or sculptural object. In other words: the architectural
pleasure in me is also related to something else. If I say that a building is
beautiful, that it well conceived, that it responds to a need in a satisfactory
way, I am doing something quite different than simply acknowledging an
immediate feeling of well-being. I relate the pleasure that I feel to
“something” in me to that which is not exclusively me – this is, we
discovered, the “definition” Kant gave for “disinterestedness”. Since
concerning architectural presentation we noted the effectiveness of the first
moment of reflection – the rapport with or relation to – why should we deny
ourselves the second moment – the projection, the supposition, the granting to

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“all the others” – and therefore the possibility of a judgement resting on a

subjective principle?

This line of argument will nonetheless seem excessively sophistic:

doesn’t it try to rediscover a disinterestedness in architecture that is manifestly
not found there? But we need to be more precise: it is not a matter of
architecture in relation to itself, but the nature of the delight than it provokes
(or doesn’t) in us. We are not speaking here about a relation other than one
which a subject maintains with the architectural thing, not of the thing itself.
And we notice in fact, in this relation, a movement that diverts the subject
from the sole consideration of itself or the sole experience without thinking
about its affects. Why then do we continue to presuppose that this deviation,
which is undisputable, is not entirely of same nature as the one at work when
considering a musical or pictorial work? Because it is never disputed that the
delight provoked by the architectural thing has even the smallest moment of
“disinterestedness” (a moment when the subject does not keep this delight to
himself, but relates it to something else), we cannot avoid presupposing that it
is a matter then of another type of disinterest than the one at work in music or
painting. How then to think the difference between these types of disinterest?

At this point we can risk the following hypothesis: the delight provoked
by the architectural object would also be a relation to, but it would
nevertheless not be possible to project it onto “all others”. Why? Not because
this delight is too individual or too private, but, on the contrary because for
architecture the common is always too immediately present to be the object of
a projection. For architecture the community cannot be considered as the
horizon of a supposition or an attributing to, because it is already present in
the very presentation of the thing. The community here is not the object of a
duty (“he must regard it as resting on what he may also presuppose in every
other person”), for it is not ahead of, in the future of the subject, but already
there in the very presentation. The common is not presumed, postulated, or
supposed, it is in the presentation of the thing, in its very presupposition. And
this is why the mechanism of reflection to the extent that it experienced
rapport and projection, cannot be effective: in architecture from the outset
there is already what in reflective judgement had to be exhumed by the double
movement of a suspension and of an attributing to: the fact of the common in
the presentation.

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The difficulty would then be that if the obviousness of the common

prevents the judgement of architecture occurring with any precision, reflective
judgement could no longer consist of the exposition of laws, rules or norms
that would make architectural judgement a determinant judgement. The
community is neither a need nor a concept: it is a fact. Architecture is the
presentation of this fact. As such architecture is not, or else it is not
exclusively, an aesthetic phenomenon, nor is it an object of science. Its
evaluation is not exclusively related to either subjective-universal principles
upon which aesthetic delights are based, or objective-universal principles
upon which knowledge is constructed.

But how can architectural criticism then comprehend its own positivity,
which is as hypothesised is unavoidable, if this positivity cannot depend on
any of these principles? Where will this criticism find its own legitimacy if it
cannot rest its judgements on one side or the other and only ever misses its
target, when it tries to be artistic just as much as when it tries to be scientific?

Obviously these questions are not trying to invalidate architectural

criticism. On the contrary: they show its inestimable interest as an example of
a discourse that is truly, constantly and constitutively confronted, in the very
presentation of its object, by a necessary and therefore unconstructible
presupposition of the fact of the community. Can we then suppose what its
proper object will be if it is neither exclusively artistic nor exclusively
scientific? What follows is only, from this point of view, a tentative,
hazardous and cautious attempt at a beginning: let’s suppose that architectural
criticism relates to what in architecture proposes an experience of the fact that
there is something in common. It would no longer be interested in architecture
as a simple object, nor simply as an occasion for applying predetermined
rules; rather it would feel what in architecture (in its visual aspects, certainly,
but also in its use and in its potential for ethical and political invention in
general) gives rise to, authorizes or emerges to open experience up to the
presupposition of the common, and to evaluate ― quite probably without any
objective criteria – the particular quality of this invitation. 6

6. Let us specify that this proposition is not only limited to collective architecture: there are individual
constructions that inform the common from which they originate, just as there are, obviously and
unfortunately, collective constructions that can destroy it, cover it over or to stifle it under
pomposity or poverty.

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Perhaps something of this kind did try to emerge at the end of

Benjamin’s famous text on the work of art, in the notion of a “tactile”
reception distinguished from visual apprehension:

Buildings are appropriated in a twofold manner: by use and by perception ― or

rather, by touch and sight. Such appropriation cannot be understood in terms of
the attentive concentration of a tourist before a famous building. On the tactile
side there is no counterpart to contemplation on the optical side. Tactile
appropriation is accomplished not so much by attention as by habit. As regards
architecture, habit determines to a large extent even optical reception. The
latter, too, occurs much less through rapt attention than by noticing the object in
incidental fashion. 7

What is interesting about this distinction, which by itself can seem too
simplistic and even naïve, becomes more apparent when we relate it to a
remark made a little earlier in the text that “architecture has always
represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is
consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction” (ibid., p. 240). For
here there is the indication of a solidarity between this kind of habitual, tactile,
distracted reception and the experience of the community. This is not
something that can be felt with the effort of attention, with the concentration
and contemplation that corresponds more to an individual experience. The
common is not what we place in front of ourselves like an isolated object to be
examined at our leisure, but it is what we are in, to which we belong before
we have even made the decision to examine it. And this is perhaps the reason
why architecture is such an experience of the common; in contrast to what
happens for example with a picture, the reception that we give to a building
does not consist of placing it in front of us as something separate; here the
experience takes place precisely without placing the object at a certain
distance in order to make it have an effect, without any defining or delimiting
it. We are in the building, we touch it and are touched by it in a dimension of
participation or, better, of com-motion: we move together without ever being
able to grasp by ourselves what the building is in its entirety. Even the powers
of representation by which I could assure myself of my mastery over the
building are insufficient here: architecture as such, as having spaces that can
be traversed and divided, is always beyond its image. We cannot isolate it like

7. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, in Hannah Arendt
(ed.) Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p.
240.

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we do when framing a picture to be mounted on a wall and later appreciated.

We are in architecture even before we notice it; before we decide to observe
it, it has already proposed itself to us and we are already affected according to
our least reflective and least analytical sensibilities. We move ourselves in it
and it delivers itself to us according to such displacements as an inseparably
spatial and temporal suggestion: a com-motion that would therefore need to
take into consideration the fact that this suggestion immediately addresses
itself to a plurality and not only to a singularity. The only architecture is one
that is distributed, since it can only authorize a multiplicity of journeys. Each
one of these journeys is a collective adventure: an experience of the
community in so far as it is not constructed like a work, in so far as it is not
reducible to a body of laws that could be enunciated a priori. It is already
there, experienced in the variety of journeys and the necessarily divided
character of each one, it is never presented truthfully by itself, never figured in
a illustrative or exemplary manner (except in architectural publicity, but even
then things are not as simple as they seem); it is what can be experienced in its
presentation – even if the presentation itself contradicts this experience
instead of supporting it.

Benjamin then adds an obviously essential remark about this absent-

minded tactile reception: “This mode of appropriation, developed with
reference to architecture, in certain circumstances acquires canonical value.
For tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points
of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is by contemplation alone.
They are mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile
appropriation.” (ibid., p. 240) This was to suggest some important issues
about architecture and that we should take responsibility for them. The text
was written in 1936. The question of knowing what could be made from a
presupposition of community in architectural presentation was then a burning
issue. Are things qualitatively any different today? Is the idea that
architectural criticism should again confront such questions only a ridiculous
anachronism, or on the contrary is it necessary to assert that it has to if it is to
participate in a very necessary resistance?

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 The Dislocation
Architecture and Philosophy
(Excerpts)

By Benoît Goetz

Translation by Tim Adams

Introduction: Architecture and Philosophy1

Panta Khorei
Plato

In the following I will ramble on about matters that appear to have no relation to
architecture. What am I saying? Is it something that will be foreign to architecture?
Claude-Nicolas Ledoux

In a 1979 article entitled “Aujourd'hui l'architecture”, Hubert Damisch

asks: “What can we learn today from architecture? Or furthermore – leading
to a quite different question – why at the end of the
millennium does this discipline, which has at least in
the West never stopped informing the labour of
thought in every sense of the word, seem to have
suddenly lost a good deal of its didactic and heuristic
virtue if not all theoretical relevance? The greatly
reduced role granted to architecture by
contemporary texts, critical as well as speculative, is
a good indication of the loss of meaning suffered by
this practice in the cultural field that is for the
moment ours.” 2 Going beyond the simple
observation that there is a lack of interest in Figure 21. Benoît Goetz.

architecture among philosophers, Hubert Damisch questions the meaning of

this negligence, which is also an estrangement, since from Antiquity until the

1. The source for this translation is Benoît Goetz, La Dislocation: Architecture et Philosophie (Paris:
Les Editions de la Passion, 2001), pp. 15-19, pp. 26-28 and pp. 181-182.
2. Hubert Damisch, “Aujourd'hui, l'architecture”, in Le temps de la réflexion, no. 2 (Paris: Gallimard,
1981), p. 463.

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Renaissance philosophy and architecture were mutually considered to be

masters of knowledge, with each being able to play the role of paradigm for
the other. But what Hubert Damisch wonders most of all is whether this
estrangement is not related to the “loss of meaning” that has affected
contemporary architecture. Certainly not because philosophy has given up
trying to “find meaning”, but because architecture has forgotten how to think
at the same time that philosophy has stopped taking architecture into its
consideration. It is this coincidence that Hubert Damisch forces us to question,
in 1979, just when the bridges between philosophy and architecture where
being remade and strengthened.

This had in fact produced something like an eclipse, to use Damisch’s

expression, such that no philosophy, no thought, any longer appeared
“behind” architecture, while the philosophers no longer “speak to
architecture” (or as little as necessary). Now an eclipse by definition cannot
last for long. No doubt Damisch’s comments themselves announced the
beginning of the end. After 1979 an established field emerged that we are now
in the habit of calling “architecture and philosophy”, which manifests itself in
the form of countless meetings between philosophers, architects, historians
and town planners, and as multiple publications on the subject. It is difficult to
put these confusing matters and writings into order. Something was unblocked
and a space opened up that was soon engulfed in a great variety of
approaches, methods and styles, with each one unravelling some threads from
the ball that intertwines architecture/philosophy. Architecture “itself” tied up
in these networks of diverse knowledges acquires the status of a complex and
problematic “object”: a work of art, an image or symbol of thought, a concept
or idea taken from philosophy, a technical object, a social assemblage.
Architecture from the epistemological point of view, in other words
architecture as knowledge, has never before appeared so clearly to be a
constructed object. In fact it became evident that the question of the very
definition of architecture become a free-for-all, and that every discourse ―
whether aesthetic, historical, critical, or ideological ― constructed a definition
of architecture that was evidently bias towards one way or another of
conceiving architecture. Architecture like philosophy, as a knowledge and as a
practice, is traversed by extremely violent conflicts, which in architecture can
take the spectacular form of conflicts between architects, but which is also
deeply interesting to philosophy to the extent that it concerns the sense ― or
non-sense ― of life and building.

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Therefore under the title “Architecture and Philosophy” we need to

understand not the vain reconstruction of an obsolete analogy, the various
attempts that are only bound together by the shared operation to create
alliances or the passages and resonances between architecture and philosophy.
But here it will be less a matter of reflection on architecture than the attempt
to think from architecture. The reflection “on” has the defect of inevitably
working towards an aestheticising discourse where architecture itself, and
everything that makes us think of it in the orders of ethics and politics become
separated. Certainly architecture “produces sensations”, certainly it affects our
senses, but the description of these effects is only of interest so long as one
can see how these impressions become definite only when they come into play
with our existence, not to the point of determining it but as its condition in the
transcendental sense. If architecture interests us to the highest degree it is
because we adhere to its existence. This dependency does not imply in the
slightest that architecture has no part to play in liberty, quite the contrary. It
leads us along pathways, streets and boulevards where the huge political
events of the modern era have been played out. One can consider architecture,
architectures, as an “echo chamber”, at once gigantic and finely tuned, where
the essential of that which happens to us finds its resonances. Architecture,
one can say, “thinks”. It “thinks” in space and in the world. It “thinks” the
political by putting it in place.

One was able to say of Nietzsche that he did not write on music but that
he wrote from music ― which means something quite different from a
musical writing in which music would be the model or writing would take its
rhythm from music. To think from music means to think from that which
music gives to thought, which is not necessarily of a musical nature. In this
sense it is not a matter of aesthetics as a regional discipline of philosophy – a
discipline that “looks into” the arts – but a thought that takes its departure, its
momentum, from a listening, from a sensation, from an experience of music.
In an analogous way, all things being equal, it would be a matter of trying to
make a preliminary sketch of a thought and a writing that would come from
architecture. Starting from architecture in order to think space and what
happens there, the time that passes between “private space” and “public
space”, the spatial articulations where existences are dispersed and collected.
Because architecture is a thought about space, spaces in which everything
happens, a thought that comes from architecture would have the chance of
capturing the event from a new point of view of the spatial conditions that
give birth to it and assure its persistence. This reference to Nietzsche is not the

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only example of a philosophical treatment of art that does not limit itself to an
aestheticizing reflection. There is also Deleuze when he conceptualises
cinema. It is necessary to understand his “philosophy of cinema” in the sense
of a genitive subjective, as the “idea of a philosophy immanent to cinema –
one that it would produce for itself, one that would come out of itself, from its
own filmic manifestation.” 3 In a similar fashion “the philosophy of
architecture” would designate the attempt to extract a thought immanent to
architecture itself. But in order to enunciate the statement “architecture
thinks” without it seeming to be meaningless it is necessary to immediately
indicate what it thinks, even if this is to anticipate a response that can only be
satisfactorily formulated at the end of this work.

Figure 22. (left) A dinner party.

Figure 23. (right) Khafre’s Pyramid at Giza, Cairo.

What does architecture think? It thinks about space. It being understood

that thought is what makes space emerge as such. But perhaps it is not beside
the point here to indicate, from the outset, that here there is not the slightest
exclusion of time. It thinks time: past, present and future. A work of
architecture is a field of immanence and a field of imminence. Too often we
only want to remember its power of retention, precisely of past events. Too
often we want to reduce architecturality to monumentality. In which case
architecture would not only be a funereal art but a dead art as well since it is
almost certain that monuments are dedicated to things past. Now, an alive
place where existences are played out today, where they collide and appear

3. Alain Ménil, “Deleuze et le « bergsonisme du cinéma »“ in Philosophie no. 47, (Paris, Les Éditions
de Minuit, 1995), p. 30.

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together, that is no less architectural than the Great Pyramid of Giza. What is
needed at present is a return to an architecture of the present, to those places
where an event can break out, as Nietzsche said, “on doves’ feet”. 4 But
between the “architecture-monument” and the “architecture-event” there is a
place for an ordinary architecture, a marvel of discretion that edifies the
conditions of everyday life and that is not less but more architectural than the
most spectacular manifestations of the art of building. It is this architecture,
which passes unnoticed, that philosophy rarely bothers to take into
consideration. We must address this as an injustice. The anaesthesia of
thinkers, their indifference towards the spaces they occupy, can hardly be
explained other than by the metaphysical prejudice according to which
thought has its place nowhere, and therefore paying attention to the “spatial
conditions of thought” has little importance to them.

In any case the attempt to make philosophy come from architecture need
not be confined to the field of aesthetics. It is first philosophy, ontology, but
also physics, ethics, politics and noetics that are the concerns of architecture.
Of course it is not a question of denying that architecture also “pleases” by
giving “free play” to the senses as Kant says, by means of the beautiful forms
that its many styles have been known to invent, but rather to suggest that
architecture is above all an “ethical substance”, which is in fact staying
faithful to the thought of the great architects themselves (such as Le
Corbusier) who are forever repeating that only in the Academies is
architecture entirely a problem of form and style. If today the Academies as
institutions are defunct it is not so certain that an academicism does not still
reign, even more fertile and disastrous since it is unaware of its own existence,
within the post-modern intoxication that redeploys all the forms of the past
while claiming – and this is its arrogance – to reintroduce “meaning” that the
modernists had eradicated in the name of “abstract univeralism”. Today it
would seem improper to propose an “illustrated defence of modern
architecture”. That would in fact be true if this discourse only supported its
arguments with a biased aesthetic or ideology. But to the extent that it
becomes obvious that architecture is an “ethical substance” the neutrality of a
purely “objective” position would not only be a mistake and an illusion but
also a weakness.

4. Translator’s note: “It is the stillest words which bring the storm. Thoughts that come on doves' feet
guide the world.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One,
Trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961), p. 130.

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Contrary to the conceptions of an architecture-image or an architecture-

sign, it is necessary from the start to defend the idea of an architecture-matter
and a “physics of space”. Architecture is a physics of space in the sense that
space makes the world. Before “speech” and before imaginary constructions
architecture “fabricates” worlds in which existences are disposed and
dislocated. And to the extent that architecture touches the very heart of
existence it is necessary to consider it an “ethical substance”. If it was nothing
more than a “representation” or an “instrument” then an aesthetic or a
semiology, or indeed a technology would be sufficient to determine its
meanings and its functions. But such is not the case. The beauty of a work of
architecture is inseparable from its ethical reach; no critic (in the Kantian
sense) ever born will be able to isolate a purely architectural judgement. A
phrase of Vivant Denon’s about Egyptian architecture clearly summarizes the
entanglement of aesthetics and ethics: “Confidence is the first sentiment that
must inspire architecture, and this is what constitutes its beauty.” 5 But
architecture is a knot where the political is never absent. It is not difficult to
admit this axiom: politics today is the city, and philosophy urgently has to
confront what is unthought in the urban. There is everything to gain from
forcing a “political turn” in the contemporary thought of existence by
proposing an analysis of “being-in-the-city”. This operation will only be
convincing when it finally shows how thought itself is “unharmed” by
architecture. In contrast to what is perhaps the most insistent prejudice of
metaphysics, thoughts are never “nowhere” and thoughts must be born in
spaces that are suited to them.

To consider architecture as a condition is to construct a transcendental

concept of architecture. Architecture is a condition of experience even to the
extent that there is no experience without spacing. The more distant goal, and
doubtless the most ambitious one that could be proposed, would be to
rephrase the question of space as necessarily “passing” through architecture.
indeed we need to be suspicious of all definitions of space, just as it is always
necessary to challenge typological distinctions: “real space”, “geometric
space”, “lived space”, “symbolic space”, “metaphorical space”, etc. A singular
(if not new) approach to space could emerge in an implicit way from a detour
through architecture.

5. Vivant Denon, Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute Égypte pendant les campagnes du général
Bonaparte (Paris: Institut français d'Archéologie Orientale du Caire, 1989).

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Heidegger is no doubt the first philosopher to take architecture itself

entirely seriously (that is to say architecture which is neither metaphorical nor
ideal) by considering that architecture’s teaching, its lesson and its dictation
for thought are just as important as those of poetry or painting. In “The Origin
of the Work of Art” the temple and Van Gogh’s painting of shoes by are
equally capable of telling the truth about the work of art. But is Heidegger still
a philosopher? If it is not possible to reply in a simply affirmative manner then
the consequence could be that philosophy and architecture are condemned to
be lacking something (whereas there would be a profound complicity or an
understanding between architecture and that which Heidegger names
“thought”). But for what obscure reason? Would it be because philosophy in
principle can never take the question of the place or space of thought
seriously? In any case it would not be without interest to see what could be
learnt “from the side of architecture” about an unthought spatiality that was at
the heart of philosophy from the beginning when its first schools where
established. Indeed, philosophy has neglected architectural singularity. What
is it in architecture itself that distinguishes it from all the other arts of space?...

Dislocation: The Definition and Critique of Place

Figure 24. Early 16th-century interpretation of the Fall and the Expulsion
from J. P. Bergomensis, Suma de tofas las cronicas del Mundo (1510),
Bodleian Library, Oxford University.

The first dislocation was the Fall from Paradise. Not only in the sense of
the first man expelled from a unique and perfect place in the narrative of

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Genesis, but also in the sense of entering a space where the division of
inside/outside reigns. Man entered into a divided space, in other words into a
space that will henceforth for him be “‘this horrible inside-outside that real
space is’, as Henri Michaux says in terms we cannot forget once we have
grasped them…” 6 Paradise, strictly speaking, does not have places (nor
clothing either). A paradisiac space is not only a space that lacks nothing –
where all movement is therefore unrestricted and “without reason” – it is
above all a space where every place is strictly equivalent to all other places. In
paradise there is no place to move to, which is to say that one always moves
within a single indivisible Place. This is a space in which differences do not
imply any heterogeneity, a space without otherness or negativity, an
environment without edge and without limit. This is what the traditional art of
gardening often tried to recreate: a space absolutely closed so that an outside
is no longer conceivable or even imaginable.

