Chris L. Smith - Bare Architecture - A Schizoanalysis

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Bare Architecture
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Schizoanalysis and Ecosophy, edited by Constantin V. Boundas

Schizoanalytic Cartographies, Felix Guattari
Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Literature,
Ian Buchanan, Tim Matts and Aidan Tynan
Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Religion,
Lindsay Powell-Jones and F. LeRon Shults
Deleuze and Futurism, Helen Palmer
Deleuze and Cinema, Felicity Colman
Deleuze and Art, Anne Sauvagnargues
Space After Deleuze, Arun Saldanha
Bare Architecture: A Schizoanalysis
By Chris L. Smith
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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To Helen Triantafyllou. Loved.
Contents
Foreword viii
Acknowledgements ix
List of Figures x
Prologue xiii
Part 1 Bodies and Architectures
1 Lying Figures 3
2 Earth and Territory 19
Part 2 Poststructural Virtues
3 The Impersonal 39
4 The Indiscernible 63
5 The Imperceptible 79
Part 3 Architectural Procedures
6 Symptomatology 101
7 Wayfaring 119
8 Speaking 135
Postscript 155
Notes 161
Bibliography 189
Index 199
Foreword
In the text Schizoanalytic Cartographies (1989), the psychoanalyst Félix

Guattari suggests the elements of schizoanalysis ‘are like crystals of singu-
larization, points of bifurcation outside the dominant coordinates, on the
basis of which mutant universes of reference can spring up’. Schizoanalysis
is thus simultaneously an act of departure and flight: a departure from the
‘dominant coordinates’ of thought – the thinking habitually imposed upon a
subject. And a flight toward ‘mutant universes’ – alternate modes of critique
and creation – generative of new subjects. The present book, Bare Architecture,
is a work of schizoanalysis. The key model of thought to be departed from is
that thinking which we have habitually applied to the body and its relation to
architecture. Three poststructural virtues: the impersonal, the indiscernible
and the imperceptible, are engaged to recast the subject. Three architectural
procedures: symptomatology, wayfaring and speaking, are invoked in order
that the architecture that once held us in place, casts us afar.
Acknowledgements
I am ever grateful for the magnificent mentoring and warm friendship I

receive from Andrew Ballantyne. Many of the thoughts herein were given
air on a terrace that faces the Basilica of Sainte Marie-Madeleine in Vézelay.
Thank you.
Sincere thanks to the University of Sydney for the award of a sabbatical
during the period from which this book emerged. I must thank those who
have kindly taken the time to read sections of this book and whose critique
and commentary has refined many ideas and many more forms of expression:
Claudia Perren and Miriam Mlecek, Andrew Leach and David Ellison, Hélène
Frichot and Stephen Loo, Ian Buchanan, Michael Tawa, Victoria Jackson
Wyatt, Farzane Haghighi, Sanja Mladenović, Kate King, Vesna Trobec and
Kieran Richards.
Thanks to Liza Thompson and Frankie Mace, my editors at Bloomsbury,
for their enthusiasm and support throughout. Thanks to Ella Mudie and
the Estate of Francis Bacon; Giulia Leali and the Lucian Freud Archive; Paul
Rousseau and the John Deakin Archive, and Julian Ridgway and Rosemary
Croft from Getty Images, for generous help with the sourcing of images and for
sharing magnificent minutiae. Thanks to Allison Collins and Peter Schneider
for helping me to access Douglas Darden’s wonderful legacy. Thanks also to
Joshua Bowler for identifying a figure in a double-exposed photograph that,

even for a psychoanalyst, can’t have been entirely comfortable.
Heartfelt thanks to those who were with me throughout the intense
pre-preamble and post-postscript of this book. Thank you to our four:
Terence and Theo Triantafyllou, Byron and Liam Smith. And thank you
to Jana Scheffler and Luke Kirchner-Scheffler, Kim Jacobs, Con and Soula
Kazantzidis, Shirley Scanes, Lynda and Bill Smith, Ross Anderson and Marjo
Niemelä for taking such good care of our family across our rawest moment.
List of Figures
Cover
Onto the Earth, the steeple of Katrine Malinovsky and Randi
Jørgensen’s ‘The Village’ via the Turbine Hall, Cockatoo Island,
Sydney, Australia. Photograph by author (2014).
0.1 Diving, Plongeoir, Carnac. Photograph courtesy of David Collins

(2006). xiv
1.1 Francis Bacon, Lying Figure, 1969. Oil on canvas. © The Estate
of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved/DACS. Licensed by Viscopy,
2016. 4
1.2 Leonardo Da Vinci, Vitruvian Man, c. 1490. Pen and ink with
wash over metalpoint on paper. 12
1.3 Exterior of Serpentine Pavilion. Photograph by author (2011). 13
1.4 Interior corridor. Photograph by author (2011). 15
1.5 A garden within. Photograph by author (2011). 17
2.1 John Deakin, Lying Figure Photograph. John Deakin, Henrietta

Moraes at 9 Apollo Place, c. 1963, © The John Deakin Archive.

Licensed by Getty Images, 2016. 20
2.2 The Net. Photograph courtesy of Chris Hawes, ‘Where the sweet
peas used to scramble’ (2014). 22
2.3 Rhythm. Photograph courtesy of Frederick Sarran, ‘Labyrinth’

(2010). 24
2.4 Empty Warehouse. Photograph courtesy of Ashley Albin, ‘These

Ghosts Aren’t my Own’ (2011). 31
List of Figures xi
3.1 Douglas Darden, Plan at nurse’s level. Image courtesy of Allison

Collins, 2016. 55
3.2 Dis/continuous Genealogy. Image courtesy of Allison Collins, 2016. 56
3.3 ‘Anatomical section’. Image courtesy of Allison Collins, 2016. 59
3.4 Douglas Darden, Frontispiece. Image courtesy of Allison Collins,

2016. 60
4.1 Bernard Tschumi, Advertisements for Architecture, Ad no. 8.,

from Bernard Tschumi, Architecture Concepts: Red is Not a Color
(New York: Rizzoli, 2012), 46. 66
4.2 Orpheus in the Underworld. Photograph courtesy of Jean-Étienne

Minh-Duy Poirrier (2006). 70
4.3 Place Léon Aucoc, Bordeaux. Photograph courtesy of Lacaton and

Vassal (1996). 76
5.1 The stair, Mémorial des Martyrs de la Deportation. Photograph by

author (2013). 93
5.2 The bunker. Photograph courtesy of Kieran Richards (2015). 95
5.3 Entrance to the chamber. Photograph courtesy of Kieran Richards

(2015). 97
6.1 Lucian Freud, Girl in a Blanket, 1953. Oil on canvas. Private

Collection © The Lucian Freud Archive/Bridgeman Images. 102
6.2 Brion-Vega Cemetery, San Vito d’Altivole. Photograph courtesy of

Scott McLemore (2009). 111
6.3 Concrete gate. Photograph courtesy of Kendra Jaen (2010). 114
6.4 Concrete stairs. Photograph courtesy of Ingrid Berniga Dotras

(2010). 116
7.1 Barns against the sky. Photograph courtesy of Marco Casagrande

(1999). 131
xii List of Figures
7.2 The burning. Photograph courtesy of Marco Casagrande (1999). 132
8.1 John Deakin, Double exposure. John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes at

9 Apollo Place, c. 1963, ©The John Deakin Archive. Licensed by
Getty Images, 2016. 137
8.2 Göteburg sauna. Photograph courtesy of RaumLabor (2015). 148
8.3 Svettekörka. Photograph courtesy of Gallasato, RaumLabor (2015). 150
8.4 Sauna interior. Photograph courtesy of RaumLabor (2015). 152
9.1 Gliding, Plongeoir, Granville. Photograph courtesy of Aliocha

Photographie (2009). 156
Prologue
There are moments when we are struck by the sheer brilliance and glow of
the Earth. Moments when we are struck by the rhythmic and surging chaos of
the shoreline, by waves, by wind and by clouds. There are moments when we
feel the force of the Earth directly. Sometimes the force pushes us, blows our
hair and warms our skin. At other times the force strikes us hard in silence
and stillness. It is often architecture that puts us in proximity to these forces.
Platforms that take us over water, towers that take us into the sky. These
moments tend to involve at least two sensations thrust together in a complex
simultaneity. The first is the sensation of the here and now – of being intensely
located. Specifically positioned in space and in time, only here and just now.
This is the sensation of finding ourselves. The second is the sensation of being
dislocated from our centres and our boundaries. Of forgetting the defined
extents of who we are and what we can do. Otherwise or whatever. This is the
sensation of losing ourselves. It is these dual sensations of finding and losing
the self and to their continual passage to which this book turns. I am exploring
architecture as a very particular instance of such passage. In this sense, archi-
tecture is at once a harbour and a launch-pad. At the end of the platform or the
top of a tower we reach for a rail in order to hold us in place lest we completely
drift away. And then, just sometimes, we breathe in deeply and let go.
There is a diving tower, a plongeoir, that sits poised above the gentle waves
of la grande plage, Carnac (Figure 0.1). This diving tower rises approximately
7 metres into the sky, when measured from the shifting sands in which it is
anchored. I’ve not measured it though, or at least I’ve not measured it in any
other manner than in the vague measures entailed in the act of climbing –
the stretching of arms and the bending of knees. The tower is composed of
a tubular steel frame and is roughly triangular, or more accurately a square
pyramidal frustum. Four legs are spread wide at the base and come closer
together at the apex. At this apex a first and second leg bend into a third and
fourth respectively. That is, the tubular steel that rises as a first leg is bent in
xiv Prologue
order that it descends as a third, and the steel that rises as a second bends as
a fourth; such that the main structure is composed of only two pieces of bent
tubular steel. The tower is divided into three equal sections vertically. Each
section is marked by a square of horizontal steel tube that acts to brace the
legs. The base section is empty (other than the four legs of the tower). The
second and third vertical sections have ladders and simple handrails of the
same tubular steel, but of a lesser diameter – that make these parts easier to
grasp. There are two diving platforms that project out from the structure over
the water. One platform sits at approximately two-thirds up from the base, the
other towards the top – approximately six and a half metres into the sky above
the shifting sands.
Figure 0.1 Diving, Plongeoir, Carnac. Photograph courtesy of David Collins (2006).
This diving tower sits about 15 metres from the shoreline – but this depends
on the tide, which in turn depends on the moon, the sun and rotations of the
Earth. The tide rises and falls by about 2.5 metres twice a day; more when the
moon is full, less when it is new; more in winter when this part of the Earth
is closer to the sun, less in summer. This shifting shoreline is located at the
southern edge of Carnac, Brittany. It is not far from the thousands of Neolithic
Prologue xv
stone monoliths that sit across the landscape of Carnac. Thousands of huge
stones aligned and organized in manners that are difficult to discern from the
Earth – but that seem more obvious when viewed from the sky, as if they are
wayfaring devices for gods. Brittany was once a kingdom, then a duchy, then
a province and is currently a region of France. The peninsula of Brittany is the
north-west tip of Continental Europe. Or, from the other direction, it can be
said that this diving tower of la grande plage, occupies the waters of Quiberon
Bay and Quiberon Bay is of the waters of the Bay of Biscay and the Celtic Sea
and these bays and this sea occupy the waters of the North Atlantic Ocean.
This tower, this diving tower, is a marking of a particular place. A geographic
point or pointer. In many senses it’s more stable than its geography. Like the
monolithic stones of the fields, this tower is the carving of territory out of the
chaos of the sea and the sky, a temporary stability in the shifting of sands;
the rolls of the tides; of lunar cycles and the spinning of the Earth; of socio-
political assignations and borders, and; of the perpetual migrations of waters.
This diving tower is also a site of the territorialization of selves. A temporary
point of fixation in the demarcations and boundaries of the self and others.
The tower operates as an anchor to desire. From the sand of the shore
scattered with tanned families and colourful towels and umbrellas we see the
tower, a tubular skeleton in the sea. We swim to the tower because it provides
a point of attraction for glistening wet bodies. A wayfaring device for libidos.
We swim to the tower because it is empty without us. A ladder always yearns
to be climbed. A handrail always desires to be held. A diving platform begs to
be occupied, if only tentatively, momentarily. When the tide is high you wade
out into the water and swim to the tower. When the tide is high you can easily
reach the bottom rungs of the ladder, haul yourself out of the sea and ascend
the tower. When the tide is low, however, you cannot reach the bottom rung.
When the tide is low it is impossible to thrust yourself from the water high
enough to grasp the bottom rail. It is impossible to reach the ladder which
makes it impossible to climb and equally impossible to damage yourself by
diving into the precariously shallow waters of a low tide. The tide is engaged
as a device to filter bodies and to afford access and exclusion. Even at higher
tides smaller bodies have trouble hauling themselves out of the water and
up the ladder. Weaker bodies have trouble too. There is a necessary strength
involved. A strength in the arms that allows you not only to lift yourself but to
xvi Prologue
overcome the strange gravity and grip of the sea. In this sense the tower is a
simple machine. A tidal machine, a lunar machine. A machine for which the
body is but one component. Stretching arms, bending knees, grasping hands.
Muscles for a tubular skeleton.
One Tuesday in August 2008 we swam to the tower. It was high tide. We
hauled ourselves from the water and climbed the ladder to the top platform.
There was a warm breeze on our wet bodies. A warm sun on our salty skin. A
tingling sensation on the surface. It feels higher than even the vague measure-
ments of climbing suggested. It is quieter than the beach itself with children
playing on the sand and the chatter of families. There is something magical
about being in the air. Especially when you are in the air above the sea. Near
naked, silhouetted in the midday sun, unrecognized, unrecognizable. When
you have removed yourself, or been removed from, all those conventions by
which you might be known: names, familial relations, genders and agendas,
titles, professions, economies, race and class, religions and certifications; you
are free. Free to connect with an outside, with the sun, the breeze, the air and
a tidal harmonics. With slow-moving clouds and gentle waves. Free to return
to the material intensities of the self, the Real. In this sense this diving tower
is implicated in the losing of the self; in the dissolutions and indiscernibilities
of the self and beyond. Up here above the water, the gentle waves, the gulf, the
bay, the sea and the ocean there is a sense of being completely exposed. Raw.
Bare. And barely there at all.
This diving tower is like much of the architecture of this book, a bare archi-
tecture. It is an architecture that the philosopher Gilles Deleuze might call a
‘prosthesis-organ’ or indeed what Deleuze and his accomplice the psycho-
analyst Félix Guattari, might together refer to as ‘a body that is all the more
alive for having no organs’.1 But it is also the architecture of Georges Bataille’s
enforme. Of Michel Serres’ adrift. Of Roland Barthes’ air. Of Jean-Luc Nancy’s
exscription. Of Maurice Blanchot’s speech. Or of Giorgio Agamben’s bare life
from which the expression ‘bare architecture’ derives. This is not an architecture
registered in style, typologies, tropes, distinctions, definitions, in fixed measure-
ments and origins; but rather in its intricate excesses and in its affecting hazes.
In its explorations and experiments. In the schizoanalytic thought it prompts.
The body of bare architecture is also at once intricate and indistinct. Though
I start this exploration with a profound sense of being found and being lost
Prologue xvii
I’m not imagining that there is something, an individual, an essential self, to

be found or lost. Rather, I imagine that the negotiation of these intensities is
itself formative. In his text of 1964 L’Individu et sa genèse physico-biologique,
Gilbert Simondon refers to a principle of individuation as an ‘operation [that]
rests on the singularity or the singularities of the concrete here and now; it
envelops them and amplifies them’.2 The manners by which the ‘here and now’
articulates selves is a key part of this exploration. The individual at stake herein
is not given but rather an ongoing operation or the continuously varying
result of an ‘architectural procedure’ as the poet designers Madeline Gins and
Shusaku Arakawa have called it.3 Bare architecture, in this sense, departs by
hedging a bet that selves are configured as architectures are constructed, in a
beautiful and intense breathing in and letting go.
Part One
Bodies and Architectures

1
Lying Figures
There is a painting by Francis Bacon that I’ve been spending far too much
time with – though this statement is not entirely accurate. Rather, I’ve been
spending too much time with a postcard reproduction of the painting. The
postcard was bought at one of the inevitable gift-shops that you are squeezed
through at almost every museum and gallery exit. The image on the postcard
is of Bacon’s painting, Lying Figure of 1969 (Figure 1.1).1
The original painting is just short of 2 metres tall and 1.5 metres wide. My
postcard version, on the other hand, is 123 millimetres tall and 89 millimetres
wide – which likely makes it an ideal size for letterboxes. It was bought on
Wednesday 13 February 2013 and cost AUS$3 (just over €2 or just under £2).
It is not, however, the location of the gift shop, the date, the price, nor the
size of my reproduction that I have found myself fixating upon, but rather the
sense of the image itself. There is something in/of this image that is entrancing,
transformative. If, as the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst
Félix Guattari suggest in their collaborative text Kafka: Toward a Minor
Literature (1975), that a text may constitute a ‘revolutionary force’ in the sense
that when one reaches for a book one is already establishing a line of thought,
a position, a community;2 then fixating upon an image too is a revolutionary
act. The reason I’ve spent too much time with this image is two-fold: first,
because it’s an escape. I can escape into this image, and; second, because it
generates a world. That is, I see a world afresh through this image. Indeed
(if I was honest) the image is somehow closer to how I imagine the world to
actually be. The Real world. Real with a capital R.
I am well aware that the image is at once constructed and that at the same
time the image (re)constructs me. There is a necessary doubling involved
in engagements with art and architecture. Our engagements are at once a
4 Bare Architecture
Figure 1.1 Francis Bacon, Lying Figure, 1969. Oil on canvas. © The Estate of
Francis Bacon. All rights reserved/DACS. Licensed by Viscopy, 2016.
Lying Figures 5
moulding and a modulation, ‘from the clay to the walls and the walls to the
clay’ as the philosopher Gilbert Simondon would suggest.3
My own mould tends to be a world configured by an architectural
education, its biases and positionings. And I’ve become fascinated by two
intertwined moments in architecture. These are the moments that might be
simplistically described as moments of finding ourselves and moments of
losing ourselves. It is these moments that this book concerns itself with. These
moments do not, of course, only occur in respect to art and architectural
operations. They occur in respect to, in relation with, along with, much more.
On the one hand we have this point, or piercing moment. A pin-pointing.
A wall moment. An ‘I am here’ moment, like finding oneself located on a
city map at the sharp end of the arrow-head labelled ‘You are here’. Moments
when you extend your finger and touch that map and know that you are there.
Just there. Nowhere else – as if you were completely found. Like being found
in the night on a lover’s sharp fingernail. On the other hand, you have those
moments when you forget where you are. When you lose yourself ‘in the
moment’. When you become dream-like and transfixed by the stars and the
clouds. A wet clay moment. Moments when you lose a sense of not only where
you are but who you are. Like being lost in a lover’s eyes. Forgetting where
they end and you begin. Forgetting like the philosopher Georges Bataille, ‘[i]n
bed next to a girl he loves, he forgets that he does not know why he is himself
instead of the body he touches’.4
It is this dual sense that I’m exploring in architecture. The manner by which
we find ourselves and lose ourselves. The manner by which architecture fixes
us into a place, a position, and the manner by which we lose, distort, liberate
a sense of self in respect to architecture: moments of being pinned down and

moments of being swept away. I see these two moments not, however, as
opposites, nor in terms of presence and absence. I imagine that both are vital
and that one is distilled from the other. They are part of the same passage.
Indeed, it is the intensity of when they are felt simultaneously that is often
most intense: when we feel the rawness of affecting and being affected by
the world. It is this rawness that I call bare architecture: to touch the burnt
concrete walls of the Bruder Klaus Chapel as one loses oneself, melts, in the
flaring star of light above; the manner by which your fingernail scraped sharp
along my spine as I was lost in your eyes.
6 Bare Architecture
The image, Bacon’s painting, my postcard, Lying Figure, speaks of these two
key concerns and more than this, it speaks of their simultaneity, their intense
collapse. In this book I consider this most beautiful and intense ‘collapse’ in
architecture, as dissipation between the territories of field, figure and place. To
introduce the idea I will briefly dwell on Bacon’s painting and my postcard, the
notion of ‘spasm’ in the work of the philosopher Deleuze and one particular
moment of spasm in one work of the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. But first
to the painting that collapses into a postcard, in a museum that collapses into
a gift shop.
The painting
The title of Bacon’s painting Lying Figure operates as an illusory anchor. It

is an anchor in the sense that the title tells us what we are perhaps looking
at (or at least measuring against). It tells us of an origin for the image. It is
an origin that serves as a departure point. We are told it is a ‘figure’, a body,
and that this figure is ‘lying’, reclined, maybe at rest. The title Lying Figure is
illusory in the sense that it reminds us that any naming can lie; and that most
naming, denotation, tends to be a poor approximation of the fuller intensity
and operation that brings a work of art into being and prompts thought.
The 1969 Lying Figure painting, like many of Bacon’s works, presents us
with an image of a human body rawer than meat. Beyond the title of the
painting, there is enough here for us to recognize a naked human body and to
recognize the body as that of a woman. Bacon’s female figures always seemed
to roam. They were, as the British art critic and curator David Sylvester
pointed out, ‘curvaceous and well-fleshed’.5 These bodies also tend to be more
mobile and amorphous than the men he depicted. Though a painting such as
the one titled Reclining Woman of 1961, that seems to have been modelled on
a man, makes such qualifications difficult. The model for the 1969 Lying Figure
was, however, female. The model was the bonne vivante Henrietta Moraes.
Though this statement too, is not entirely accurate. Rather, the painting was
based on a photograph of Moraes. The photograph was taken by ‘a horrible
little man’, the English photographer John Deakin.6 Bacon painted Moraes,
from photographs taken by Deakin, at least 16 times, over 20 years.7
Lying Figures 7
There are earlier, different versions of this 1969 Lying Figure, embryonic
versions in some respects, such as: Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe of
1963; Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, of 1963; Lying Figure of 1966; Henrietta
Moraes also of 1966, and; a version number 2, Lying Figure with Hypodermic
Syringe of 1968. As with the earlier versions, in the 1969 painting the figure
is located on what might be read as a bed. A round bed. There’s a striped
bedspread (or is it a bare mattress) and perhaps a pillow, but her head is not
always on it. The bed in this 1969 version is in a space, a room maybe, with
a brown earthy or dirty floor. There’s also what could be dirty footmarks
on this floor. Alongside the bed there’s a side-table or two. There is also a
hanging light and what appears to be a hanging light-switch. The light recurs
in many of Bacon’s works. It is the light of Bacon’s famous 7 Reece Mews
studio of South Kensington.8 The light with its globe and the light-switch
establish some sort of tentative gravity to the space. The light that hangs
straight seems to suggest a centre to the image, not a physical centre, but a
centre of force.
Particular attention in the 1969 Lying Figure is given to the figure’s head. It
is more detailed and more dissected, opened, than the other parts. Minced and
mangled like meat. Another item that is particularly detailed in the image is
a syringe. It is a syringe in an outstretched right arm, and it pierces the image
directly under the light that hangs. Again establishing some sort of gravity or
force. In reference to the 1963 Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe, Bacon
suggests of the syringe that he wanted to pin the figure, to fix it to the bed and
to the canvas. In an interview with Sylvester, Bacon suggests:
I’ve used the figures lying on beds with a hypodermic syringe as a form of
nailing the image more strongly to reality or appearance, I don’t put the syringe
because of the drug that’s being injected but because it’s less stupid than putting
a nail through the arm, which would be even more melodramatic. I put the
syringe because I want a nailing of the flesh onto the bed.9
The ‘nailing’ is likely a more complex operation than the mere fixing of a
figure to a ground. That is, within a frame. If one is to follow the tact of
Deleuze’s understanding of Bacon in his text of 1981, Francis Bacon: The
Logic of Sensation, then it is necessary to consider the non-representational
impetus of Bacon’s work in nailing ‘to reality or appearance’.10 What is it to nail
to reality or appearance when, as Deleuze describes, Bacon was generating a
8 Bare Architecture
relationship ‘not of form and matter, but of materials and forces – making
those forces visible through their effects on the flesh’?11 The syringe indeed
is a type of nailing to ‘reality or appearance’ in the sense that the syringe
is perhaps the only element in the painting that ‘looks’ as it does in reality.
That is to say, the syringe looks like a syringe. The syringe is a sharp near
photo-realistic element in a painting that otherwise escapes from figuration.
Even on my postcard it looks as one might expect a syringe to look and thus
may be considered a particularly literal nailing to ‘reality or appearance’. The
other sense by which the syringe nails is suggested by Christopher Fynsk, a
Professor of Comparative Literature. When Fynsk considers Bacon’s expla-
nation for the use of the syringe he suggests that:
Where a scene is constituted in such a way as to define what Deleuze terms ‘a