“Es ist, wie man sieht, wieder eine Frage des Aussen und Innen” wrote
Freud in Die Verneinung. 7 This is this same problem that we find at the
crossroads of architecture and the question of place. As Joseph Rykwert has
demonstrated in On Adam’s House in Paradise, this theme has never stopped
informing architectural thought, even when it goes unnoticed. The archetypal
house, the first dwelling of man, has obsessed house builders even more so
since the Scriptures fail to make any mention of it thus giving free reign to the
imagination:

Much has already been read into the Good Book, and into the beginning
particularly, and I hope that my modest inference will prove unexceptional. I
make it in the conviction that the shadow or outline of this inferred house has
dogged many builders and architects, much as the enigmatically described
plan of the garden, with its four rivers, has inspired so many decorators,
weavers, makers of carpets, as well as gardeners….the notion of a first house
(right because it was first) was invoked by them as a justification: the first
principle of their radical reforms … this notion, which may not have exhausted
itself entirely yet – it will come up in some odd contexts – had an extended

6. Maurice Blanchot, “Vast as the Night,” The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson
(Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 324.
7. “It is, we see, once more a question of external and internal”, Freud, Die Verneinung, Gesammelte
Werke, ed. Anna Freud et al. (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1968-1986), vol. XIV, p. 11. [Translator’s note:
Sigmund Freud, “Negation”, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, vol. 19, trans. James Strachey, Anna Freud, et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-
1974), pp. 237.]

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history and is certainly as old as architectural theory. Architectural theory

may be said to have begun with Vitruvius, if only because no earlier
literary evidence has survived. 8

We should allow this allegory to be subjected to a slight modification of

detail: in paradise Adam did not have a house. Or if he had one it would not
have been outside, and consequently would not have constituted an inside
either. Paradisiac space is without division, strictly speaking it is nowhere and
only the tree of knowledge introduces rupture into the field of immanence
such that an anywhere, a “this is paradise” becomes possible. On leaving this
place, on leaving Place, the first man and first woman did not only discover
suffering and shame, they discovered an outside, and by trying to construct an
inside they then, and only then, invented architecture. The meaning of this
apologia is that the partition of space that constitutes “the first dislocation” is
constitutive of architecture itself. 9 One cannot conceive an architecture that
does not work this original division of inside and outside. Of course it can
make it work, by trying to complicate it, by playing it, making the outside
enter the inside, and opening the inside to the outside (this is, furthermore, one
of the principal characteristics of modernity in architecture). But never will it
be able to reduce this opposition or this distinction. That would be to try and
make a fragment of paradise return to earth and the even most grandiose
utopians among architects, who are by profession all more or less utopian,
have never been so excessively pretentious (to the extent that all architecture
is in part a project [projet], it could be considered that there is no architecture
without utopia, even when it becomes fully realized).

The expulsion throws in [jette] dislocation, in other words creates a

fracturing of space where there is no longer only the Good Place, where there
is always more than one place, and always a “going outside” of place. For
man the expulsion from paradise is the entry into a fractured space that
thereafter becomes “architectured” and “architecturable”. It is a space where
architecture imposes itself because, in a sense, it is the very property of this
space to have dislocated properties that renders architecture necessary. Where

8. Joseph Rykwert, On Adam’s House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural
History (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1972), pp. 13-14.
9. These considerations are inspired by a lecture of Jean-Christophe Bailly entitled “La ville
Adamique” read at the symposium on La Ville en Œuvre, Centre Beaubourg, March 1993. On
completion of the present manuscript this lecture had just been published in the admirable
Panoramiques, Détroits (Paris: Christian Bourgois Éditeur, 2000).

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there was only one space without inside or outside, without a right or wrong
side, architecture had no place of its own, very simply it had no place to be.
Once there is architecture spaces become singularised, distinguish themselves
and so one cannot any longer be nowhere as if it was everywhere (such was
the essential property of the paradisiac Place). In paradise Adam and Eve were
unaware of their finitude. They discover the end and the need to cover
themselves up. This is the beginning of the end that will lead to the
construction of cities, in other words, to History.

The differences that architecture introduces “into” space are a

consequence of a primary dislocation that “belongs” to space itself. It is not
entirely nonsense to notice an architecturality of space itself that precedes all
architecture, which all architecture makes use of as part of its condition.
Dislocation is not an event that occurs in space or even to space. Space is
dislocation. Space, the disjunction of places, the original division, never stops
taking place. Dislocation does not stop taking place. This is why there is no
place without dislocation. Dislocation is not that which destroys, deconstructs
or devastates place. It is the very condition of all location to undergo the
division of places….

Conclusion

It is a matter now of taking hold of what these “ramblings” – to use

Ledoux’s expression from the epigraph that begins this work – will allow to
be shown as evidence regarding the mode of action of architecture.
Architecture constructs moments of world, in other words spaces where we
conduct ourselves (that is how it is an “ethical substance”), spaces where we
place ourselves (that is how it specifies political divisions) and spaces where
thought is born (that is how it is also a noetic condition). To meditate on
architecture is therefore to articulate an ontology (which questions the
meaning being-there) and an ethics (which poses the practical questioning of
the living of this being). What does living mean to say? Rather than resolve
this problem too quickly, as usually happens, in terms of incorporation or
installation in an appropriate and appropriating environment – which suggests
and imposes the concept of place that is here being criticized – it is necessary
to underline the unusual and unstable character of to dwell and renew the
questioning of its univocity. To dwell always consists of variations, thresholds
and modulations. To dwell never returns to itself. It is impossible (other than

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in a mythical or imaginary way) to halt dwelling, to fix it in a definitive

posture or attitude (as if there existed an authentic dwelling adequate to the
world). To dwell permanently dis-locates itself in a moment of world by a
moment of world. At the limit, every thought is a singular mode of dwelling, a
singular way of being in space. 10 Every thought “makes world” in a different
way.

What is certain is that all great thought is the invention of a way of

dwelling, in other words of a way of being in space. Thus Lévinas does not
dwell in the world as Heidegger does, and this is without doubt what
essentially separates them. On the other hand dwelling is at once to be in life
and to exist. Any thought about dwelling cannot happen without taking into
account these two dimensions. It is fitting then to articulate a certain vitalism
(Deleuze’s, but also Le Corbusier’s) together with certain great thinkers of
existence (Heidegger, Arendt, Lévinas) even if this risks becoming eclectic,
but without its usual carelessly reconciled mixture. The very instability of the
meaning of dwelling imposes this plurality of references. Spaces, like
thoughts, mix together without themselves becoming mixed up. Dis-location
preserves discretion, the heterogeneity of moments of world. No one thought
alone will therefore suffice to exhaust the meaning of the different ways of
dwelling. Such is the case for the young person who hesitantly climbs the
steps of Raphael’s School of Athens towards the milieu of the philosophers,
each dwelling in his own way in the space of the portico between the
slumping Diogenes and the majestically towering Plato, to find out what they
can about dwelling they will need to address several masters.

The critique of the principle of localization does not establish what

would finally be a “true” space, a space without place, without qualities, a
space voided or deserted. Inhabitation is not the simple inversion of the myth
of a space perfectly habitable and perfectly suitable. Dislocation, which is the
condition of inhabitation, does not in any way signify total and radical
deprivation of all possibility of dwelling. When the myth of localization stops
imposing its architecture on the universe then no space that is discovered,
whether it be infinite, abstract or immeasurable, can any longer claim to
monopolize the resources of spatiality. When it breaks with the grand analogy
(between the micro and the macro, earth and sky, mortals and gods) no space

10. Alain wrote: “All thought is a monastery of the small moment”, Propos sur l'éducation suivis de
Pédagogie enfantine (Paris: P.U.F., 2005), LXXXVII.

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 GOETZ

can any longer be considered to be central, principal or sacred; no space is a

priori more “true” than any other space. Every space floats and shifts in the
midst of other spaces, and architecture rules over the play between these
spaces: their separations, openings, thresholds and passages, their
superimpositions, interlockings and penetrations, “the masterly, correct, and
magnificent play of masses brought together in light.” 11 Every space becomes
architecture in relation to other spaces. But sometimes a space also happens to
open onto an “other space”: an “ineffable space”, an “amazing space” or a
“splendid space.” The latter is, once again, only rare and exceptional. In this
game of dislocation they are the events that architecture gives birth to
whenever it “wins”.

11. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, trans. Frederick Etchells (New York: Dover
Publications, 1986), p. 29.

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 SECTION 3
TWO ARCHITECT-THEORISTS

Figure 25. Piotr Kowalski: Avec un léger déplacement de la tête, 1974.

Introduction to Boudon and Girard

This brings us to another quite different group of theorists whose work is

included in this thesis, because they are the first and only architects included in this
survey. Perhaps this reflects and confirms the many claims made during the 1999
Anymore conference that French architects are proudly anti-intellectual. 1 It is hard to
deny the general observation that in France the best architectural theory does not
come from architects or even philosophers teaching within architecture schools but

1. This is a sentiment that was repeated by Brendon Macfarlane, Jean-Louis Cohen and Mark
Goulthorpe in Cynthia C. Davidson (ed.) Anymore (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2000), pp.
47, 51, 287, 288 and by Christian Girard in “French Architects say ‘Basta’ to Theory”, ANY
(Architecture New York), vol. 25 – 26 (2000), pp. 6 -7.

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 INTRODUCTION TO BOUDON AND GIRARD

from philosophers working in philosophy departments like Daniel Payot at the Marc
Block University of Strasbourg II and Benoît Goetz at the Paul Verlaine University of
Metz. Jean-Louis Cohen, director since 1999 of the Institut français d’architecture
(French Institute of Architecture) says that after May ’68 and the closure of the École
des Beaux Arts students would either go to hear the lectures of the architect Jean
Prouvé at the Conservatoire des arts et métiers or else attend the seminars of
intellectuals like Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault at the Collège de France, and
since they were located on opposite sides of the Seine it was very hard to attend both
and this opened a gap between architects and intellectuals and “it is precisely the
shape of this lasting gap that Anymore revealed.” 2 But Cusset’s more credible version
is that this anti-intellectual attitude is a carryover from the École des Beaux Arts itself
where the only books allowed were those with ample illustrations and where students
were kept busy all day making beautiful water-coloured renderings of revivalist
architecture. 3 We should remember that the École des Beaux Arts, established in
1863, had its origins in the Académie des Beaux Arts which was founded by Cardinal
Mazarin in 1648 to educate artists and architects the best of whom were to be selected
by Louis XIV to decorate the royal apartments of palaces like Versailles. 4 Hardly a
background that would foster critical thinking, and despite the French Revolution
there are still many reminders of monarchical society embedded in French customs
and etiquette. 5 It is simply not good form for a French architect to discuss matters
outside of their scope of work and when they do they are likely to have to answer
difficult questions from people better informed in such matters.

But there is one theorist based within an architecture school who has had a huge
impact on cultural studies worldwide and that is Paul Virilio. In fact Virilio’s interests
are so broad and his influence so widespread that it is easy to forget that he was for a

2. Jean-Louis Cohen, “Letter to Anymore”, Cynthia C. Davidson (ed.), Anymore (Cambridge, Mass.:
The MIT Press, 2000), pp. 286 – 287.
3. François Cusset, French theory: Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Cie et les mutations de la vie
intellectuelle aux Etats-Unis , 2003), pp. 257 – 261. Translated in the Introduction
above.
4. For the best source on the history of the École des Beaux Arts see Arthur Drexler (ed.), The
Architecure of the École des Beaux Arts (London: Secker and Warberg, 1976).
5. See Pascal Baudry, French and Americans: the Other Shore (Paris: Les Frenchies, Inc., 2005) for an
excellent characterisation of what makes the French different, including an analysis of many
hangovers from a long history of monarchy still noticeable in French behaviour.

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 INTRODUCTION TO BOUDON AND GIRARD

while an architect in the Architecture Principe group and spent most of his life based
at the École Speciale d’Architecture in Paris where he even taught in the studio.6
Virilio is so well-known and so well-published in translation (see the figure 1 in the
introduction that shows him to be first equal with Derrida as the most often referred-to
French theorist in the architectural journals from the Avery catalogue) that it was
deemed unnecessary to include him in this short survey. For the same reason very
little mention is made of Derrida. To do so would risk boring anyone who has
followed architectural theory in the last twenty years such is their dominance.
Furthermore both their interests, for Derrida the deconstruction of the metaphysics of
presence and for Virilio “dromology” or the study of the technologies of speed, are
only tangentially concerned with architecture at all and so the application of their
work to architecture tends to stretch their thought too far into the realm of metaphor.

This is certainly not the case with the next theorist and the first architect in our
survey, Philippe Boudon. Boudon is the most extreme rationalist of the group for his
aim is to establish a science of architecture, and if the number of books and followers
he has created is anything to go by then we could say that he has succeeded. 7 Philippe
Boudon, born in 1941, is a professor at the Paris-la-Villette architecture school and
director of the Laréa research institute (Laboratoire d’Architecturologie et de
Recherches Épistemologie sur l’Architecture: Laboratory for Architecturology and
Epistemological Research on Architecture). That only one of Boudon’s books has
been translated into English, his first one written in 1969, is surprising to say the least
because this first one was an instant hit around the world. Pessac de Le Corbusier:
Étude socio-architectural 1929/35 (translated as Lived-In Architecture: Le
Corbusier’s Pessac Revisited) had a widespread influence and was the strongest
weapon in the postmodernist attack on modern architecture. It has a key place in

6. For this little known aspect of Virilio’s life see Charles Bessard, “Paul Virilio”, Architectural Design
vol. 74, no. 5 (September-October 2004), pp. 42 – 47.
7. The “Bn-Opale plus” online catalogue of the French National Library lists 25 books published by
Boudon, most of them directly relating to his concept of architecturology. Boudon’s Laréa research
institute has five research assistants all publishing works around the topic of architecturology and
many of Boudon’s books are anthologies that include even more people who write on this subject.

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Charles Jenck’s book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture which became the
bible of postmodern architecture and both these books are still in print today. 8

Lived-In Architecture is a careful documentation of all the owners’ modifications

to Le Corbusier’s experimental worker’s housing called the Quatiers Modernes
Frugès located in Pessac, not far from Bordeaux. In almost every case the owners had
tried to make their modernist homes look more like the typical houses of the region.
For example, they often bricked in the famous strip windows to make rectangular
windows and then decorated them with frames, shutters and mullions. Here was living
proof demonstrated on the houses of the greatest advocator of modernism that people
prefer vernacular styles. It needed no convoluted argument, this simple documentation
was the most powerful critique of modernism imaginable. Boudon supplemented this
by including interviews with the owners thus letting them speak for themselves.

Figure 26. Boudon's images of Pessac used

in Jencks’s book The Language of Post-
Modern Architecture.

8. Philippe Boudon, Lived-In Architecture: Le Corbusier’s Pessac Revisited, trans. Gerald Onn
(London, Lund Humphries, 1972) and Charles Jencks, The Language of Postmodern Architecture
(New York: Rizzoli, 1977).

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 INTRODUCTION TO BOUDON AND GIRARD

Boudon’s next book two years later in 1971 was radically different but equally
pioneering because Sur l’espace architectural, essai d’épistémologie de l’architecture
(On Architectural Space: An Essay on the Epistemology of Architecture) launches a
new science of architecture which Boudon calls “architecturology.” 9 He claims it is
an epistemology of architecture, by which he means that it determines what the
conditions are for a purely architectural knowledge, and he does this by making scale
the fundamental concept of his epistemology of architecture. It might at first seem
rather strange to group the clear-headed rationalist Boudon, who creates of a science
of architecture certain of its autonomy from other disciplines, with the emotionally
charged transversal writings of Irigaray and Lyotard in the same category of “heretical
rhapsody”, but if we look a little deeper we will find much in common in their
projects because they all share an anti-doctrinal attitude and they all rhapsodise on the
theme of architecture making it into something distinctly original.

Boudon creates a singular new territory of architectural research, where

architecture is not an object to be observed, considered or measured within the pre-
existing fields of sociology, philosophy, engineering or any other discipline, but is the
very field of study itself. And here we notice many shared aims with Goetz’s work
that came after Boudon. Boudon calls the first situation “applicationist” theories of
architecture because other fields apply their concepts to architecture, so then
architecture becomes either a social object for sociology, or a thought object for
philosophy, or a physical object for engineering and so on. 10 Boudon shifts our focus
from the empirical object of architecture to its conception, there is no architectural
object that is not first of all conceived says Boudon, and it is within the process of
conception that we can find the axiomatically purely architectural field. He sees this
as a shift from, or “epistemological cut” between, architecture as an object of science
to architecture itself as science. To use Boudon’s medical metaphor, it is a shift from

9. The source of the following discussion and the best introduction to this now large body of works
called architecturology is Philippe Boudon, Sur l’espace architectural: Essai d’épistémologie de
l’architecture (Paris: Éditions Parenthèses, 2003). This recent re-edition of Boudon’s second book
from 1971 is left unchanged but does include a new introduction and additional “Re-readings” at the
end of each chapter.
10. See Boudon’s often quoted paper, Philippe Boudon, “Recherche fundamental en architecture”,
Architecture et comportment/Architecture and Behaviour, vol. 5, no. 3 (1989), pp. 207 – 214.

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 INTRODUCTION TO BOUDON AND GIRARD

being a doctor impatient to cure the sick (applicationist theories and practices of
architecture) to the patient search for new medical knowledge (architecturology). So
on what does Boudon base his proposal for a genuinely architectural knowledge? It is
based on the concept of scale, architecture is geometry plus scale he says.

Figure 27. Philippe Boudon: The cube of the geometer compared with the cube
of the architect, where X represents not an indeterminate number but a
multiplicity of kinds of scales.

But this scale is not a single universal scale like that of the geometer’s, rather it is
a multiplicity of scales enabling multiple passages between the mental space of
architectural conception and the real space of buildings. He defines architectural space
as an ensemble of at least two spaces, mental space and true space, where each is
made to intervene in the other, and he defines scale as the rules for projection or
passage between the two or more spaces. Boudon lists twenty such scales that are
grouped under four categories:
1) Scales that refer real space to itself (adjacency, parcellar, geographical, visibility
and optical scales).
2) Scales that refer architectural space to an exterior referent (technical, functional,
dimensionally symbolic, formally symbolic, extensional, socio-cultural, model,
semantic, extension and economic scales).

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 INTRODUCTION TO BOUDON AND GIRARD

3) Scales that refer architectural space to its representation (geometric, cartographical,

and representational scales).
4) Lastly scales of architectural thought processes which involve a constant moving
backward and forwards between different spaces (levels of conception, global and
human scales). 11

These are multiple, qualitatively different, scales so in terms of geometrical

scale they all can overlap. Boudon asks the question, “how does the architect give
measurement to space?” And answers, “with a multiplicity of scales.” The geometer
takes measure of a given perceived object with comparison to a pre-established gold
standard or the circumference of the earth, while the architect by contrast gives
measure to an object that is not given a priori but one that is only conceived post
priori in the giving measure. One could argue that under the concept of scale Boudon
brings in all the applicationist theories through the back door that he had only just
thrown out the front door, i.e. sociology, engineering, philosophy etc. But if this is
indeed the case then we could argue that they now enter into architecture as well
behaved house guests rather than as rowdy visitors trying to dominate the host.

There are two aspects of Boudon’s architecturology that make it confirm to the
overall theme emerging from all the writers included in this thesis. Firstly Boudon
considers applicationist theories of architecture to be a form of doctrine that produces
aesthetic principles to be followed in contrast to his own genuine theory that produces
concepts unique to architecture. Boudon’s project for architecturology is a bold
challenge to architectural doctrine and therefore forms a dangerous and risky heresy,
the risky heretical nature of this project is clearly evidenced in the complete failure of
architecturology to cross the Atlantic despite the great success of Boudon’s first book.
As an example of doctrine Boudon gives the silent teaching of buildings themselves,
as when an architect presents a slide show of their work in which case we are
presented with a unique value system, a set of aesthetic principles, not so much as
teaching of values as a transmitting of them. 12 Architectural education only begins,

11. For the list of twenty scales see Philippe Boudon, La ville de Richelieu: étude de la notion d’échelle
en architecture (Paris: AREA, 1972).
12. For his critique of the silent teaching of buildings themselves, see Philippe Boudon, “Architecture,
Ethics and the Education of Architects: The View of Architecturology,” in Anne Elisabeth Toft (ed.)

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Boudon says, when we tackle the ethical problem of exposing students to a wide
variety of values from the world of architecture. Secondly, his sole aim behind the
establishment of a singular discipline of architectural knowledge is to better enable
interdisciplinary exchanges. There cannot be exchanges between disciplines if there
are not first of all disciplines to leave from and arrive at Boudon argues. Architecture
cannot make cross-disciplinary bridges if it is not itself an established discipline. And
that is Boudon’s major concern in the short essay, The Diversity of Research in
Architecture from 1996, translated below. Here Boudon gives a brief overview of the
many kinds of research taking place in French architecture schools today. We need to
respect the heterogeneous nature of the architectural object but this doesn’t mean
there cannot be a science of architecture, rather there must by many sciences of
architecture just as there are human sciences or sciences of languages to use Boudon’s
example.

And this leads us quite naturally to our next architect-theorist and quite possibly
Boudon’s harshest critic because Christian Girard has written an entire book that
argues that architecture is not and can never be a discipline in the scientific sense that
Boudon wants to give it. 13 Christian Girard is a practicing architect in Paris but he
also holds a PhD in philosophy from the Sorbonne and is currently the head of the
Theory, History, and Projects Department of the Paris-Malaquais school of
architecture. He is on the editorial board of the Chimères journal founded by Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari and he is a regular contributor to the Archilab series of
conferences. 14 Girard also gives occasional lectures in American schools of
architecture and has published in English language journals. 15 Girard published

Ethics in Architecture: Architectural Education in the Epoch of Virtuality, Transactions on

Architectural Educations No. 8 (Aarhus: EAAE, 2000), pp. 57 – 72.
13. Christian Girard, Architecture et concepts nomads: Traité d’indiscipline (Brussels: Pierre Mardaga,
1986), see the conclusion to this book translated below.
14. The Archilab series of conferences and books starting in 1999 is organised by the FRAC Centre
(Fonds Régional d'Art Contemporain: Regional Contemporary Art Collection) in Orléans. FRAC is
directed by Marie-Ange Brayer and was established in 1991 as the result of the French
government’s move to decentralise cultural activities away from Paris. Today FRAC houses one of
the largest collections of contemporary architecture in the world and invites young and interesting
architects from around the world to its biannual Archilab conferences.
15. For example Girard gave the lecture, “Theorizing the Contemporary” at the Columbia University
Graduate School of Architecture in November 1997 and has published “The Oceanship Theory:
Architectural Epistemology in Rough Waters”, Journal of Philosophy and the Visual Arts, no. 2

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Architecture et concepts nomades: traité d'indiscipline (Architecture and Nomadic

Concepts: A Treatise of Indiscipline) in 1986 and it remains today the most thorough
treatment of the ideas of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari by any architect. The
French architect Bernard Cache actually studied under Deleuze and wrote Terre
meuble (Earth Moves) in 1983 which is a fascinating work but which never mentions
Deleuze and owes far more to Cache’s other great teacher, the Italian architect
Vittorio Gregotti. There are countless others researching in the area of Deleuze and
architecture, especially around the topics of the Fold and the diagram but Girard’s
work is still today the only continuous book-length inquiry into the subject. The
concept of nomad is championed in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus and
this forms the key concept of Architecture and Nomadic Concepts. But before Girard
can introduce their philosophy into architectural theory he feels the need to clear the
ground of what he sees as its stiffest competition, and that is none other than Philippe
Boudon’s architecturology, so Girard devotes an entire section called
“Architecturology Reconsidered” to this end. Girard’s critique is exhausting in its
detail but it hinges on what he sees as Boudon’s naivety in assuming a strictly
linguistic interpretation of architecture by taking a structuralist approach and then
further assuming that a scientifically certain language can be kept separate from a
doctrinaire language full of metaphors. “Therefore, the metaphor ‘displacement of
concepts’”, writes Girard, “leads to a sort of mise en abyme of the concept of concept
comparable to that which presented the concept of model. Boudon’s meta-theory,
before this theoretical vertigo, will seek out the transcendental security of the system,
which it erects from the mutual implication of the model and the scale in the
representation and conception.” 16

In contrast to Boudon’s positivistic theory of architecture which thinks it can

discover concepts within a fully integrated system, Girard introduces his Deleuzian
theory of nomadic concepts which continuously drift from discipline to discipline

(1990), pp. 79 – 81, “The Politics of Complexity in Architecture”, Journal of Philosophy and the
Visual Arts, no. 6 (1995), pp. 78 – 81 and “Weaponry-Theory: Architecture in an Age of Capitalist
Warlords”, Haecceity Papers, vol. 1, no. 1 (2005) n. p.
16. Architecture et concepts nomads, p. 51. The term “displacement of concepts” used by both Girard
and Boudon has its origin in an essay by Alan Colquhoun, “Displacement of Concepts”,
Architectural Design, vol. 43, no. 4 (April 1972), pp. 236. Here Colquhoun reveals his source for the
term is in turn, Donald A. Schon, Displacement of Concepts (London: Tavistock Publications,
1963).

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denying any systematic mastery because they never stop referring back to a discipline
they came from and this discipline itself is forever changing so it is no help to tract
down its original meaning because that is shifting too. 17 The synthetic ideal of
Vitruvius, who Boudon never fails to mention, is a myth says Girard, the best we can
hope for is to “allow for singular, momentary and heterogeneous planes of reality to
come together and form new planes of consistency beyond any idea of system.” 18
Girard concludes that there is no architectural concept in the positivist sense of the
word, in the sense that it would finally take its place in a finite system, but rather there
are a large number of nomadic architectural concepts that cannot be reduced to poetic
effects but instead allow for the most concrete reality to take place by allowing
elements of subjectivity to mingle with elements of verbalization, conceptualization,
bodily sensations and all the other elements that go towards the construction of
buildings. Architecture is therefore an indiscipline, in other words a heresy.

As an example of a nomadic concept Girard uses Le Corbusier’s well-

documented fondness for oceanliners. If the oceanliner was a positivistic concept
adapted by a systematic discipline we should be able to trace the meaning of the
adopted elements of ships back to their original maritime source without too much
trouble. But as Girard observes, there are no portholes on the Villa Savoye. Girard
continues:

What needs to be documented is the process by which something like an

“oceanlinerity” … acts upon Le Corbusier’s mental universe. Memories, references,
archetypes, sources of formal inspiration, can never be restricted to simple linguistic
analogy. Le Corbusier, but also Patout, Herbst, Mallet-Stevens in the thirties, or more
recently Eisenman, Meier, Rogers, and a host of architects are undergoing a distinctly
“oceanship drive.” They seem to share some kind of deep mood or affects with
whatever is linked to oceanliners. Namely: the sea, the steam machines, the steel ―

17. Note that Architecture and Nomadic Concepts was written in 1986 before Deleuze and Guattari’s
What is Philosophy? came out in 1991, which has a quite different account of the concept, reserving
it purely for philosophical use, while art is restricted to capturing sensations. This casts a shadow on
the very idea of architectural concepts and no one has yet adequately dealt with this inherent
problem for any Deleuzian theories of architectural concepts, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari,
What is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York, Columbia University
Press, 1994).
18. Architecture et concepts nomads, p. 212.

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its smoothness, its sound, its reflection ― the bolts, the whole voyage mood, the idea
of speed. All this combined in various ways represents the “oceanlinerity” and
accounts for much more than a spatial image or configuration to be “metaphorically”
transferred to architecture.19

So despite Le Corbusier’s love of ships there are no portholes on the Villa

Savoye. There is nevertheless a deep feeling for the spirit of the oceanliner when all
these elements come together: the many images of ships in Le Corbusier’s books, the
openness of the roof deck, buildings floating on pilotis etc. Then, as if just to prove
Girard wrong, Rem Koolhaas builds a kind of Villa Savoye at Bordeaux (with Le
Corbusier’s grid of pilotis absorbed into one giant silver piloti, the roof deck now
sandwiched between two floors, the ramp morphing into a platform lift and so on)
only this time it is now absolutely plastered with portholes both big and small. This
house seems to be saying, with Koolhaasian mock humour that disguises a profound
intelligence, Girard is wrong, there are easily traceable transferences from one
discipline to another, and architecture is, despite everything, still a discipline.

Figure 28. Rem Koolhaas: House in Bordeaux, 1994-8

19. “The Oceanship Theory: Architectural Epistemology in Rough Waters”, Journal of Philosophy and
the Visual Arts, no. 2 (1990), pp. 80 – 81

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 The Diversity of Research in Architecture

By Philippe Boudon

Translated by Tim Adams

I will start with what will seem pedantic in the eyes of some and archaic
in the eyes of others by quoting from Vitruvius. 1 The architect should he says,
“be educated, skilful with the pencil, instructed in
geometry, know much history, have followed the
philosophers with attention, understand music, have
some knowledge of medicine, know the opinions of
the jurists and be acquainted with astronomy and the
theory of the heavens.” 2 But is this text so
anachronistic? In the end I do not think so because
you can find echoes of it in an excellent text issued by
the Conseil scientifique supérieur de l'enseignement
de l'architecture [Upper Scientific Council for the Figure 29. Philippe Boudon
Teaching of Architecture] that gives a clear idea
about the reform of architectural education (and on this issue we have not seen
a text like this for a very long time): “Research in architecture is unique on
account of its process of hybridizing competencies and its transversality
between diverse categories of disciplines.” 3

Therefore from Vitruvius up until our time the heterogeneity of the

object of architecture is a structural situation that shows no sign of coming to

1. The source for this translation is Philippe Boudon, “Diversité des recherches en architecture” in
Actes des assises de la recherche, 17-18 June 1996 (Paris: Ministère de la culture et de la
communication, direction des Affaires générales, Mission de la recherche et de la technologie, 1997)
p.113-118.
2. Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Morris Hicky Morgan (New York: Dover
Publications, 1960), pp. 5-6.
3. Conseil scientifique supérieur de l'enseignement de l'architecture, Avis et propositions concernant le
projet de réforme des études d'architecture (29 April 1996). [Upper Scientific Council for the
Teaching of Architecture, Notification and Propositions Concerning the Project for the Reform of
Architectural Studies]

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an end. Therefore it is better to take this heterogeneity as a given and try to

examine its consequences, which is the approach I shall take here.

1. The First Consequence

The first consequence is the lack of legibility of research. This poses such
a problem for architectural research that when it comes to the object of the
research it is often asked: “what is it?” Such a question is deeply troubling
(unless every problem has been solved in the best possible world of
architecture, in which one case we would not need to conduct any research),
and can best be explained by the heterogeneity of the object of which I have
just spoken. And this question is asked so often that it is rare to hear it
answered or even the reasons for it being asked investigated.

Do we say that architecture is the study of the human habitat? In that case
there is the excellent laboratory of the Centre de recherche sur l'habitat
[Research Centre on the Habitat] at the Paris-la-Défense school. Or do we say
that it is about computer applications in the design process of architecture?
We can see this in the works of the Gamsau 4 group at the Marseille school.
And this application of computers, does it lead naturally to the digital
modelling of the existing works of architecture, to an inventory of
architectural heritage for example or indeed to the computer simulation of
buildings now gone, or does it mean moving towards the rationalization of
realization, for example the remarkable work conducted by the Crai 5 group at
Nancy on the technological fabrication of projects? Or perhaps the
organization of trades on building sites such as for the making of the pyramid
at the Louvre for example? Or does it lead to the simulation of sun paths and
lighting, of which the course offered at the Louvre is a fine example? Finally
does it lead to the order of an epistemological research as it concerns the
computer’s effect on architectural conception (not only a problem of
manufacturing but scientific problems as well, which Dominique Lecourt
spoke of yesterday).

4. Translator’s note: Groupe de recherche pour l’application des méthodes scientifiques à

l’architecture et à l’urbanisme (Research Group for the Application of Scientific Methods to
Architecture and Urbanism).
5. Translator’s note: Centre de recherche en architecture et ingénierie [Research Centre for
Architecture and Engineering].

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Not only are habitat, heritage, construction, site, cathedrals and new
cities the objects of research, but also social space for example, the topic for
sociologists and the laboratory of the architecture school at Paris-la-Villette.
As Henri Raymond once asked, “on whose behalf do we speak when we talk
about architecture?” And the question still needs to be asked. I will not list all
the topics for research since they are already listed in the Directory of
Research. 6

It is not hard to imagine that the first consequence of such diversity and
heterogeneity of topics would lead to problems of the lack of legibility of the
architectural research. One can equally imagine, and this often poses problems
for researchers, that there would be a problem getting adequate recognition for
the institutions conducting such research. This was clearly enunciated by the
comments of the two preceding participants. 7

2. The Second Consequence

The second consequence is the need for “interdisciplinarity” (and not just
an interdisciplinarity of method). This is a double problem because I believe
that there can be no interdisciplinarity without there first being disciplines,
just as there can be no bridge without two shores to cross. The problem of the
interdisciplinarity is therefore also a problem of disciplinarity.

The problem therefore is how to specify a uniquely architectural

discipline: Laréa for its part works on one of them called architecturology. 8
Here I believe it is fair to say that if something like a new discipline ― or
disciplines ― have appeared in the last twenty years they are without doubt
disciplines constituted in the area of the science of conception, which either
lapse into “poietic” research, and this is what occupies the laboratory at the
Lille school of architecture, or flows into what one could call “cognitive”
research, and this is the aim of architecturology, or else becomes a kind of
“sociological” research when architectural conception is taken to be a process

6. Annuaire des formations de recherche dans les écoles d'architecture, 1994/1997, MATET-DAU
(Marseille: diffusion Parenthèses, 1995).
7. Translator’s note: Philippe Aigrain, Bernard Haumont and Gérald Krafft also made contributions to
the June 1996 “Assises de la recherché” conference.
8. Translator’s note: Laréa is the Laboratoire d'architecturologie et de recherché en épistémologie sur
l'architecture (Laboratory for Architecturology and Epistemological Research on Architecture) that
Philippe Boudon directs at the Paris-La Villette school of architecture.

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of negotiation and decision-making between various agents. Here I refer to the

special issue entitled “To Conceive” of the Cahiers de la recherche
architecturale. 9 This includes a good selection of the work done on design
research.

Concerning the problem of interdisciplinarity with other disciples I will

only give one quite significant example: the laboratories for the research of
ambiances conducted at the Masters level by Cresson 10 at Grenoble and
Cerma 11 at Nantes, whose topic of ambiance brings together the analysis of
phenomena that consist simultaneously of physical dimensions (aerodynamic,
acoustic, thermal, luminous etc.) and dimensions of use and perception. One
could go so far as to say that this is an example of a “second degree
interdisciplinarity” since it is clearly an interdepartmental interdisciplinarity
according to CNRS’s categories of SHS and SPI. 12

Another interdisciplinary example: the unexpected but productive

collaboration between philosophy and morphology in the quantitative analysis
of the system of bays and facades of 19th century buildings conducted by the
Laboratoire d'analyse des formes [Laboratory of the Analysis of Forms] at the
Lyon school of architecture. When faced with such diversity and such
complexity any talk about an “architectural research” in the singular would
seem to be reductive and scientifically untenable. It is better to speak ― as I
believe more and more researchers are themselves doing ― of “research in
architecture” (all the same let me add in parentheses that the term architectural
discipline in my opinion conforms to a scientifically untenable fetishization
that could be seriously questioned in favour of a plural “sciences of
architecture”, just as one talks about the “sciences of language” for example).

9. “Concevoir”, Cahiers de la recherche architecturale, no. 34 (1994).

10. Translator’s note: Centre de recherche sur l’espace sonore et l’environment urbain (Centre for
Research on Acoustic Space and the Urban Environment).
11. Translator’s note: Centre de recherche méthodologique d’architecture (Centre for the
Methodological Research of Architecture).
12. Translator’s note: The CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique: National Centre for
Scientific Research) is a major sponsor of research in France, funding projects under such diverse
categories as SHS (sciences de l’homme et de la société: Human and Social Sciences) and SPI
(sciences pour l’ingénieur: Engineering Sciences).

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3. The Temporality of the Research Process

The last effect of the relative complexity of the architectural object,

which is due to its heterogeneity on the one hand and its consequential
interdisciplinarity on the other, is the need to see it as something existing in
time, because research is a process that depends for a substantial part of its
meaning on being a cumulative process. And not only does the architectural
object have a long duration it is also a current event, which can then put
accumulation into question and favour a more ephemeral approach.

To give an idea of the kind of complexity that researchers must deal with,
take for example the theme of habitat. It is not hard to imagine that such
research must investigate, in parallel, something like the social, cultural and
functional invariants of habitat in order to achieve a stable and cumulative
knowledge of the subject. But at the same time we know that the building’s
context (buildings age and change) and its social aspects (leading to the larger
theme of exclusion that can’t be avoided today) require an almost constant
updating of the task of research. And what is valid for the theme of habitat is
obviously quite valid for other topics as well. Research has therefore to be
considered as a process in evolution, and this explains the need for both a
constant process of up-dating research and at the same time the need for
stability within the teams of researchers without whom the research would not
be done.

Now it seems to me, particularly in the domain of architecture, that the

tension between the short-term vision of the profession and the longer
temporality needed by research to accumulate knowledge is often the cause of
conflicts that could be avoided if there was more awareness of these
differences in temporalities. This is without doubt one of the principal reasons
behind the common lack of understanding of research among architectural
professionals, some of whom even suffer under the heavy burden of having to
negate any idea of research.

4. The Four Poles that Mark Out Research

To conclude: faced with so much diversity and heterogeneity how can we

nevertheless bring some clarity into the discussion? It seems to me that the
traditional categories, which are quite naturally tools for the management of

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personnel, notably through university disciplines, are sometimes a kind of

“bed of Procrustes” for the structuring of research in architecture. For my part
in order to epistemologically mark out research in architecture I would not use
the various university disciplines to account for the unique complexity of this
domain. I recently proposed an outline that located four poles of research in
the architectural domain. Located on the circumference of a circle these poles
are conception, representation, production, and reception.

Conception: architecture would not exist if it was not first conceived,

when it is taken as conceived it is seen as something undergoing cognitive,
artistic and social processes as well. Conception presupposes some kind of
representation: which covers everything from the pencil to the computer.
Next it is produced through processes of production: complying with for
example technology, economics and many other things. Finally it is perceived,
lived-in and used, all the things that can be placed under the pole of reception.

Accordingly, researchers work on one or other of the poles, and this has
the advantage that they belong to the same discipline regardless of whether the
researcher is a sociologist or a computer scientist, but they don’t do the same
thing as a sociologist or a computer scientist when they are located on another
pole. 13

In conclusion I believe that research in architecture needs to accept such

a diversity of the disciplinary views coming from problematics that emerge
from both within and from outside of architecture ― I talked about
conception, a latecomer in the epistemological landscape ― as the latest of
the intradisciplinary renewals.

Among these renewals I will give one more example, from a domain that
I have yet to mention since it is so “established” and that is the history of
architecture. The question of the “relation of typologies to particular works of
architecture” that the Laboratoire d'histoire de l'architecture contemporaine
[Laboratory for the History of Contemporary Architecture] at Nancy
addresses is a good example to show that even with the oldest and the most
established discipline there is a place for new problematics to emerge in the

13. This outline was created by Philippe Deshayes’ contribution to architecturology where he
demonstrated how the diversity of research relating to architecture could be distributed on certain
poles, providing that such an outline is complicated with a diversity of possible relations between
the poles.

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university, the product of numerous and fruitful collaborations between

researchers in the university and researchers in architecture. 14

It is necessary to add two more domains if only for the sake of keeping
my concern for the legibility of research in mind: neither research on the city,
which is notably illustrated by numerous analytical works called “typo-
morphological”, nor the technical research conducted on the relationship
between architecture and construction, suffer from the lack of legibility so
naturally one finds them quite acceptable. Two issues of Cahiers de la
recherche architecturale are dedicated to this idea. 15

But these generally accepted areas of research need to be questioned at

the epistemological level just as much as any other kind of research. The
architectural object does not in fact have the same status in these two cases so
the problem of legibility is again raised, only this time on an epistemological
level.

For the diverse kinds of research according to which architecture is

either: the terrain of study, the domain to be studied, a theme or a scientific
object, architecture does not hold the same status in each case. It would help
therefore to distinguish between registers of research according to whether
they are either applicationist, hermeneutic or axiomatic, so that research
would have need of an epistemological dimension. 16 But that would require
more space than is available and besides, that is not our topic for today.

14. F. Hamon et W. Szambien, “Qui a peur de l'histoire de l'architecture ?” in Histoire de l'art, no. 31,
(October 1995).
15. “Cultures constructives” Cahiers de la recherche architecturale, no. 29 (1992) and “Ville et
Architecture” Cahiers de la recherche architecturale, no.s 32-33 (1993).
16. Cf. Philippe Boudon, “Recherche fondamentale en architecture” in Architecture et comportement,
vol. 5 (October 1989).

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 Architecture and Nomadic Concepts
A Treatise of Indiscipline
(Excerpt)

By Christian Girard

Translated by Tim Adams

Conclusion

The concepts that architecture borrows are never fully integrated into a
system that can guarantee their coherency with the new object they define;
they continue to nomadize between architecture and the disciplines that they
left behind. 1 Architectural concepts are deeply
ingrained in architectural thought in order to perform
tasks that are as various as they are contradictory, by
responding to theoretical demands they are used both
as means for exploration and legitimation. In short,
they are simultaneously and inseparably concept-
metaphors for thought and precepts for action. And
concepts which have long been used in architectural
discourse – concepts such as proportion, scale,
composition, character, planning, etc. – are no better Figure 30. Christian Girard.

captured, isolated, or modelled by the so-called theoretical discourses.

Therefore architectural concepts are forever left to drift.

With the hypothesis of concept-metaphors, or better still nomadic

concepts, we have pointed out instances that are active in architectural thought
today, in architects’ thoughts about the “project” and in the formulations they
adopt in their discourse, as well as in the critical texts on architecture by non-
architects (critics and art historians). In fact categories used by architectural
critics are often due to such instances that are then absorbed into their
thinking. When architectural discourse believes it has constituted concepts of
its own, for example categories coming from the analytical instruments of
linguistics or semiology, they are in fact already redeployed and engaged for

1. The source for this translation is Christian Girard, Architecture et concepts nomads: Traité
d’indiscipline (Brussels: Pierre Mardaga, 1986), pp. 211-215.

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not entirely conceptual deployments. Syntax, metaphor, rhetoric, etc. are

never “pure concepts”; they escape the determination of a single conceptual
system which is situated elsewhere in their original fields.

The hypothesis of nomadic concepts does not produce a grid for reading
architecture, it does not offer any analytical instrument that can then be
exploited by the discipline. Quite the opposite, the hypothesis claims that such
grids are of no use here, architecture refuses to be subjected to the imposition
of any such system. The project, which does indeed have its moments of
excessive rationalization, requires the establishment of so many relations and
recoveries between disparate and sometimes incongruous elements that it
denies itself the possibility of any systematic mastery. It can not be
assimilated into some kind of synthesis of all the different kinds of knowledge
utilised by architecture. The synthetic ideal of the architect as a craftsman of a
supposed synthesis of knowledge according to the model established during
the Renaissance has a mythical function only. Nomadic concepts do not form
a synthesis but allow for singular, momentary and heterogeneous planes of
reality to come together and form new planes of consistency beyond any idea
of system.