matter of fact’ (Logique, 10), the referent of this portrayal cedes to a ‘reality’ or
appearance that is proper to the painted figure. And this is undoubtedly the
principal direction of Bacon’s words when he speaks of nailing the figure into
reality or appearance. He nails it down (the implication being that it will ‘drift
off ’ otherwise – namely into illustration), and thereby nails it into reality or
appearance – transitively, we might say.12
Fynsk goes on to suggest that ‘[t]he nail itself (or the syringe) figures this act
of figuration, this in(x)scription by which the figure is brought into emergence
and ‘reality’ is ex-scribed (to use [Jean-Luc] Nancy’s term)’.13 In this way the
syringe is a forceful marking of the territory between figuration and figure.
Between an abstract and a concrete real.
Deleuze’s point
In his text on Bacon, Deleuze does not fully concede to Bacon’s own account
of the use of ‘a hypodermic syringe as a form of nailing the image more
strongly to reality or appearance’.14 Deleuze instead was to write of this
painting that:
Bacon’s Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe (1963) is less a nailed-down body
(though this is how Bacon describes it) than a body attempting to pass through
the syringe and to escape through this hole or vanishing point functioning as a
prosthesis-organ.15
Lying Figures 9
Deleuze makes the statement in a chapter titled ‘Athleticism’, the third chapter
of the Bacon book. Deleuze introduces the chapter by asking that we ‘return
to Bacon’s three pictorial elements: the large fields as a spatializing material
structure; the Figure, the Figures and their fact; and the place – that is the
round area, the ring, or the contour, which is the common limit of the Figure
and the field’.16 These elements are architectural: the field, the figure and the
place. However, as with all translations of philosophy into architecture we
must be careful not to dwell upon the lexical concordance. Architecture’s fields
are likely far greener or greyer, its figures likely more figurative, and, its places
more privatized. And contemporary architecture concerns itself far too much
with a gloss of spectators and spectacles. Deleuze identifies a will to remove
the spectator and spectacle in the work of Bacon. He identifies a point at
which ‘[t]he sole spectacle is in fact the spectacle of waiting or effort’, however
goes on to suggest that ‘these are produced only when there are no longer any
spectators’.17 What is being described, in terms of ‘waiting or effort’, is a type of
exhaustion. Perhaps the type of exhaustion that we find in Deleuze’s critique et
clinique project. A type of exhausting of the habits by which we concede to art
as an audience. An exhaustion of the manners by which we traditionally and
habitually perceive, construct, consider art. A type of ‘museum fatigue’ that
leads us to welcome a gift-shop exit. A type of exhaustion that accommodates
the forces by which art constructs us.
For Deleuze this elimination of the spectator, this exhaustion, climaxes in
a very particular moment in the work of Bacon. It is the moment when ‘[t]he
body exerts itself in a very precise manner, or waits to escape itself in a very
precise manner’.18 The repetition of the word ‘precise’ is worth noting. What
is at stake in this operation, it would seem, is the specific and the particular,
the geographic and historic pin-pointing: what Karl Marx would call the ‘real
concrete’, and Simondon would call ‘the concrete here and now’. For Deleuze
this pinpointed precision is a moment of athleticism. Focused, intense athlet-
icism, or what Deleuze calls ‘singular athleticism’.19 It is the moment when the
lover’s fingernail finds you, only you, right there. At that precise point: along
the spine just below your left shoulder-blade in a room on the third floor of
the Adelphi Hotel, Flinders Lane, Melbourne. At that precise moment: 16:36
Friday 1 October 2010, lost in your eyes, just as all existence flows fast through
a urethra.
10 Bare Architecture
We should not, however, make the mistake of thinking of this singular

athleticism as what the body does. Rather, it is the becoming of the body. It is
not the body nailed down but rather the body that passes through the syringe.
For Deleuze ‘[i]t is not I who attempt to escape from my body, it is the body
that attempts to escape from itself by means of … in short, a spasm: the body
as plexus, and its efforts or waiting for a spasm’.20
Of architecture
It is not surprising that such moments of spasm also belong to the realm of
architecture. Bacon’s three pictorial elements: the large fields; the figure; and
place, are elements well known and much engaged in architectural experiments,
despite lexical incongruities.21 And the precisions of the here-and-now concrete
real are the focus of much architectural education. It is also the case that archi-
tecture has at its origins its own Lying Figure, in the form of Vitruvian Man.
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio’s text De Architectura (published as Ten Books on
Architecture) is the earliest treatise on architecture we have. Written circa
15 bc the text is dedicated to the emperor Caesar Augustus, the ‘first citizen’
of the Roman Empire. Vitruvius repeatedly describes his treatise as ‘writing
the body of architecture’22 and with any consideration, even contemporary
considerations, of the ‘body of architecture’ the given tends to be the classical
Vitruvian figure. This figure was iconized in Leonardo da Vinci’s c. 1490
sketch of human proportion superimposed with Euclidean geometry (Figure
1.2). This dialectical image operates as an emblematic origin and as with all
origins it remains difficult to escape. There is no lack of will on the part of

architectural theorists to depose the Vitruvian ‘normal man’ of architecture.23
Contemporary motivations behind the removal are based on the figure’s
inherent links with anthropocentric humanism, phallocentrism and mimesis.
The will to depose the ‘normal man’ of architecture is, however, no measure
of the success of any deposition. The philosopher and physician Georges
Canguilhem reminds us, ‘[n]ormal man is normative man, the being capable
of establishing new, even organic norms’.24
It is Vitruvius himself that tells us that Vitruvian Man is nailed flesh
and speaks of the near medical operation by which the Vitruvian body
Lying Figures 11
is constructed. Drawn in the cadaveric plane, Vitruvius tells us, ‘if a man
be placed flat on his back, with his hands and feet extended, and a pair of
compasses centred at his navel, the fingers and toes of his two hands and feet
will touch the circumference of a circle described therefrom’.25 A compass
point is placed like a nail or a syringe in the navel to inscribe the circle about
this body. The placement is not coincidental. The navel reminds us all that not
only can the body pass through the most precise of points, but that everybody
already has. Though the navel is already a wound marking an origin, the
Vitruvian act of fixing the body in space is a further violence aligning the body
with the geometries of architecture and with a well-balanced cosmos. Even
architectural icons suffer.
Architecture persists in these moments of nailing, of pin-pointing, of
pinning down. But it does so in a context of swirling clouds, mobile crowds,
bicycles, postcards, newspapers and rustling leaves. In moments of dissipation
between the territories of field, figure and place. In this book I consider both
the idea of a body nailed down as Vitruvian Man is; but, more particularly;
the idea of architecture as a ‘prosthesis-organ’ through which the body passes
transformed. Modulated. Made raw or bare.
In order to introduce this sensation in architecture I wish briefly to turn to
Zumthor’s temporary Serpentine Gallery pavilion from the summer of 2011.
The pavilion sat in London’s Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park. This place is a
short walk from Bacon’s studio; or at least it was, before the studio, its hanging
lights, paint-smeared walls, photographs and dust were relocated. (It is hard to
nail anything down completely.) Zumthor was the eleventh architect to design
a summer pavilion for the Serpentine. He was selected to design the pavilion
with the Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf. All the Serpentine pavilions
are temporary, perennial. Zumthor’s pavilion was open from 1 July until 16
October.
I undertake this task of exploring Zumthor’s pavilion with some trepi-
dation. It is the trepidation alluded to when I suggested that my fixation with
the Bacon image, with my postcard, is at once a moulding and a modulation.
What we negotiate when we deal with architecture, the thinking, the writing
and thought of architecture, is what Simondon might call ‘a certain system of
internal resonance’ and writing is often unequal to fundamental encounters
with architecture.26 Far too much escapes.
Figure 1.2 Leonardo da Vinci, Vitruvian Man, c. 1490. Pen and ink with wash over
metalpoint on paper.
Lying Figures 13
Trepidation aside, on Sunday 10 July the first engagement we have with

Zumthor’s pavilion is one that appeals to all our well-ingrained architectural
habits and well-understood tropes (Figure 1.3). The pavilion sits on the green
grass as a black rectangular prism. It looks to be approximately 15 metres long
and a little less wide. It’s not too tall, maybe 5 metres, giving the prism that
satisfyingly stable – not quite golden-section – proportion. We are presented
with a clearly articulated object/landscape distinction – and as this black
object is approached through the picturesque Kensington Gardens, you find
yourself firmly constituted as a mobile, roaming subject in the landscape.
Gentrified with all the other bourgeoisie of the park: children on scooters
and hipster parents on bicycles with baskets and bells. The pavilion can be
approached from any side and you’ll be presented with a similar sense of
a black box in a genteel landscape. In his architectural manifesto, Thinking
Architecture (1998), Zumthor writes:
To me, buildings can have a beautiful silence that I associate with attributes
such as composure, self-evidence, durability, presence, and integrity, and
Figure 1.3 Exterior of Serpentine Pavilion. Photograph by author (2011).
with warmth and sensuousness as well; a building that is being itself, being a
building, not representing anything, just being.27
This pavilion is, from the exterior, just that: a building being a building.
When you get close, however, the solidity of the rectangular object in space is
compromised by its materiality. The front of the volume is marked by a simple
string of light-bulbs draped between splayed light metal poles. They are the
type of lights you expect at a travelling circus or a summer fayre – somewhere
you can throw balls at coconuts in order to win a goldfish in a plastic bag.
The lightness and mobility of the lights signals something about the character
of the main black box. On getting closer you realize this solid block to be a
timber framed structure. Plywood, you imagine, covered in gauze and painted
over with a black adhesive. It’s lighter than you thought. Something like tar
on hessian on plywood. The volume at this point becomes planar. Tectonic.
Constructed.
The approach to this pavilion had created an expectation of clearly defined
divisions of interior/exterior. It is an expectation that is not fulfilled. The
cut-out rectangular entrances open not to an interior but to a corridor space.
Upon entering, much of our ability to perceive is taken away in a dark, long
hall lit only by the light of the other entrance (or maybe exit) points and a
couple of very dim lamps (Figure 1.4). The black floors meld with the black
walls and the black ceilings. Your eyes, sight, the act of seeing, that was so
important to the volumetric understanding of the exterior of the object,
becomes compromised. It’s like sliding between the veils of a traveller’s tent
before having your tarot cards read. The sounds of the exterior are lost too.
Though loss is not the right word.
Though the sound of bells from the bikes don’t tend to penetrate, you know
the bells are still ringing there – with their bicycles, baskets and children
called ‘Félix’ and ‘Millie’ – but thankfully we don’t have access to them
anymore. They fade from our view. Other visitors to the space are made near
indiscernible too. You were walking a few steps in front of me, but you might
be anyone, anywhere. ‘The absent and inert girl hanging dreamless from my
arms is no more foreign to me than the door or window through which I can
look or pass’, writes Bataille.28 There is here a moment of dissipation between
the territories of field, figure and place. You hold yourself differently in this
Lying Figures 15
Figure 1.4 Interior corridor. Photograph by author (2011).
space, walk at a different pace. Rely on the ritournelle of the foot-stepping, in

an attempt to refocus – to find order. We exit the dark corridor that ran down
one interior wall of this black box and step into the heart of the volume.
And we are hit. We are hit with light. A light made all the more stark by the
darkness from which we’ve just emerged (Figure 1.5). It is a starkness that is
also produced by the black band that now surrounds us. Us and a garden. We
find ourselves in an enclosed space. Enclosed and yet open. Enclosed on four
sides by the same black walls that we recognize of the volume’s exterior. Open
to its own centre, a garden, and to the sky. We enter this garden surrounded on
four sides with this black band. The band is a shadow, a wall, a seat, a ceiling
and a roof. It’s a faceted band that runs around this external interior. The
outside, that was Kensington Gardens, isn’t there anymore. It’s been removed.
Deleted or struck out by the black mark that runs around us, removing the
interior garden from the exterior park. Cutting the place from the field in a
stroke of an architectural censor’s pen. In this sense the pavilion is a particu-
larly brutal framing. Not of a garden and not of us, but of a sensation. A
perennial sensation.
In a demonstration of the problem of writing about architecture and any
‘system of internal resonance’, in Thinking Architecture Zumthor suggests:
The sense that I try to instil into materials is beyond all rules of composition,
and their tangibility, smell, and acoustic qualities are merely elements of the
language we are obliged to use. Sense emerges when I succeed in bringing out
the specific meanings of certain materials in my buildings, meanings that can
only be perceived in just this way in this one building.29
Zumthor is clear about the precisions of ‘just this way’ and ‘in this one
building’ and we can forgive the confusing of sense and sensation with intent
and meaning. Between architecture and writing too much escapes. There’s
an erotics and a violence to Zumthor’s Serpentine pavilion that is difficult to
write about. An erotics of indecipherable figures in dark passages, of gardens
within gardens. A violence to this hit and this cut, to the light of the sun and
to this black band, but it’s not a sadistic erotics or violence. It’s a type of hit
that resonates with the impact of Bacon’s work. Barbara Dawson, director
of the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, where the light of the 7 Reece Mews
studio now hangs, finds in Bacon a ‘masochistic streak’, that she suggests ‘was
Lying Figures 17
Figure 1.5 A garden within. Photograph by author (2011).
accompanied by intellectual rigour, and an insistent attempt at objectivity’.30

For Dawson, Bacon is ‘trying to detach from himself as well. “Oh, you hit me.
What kind of a sensation is that?”’31
In this pavilion people sit, drink coffee in takeaway cups, chat, flick through
broadsheet newspapers now in tabloid formats, drop the names of other archi-
tects they know and gently lecture less than gentle children on the reasons for
not plucking the flowers from the garden. Much of the accoutrement is left
outside the pavilion. There’s no bikes nor bells in here. Everyone sits within
the black band, on either black benches or the light steel tables and garden
chairs. It’s not that they weren’t changed by the passage into this garden. It’s
not that they aren’t affected. It’s that such experiences take time and thought.
The bearded father with the Campos shoes and drainpipe jeans isn’t really
reading his copy of Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway. He’s busy pondering what
just happened and who he now is.
The architecture of Zumthor’s garden: the precisions of the pavilion, its
careful placement, proportions, measurements and measure, its materials and
connections, operate as the common limit of the figure and the field. Though
more than just a limit or a nailing, this architecture operates as a prosthesis-

organ allowing a spasm by which the body momentarily escapes itself.
Bare
In turning to the figures of Bacon and the literary characters of Samuel

Beckett, Deleuze suggests that ‘[t]he body escapes from itself through the
open mouth, through the anus or the stomach, or through the throat, or
through the circle of the washbasin, or through the point of the umbrella’.32
It is this moment of passage that Deleuze identifies in Bacon’s Lying Figure
with Hypodermic Syringe. It is without much mental effort that the zone of
indiscernibility constituted by the proximities of the body, orifices and organs,
syringes, washbasins and umbrellas may be extended to an indiscernibility
between (our) transformed selves and architectures. It is the intention of this
book to explore this zone of indiscernibility. This book concentrates upon
life laid bare, raw and an intense forgetting of where I end and you begin.
Forgetting where the room ends and you begin. On that simultaneity of loss
and of being found. That spasm. That singular intensity.
2
Earth and Territory
Sprawled on the mattress, the lying figure of Henrietta Moraes was at risk of
drifting off. Indeed, in a clinical sense, it was likely. Francis Bacon could nail
the figure into reality on a canvas but the model on the mattress was not so
easy to pin-down. Moraes’ drinking and drug habits were always threatening
to sweep her away.1 It is perhaps fortunate that her drinking partner, Bacon,
chose to paint his friends from photographs (Figure 2.1).2
In a paper titled ‘The Ethico-Aesthetic of Heroin Chic’ (2011), Peta Malins
focuses on Bacon’s Lying Figure paintings (1963 and 1969) and suggests ‘the
force of the drug is one which simultaneously deforms and rigidifies, bringing
forth the body without organs at the same time as it draws forth all the strati-
fications of habit and social sanctioning’.3 It is not the drug that matters. On
this point Bacon concurs. For him it may as well have been a nail as a syringe
(except that a nail would have been too ‘melodramatic’).4 Indeed Antonin
Artaud would have used a peg. Salvador Dalí, a crutch. Moraes’ drug of choice
was amphetamine, not heroin. What matters, what is valuable in Malins’
reading, is not the idea of the drug itself but the sense of both rigidity and
deformation; stratification and the Body without Organs; the stratifications of

habit and the zone of indiscernibility. A simultaneity.
I want, in this chapter, to explore the manner by which things are made
discernible. The way in which we make things rigid, stratified, and the manner
by which we habitually order things. It is the idea of territory to which I turn.
It is an idea equally important for selves and all that exists in (dis)respect to
the constructions of self – including our architectures, landscapes and cities;
and the relations between. I will step through the ideas of Earth, territory,
territorialization, and de- and reterritorialization. When I suggest that
I’m turning to the idea of territory in terms of the way that things are made
Figure 2.1 John Deakin, Lying Figure Photograph. John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes
at 9 Apollo Place (c. 1963)
discernible I am only offering half the story because it is also an idea which
privileges indiscernibility, and the pleasures of losing the self. As such I will
commence with that from which territories emerge and that which threatens
to sweep them away. That which comes before stratification and before the
categorizations and demarcations of architectures and selves. I will return to
the Earth: to the terre, that precedes the territoire.
Earth
For Michel Serres, the philosopher of science, all about us: nature, the world,
everything and always, is chaos.5 It is a wild and seething chaos, and the
Earth and Territory 21
cosmos itself is chaos – or at the very least, the great chaosmos of which James
Joyce wrote.6 It is a chaos in which we too are implicated. For Serres:
Nothing distinguishes me ontologically from a crystal, a plant, an animal, or

the order of the world; we are drifting together toward the noise and the black
depths of the universe, and our diverse systemic complexions are flowing up the
entropic stream, toward the solar origin itself adrift.7
This is a chaos that we know well from poetry and literature. It is the chaos
that the Roman poet Ovid charts in heroic hexameter in his Metamorphoses
(2 ad), documenting the transformations and erotic emergence of the world.8
It is the chaos of The Tempest (1610–11) blowing boats into uncharted
imaginings. It is the chaotic sea of Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’ (1798) and
the chaos of nature encountered by the vagrant Childe Harold (1812–18). It is
the chaos of Gregor Samsa’s waking in Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915) and of
the sleeping dream that is Finnegans Wake (1939). It is also the chaos of Ted
Hughes’ turn to, returns to, Ovid in his masterful Tales from Ovid (1997):
Before sea or land, before even sky
Which contains all,
Nature wore only one mask –
Since called Chaos.
A huge agglomeration of upset.
A bolus of everything – but
As if aborted.
And the total arsenal of entropy
Already at war within it. 9
What we get in this poetry is a nature, an Earth, a cosmos, which is contin-

ually transforming and endlessly restless. Any origin is ‘itself adrift’. This is
the image of the Earth that is pervasive in speculative accounts of the origins
of things, whether in Ovid’s beginning of the Earth, aboriginal dreaming,
biblical chaos, Lucretius’ clinamen or the big bang.10 This image too resonates
with our own emergences into the world. Our own comings and becomings.
Like our own emergences there is here a violent and erotic sense of potential.
Screams and cries and ‘a bolus of everything’.
Territory
For Serres, what science does is to throw into the chaos something like a net.
This net allows certain things – a small part of the chaos – to be measured,
understood, captured and regulated. I always imagine it as a net that an aged
fisherman, an ancient mariner, might throw from a boat whilst lost in the
middle of the least passive of seas on the least moonlit of nights. The net
already forms something of the image of that which it catches: its weave,
its patterning, its porosity, the strength of its threads and the way it is cast,
already determines what the fisherman will or will not pull back into that boat
(Figure 2.2). Science, according to Serres, is like a small net (a set of coordi-
nates) thrust over a very small part of the chaos. It extracts territoire from
terre – making territory from the Earth.
This idea of the net is a particularly productive image. It suggests that
what an individual or a discipline looks for tends to be closely aligned with
what that individual or discipline finds. One doesn’t operate in astronomy
and discover a poem. One doesn’t inject amphetamine in order to shoot an
albatross. The image of the net also suggests that the manner by which an
individual or a discipline observes tends to be closely aligned with what an
individual or discipline sees. If coordinates and spatial grids are the tool, the
net, then you will tend to find that which can be mapped by those coordinates.
Figure 2.2 The Net. Photograph courtesy of Chris Hawes, ‘Where the sweet peas
used to scramble’ (2014).
If the scale of the fixation is defined, then you’ll tend to see what occurs at
that scale. One doesn’t proceed in science to seek out a particular fragment
of the human genome and come away having discovered a planet circulating
around a distant star. Microscopes are for small things. Telescopes for large.
Fishing nets are for something in-between. Architecture catches something
very particular too. Generally larger than fish and smaller than planets.
Serres’ long-running argument is that although the sciences have been
instrumental in establishing laws of logic and rationality that have been
crucial to the present understanding of ourselves and our universe, one of the
most pressing tasks of thought is to recognize that such pockets of order are
themselves ‘islands’ in a sea of chaotic multiplicity.11 Flux is the substrate of
life and everything else is extracted from it, defined by more-or-less geometric
borders that help us deal with it.12 Territory is extracted from flow, from chaos.
The net passes through the sea. The sea pre-exists the net and every fisherman
is also adrift. For Serres:
Knowledge is at most the reversal of drifting, that strange conversion of times.

Always paid for by additional drift; but this is complexity itself, which was once
called being. Virtually stable turbulence within the flow. To be or to know from
now on will be translated by: see the islands, rare or fortunate, the work of
chance or of necessity.13
If science extracts territory from chaos, then poetry also casts a particular
net – making territories from the Earth. Carving the chaos of the Earth into
words, ‘rare or fortunate’. When Ovid charts the emergence of the world he
casts a net of formal devices into that chaos to extract meaning, to signify
and to speak. Dividing the chaos of the Earth into communicable fragments,
repeatable phrases and rhythmic pulses. And it is in rhythm that architecture

too makes territory from chaos. At architecture’s very origins lies a net, a plan,
which sought to impose an order. Amidst the chaos, the violent and erotic
emergences of the world, Ovid tells us of the architect Daedalus, who was to
impose an order, a territory (Figure 2.3). This territory is imposed upon the
unnaturally conceived Minotaur. A labyrinth is extracted as rhythms from the
flows of rivers and sea:
Dædalus, a man very famed for his skill in architecture, plans the work, and
confounds the marks of distinction, and leads the eyes into mazy wanderings, by
the intricacy of its various passages. No otherwise than as the limpid Mæander
sports in the Phrygian fields, and flows backwards and forwards with its varying
course, and, meeting itself, beholds its waters that are to follow, and fatigues its
wandering current, now pointing to its source, and now to the open sea.14
‘Rhythms’, said André Leroi-Gourhan, the eminent palaeontologist and prehis-

torian, ‘[r]hythms are the creators of space and time, at least for the individual.
Space and time do not enter lived experience until they are materialized within
a rhythmic frame. Rhythms are also the creators of forms.’15 As poets and
architects we pay attention to the rhythms that underpin our lives and come
to constitute our worlds.16 There are rhythms of habit, of words, of speech,
annual cycles, of movements backwards and forwards, quick hammerings and
the rhythm of the feet, the rhythms of bells, façades, columns and stairs. Even
free verse has rhythm. There are the rhythms generated through our bodies,
which we unfold into the world, and there are rhythms in the world that we
enfold (internalize) to ward off the chaos.
We recognize the value of rhythms and repetitions in our life as a defence
to chaos. At those moments when we feel most lost or beset by darkness we
cannot but help to create territory from chaos. When I stay out of a night far
too late and drink far too much (gin) and have to make my journey home
across the dark park surrounded by derelict warehouses the clamour of chaos
is almost too much. The nauseous rotations of the Earth, the mobile shadows,
Figure 2.3 Rhythm. Photograph courtesy of Frederick Sarran, ‘Labyrinth’ (2010).
the rustling of bushes, the swirling of leaves, or was it leaves? At these

moments what I do is likely what you also do. I concentrate on my footsteps,
my pace, and avoid stepping on the lines in a concrete path or shadowy
pavement. From the rhythm of my footsteps in concert with the rhythm of
lines in pavement I get syncopation. Sometimes I repeat little phrases in my
head. Indeed sometimes it’s that David Bowie song ‘Space Oddity’ – ‘Ground
Control to Major Tom’ – that I start repeating ad nauseam. As if one nausea
might supplant another. As if in repetition, in rhythm and then syncopation,
I might feel less lost, less threatened, less vulnerable, more grounded. As if in
rhythm I can feel found. The rhythm is like an anchor dropped into the chaos
of the night. Syncopation is knowing that I belong.
As children, in particular, this anchoring in chaos is important. Those
night-time moments when anything could be in the darkness (deep below
the blankets, under the mattress, within the cupboard, behind the door) are
particularly frightening. We fear the marks on the carpet are the footsteps of
a shadow. Too often we like to think (and be told) that ‘there’s nothing there’.
However, from the perspective of chaos – from the perspective that we begin
with chaos – there is everything under the bed, in the cupboard and behind
the door. In darkness everything is possible and anything can populate a space
ill-perceived. When a child in the dark yells out: ‘There’s something under my
bed!’, Serres yells back down the corridor: ‘There certainly is’. And again, in
the chaos of the night, where the doors and walls that are meant to protect
us cannot be discerned, we construct a space, weave a shelter, in which to
orientate ourselves. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari tell us:
A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his
breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients himself
with his little song as best he can. The song is like a rough sketch of a calming
and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos. Perhaps the child
skips as he sings, hastens or slows his pace. But the song itself is already a skip:
it jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos and is in danger of
breaking apart at any moment. There is always sonority in Ariadne’s thread. Or
the song of Orpheus.17
In the rhythmic metre of a poem we find solitude. In free verse too we trace
a thread, a sonority. And architecture is the song of landscape in the chaos of
Earth. It is the constructing and organizing of matter in order to demarcate,
to make discernible. It is the dividing up of the chaos of life into interiors

and exteriors; placing chaos behind walls, outside doors, under floors and
above roofs and deep within labyrinths. We construct in order to anchor.
At the very least in order to ‘cleave’ as Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline
Gins put it.18 To provide a way into the calm and out of the chaos. To carve
a territory from the Earth. For Deleuze and Guattari territory already has
qualities associated with architecture: ‘It has the interior zone of a residence
or shelter, their exterior zone of its domain, more or less retractable limits
or membranes, intermediary or even neutralized zones, and energy reserves
or annexes.’19 Whether it is the warm hearth of a Frank Lloyd-Wright house,
the encircled hearth of Robert Venturi’s mother’s house or the void at the
heart of Daniel Liebeskind’s unfolding star, there is in architecture a ‘solar
origin’. Even when architecture ‘confounds the marks of distinction’, as
Daedelus had, there remains the marking of a territory: a house. This house.
That house. A wall, a column, a floor, a roof, a surface, an envelope and an
entrance; architectural fragments tend toward sonority and the construction
of a discernible zone:
Now we are at home. But home does not preexist: it was necessary to draw
a circle around that uncertain and fragile center, to organize a limited space.
Many, very diverse, components have a part in this, landmarks and marks of
all kinds, now the components are used for organizing a space. The forces of
chaos are kept outside as much as possible, and the interior space protects the
germinal forces of a task to fulfil or a deed to do.20
Territorialization
This idea of territory: of nets and sonorous threads; of fish extracted from the
chaos of the sea; of homes carved from the chaos of Earth, is not limited to a
description of what we do. There is much to suggest we don’t just do these things
but are ourselves constructed by these operations. We don’t merely generate
territory; we are ourselves territorialized. Nailed down, lest we drift away.
It should be noted that the term ‘territorialize’ does not emerge as a neces-
sarily spatial or architectural term. Territorialization relates not to how we
form or give form to something but rather how form is given to ourselves:
how we are formed. The term is derived from Lacanian psychoanalysis.

For Jacques Lacan, as new-borns we originally inhabited a world where we
did not differentiate.21 That is, we did not differentiate ourselves from our
mothers or fathers, nor did we differentiate ourselves from our environments,
our blankets, walls and doors, our contexts. The new-born does not distin-
guish itself ‘from a crystal, a plant, an animal, or the order of the world’.22
The new-born experiences sensations, pleasure and hunger and it exists in
something like a pure materiality. According to Lacan, there is no sense
or notion of absence in this state. Everything is presence and present. The
mattress was sprawled on you as much as you were sprawled on it. Your flesh
was everyone, everywhere and everything. You were boundless. Connected.
Extensive. This stage is called ‘the Real’. Just as Earth precedes territory, the
Real is prior to our territorialization.
4 December 1973–4 June 1974
Tuesday’s child may have been full of grace, but even at this early stage we
have begun to be territorialized. For Lacan the term ‘territorialization’ is
defined as the imprint of maternal nurture and nourishment on the infant’s
libido, and the formation of part-objects and erogenous zones arising from
the connection of orifices and organs, such as the mouth-breast. The infant
is configured, territorialized, first by maternal nurture and nourishment. The
infant begins to make distinctions – to distinguish erogenous zones, orifices
and organs. My lips, her nipple. This neo-natal categorization and differenti-
ation is the commencement of socialization. You begin to find an exterior that
fulfils your longings: a mother’s nipple, her voice, her gaze; you commence
the construction of boundaries and borders: your lips, your blankets, walls
and doors. That which was all immediate presence and assimilation becomes
absence and extraction. I am this, not that. I am here, not there. We extract
our-selves out of the Real.
4 June 1974–4 June 1975
Lacan invokes a ‘mirror stage’ where we ourselves become not only terri-
torialized as differentiated from that which we are not, but where our
identities become aligned with an image of ourselves as spatial entities.

Whole. Complete. Individual. For Lacan the mirror stage ‘manufactures for
the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession
of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its
totality’.23 The mirror stage is that point when we recognize and identify
ourselves with our own image. We notice the fixations that infants have with
mirrors, indeed with all that reflects. It is as if the infant is surprised to see
themselves within the mirror. As if amazed that they look as they do. For
Lacan, in reflection the infant is torn from the immediacy of presence into a
world of images, including images of the self. This reflection, that is at once the
self and yet so very clearly not (you), is what Lacan would call an ‘alienating
identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental
development’.24 At this moment the child is at once finding themselves and
losing themselves. Finding themselves as whole, spatially complete images.
Losing themselves as fragmented and yet connected whatevers. The Body
without Organs, the mobile and dynamic materiality with which we conceived
ourselves, becomes rigid, organized in ‘the form of its totality’. Differentiated
from the mother and the father, the blanket, wall and door.
Much psychoanalysis concerns itself with these moments of extraction.
Extraction from the Real, extraction from the other. The focus of psycho
analysis has tended toward the anxieties of being extracted from the mother.
It’s concentrated far less on the anxieties of being extracted from our blankets,
walls and doors. It’s a tradition that begins with Sigmund Freud’s Introduction
to Psychoanalysis (1916). When Freud turns to the fear of darkness in children
he forcibly forgets the bedroom, the nursery, with its walls, doors and
blankets. He also forgets the repeated phrases and whistles and repetitions
of breath. For Freud the fear of the dark is a separation anxiety disorder. Not
an anxiety related to one’s attachment to the cosmos or the house, but rather
to the home. And for Freud a home is not composed of walls and doors,
but of people (mother, father, aunts and uncles and an anxious Oedipus).
Freud recalls: ‘I once heard a child who was afraid of the dark, call into an
adjoining room, “Auntie, talk to me, I am afraid.”’ One imagines Freud sitting
upright in his bed at this moment, less out of concern for the child than for
the potential of the situation to reinforce the axioms of psychoanalysis. Freud
tells us, the Auntie responds to the call ‘talk to me, I am afraid’, with the words
‘“But what good will that do you? You cannot see me!” Whereupon the child
answered, “If someone speaks, it is brighter.”’25 One imagines at this point
Freud hurriedly reaches for a pencil rather than a hanging light-switch. Freud
writes of this particular little Oedipus that ‘[t]he yearning felt in darkness is
converted into the fear of darkness’, noting that the anxiety originates because
of an ‘unemployed libido’.26
Freud imagines that in darkness the bright actual world is still there, but
somewhat concealed. The dark, in this sense is considered the absence of light,
just as anxiety and neurosis is considered the absence of sexual release. And
for Freud any absence is the absence of the mother and whole worlds can be
constructed around this particular longing. The Oedipal triangle becomes the
geometry of a net through which all of life must pass. Freud himself was to
note that ‘sober science’ would critique psychoanalysis as that which ‘would
build in darkness and fish in murky waters’.27 Pathologies and neuroses are
extracted from our childhoods like dolphins in drift-nets or salamanders in
fish-net stockings.
In all such extractions pain is involved and a trace is left. It is the contention
of psychoanalysis that in adapting to, adopting, our new senses of self we
necessarily must repress the old. For Freud, as for Lacan, in order to be a fully
differentiated whole, complete, individual we need to successfully repress the
chaos, the fragments, the drift of desires and connections. And yet all these
senses we had of ourselves will leave a trace. The fear of the dark is such a
trace, a residue. Despite Freud’s suggestion that this fear may ‘exist at the very
beginning’,28 it does not tend to manifest before the age of two. It would seem
to be the case that we must recognize ourselves as differentiated before we
can fear that which we are not. The undifferentiated sense of self also leaves
a trace. There will remain a trace of our fragmented and flailing limbs. There
will remain a trace of the chaos of thoughts and feelings, the drift of desires
and connections. There will remain a trace of a mother’s nipple on all our
lips. Chaos, it would seem, is always lapping at the boundaries of our sense of
self. It is a bottle of gin or a syringe of amphetamine away. It is also a disused
warehouse, an empty park or a burning barn away. It is an architecture away.
When we see fragmented architectures we look twice. We seem to recognize
something in or of these buildings. A warehouse of broken windows, leaking
and crumpled roofs is engaging in some manner. Scary, maybe. Difficult
to look at. And yet, enticing. We seem to recognize this broken and empty
warehouse (Figure 2.4). There is something about it that produces that sense
of déjà vu. In his text of 1992, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern
Unhomely, the architectural theorist Tony Vidler turns to the architectures
that produce this sense. He also turns to Freud and Lacan. He appropriates
Freud’s term for this sense of déjà vu: ‘the uncanny’. In Freud’s German the
word was ‘unheimlich’, and it translates more literally as ‘unhomely’. (For
Freud too territorialization may already have qualities associated with archi-
tecture.) Vidler suggests that the architecture of broken buildings and of
deconstruction with its irregular fragments and inconsistent connections,
with its awkward placements and dynamic asymmetries, excites the sense of
the unhomely.
Engaging the developmental narrative of Lacan, Vidler is to suggest that the
reason we are so drawn to this architecture, the reason for that sense of déjà
vu, is that we recognize something of ourselves in the architecture.29 What we
find is a trace of our pre-mirror stage fragmented selves. A trace of that which
we had repressed in order to be whole, complete, individuals. For Vidler, the
body and the instrumental world have a reciprocal relationship in that one
necessitates the other in order to conceive of itself.30 Thus architecture is an
unfolding of the body into the world. It is a projection of the interiorized body
and as such is itself bodily. It is this bodily common denominator of selves
and architectures that allows Vidler to suggest that architecture possesses the
ability to affect ‘the disturbing ambiguity of the uncanny’.31 What architecture
is returning us to is that which had been repressed: an ‘alienating identity’. The
argument may be summarized as: architecture is an unfolding of ourselves
into the world; thus architecture is bodily; as bodily, architecture resonates

with ourselves; in resonance it may reflect not only our present image of self
but those images that were repressed, and; in doing so architecture may incite
‘the return of the repressed’. For Vidler ‘in this context it would be, so to speak,
the return of the body into an architecture that had repressed its conscious
presence that would account for our sense of disquiet’.32
Another way of saying this may be to say that the territories of architecture
are in resonance with the territorializations of our-selves. I would suggest that
architecture may return us not only to the Real, but simultaneously to the
Earth. To both: to the great chaosmos. For if there is trauma, loss and a type
Figure 2.4 Empty Warehouse. Photograph courtesy of Ashley Albin, ‘These Ghosts
Aren’t my Own’ (2011).
of violence associated with territorialization, of separating and distinguishing

oneself from that which we are not, then the blanket, the door and wall are
equally implicated.33 They are as much of the Real as the nipple, the mother
and father.
4 June 1975–4 December 1977
Speech and language, poetry and song; help us think of other ways we have
been territorialized. We have gasps and sighs and groans and screams. These
might be thought of as sounds. Sounds are refined, cut, rounded and manipu-
lated into the territories of language. But just as language is a territorialization
of sound, so too does language territorialize.
It is the central proposition of Lacan that the unconscious is structured
like language. That is, though there is no ‘word made flesh’ as in the biblical
account, the incorporeal word and corporeal consciousness are structured in
the same way: linguistically. Language inserts itself (into our sense of self) like
a father inserting himself on the sofa between myself and the mother I was
hugging at the time (4 December 1977). ‘Move over’ were the words used.
For Lacan, at this point ‘language restores to it, [to you,] in the universal,
its function as subject’.34 Language allows you to join a wider social order.
There is always community in communication, as Jean-Luc Nancy tells us.35
For Lacan, however, entering this community removes you from the warm
immediacies of the mother and removes you from the imaginary. Language
is to know your place on the sofa, on the mattress and on (rather than of) the
Earth.
There is no common denominator between this highly differentiating,
categorizing, hierarchical, symbolic order and the Real. The immediacies of
materiality, the blanket, nurture and nourishment, the mother’s unconditional
hug, have been replaced with mediated relations. Relations mediated by laws,
codes, representations, norms and habits. For Lacan the figure of the father
is fundamental in this move into the symbolic realm. For Lacan le nom du
père would always be le non du père. Boys and men will hear the word ‘No’
in everything their father says, irrespective of whether they are being scolded
or praised at the time. Even the perpetually adrift Georges Bataille invoked
the name of the father when arraigning André Breton for being ‘Icarian’.36
There is in ‘the name of the father’ a type of fascist syncopation. A rhythm
that exactly matches. The march and drum beat of a military band. This set of
rules and natural laws by which we now operate restrict both alternate forms
of communication and desires. In this sense all codes, rules and laws tend to
repeat the word ‘No’.
With the net of language, we are extracted from speechless identity with
the mother into the symbolic order of linguistics: of mother tongues; and
into the order of societies: fatherlands. Escaping this coding is fraught and
poetry and literature attest to the problem of returning to chaos. For Icarus
‘caught no more air. His face, too, as he called on the name of his father, was
received in the azure water’.37 From our gasps, sighs and screams language
is extracted and even the territories of language are territorialized further
into specific forms: poetry and verse, song and then into specific styles and
intonations. The poet regulates with a repetition of sound; a deployment of
word to communicate perspective; a negotiation of syllable to create tone; an
intonation to generate a mood; a rhythm to regulate the flow of affect. The
role of rhythm in poetry and in architecture doesn’t, however, end here in the
azure water.
Deterritorialization
The rhythms of poetry and architecture are very different from the rhythms
of science. According to Serres, science measures rhythms in particular
ways. Indeed, the etymology of the word ‘rhythm’ suggests something of
measurement – movement and measurement. The mode of scientific operation
is organizing, regularizing, regulating, coordinating and classifying. Science
belongs to the world of the symbolic order.
There is a sense in which by labelling we might know the world better. On
the one hand it is superb to be able to nuance our thoughts, our thinking and
our understandings, by more and more fine-grained classifications and labels,
codes and qualifications. On the other hand, the naming of constellations
(‘caelum’, ‘capricornus’, ‘carina’) and the classifications of stars by their spectra
and temperatures (‘Oh be a fine girl, kiss me’) do nothing for the stars and
indeed hinder that childlike wonderment, that divine wonderment, we get
when we lay back on the Earth and watch the chaos we don’t control; when we
watch stars form and fade, scintillate and shoot; and when it takes our breath
away. Exhale.
For Deleuze and Guattari the problem with habits, axioms and laws (such
as the Oedipal complex in psychoanalysis) is not that we have them, but that
we’ve allowed them to transcend – to rise above as a system of coordinates by
which all life is chartered, and; simultaneously to sink below as if these habits
were foundational to life itself. We run a risk when we start imagining that
constellations are the order of stars, rather than merely an ordering of stars.
The problem with psychoanalysis is that in imagining life can be classified
and distributed into its ever-developing categories, largely under the axiom
of Oedipal theory, we incur the repression of potentially revolutionary
expressions of desire. Desires that fall outside the order. That is to say, any
‘habit of thought’, any axiom, operates much like a Lacanian father, endlessly
uttering ‘No’, whether or not we are listening. They operate like a constellation
awaiting a star or a darkness awaiting a child’s cry. When an Aunt calls back
down a corridor and when Freud enlightens us that the child in the dark is
an Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari scream from somewhere within a mattress:
‘Stop! You’re making me tired! Experiment, don’t signify and interpret! Find
your own places, territorialities, deterritorializations, regimes, lines of flight!
Semiotize yourself instead of rooting around in your prefab childhood and