Take the notion of type for example, which could be considered to be

among the most rigorous concepts conceptualised in architecture and which
has the invaluable advantage of reconnecting architecture with social and
economic dimensions. So-called typological analysis offered a means of
connecting the formal characteristics of the built environment with its
historical and economic conditions, with its social practice, and ultimately
with its mode of production. Has not type been defined as the “place par
excellence where the articulations between structures and different cultural
and ideological levels are elaborated”? 2

But if one looks a little deeper type as a rational operative concept has
already undergone a shift towards a more poetic usage, as Anthony Vidler has
noted, “type became not merely a method of taxonomic analysis – no longer
simply a continuation of nineteenth century natural science – but a poetic.” 3
Even an air of mysticism has become attached to the notion due to the
overestimation of its possible virtues, as shown by the architect who believes

2. Bernard Huet, “Modèles Culturels et architecture”, p. 34. [Translator’s note: I can find no source for
this article in Girard’s book or elsewhere.]
3. Anthony Vidler, “On Type”, in Skyline (January 1979). p. 2.

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that a sufficiently elaborated typological decomposition would reveal a

timeless abstraction (for example the house as an absolute type beyond any
particular context or period) and permit the production an architectural object
per se, which is in fact the reverse, the misappropriation of a precise moment
in architectural history as an immutable fixity (nothing is more paradoxical
than this reduction to a circumscribed period, and in the end, to a particular
architectural style in the typological works of someone like Leon Krier).

By reversing the relation between metaphor and concept – the metaphor

no longer being referred to the concept but the concept to the metaphor – by
abandoning the criteria of system as the ultimate jurisdiction over the quality
of theoretical discourse, by showing how enunciations exceed the antagonisms
between subject and object and can therefore produce assemblages that bring
planes of theorization together with affective planes, and how architectural
thought in harmony with nomadic concepts can interpret fragments of
disciplines or even entire disciplines while at the same time increasing its own
autonomy, we have proposed a different course of architectural theory
liberated from positivistic schemas as well as the incessant recourse to the
ideology of an art/science alliance.

One can still hope, it seems, to benefit from the call to the poetic and
from Heidegger’s two texts that are untiringly repeated every time the poetic
is mentioned in architectural discourse. 4 And therefore no longer accord pre-
eminence to the perspectival space inherited from the Renaissance which has
vision dominating all the other senses, nor is there any need to go through
Freud, nor to make any pleas for a return to the body or to nature, “the body
must be re-appropriated and reintegrated with the space through which it
moves. Nature must be restored to and re-learned by the body.” 5 Because
nature of course does not exist in this cleaved form, it is neither artificial nor
natural but always and everywhere a composition of the two, and for
architecture, where anthropomorphism is so obviously fundamental, the body
has never been absent.

The idea of nomadic concepts furthermore calls for a revision of the

4. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row,
1971). The two essays are “Building Dwelling Thinking” (pp. 143-161) and “...Poetically Man
Dwells …” (pp. 211-229).
5. Françoise Choay, The Rule and the Model: On the Theory of Architecture and Urbanism. Edited by
Denise Bratton (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), p. 285.

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relationship between theory and scientific method, between theory and

doctrine. To think that theory can detach itself from doctrine by simply stating
that this is the case is not enough. It is certainly necessary to separate the two
kinds of discourses on the field of intentionality and on the field of the
concept-metaphors as well, theory would then recognise this fact, its
irretrievable autonomy to doctrine due to it responding to a directing will,
whether organizing or positive. Doctrine would then be the use of nomadic
concepts, a fact which it eventually becomes conscious of and accepts its
dependence on them. Theory is an amused look at concept-metaphors,
doctrine is blind to them, but these metaphors are too pejorative for doctrine to
admit to since it alone is often called upon to act as a scientific theory.

As for the idea of architectural autonomy, the possibility of explaining

the discipline in its own terms, this is no less problematic. A discipline is no
longer in general an autonomous system of concepts but ultimately a place for
the production of regulated concepts constantly crisscrossed by nomadic
concepts, a field of coexistence for multiplicities that can doubtless partially
“systematize” but never in a manner that is complete and totalising.

It is no longer a question of knowing what status to give architecture, of

knowing what status it has the right to objectively give itself, nor of knowing
if it can in return give something for reflection to other forms of knowledge
and other disciplines. It has no model to propose, the only pseudo-paradigm
that it could propose or could draw into his vicinity would be the essential
impossibility of all transdisciplinary paradigms. Architecture does not accept
rationality from elsewhere and does not reformulate anything for itself other
than the practical rationalities of legitimation and internal consensus in the
form of rules, conventions, laws and norms that allow it to justly discipline
itself. Therefore one of the best contemporary “theoreticians” Peter Eisenman
boldly confesses, “without a discipline, how do you yourself know that you
are making architecture?”6 an involuntary play on words – on the term
discipline ― how without rules, without laws or precepts, norms or principles,
can one be sure that they are doing architecture and not something else
(“construction” for example). This is the principle anguish of people like

6. Peter Eisenman, “Discussion with Philip Johnson” in Skyline (February 1982), pages. 14-17, p. 15.
“It seems to me that without some sort of discipline – call it language or rules – but with instead a
merely capricious freedom, you may never be able to know how to make architecture because no
one will be able to speak or write and no one will be able to understand what is written. Therefore
we may have to find some way of defining architecture other than through absolute freedom.”

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Eisenman who dedicate themselves to architectural theory, an anguish that

practically defines their theoretical attitude. Discipline is the order word that
accompanies the compulsion to theorize. But this is not to question whether
architecture can produce its own concepts, there is no architectural concept in
the positive sense of the word, on the contrary, there is a large quantity of
properly architectural nomadic concepts, and for this reason it has no need to
envy other practices of knowledge that are richly endowed with concepts.

From this point of view, does not the analogy between architecture and
language that is both current and at the same time often criticized and
denounced now seem quite innocent? It is disparaged for not being scientific
enough and for being epistemologically ungrounded. But it, among others,
definitively ought to be exempted from these reactive and normative
judgements, from these anachronistic verdicts. The linguistic analogy can
proceed from local, punctual and infinitesimal movements, born out of
projectation, the very requirements of architectural practice itself, and appear
theoretically valid when placed under the sign of nomadic concepts. Discourse
is not necessarily insufficient when it fails to deliver results that are integral
with a logic of sense, the analogy remains a process in which its finality does
not coincide with the closure of a system. To say: “this building is
metaphorically an ocean liner” is a statement that should not be confronted by
a criterion of scientific truth or be taken hostage by a scientific view. This is
not the point upon which its theoretical character is decided.

Figures 31 and 32. Le Corbusier: sketches 670 and 671 of Carnet C.10 (1932-33),
Fondation Le Corbusier archives.

Nevertheless, using these analogies and metaphors architecture gives

itself a discourse that is rendered smooth by nomadic concepts and animated

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by sudden eruptions of transdisciplinary sympathy, for which it would be a

mistake to reduce to poetic effects. The most concrete reality takes place there
as the investment of a desubjectivised subject, objectivised in a machinic
flight that makes relative verbalization and conceptualization interfere with
corporeal and sensational assemblages. It is the same necessity that drives
Gregotti to talk about “territories of architecture”, Eisenman to comment on
“deep structure”, Kahn to celebrate “silence” or the “project’s desire to be
built” and brings Le Corbusier to evoke ocean liners and to draw a cross
section of the Titanic, and all of them to invent neologisms. The nomadic
concept is not a mental category in the strict sense of the word, a timeless
Kantian category of thought in general, but a pragmatico-anthropological
given.

Figure 33. Le Corbusier: cross-section of the Titanic, Fondation Le Corbusier archives no.
27975, undated.

Of course it is not because these analogical and metaphorical acts of

thought, these borrowings and misappropriations that oscillate between a
conceptualization that is never attained and a metaphorization that is never
complete, have been theorised that they have by this simple fact been
whitened and exempted from any original taint by passage to the mythical
level of meta-discourse or meta-language. One does not exempt them so they
would be more productive, more useful and more effective in the project,
because the argument from practice is quite weak. No, they are the project
itself and not only the architectural project. It is none other than the
project/processes of knowledge as it develops and is accomplished in every
domain, in those practices that seem unable rise above the level of practical

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know-how as much as those that attain the highest prestige in the chapters of
science.

Retrospectively what good are the precautions, the prudence, the denials
and other gestures of partition made by architectural epistemology that goes
under the name of “architecturology”, always being careful to keep its
distance from what it identifies as an analogical approach, always guardian of
an epistemological virtue that even it has to admit has only an illusory
character. But what one calls architecturology should certainly not hide the
incomparably more futile attitudes of discourses that believe themselves
rehabilitated in their very incoherence. For those discourses that appear to
follow a less hypnotic path than the one demanded by epistemology, once
again question the ideal of scientific truth, even more than architecturology
ever did, but they are incapable of judging the extent to which this regressive
complex is actually reproduced within them.

The system of borrowing/analogy and the obligatory deformations/

misappropriations that this implies, far from being specific to architecture and,
why not, to art as well, as the certain desire to have a clear conscience in
difficult times, all the while recovering a little bit of autonomy and specificity
wherever it can and to finally make a home for itself, in fact applies to all
forms of knowledge. But this observation does not constitute a principle of
generalized levelling of everything to the same. The model of rationalist rigor
is not at all abolished in the way that a too quick or too literal reading of
contemporary epistemologies can lead us to believe. For the production of
architectural knowledge it is necessary to accept that other models and other
procedures accompany it, double it, and sometimes contradict it.

We content ourselves with being blind to what is under our very noses:
that autonomy is already achieved once the word (or the nomadic concept?)
“architecture” enters the world. Not only is the question no longer important
and without object but the eventual access of architecture to an objective and
positive knowledge of itself historically no longer needs to be posed. For this
regime is only one facet of a more general regime of indiscipline that fills the
gap made by every discursive practice that desires to call itself a “discipline”,
just as it fills the gap of each nondiscursive practice desperately trying to give
itself a theory based on the model of a conception of theory that is henceforth
obsolete.

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Furthermore, the epistemological cut has no chance of happening in

architecture. Architects would be the last to understand that according to the
ironic formula of two American anthropologists, “the cargo cult of the ‘about
to arrive science’ just wont do”? 7 At least it seems that those who are faithful
to the ideology of the failure of scientific discourse will have plenty of fellow
believers.

Figure 34. Christian Girard’s house in Paris, 2003.

7. Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan, Interpretive Social Science (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1978, 2nd ed. 1986).

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 SECTION 4
AN ESSAY ON ARCHITECTURE BY
FRANCE’S MOST CONTROVERSIAL WRITER

Figure 35. The dust cover of Michel Houellebecq's novel The Possibility of an Island, 2005.

Introduction to Houellebecq

When the French-domiciled English author Andrew Hussey visited Michel

Houellebecq in his seedy council-flat near the Boucicuat metro station in 1996,
Houellebecq was a computer administrator with a minor reputation as a writer of
melancholic poems about the meaninglessness of contemporary life. 1 In the corner of
the room, says Hussey, was a pile of dog-eared papers that Houellebecq told Hussey
would either make him famous or destroy him. This became the best-selling novel in
France for 1999, Les Particulars élémentaires, and a hit across the world in
translation (translated as Atomised in England and The Elementary Particles in the
US). The dust-cover blurb quotes Julian Barnes’ review for the Times Literary
Supplement saying, “A novel which hunts big game while others settle for shooting
rabbit”. On this rare occasion the hype is right because as every reader of
Houellebecq will agree, he is a novelist of ideas. These are challenging and pertinent
ideas with a profundity that leads to articles being written on Houellebecq in

1. This account of Houellebecq before he became famous is found in Andrew Hussey, Paris: The
Secret History (London: Penguin Books, 2006), pp 427 – 428.

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philosophy and literature journals. 2

Houellebecq is so well known in France that he is often compared to Albert

Camus and the adjective houellebecquien is used to mean someone who has a
depressingly cynical view of the world around them. Most commentators notice an
unusual feature of Houellebecq’s style of writing; it is almost impossible to separate
his fiction, the character and plot development, from Houellebecq’s own social and
political commentary that takes the form of polemical monologues which continually
break out from the context of the story. So to take one example from the epilogue to
Atomised where the narrator is speaking to us from the year 2079 we can read, “It is
also a measure of how little the public understood or cared about philosophy. The
global ridicule inspired by the works of Foucault, Lacan, Derrida and Deleuze, after
decades of reverence, far from leaving the field clear for new ideas, simply heaped
contempt on all those who were active in ‘human sciences.’” 3 And this hints at a
theme that runs throughout all of Houellebecq’s novels; the apparently liberating
philosophies of the ’68 generation actually led to personal despair and loneliness,
only punctuated by the ever decreasing possibility for sexual fulfilment, note there are
a lot of pornographic scenes described in Houellebecq’s books. Another parallel
theme is that the so-called sexual liberation emerging from America in the 60s was
nothing more than the extension of the market into our private lives, so just as in
capitalism there is a small number of capitalists who acquire large amounts of capital
while the majority become slaves to the job market, so in the sexual market a few
young and attractive people have varied and fulfilling sex lives while the majority are
starved of sex and left to masturbate. This sexual-political-economic theory is most
clearly stated in Houellebecq’s first novel, Extension du domaine de la lutte (The
Extension of the Domain of Struggle, translated as Whatever) but it runs through all
his work:

In societies like ours sex truly represents a second system of differentiation,

completely independent of money; and as a system of differentiation it functions
just as mercilessly. The effect of these two systems are, furthermore, strictly
equivalent. Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons,
sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization. Some men make
love every day; others five or six times in their lives, or never. Some make love

2. See in particular, Martin Ryle, “Surplus Consciousness: Houellebecq’s Novels of Ideas”, Radical
Philosophy, no. 126 (July-August 2004), pp. 23 – 31 and Katherine Gantz, “Strolling with
Houellebecq: The Textual Terrain of Postmodern Flânerie, Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 28,
no. 3 (Spring 2005), pp. 149 – 160.
3. Michel Houellebecq, Atomised, trans. Frank Wynn (London: William Heinemann, 2000), p. 376.

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with dozens of women; others with none. It’s known as “the law of the market.” 4

Houellebecq therefore proposes credible philosophical and political theories

throughout the course of his novels. Along with pornographic scenes, Houellebecq
sometimes includes unpleasant racial and misogynist statements. His third novel,
Platform for example, which is about sex tourism in Thailand, includes many
derogatory comments about Muslims. Near the end of the novel when Valerie and the
lead character Michel finally seem contented and start to make plans for the future,
Valerie is killed by an Islamic bomb attack on a beachfront restaurant they are sitting
in. When Houellebecq was later questioned about this in a published interview it
became clear that the sentiments expressed in the book were actually those of
Houellebecq himself. This led to a case being brought against him by the Muslim
community in Paris but he was acquitted in October of 2002 on the grounds that he
was criticising a belief and not inciting hatred against a people. That very month, with
an uncanny resemblance to the bombing described in the book written three years
earlier, the Bali bombing took place, the worst ever in Indonesia, killing 202 mostly
Australian tourists. Therefore it is no exaggeration to label Houellebecq France’s
most controversial writer.

Houellebecq’s biography helps explain his hatred of everything the liberal 60s
represents including the philosophers of the ’68 generation like Foucault and
Deleuze. 5 He was born in 1958 on the French island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean
east of Madagascar. There his father was a mountain guide and his mother an
anaesthetist. They lived a dissolute hippy lifestyle and abandoned the young Michel
at the age of six to his communist grandmother who lived on the outskirts of Paris.
His grandmother died when he was 20. Then at 22 he received his degree in
agricultural engineering and married for the first time. One year later they had a son,
Etienne, but Houellebecq suffered long-term unemployment and they were divorced
after four years of marriage in 1985. This is when Houellebecq suffered from
depression and needed psychiatric care. He finally found work as a computer
administrator for the French National Assembly. He had already begun writing poetry
when he was twenty and this led to his first published collection of poems in 1992
called La poursuite du bonheur (The Pursuit of Happiness) for which he was awarded
the Prix Tristan Tzara. His first novel, Extension du domaine de la lutte (Whatever)
came out in 1994. This was followed in 1998 by a collection of critical texts called
Interventions, from which comes the essay on architecture included in translation

4. Michel Houellebecq, Whatever, trans. Paul Hammond (London: Serpent's Tail, 1999), p. 99.
5. This biography is based on the one available at Michelle Levy’s “Michel Houellebecq Friends”
website at http://www.houellebecq.info/english.php3, accessed 12 October 2002.

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below, and in the same year his second novel, Atomised, which as already mentioned
was the top-selling novel in France for 1999. Also in 1998 he married Marie-Pierre
Gauthier. Later novels include: Platform in 1999, Lanzarote in 2000, and The
Possibility of an Island in 2005.

It is unusual to include an essay by a novelist in a collection of architectural

theories but, as we will see, Houellebecq is in fact a very astute critic of
contemporary architecture who intuitively picks up existing theories of architecture
and develops them in unexpectedly new ways. For example his theme of dislocation
closely echoes the argument we found in Goetz’s book La Dislocation. Both see
dislocation as an unavoidable fact of the current human condition, the difference
being that Goetz sees dislocation as a constant property of space itself to divide into
inside and outside, while Houellebecq sees dislocation as something that is being
greatly accelerated by the extension of the market into every sphere of our lives,
aided and abetted by modern architecture. And the contrast Houellebecq makes
between contemporary art and architecture takes up and extends Payot’s discussion of
Walter Benjamin’s idea that, other than its image, we cannot frame architecture itself
and put it on the wall because it is something that must be traversed and apprehended
as a tactile immersive spatial experience. But whereas Benjamin and Payot see the
experience of architecture as potentially revolutionary because it can modify the
habits of the collective especially when they are distracted and not thinking about it,
Houellebecq gives architecture a more negative role in the dislocation of the human
condition. We can treat art with contempt he says, and then simply laugh it off and
walk away but we cannot treat architecture with the same contempt because it has the
power to effect us negatively on a physical level, as can be seen by the painful
expressions on the faces of tourists lost in a business district surrounded by dense
traffic and impenetrable glass facades on every corner.

Houellebecq sees architecture as a form of social control. Architecture he says

makes shelves for stacking people as if they were themselves supermarket
commodities to be used and discarded by the market economy as it extends further
and further into a market society. All relationships, whether erotic, amorous, or
professional are now reduced to a universal exchange value. This is a rather
pessimistic view of contemporary life and architecture but it does explain the
increased divorce rate and the increasingly part-time and short-term nature of
employment, which is becoming the norm in the age of neoliberalism and
“monetarist” economic policy that now dominates the Western World. Houellebecq
takes up and extends the 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s

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view that everything is either will or representation. 6 The will for Schopenhauer is a
force of nature that drives us to find food, shelter, a mate and have the desire to be
powerful. But today this will is now divided, and therefore dissipated, amongst a
multitude of consumer goods and this leads us to lassitude, wariness and depression.
It is hard to dismiss this theory given that the taking of anti-depressants and the
suicide rate go up despite the increased level of affluence in industrialised market-
driven economies.

Houellebecq makes good use of his background in computers to give us a brief

history of information technology, which concludes by observing that despite the
ubiquity of personal computers the book has made a surprising comeback and it is in
books that we will find a way out of the disarray of the market society. This is
because the book calls for readers to be stable subjects able to think and to feel.
Books can only be appreciated slowly and thoughtfully allowing us to step outside the
flows of advertising and to help us find points for locating the self. We might argue
that theories of architecture do the same thing. Theories call out to architects and
allow them to momentarily stand outside the everyday budgetary constraints, the
doctrines of the State, and the consultant’s and client’s demands and desires, and
engage their own imaginations in a field of experimentation.

As a kind of illustration of Houellebecq’s theory of architecture there is a

Chinese artist called Wang Qingsong who creates large photographs of theatrical
scenes, tableaux vivants depicting the massive changes taking place in China as it
moves rapidly towards a market economy. 7 One is called Dormitory. It shows the
same extension of the market into our private lives that is depicted in the novels and
essays of Michel Houellebecq. In both cases architecture is reduced to the building of
shelves for the social supermarket. Neoliberalism and global capitalism spread their
tentacles into every facet of contemporary life and we are left in a state where
derision of the disarray is no longer any fun. But from this formless dissolution of the
community there is the groundless ground of being-in-common, the shared
experience of the lack of singular value that is the catalyst for the interruption of
production, the unworking of work that Jean-Luc Nancy has shown to be the source
of a new “inoperative community” capable of creating its own singular values and
this is just what we are seeing in the new art form China, from people like Wang
Qingsong.

6. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York:
Dover Publications, 1966).
7. See Wang Qingsong’s website at http://www.wangqingsong.com/ visited 12 March 2007.

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Figure 36. Dormitory by the Chinese photographer Wang Qingsong 2005

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 Approaches to the Disarray
By Michel Houellebecq

Translated by Tim Adams

I fight against ideas I am not even sure exist.

Antoine Waechter

Contemporary Architecture as a Vector in the Acceleration of

Dislocation

That the general public doesn’t like contemporary art is well know. 1 But
this banal observation confuses two quite different attitudes. When the
average passer-by finds themselves by chance in a place where contemporary
paintings or sculptures are displayed, they will only
stop if they want to mock the works of art. Their
attitude will alternate between ironic amusement and
treating the art as a complete joke, in which case
they will feel a certain amount of derision. The
insignificance attached to what has been presented is
taken to be a reassuring guarantee of its
harmlessness. Certainly it was a waste of time but in
the end not one that was too disagreeable. But when
the same passer-by encounters a work of
contemporary architecture it is very unlikely that
Figure 37. Michel Houellebecq.
they will want to laugh. Under certain conditions
(for example late at night when police sirens are blearing) an acceleration of
all the bodily secretions can be observed, a phenomenon typical of anguish. In
any case the rate of activity of the organs of vision and the limbs of
locomotion will be significantly increased.