Western semiology’.38
Deterritorialization may be understood as an awakening of the intensities
and excesses that come before distinctions, codings and classifications. It is
an awakening in the sense that we never completely lost the chaos. It is also
an awakening in the sense that we emerge only in the very wake of chaos.
Serres reminds us that territory is, first and foremost, territorialized Earth.
The importance of this is that the stratifications of habit are extracted from
the chaos; and necessarily not vice versa. Bodily organizations, organs and
social constructs are extracted from an indistinct Body without Organs.
Constellations are extracted from stars adrift in a universe which is, as Serres
says, ‘itself adrift’. To deterritorialize is to set adrift. It is a gift to all who seek
ways out of the labyrinth of symbolic order. If laws, rules and regulations
frame, classify and codify, then it is deterritorialization that removes the nails
that pin something down and casts that something adrift – allowing it to be
otherwise or whatever. If territorialization is the extraction of an order and a
coding from the Earth, then deterritorialization is the return to the unformed
materiality and unnamed intensities of the Earth and the Real.39 All invest-
ments of desire are ripe for a return to chaos, a deterritorialization.
The carving of poetic and architectural territory is so much more than the
construction of classifications and the measurements of rhythm. The linguistic
and material ordering of the worlds of poetry and architecture are much more
than the construction of islands of order in chaos. Much more. This is because
if poetry and architecture allow us anything it is the promise of returning us
to chaos. When in the darkness of a night I lost myself in you, in your eyes,
when I forgot where you end and I began I was not reflecting upon the nets
of psychoanalysis and Oedipal theory, or the classifications of anatomy, or the
representations of language, or the geometries of the room in which we lay.
In architecture we create a bedroom in order that we might sleep soundly and
secure ourselves against the dark. But this is only half the story. We also create
the bedroom in order to activate all the intensity of darkness. To fuck and to
dream. To feed the germinal forces. To return to the chaos. Architecture, in
this sense, is a most marvellous ‘uncertain and fragile center’.40
Reterritorialization
The rhythm of breath does not only regulate life but fosters all its wonder-
ments. It allows the speech and the sigh. The voice and the scream. The clear
articulation, the clearest of articulations; and the no-less articulate grunt or
stutter. Like the metre of a poem, the tread of a stair and a row of columns can
at once regulate and afford great pleasures. Like a poem, architecture can take
our breath away. It can disrupt rhythm, it can pause you, have you gasp, have
you sigh … . We master the technicalities, the science and technê, of archi-
tecture, so that we too might have poesis and eros. So that it, our architectures,
do not merely harbour, but affirm life. (Blowing aged fishermen back into
the ocean; bringing the chaotic sea back onto land.) Watching stars, writing,
singing, drinking, fucking and fishing are events in which we negotiate the
flows of desire. Sometimes such acts tend towards territories (the naming of
constellations, the significations of language, labyrinths, finger-nails along
the spine, negotiating bottle-openers and tying knots in fishing lines) and
sometimes they return us to the chaos (the drift of stars, the grunt and scream,
the sonority in Ariadne’s thread, losing myself in your eyes, feeling the Earth
spin and surging as the sea surges). And architecture can produce those
moments of supreme wonderment: in excess of the technicality; in excess of
the rhythm. Joyously adrift.
The short essay of Borges, The House of Asterion (1947) reminds us that
Daedalus’ labyrinth was not only about enclosing chaos but was indeed open
to it: the Minotaur spoke, ‘It is true that I never leave my house, but it is also
true that its doors are open day and night to men and to animals as well.
Anyone may enter.’41 The labyrinth is at once about a regulation of chaos and
simultaneously a courting of chaos. It may have been difficult to escape. But
it was not impossible. Ariadne could get Theseus in and then out. There is
some contention in Ovid as to whether the thread may indeed have been an
architectural plan communicated to Ariadne by Daedalus.42 It matters little.
All architectural plans are at once plans of containment and sonorous threads.
Architecture, like poetry, has the potential to return us to the wonderment
of childhood, to the tentativeness of first times and the intensity of joy that
comes from the unregulated, the transformative, mythic potential of the Earth
before territory. And as for the Minotaur, that great and dangerous chaos
we have been taught to fear, it was not nearly as foreign and dark as we may
have imagined. ‘Would you believe it, Ariadne?’ said Theseus ‘The Minotaur
scarcely defended himself.’43
Part Two
Poststructural Virtues
3
The Impersonal
Henrietta Moraes’ autobiography of 1994 reminds us that the auto is always

extracted from the bio.1 Moraes’ memories are pulled into focus like the paint-
splattered photographs of Francis Bacon’s famously cluttered studio. Each
instant recounted maintains something of its own piercing clarity but the
chaos from which it emerges and the assemblages into which it is placed are
tenuous and mobile. It is perhaps an appropriate tenuousness and mobility,
given the dangerous intensities of the subject of this autobiography. The modes
by which we capture such intensities are rarely equal to the task. Grammar
falls short of capturing that which breaks laws. Chronology seems inept
as the organizing principle of such a helter-skelter of events. Geographical
placement might be a better organizing principle but fixing anything into
place is never as simple as dropping a pin or naming the nearest cross-street.
Moraes demonstrates as much in the most joyous of sentences: ‘I went up into
this girl called Eleanor’s room’.2 A sentence such as this may be ungrammatical
with a geography that slides, but it needs to be. It may confuse subjects and
objects, but this too is necessary. There’s nothing lacking here. The sentence
‘I went up into this girl called Eleanor’s room’ is replete. A magnificent indul-
gence in the asubjective and the impersonal: where the differentiating of
architectures from individuals serves little pragmatic purpose.
The room that Moraes speaks of in this sentence, the room she was visiting,
was on Oakley Street, Chelsea. The street runs from Kings Road to the River
Thames embankment. Scott of the Antarctic had lived at number 56. Oscar
Wilde’s mother had died at number 87. There’s no record of the number of
the terrace in which ‘this girl called Eleanor’s room’ was situated. There’s
no indication of the nearest cross-street. There is no English Heritage blue
plaque on the façade. It is likely best this way. Discretion seems appropriate.
The purpose of Moraes’ visit to this room was to acquire methedrine, a potent
liquid form of amphetamine. For Moraes lived life as ‘a horizontal fall’ as the
poet, playwright and author Jean Cocteau had described it in his text Opium,
written during a period of withdrawal from the drug in 1929.3 Moraes had
only recently been released from the controls of a hospital wing at Holloway
prison, and she went to ‘this girl called Eleanor’s room’ to return to the chaos.4
Though defining the effect of methedrine as a return to chaos is not entirely
accurate. What Moraes suggests is not chaos exactly but rather that the drug
allowed her to be configured afresh in a world that is itself a terra nova. It
allowed her ‘a dream quality, a mixture of Marvel comics and the occult’.5 It
allowed her to drift like the Bacon paintings – not endlessly (though once for
ten days straight) and not everywhere (even canvases have edges) – but at a
particular speed and in a particular direction. The drug functioned as Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari suggest of art; ‘not chaos but a composition of
chaos, that yields the vision or sensation, so that it constitutes, as Joyce says,
a chaosmos’.6
Moraes was aware of the multiplicity of people, visions and sensations that
this particular drug might constitute. She was ‘told Hitler was fond of it’ and
that ‘it was used by military personnel who needed to perform irksome tasks
tirelessly and without fear’; she suggests that the post-war industrial boom
of Japan was largely due to workers being paid ‘in the minimum yen and the
maximum methedrine’, and; that the drug was ‘once used to resuscitate the
dead by injection straight into the heart’.7 Moraes wasn’t attempting to lead a
fascist state, nor perform the irksome tasks of a soldier. Nor was she planning
to reignite the British economy through her methedrine use. She may, however,
have been planning to wake the dead. For Moraes’ oft-ungrammatical autobi-
ography awakens that which we tend to think of as dead: rooms, Oakley
Street, the park below Chelsea Bridge and a number 19 bus; whilst dispersing
that which we think of as alive: a tribe of rebels, Eleanors and Henriettas.
For as much as the sentence ‘I went up into this girl called Eleanor’s room’ is
a personalization of the room, it is also an asubjective impersonalization of
Eleanor. That is, as the incorporeal room is made more alive, the corporeal
Eleanor is made compossible with her space.8 The sentence is a line in an
Orphic song. At once a resuscitation of an architecture and a passing of a
subject. At the very least, the passing of the subject as we once knew it.
The Impersonal 41
In this chapter I seek to explore the manner by which literature, art and
architecture at once seek to constitute a chaosmos and, in doing so, lose the
self. The manners by which the disparate components of literature, art and
architecture are brought into proximity, assemble and configure subjects
is explored. I’m interested in the personalizations of architectures and the
asubjectivities of the self that allow an ‘apportioning’ of one to the other, as
Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins call it.9 The drifting cartography of
this chapter will move from body/architecture indifferentiations toward the
manner by which architecture may itself breathe life.
Proximities
The auto and bio of an autobiography have nothing in common except

proximity. This is the graphia of literature: the positioning, organizing and
constructing that brings disparate elements together: characters, events,
contexts, senses and styles. Grammars and geographies. Much of this proximity
is measured out or dispersed in an architectural manner. We consistently fix
things in terms of human settlement, urbanities, streets and rooms.
Cocteau commences his novel of 1929 Les Enfants Terribles with this type
of urban positioning.10 He locates us at ‘[t]hat portion of Old Paris known as
the Cité Monthiers bounded on the one side by the rue de Clichy, on the other
by the rue d’Amsterdam’ and tells us how to successfully approach it. Cocteau
walks us in and introduces us ‘first to a block of tenements, and then to the
courtyard proper, an oblong court containing a row of small private dwellings
secretly disposed beneath the flat towering walls of the structure’. Yet even at
this ‘outside’ position we are made aware of the intensities of the architectural
inside: ‘The windows are blind, covered with photographers’ drapes, but it
is comparatively easy to guess what they conceal: rooms chock-a-block with
weapons and lengths of brocade, with canvases depicting basketfuls of cats
or the families of Bolivian diplomats.’11 There is, behind the ‘blind windows’
much to see.
It is within this courtyard that Paul, one of the novel’s key protagonists,
is hit hard in the chest with a snowball concealing a rock. It is assumed his
lung is punctured. As a result, he finds himself confined to his home on rue
Montmartre, and within the home to the room he shares with the novel’s
other key protagonist, his sister Elizabeth. ‘This room they shared was as it
were a shell in which they lived, washed, dressed together as naturally as if
they were twin halves of a single body.’12 The single body Cocteau speaks of
is at once the singularity of the brother and sister and the singularity of the
two and the room. Cocteau comes to write ‘room’ with a capital ‘R’ as in the
manner by which one denotes a proper noun, names something or makes of
it a character. It is likely for the same reason that Jacques Lacan comes to use
a capital R to denote the Real.
The Room is much like Bacon’s studio. It is strewn with boxes, towels,
underwear, a threadbare rug, a plaster bust, two ‘diminutive’ beds, a chest of
drawers, distorting mirrors, three chairs and a mantelpiece. Cocteau tells us
the walls are covered with newspaper and magazine articles, programs, photo-
graphs of film stars, murderers, boxers; cut out and pinned. (It would seem
to be only one diminutive bed too many, and many canvases short of Bacon’s
studio.) We have a sense of the Room’s complete disorder but also a sense of
the necessary consistency that underpins that which is cut out and pinned.
That is, the space seems to operate in spite of its seeming disorder. In the
Room the strife of the outside is held at bay, suspended. This Room operates as
a tentative sanctuary for the brother and sister. It is the place where Elizabeth
and Paul retreat from the trauma of their family. Where the laws and rules
of mother tongues and fatherlands fade. In fixating on the Room, Paul and
Elizabeth’s parents fade along with all that is outside. The brother and sister
become orphanos. The Room becomes an anti-oedipal machine.
An important aspect of the understanding presented in Deleuze and
Guattari’s first collaborative text, Anti-Oedipus of 1972, is that when a machine

is assembled and it functions then the irrelevant parts of the bodies, objects
or concepts fade from view. When an addict fixates on acquiring their drug
of compulsion they don’t stop to read blue plaques. They just don’t seem to
matter. When an addict inserts a syringe into an outstretched right arm they
aren’t concerned for their lungs. When Orpheus played his harp he forgot
Eurydice. When I lay in your arms I forgot to worry about the approaching
storm; clouds and wind and the sound of a heart murmur. I forgot the chapter
awaiting writing, the nephew in the dark adjoining room, the number 19
bus, the keys abandoned in the back pocket of yesterday’s jeans, the knife
The Impersonal 43
fights in the park below Chelsea Bridge. They were somewhere else. Paul
and Elizabeth’s sickly mother and deceased father are well beyond the Room.
Outside and not part of our focus.
Sigmund Freud would refer to this type of focus and the way by which
all else fades when we undertake a task or fulfil a desire in terms of the ‘lost
object’.13 When we concentrate upon a task at hand little else invades that
bubble. A boundary is drawn and a seal is set. It is a seal that remains set until
we find the lost object. Addicts focus on the secret semiology of the street in
order to locate Eleanor’s room. I scour the house for the car keys. I check the
usual places. The mantelpieces and the bedside tables. I check the unusual
places. The bottom of the washing basket. The drawer full of loose change
and unwritten postcards. Freud noticed that at these moments we have a very
odd sense. It is the sense that everything will be OK once we find the object at
stake. As if the entire world will fall into order once we find the keys. It is as
if the keys weren’t about unlocking the Golf (the architect’s car of choice in a
post-Saab era) but rather as if the keys open the universe itself. And they do.
Or at the very least they do for an instant. Because when you finally find the
keys – you too feel profoundly found. As if the entire world is again complete.
But only for an instant. Just an instant.
Freud would talk about such moments in terms of loss. He talked about
everything in terms of loss. For Freud the lost object isn’t a particular object.
It’s not the drug or the keys. It is the drug and the keys. The drug and the keys
and Eurydice and yesterday’s jeans. The lost object is any and every object
that is lost which becomes a momentary stand-in or double for another
more significant past loss. For Freud all lost objects connect us to an endless
withdrawal and longing for two oft connected objects: the lost nipple and
the lost mother.14 Lacan’s version of the lost object, the unattainable object of
desire, was the ‘objet petit a’. The ‘a’ stood for autre, other. The lost object is
the object that silently reminds us that as infants, we were retched from the
(m)other in order that we might be sole individuals. Every time you lose your
keys you are losing your mother and experiencing the violence of drawing a
boundary that at once removes you from the bio in order to constitute an auto.
There’s a point to this, but it’s not as terminal as Freud would suggest. It’s
more ‘terminus’, as the early psychologist William James says.15 For James
this drawing of a boundary, this fixation, operates like a constellation when
we are adrift at sea or like the pole-ward navigation of Scott’s last Antarctic
trek.16 It is a vector. That is, the fixation allows us to make a movement in a
certain direction and at a certain speed. To chart a course in what is otherwise
too difficult, too chaotic. It operates as an anchor of a sort – but not a fixed
Freudian anchor deeply wedged in a past loss. Rather it is an anchor thrown
forward, toward that which we desire at any given moment. Even the simplest
of desires operate via termini. When I want to go to my office there are an
endless number of actions, activities and elements involved. Sunrises, waking,
kissing, lips and labia, clothing, dressing, nice shoes, teeth, shit, food, framed
photographs, caffeine, yesterday’s pockets, a Golf dreaming it was a Saab,
rooms, streets, walls and doors. My keys are part of that chain. Once I have
them (and feel momentarily found) I throw an anchor toward my car (to again
feel found). The office is like a temporary terminus too. It fits into a larger
chain of desires. A larger machine. Of books on shelves I wish to read. Of
pencils and sentences underlined. Of chapters I wish to write. Of people I wish
to see. Of conversations I wish to have. Of a sense of self I wish to construct.
The termini are like points on a mapping – a cartography – but not a cartog-
raphy fixated on borders, boundaries, selves and territories. The termini are
like mobile constellations that are nonetheless fixed upon in order that we
might ever tangentially head toward another pole. Paul and Elizabeth, in and
of their Room, desire each other but get there consistently via others. Other
people, other places, other rules, other objects, other words.
Desire, in this sense, is always assembled. It is about proximities and
relations, configurings and dispersals. I imagine this is what Michel Foucault
is referring to in his ‘Des Espaces Autres’ paper of 1967 where he suggests
‘[w]e are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the
epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed’.17 Everything
is proximity, the bringing into proximity and the casting afar. We bring the
most disparate of things into simultaneity: rooms, streets, snowballs, lungs,
Eleanors and amphetamines, Marvel comics and the occult. These elements
don’t necessarily have a common denominator that allows them to intertwine.
They don’t need one. They are all extracted, cut from the chaos, from the
Real. In this sense they were already all together. Already assembled in some
silent and secret manner. Deleuze and Guattari offer a concept of assemblage
that stands in for a concept of bodies, of persons, of organs and collective
The Impersonal 45
bodies and disciplines, in a notion that can be applied equally to conceptual,

social or personal identities.18 Different identities are specified in terms of the
lines or processes that make up different kinds of assemblage. When I desire
something I extract the necessary components from the chaos, I cut them out
and pin them to a wall, I bring them into focus, into proximity. I assemble the
components as a navigation tool that points, tangentially, toward a desire. I try
not to forget that that very desire too is not pre-given, but is itself assembled:
‘[b]eing an assemblage desire is precisely one with the gears and the compo-
nents of the machine, one with the power of the machine’.19
Machines
The text, Anti-Oedipus, is an effort to free desire from habitual containments

and classifications.20 It is anti-oedipal in the sense that the text is against, is
anti, to all unquestioned habits of thought that regulate the flows of desire
and which reinforce any singular form of subjectivity. Oedipal theory is
seen as a particularly noxious example of a habit of thought by which the
subject came to be fixed, classified, and by which abhorrent desires and
associated subjectivities were pathologized. Deleuze and Guattari, the philos-
opher and psychoanalyst, were to describe the theory as a ‘grotesque error’
that channelled desire into closed narratives of loss and anxiety.21 Of Oedipal
losses and castration anxieties. From the awkwardness of axioms that pin the
subject down, Deleuze and Guattari construct a theory of the machine: the
machinic. This machine finds positive engagement in tasks that would liberate
the subject from the rigid structures that serve to couple a ‘thing’ to pre-given
desires and social and classificatory norms.22 If Deleuze and Guattari intend
to offer through the text a machine that functions, then its particular function
is a form of transformation that negates the subjectivity of the subject while
simultaneously offering that subject a field of possible liberations. It is the first
paragraph of Anti-Oedipus that suggests the agenda of almost all that follow it:
It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits

and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have
ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines – real ones, not figurative ones:
machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines,
with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged

into an energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other inter-
rupts. The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth a machine
coupled to it. The mouth of the anorexic wavers between several functions: its
possessor is uncertain as to whether it is an eating-machine, an anal machine,
a talking-machine, or a breathing machine (asthma attacks). Hence we are all
handymen: each with his little machines.23
A machine at its simplest is a connection in order to produce. To produce

anything. To inject methedrine, to get me to the office, to sing, to dream, to
shit, to fuck. Just as the mechanics are part of the steam-engine’s evolutionary
mechanism in Samuel Butler’s description of them, so the breast and the
baby; the nipple and mouth, connect as a unified machine and it makes no
sense to insist on the separateness of two distinct individuals, or two distinct
organs. The sense of where to draw the line to mark out an entity is pragmatic
and derives from the kind of description that we find it helpful to make in
order to deal with the situations in which we have to act.24 Paul has his life.
Elizabeth has hers. However, one cannot draw a distinct boundary around
one to the exclusion of the other, nor to the exclusion of the Room. An addict
without a drug is likely not an addict. I forget myself in the search for my keys,
even though that same search may result in me getting somewhere else. For
Deleuze and Guattari even ‘[a] body operates along lines that vary according
to whatever aspect of them we are considering’.25 A body, thus, is configured
by that which is pre-personal or impersonal, including ‘aspects’ and consid-
erations. There is no punctured lung without that which punctures. Following
that moment in an oblong courtyard in Cité Monthiers, that moment of stone
in snowball hitting chest, the entire body becomes a breathing machine:

a fighting for breath machine. A body lung. In that instant rest becomes
respite. A sister becomes nurse. A room a Room, a shell, an organ. A relative
organization of life. An ‘organology’ as the philosopher of medicine and
biology Georges Canguilhem had described it.26 Machines within machines.
Machines among machines. Darwin among the machines.27 This question is
a fundamental one – the machinic character of selves. So ‘why have we kept
our own names?’ ask Deleuze and Guattari, ‘Out of habit, purely out of habit.
[…] Also because it’s nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when
everybody knows it’s only a manner of speaking’.28
The Impersonal 47
The element of one machine can so easily become an element of another.

The sun that rises in common parlance is also a point of fixation in the
astronomy machine. It fails to rise there but remains a point of focus never-
theless, or perhaps more so. Methedrine flows through fascist dictators,
soldiers, economies, Eleanors and the dead. It is taken up in many machines
in order to produce many effects. The outcomes are radically different and
all distinctly different from the drug itself. The march of a soldier, the injec-
tions of ‘a girl called Eleanor’s room’ and those of the Japanese economy
carry internal characteristics that tend to align them to or ‘presuppose’ or
‘implicate’ particular components, organs, that may or may not enter into
relations. Methedrine in the hands of a marching soldier might be a tool for
managing the nerves in the necessary taking of risks, but in the hands of
Eleanor the same liquid might be an aid to achieving a dream-like state. In
this sense methedrine is consequence, nothing but consequence. It depends
upon what we desire … Or rather, it depends what desires we are ourselves
implicated in. We are reminded of the definition of ‘[d]esire: machines that
dismantle into gears, gears that make up a machine in turn’.29 The same is true
of the bodies involved. A soldier can dream and an addict can fight. However,
the deployment of the soldier in the soldier-methedrine-gun-march machine
is different from the deployment of the addict in the addict-methedrine-
syringe-dream machine. Bodies are not made, they are configured: implicated
in, as and among machines. When focused on connections even the bound-
aries of the self dissolve into the things we engage with – rooms, nipples and
mouths, people, places, furniture, music, murmuring hearts and punctured
lungs, keys, stars, snowballs, horizontal falls: all machines.
Cuts
There is thus something impersonal and asubjective about the machine. There
is also something astructural and ungrammatical. The concepts related to the
machinic are located in (and purposefully ‘out’ of) the fraught issues of subject,
subjectivity and subjectification that concern poststructural philosophers,
authors, artists and architects alike. In turning to the machine, Deleuze and
Guattari do so in a literal rather than metaphoric sense, following the simple
descriptors of the nineteenth-century mechanical engineer Franz Reuleaux

and the pragmatism of the twentieth-century writer, historian, philosopher
and critic Lewis Mumford. Reuleaux had generated the basic descriptors for
the kinematic modes of operation of any chain of connections that constitute
a machine. Mumford had designated the archaic empires ‘megamachines’,30
and Deleuze and Guattari would make the point ‘that, once again, it is not
a question of metaphor’.31 Deleuze and Guattari emphasize this idea of the
machine that escapes from the bounds of symbolic and metaphoric forms of
representation, consistent with their broader philosophic critique. The privi-
leging of the machinic over mechanical and organic descriptors is a means of
negating the representational in favour of the performative. We ask not what
something means but rather what it does. The elements of any machine don’t
need to be consistent. They just need to operate, to produce, to make music
like Orpheus, to move like the number 19 bus, to trace a sonorous thread or
to build a room. The machines of literature, art and architecture produce too.
The overarching (or underpinning) sense that Cocteau’s Room-machine
produces is that of a constriction – like a weight that sits on the chest. A
slowly collapsing lung. A restless constricting, a tumult of items and images
and cut-out newspaper clippings that pin one down. The rules of the Room
are not those of other spaces. There is here ‘games’ and ‘treasures’, a coming
and going; a reward for brow-beating and the generation of hurt. The laws of
the outside play no part in the space and the aggressive and anxious behav-
iours of the brother and sister, Paul and Elizabeth, play themselves out both
in aggressive and anxious words, in speech, but also in the sense that the
Room itself is an aggressive act, a collapsing. What occurs within the Room
doesn’t occur outside and the Room operates much like a set of contracts
drawn between that (and those) which constitute it. There is here a loyalty,
a fierce loyalty, in a way that exceeds the feelings of any one person. ‘What
a mistake to have ever said the id’.32 Those who enter the Room desire what
they are instructed to desire – Paul and Elizabeth and the Room, sometimes
Paul or Elizabeth and the Room. The Room is obsession driven. It’s a highly
productive pathology. Freud would note that ‘[l]ocalities are often treated like
persons’ in dreams,33 but it may be a more generalizable delirium. There is
here, in the Room, not chaos but chaosmos. All the elements of the Room are
not haphazardly brought into connection, but rather cut from life in order to
The Impersonal 49
produce a restless constriction. And the sense of constriction simultaneously