So when a tourist coach gets lost in a maze of foreign signs and

transports its passengers to the banking district of Segovia or the business
district of Barcelona, the visitors will find themselves in a universe of glass,
steel and information. They instantly set out at a fast pace, their eyes fixed in

1. The source for this translation is Michel Houellebecq, “Approches du désarroi” in Michel
Houellebecq, Interventions (Paris: Flammarion, 1998), pp. 57-80.

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the direction of the desired environment. Using maps and landmarks they soon
reach the cathedral district, the historical heart of the city. Then, just as
quickly, they slow down, their eye movements become random, almost
erratic. A certain look of stupefied amazement appears on their faces (the
open mouth typical of American tourists). Apparently they are in the presence
of a strange, complex and indecipherable object. Messages instantly appear on
the walls however, the historico-cultural markers erected by the local tourist
bureau. Our travellers can then take out their video cameras and record the
memory of their dislocation in an orientated cultural journey.

Contemporary architecture is a modest architecture, it does not express

its autonomous presence, its presence is due to discrete winks as much as it is
due to the architecture – in general, micro-messages advertising the
techniques of its construction (making the machinery of the elevator clearly
visible along with the manufacturer’s name for example).

Contemporary architecture is a functional architecture, aesthetic

questions concerning architecture have long since been eradicated by the
formula, “what is functional must also be beautiful”. This is surprisingly
narrow-minded given that it is perpetually contradicted by the spectacle of
nature, prompting us instead to see beauty as a kind of revenge on reason. If
the forms of nature please the eye it is often because they serve no purpose
and answer to no perceptible law of necessity. They reproduce with a
luxuriance and a richness that seems to be driven by the simple desire to
reproduce, an internal force which can be described as simply the desire to be,
which to be honest is not very well understood (think of the burlesque
inventiveness and repulsiveness of the animal world), a force that is
nonetheless blindingly obvious. It is true that certain forms of inanimate
nature (crystals, clouds, hydrographic systems, etc.) appear to obey the law of
thermodynamic optimization when in fact they are more complex and
ramified than that. They suggest a chaotic overflowing of a process rather than
any operation of a rational machine.

Optimised to constitute places so functional that they become invisible,

contemporary architecture is a transparent architecture. Having to facilitate
the rapid circulation of individuals and goods, it tends to reduce space to
purely geometrical dimensions. Intended for an uninterrupted flow of textual,
visual and iconic messages, it must ensure their maximum legibility (only a
perfectly transparent space is likely to guarantee the transmission of

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information without loss). Subjected to the unbending rule of consensus, the

only permanent messages authorised will be those which are limited to the
role of objective information. Thus the content of the immense billboards
bordering motorways is subjected to an in-depth feasibility study. Many
surveys are carried out in order to avoid shocking certain categories of road
users. Social psychologists and specialists in road safety are consulted. All
this leads to signs in the style of the “Auxerre” or “Les lacs” billboards.

The Gare Montparnasse train station forms such an architecture,

transparent and without mystery. It establishes a necessary and sufficient
distance between the screens displaying the arrival and departure times and
the electronic ticket-dispensing machines. It gives directions to the departure
and arrival platforms with sufficient redundancy to enable a Westerner of
average or better intelligence to carry out their objective of dislocation with a
minimum of friction, uncertainty and wasted time. More generally, all
contemporary architecture must be regarded as an immense apparatus for the
acceleration and rationalization of human dislocation. The ideal in this respect
would be the system of motorway exchanges that can be seen in the southern
Fontainebleau-Melun area.

Figure 38. (left) The Gare Montparnasse train station, Paris.

Figure 39. (right) The Esplanade at La Défense, Paris.

Thus the architectural ensemble known as La Défense can also be read as

a purely productivist apparatus for increasing individual productivity. This
paranoid vision has the beauty of being locally precise, but it doesn’t account
for the uniformity of architectural responses to the diversity of social needs
(supermarkets, night clubs, office buildings, cultural centres and sports
stadiums). On the other hand, it is an advantage to consider that we live not

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only in a market economy, but more generally, in a market society. In other

words the space of civilization where all human relations and similarly all the
relations between man and the world take place is madiatised by means of a
simple digital calculation of novelty, desirability, and cost-effectiveness. This
logic, which extends from shopping behaviour to include erotic, amorous, and
professional relationships as well, facilitates the multiple installation of easily
replaced relationships (between consumers and products, between employees
and companies, and between lovers) therefore promoting a consumerist
fluidity based on an ethic of accountability, transparency and freedom of
choice.

Building Shelves

Contemporary architecture therefore implicitly follows a simple

programme that can be summarised as follows, building shelves for the social
supermarket. It achieves this with a total dedication to the aesthetics of the
filing cabinet on one hand, and by privileging the use of materials with zero or
low granulation (metal, glass, plastic) on the other. The use of reflective or
transparent surfaces will furthermore allow for a reduction in the number of
displays needed. In any case, it’s a matter of creating polymorphic, indifferent
and flexible spaces (the same process is at work in interior design, to design
an apartment in the late-20th-century is essentially to knock down all the walls
and replace them with mobile partitions – which in fact will not be moved
much because there is no reason to move them, but what is essential is that
there is the possibility of dislocation, that an additional degree of freedom is
created – and to reduce the fixed elements walls must be white and furniture
translucent). It is a matter of creating neutral spaces that can freely transmit
information and advertising messages – generated by the social environment
and furthermore actually constituting it. So what then produces the employees
and frameworks assembled by La Défense? To be strictly accurate, nothing,
the processes of their material production are becoming completely opaque
even to them. Digital information is transmitted to them through the objects of
the world. This information is the raw material for statistical calculations,
models are worked out, strategies are produced, and at the end of the chain
decisions are taken and new information is reinserted into the social body.
Thus the flesh of the world is replaced by its digital image and the being of
things is supplanted by the graph of their variations. Multi-purpose, neutral
and modular, modern space adapts to the infinite messages that it must

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support. It cannot be allowed an autonomous significance or to evoke a

particular ambience, it can have neither beauty, poetry, nor more generally
any distinct character. In this condition of being stripped of any individual and
permanent nature, modern space will be ready to accommodate the infinite
drive of the transitory.

Mobile, flexible and disposable, the modern employee undergoes an

analogous process of depersonalization. The personal development courses
popularised by New Age workshops aim to create infinitely mutable
individuals, removed of any intellectual or emotional rigidity. Released from
the obstacles which constituted a sense of belonging, faithfulness and rigid
codes of behaviour, the modern individual is made ready to take his or her
place in a system of generalised transaction within which it is possible to
measure them with an unambiguous and univocal exchange value.

To Simplify Calculations

The progressive quantification of microsociologic operations already

quite advanced in the United States was remarkably delayed in Western
Europe, as testified by the novels of Marcel Proust for example. It took
several decades for the examination of the symbolic consequences to the
professions to be completed, whether these consequences were laudatory (the
church, education) or devaluing (advertising, prostitution). At the end of this
process of confirmation it became possible to establish a precise hierarchy
between social groups on the basis of two simple digital measures, annual
income and the number of hours worked.

In the area of love the parameters of sexual exchange also for a long time
remained part of the system of lyrical description that was impressionistic and
unreliable. It is once again from the United States that the first serious
attempts came at setting the standards. Based on simple and objectively
verifiable criteria (age, size and weight, along with hip, waist and chest sizes
for women, and size of the erect penis for men) these standards were first
popularised by the porn industry and then taken up by women’s magazines. If
for a long time the economic hierarchy has needed to control occasional
opposition to it (movements in favour of “social justice”) then it should be
noted that the erotic hierarchy, perceived as being more natural, was quickly
interiorized and instantly produced a broad consensus.

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Henceforth able to define themselves with a short list of digital

parameters, released from the thought of Being which for so long blocked the
fluidity of their thoughts, Western human beings – at least the younger
generation – are now able to adapt to technological mutations that permeate
society, mutations that bring about continuous transformations of the
economy, society and psychology.

A Brief History of Information

Towards the end of the Second World War the simulation of trajectories
for medium and long range missiles along with the modelling of fission in the
nucleus of the atom created the demand for an increased capacity in the
algorithmic and digital means of calculation. Thus the first computers were
built due in part to the theoretical work of John von Neumann. At that time
clerical office work was characterised by a standardization and rationalization
less advanced than that which prevailed in the area of industrialised
production. The application of the first computers to management tasks
immediately resulted in the disappearance of any freedom and any flexibility
in the implementation of procedures – all things considered, it was a brutal
proletarianization of this type of employee.

During the same years, with comic delay, European literature was
confronted with a new tool, the typewriter. The endless and multiple work on
the manuscript (with its additions, references, and footnotes) disappeared and
was replaced by a more linear and dull style of writing, leading in effect to a
conformity based on the standards of the detective novel and American
journalism (the appearance of the Underwood myth and the success of
Hemingway). This lowering of the status of literature involved a number of
young people with “creative” temperaments tending towards the more
gratifying course of cinema and popular music (in the long run a dead end,
indeed the American entertainment industry creates little else once started on
its course of destruction of the various local entertainment industries – a
project which we can see coming to completion today).

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Figure 40. (left) An IBM 360, 1964.

Figure 41. (right) An IBM PC, 1984.

The sudden appearance of the microcomputer in the early Eighties can

seem a kind of historical accident that doesn’t correspond to any economic
necessity. Indeed its appearance cannot be explained apart from
considerations such as the progress made in the control of low currents and
the fine etching of silicon. Unexpectedly, office workers and middle
management were in possession of a powerful and easy-to-use tool which
enabled them to regain control – in fact if not by right – by means of the
primary elements of their work. A little-known struggle silently took place for
several years between data-processing and the “rank and file” users,
sometimes including teams of impassioned computer programmers. The most
astonishing thing was that where there was once a perception that data
processing was costly and inefficient, mass production eventually produced
reliable and cheap hardware and office automation software so the general
trend favoured of the microprocessing camp.

For the writer the microcomputer was an unhoped-for liberation, if not

the return of flexibility and pleasure of the manuscript it was at least once
again possible to devote oneself to the serious work of the text. During the
same years various indications gave reason for thinking that literature could
rediscover part of its former prestige – less by its own merits than by the self-
destruction of rival activities. Little by little rock'n'roll and cinema lost their
magic, subjected to the formidable levelling capacity of television. The former
distinctions between films, shorts, current events, advertising, human interest
stories, and news reports tended to be erased by a concept of generalised
spectacle.

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The introduction of fibre optics and the industry agreement on the TCP-
IP protocol in the early Nineties allowed for the appearance of intra and then
inter-networks. Becoming a simple workstation within reliable customer-
server networks, the microcomputer lost any autonomous processing capacity.
There was in fact a renormalization of procedures within more mobile, more
transverse, more efficient systems of data processing.

While omnipresent in business, microcomputers had failed in the

consumer market for reasons that have since been clearly analysed (priced too
high, lack of really useful applications, difficult to use in the reclining
position, etc.). The end of the Nineties saw the appearance of the first passive
terminals purely for internet access, deprived of memory and therefore
produced at very low unit-cost, they were intended to give access to the
gigantic American entertainment and industry data-bases. Finally provided
(officially at least) with security for electronic-commerce, aesthetic and easy
to use, they quickly imposed themselves as the new standard, at once
replacing the portable telephone, the Minitel videotext terminal and the
remote control of traditional television sets.

Unexpectedly the book was to constitute an age-old source of resistance.

Attempts at storing works on Internet servers took place but their success
remained covert, or else limited to encyclopaedias and reference works. After
a few years the industry had to concede that the printed book stayed in favour
with the public because it was more practical, more attractive and more
convenient. However, once purchased all books become a frightening
instrument of disconnection. In the past literature had, in the intimate
chemistry of the brain, often kept pace with the real universe having nothing
to fear from virtual universes. This was the beginning of a paradoxical period
which continues today, where the globalization of entertainment and exchange
– in which spoken language holds a minor place – went hand in hand with a
reinforcement of vernacular languages and regional cultures.

The Appearance of Lassitude

On the political level opposition to world-wide economic liberalism had

in fact started much earlier, its founding act in France being the campaign for
No during the Maastricht referendum of 1992. This campaign drew its

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strength less from references to national identity or republican patriotism –

both discredited since the Verdun slaughters of 1916-1917 – than from an
authentic general lassitude, a sense of pure and simple refusal. Like all
historicisms before it, liberalism intimidates by presenting itself as historically
inescapable. Like all historicisms before it, liberalism proposes itself as the
absorption and superseding of a simple ethical feeling in the name of a long-
term vision of the historical becoming of humanity. Like all historicisms
before it, liberalism when faced with immediate struggles and sufferings
promises happiness for all within one or two generations. Such a mode of
reasoning has already caused enough damage throughout the twentieth
century.

The perversion of the concept of progress regularly employed by

historicism unfortunately favours the appearance of clownish thoughts typical
of periods of disarray. Often inspired by Heraclitus or Nietzsche, having a
perfectly pleasant aesthetic well-adapted to the middle and upper classes, they
seem to find confirmation among the less favoured strata of the population, in
the proliferation of multiple identical reflexes that are unpredictable and
violent. Those advanced in the mathematical theory of turbulences tend in
fact, ever more frequently, to represent human history in the form of a chaotic
system in which futurologists and media theorists strive to detect one or more
strange attractor. Stripped of any methodological basis, this analogy must not
gain ground among the educated or half-educated strata, where it would
permanently prevent the constitution of a new ontology.

The World as Derision and Supermarkets

Arthur Schopenhauer didn’t believe in History. He thus died convinced

that the revelation he brought to the world, that everything exists as will (as
desire, as élan vital) and is perceived as representation (in itself neutral,
innocent, purely objective, susceptible as such to aesthetic reconstruction)
would survive successive generations. Today we can see that he was partially
wrong. The concepts he gave us can still be recognised in the framework of
our lives but they underwent such metamorphoses that one can wonder about
their enduring validity.

The word “will” seems to indicate a tension with long duration, a

continuous effort directed towards a goal whether this is done consciously or

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not. Clearly birds still build their nests and stags still fight for the possession
of females, and in Schopenhauer’s sense one can say that it is the same stag
that fights, that it is the same larva that excavates, ever since the painful day
of their first appearance on the Earth. It is totally different for humans. The
logic of the supermarket necessarily induces a scattering of desires, the man of
the supermarket cannot organically be a man with only one will, with only one
desire. From this comes a certain depression of willing in contemporary man.
Not that individuals desire any less, on the contrary they desire more and
more, but their desires have become something like a small cry or a
squawking. Without becoming pure representation, they are to a large extent
the product of external determinations – which we will call advertising in the
broad sense. Nothing in them evokes the organic and total force, obstinately
fixed on its fulfilment, which the word “will” suggests. This produces a
certain lack of personality that can be perceived in everyone.

Deeply infected by meaning, representation lost all innocence. One can

designate a representation as being innocent when it is given simply as such,
simply claiming to be the image of an external world (real or imaginary, but
external), in other words that which does not include its own critical
commentary. The massive introduction of references, derivatives, derision and
humour into representation quickly undermined artistic and philosophical
activity by transforming it into a generalised rhetoric. All art, like all science,
is a means of communication between people. It is obvious that the
effectiveness and intensity of communication decreases and tends to be
cancelled out as soon as doubt enters into the veracity of what is said, into the
sincerity of what is expressed (imagine for example a derivative science?).
The disintegration of creativity in the arts is therefore another aspect of the
same contemporary impossibility of conversation. Indeed anything like a
direct expression of a feeling, an emotion, an idea has become impossible in
the current, too vulgar state of conversation. Everything must pass through the
deforming filter of humour, humour which ends of course in a void and in
tragic muteness. Such is at once both the history of the famous
“incommunicability” (note that the continuously dredged-up exploitation of
this topic by no means prevents incommunicability from extending in
practice, and that it remains topical now more than ever even if it becomes a
little tiring to talk about it) and the tragic history of painting in the 20th
century. Therefore the course of painting reflects, more by analogy of
ambiences than direct comparison, the course of human communication in the
contemporary period. In both cases we slip into an unhealthy, faked,

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profoundly derisory world, even tragic after all its derision. Thus the average
passer-by passing through a gallery will not stop too long if they want to
preserve their attitude of ironic detachment. After a few minutes they will, in
spite of themselves, be left in a certain state of disarray, at the very least they
will feel a numbness, an uneasiness, a disturbing deceleration in their capacity
for humour.

The tragic intervenes the moment that derision fails to be perceived any
longer as fun, it’s a kind of brutal psychological inversion that translates for
the individual the appearance of an irreducible desire for eternity. Advertising
avoided this phenomenon that is counter to its objective with a ceaseless
renewal of its simulacra, but painting keeps its vocation to create permanent
objects and is equipped with its own character, it is this nostalgia of being that
gives it its painful halo and which in fact willingly desires a faithful reflection
of the spiritual situation of Western mankind.

One will note by contrast the relative good health of literature of the
same period. This is easily explained. Literature is a profoundly conceptual
art, it is even to be strictly accurate, the only one. Words are concepts, clichés
are concepts. Nothing can be affirmed, denied, relativised, made fun of,
without the help of concepts, and words. Therefore the astonishing robustness
of literary activity, it can deny itself, self-destruct, make itself impossible,
without ever ceasing to be itself. It resists all the mises en abyme, all the
deconstructions, all the accumulations of degrees, however subtle they may
be. It simply gets up, shakes itself off and walks away, like a dog emerging
from the water.

Contrary to music, painting, and also cinema, literature can thus absorb
and digest unlimited quantities of derision and humour. The dangers which
threaten it today have nothing to do with those which threatened and
sometimes destroyed the other arts, they are due much more to the
acceleration of perceptions and sensations which characterises the logic of the
supermarket. A book can in fact only be appreciated slowly, this implies
reflection (not especially in the sense of intellectual effort, but in the sense of
flashbacks), there is no reading without stopping, without backwards
movement, without a second reading. An impossible and even absurd thing in
a world where everything moves, everything fluctuates, where nothing has
permanent validity, with neither rules, nor things, nor beings. With all its force
(which is large) literature is opposed to the concept of permanent topicality, of

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the perpetual present. Books call for readers, but these readers must have an
individual and stable existence, they cannot be pure consumers, pure
phantoms, they must also be, in some manner, subjects.

Undermined by the cowardly obsession with being “politically correct”,

bowled over by the flood of pseudo-information that gives them the illusion of
a permanent modification of the categories of existence (one can no longer
think what was thought ten, one hundred, or one thousand years ago),
contemporary Westerners cannot manage being readers any more, they are no
longer able to satisfy the humble request of a book placed in front of them,
simply to be human beings capable of thinking and feeling for themselves.

With even stronger reason, they cannot perform this role vis-à-vis
another being. This is still needed however because the dissolution of being is
a tragic dissolution, and each one continues, driven by a painful nostalgia, to
require the other to be what they can no longer be, to seek, like a blinded
phantom, a weight of being which they cannot find in themselves any more. A
resistance, a permanence, a depth. Of course everyone fails and the solitude is
atrocious.

The death of God in the West constituted the prelude to a formidable

feuilleton metaphysics, which continues up to the present day. Any historian
of ideas would be able to reconstitute its stages in detail, to summarise let us
say that Christianity succeeded to combine, in one master stroke, the fierce
belief in the individual with the promise of eternal participation in absolute
Being ― compared to the epistles of Saint Paul for example, all ancient
culture seems curiously organised and dull to us today. Once the dream
vanished various attempts were made to promise the individual a minimum of
being, to reconcile the dream of being which he or she carried within
themselves with the obsessive omnipresence of becoming. All these attempts
until now have failed and misfortune has continued to spread.

Advertising constitutes the latest of these attempts. Although it aims to

arouse, to provoke, to be desire, its methods are at bottom rather close to those
which characterised the old morality. In fact it sets up a terrifying and severe
super-ego, much more pitiless than any imperative that ever existed before,
which is carved into the skin of the individual unceasingly repeating: “You
must desire. You must be desirable. You must take part in the competition, the
struggle, the life of the world. If you stop, you cease to exist. If you fall

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behind, you are dead.” Denying any concept of eternity, defining it even as
process of permanent renewal, advertising aims at vaporising the subject to
transform it into a phantom subservient to becoming. And this epidermic
surface participation in the life of the world is supposed to take the place of
the desire for being.

Advertising fails, depressions multiply and the disarray is accentuated,

however advertising continues to build the infrastructures for the reception of
its messages. It continues to improve the means for the dislocation of beings
which have nowhere to go because it has no place for them, to develop the
means of communication for beings which have nothing left to say, to
facilitate the possibilities of interaction between beings which no longer want
to enter into relation with anyone whatsoever.

The Poetry of Arrested Movement

In May 1968, I was ten years old, I played marbles, I read Pif le Chien,
life was sweet. Concerning the “events of ’68” however, I have one very clear
memory. My cousin Jean-Pierre was in his first year of secondary school at
Raincy. Secondary school seemed to me then (and later experience would
confirm this early intuition while adding a painful sexual dimension to it) a
vast and alarming place where older boys studied difficult subjects with
eagerness in order to ensure their professional future. One Friday, I do not
know why, I went with my aunt to wait for my cousin after school. On this
day the Raincy secondary school was hit by the general strike. The courtyard
which I expected to see filled with hundreds of busy teenagers was deserted.
Some teachers wandered aimlessly among the handball courts. I remember
spending quite some time walking in this courtyard while my aunt went to see
what was going on. There was complete peace, absolute silence. It was a
marvellous moment.

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Figure 42. Paris streets during May 1968.

In December 1986 I was at the Avignon station with time to spare.

Following some sentimental complications that would be tiresome to recount,
it was imperative – at least that’s what I thought – that I take the TGV and
return to Paris. I was unaware that a strike had spread over the entire network
of the SNCF. 2 Thus the operational chain of sexual exchange, adventure and
lassitude was broken in one blow. I spent two hours sitting on a bank facing
the deserted railway landscape. TGV carriages were immobilised on the
sidings. One could believe that they had been sitting there for years or that
they had never moved. They were simply there, motionless. Travellers
whispered among themselves in low voices, the atmosphere was one of
resignation, of uncertainty. It could have been the war or the end of the
Western world.

Certain closer witnesses of the “events of ’68” later told me that it was a
marvellous period when people spoke to each other in the street, when
anything seemed possible. I very much want to believe this. Others simply
observe that the trains didn’t run, that you couldn’t buy gasoline, which I
accept without hesitation. The common theme I find in all these testimonies is
enchantment, for a few days a gigantic and oppressive machine stopped
running. There was an undulation, an uncertainty, a suspension, and a certain
calm that spread throughout the country. Naturally the social machine began
to turnover again, only now even faster, even more pitiless (and May ’68 was
used only to break the few moral rules which hitherto blocked the voracity of
its functioning). The fact remains that there was an instant of arrest, of

2. Translator’s note: The TGV (train à grande vitesse) is the high-speed train and the SNCF (Société
Nationale des Chemins de fer Français) is the French national railway.

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hesitation, a moment of metaphysical uncertainty.

It is undoubtedly for the same reasons that when faced with a sudden
stoppage in the networks of information, once the initial feeling of strife is
overcome, the reaction of the public is far from being entirely negative. One
can observe the same phenomenon every time a computer system goes down
(which is quite often). Once the inconvenience is accepted, especially once the
employees decide to use their telephones, a secret joy spreads among the
users, as if destiny gave them the opportunity to take an underhand revenge on
technology. In the same way to find out what the public really thinks about the
architecture it is forced to live in one only needs to observe their reactions
when it is decided to blow up one of those housing blocks built in suburbs
during the Sixties. It’s a moment of very pure and very intense joy, like the
intoxication of an unhoped-for liberation. The spirit which inhabited these
places is bad, inhuman, hostile, it is that of cruel and oppressive gears,
constantly accelerating. Everyone in their heart feels this and wishes for their
destruction.

Literature finds agreement with everything, accommodates everything,

excavates among the refuse and licks the wounds of misfortune. A paradoxical
poetry of anguish and oppression could thus be born in the milieu of
supermarkets and office buildings. This poetry isn’t cheerful, it can’t be.
Modern poetry has no more vocation to build a hypothetical “house of being”
than modern architecture has to build habitable spaces, it would be a task quite
different from that of multiplying the infrastructures of circulation and the
processing of information. A residual product of impermanency, information
is opposed to significance like plasma is to crystal. A society having reached
an overheated stage doesn’t necessarily implode, but it proves itself unable to
produce any significance, all its energy being monopolised by the
informational description of its random variations. Each individual can
however produce in themselves a kind of cold revolution by placing
themselves outside the informational-advertising flows for a moment. It is
very easy to do, it has never been so simple to place oneself in an aesthetic
position in relation to the world. All that is needed is to step aside. And this
step is itself in the end useless. All that is needed is to have some downtime,
to turn the radio off, to disconnect the television, to stop buying anything, to
stop desiring to buy anything. All that is needed is to stop participating, to
stop knowing, to temporarily suspend all mental activity. All that is needed is
to be immobilised, literally, for a few seconds.

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 SECTION 5
SPECULATIONS ON A FUTURE
PHILOSOPHY OF ARCHITECTURE

Figure 43. Iranian ta‘ziyah passion play, Khunsar, 2000.

Introduction to Badiou

The last writer included in this thesis is the French philosopher Alain Badiou.
While there is no reason a reader of architectural theory should know of him he is
rapidly becoming world famous with many of his books now available in translation.
In France Badiou is taking over Deleuze’s role as the most often referred-to
philosopher. To quote Badiou’s greatest English supporter:

Badiou’s philosophy of the event is itself undoubtedly one of the greatest events
in recent French thought. Badiou is perhaps the only serious rival of Deleuze and
Derrida for that meaningless but unavoidable title of “most important

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contemporary French philosopher,” and his major treatise, Being and Event
(1988), is certainly the most ambitious and compelling single philosophical work
written in France since Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960). 1

Such is the importance of this philosopher that he should be included in this

survey but in none of the currently available works does Badiou ever say anything
directly concerning architecture. 2 His aesthetic interests tend towards poetry
(Mallarmé and Rimbaud), literature (Pessoa and Becket), music (Wagner and
Schoenberg), film (Orson Welles and Wim Wenders) and above all theatre, since like
Sartre, Badiou is a successful playwright as well as being an important philosopher. 3
It is not necessary or even advisable to look for architectural implications buried
within the work of every interesting thinker, although such a project is not as
misguided as it sounds given what Benoît Goetz has taught us about the spatial
conditions of thought and how each great thinker invents a new way of dwelling. It is
just that Badiou will be particularly useful to architecture because his key concept is
the event and this has also been a major concept in architectural theory over the last
20 years. Bernard Tschumi for example has applied the concept of event to
architecture throughout his career, with titles such as “Spaces and Events”, “Event
Architecture” and “Event-Cities.” 4 Sanford Kwinter and Ignasi de Solà-Morales have

1. Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p.
xxi. Slightly modified by anglicising the book titles, since it has now been translated there is no need
to continue referring to it as L’Etre et l’événement, see Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver
Feltham (London: Continuum Books, 2005).
2. Badiou does start to show an interest in urban design in the follow up to his magnum opus, Logiques
des mondes: L'Etre et l'événement, Tome 2 (Paris: Seuil, 2006) (Logics of Worlds: Being and Event,
Volume 2), where he devotes several pages to describing Brasília, the city planned by Lúcio Costa
with buildings by the architect Oscar Niemeyer, in order to give an example of topological space.
Topology is a branch of mathematics dealing with folded surfaces and the term is often loosely
applied to contemporary “blobby” architecture. It is fascinating to see someone like Badiou with a
deep understanding mathematics apply the term properly to the morphology of the capital of Brasil.
3. For an indication of Badiou’s aesthetic interests see his key work on art, Handbook of Inaesthetics,
trans. Alberto Toscano (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005) and for his interest in music, see
his recent essay, “A Musical Variant of the Metaphysics of the Subject”, trans. Justin Clemens,
Parrhesia, no. 2 (2007), pp. 29 – 36.
4. Bernard Tschumi, “Event Architecture” in Peter Noever (ed.), Architecture in Transition: Between
Deconstruction and New Modernism (Munich: Prestel, 1991), pp. 125 – 129, “Spaces and Events”
in Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1994), pp.
140 -149, and Bernard Tschumi, Event-Cities (Praxis) (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1994).

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both written books focusing on the idea of architecture as an event. 5 Of course a lot of
this work gains its spiritual impetus from “May ’68”, which is known simply as “les
événements” (the events) in France. May 1968 was when the student riots sparked off
the largest strike in French history and this became the major cultural and political
point of reference for an entire generation. Then there is, in a similar vein to the event
since they also bring the dimension of time into architecture, the importation of
concepts from film and computer animation, and the idea of ephemeral architecture
often associated with Japan. But all this, like so many other things, was anticipated by
Le Corbusier when in 1929 he declared: “architecture is an undeniable event that
arises in that instant of creation when the mind … finds itself raised by a higher
intention than that of simply being useful, and tends to show the poetic powers that
animate us and give us joy.” 6 And despite all the years in between no architectural
critic has written a better definition of just what event means when we say that
architecture is an event.

The most rigorous definition of the event of architecture we have today comes
from an unusual quarter, from Lindsay Jones exhaustively researched two-volume
work, The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture. 7 Jones’s topic is religious sites such
as churches, temples and holy shrines, but if we overlook that for a moment then we
will find a fully-developed theory of architecture as event, which Jones calls “the
ritual-architectural event.” “Whether deriving this insight from Ingarden, Gadamer,
reader-response criticism, or elsewhere, we need to accept the profound ramifications
of conceiving of peoples’ interactions with architectural works as dynamic, open-
ended, interactive processes (or events) in which both buildings and beholders make
substantial contributions and both are significantly transformed.” 8 The ritual-
architectural event takes place, says Jones, when the building is consecrated during a

5. Sanford Kwinter, Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture
(Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2001) and Ignasi de Solà-Morales Differences: Topographies of
Contemporary Architecture, trans. Graham Thompson (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1997).
6. Le Corbusier, Precisions on the Present State of Architecture and City Planning, trans. Edith
Schreiber Aujame (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 218 – 219. Emphasis added.
7. Lindsay Jones, The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture: Experience, Interpretation, Comparison
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), vol. 1: “Monumental Occasions: Reflections
on the Eventfulness of Religious Architecture” and vol. 2: “Hermeneutical Callisthenics: A
Morphology of Ritual-Architectural Priorities.”
8. Ibid. vol. 1, p. 45. The words “or events” in parenthesis is in the original.

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ceremonial occasion, bringing about a convergence of people and buildings. During

such a ceremonial occasion what was previously simply an arrangement of materials
and individuals becomes an eventful exchange between active partners, a negotiation
or ritual-architectural game going backwards and forwards between the object and the
subject, and this convergence transforms both the people and buildings into a church
and a congregation for example. But for the sake of argument we could extend the
analysis and add: into a home and a family, into a classroom and a class, into a State
capital and a government, into a city and a civil society and so on. During the
consecration there will be an “increase of being” on both sides. Importantly Jones
adds, this occasionality or eventfulness of architecture is contingent to the situation, it
is not something that can be predicted but must be contextualised or “situationalised”
in relation to the participants’ prejudices and understandings so that the building, the
community and the festive occasion all merge into one to become a singular ritual-
architectural event. To summarise Jones’s careful analysis, the three characteristics of
ritual-architectural events are 1) the interactivity of the architecture within the
performance, for example a church being experienced as an essential part of a
liturgical performance, 2) the seriousness of the architecture demanding commitment
to the event with serious consequences for those who enter it half-heartedly. For
example, having decided to enter the running of the bulls in the streets of Pamplona
one cannot then afford to be blasé about it, and 3) the productivity of the
transformation of architecture and its participants, a previously unimagined
enrichment of meaning occurs, interrupting everyday complacency with jolting
surprises. For example having contemplated a particular Japanese garden for some
time you suddenly come to the realization that the entire Japanese landscape is a
carefully manicured garden.

This description of the ritual-architecture event leads us to the most speculative

part of this thesis. Here we propose to use Badiou’s philosophy of the event to make
up for the previous lack of rigor in theories of architecture as event. Architectural
theorists are often ahead of other disciplines in their discovery of useful concepts. For
example post-modernism (with a hyphen) was the creation of the architectural critic
Charles Jencks, but his definition of post-modernism as the double coding of elitist
and popular meanings did not pass beyond architecture. Jean-François Lyotard’s
definition in The Postmodern Condition as the incredulity towards the grand

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narratives of scientific progress and Marxism struck a chord with a number of people
in many fields and thereafter postmodernism (without the hyphen) entered everyday
language. In a similar fashion despite the best endeavours of many architectural
theorists the concept of architecture as event has always fallen back into the dominant
conception of architecture as a static monument impervious to and unchanged by
human experience, all for the lack of a rigorous definition of the event. For all the
above reasons it seems inevitable that Badiou’s philosophy would one day be applied
to architectural theory.

To begin our speculation on a future philosophy of architecture based on

Badiou’s philosophy the following three propositions are needed: firstly that Badiou
gives us the most rigorous concept of the event, secondly that his writings on the
theatre are the clearest demonstration of what he means by event, and thirdly that we
can say architecture is theatre without this being in any way derogatory. Concerning
the second statement, why would any philosopher’s thinking be best represented in a
small “rhapsodic treatise” on one art alone, in this case on the theatre? The simple
answer is that for Badiou the theatre is not just any art form because he has written
several plays himself and within his philosophical thinking theatre is the paradigm
event. 9 Although the theatrical aspects of architecture have, other than during the
Baroque period, always been treated with great suspicion, the conceptualising of
architecture as theatre will make sure that we will not fall back into the habit of
considering architecture as being entirely separate from the human agents who design
it, build it and live in it. 10

Before introducing the translated excerpts from Badiou’s

(Rhapsody for the Theatre) we should add a few general comments about his
philosophy. Badiou’s project is contrary to almost every dominant philosophical trend
of his time. Where most philosophers show a strong interest in language Badiou has

9. The plays written by Badiou are Ahmed le subtil (1994), Ahmed Philosophe and Ahmed se fâche
(1995), Les Citrouilles, a comedy (1996) and Calme bloc ici-bas (1997). There is also a libretto
written for an opera by Georges Aperghis called L'Écharpe rouge (1979).
10. See Lindsay Jones, The Hermeneutics of Sacred: Experience, Interpretation, Comparison
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), vol. 2, pp. 188 – 212 for a discussion of the
theatrical aspects of architecture and how this has always been suspected as being a form of
“religiopolitical propaganda”.

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no interest in it, where most will argue for the cultural relativity of truth Badiou
searches for universal truths, where most have given up on ontology and systematic
thinking Badiou gives us a 500-page system of ontology (his magnum opus Being and
Event), where most consider Plato as someone to be attacked Badiou revives the
Platonic categories of love, science, politics and art, and where many have given up
on the category of the human subject Badiou gives us a rigorous definition of the
subject. Finally where most French philosophers since May ’68 have adopted a self-
consciously literary style Badiou uses mathematics and set theory to bring precision to
his philosophy; Badiou is famous for announcing in Being and Event that ontology is
mathematics.

One way of introducing Badiou would be to say that he continues Sartre’s

project of radical commitment to political change but whereas Sartre’s focus was on
the group and commitment to the communist party, Badiou’s focus is on the
subjective commitment of the activist. And where Sartre’s philosophy was based on
imprecise notions of existential authenticity, Badiou’s is based on a precise notion of
the truth procedure and the event. 11 Although Badiou is an atheist the clearest
example of what he calls the truth procedure and the event is demonstrated in his
account of Saint Paul, who Badiou turns into the paradigm figure of the militant
activist in Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. 12 For this example the event
is the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. For the Roman State the situation is
simply a combination of the site of Palestinian uprisings and an everyday execution of
a fanatic. For Saint Paul as the witness to the truth of Christ’s death as a human and
resurrection as the Son of God this is an event (in Badiou’s rigorous definition of the
term) that creates a new situation in which Christianity will emerge and time will be
orientated towards universal redemption. Saint Paul as the subject and witness to the
truth of the event emerges simultaneously with the event. The event must emerge
form its own site within the situation, the “evental site” (site événementiel) at the edge
of what the situation represents as a void or formless, a desert wasteland, devoid of
value or promise. In this case it is the human flesh and suffering of Jesus. But it would

11. This comparison with Sartre comes from Peter Hallward’s entry, “Badiou, Alain: Philosopher” in
Christopher John Murray (ed.) Encyclopedia of Modern French Thought (New York: Fitzroy
Dearborn, 2004), pp. 36 – 39.
12. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2003).

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not be an event if there were not a precisely situated subject as witness to the truth
who then makes a subjective intervention, who takes sides and decides upon the
undecidable, proclaiming the event to be a decisive turning point in history and then
remaining faithful to the consequences of this. But a new situation will only arise if
the subject can formulate a rigorous universal truth that anyone in the same situation
could affirm and in this way mobilize the collective. The promotion of the partisan
interests of a particular group or the bureaucratic coordination of opinions and
differences will never achieve the universality of the genuine subject as witness to the
truth. Following the terms of Paul J. Cohen’s set theory and also Mallarmé’s poem Un
coup de dés (A Roll of the Dice), Badiou claims there is nothing in the situation that
infers the event, it needs to be specific to the situation but cannot be specified by it
prior to its occurrence. In this way Badiou allows for the possibility of unforeseen
radical change and transformation within any situation.

Another example that Badiou often uses to demonstrate his concepts of the
event and the truth procedure comes from the world of music: the composer Arnold
Schoenberg. 13 In this case the situation is German music at the end of the 19th century.
Tonal music inherited from Bach and Beethoven is already supersaturated as Wagner
and Mahler clearly demonstrate. The tonal situation considers atonality a void, a
formless desert. Schoenberg goes to the very edge of this void with his second quartet
(1908) and Erwartung for Soprano and Orchestra (1909). Then from this evental site
of atonality Schoenberg takes a stand and commits himself to a new system called the
twelve-tone system later known as “dodecaphony” or “serialism” with his piano
pieces opus 23 and opus 25. Thus a “Schoenberg-event” springs out of the atonal
evental site and shifts the situation of classical music forever. The new system uses
the entire chromatic scale with a twelve-note octave instead of the usual eight-note
octave of the tonal system along with the use of a twelve-note series of intervals that
is endlessly repeated in chords or transposed to different registers in order to avoid
recreating a tonal centre which would allow the old habits of tonal music to return. A
consequence of this radical new approach is the emancipation of dissonance and this

13. Badiou discusses Schoenberg’s music in Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London:
Continuum Books, 2005), pp. 394 – 395, in Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans
Peter Hallward, (London: Verso, 2001), pp. 41 – 42 and in “A Musical Variant of the Metaphysics
of the Subject”, trans. Justin Clemens, Parrhesia, no. 2 (2007), pp. 29 – 36. This last essay is taken
from Logiques des mondes: L'Etre et l'événement, Tome 2 (Paris: Seuil, 2006), pp. 89 – 99.

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ultimately leads to the incorporation of noise into music, the effects of which can be
heard in all music that comes after the Schoenberg-event. Of course it would not have
been an event without witnesses to the truth of the new music. There were
Schoenberg’s brilliant students Alban Berg and Anton Webern who immediately took
up composing with the new system, there was René Leibowitz who codified it into
text books for musicians and then Theodor Adorno who applied his brilliant
philosophical mind to it and wrote the Philosophy of New Music. 14 Finally it gets a
theological interpretation within Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus. 15

Already we notice some striking analogies between Alain Badiou’s concept of

the truth procedure and Lindsay Jones’s description of the ritual-architectural event.
In both cases there is an event that is located in but contingent to the situation. For
Badiou the event is a lightning bolt that comes out of nowhere to change the situation
while for Jones the event is the ceremonial consecration that causes the buildings and
people to merge. But in both cases a mere collection of materials or the configuration
of the site and people is transformed by the event into something greatly enriched in
meaning. In both cases the situation is changed in unpredictable ways. For Badiou
there is the emergence of the subject as witness to the truth and for Jones there is the
participant in the architectural event who experiences a productive interruption of
everyday complacency and thereby gains a surprising insight.

The key idea in Badiou’s Rhapsody for the Theatre is that theatre is heretical,
coming from the Greek hairetikos meaning “able to choose.” Heresy gets its modern
negative connotation from the early Christian Church which takes it to mean all the
heterodox interpretations of biblical texts as opposed to the orthodox view of the
Church. We recall that in Badiou’s truth procedure from Being and Event that the
subject is something that emerges with an event, as the witness to its truth, and must
choose to take sides and decide on the undecidable. They must choose to commit
themselves to the consequences of an event. In other words they must commit an act
of heresy and take a stand contrary to the orthodoxy of the current situation. The

14. Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2006)
15. Thomas Mann , Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn as Told by a
Friend, trans. John E. Woods (London: Secker & Warburg, 1949)

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theatre is heretical in Badiou’s view because it takes the passive audience, one that
you would find in the cinema for example, and transforms it into an active spectator
of the theatre event. And this is why he says theatre is isomorphic with politics. Live
theatre differs from the cinema in that the audience can return the gaze of the actor
and that the performance is each time a singular event. Its performance is the
actualization of a unique instance of the timeless characters and script. When all the
seven elements of the theatre come together to create a situation (place, text, director,
actor, scenery, costumes, and audience) an event can happen, an unexpected flash
Badiou calls it, when the audience becomes an active subject and is taken to the edge
of a void which sustains the State and this then engenders an ethics, a subjective
adherence to a militant cause. “To be faithful to an event,” writes Badiou in an earlier
work, “is to move within the situation that this event has supplemented, by thinking
(although all thought is a practice, a putting to the test) the situation ‘according to’ the
event. And this, of course – since the event was excluded by all the regular laws of the
situation – compels the subject to invent a new way of being and acting in the
situation…. ‘Some-one’ can thus be this spectator whose thinking has been set in
motion, who has been seized and bewildered by a burst of theatrical fire, and who thus
enters into the complex configuration of a moment of art.” 16 The theatre event is a
machine for orienting us in the political situation so that we may find what it
considers to be a void, a wilderness without potential, and from this evental site make
our own events as active agents of change.

Before unlocking the implications of Rhapsody for the Theatre for the
architectural event we must first defend the architecture-theatre analogy that this
implies. Lindsay Jones has shown us how the theatrical aspects of architecture have
always had an ambivalent reception in the West. For example, on the one hand
“architectural thespianism” such as Bernini’s fabulous sculptural-architectural
configuration, the Ecstasy of St. Teresa (1645 – 1652, see the image on p. 41 above)
which captures a crucial moment in a story and is often admired for its ability to bind
architecture with the affective response of the spectator in an awe-inspiring high
drama, but on the other hand this choreographed spectacle is just as often treated with
contempt for being mere superficial flash and glamour, as sentimentality lacking

16. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London:
Verso, 2001), pp. 41 – 42 and 45.

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rigour. Behind this contempt lies the knowledge that theatre and politics are closely
linked, that power needs spectacular performances to seduce and cajole the spectator
into acceding to its legitimacy. And certainly there is no shortage of writers who take
the view that architecture is predominantly the theatre of power, for example Deyan
Sudjic in The Edifice Complex, Thomas A. Markus in Buildings and Power, and all
the countless others who have made facile applications of Foucault to architecture. 17
But it is rare to find the opposite approach taken where architecture would not be a
theatre of power but a theatre of operations for resistance to power, where architecture
itself could be considered an active participant in political change. This would be a
heretical position to take given the orthodoxy of the view that architecture is always a
passive agent of control in our current situation. The French Revolution, the Russian
Revolution, May ’68 and the War on Terrorism would not have taken place without
the active participation of the following buildings at precise moments in history: the
Bastille prison on July 14, 1789, the Winter Palace on October 25, 1917, the Faculté
des letters at Nanterre University on March 22, 1968, and the Twin Towers on
September 11, 2001. To quote Benoît Goetz, from our translation in Section 2, p. 91
above.