comes by constricting, by cutting. By removing an outside. By the necessary
fading that any fixation generates. The chaosmos of the Room is always threat-
ening to turn one of two ways: Either to the inside chaos of incest, violence
and death or to the equally violent stratifications of the familial outside. Paul
and Elizabeth’s desire for each other occurs both via and at the exclusion of
all others. This same desire is that which threatens to tear the machine apart
‘in fits and starts’. This Room may be an anti-oedipal machine but it is one on
the very edge of collapsing into a solitary Oedipus or Electra.
This sense of constriction is one that belongs neither to an individual
character, an author, any sentence or an audience, but rather subsists. Just
as the motion of a locomotive does not belong to a spark plug, a driver, a
signalman or a track, but rather subsists. Cocteau is as implicated as the
brother and sister, the Room, bust, mirrors and pinned photographs of
which he writes. The characters have an agency just as the author and like
the author ‘[t]he mechanic is part of the machine, not only as a mechanic but
also when he ceases to be one’.34 Cocteau wrote Les Enfants Terribles over a
week of weaning from his opium addiction. He was to describe the treatment
as ‘a wound in slow motion’,35 yet one might describe Cocteau’s literary style
as ‘smooth’. It might even be described as ‘light’; perhaps like ‘that profound
lightness that opium can imitate a little’.36 Cocteau glides through episodes,
descriptions, accounts. Sliding like an anatomist’s scalpel through lives. At the
centre of the novel, however, nothing is light. Despite the literary style there is
a dense and weighty need to control and a tense violence and want to hurt that
to which you are closest. A body slowly collapsing like an organ. The stylistic
component of this effect, the graphia, is produced in two particular ways: in

one, language masks or ritualizes the discomfort; in the other, language itself
is the discomforting act:
[A] kind of delirium seemed to take possession of them. The Room waxed
feverish with images reflected in distorting mirrors. Then a dark shadow fell
across her; she would ask herself if this mysterious elixir they imbibed was
none the less as noxious, habit-forming, as likely as any other drug to lead to
the gas oven.37
The language of this novel, Cocteau’s language, is a matter-of-fact type of

journalistique that feigns an objectivity. It is the language of Paris Match and
Vogue. However, even given this matter-of-factness, the language is at once a

referential and a performative part of the machine. It is referential in the sense
that it speaks of the tensions, the violence and intensities. It tells us or denotes
the intensities. It stands in place of the acts depicted. It is performative in the
sense that it is itself imbued with the violence and tension and anxiety. It itself
hits. Cocteau writes of the death of Paul and Elizabeth’s mother: ‘Suddenly
their mother died – a shock that stunned them’.38 We are stunned. We are
stunned not only in the idea that the mother died. But we are also cut by
the blank and cruel manner by which we are told. The sheer impersonality.
The enunciation exceeds corporeality. Not only is the language of literature
invoked in service of violence and discomfort but so too is architecture. When
Elizabeth’s new husband Michael sets out alone on a business trip immediately
after the wedding ceremony, Cocteau tells us ‘[t]he genius of the Room was
vigilant. Need it be told in words? On the road between Cannes and Nice,
Michael met his death.’39 Here the Room, the domestic space, is brought as
one might bring a character or a force of nature into the intensity of death; in
a manner that, like the words themselves, at once cloaks the violence and is
violent. The enunciation exceeds incorporeality.
The literary style of Cocteau operates like the Room as a means of
un-making the ‘personal’ desiring mechanisms, by systematically defeating
them and making them cause pain and confusion in the individual – assem-
bling across the brother, sister, author and reader a Body without Organs,
a different desiring machine – closely-bonded, quick-reflexed, deadly to its
enemies, difficult to befriend, noxious and habit-forming. When switched
out of the Room mode, Paul and Elizabeth can indulge in riotous self-indul-
gence, but then switched into it the individual desires are cauterized. Urban
and urbane desiring-machines dis-assembled because some of the parts are
needed in the Room-machine, and so rendered inoperative. Individual desire
interferes with the smooth running of the Room, just as the smooth literary
style breaks and cuts when dealing with intensities beyond the Room itself.
The singular identity of the Room disconnects when the key elements leave
it. But this disconnection is always also a reconnection to other machines, to
other assemblages, rhythms and resonances.
The Impersonal 51
Architecture machines
In a text published the year of Cocteau’s death, 1964, Deleuze was to turn to
the idea of the machinic in the performative analysis of the modern work
of art or literature. The subject of Deleuze’s text was not Cocteau but rather
Cocteau’s trustful friend Marcel Proust. Cocteau was a lung on an opium pipe,
Proust was a pharmacy. Cocteau occupied a house, streets and an urbanity,
whilst Proust had a bedroom and Combray. Cocteau would see the last photo-
graph taken of Proust. Proust would not. Nor did Proust see the photographer,
Man Ray, on this occasion. He was already dead. The New Yorker staff writer
Brendan Gill would recall the photograph in conversation with Man Ray,
‘never had a body looked more intensely (one might even say, Proust being
Proust, more intently) dead’.40 There’s no grand narrative involved in this small
story. No big meaning as such. No absolute truth. Just the production of an
image, a photograph. Deleuze suggests in his text Proust and Signs the need to
counter the search for a non-contingent meaning that is the object of modern
and organic criticism. For Deleuze ‘[t]he modern work of art has no problem
of meaning, it has only a problem of use’.41 For the modern work of art the
‘problem of use’ locates the interpretative function clearly within the machine
that the artwork itself is; a focus on its components, its connections and multi-
plicities, and implies a relationship between art and interpretation that can be
located in these same connections. A photograph isn’t a photograph of this or
that, but just a photograph being a photograph, ‘more intently’. For Deleuze,
the modern work of art is a machine:
Why a machine? Because the work of art, so understood, is essentially productive

– productive of certain truths […] that the truth is produced, that it is produced
by orders of machines which function within us, that it is extracted from our
impressions, hewn out of our life, delivered in a work.42
The incorporeal work of art, and we are reminded that for Deleuze architecture
was the first of the arts, is a machine because it functions and its function is
the production of ‘certain truths’.43 This is not the production of an absolute
truth but rather truths (plural) as a formulation of a particular and relative
organization of the world. A chaosmos. The machine does not allow us access
to a sanctified meaning of that which exists, but significantly provides the
apparatus by which one may access the truths it, itself, has produced. It is why
any critique of art must necessarily be conducted with an attention to the logic
the work itself produces. There are no master-narratives. No good and bad in
the machine. Only what something produces and whether or not or how it
works. Deleuze writes that, ‘[i]t is the work of art which produces within itself
its own effects, and is filled with them, and nourished by them: the work of art
is nourished by the truths it engenders’.44
These truths, however, are not always truths that invent the world afresh.
They are not always the small ‘certain truths’ of a chaosmos. Sometimes
they are truths that merely serve to reinforce the habits and conventions to
which we are subject. Subject and subjectified. Truths perfectly syncopated
to the hymn sheets of authority rather than the Orphic songs that breathe
life into that which was without. Cocteau tells us that the courtyard in Cité
Monthiers is generally quiet and secure with little to jolt the painters whose
studios form the periphery. However, ‘at half past ten in the morning and at
four in the afternoon the silence is shattered by a sound of a tumult’.45 It is the
violent helter-skelter of children. Heading to school and returning, fighting
and yelling and crying and operating like a herd and then as rogues. Cocteau
suggests that:
Should one of that tribe of prosperous, hermetically preserved artists happen to

pull the cord that works those drapes across his window, I doubt if the spectacle
thereby revealed to him would strike him as copy for any of his favourite
subjects: nothing he could use to make a pretty picture with a title such as Little
Black Sweeps at Play in a White World; or Hot Cockles; or Merry Wee Rascals.46
The critique is clear. The gentility of art is an illusion, or worse: a sycophant’s

truth. The gentility of art is, at times, a mask or what Georges Bataille would
call a ‘frock coat’ and the intensities of the world are harder, faster, more
stone than snowball. The language of the artist may resonate perfectly with
social structures and hierarchies and in doing so may be itself the real violent
act. The texts of the architectural phenomenologists, our own hermetically
preserved artists, are replete with self-same bodies and well-reinforced upper-
middle-class subjectivities. These texts bolster that which already exercises
power and assigns values. The architectural phenomenologists breathe air
into the subject as we already know it; that which is already endowed with
The Impersonal 53
the majesty of corporeality. Their accounts can have us thinking that the
world is a very genteel place indeed. That our most intense pleasures come
from handrails or door-handles. That the domestic is all about comfort and
pleasure and that the world is configured by thoughtful whole selves. But
this theoretical resuscitation is much like the paintings of baskets of cats and
the families of Bolivian diplomats. It is a restitution of a bourgeois son being
reconnected with the picturesque land he inherited from his father. And with
the well-composed words the mother spoke in lieu of a hug. A furthering or
extension of an order of existence that is already seen to underpin all that
is authentic, authorial and auto about life. The body parts the architectural
phenomenologist’s focus is upon too, are as quaint as the architectural inten-
sities to which they respond. Eyes are all about reception and mouths are
all about taste and gentle whistles. Tender is their flesh. There’s no engorged
penis, no labia, no ex nihilo vagina nor trumpeting anus in phenomenology.
No fellatio nor cunnilingus. No veins of methedrine, no menstruation, nor
punctured lungs. Though phenomenology allows us to think the gentle
subjective intensities well, art must address Cocteau’s critique and architecture
must ask of itself the question that Bataille poses: is it merely the bodies of
‘that which has the authority to command and prohibit, that is expressed in
architectural compositions’?47
There is, despite the phenomenologists, a line in architecture, a minor
line, a machinic phylum, that is a punctuated attempt at losing the subject,
the body, as we know it. It is a line that similarly attempts a resuscitation of
‘pre-individual singularities’. This line breathes life into architecture in order
that it might reconfigure the subject. These architects ask how an architecture
might itself be intense. How it might apportion itself. Set itself adrift in order
to affirm life. Not resurrect the subject as we know it but for architecture
to be all the more alive for being incorporeal. It is a line of experiment and
exploration. A line that desires an architecture more machine than structure
and more machinic than machine. More organ than organization and more
organ-prosthesis than organ. A line that desires architecture to be bare. It is a
line of secret draughtspeople for whom the body as we know it is not nearly
enough. Jean-Jacques Lequeu struck this line. Ludwig II of Bavaria pumped
gold into it via his anus. It is the line which caused Hugo Häring to bang tables
and rise from chairs. A line Carlo Scarpa made mobile and monstrous. A line
that Gunther Domenig made tangent. A line that John Hejduk animated and
Lebbeus Woods took to war. That Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio probe
restlessly and that Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto trace as one traces
contours over a thigh. Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal swoon to this
same line. For Douglas Darden it is an oxygen line to a punctured lung. A
breath of fresh air.
An oxygen house
Darden’s ‘Oxygen House project: A Near Triptych on the Act of Breathing’

(1993) is a condemned building for a condemned body. Not a body as we
habitually know it nor an architecture of convention and habit. The project
is located north-northwest of Frenchman’s Bend, Mississippi. The client is
Burnden Abraham, a former train signalman. He’d likely still be a signalman
except that a train derailment sent shrapnel into his chest. Signalling his
retirement. Puncturing a lung. As a result, Abraham must live in an oxygen
tent. He is assisted in his constrained life by a nurse, Sister Jewel. Abraham
commissioned Darden to design a house, an iron lung and oxygen tent
of a house, on the very site where the accident had occurred (Figure 3.1).
Abraham’s request was also that he might eventually be entombed in the
house. He wrote to Darden in a letter dated the 6 July 1979, ‘death no longer
threatens me. It runs like a soft gold between the shadow spaces, a diagonal
vein gives me an enduring sense of sound movement, of amazement and
privilege. Let’s go on and build the house.’48 Darden tells us that Abraham
died ‘shortly after the footings of the house were poured. The construction
of the house was never finished’.49 It is a fiction. In as much as a fiction is a
production of a certain truth. The first difference here, to a more traditional or
habitual architecture, is that Darden provocatively engages fiction. The second
is that the usual fictions of style, convention and typology are exchanged
for a literary fiction. That is, Darden narrates an entire world into which his
machines take effect. The truth at stake here is a small truth. A truth produced
by a clunky machine into which other machines are plugged. His bodies are
part of these machines and despite the grinding of gears, his architecture cuts
sharp like a scalpel.
The Impersonal 55
Darden doesn’t start with an object because his architectural object is

already a prosthetic-organ that is itself plugged into existing machines. Into a
lung, a bend in a creek prone to flooding and a buckled train line. His buildings
are constructed as machines within machines. The house itself is a point of
connection of disparate elements brought into a logic, an ethico-aesthetic,
of proximity. In ‘Oxygen House’ Darden brings together an American Civil
Figure 3.1 Douglas Darden, Plan at nurse’s level. Image courtesy of Allison Collins,
2016.
Figure 3.2 Dis/continuous Genealogy. Image courtesy of Allison Collins, 2016.
The Impersonal 57
War engraving, a caboose water Cooler and Basin, a Westinghouse Train

Brake and a Hindenburg Zeppelin (Figure 3.2). Darden creates a proximity of
elements, scales, places, tastes and dreams.
Darden doesn’t concentrate on the elements themselves but rather on the
connections. This constructing, this configuring, is a method that he refers to
as ‘[d]is/continuous genealogy’.50 Proust might have called it an ‘incorporeal
outline’.51 All manner of object and subjectivity is connected. Darden doesn’t
cut the human out as rarefied, but cuts across it to see what it does. It matters
little what is or is not corporeal in the machine. Subjects and objects have
faded from view when Darden concentrates on the connections. All that
matters is performance. What an assemblage does as opposed to what it is
or what it means. What desires are enacted as opposed to represented. What
matters is that this machinic architecture produces a breath even as the body
expires. All machines produce and Deleuze and Guattari would use the word
machinic because there is little that is mechanical to the machines of which
they spoke. The literary theorist, Alice Jardine, makes the point that just
because ‘desire is “mechanized” in modern culture rather than “personalized”
or “naturalized” does not mean, however, that it is mechanical’.52 The house
may be a machine but what a mistake to have ever thought it mechanical.
The models and drawings that exist of the Oxygen House are evocative,
forceful. The section, in particular, is a cutting of logics, of forms that are
connected; and the connections themselves are pragmatic. The discontinuities
of the elements are lost in the diagonal lines of movement across the site and
through the house. For Deleuze and Guattari:
A machine may be defined as a system of interruptions or breaks (coupures).

These breaks should not in any way be considered as a separation from reality;
rather, they operate along lines that vary according to whatever aspect of them
we are considering.53
The translation of coupures as ‘breaks’ is perhaps not as violent as the ‘cut’ to

which the word more literally refers. If one thinks of the violence of the archi-
tectural section, we might be closer to the implied intensity and function of the
cut (Figure 3.3). The architectural section is struck through a building, rooms
and all the elements and materials that come together to extract territory
from the Earth. It allows access to the inside orders of a house and home, to
the distributions of materials, timbers, stone, sunrises, bodies and airflows

that constitute that which, when assembled, make a house. These elements
were always there, but before the section was struck we couldn’t see them. We
didn’t have access to them until they are exposed by a cut. They are brought
into focus in an architectural section in order that we produce a room and
construct lives. In this sense the section is not representational. It’s concrete
real. It is also the case that the architectural section is not structural. That is,
the cut destabilizes the structures on which we tend to rely. The walls which
hold the floors are structurally compromised in order to access the motilities
and intensities of a space. In order to articulate the flows that constitute any
machine – that allow it to operate. Darden’s section is cut with an anatomist’s
knife, a smooth and yet violent access to the organized and performative.
The movements of Abraham, Sister Jewel and visitors are mapped out in the
section. Not fixed, but mapped. Abraham’s death, the ‘horizontal fall’ of his
life, is also mapped. The oxygen tent space, the iron lung element sits high
and the tomb, once an elevator shaft, falls low. This same incision would be
an intrusion or an imposition that would compromise the structure of the
situation into which we are given entry. It would cause Rooms and lungs to
collapse. But it’s not about structure. It’s about performance.
The architectural section is like a piece of literature making an incision into
materials, details, rooms and lives that are otherwise kept hidden behind blue
plaques, façades, bolted doors and closed blinds. All the connections between
the elements are revealed in the section.
When one element comes together with another there is always a conse-
quence. A material and formal, a social and intensive consequence. For
elements are not just brought together but always implicated in a type of
‘coupling and connection’. The material of our lips always mocks that of the
nipple and the moments of the body where outsides slide toward insides are
always marked by a ‘mucous membrane’ as Deleuze would call it (following
Gilbert Simondon).54 Darden gives particular attention to the moments where
one element intersects another. To the connection and construction. To the
moment of this element intersecting with that. To the moment of entrance
and exit, death and the transformation of house to grave. At this moment the
elements of one machine are taken up by another. An oxygen tent becomes a
shroud. An elevator shaft a tomb.
The Impersonal 59
Figure 3.3 ‘Anatomical section’. Image courtesy of Allison Collins, 2016.

Darden’s architecture desires breath. A forceful drawing of breath and an

expiration of life. His work is vulnerable to a brutal intensity that is at once
mediated in language and where the language is itself the violent act. This is
because this architecture occurs somewhere between the referential abstrac-
tions of thought and the performative abstractions of concrete. Referential
structures are not the point, but they remain part of such machines. This
architecture is a connection and a cutting of forms, narratives, concepts, signs,
ideas, ideals, mathematics and ethics; and simultaneously a connection and
Figure 3.4 Douglas Darden, Frontispiece. Image courtesy of Allison Collins, 2016.
The Impersonal 61
cutting of a lung by the shrapnel of a locomotive, the aggregate, the cement

and the water of raw concrete (béton brut) and the flesh of bodies. There is
nothing tender to this flesh. In a work such as Oxygen House, it makes no
sense to insist on the separateness of distinct individuals, distinct organs and
architectures. The architect is part of the machine too (Figure 3.4). Darden
isn’t any more stable or definitive than any other element. He has breasts
and his nipples are poised along the hard upper hem of a corset. Returning
the auto to the bio, he is configured as he configures a world. A world that is
‘multiplying itself ’ as Proust would say.55 A chaosmos.
Prosthesis-organ
In his short essay titled ‘Architecture’, published the same year as Cocteau’s
Opium and Les Enfants Terribles, Bataille writes of ‘the architectural chain
gang’ and ‘a sort of hidden architectural skeleton’ that lies behind classical
painting and indeed behind all that which cloaks the violence of authority.56
Bataille is ‘against architecture’ inasmuch as architecture operates structurally
as a language, a geometry and a mathematics that conceals the violence and
erotics of authority and life behind an image of stability, order and matter-of-
factness. There is no such stability, order and matter-of-factness to the work of
Darden or the aforementioned secret line of draughtspeople that practise an
experimental graphia, reorganizing all that the body might be. There is more
than one way by which we negotiate desire, the intensities of violence, erotics,
trauma and pleasure. There is more than one way to explore the sensations and
visions that fill ‘the flesh at a particular moment of its descent, contraction, or
dilation’ as Deleuze would say of Bacon.57 Literature, art and architecture may
also be valuable in uncloaking. In making bare. The intensities of joy, pleasure
and pain are always part of the timbre of a line, the harmony of a wall, the
rising of a note and the daub of a sentence. What is at stake in the project of
bare architecture is the passing of the subject as we know it and a resuscitation
of the forces of the asubjective impersonal. Of making our literature, art and
architecture itself breathe, eat, speak, shit and fuck, spit, sing, stammer, stutter
and spasm. Making it, itself, intensive. Alive and incorporeal. A prosthesis-
heart that throbs. An Orphic song to stone.58
4
The Indiscernible
There are two versions of the story of Orpheus. I imagine this means there are
two Orpheuses. One Orpheus unfolds in the poetry of Ovid’s Metamorphoses
and follows the pattern of Virgil’s Georgics.1 Ovid tells a story of an Orpheus
that breathes life into stone with song. It’s a story of an Orpheus in love but
who lost his new bride Eurydice. Twice. The first loss occurred when Eurydice
was playing with other nymphs in a field and was bitten on the ankle by a
serpent. Orpheus found the body. His grief was so immense that he sang for
Eurydice ‘in the upper realms of air’, on the Earth, and then in ‘the shades
below’, the land of the dead, Hades. He wanted her back. He sang such a
ritournelle that he was able to assert an order of life in the underworld itself.
Orpheus sang to Persephone, queen of Hades: ‘[b]y these places filled with
horrors, by this vast Chaos, and by the silence of these boundless realms, I
entreat you, weave over again the quick-spun thread of the life of Eurydice’.2
The song was so affecting that even the ‘bloodless spirits wept’. Orpheus was
granted his wish to return Eurydice to the Earth, but on the condition that he
led the way and did not look back upon his bride until they had both reached
the surface. Before the journey was complete Orpheus, perhaps out of fear,
turns. He gazed back at Eurydice only to see her falling for a second and final
time back to Hades: ‘stretching out her arms, and struggling to be grasped,
and to grasp him, [she] caught nothing but the fleeting air’.3
This Orpheus is the Orpheus of much artistic, theatrical, literary and
architectural endeavour. It is the Orpheus of architects who hope to breathe
life into stone – into architecture – in order to breach the gap between the
corporeal and incorporeal; to occupy a zone of indiscernibility between the
two. It’s perhaps a noble endeavour but it may be a fruitless one. The tale of
this Orpheus suggests as much. For if we are to imagine that we can breathe
life into architecture without also giving over, losing, something of the self (or
at least the self as we know it) then the task may be in vain.
A second Orpheus also engages with this gap between the corporeal and
incorporeal but the moral of this tale suggests that this gap should be breached
in a radically different manner. This Orpheus predates that of Ovid and Virgil
and is thus a ‘second’ Orpheus in systems other than chronology. This Orpheus
is invoked by Phaedrus, a character which in turn is invoked by Plato. In
Plato’s Symposium Phaedrus, an aristocratic insider, joins a party of figures to
lecture on love.4 The party consists of Pausanias a legal expert, Eryximachus a
physician, Aristophanes a playwright, Agathon a poet, Socrates a philosopher
and Alcibiades a statesman. In his opening lecture, Phaedrus makes mention
of an Orpheus. It’s a fleeting reference. It’s a story within a story as such. A
story within a story that we hear as a third, fourth and fifth-hand account. For
there is in Plato’s Symposium a rhetoric of layering: of stories, of accounts and
of what may come to pass as rumours. This work reeks like the press confer-
ences of the Bush and Blair era. An era of media theatre, of spin-doctors and
the doctoring of events in order to keep blood from the hands of authors.
Terminally mediated stories with devastating consequences. Plato begins to
tell his story via Phaedrus. Phaedrus in turn quotes Hesiod:
First Chaos came, and then broad-bosomed Earth,
The everlasting seat of all that is,
And Love.5
The story Phaedrus tells is a story of love; love and death. Eros, we are told,
is the oldest of the gods and ‘Love is a mighty God’ and for Phaedrus death
is framed as love’s most fitting corollary. In his lecture, love and death are a
system of equilibrium whereby every sacrifice equals a commensurate reward.
Phaedrus tells a story of the love of country expressed on battlefields and of
the eros of the soldier. The eros of those that die for love. Orpheus was no such
figure and Phaedrus casts his Orpheus as a ‘miserable harper’ and a coward.6
For Phaedrus, Orpheus dabbled at the edges of Hades and failed to appropri-
ately respond to the death of Eurydice. We are told that this Orpheus went
to the underworld in order to bring his beloved back and instead was given
only an apparition. This Orpheus was mocked by the gods. His crime was in
choosing not to die in order to be with Eurydice. Phaedrus reminds us that
The Indiscernible 65
the decision to die for love was a decision that was rewarded by the gods in
the case of Alcestis who had died in order to preserve the life of her partner
Admetus. There is no more noble an act in Phaedrus’ cosmos than to die for
love, for ‘[l]ove will make men dare to die for their beloved – love alone’.7
For Phaedrus love has an object: love for country, love for a partner. It
has meaning: love is a sign of loyalty. It is in service of a stable state: a love
in the service of fatherlands and extant relations, and; it operates in a well-
balanced system of morality. All the daughters of the state love a soldier in
Plato’s Symposium and in more contemporary times every death on a battle-
field is rewarded with a military funeral: a coffin draped in a crisp national
flag, a lone bugler and a budget dedicated to flowers. It is love that leads us to
places from which we may not return: Afghanistan, Iraq and Hades. It is an
easy story to tell for the men of the Symposium: an aristocrat, a legal expert,
a physician, a playwright, a poet, a philosopher and a statesman. It’s a harder
story to hear for those that have to fight and die. For those that are the subject
of the story rather than the authors thereof: a soldier, a refugee, a grieving
widower and an orphan. But Eros – like every Marvel comic character – is
already an orphan, with nothing to lose but the sense of loss. The sacrifice
was already made.
This second Orpheus is an Orpheus largely unrecognized in artistic,
theatrical, literary and architectural endeavour. Its most fleeting appearance
in architecture may have been in the provocations, the Advertisements for
Architecture of the mid-1970s by the Swiss-born architect Bernard Tschumi.
This Orpheus may also have been briefly invoked on the drowning and flying
stairs of Carlo Scarpa’s Brion-Vega cemetery. It may have once sat, momen-
tarily, in Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio’s ceiling-anchored chairs. It