If architecture interests us to the highest degree it is because we adhere to its

existence. This dependency does not imply in the slightest that architecture has no
part to play in liberty, quite the contrary. It leads us along pathways, streets and
boulevards where the huge political events of the modern era have been played out.
One can consider architecture, architectures, as an “echo chamber”, at once gigantic
and finely tuned, where the essential of that which happens to us finds its resonances.
Architecture, one can say, “thinks”. It “thinks” in space and in the world. It “thinks”
the political by putting it in place.18

Clearly Benoît Goetz is not one of those who think that architecture is a passive
agent of control. On the other hand there is long tradition of community architecture,
participatory planning and self-help housing, all of which should be congratulated for
their struggle against the prevailing neoliberalism and its indifference to others’ lack

17. Deyan Sudjic, The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful Shape the World (New York:
Penguin Press, 2005), Thomas A. Markus, Buildings and Power: Freedom and Control in the
Origin of Modern Building Types (London: Routledge, 1993) and Paul Hirst, Space and Power:
Politics, War and Architecture (Cambridge: Polity, 2005).
18. Benoît Goetz, La Dislocation: Architecture et Philosophie (Paris: Les Editions de la Passion, 2001),
p. 16.

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of adequate housing and self-determination, but these utopian projects sharply

separate their aims from the general situation and are therefore blind to the evental
sites for liberation within the current situation. 19

There is one very good reason to see the architectural event as a theatre event
and that is to make a full and active place for ethics in architecture. There has been so
much research into architectural ethics in recent years that it is possible to talk about
an “ethical turn” in architectural theory. 20 For most of the long history of architectural
theory and education the focus has been on the object of architecture: the building and
its aesthetics, in which case the architect was conceived as a designer and the
occupant as a spectator of beauty. Beginning with the twentieth-century there has
been shift of focus towards the project, the process of architectural production and the
logic that lies behind it, in which case the architect is conceived as a problem solver
and the occupant a user, slightly more active than a spectator of beauty but whose
behaviour is nevertheless considered to be deterministically influenced by the built
environment. Beginning in the 1970s and 80s there has been another shift in focus,
this time towards the agents of architecture: the architects, the contractors and the
occupants, and the ethics underlying their actions. 21 But despite this shift in focus
there is still the lingering orthodoxy of earlier paradigms which considered the
architect to be the active artist or problem solver and the occupant to be the passive
spectator of beauty, the user, or the deterministically behaving organism. To put this
new focus on the subjective side of architecture on a better footing a heretical concept
of architecture is needed that would no longer allow architecture to be conceived of as

19. Nick Wates and Charles Knevitt, Community Architecture: How People are Creating Their Own
Environment (London: Penguin, 1987) and Graham Towers, Building Democracy: Community
Architecture in the Inner Cities (London: UCL Press, 1995).
20. This phrase and much of the discussion that follows comes from a reading of Rabah Bousbaci and
Alain Findeli, “More Acting, Less Making: A Place for Ethics in Architecture’s Epistemology”,
Design Philosophy Papers, no. 4 (2005). For an excellent introduction to architectural ethics, see
Barry Wasserman, Patrick Sullivan, and Gregory Palermo, Ethics and the Practice of Architecture
(New York: Wiley, 2000).
21. After this most recent paradigm shift the architect is not so much a problem solver as a storyteller,
see Marie-Ange Brayer, “Active Narratives”, Architectural Design, vol. 75, no. 2 (March/April
2005), p. 82 – 87. The occupant is less a “user” than an equal other, an embodiment of the world.
For an excellent introduction of Walter Benjamin’s concept of the storyteller and the living
community of equals that Benjamin grants to it, see Alan Latham, “The Power of Distraction:
Distraction, Tactility, and Habit in the Work of Walter Benjamin”, Environment and Planning D:
Space and Society, vol. 17, no. 4 (1999), pp. 451 – 473.

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an object or a project but instead it would be one of many equally important actors in
a theatre of operations.

Let us return once more to Badiou’s truth procedure and his rigorous definition
of the event in order to sketch out a rigorous definition of the architectural event. The
seven elements of the architectural situation are the site, the programme, the client,
the architect, the builder and the occupant (the four actors), and all the various
building materials, each material having an associated technology. Altogether they
still do not make architecture. What is needed is an architectural event. This is
something contingent to the situation yet precisely located in it. Something like the
projection of all the combined knowledge and experiences of all the actors that give
the project a qualitative and singular value. Any one of the four actors (the client, the
architect, the builder, the occupant) can make an ethical choice and commit
themselves to being the witness to the truth of the architectural event by remaining
faithful to its consequences. The architectural event itself can take any form. It might
be a ceremonial occasion like a roof party or a religious consecration or a State
inauguration. Or it could simply be a drawing done on the back of an envelope while
flying between cities, or perhaps a long discussion between friends over many bottles
of wine. In any case the architectural event must come from the edge of what the
orthodoxy of the current situation considers to be the desert or void from which
nothing can be expected. If the actor who heretically chooses (Greek hairetikos, able
to choose) to declare that this building is a work of architecture and can then find
arguments that would give this statement universality so that anyone in the same
situation could say the same thing, and if the building is also faithful to the event by
itself being heretical, then the entire situation of future works of architecture will be
shifted. But beyond the architectural event, architecture is also a vital and active part
of any situation, so it can help locate evental sites in the domains of politics, science,
art and love. The evental site of the factory for politics. 22 The evental site of the
laboratory for science, the evental site of the studio for art, and the evental site of the
bedroom for love. Never again will architecture be reduced to only being the theatre
of social control, a sad legacy of the naively literal reading of Foucault.

22. See Alain Badiou, “The Factory as Event Site”, Prelom: Journal for Images and Politics, no. 8
(Fall 2006), pp. 171 – 176. Note that the original title was L’usine comme site événementiel which
following Peter Hallward’s felicitous neologism I have translated here as “evental site.”

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Figure 44. Drawing by Alain Badiou handed out for his lecture, “Truth
Procedure in Politics”, Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York, November 18, 2006.

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 Rhapsody for the Theatre
(Excerpts)

By Alain Badiou

Translated by Tim Adams

There is one parting of the world into two that leads to another, which
claims that there are, or there have been, some societies with theatre and other
societies without it.1 Among those societies that do have this strange public
space where fiction is consumed in a repeatable event,
theatre has always generated enthusiasm for it but
also reluctances, anathemas and major and minor
excommunications as well. And what is even more
remarkable is that this spiritual suspicion surrounding
the theatre has always been countered by the vigilant
protection of the State, so much so that all theatre is
one of the affairs of the State. And its abode!

What does this mental and territorial division of

Figure 45. Alain Badiou.
the world do besides highlighting the already over-
saturated divisions of East and West or North and South? Because in the
Middle East there shines an exceptional theatre, one that is generally shrouded
by Islam. How could we exclude from universal theatricality the sacred
dramas of Iranian Shi’ism that bring their founding martyr back to life? 2

A heresy inside a scandal. But all true Theatre is an act of heresy. Its
orthodoxy is what I call “theatre”, an innocent and lucrative ritual out of
which the Theatre emerges in an unexpected flash.

1. The source for this translation is Alain Badiou,

(Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1990), pp. 7-9, 19, 24-27, 94-95, 106-109, 116-119, 128-129.
2. Translator’s note: Badiou is here referring to the ta‘ziyah passion plays of Shi‘i Islam performed
during the religious festival of Ashura, primarily in Iran, and in particular to the ta‘ziyah of the
Martyrdom of Hussein which re-enacts the death of Hussein in 680, the founding event of Shi’ism.
See The Drama Review, vol. 49, no. 4 (2005) for an issue devoted to this unique theatre.

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II

Another observation to stir things up: if the cinema is everywhere it is no

doubt because it has no need of spectators, only the walls of an audience.
Let’s say that a spectator is real while an audience is only a kind of reality,
what it lacks is plain to see since it is simply a matter of what each depends
on. The cinema depends on the audience while the theatre depends on the
spectator, and both are reduced when in a ruinous paradox the critic invents
the spectator of a film or the audience of a play. François Regnault deciphers
the spectator in the lustre and this lustre is the opposite of the projector.

III

At one time the complete cinematographic works of Guy Debord, which

significantly had already appeared in book form, were projected without break
in a cinema in Paris with the superb In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
as the centrepiece, indifferent to whether the seats were empty or fill (but not
to the lustre, the armchair). This was due the friendly grace of Gérard
Lebovici rather than the critics since they are happy to pull everything down
(it must be said, those who hold on to such an idea of friendship in the arts are
immediately suspected of living in a world of fantasy). This pure temporal
moment is the glory of cinema which can outlive the lives of men. This is
completely foreign to the theatre which does not happen without a spectator
because the representation (a word that we will discover to be misleading)
changes with every additional repetition – opposite to the “fashion seekers”
and other “hangers on” who are too literally spectators and turn the repetition
into the premature occurrence of the spectacle….

XI

The theatre/politics isomorphy did not abandon us when we drew up this

list, because the three obligations of any politics (a massive event,
organizations, thought-texts) also have established consequences.

The first one is that the State is an unavoidable setting for politics.
Because the survival of politics depends on the State’s dissemination, its
sudden aleatory events that order the masses by chance. Politics has its origin
in this visible event of the State which it then needs in order to justify its own
legitimacy.

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The symbolic is cast here because it becomes evident that its universality
is purely contingent. This unpredictable visibility of the State as perhaps
illegitimate separation is the horizon for the deployment of the masses. The
second obligation (that all politics is organized) means that there is no politics
without the efficacy of proper names, the names of the political leaders. The
body and voice of these actors, as the ultimate concentrations of organic
divisions ― all politicians exist in opposition to other politicians ― are
crucial operators. For example, the death of one suspends, slowly or in a flash,
the usual course of events of the other. Endless agonising, murder or
abdication are the significant and inevitable outcomes. Those who utter
eulogies in the appropriate tone to the political leader do so in the illusion that
this will allow them to continue.

The political leader is a visible thought through which the political, what
it represents, touches the very presentation of Being and its truth (as in the
theatre the actor is sustained by an ethics of play where some truth shines
through and eclipses itself).

Finally the third obligation, of references and texts, which ties political
action to the historicised function of discourse and of its nominal servants,
dead thinkers, in their arrested correlation to a sequence of real politics.

Due to this reversal consider the difficulty in making a theatre of real

politics. Lenin or Mao on the stage never works well. Büchner’s Robespierre
is in my opinion a dreamy fiction who could equally be called Dujardin or
Bassompierre.

Evidently a Caesar or an Alexander is more successful since they are

ancient conquerors and are therefore comparable to Apollo or Theseus.

If you want to renew the figuration of the political use legendary figures,
or Plutarch, the treasure trove of the historical legends. As for the others,
politics itself provides its own best presentation and representation….

XVI

Neither the isomorphy with the political (while keeping a figurative

distance) nor listing its seven elements (place, text, director, actor, scenery,
costumes, audience) will capture theatre in its being. Ever since Plato we have

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known that no list can produce an essence and no analogy will produce an
Idea.

But forgive the philosopher some barbarisms for the sake of clarity. Let’s
call the analytic of the theatre that which concerns the assemblage of the
seven terms already mentioned. Let’s call the dialectic of the theatre that
which is singularly necessary to summon a spectator to the tribunal of a
morality under the eye of the State. The aim of the conceptual scheme that I
propose is to discover, here and now, the generic of the theatre such that the
transversal of these (analytical) elements by an evental occurrence of its
(dialectical) provocation can be productive of truth.

Or if the one prefers to see it: it is a matter of thinking the correlation

between the two columns in the table below:

THE THEATRE

Analytic (elements) Dialectic (in play)

The State
Place (situation of the representation)
Text
Director Ethics of the Play
Actor (the provocation of the presentation)
Scenery
Costumes The Spectator
Audience (possible support for the Truth)

The productive assemblage of the elements of Analysis is (or is not) the

event from which some truth emerges through the diagonal created by the
figures of the Dialectic. A representation is then an inquiry into the truth, an
inquiry for which the Spectator is the vanishing subject.

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XVII

If it is necessary to find some order in the fragments of thought that

follow, perhaps it will be in three parts following the traditional articulation of
the Dialectic.

1. Theatre as an affair of the State. Since it was founded by the

democratic regime of the agora and needs to be agreeable to the princes, the
theatre is undecided or frozen, not due to the reign of television as we pretend
but because it is only political to the extent that it is converted into the
electoral. Theatre is therefore an invalid of parliament and is cared for by
whichever administration is in power, and on the stage by the doctors of
Molière (one can suppose that the Ministry of Culture now plays the role of
the syndicates). As an art: the theatre unties the strands of political desire with
virtuosity but is unable to accommodate itself to the social while it remains
constrained by the social.

2. Theatre as a concern of ethics – starting from the ethics of play, so rare

and disrupting. Being accustomed by comedy to pronounce that everything is
not what it seems, and by tragedy to say that what is saved is also lost, theatre
has a precarious existence because it seems to have value and yet complete
salvation always escapes it. It is the non-spirit of the times.

3. Theatre as eclipse and incision of at least one spectator. It is the

audience this time (its notion, not its number or its existence), which is
hyperbolically affected or infected with laziness, that must be attacked. As
everyone in the theatre knows, it is the only vice that the theatre cannot
accommodate precisely because it must please and purge the passions. No
effect of truth, not even one of scenic splendour can purge the lazy of their
greatest passion – ignorance. Or, as Antoine Vitez 3 once said to me – the
theatre taught him this profound truth: the essence of the scoundrel, even
worse the executioner, is laziness, it is wanting to “live” without having to
work or think….

3. Translator’s note: Antoine Vitez (1899-1990) was an influential French actor, teacher at the
Conservatoire national d’art dramatique (1968-81) and director at the Théâtre national de Chaillot
(1981-88).

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LXIV

Finally what the Church abhors in the theatre and especially in the play is
that in opposition to the natural ethics organized by the Church on behalf of
the spectacle, theatre puts forward an ethics of the event and singularity. For
the Church art is ornamental, it exhausts its power on the scenic repetition of
figures from the sacred order. For true theatre art is the beginning (the text of
the poet) and the end (the representation governed by the director). Between
the two there is no mediation of an order, whether it be one of metier,
technique or talent. It is an ethical openness directed against all
substantialism, against all fixed conceptions of what the roles, the people and
the representations are. The actor exhibits on stage the evaporation of all
stable essences. The firmness of corporal and vocal signs with which the actor
adorns himself serve primarily to establish by surprise and delight that nothing
coincides with himself. The ethics of the play is an escape, one could say, a
beautiful escape. The actor operates contrary to any natural theory of
differences, sexual difference in particular. He makes artificial what we
believed to be most self-evidently given, joins what we always imagined to be
separate, and separates what seemed permanently unified. The performance of
the actor is always in between. This in between operates in the pure present of
the spectacle and the audience, who in the Mass bow down in front of
Presence, and who in the theatre only attain this presence after the event of a
thought. What true theatre presents is not represented, the word
“representation” is poorly chosen. A spectacle of the theatre is, each evening,
an inauguration of meaning. The actor and the actress are, when the text and
the performance know how to solicit the virtual ethics of play, the pure
courage of this inauguration….

LXXI

All at once the unfathomable mysteries of the theatre (but are they really
of the theatre?) would occupy the material position of another problem that we
know to be equally opaque: the relationship between psychoanalysis and
philosophy. The theatre would be the effectivity of this problem, summoning
the spectator to decide between them (if he is sure of the reality of his desires
it is psychoanalysis, if he is educated about the Idea it is philosophy) but of
course without ever knowing just where to cut because when pressed for an
answer they will only reply “it was good” or “it wasn’t great”, aphorisms from
which neither the psychoanalyst nor the philosopher can extract a law.

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LXXII

Theatre would then be a complex machinery (with seven elements) that

creates a situation where the objective dialectic sustains the majesty of the
State, where the subjective dialectic engages an ethics, especially at the point
of sexual difference, where the absolute dialectic causes a subject-result, a
Spectator to occur, and where it is impossible to decide whether the
machination attributes this to the reality of their desire or to the power of an
Idea.
LXXIII

Since the theatre is always the materiality of an unsolvable problem

between the mastery of philosophy and the therapy of desire, one can no doubt
find it in some of the hesitations of Aristotle. But it is even more evident in
what opposes let’s say, Plato to Lacan (or equally to Freud) concerning the
investigation of the theatrical poem. The first is affronted that the poem can
even claim to educate youth where the philosopher intends to rule over them,
where understanding should be gained through the knowledge of truth which
depends on knowing men and gods. In his infinite and painful polemic against
the theatre and poetry Plato confronts it as a rival who he then banishes from
the place where the philosopher holds sway. This is clearly opposite to the
accomplice that Freud and Lacan turn to when they interrogate Sophocles and
Shakespeare.

What rivalry and complicity have in common is that they both need to
presuppose a community of the play. Whoever is known to be other than the
accomplice is a potential rival precisely because those who count themselves
as being one can only do so by not being the other. Look at what Shakespeare
teaches us on precisely this point in Macbeth. It is therefore certain that both
philosophy and psychoanalysis recognize that the operations of theatre take
place on their respective territories, and therefore at the always-disputed
intersection of these territories. Psychoanalysis sees theatre as a social and
artistic extension of its field and with this recognition quite happily proceeds
to take its complexes (Oedipus) or its case studies (Hamlet) from the
repertoire. Philosophy is more rebellious, for it the latent Idea of the theatre
can only claim to be the generic particularity of art, and not the Great Lesson
of the master.

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But perhaps philosophy does above all else see in the theatre, which has
fascinated and kept it busy from the start, how the Idea is always infected with
desire. Thus the theatre would be philosophy seized by debauchery, the Idea
auctioned off for sex, the intelligible in costume. So that through
philosophical means (the Idea, the intelligible) it would compete with the
master, and by means of debauchery (sex, costume) it would be the
accomplice of psychoanalysis.

Theatre: the embodiment of the Idea. From the point of view of desire it
is life, and from the point view of the Idea it is the tomb, hence all the
anathemas and disputes. Theatre as bastard philosophy, or philosophical
bastardization: principle impurity, diverted lesson, analysis too serious to be
true, truth too playful to be certain. A tourniquet….

LXXVIII

This brings me to the theme of a note by Vitez, that the real function of
the theatre is to orient us in time, to say where we are in history. 4

Theatre as a machine for questioning “where?” A machine for localizing,

a machine for making a topological relation to time.

Grüber, immediately after working on the timeless play Titus

Andronicus, said to me that today we have maximised the original discord
between men and women precisely because we represent them as being equal,
indeed identical. 5 And he also told me that history has come to an end and that
it is always due the appearance of this completion that our world which is so
affluent is at the same time and in all respects fatigued.

And Vitez, after an encounter with the same Titus once again saved from
obscurity, tells me that the critical intellectual who wants to stay close to
power, or at least be on the side of it, wastes all his energy and loses his sense
of direction by doing so, that confusion reigns over desire as it does over
thought and that the big question today is: “What in this century survives the

4. The idea of theatre as operator of an historical orientation was developed by Vitez in a (unpublished)
talk for the journal Le Perroquet.
5. Translator’s note: Klaus Michael Grüber (b. 1941), the German theatre director active in Italy,
France and Germany, and famous for using unusual venues such as chapels and stadiums.

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death of history?” It is necessary to reply, the same cry that the actor Vitez
gives to Antiochus at the end of the play, “communism, alas!”

LXXIX

Therefore there will be three terms rather than two:

1. The eternity of figures captured in the text, the simple capacity to exist
at any instant.
2. The instant of presentation, which artistically machines an encounter
with the eternal and therefore proceeds to a perceptive elucidation of the
instant as the instant of thought.
3. Time, in which the elucidation of the instant orients us, the instant
making a “cut” in time, even though we are part of its obscure thickness.

Theatre would not have such complex and random ingredients were it not
for the fact that it ties together the eternal, the instant and time. And its
destination would therefore be:
― the elucidation of the instant through the encounter with the eternal;
― the orientation in time through the after effect of this encounter.

We would then be better able to orient ourselves in time, since one has
experienced the instant as thought (should we say: just as the insurrectional
instant made a moment of clarity durable for our tasks in time? And is there
any other function for such a moment? But where is the eternal in this
analogy? What is historically eternal? Perhaps exactly the political itself? In
the text for example?)

LXXX

This experience, this localized fiction of an image of the political that

joins the instant, time and eternity in the effort to become a spectator, is so
fundamental to us, so precious, that it is only admissible when it is reserved
for a few.

The “problem” of the theatre audience (its disappearance almost, or at

least its thinness, its lack of identity) has first to be posed in terms of a class
analysis: the alienated in the suburbs had to be made to attend the theatre by
lowering ticket-prices and making alliances with unions. Or else “touring” the
towns and villages was required. The era of the popular theatre, culture for all,

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theatre as a universality beyond class distinction. It required austere venues,

rough concrete, exposed stage machinery, the repudiation of anything velvet
and gold, the removal of the boxes where ladies once showed off their low-cut
dresses. The velvet, gold and low-cut dresses disappeared without the arrival
of large numbers of blue collars and caps, let alone any effective modern
proletariat, those profound intellectuals with lives of unimaginable complexity
living among our factory-working Moroccans, Algerians, Senegalese,
Malians, Turks, Yugoslavs, Pakistanis, etc. Distributive egalitarianism didn’t
establish its empire in the stalls.

After the short interval of militant and street theatre, improv and agit-
prop in the wake of May ’68 there has been a complete capitulation. Theatre
has stabilized itself into a “middle class” activity flanked by bourgeois
“theatre” on one side and television “theatre” on the other, communicating in
a sort of consensual jargon where the same actors jump for joy in the same
limp stories….

LXXXVIII

Neither tragic nor comic, contemporary theatre orients itself around

simple declarations. It is in the constant state of Beckett’s fables, haunted by
monologue. Declarations about what it is (no big thing, but not nothing
either), what it is not (neither comedy nor tragedy), and what it could be
(starting with a modern tragedy no doubt). Contemporary theatre desires to be
tragic but no longer has the means for it. It desires to offend the significations,
to be comic, but it no longer has the means for that either. It is caught between
tragedy desired and comedy attempted.

But for the situation to change does not entirely depend on the theatre. Its
time will come as will ours. Unforeseeable but beyond the market and beyond
limited action. Where some truth is held in the balance of sense.

LXXXIX

The theatre provides proof for the completely real present state of the
link between being and truth. A valid proof even when the theatre declines
into failure on certain points, which is our situation.

Let us end with Mallarmé’s perfect definition of the theatrical act:

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 BADIOU

“It must take place in the combinations of the Infinite face to face with
the Absolute. A necessary extracted Idea. A useful madness. One of the acts
of the universe comes to be committed there. Nothing more, only the breath
remains at the end of unified speech and gesture – blowing out the candle of
being by all that has been. Proof.”

Mallarmé adds: “to dig all that”. 6 Indeed. To dig.

6. Mallarme’s phrase comes from the preparatory notes for the unpublished text of Igitur.

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 Conclusion

Bernard Huey, one of the leading architectural educators to emerge from the
events of May ’68, summarises what students in architecture need to learn. 1 Firstly
they must gain mastery of the codes and techniques of architectural presentation, the
craft of architecture per se. Secondly they must be able to deal with the programme,
they must be able to conceptualise its many parameters and resolve them spatially in a
plan. But these are all quantitative tasks that any designer should be able to do. The
real work of the architect says Huey begins at a third qualitative level, by perfecting
and refining its elements they must project onto the project all their experiences,
techniques and knowledge. They must give the project a singular value. This need for
value brings us back to the proposition of Heretical Rhapsodies: that there exists a
large body of valuable architectural research undertaken in France during the 1980s
and 90s that remains untranslated and therefore unknown to the English-speaking
world. Now that we have seen a small sample of these works translated here for the
first time into English, are we in a better position to judge the validity of the
hypothesis?

But before we can begin to answer the question we need a further definition
because the phrase “valuable architectural research” begs the question: what makes
architectural research valuable? And further, how do we judge value in architecture?
Recall that Daniel Payot claims in his recent article, Le jugement de l’architecture
(The Judgement of Architecture, translated in Section 2) that, since all aesthetic
judgements are made by standing in for the group, and, due to the fundamentally
social nature of architecture the group is always already there, there can be no
judgement of architecture. But can there be a judgement of architectural research?
Which is a different matter, the group is not necessarily there when we do research.
Then is it like any other commodity in that its value will be constantly floating
according to the rises and falls of the market, in this case the international market for
intellectual exchange?

1. Bernard Huey, “The Teaching of Architecture in France, 1968 – 1978: From One Reform to the
Next”, Lotus International, no. 21 (1978), p. 36 – 45.

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 CONCLUSION

In the introduction it was proposed that France is a kind of clearing house for
intellectual exchange, adding French lightness and style to imported German
profundity and exporting this to the world. If there is an intellectual market then the
exchange value of “French theory” has recently taken a dive (see the graph in the
introduction, p. 10 above). Perhaps this is a very bad time then to release even more
French writers on the very flat “intellectual market.” To extend the metaphor (or is it
just a metaphor?) at the risk of getting tiresome, the research presented here would
constitute a better conceived and better constructed product than anything that has
come out of France before and as such would form an entirely new market with
unforeseeable value. It all depends on how it’s marketed.

To take a specific case, within Lyotard’s essay “Conventus” (translated in

Section 1) we find there is a highly suggestive and erotic theory of architecture that
Lyotard christens “undulatory mechanics.” This new approach to architecture
inextricably links together the human habitus (habit, way of life, the enduring
structures of human behaviour) with the situs or habitat in a constant relay based on
the analysis of rhythms and frequencies and in this way avoids all the traditional
pitfalls of the humanist anthropocentric projection which, for example, would treat a
house as simply a passive extension of the active body. In Lyotard’s view there can be
no mastery or passivity either in the house or the body because they are always
intertwined in a polyphonic duet, like a pianist and flutist playing a counterpoint, two
melodies wrapping around each other with neither one dominating. A “loving
frequentation” as Lyotard so beautifully puts it. This goes deeper and is more subtle
than the alternative analyses of architecture based on the concept of habitus suggested
by the more influential sociologist Pierre Bourdieu or the architecturally more
problematic concept of “rhythmanalysis” of the equally influential Henri Lefebvre. 2

2. For Bourdieu’s concept of habitus see Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans.
Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), Chapter 2; “Structures and the
habitus” and for its application to architecture see Gary Stevens, The Favored Circle: The Social
Foundations of Architectural Distinction (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1998) pp. 57 – 59. For
Lefebvre’s concept see Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, trans.
Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore (New York: Continuum, 2004), this latter work awaits its
architectural application.

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 CONCLUSION

So we can value Lyotard’s stimulating ideas by comparing them heuristically

with similar intellectual products and conclude that yes – they are doing something
similar (linking habitus with habitat) and yes – this one is genuinely doing it better.
Lyotard’s version moves us more deeply with its sympathetic and detailed approach
(all architecture is in the nature of a loving frequentation, and, where I can get a glass
of milk in the night without turning the lights on that is my house) compared to
Bourdieu’s and Lefebvre’s rather loveless and distant visions of urban life. So we can
say it has relatively more value to architectural research if we agree that it is in the
nature of architecture to include the personal as well as the social and the political.
But this sense of value, even though it touches us at a personal level would
nevertheless still be, following the line of argument in Michel Houellebecq’s critique
of architecture included in Section 4, simply another form of the extension of the
market into our private lives, a major factor in today’s increasingly virulent
institutionalised individualism as confirmed by the German sociologist Ulrich Beck. 3

But there is another sense of value, as the psychotherapist and sometime

architectural-commentator Félix Guattari reminds us in his essay “Architectural
Enunciation.” If architects accept that their task requires them to be more than mere
“plasticians” of built form and that they assume the role he claims is now expected of
them as “artists and craftsmen of perceptual and relational lived-experience”, if they
do this Guattari concludes, “the only criterion of truth confronting the architect will
then be the effect of an existential completeness and an overabundance of being,
which will never be absent so long as they have the good fortune to be caught up in a
process of becoming-an-event, that is to say, the historical enrichment and re-
singularization of desire and values.” 4 So if we follow Guattari’s reasoning it is
essential that the architect does not universalise their particular value system and
thereby build what would be tantamount to a built doctrine, like a Ville Radieuse built
on the basis of an Athens charter. And it is this denial of anything doctrinaire that is
the common thread running through all the writers surveyed in this thesis. They are all
anti-doctrinal architectural heretics because they are all working against the invariable

3. See Ulrich Beck and Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim, Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism

and its Social and Political Consequences (London: SAGE, 2002) see especially chapter 2; “A Life
of Ones’ Own in a Runaway World: Individualization, Globalization and Politics” which was
published under the same name in Archis, no. 2 (2001), pp. 17 – 28.
4. Félix Guattari, “Architectural Enunciation” trans. Tim Adams, Interstices, vol. 6 (2005), p. 125.

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 CONCLUSION

application universal rules and values. A re-singularising emergent value rather than
the dominant universalising exchange value must arise from an historical event
independent of any pre-established theoretical support.

So to rephrase the proposition of this thesis: does this body of previously

untranslated architectural research from France not rely on universal values but rather,
can it form a set a multiple catalysts capable of re-singularising ecstatic and emergent
values, in other words do they each separately and in their own way allow for the
creation of new values within the theory and practice of architecture?

To conclude let us test the proposition from the point of view of this re-
singularising of value. The event, as conceptualised by Alain Badiou and well
illustrated in his analysis of the theatre, Rhapsody for the Theatre, excerpts of which
were translated in Section 5, is an unexpected flash that for a brief moment brings the
seven elements of the theatre (place, text, director, actor, scenery, costumes, audience)
into direct contact with the State, ethics, and the spectator, transforming the passive
audience into an active subject of history and a witness to the truth. Before the event
is the orthodox theatre or building, a mere collection of parts and ideas, a tomb, but at
the moment of the event there is, totally unexpectedly, the heresy of true Theatre and
true Architecture. By considering architecture to be isomorphic with theatre and
replacing architecture where Badiou writes theatre we arrive at the following
statement: “Architecture is a machine for questioning ‘where?’ A machine to localise,
a machine for making a topological relation to time … the real function of
architecture is to orientate us in time, to say where we are in history … But perhaps
philosophy does above all else see in architecture, which has fascinated and kept it
busy from the start, how the Idea is always infected with desire. Thus architecture
would be philosophy seized by debauchery, the Idea auctioned off for sex, the
intelligible in costume….” 5 This rounds off and completes Lyotard’s erotic view of
the undulatory mechanics of architecture. The ecstatic union between the human

5. Alain Badiou, (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale,

1990), pp. 116 and 108 – 109, see the translation above pp. 167. For an excellent account of the
historical relation of theatre to architecture and how theatrical architecture often evokes fierce
condemnation, in other words how it is seen to be heretical to orthodoxy see Lindsay Jones, The
Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture: Experience, Interpretation, Comparison (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2000), vol. 2, pp. 188 – 212.

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 CONCLUSION

habitus and the habitat, between frequency and frequenting, forms the site for the
event of truth and the creation of the subject as the witness to the truth, where new
values can emerge simultaneously with the production of new subjectivities.

Obviously a simultaneously personal and historical event that opens up the

possibility for the re-singularising of value and desire outside of the dominant
universalising values will be fleeting and will soon fall prey to the dominant inertia
and become either eradicated or else will itself form a new universal value, the tragic
fate of all revolutions both personal and political. The event, when new values emerge
with a new subject, a new way of being, is extremely rare in Badiou’s universe, his
examples of such events include Galileo’s creation of physics, the French Revolution,
the Chinese Cultural Revolution and Schoenberg’s invention of twelve-tone music. 6
It is extremely unlikely that the research presented in this thesis represents, or even
contributes to, historical events on this scale.

Here the danger is thinking that the everyday work of the architect or the
architectural researcher does not contribute to historical events and therefore has no
chance of creating re-singularising value and as a consequence may as well give in to
the dominant universal exchange value, or forsake symbolic cultural capital in favour
of economic temporal capital to use the language of Pierre Bourdieu. And we end up
where we started with the market determining all values. Here it is useful to return to
Guattari’s analysis once more because he shows how the architect can form
transitional objects that move across heterogeneous levels in a process of
“heterogenesis.”

Architectural form is not destined to function as a gestalt closed in on itself, but as a

catalytic operator setting off chain reactions among the modes of semiotization, which
draw us out of ourselves and expose us to new fields of possibility. The feeling of
intimacy and existential singularity contiguous with the aura given off by a familiar
situation, an old dwelling or a landscape inhabited by our memories … can be the

6. For a list of what Badiou thinks of as events, see Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the
Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), p. 41.

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 CONCLUSION

generator of a proliferation and lines of flight in all the registers of living desire, of the
refusal to give in to the dominant inertia.7

This heterogeneity is the transversal opening up of various scales of action from

the most personal and seemingly inconsequential, like a particular crack in the
pavement that has significance only to us, right up to the epoch making historical
events like the Chinese Cultural Revolution, so that every little thing can in this view
be an heretical event leading to the emergence of a new re-singularising value
bringing together history and desire in a way that is not universal. So in Guattari’s
analysis of architecture it is essential that the architect be constantly on the alert for
small catalysts that can have large scale effects on quite different levels and can make
the most heterogeneous of things work together. But what would support this re-
singularising of value in concrete architectural terms? Guattari gives us to two
examples, one a little sad and the other quite humorous.

In the essay “Architectural Enunciation” Guattari tells us a story, no doubt from

his own clinical experience as a psychotherapist, about a child hospitalised in a
psychiatric home. 8 The child keeps a shoebox under their bed in which they hide a
few keepsakes. In the child’s imagination this treasure chest links together a secret
codeword shared only by the other children, a particular space that they occupy in the
hospital, a tree in the playground which for them has magical totemic properties, and
a view of the sky known only to them. The architect, Guattari says, must at the very
least allow for such fragmentary components of subjectivity. This could be something
as simple as making sure there is ample lockable storage in hospital wards for very
personal items to be kept safe. This is something that could easily be overlooked but
could have much larger consequences. Another example he gives is the kitchen at the
La Borde clinic in Cours Cheverny where Guattari worked most of his life. 9 This
facility within an institution could easily turn into a “site of stereotyped attitudes and
behaviour, where everyone carries out their little refrain.” Or it could, as often
happened at La Borde, become a little opera in which people talk, dance, turn dustbins

7. Félix Guattari, “Architectural Enunciation” trans. Tim Adams, Interstices, vol. 6 (2005) p. 124.
8. Ibid. pp. 125 - 124.
9. Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 69 – 71.

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 CONCLUSION

into musical instruments, and the chef give an impromptu impersonation of a celebrity
chef. Everything comes together: food, equipment, staff, doctors, patients, in an
atmosphere of openness and fun. But Guattari warns, this is “an essentially precarious
undertaking, of a continual creation, which does not have the benefit of any pre-
established theoretical support. The enunciative emergence of the kitchen at La Borde
… calls for a permanent renewal of the assemblage, a verification of its capacity to
welcome a-signifying singularities – unbearable patients, insoluble conflicts – a
constant readjustment of its transversalist opening onto the outside world.” 10 This has
obvious implications for whoever designs such a kitchen since it needs to be much
larger than otherwise and more stage-like with good visibility for all the participants.
A normal kitchen would not allow for such an opera to take place. Both the child in
the psychiatric home and the participants the kitchen-opera at La Borde are captured
in ever-increasing spheres of influence right up to the scale of the French national
policy on psychiatric hospitals and on a global scale through the translations of
Guattari’s account of them.

So are there any threads linking this diverse group of thinkers writing about
architecture: some of whom are generalist philosophers (Lyotard, Irigaray, Nancy,
Badiou) others who are specialist philosophers on architecture (Payot, Goetz) some of
whom are architects (Boudon, Girard) and one a writer (Houellebecq)? Yes – they all
share a constant desire to create personal values that break out of the dominant codes
and connect the most varied things together with a skewed logic that does not accept
the dominant homogenising of value. They all in their own way rhapsodise on the
theme of heresy. These writings have no value at all if the only value is the universal
value of exchange, but they are priceless in terms of their re-singularising of value.
“Research in architecture is unique on account of its process of hybridizing
competencies and its transversality between diverse categories of disciplines,” writes
Boudon quoting a document advocating the reform of architectural education, then he
adds his own thoughts, “Therefore from Vitruvius up until our time the heterogeneity
of the object of architecture is a structural situation that shows no sign of coming to an
end. Therefore it is better to take this heterogeneity as a given and try to examine its

10. Ibid. p. 71.

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 CONCLUSION

consequences, which is the approach I shall take….” 11 And this has been the approach
taken in this thesis as well.

To leave the reader with two images, not of French architectural theorists this
time but of young French architects. The first is from a group of architects and artists
who call themselves EXYZT and who were chosen under the direction of Patrick
Bouchain to represent France at the 2006 Venice Biennale. The theme for the
Biennale was Cities, Architecture and Society and the brief was to shift attention away
from the closed discipline of architecture towards the shifting urban environment as a
field. 12 While other countries presented beautiful models and images of overpopulated
and chaotic urbanism from around the world, all with varying degrees of interactivity,
the French team simply chose to move into their Venetian pavilion and make it
habitable for the three months of the Biennale. They called it Metavilla/Métacité.
They installed a kitchen, a dining area, a workshop and cubicles for sleeping. Visitors
could come and eat, watch TV, or even take a sauna on the roof if they felt so
inclined. It would be very easy to dismiss this as being derivative of the sort of work
being done by contemporary artists like Rirkrit Tiravanija, a kind of convivial
performance art that has been theorised by Nicolas Bourriaud as the new “relational
aesthetic.” 13 Or else one could say nice party but where’s the architecture? Or we
could say, given a little more understanding of recent French architectural theory, that
Metavilla/Métacité represents a heretical challenge to the site of architecture by
attempting to shift the current situation of architecture. There is a “loving
frequentation” between the visitor and the pavilion, a “displacement” of the normal
situation of an exhibition, a denial of any “judgement of architecture”, and we might
even say Metavilla/Métacité exhibits a certain quality of “building shelves” with an

11. Philippe Boudon, “Diversité des recherches en architecture” in Actes des assises de la recherche,
17-18 June 1996 (Paris: Ministère de la culture et de la communication, direction des Affaires
générales, Mission de la recherche et de la technologie, 1997) p.113-118. Translated in Section 3
above as “The Diversity of Research in Architecture.”
12. Fabrizio Gallanti, “Exhibition Review: Cities. Architecture and society, 10th International
Architecture Exhibition, Venice, Italy”, A+U, no. 434 (November 2006), pp. 118 – 121.
13. Rirkrit Tiravanija is famous for turning gallery spaces into exact replicas of his apartment then
cooking Thai food for all the visitors who then sit around and talk about art. See Nicolas Bourriaud,
Relational Aesthetics
, 2002). For a critique of Baurriaud see Eric Alliez, “Capitalism and Schizophrenia
and Consensus: The Relational Aesthetic”, trans. Tim Adams, Z/X: Journal of the Manukau School
of Visual Arts, no. 3 (2006), pp. 3-7.

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 CONCLUSION

aesthetics of the filing cabinet, but without doubt the pavilion is above all an “event”
in every sense of the word. 14 All these concepts belong to the French intellectual
milieu of the last twenty years and are, at least potentially, drivers in this challenging
work and in any case would do it more justice than to say it is just another work of
performance art.

Figure 46. The French pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, 2006.

Figure 47. Axonometric of the French pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale.

14. The words in quotation marks are key concepts found in the translations included in this thesis by
Jean-François Lyotard, Benoît Goetz, Daniel Payot, Michel Houellebecq and Alain Badiou
respectively.

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 CONCLUSION

Patrick Bouchain, the guest architect for the French pavilion sees all architecture
as a site for on-going experimentation. As such his focus is on the building site itself.
He thinks we must give the site a new credibility as a place for serious research
because this is where all the various skills of all the actors involved in the project
come together. “The site should”, he says, “be a place of learning. It should be
possible for everyone who is interested, and obligatory for all those learning ― or
devoting themselves ― to building to come and observe the way the work evolves, as
knowledge is acquired through experimentation and mimicry.” 15 Bouchain proposes
that a part of each construction site be set aside for classes so that architecture
students among others could have in situ lessons in live building construction. And
this, it could be suggested, is what we are seeing in the French pavilion, a model of
what such an in situ class room would look like, with all the temporary
communications and services needed for sustaining research on the building site over
the period of construction.

The last image is a morphed portrait of François Roche and Stéphanie Lavaux
whose architectural cooperative is called R&Sie… (“R” for Roche, “S” for Stéphanie
and “& Sie” meaning “and Associates”, the dots representing their openness to
collaboration), and since “h” is silent in French it is pronounced the same as hérésie,
or “heresy.” We could have chosen any one of a dozen R&Sie… projects that push
the boundaries of architecture in terms of technology and human usage: nomadic
shelters for the homeless such as Furtive flat (1998), the stealth tents of Maison Barak
(2001) and Maison Souriou (2003), or the robotically self-assembling Olzweg
installation (2006) and the award-wining I’ve heard about…© urban experiment
(2006).

15. Patrick Bouchain, “The Site: A Place of Experimentation” in Laurence Castany and Christophe
Catsaros (ed.), Metavilla Métacité, The 10th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice Biennale,
French Pavilion (Paris: The French Ministry of Culture and Communication, 2006), p. 10.

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 CONCLUSION

Figure 48. Morphed portrait of François Roche and Stéphanie Lavaux of R&Sie… architects.

But what is most heretical about the work of R&Sie… is not their use of cutting
edge technology and their convincing science-fiction scenarios, that is the normal
situation for young architects today, rather it is what their work implies for the
identity of the architect and the occupant. The human is no longer to be considered a
stationary and centred observer for the experiments but is now exposed to the same
hybridizations and mutations of the real that are the everyday techniques of the
architect. “R&Sie invites all species, human as well as non-human, in an architecture
constantly including animals and insects as forgotten inhabitants of territories. An
architecture of hybridization playing with the real, the fictional and the mythical
opens before us a pagan atmosphere with a strange taste.” 16 It would be hard to find a
better description of architectural heresy than this. Architecture, architect, robotic
assembler, and the occupant are all co-authors in the production of an indeterminate
emergent habitat.

What the French pavilion and R&Sie… tell us about contemporary French
architecture is that without some knowledge of the intellectual background that these

16. Zeynep Mennan, “Delicious Decay”, on the R&Sie… website at http://www.new-

territories.com/roche%20text.htm, accessed 21 March 2007.

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 CONCLUSION

architects are immersed in, of which we have only began to scratch the surface here,
the fragile singular values that emerge from them would be totally missed. It is
therefore a matter of witnessing the uniqueness of French architectural theory between
1984 and 2004 and committing ourselves to its consequences and that is what we have
begun to do here with Heretical Rhapsodies.

183
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