may have also have been the Orpheus of Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe
Vassal’s authorless Place Léon Aucoc. It is the Orpheus of architects who hope
to maim or slay the subject in order to breach the gap between the corporeal
and incorporeal; to open a zone of indistinction between the two. In Tschumi’s
eighth advertisement, above a grainy black and white image of a man falling
from a building and a woman at a window with arms outstretched as if to
grasp or to push, Tschumi was to write: ‘To really appreciate architecture,
you may even need to commit a murder’ (Figure 4.1).8 It’s a provocation,
an incitement, which may nevertheless be fruitful. For we may need to take
Figure 4.1 Bernard Tschumi, Advertisements for Architecture, Ad no. 8., from
Bernard Tschumi, Architecture Concepts: Red is Not a Color (New York: Rizzoli,
2012), 46.
breath from the subject in order to reunite it with architecture. This second
Orpheus would suggest as much.
It must be noted that these two Orpheuses, that of Ovid and that of
Phaedrus, though opposed, are not diametrically opposed. It’s more complex
than this. The song of one Orpheus breathes life in order that the incorporeal
might join the corporeal (in life). The other Orpheus is remonstrated for
not embracing death in order that the corporeal might join the incorporeal
(in death). The corollary of each story is an apportioning of the self and that
which it is not. That is, the taking on and the giving over of a quality in order
to restore to the other that which distinguishes it from the self. In this sense
apportioning is a move toward and from life and each move is an opening of
a zone of indiscernibility.
Apportioning
Between the self and any other (person, object, room, architecture) there is
always difference. It is a difference that is at once between and yet very much
part of both. Apportioning is, at its simplest, the distribution of difference
between a self and an other.9 Orpheus was already apportioned to Eurydice
and Eurydice to Orpheus before the depth of the apportioning was articu-
lated in song. It is apportioning that occurs when we lose ourselves in the
arms, eyes and thoughts of our lovers. It is apportioning that occurs when I
forget where you end and I begin. The two that became an indiscernible two.
The twoness that became distinctly one. Apportioning is that completion of
thoughts and contrapuntal phrases that only someone who holds part of you
can seamlessly negotiate. The secret languages that are held between you. The
breath that is not yours and that is not mine but that operates between us
both. That song of joy in every petite mort. Apportioning is also felt when the
death is not small. It is felt intensely at moments of separation. An indistinct
portion of me that lay with you, stayed with you, when I travelled. It’s that
hole I felt somewhere deep in my abdomen, or is it that space where I thought
my heart to be, that drew me home. Apportioning is the sense I have that a
portion of me is operated by you – not this or that organ necessarily, not this
or that percentage – but an indiscernible zone that was neither me nor you
but both. Apportioning is also that death that occurred in me when you died.
The perpetual howl that surges within and on occasions breaks free in a cry or
a scream. The term ‘apportioning’ comes, not coincidentally, from those who
had chosen not to die – from Madeline Gins and the late Shusaku Arakawa.10
Apportioning is that song of grief in every death. A struggling to grasp and
be grasped.
Our engagements with art, theatre and literature always tend toward an
apportioning. It involves a part of the self becoming apportioned to a part of
the art simultaneous to an apportioning of the art to the self. This movement
is machinic. It involves both a shutting down or suspension in order to open
something afresh. It is complex like the act of giving and receiving a gift.
Though this is not like the gift given by the anthropologist Marcel Mauss:
a simple economic exchange that implies a reciprocity.11 An Alcestis for an
Admetus. It is rather the gift of the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard: a
complex ‘pulsional machinery’; a mutual pleasure, and; the constitution of a
simulacra.12 A metamorphosis. We can understand the libidinal economy of
apportioning when we think of the manners by which we engage with the arts,
the manners by which we are shut down and opened up and constituted by
art. We can understand apportioning too by a consideration of the spaces, the
architectures, that configure such intensities and affections: galleries, theatres
and ‘a room of one’s own’.
In a gallery, we go quiet. There is always a small death in awe. Or at least
a giving over of one mode of life for another. Jean-Luc Nancy tells us there is
always community in communication and yet silence is also an entrance to an
alternate community: that of the gallery.13 We shut our larynxes in order to
hear the clamour of the art over our own voices. To converse with that which
doesn’t speak as we do. It’s a death of a kind that opens us to the life of art.
I always imagine that the art tourist in the loud shirt, wearing the provided
headset and listening to the authoritative tone of an art interpreter cannot
properly hear Francis Bacon’s screaming Pope. In shutting certain things
down (organs, sounds, shirts, landscapes, exteriors) we open others (depths,
intensities, colours, galleries, screams). Opening is necessary. Open eyes and
minds. Open heads and an exposing of the self. There is a necessary rawness
and a nakedness that we need to adopt in order to approach a Lying Figure.
It was necessary for Henrietta Moraes to open her house on Apollo Place,
Chelsea, and then to open herself for John Deakin to photograph; black and
white and naked on that mattress. It was necessary that Bacon opened in his
shut-off Kensington studio. That he was willing to lose himself. ‘The will to lose
one’s will?’ David Sylvester asks Bacon. ‘Absolutely. The will to make oneself
completely free. Will is the wrong word because in the end you could call it
despair.’14 It was necessary for Bacon to enter that impossible lying figure. To
despair in order to open the body, to expose the head behind the face, the
meat behind the flesh. At this moment we no longer need to speak of the body,
this body or that body, but rather in terms of a body. A singular plural. A work
of art, a piece of art, is an apportioning of an artist and a community of artists
and then silent audiences: a people for whom a mode of communication has
not yet solidified. An ‘unborn people’ as Gilles Deleuze says,15 a ‘people yet to
come’ as Deleuze and Félix Guattari say.16 Every reclining figure is an appor-
tioning of models, mattresses, studios, libidos, rooms, canvases, paint and a
liquid semiotics in the generation of a life that exceeds the parts. It’s not about
this or that element. It’s not about a particular organ or fragment that finds
itself in the image. It’s not about presence or absence as such. It is that the
image, just like the gallery, is an opening of a zone of a kind where indistinct
entities are framed, suspended and sometimes pinned down; and where indis-
cernible intensities migrate, waver and sometimes drift.
In a theatre we are suspended (Figure 4.2). Held in a space for a time and
for that time complicit in certain truths. It’s a ‘wilful suspension’, as Samuel
Taylor Coleridge had suggested, invoked in order that the life of the stage
might be entered.17 It is at once a shutting down, a holding at bay; and an
opening, an exposure or rawness. The theatre shuts us to the outside that we
once had: a London street in Covent Garden with its rain, umbrellas, buses,
cabs and ruckus, crowds and a girl selling flowers. This outside is shut down,
the headlights of cabs are channelled into the pendant lights and chandeliers
of the forecourt and entrance. The noisy ruckus of the street is hushed into the
sounds of chatter, clinking glasses and the mwah of a hundred air kisses as the
bourgeoisie meet and greet and hold themselves tall and appear popular (even
alone they appear popular).
The audience has already been configured by this portion of the city, this
square, these streets, the cab, the box-office and the glowing white dry-cleaned
shirt. Crisp, with Piccadilly collars and Portofino cuffs. A bell tolls and the
Figure 4.2 Orpheus in the Underworld. Photograph courtesy of Jean-Étienne

Minh-Duy Poirrier (2006).
clink of champagne flutes is channelled through silver bracelets that tap

along brass balustrades. The sound of stilettos on steps too is a channelling.
A thousand sharp stabs that mould a foot and a calf muscle and a stair that
rises toward the theatre proper. The channels get tighter. You make a genteel
exchange with a ticket collector, the theatre’s Charon. It’s not money at this
point. Money belonged to the vulgar economy of the street outside. The
theatre has its own polite currency: tickets. They aren’t for trading everywhere,
but operate only here and only at this time on this night. And relate only to
these two bodies and these two seats. I find our allotted positions and shuffle
to remove a jacket hoping that someone might catch a glimpse of the label. I
gaze around the theatre to see, but more importantly to be seen. And then the
lights go dim. I can’t discern my beautiful partner any more. You were on my
left and reach for my forearm lest I have to turn to check you’re still there. We
go quiet. Still. Lifeless. The audience is not of this world. Even the spectator we
were is shut down, suspended, in order to focus. We have given ourselves over.
A singular point of light on a stage. A spot of light, a pinpoint through which a
quick-spun thread of life passes. A raised curtain, an opening and an entrance.
We find ourselves on a London street, Covent Garden perhaps, with its rain,
umbrellas, cabs and ruckus, crowds and a girl selling flowers. It’s not the chaos
of the street we left behind but, in this case, a chaosmos named Pygmalion.
And in literature, in the production and devouring of every book, we are
apportioned. Propped up in a lonely bed in our room I lose myself in a book.
Reading may be a revolutionary act in the sense that we construct ourselves
through it but every construction is an apportioning of materials from this
place to that, from this structure to that. From writing to reading. From that
room to this. Every piece of writing and every reading is an apportioning.
There is a shutting down – a closing of the bedroom door that protects
me from the outside whilst I read. Well away from the window I sit with
a bedhead behind my back and a masonry wall behind that. This shutting
down was necessary in order that something else might be opened, exposed.
The ‘alienating armour of identity’ of which Jacques Lacan spoke is breached
in every act of writing and reading18 – a courting of the words onto a page or
into your head that allows them to do as they please with you. A disarming
of the ego. There’s the possibility of a violence here. A small suicide as you
forget yourself. Nancy was to name the shutting down and opening up of text
exscripting and exscription. In one, text removes the logics of meaning that we
had previously cloaked ourselves with and leaves us bare and exposed. In the
other, we enter a new world in text and are transformed. The process is much
like that of schizoanalysis and it is similarly exposing. Nancy was to suggest:
The nakedness of writing is the nakedness of existence. Writing is naked

because it ‘exscripts’, existence is naked because it is ‘exscripted’.
From one to the other passes the light and violent tension of that suspension
of meaning which compromises all ‘meaning’; that jouissance so absolute that
it accedes to its own joy only by losing itself in it, by spilling itself into it, and it
appears as the absent heart (absence which beats like a heart) of presence. It is
the heart of things which is exscripted.19
This losing and spilling; this absence which beats like a heart in our bed, beat
almost as loud in the keys of Virginia Woolf ’s Portable Underwood typewriter
and from these keys to the 14 taps of the final sentence of Mrs Dalloway (1925)
where we find ourselves desperately apportioned.20 Woolf concludes the
novel with the sentence ‘There she was’ and in this moment we find not the
eponymous character Mrs Dalloway but we find ourselves: lost and adrift.21 In
a lonely bed, in our room, which will always smell of lily.
Zones of indiscernibility
The novel titled Mrs Dalloway, and ostensibly concerned with the character
of Mrs Dalloway, ends with the sentence ‘There she was.’ It is a sentence that
reminds us that Clarissa Dalloway, Mrs Dalloway, Mrs Richard Dalloway, was
not entirely present earlier in the novel. That is, we never completely meet
Mrs Dalloway; but that is not to say that we don’t know her. She had been
constructed in portions: in the sliding and occasionally vague memories and
imaginings of close friends, in recollections, in desires, in shell shock and
indecipherable hallucinations, in dreams, misplaced flowers, deaths, ticking
clocks, taxi cabs, doorsteps, dogs on rugs, footsteps on pavement and in the
tolling of bells. The deep and lingering sense we have at the conclusion of this
short novel is that we too are constituted or configured in connection with so
much more than that which we call the self. Apportioned to so much more
than that which we’ve come to habitually define and delineate ourselves as.
And yet, by so much less than the image we saw reflected in our mother’s eyes.
But this sense of less is not felt as loss. The novel leaves us feeling neither more
nor less, neither definitively present nor absent, but rather indiscernibly both.
The realms of galleries, theatres and rooms complicate the body/world
distinction in extending the understanding that individuals themselves cannot
be differentiated from others, modes of communication, odd economies and
the technologies they surround themselves with, embed within themselves,
constitute and are constituted by, as matters of life. Orpheus was a harper.
To be a harper is to be with harp. It becomes impracticable to differentiate
individuals from what they are not, let alone specify conceptual, temporal
or spatial boundaries to that entity.22 We recognize Ovid’s Orpheus in Jean

Cocteau’s Orphic trilogy just as we recognize Cocteau’s Orpheus in Ovid.23 In
Ovid a Freudian anxiety and in Sigmund Freud an Oedipus. In Anti-Oedipus
a Marcel Proust and in Proust a painting, a Pierre-Auguste Renoir and a
singular women: ‘Women pass in the street, different from those we used
to see, because they are Renoirs, the same Renoirs we once refused to see as
women.’24 Every time Woolf took to the streets of London for a pencil she was
poststructural and piercingly contemporary. The pencil wasn’t for writing
and all that she spelt or misspelt was, she declared, ‘the spelling of a Portable
Underwood – not mine’.25 We are exscripted. Every Marvel comic hero is an
orphaned Eros. Every orphan an Eliza Doolittle awaiting a Colonel Pickering

and a Professor Henry Higgins. A Sharon Osbourne, a Wendy Vera and a
Simon Cowell. The contemporary celebrity plucked from a street and sculpted
by a panel, a symposium, of authors and authority figures. The same confu-
sions of affection and authority that the military fosters. The same confusions
Freud had formulated to account for the masochist and that Bacon had recited
as a logic for his own masochisms. Every ‘no’ of a Lacanian father passes
through lips that once grasped the nipple of a mother. We are inscripted. This
constitutive apportioning, this impracticability of differentiating a body from
that which it is not and where temporal boundaries operate in systems other
than chronology, leads us to a sense of selves as indiscernible.
In the work of Deleuze this ‘zone of indiscernibility’ is presented as a unity
of a kind. Like Ovid, Deleuze starts with an idea of a chaos from which all
that is distinct has been extracted. For Deleuze this chaos is not only that
which we have departed from, but that which is ever-present, lapping at our
doors, beckoning us to our windows. The negotiation of chaos is what matters
and every element that we know and all that we name has been extracted
from the chaos and bares a trace of the mode of extraction. This trace is
what Fredric Jameson refers to as a ‘structural limitation’ that any ‘strategy
of containment’ inflicts upon its objects and subjects.26 Deleuze would refer
to this trace as ‘sense’. It is for this reason that Deleuze suggests in his 1962
study of Friedrich Nietzsche; ‘[w]e will never find the sense of something (of
a human, a biological or even a physical phenomenon) if we do not know
the force which appropriates the thing’27 and for Deleuze and Guattari all
elements extracted from the Earth maintain ‘a zone of neighbourhood, or a
threshold of indiscernibility’.28 The text, A Thousand Plateaus (1980), may be

understood as an exercising of the multiplicitous valences of this threshold.
Every apportioning is a drift through the threshold of indiscernibility and
a return, often a composed return, to the Earth. In this way every appor-
tioning is the breaching of the barriers that were necessary in order to extract
elements, subjects and objects from the Earth. A zone of indiscernibility is
thus the zone between indistinct entities and every apportioning is a return to
an undifferentiated unity of a kind. For Deleuze and Guattari:
Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing
to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal
movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or
end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle.29
The distinctions between what we are and what we are not are swept away in
galleries, in theatres and rooms, and; in the arms and thoughts of others, of
lovers. It is a zone of indiscernibility that we enter when we struggle to grasp
and to be grasped. It is a zone of indiscernibility that we enter when we are
affected by the world. It is also the zone that allows us to affect. To impact. To
sing like a bird. To drown like a stone. To smell like a flower. To serve like a
flag. It isn’t a matter of metaphor. It has little to do with a mimesis or miming.
It’s about the singular intensity that operates between. Between both.
Streets
There is much architecture that endeavours to occupy a zone of indiscerni-

bility between the corporeal subject and the incorporeal building by breathing
life into architecture. By operating like a first Orpheus in order that the incor-
poreal might join the corporeal (in life). Much architecture that operates as
galleries, theatres and rooms which harbour life. This architecture dabbles
in questions of subjectivity but it tends to do so whilst reinforcing that same
subject. In genteel white-walled galleries, secure in theatre seats and in our
beds with our backs against bedheads, that are themselves against walls, the
subject is far too protected, reinforced. In a gallery, a theatre and in a room of
one’s own we can only enact the little deaths.
There is, however rare, moments of another architecture. An architecture
of a second Orpheus that occupies a zone of indiscernibility by embracing

a death of a kind in order that the corporeal might join the incorporeal
(in death). In the admonishing of Phaedrus, and in the provocations of
Tschumi we are incited to an alternate manner by which the distinctions
of the corporeal and incorporeal are breached. Not in connection and life
but in connection and death. Below the grainy black and white image of the
man falling and the woman at a window, who one suspects was there not to
grasp but to push, Tschumi reminds us that ‘Murder in the Street differs from
Murder in the Cathedral in the same way as love in the street differs from the
Street of Love. Radically’.30 This is a provocation to a much rawer architecture.
A provocation to a gap breached, a between occupied, a parallel line followed

that is not the line of life (as we know it).
One of the most sublime deaths of contemporary architecture occurred
in 1996. It was an act of the Paris-based architects Lacaton and Vassal. The
firm were commissioned by the City of Bordeaux to master-plan what may
have been considered a ‘non-descript’ gravel square on the outskirts of the
city (Figure 4.3). The square was called Place Léon Aucoc. It was named
after an administrator and jurist: a man of symposia. Place Léon Aucoc is a
triangular square surrounded on three sides with streets in which white vans
park alongside aging Peugeots, Citroëns and Renaults. The cars likely belong
to the owners of the simple yet dignified two-storey rendered masonry and
tile terrace houses that surround the streets which surround the Place. One
assumes the people who occupy the homes are likewise dignified. Neither
dignitaries nor bourgeoisie, but dignified for not being so. Comfortable but
not contorted by comforts. The Place has a number of park benches of iron
and timber slats nestled amongst the deciduous trees that run around the
edge. The seats are like the seats you might imagine in any park. The trees
too. There is a simple grey steel light pole which branches into three globes at
the square’s centre. The ground is roughly level and largely gravel; making it
ideal for pétanque. The people play when the weather is good. A garbage bin
for recyclables now sits in one corner. There’s also now a children’s play area.31
Again, it’s familiar enough that one might not have ordinarily looked twice.
The brief the City had established for the Place was embellissement, which
roughly translates as beautification or embellishment, but Lacaton and Vassal
felt the Place to be already beautiful. So, as architects, they did something
profound. They were to suggest ‘[a]t the beginning there was this feeling that
there was nothing to do’32 – and this is roughly what they did do.
‘[I]t is our duty to start from scratch with each new Project’, Vassal writes.
‘That can also mean fundamentally questioning our own profession – and
with that the way in which architecture is practiced’.33 The architects did not
present the City of Bordeaux with an architectural form, an installation or
a landscape and instead chose to construct a contract, or what they called
an ‘argumentation’.34 The argumentation was at once both an argument and
a building of a kind: Vassal suggests that ‘[a]s an architect, you explore the
concept of building. Building can be seen in very material and systematic
Figure 4.3 Place Léon Aucoc, Bordeaux. Photograph courtesy of Lacaton and
Vassal (1996).
terms because you build with bricks, concrete, steel, and windows. But in our
view building means first and foremost thinking’.35
This argumentation, this argument, this thinking, was an advocacy for the
maintaining of the park roughly as it was. A maintaining of what may have
been considered ‘non-descript’. The architects were to propose a schedule of
maintenance that stipulated a replacing of the gravel and a routine of other
minor maintenance works. Raking, cleaning, garbage collecting. They were
to develop a contract that was not about the imposition of their order on the
space but rather that allowed the space to maintain its own dignified quietness.
It is a contract that allows this place to continue as ‘a zone of neighbourhood’,
to maintain the ‘threshold of indiscernibility’ which it possessed on the very
first day the architects visited.36 The contract would protect the Place from a
landscaping and an architecture that in all likelihood would shout ‘look at me’,
and instead allows the Place to continue to whisper ‘love’.
This act of restraint is such an important and rare event in architecture.
Below an image of Le Corbusier’s once decaying Villa Savoye, in another of
Tschumi’s Advertisements, the provocateur was to suggest ‘[a]rchitecture only
survives where it negates the form that society expects of it. Where it negates
itself by transgressing the limits that history has set for it’.37 These transgres-
sions are moments in which even the professional men of the symposium
are made vulnerable. Where they give up entrenched positions, boundaries,
borders and fail to deploy soldiers. The significant act of Lacaton and Vassal
was to give themselves over in order that the Place might remain quiet. A
quietness ruptured only in the joyous clinks and guttural thuds of pétanque
balls. Lacaton and Vassal gave themselves over quite consciously. Like a
masochist to his own contract. Lacaton suggests ‘[i]t isn’t a refusal – it’s a
project involving a conscious decision to do nothing’.38 As such, Place Léon
Aucoc is an architecture where even the architect is silenced. A giving over of
the self rather than an assertion. To have done with this id. To shut down this
ego. As an act of love. Love on a street.
Thresholds
Ovid’s Orpheus asks that we ‘enjoy the short spring of life, and its early
flowers’ whilst noting that ‘sooner or later we all hasten to one abode’.39 The
negotiation of life and death and of love and death, is never simple. Life isn’t
always as organized, suspended, opened and closed, inscripted and exscripted
as galleries, theatres and rooms may suggest. Our nakedness is not always so
genteel. Our suspensions not always so momentary. Our deaths not as pleasant
as ‘hasten[ing] to one abode’. The collapse of the boundaries between the
corporeal and the incorporeal are often of a higher intensity than the deaths
and the loves that galleries, theatres and rooms apportion. This is likely why
Tschumi points to the difference between ‘Murder in the Street and Murder
in the Cathedral, love in the street and the Street of Love’. It’s a difference of
intensity. There is a difference of intensity between the little death in awe that a
gallery inflicts and an awful death. Between a screaming Pope and the scream
of a lover. Between architects writing themselves out of an architecture and a
suicide note. Between a wilful suspension and that suspension that is thrust
upon us via shrapnel or a knife. Between ‘a stream without beginning or end’
and to take to the river Ouse with pockets full of stones. The difference in
intensity between the mild and profound loves and the small and great deaths
does not however discount the fact that they are indeed between, and art and
life too is ‘caught in a movement that sweeps one and the other away’.40
Orpheus’ song was one such transversal movement, a conduit. It was a
scream from the portion of himself that was Eurydice. It is the same scream
of Bacon’s Pope and the same scream that sometimes breaks free from my
abdomen or is it from where I thought my heart to be? To be bare is to know
the weight of the unbearable. We carry love and death, art, theatre and writing
into streets and we carry streets, love and death back into galleries, theatres
and rooms of one’s own. It is love and death that pass through forms of life and
art. It is the subject that is constructed in apportionings. And not the other
way round. The single story of the two Orpheuses suggests as much. Orpheus’
crime was not in the manner by which he breached the divide between life
and death, but rather that he hesitated. Turned. Turned to grasp ‘nothing but
the fleeting air’.
5
The Imperceptible
It is not entirely accurate to have suggested that when Orpheus turned he

caught ‘nothing but the fleeting air’.1 Ovid was to tell us that when Orpheus
turned he also caught a sound. Orpheus heard Eurydice. He heard Eurydice
as she ‘pronounced the last farewell, which scarcely did he catch with his
ears’.2 Ovid does not tell us what the farewell of Eurydice was. We’re not told
the words. The content of the farewell may not be narrated by Ovid because
it matters little, or; because to recount such words is never equivalent to the
expressing of them. We’re not even certain that Eurydice’s ‘last farewell’ was
composed of words. The farewell may have been only a tone. A gesture. It
may have been an asignifying sound in a last breath: a scream, a gasp, a sigh,
a singular athleticism, a pulse of fleeting air. And even if the farewell was
one that was composed of words, we cannot be certain that Orpheus heard
them. The phrase ‘scarcely did he catch with his ears’ suggests both a hearing
and a missing. (If the opposite of ‘to hear’ is ‘to miss’.) Orpheus may have
barely heard the farewell or nearly missed it but it is not to say he didn’t feel
it intensely or that it wasn’t piercingly affecting. But we are not told what the
last farewell was. We didn’t hear it. And thus the farewell is left imperceptible.
Forceful and imperceptible. Powerfully lost in all that could be a farewell and
all that could be said in words and out of them.

One of the consequences of Michel Serres’ idea that all we access is extracted
from chaos is the sense of both the immensity and the intensity of that which
we do not, or cannot, perceive.3 Words that vibrate unheard. Phrases which
remain unspoken or unspeakable; silent or indecipherable. Worlds that remain
unseen, invisible or unfound. Thoughts prior to articulation. Serres conveys
a sense of the incredible depth to the oceans that surge about the islands of
order: the incredible force of the chaos that seethes at the boundaries of the
chaosmos.4 We don’t have control of these forces nor do we always have names
for them. These forces are however both intense and extensive. The forces of
the imperceptible drift through and with organs, organisms and what Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari would call the ‘inorganic life’ of art and the archi-
tectural endeavour.5 These forces are our ever-outside and simultaneously part
of our deep and thick boundaries. They occupy our blind-spots and are also
the transparent surfaces through which we perceive. They belong to that zone
we occupy in acts of love and death; acts of creativity, eroticism and violence.
Acts which are equally difficult to classify, contain and organize. They have
intensities, though not classified and oft non-classifiable, that are as real and
affecting as an unstated farewell.
It is to the question of the imperceptible that this chapter turns: to that
which we can’t perceive because it sits out of sight, and; to that which we don’t
perceive because of the silence and transparency through which it operates.
The key question here is the intensity and immensity of the forces of the
imperceptible and the manners by which such forces might be courted in
art and architecture. In order to explore this question, I first turn to all that
remains adrift and imperceptible and that which is afforded us. Second, to the
manner of the pragmatics by which we negotiate that which is not perceived.
I will then turn to one architectural moment where we are struck hard by the
imperceptible: Georges-Henri Pingusson’s 1962 Mémorial des Martyrs de la
Deportation located at the edge of an island of order, the Île de la Cité, Paris.
Organs and organization
In correlating ‘fleeting air’ with a ‘last farewell’ and the ear of Orpheus, Ovid
follows the Greek philosopher and ‘first scientist’ Aristotle who aligned the
element ‘air’ with the sense of hearing, of sound, and with an organ, an ear.6
Aristotle was keen to align his four elements: earth, air, fire and water; with
four senses: touch, sound, smell and sight, respectively. Taste was considered
a subset of touch, which is fortunate for Aristotle because there wasn’t a fifth
element with which he could align the sense. Four elements, four senses and
also four causes: the material, formal, efficient and final.7 Aristotle imagined a
world neatly ordered, classifiable and holistically harmonious. However in the
system of the order of the senses, ‘cause’ remains a complex issue for Aristotle.
In On Sense and the Sensible (350 bc) he writes:
The Imperceptible 81
[W]e must conceive that the part of the eye immediately concerned in vision
consists of water, that the part immediately concerned in the perception of
sound consists of air, and that the sense of smell consists of fire. (I say the sense
of smell, not the organ.) For the organ of smell is only potentially that which
the sense of smell, as realized, is actually; since the object of sense is what
causes the actualization of each sense, so that it (the sense) must (at the instant
of actualization) be (actually) that which before (the moment of actualization)
it was potentially.8
Aristotle offers an organ for a sense and a sense for an element. The world
was one of correlates and access. The human was in resonance with a universe
and the Earth was actualized, translated and relayed through the senses.
The organ is both ‘the object of sense’ and simultaneously ‘what causes the
actualization of each sense’. It was as if the senses were a replete mapping of
that which is sensed and thus the sensible. As if the senses at once capture the
Earth, actualize it, and were simultaneously formed or actualized by it. There
is a consistency and circularity to this discourse of the relationship between
the senses and what is there to be sensed. A self-fulfilling relation ‘as though
nature had foreseen the result’, as Aristotle writes elsewhere of our perception
of the universe.9 It is as if the Earth offered nothing beyond what the human
may perceive of it and even the stars move without jarring our sensibilities.
In more contemporary times phenomenology is tasked with finding forms
of truth in perception and of relegating that which the human doesn’t sense
as having lesser consequence. As if all that the Earth offered beyond what
the human may perceive of it was either not there or inconsequential. As if
that which remains unsaid was without force. It is a position that the archi-
tectural phenomenologists indulge and that remains difficult to critique; for
who would question an account of what one experiences, feels, sees, hears,
tastes and smells? For all this self-evident consistency and self-resonating
harmony there are however small moments in phenomenology too where
the senses aren’t about correlation and access, where the senses are not
about a comfortable embodying of the world. They are moments that Luce
Irigaray might call ‘ruptures’.10 Moments where phenomenology suggests an
escape from the human and his [sic] Earth. Moments where phenomenology
escapes itself. In Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s early work The Phenomenology of
Perception (1945) there is one such moment of rupture where Merleau-Ponty
suggests an exterior to human perception, an Earth beyond what is touched.

Oddly enough, Merleau-Ponty alludes to this moment in the touching of one
hand by another. Merleau-Ponty writes:
If I touch with my left hand my right hand while it touches an object, the right
hand object is not the right hand touching: the first is an intertwining of bones,
muscles and flesh bearing down on a point in space, the second traverses space
as a rocket in order to discover the exterior object in its place.11
When Merleau-Ponty’s left hand touches his right both are at once feeling
and felt. In this simple act of one hand touching another lies much of the
architectural complexity of the indiscernible. This zone is what we enter when
we touch and simultaneously are touched. Mould and modulate. It is (on the
one hand) the entwining of the grain of our fingerprints and the materials
that lie beneath them. In this sense all the surfaces we touch are deep. They
all have their own depth and activate ours. Texture is the contour of depth. It
is the changing of depths and intensities in depth. All surfaces have texture.
In architecture we tend to speak of texture in terms of material composition,
morphology, smoothness, tone, gravity and weight. We speak of texture when
we talk of the positioning of materials at all scales. We also talk of it as the
treatment of materials and the manner by which materials touch us, hold us.
In this moment of one hand touching another Merleau-Ponty reminds us
that perception is not about subjects and objects. It is not about the human
as the subject (the one that touches) and its exterior as object (that which is
touched); but rather the rich ‘intertwining’ of the two. In a last unfinished
chapter of his last unfinished book, The Visible and Invisible (1964), Merleau-
Ponty was to describe an object of sense and a sense proper, ‘as though it were
in a relation of pre-established harmony with them, as though it knew them

before knowing them’.12 The phrases resonate with the Aristotelian account.
When I place my hand on Alvar Aalto’s leather-wrapped handrail at Finlandia
Hall I am gifted a moment of exchange, of connection. It’s an exchange and
connection in which I am implicated, implicit. The handrail is made for a
hand much like mine. It seems incomplete until I grasp for it. Just as my hand
seems empty until I hold it. The oils in the hands of all that have moved up or
down this stair condition that leather just as the leather conditions my skin. I
am held as I hold. I am touched as I touch. I have, at these moments, a sense
that there would be no leather handrail but for my hand, and; no music, no
Sibelius, if not for my ear.
However (on the other hand), this moment in the work of Merleau-Ponty
suggests not so closed a system. Not so complete and circular an arrangement
between selves and worlds, between organs and the organizations of the world.
Indeed we have here an image not unlike that of Deleuze’s ‘spasm’.13 A rupture
at that moment of the simultaneous pinning down and drifting of the self.
The simultaneous sense of intensity and immensity. And here lies much of the
architectural complexity of the imperceptible. For Merleau-Ponty does not
only suggest the intermeshing, the ‘intertwining’ of flesh and ‘a point in space’.
He also sends a ‘rocket’ to an exterior object ‘in its place’. One imagines that
the idea of ‘in its place’ is to refer to an exterior world. An objective exterior.
A real world beyond human touch. A world beyond human perception. A
‘mutant universe’ as Guattari might call it.14 In architecture we tend to speak
of this hard-to-classify reality beyond ourselves in terms of the ‘spirit of place’
or ‘genius loci’. But such descriptors are problematic for their odd parochial,
postcolonial or nationalistic (blood and soil) implications. Often the term
used is ‘sense of place’ or sometimes just ‘sense’. The sense of an architecture
is usually thought of in terms of atmosphere, feeling, affect, speed, density
and gravitas. We speak of sense when we talk of the dynamisms, sensations
and sensitivities of a place. We also talk of it in terms of the qualities that pass
through us upon entering into proximities. Sometimes gentle, sometimes
hard and harsh. In the moment of one hand touching another Merleau-Ponty
reminds us that perception is also about the force of the imperceptible. When
I place my hand on Aalto’s leather-wrapped handrail I have a sense of those
who have also touched it but are no longer there. I have a sense of the life
of the handrail, all the ‘more alive for being inorganic’.15 A sense of a music
that plays of its own accord in empty spaces. A sense of unheard sounds. The
leather handrail and the stair cause you to think. Sibelius is still playing in the
theatre when I descend Aalto’s stair. There is a chill in the air and the sound
fails to reach my ear, but I can still feel it. James Joyce aptly describes this sense
in a necessarily ungrammatical manner in Finnegans Wake: ‘What can’t be
coded can be decorded if an ear aye seize what no eye ere grieved for’.16
Organisms and organizations
The questioning of the efficacies of the human senses and the concomitant
rupturing of the idea of the human as the dual receptor and formulator of the
Earth is also an ongoing project in the biological sciences. From the period of
the conjoining of Darwinian natural selection and Mendelian mutationism,
the German biologist Jacob von Uexküll takes up the case of the perceptions of
other animals as organizers of the world. His small book, A Stroll Through the
Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds (1934) focuses
on the spatio-temporal subjectivities (Umwelt) of non-human animals.17
The worlds of other animals are ‘invisible’ only in the sense that we can’t see
them – that is, they are imperceptible to us – and not in the sense that they
cannot be seen or that they are necessarily out of our proximity. Uexküll’s
paper concentrates on the transmissions between territory and the perceptual
and expressive possibility of an animal; that which he suggests is formative in
generating meaning. Uexküll asks his reader to enter a pre-Bourdieu habitus
and a proto-Slöterdijk bubble. He asks that you ‘first blow, in fancy, a soap
bubble around each creature to represent its own world, filled with the percep-
tions which it alone knows’; and proposes that, ‘[w]hen we ourselves then
step into one of these bubbles, the familiar meadow is transformed. Many of
its colorful features disappear, others no longer belong together but appear in
new relationships. A new world comes into being.’18
The outcome of Uexküll’s thinking is a phenomenology of other animals.
Our human perceptions and capacities come to be only one relative organi-
zation of the world. Indeed, only one world among many. Uexküll speaks of ‘a
new world’ in the sense that the world of other animals bears little perceptible
relation to the world we inhabit. The world of a bird is a radically different
world from ours and that of its prey. There are few common denominators.
It is not that the bird sees and hears, smells and tastes anything less rich or
less varied than we do. It is just different. They see things I don’t; they hear
things I never will. Their world includes spectra we can’t perceive, polarized
light and magnetic fields. Many birds can perceive the flicker of a fluorescent
bulb. They hear a lesser range of frequencies but are highly sensitive to pitch,
tone and rhythm. Some have echolocation much like a bat, imaging their
world in pulses of high-frequency sound. The sensations that the bird accesses
aren’t translatable. Jonathan Livingstone Seagull was a fraud. Daffy Duck a

dangerous delusion. There is nothing particularly auspicious about the world
of the bird. The world of a bird is a world of its own with its own codings and
counterpoints. Just as the prey of the bird also occupies its own world. Deleuze
and Guattari draw on the work of Uexküll and come to speak of the compo-
nents of a relation in the natural world, such as the relation between wasp
and the orchid; snapdragon and bumblebee, and; spider and fly ‘as melodies
in counterpoint, the one serving as the motif for the other: Nature as music’.19
When we consider the immensity of ‘the worlds of animals’ we can appre-
ciate the strained and tight limits of the world to which we have access;
the particular ‘music’ which is afforded us. Deleuze and Guattari invoke
the eighteenth-century French naturalist Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in
suggesting ‘the human in them [in us] is only a straitjacket for inhuman forms
and substances’.20 What is in, or out, of the human bubble, this world, that
straitjacket, is at times a matter of perception, at times a matter of proximity
and at times a matter of action. Together perception, proximity and action are
described by Uexküll as ‘subjective reality’.21 From where I sit at this moment,
my subjective reality is particularly tight. I have access to four walls though I
have to turn to see any more than two at a time; a desk; a computer; an empty
coffee glass; two framed photographs, one colour and one black and white;
three precariously high piles of books organized according to size rather than
content or colour or frequency of use; an Ikea lamp and a Regency convex
mirror both bought by you – the beautiful woman in the framed photographs.
There’s the lingering bitterness of coffee in my throat and the faintest smell of
rotting flowers. There’s a window seat to my left and from where I sit I can
glance over my shoulder to see the wind blowing gently through new leaves
on old trees. I can’t feel the wind; the window is shut. I can see a little of a
street and very occasionally a car, but only for an instant and only if I turn.
I’m listening to music, to Ludovico Einaudi’s Le Onde (1996) based, I’m told,
on Virginia Woolf ’s novel The Waves (1931). Occasionally a solitary bird I
cannot see squawks and I hear it through the music. All these things are things
I perceive and are within proximity. You will have your own bubble at this
moment. That which you can see, that which you can hear and touch and feel
and taste. This book, that seat, and the lingering taste of coffee. It’s part of your
world. It’s in your bubble.
The boundaries of the bubble are not only external. All boundaries are
thick and many boundaries pass deep through the body. Taste tends to occupy
a depth like touch, which may be why Aristotle aligned the two. Sound too
plays itself right through the body. In his text The Five Senses: A Philosophy of
Mingled Bodies (1985) Serres suggests that much of this boundary building,
what he terms ‘softening’, occurs in and through the organs associated with
the senses and the languages in which we circulate.22 For Serres our ears are
a ‘labyrinth’ for the negotiation of sound and the entire body is implicated in
hearing.23 Serres’ version of the labyrinth is much like that which Jorge Luis
Borges described: a complex architecture that is open and allows access but
which, despite its openness, also excludes.24 And for Serres the image of the
bubble also becomes more stridently architectural. A box. Boxes within boxes:
Every possible kind of audible finds sites of hearing and regulation.

It is as though the body were constructed like a box, a series of boxes,
through which these cycles pass. As though the collective forms itself into a
box or boxes through which these flows circulate. And as though knowledge,
a world crying out for more attentive hearing, constructs the largest white box
of all.25
The bubbles and boxes are our possibilities for action, in this place, at this
time. What is inside or out of such bubbles and boxes affords us possibilities
in action and simultaneously conditions us. The boundary traditionally
associated with the self is comprised of a depth of boundaries that at once
configure and extend us; that are simultaneously within and without. It is not
possible to speak of what we hear as purely external. Einaudi’s piano rocks
and raises me gently before throwing me down like a wave. In the throbbing
beat of a rave we find ourselves, our bodies, pulsing like a sailor drawn to a
Siren or banged like the taut skin of a drum. ‘Sensation has the same status as
music’, says Serres.26 Orpheus’ song touches me deeply. In silence too we note
the depths of bubbles and boxes. The North American composer John Cage
once went into the anechoic chamber at Harvard University.27 He was to ask
an engineer why ‘if the room was so silent, … [he] had heard two sounds one
high and one low’. The engineer told him ‘[t]he high one was your nervous
system in operation. The low one was your blood in circulation’.28 We find a
ritournelle deep in the intensity of silence. A sonorous thread murmuring in a
labyrinth in a box in a labyrinth in a box.
I’m unconvinced by Serres’ assertion that ‘[e]very possible kind of audible

finds sites of hearing and regulation’. I like to imagine an escape for sound
itself: a reservoir of the unheard and unhearable. If sound is a mechanical
wave, a wavelength and an oscillation of pressure then the linear possibilities
of that wavelength and the possible range of frequencies of oscillation are
immense. Immense, but not infinite. For even sound has a boundary: a sound
barrier. Yet from the immensity of possible sound, our ear allows us to access,
to hear, only a fragment of all that could be heard. A tiny fragment of the
wavelengths and frequencies that exist and that are possible. Our voices too
can only produce a minute fraction of all the sound that might be produced,
of all the sounds that could be sung. There is much song above the lyric
coloratura soprano and below the basso profondo. Above, below and beyond
the world of human perception is the rich immensity of the imperceptible.
If we are to imagine the immensity of all sound, and; then the subset of that
which animals might hear, and; then the subset of that which the human ear
hears, and; then the subset of that which you hear at this moment in time,
we may appreciate what Friedrich Nietzsche meant when he spoke of ‘the
wretched glass capsule of the human individual’.29
Beyond what we can or cannot perceive there remains something arbitrary
about what is in or out of our bubble. What is in or out of the straitjacket and
the wretched glass capsule. What we hear and what we miss. (If the opposite of
‘to hear’ is ‘to miss’.) The arbitrary nature of the transparent and imperceptible
bubble can be felt if we consider that which we access, that which we have, and
that which we feel we don’t. When I turn to my desk, computer, empty coffee
glass and the three precariously high piles of books, I can no longer see the
window seat to my left. I can no longer see the landscape, the old trees with
new leaves, fragments of other houses, and the street with the occasional car.
Yet I imagine that they are still there. Even though I can’t see them. I imagine
that the room in which I sit still has four walls when I can only see two at a
time. I rarely look at the ceiling but I imagine it’s still there too. I imagine that
my legs are still connected even when I fail to see or feel them below my desk.
And I imagine that the beautiful woman in the photographs – you – are still
there. Here. Yet the music that I currently hear, I imagine has gone when I no
longer hear it. Much of this constructing of presence and absence is just that:
construction. It is a matter of odd equations relating with and without to inside
and out to hearing and missing. There’s no adequate phenomenology or empir-

icism to account for the imperceptible. It is a matter of normalized inclusions
and exclusions, near arbitrary formulations, political biases and cultural
fabulations. The composer, Cage, was to write that ‘[t]he Native Americans
long ago knew that music was going on permanently, and that hearing it was
like looking out of a window at a landscape which didn’t stop when one turned
away’.30 I like to imagine that at this very moment in time there is a radio in a
tent in an abandoned field in Finland, tuned into an obscure frequency, that
is banging out the piano notes of Cage’s lost work ‘Lidice’ (1943). The tent and
the song are out there. Real and intense. I just don’t have access to them at the
moment. Instead I’m alone at my desk listening to Einaudi and the squawk of
a solitary bird.
Pragmatics
If we are to think of all that can be heard: all the sounds and all the combina-
tions of sound. All the words of love uttered in whispers and all the sighs,
cries, gasps and screams of passion and of violence. All the poems and
speeches and lectures of symposia. All the phrases that may be repeated in
one’s head. All the words from a parent and all our own fatherly non. All
political slogans, clichés, threats and rhetoric. All tones and intonations. All
accents and attenuations. All the songs and all the music in all the theatres,
halls, homes, rooms and tents from all the orchestras, bands, accordionists,
humming voices and lonely radios. All the claps of thunder, the patter of rain
and the banging of drums and waves. All squawks and the songs of Sirens and
all birds and the tinnitus of all buzzing insects. The beating of all hearts and
all last farewells. If we are to think of all that can be heard – all of it and all at
once – it becomes impossible to hear. It becomes impossible to speak. In The
Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872), Nietzsche was to write of such
an overpowering:
Suppose a human being has thus put his ear, as it were, to the heart chamber
of the world will and felt the roaring desire for existence pouring from there
into all the veins of the world, as a thundering current or as the gentlest brook,
dissolving into a mist – how could he fail to break suddenly? How could he
endure to perceive the echo of innumerable shouts of pleasure and woe in the
‘wide space of the world night’.31
Whilst the world may ‘cry out for more attentive hearing’ as Serres suggests,
listening to the clamour of the imperceptible is difficult. In the wondrous and
creative possibilities of the imperceptible there is threat. It is the threat of
becoming completely adrift or of an ‘expiring in a spasmodic unharnessing
of the wings of the world’, as Nietzsche cautions.32 Of hearing Eurydice when
she is not there. Of rupturing ear drums and of squawking like a bird or
rubbing oneself endlessly like a leather handrail. Jean Cocteau weaning from
his cocaine addiction would write that ‘the ear can detect a whole apocalypse
in the starry night of the human body’.33 Thinking about the extensity of
the imperceptible may easily become an argument for gods, aliens, angels
and fairies. Jonathan Livingstone Seagulls and Daffy Ducks. All manner of
phenomena might be out there – if only we could hear it. All of us a potential
Saint Anthony of the Desert or L. Ron Hubbard of the Galactic Confederacy.
All of us tuning our radios into the deep silences of the universe in order to
hear aliens. Or likewise, all of us a potential schizophrenic with a radio at our
ear listening to blank out the voices that are always there. A schizophrenic
fighting to stop the voices that the Saint and scientologist court. An outcome
to the discourse of imperceptibility is: just because we can’t hear these voices
doesn’t mean they cannot be heard. But what a nauseating clamour they
would make. I imagine that to hear the voices of gods and demons and the
dead would be to consistently scream ‘Shut up! Shut up! Shut the fuck up!’
A constant adjusting of a radio frequency in order to confuse. The wearing
of aluminium foil hats. The torment of Saint Anthony. It is little wonder that
Nietzsche suggests the smashing of ears and that Antonin Artaud was ‘done’
with organs as much as with God.34 How could they fail to break suddenly?
If we are to think of all that can be drawn, painted and designed. All possible
art and architecture. All the possible forms, materials, details, configurings,
combinations, scales and all that has and has not yet been drawn, painted and
designed it becomes impossible to raise a pencil. There is in such immensity
always a loneliness. It is the loneliness in every blank sheet of paper, every
empty canvas and the burning whiteness of an empty digital design file. The
immense depth of every surface and screen. There is a question of pragmatics
here – of how to negotiate the imperceptible without becoming permanently
unhinged and perpetually adrift. Of how to control monsters whilst weaving

sonorous threads. Art and architecture and all that deals with creating and
imagination operates in this space of torment and joy. At the intersection of
exhaustion and majesty, of despair and freedom, of silence and song. It is a
zone of both catatonia and creativity. Francis Bacon says ‘it really comes out of
an absolute feeling of it’s impossible to do these things, so I might as well just
do anything. And out of anything, one sees what happens.’35
In many ways this impossibility, exhaustion, despair and silence, this
catatonia, is exactly what is necessary in order to occupy the chiasm, the
between, of subjects and objects; in order to raise a pencil and to act. In
dealing with the imperceptible we may need to exhaust the self. To strain or
tighten straitjackets and to overflow glass capsules is not to become super-
human but to become a little less ourselves. Less human. To become inhuman.
To blow new bubbles and open a few boxes is not to become more animal but
to become organized in alternate manners. Less organized as organism. To be
swept up in the life that exceeds the human, the animal and then the organism
itself. Cage was to suggest that ‘[w]hen you start working, everybody is in your
studio – the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own
ideas – all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by
one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave’.36
In order to tap into the forces of the imperceptible and to affirm life it may be
necessary to exhaust the subsets of life: perception, the human and his [sic]
privileged organs, the organism, the organic. To leave it all and ‘if you are
lucky’ become imperceptible.
Hardening
Such a confluence of the intensities of the imperceptible and the erasures of

selves are poignant in the monuments and memorials to the Holocaust. These
spaces have powerfully populated architectural sensibilities and journals over
the last fifty years and yet one wonders how it is that they can be produced at
all. How it is that a pencil can be raised to the dark immensity of that particular
‘world night’. How, out of the impossibility of that violence, something can be
built at all. I would argue that the most forceful of this architecture is not that
which generates a humanity but rather that which flees it. I am referring to
structures such as Rachel Whiteread’s cold concrete Judenplatz Holocaust
Memorial (2000) in Vienna and Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered
Jews of Europe (2004) in Berlin. These architectures groan with the disturbing
repetitions of train timetables and the inhumanity of grinding gears. These
places scream with the hard repetitive rationalisms which Hannah Arendt was
to label ‘banality’.37 In this respect this architecture is not a softening. That is,
it is not the production of music from sound or the softening of an already
tender flesh that these architectures activate. Nor do these architectures
constitute the degeneration of threat into the ‘idle chatter’, of which Theodor
Adorno warned.38 Rather, these architectures are a hardening. These architec-
tures are a hardening of the world. Making it harder against the body. These
architectures cut and bang and silence bodies in the world. Or, at the very
least, cut and bang and silence sensibilities.
The Mémorial des Martyrs de la Deportation by the architect, urban
planner, writer and educator, Pingusson, is an early example of this hardening.
An early forceful courting of the imperceptible and one particular making-
imperceptible. The memorial sits deep in the eastern nose of Île de la Cité:
an island of governance and religion, of state and church. An island of
defensive Roman walls; populated by police, clerics and clerks, lawyers,
doctors and tourists. The island is home to the most regulated of institutions
and apparatus of the state: Cathédrale Notre Dame, the Palais de Justice, the
Prefecture de Police, Hôtel-Dieu Hospital and the Tribunal de Commerce.
The island is home to the most regulating of sounds: horns, bells, sirens and
whistles; the ping of machines telling you to cross roads and monitoring
the beat of hearts; the instructions read aloud to flocks of tourists; the bang
of gavels and assault of hymns. Serres was to suggest that ‘[n]oise is what
defines the social’.39 The Memorial however sits quietly. Quietly to the rear
of, below and behind, the ornate buttressing of Notre Dame and the genteel
formalities of Square Jean XXIII. This site formerly housed the silent. It was
once a morgue. The site is cut from the rest of the island by the busy road
Quai de l’Archevêché. The road runs south to the bridge bearing the same
name. This narrow bridge is covered in thousands of padlocks bearing the
names of lovers. As attempts to bind, to hold, that which drifts, the keys are
thrown into the Seine.
The clamour of the street and the surface here becomes a dense and indeci-
pherable din. Cars and bikes and tourists averse to silence all sound as one.
The memorial is not obvious. Upon crossing the road there is little to suggest
anything special. There’s a small park behind a cast iron fence and hedges. The
park is largely gravel and there are a few orderly-placed trees and standard
timber benches. From the creaky metal gate to the park you can see a concrete
wall a little less than 1 metre above ground. The concrete is very light grey,
almost white, and rough. It is set as if it were roughly cut by some form of adze.
A black dust covers much of the concrete and seems to be the result of the slow
accumulation of pollution from the street in the roughness of the concrete
surface. One assumes this is the edge of the island. One assumes only the
parting Seine and a view to Quai d’Orléans and Pont de la Tournelle is beyond
this edge. The only hint that there is more to this edge is two small metal gates
that sit either side of this wall – to the left and right (the north and south) –
about 12 metres apart. Next to the gate on the right there is a placard, a sign.
As you approach you note that the rough concrete wall between the gates
carries an inscription: ‘1940 Deux cent mille morts dans les camps Martyrs
Français de la Deportation 1945’. The letters are blood red in colour and are
inscribed in a font that appears like the hard and sharp scratching of vandals.
The memorial is cut from the island not only horizontally by the road
and vertically by its depth but also in sound. You pass through the gate and
descend into the silent depth of the memorial. The stair under your feet and
the adjacent walls are solid and of the same rough concrete as the exterior wall;
though the black dust of the street hasn’t settled on the walls of this sunken
space (Figure 5.1). It is as if the stairway had been carved from the stone of
the island. The stair is about 1 metre wide and there’s a solitary square-section
black metal handrail on your left. It’s a utilitarian balustrade, not human,
not warm, but banal and cold and functional. It helps you descend. It makes
you think. Not as Aalto’s balustrade in Finlandia Hall fosters warm, perhaps
even erotic thoughts about other hands and a form of music. Here, you think
colder thoughts. Lonelier and less lyric thoughts. The clouds that pass above,
between the walls either side of this stair makes those that descend more still.
More deep. More alone and harder.
In Merleau-Ponty’s unfinished text, The Visible and the Invisible he would
again turn to the idea of the texture of experience and the ‘reversibility’ of
Figure 5.1 The stair, Mémorial des Martyrs de la Deportation. Photograph by

author (2013).
touching and being touched. He would remind us of the moment at which ‘the
“touching subject” passes over to the rank of the touched, descends into the
things, such that the touch is formed in the midst of the world and as it were
in the things.’40 Merleau-Ponty moves from an idea of perception as being a
completion of the body-world toward an idea of the ‘sensible sentient’ and thus
the body’s ‘double belongingness to the order of the “object” and to the order
of the “subject”’, and to what he refers to as the ‘quite unexpected relations
between the two orders’.41 I imagine that part of this unexpected relation is the
inhumanity of selves and the odd life of that which we had formerly come to
think of as external, inorganic and lifeless. The stark handrail generates stark
thoughts. It is a handrail that fails to record the passing of bodies. The handrail
is silent and the bodies imperceptible. And yet in such absence you cannot
help but hear a collective cry more powerful for its silence.
Bare
From the stair you step into a space less tight and more open to the sky.
Clouds pass overhead and the very occasional bird. You are standing in a
massive below grade bunker, a crypt of a kind, a bare triangular space with
a rounded point at the upstream end of the island (Figure 5.2). At the base
of this rounded point there is a small barred opening to the Seine. You can
see the water and it’s passing. Silently. The opening is like a grate of a prison
and there’s a sharp black metal sculpture above. The sculpture is elongated
vertically with a series of flat and sharp spikes, like two-dimensional arrows
pointing up or thrusting beyond the walls. The floor of the space is as if cut
from the same concrete as the walls. The floor is inscribed with a square
pattern that is oriented in such a manner that it looks as though any rainwater
or other liquid residue would trickle along the grooves and splash into the
Seine beyond. The space makes you particularly aware of the inorganic life
that seethes, vibrates, that runs like clouds between still walls, and the river
that surges and sweeps about this contained space.
There is a strong sense of having left Paris and the clamour and grit at the
street level. A strong sense of having exchanged its formal architectures and
institutions and its regulating sounds – for this place of passage. There is an
Figure 5.2 The bunker. Photograph courtesy of Kieran Richards (2015).
odd ecstasy to this place. It is the sense of having left something of yourself at
the street level too. You have left the articulate chatter that occupied your ears
and the measured voice that occupied your mouth.
Just as you cannot see and hear, smell, touch and taste the street, the street
cannot access you down here. You are less perceptible. The affect is a type of
mournful ekstasis. There is a deep sense of despair down here and a powerful
sense of inhumanity or a humanity lost; left elsewhere and swept away by
fluid forces. The space achieves a sense of what Deleuze and Guattari would
describe as:
[A] transformation of substances and a dissolution of forms, a passage to the

limit or flight from contours in favour of fluid forces, flows, air, light, and matter,
such that a body or a word does not end at a precise point. We witness the
incorporeal power of that intense matter, the material power of that language.
A matter more immediate, more fluid, more ardent, than bodies or words.42
Behind you, a tomb of a kind runs deep into the earth. It is oriented toward
the vaults of Notre Dame. You enter this space by moving between two
massive rectangular blocks of concrete (Figure 5.3). They are all the more
heavy for appearing to be suspended just a few centimetres above the ground.
Concrete weighs so much more when suspended, when what holds it in space
is not perceptible. It is often in imperception that we ‘witness the incorporeal
power of that intense matter’. The dark entrance between these two concrete
masses is tight; less than a metre wide. Once your eyes adjust to the darkness
you find yourself in a hexagonal vaulted chamber. The chamber has a circular
bronze plaque on the floor inscribed: ‘They descended into the mouth of the
earth and they did not return’. This chamber is symmetrical and connects
three further spaces. To the right and to the left are small empty rooms, cells.
Barred, dimly lit and despairing. Straight ahead extends a long corridor of a
space that houses the Tomb of the Unknown Deportee. The tomb is located at
that same end of the corridor that intersects with the hexagonal chamber in
which we stand. From this end, the corridor runs about 20 metres long. The
long walls contain thousands of equally spaced quartz stones that are backlit.
Dimly. At the far end of this corridor is a small eternal flame. No one speaks in
this space. Though, every now and again, you catch a sigh. A tone. A gesture.
An asignifying sound in a shallow breath.
In this weighty chamber breath reverberates and echoes. The sound generates
a sense of depth that exceeds the dimensions of the space. It is a sense that
is amplified as much in text as texture. The space contains lists of the names
that you repeat in your head or spell out in the broken rhythms of breath.
Names of some of the largest concentration camps: Auschwitz-Birkenau,
Buchenwald, Struthof, Majdanek, Neuengamme, Mauthausen, Flossenburg,
Aurigny, Gross-Rosen, Bergen-Belsen, Dora-Ellrich, Ravensbrück, Dachau,
Oranienburg-Sachseshausen. The silence of the space is also broken in your
reading of quotes: from Jean-Paul Sartre, Augustin Maydieu, Louis Aragon,
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Paul Éluard and two from Robert Desnos. The
words are inscribed in the concrete, cut deep. This text resonates; and the
words pass over each other, intertwine, are constructed, have depth and can
be held. In architecture text is a quality of both thought and matter. Texture is
equally complicated. Texture is related to both perception and the meanings
we construct which are not visible. That is to say, texture occurs somewhere
between that which is visible and that which is invisible and conceptual. The
leather of Aalto’s handrail stops short of the end of the handrail itself; just
at the stair’s end. That is, the leather ends and the timber of the handrail
continues. The hand reads the change from the leather to the timber at this
point as an indication; as a sign. In this case texture creates meaning. The
end of leather and the continuation of timber unfolds as a penultimate note
Figure 5.3 Entrance to the chamber. Photograph courtesy of Kieran Richards

(2015).
in Sibelius. There is text deep in this memorial too: a set of material signs to
be read. A narrative, a story, a thread of Ariadne or a song of Orpheus, cut
and carved from the island. In this sense text and texture together constitute
a vector that does not end at any precise point.
Inscribed in the dimly lit cell to the left is the famed ‘Dernier poème’,
the ‘Last poem’ by Desnos.43 You read it silently, but the words are loud and
continue to reverberate. The poem translates as:

I have dreamt so very much of you,
I have walked so much talked so much,
Loved your shadow so much,
That nothing more is left to me of you.
All that remains to me is to be the shadow among shadows
To be a hundred times more of a shadow than the shadow
To be the shadow that will come and come again into your sunny life.
Desnos had been active in the French Résistance against the Vichy government
and the Nazis. He was arrested by the Gestapo on Tuesday 22 February 1944
and deported from France to Auschwitz, then Buchenwald, then Flossenburg,

Flöha and, finally Terezin (Theresienstadt) concentration camp outside
Prague.44 Desnos died within Terezin a few weeks following the liberation of
the camp. The myth of the ‘Dernier poème’ was that it was written by Desnos
on his deathbed.45 The concrete-reality is different. The poem was not Desnos’
last, but rather a rewriting of his 1926 poem ‘I Have Dreamed So Much of
You’.46 This poem was written for Desnos’ lover, Youki, and yet becomes
impersonal on the wall of the memorial. Impersonal but no less intense. A
collective cry, louder for the silence. Raw like a shadow. Bare like concrete.
The architecture of the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Deportation reminds
us of life beyond that which we are afforded. When I descended into the earth
here; when I let go of that cold utilitarian handrail at the base of the stair, I let
go of some minor vestige of humanity. There is a sense of being cut adrift in a
world that threatens to carry us away. Our architecture perpetually confronts
the space of ‘the world night’ in both fixing oneself to a point and then in
casting adrift. It’s not always about making ourselves softer and more receptive
but may be about allowing the organic the hardness of the inorganic. Allowing
ourselves to die a little in order to amplify the forces of life that flow well
beyond the human and the organic. Allowing ourselves to be more intense for
being imperceptible. In this chamber, cut into the nose of this island, I couldn’t
help but cry. Not audibly, but the tears may as well have run from my ears. The
sadness, the sad ekstasis cannot be attributed to any one organ. Likewise, the
tears are not the product of the architecture. They are not the product of any
singular sensation nor sentiment. The tears are not for the martyrs deported
to concentration camps, not for those that lost their lives. They are not for the
shadow of Desnos. Not for myself. Not even for you – the beautiful woman
in the two photographs back home upon my lonely desk. The tears pass like
the clouds and the river above and about this island, ‘more immediate, more
fluid, more ardent, than bodies or words’. At these moments we have a choice
of either breaking suddenly or sending a rocket to a life beyond. Mourning
or building monuments. Offering a last farewell or raising a song to silence.
Part Three
Architectural Procedures
Smith, Chris L.. <i>Bare Architecture : A Schizoanalysis</i>. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2017. Accessed September 20,
2021. ProQuest Ebook Central.
6
Symptomatology
Henrietta Moraes fled from a Freud when she found menstrual fluid in a
bed.1 It wasn’t her menstrual fluid but it was what she thought of as her bed.
It wasn’t Sigmund Freud, but his grandson, the painter, Lucian. Another child
in the dark.
Moraes met Lucian Freud in the Gargoyle club on Dean Street, where
Francis Bacon was also a regular. They consummated the friendship on a
kitchen sink in a basement off Brewer Street.2 Moraes and Freud continued to
cavort over the course of at least three portraits of Moraes at an upstairs flat in
Delamere Terrace on the south bank of the Paddington Branch of the Grand
Union Canal. The 1953 portrait of Moraes, ‘Girl in a Blanket’ was painted
during the affair (Figure 6.1). It depicts Moraes on a bench in front of one of
the large windows of the flat that overlooks the canal. Moraes is half-wrapped
in a grey blanket. Possibly from the bed. She sits upright with bare breasts
and abdomen. There is something vacant in her expression. The face is darker
than one imagines it should be. It’s overworked or dirtied in some manner
by Freud’s brush. In the background, outside the window, there’s the canal, a
lamppost, some bare winter trees, stone walls and buildings, the terraces of
Blomfield Road on the north bank opposite. The figure of Moraes is thrust
into contrast with the lightness of the background beyond the window. It’s
winter but it’s a light day, there’s a thickness to the atmosphere but it’s a white
thickness. Just below Moraes’ arms and adjacent to her breasts the light passes
through the grey blanket. Freud had his subjects sit for hours upon hours,
sometimes whilst he painted the backgrounds. Another model and muse of
Freud’s, Celia Paul, would recount that posing for Freud ‘felt quite clinical,
almost as though I was on a surgical bed’.3 Freud would suggest that the longer
you looked at someone the more abstract-real they would become.4 Given the
Figure 6.1 Lucian Freud, Girl in a Blanket, 1953. Oil on canvas. Private Collection
© The Lucian Freud Archive/Bridgeman Images.
Symptomatology 103
time Moraes is likely to have sat at the window that winter, the blanket does
not seem nearly as warm as it might be. But Moraes didn’t take flight because
of the cold.
It only takes Moraes one page of her autobiography to tell the story of that
which ‘went on for over a year’ with Freud. Moraes suggests that she was
entranced ‘like a mezmerized rabbit’.5 It might explain the vacant expression.
The moment Moraes took flight from Freud is recounted in her autobiography
in an awkwardly constructed phrase or two: ‘after I discovered someone else’s
menstrual fluid in what I thought of as my bed I decided I could take no more’.6
Just as love was first made on a kitchen sink it was unmade through a stain on
a sheet. Much of life passes through such pin-points: The needle of a syringe, a
scalpel, the drain of a kitchen sink, a hole in a heart, a canal or a cervix. These
pin-points allow the passage of singular intensities. Indeterminant symptoms
as tight as molecules, that nevertheless constitute a broad delirium. In the
text, Francis Bacon (1981), Gilles Deleuze describes a moment in the work of
the painter where domestic elements stop operating as the accoutrement of
life, as backdrop and background, as comforting security, and instead become
the site through which the body itself might escape: ‘The body escapes from
itself through the open mouth, through the anus or the stomach, or through
the throat, or through the circle of the washbasin, or through the point of the
umbrella’.7 All objects in such an account are partial objects. Signs of life that
occur beyond or in excess of the bodies concerned. The blood that leaves us.
Organs that depart. Freud’s painting ‘Girl in a Blanket’ is not about a body
at one with its context but a body tormented by it and of a context equally
dismayed. The denuded trees of winter, bare breast and abdomen, the coldness
of the northern light, a face darkened by a brush and a threadbare blanket.

Singular signs are collated and composed like symptoms. Menstrual fluid can
break a heart. Moraes fled.
Beneath the painting, and beyond Moraes’ account of her time with Freud,
is also that which detaches like a partial object and which is affecting precisely
because it is in excess of the elements that come to configure images and
events. The unit of value here is the assemblage and not the elements alone.
To flee one assemblage is always to enter another. The art of living is the art
of composing, configuring, entering and leaving assemblages. Moraes would
draw a line and ‘take no more’. The question is how to move on in this world,
where ‘truths’ commence with little ‘t’s and are perpetually plural. How to
engage in a collecting and configuring and composing? A constructing or
arrangement of symptoms in which we too are implicated. I imagine this is
why for Georges Bataille a ‘philosophy is never a house; it is a construction
site’.8 Drawing a line. Constructing. They’re not gestures of death but of life.
The act of living.
In this chapter I seek to explore an architectural procedure related to the
entering and leaving of assemblages through the composing of singularities.
That is, a method of collating and configuring the (asubjective) impersonal,
the (asignifying) indiscernible and the (anorganic) imperceptible. In order
to do so I will focus on Deleuze’s engagement with medicine. Or what may
be thought of as the art of medicine. For it is medicine that sees all objects,
elements and the accoutrement that surrounds us as signs. More often than
not, as signs of life.
In Essays Critical and Clinical (1993) Deleuze suggests that medicine
(the clinical) might distil from art, and specifically literature (the critical), a
symptomatology. And it is this symptomatology that I am interested in for
architecture. For when Deleuze speaks of the ‘writer’, I cannot but help think
that he might have also easily spoken of the architect; and when Deleuze
speaks of literature (of text, of style, of its ‘revolutionary force’) I cannot but
help think he could almost as easily have spoken of architecture. Deleuze
writes: ‘the writer as such is not a patient but a physician, the physician of
himself and of the world. The world is a set of symptoms whose illness merges
with man. Literature then appears as the enterprise of health.’9 Architecture
too might appear as the enterprise of health.
The therapeutic and the diagnostic
There is a long and complex history to the relations between architecture and
medicine. It’s a history built upon the therapeutic and diagnostic potentials
of both and the shared critical and clinical management of life and death. I
start this story, however, not with architecture explicitly, nor with Deleuze’s
notions of the critical and the clinical, but rather with a Victorian recollection
of murder on a street. It is the recollection of the naturalist Charles Darwin.
Symptomatology 105
Darwin had taken flight from blood twice in his time as a medical student in
Edinburgh, before taking flight from a career in medicine itself. But the streets
of England were no sanctuary. In his autobiography Darwin writes:
I once saw [...] in the streets of Cambridge almost as horrid a scene as could
have been witnessed during the French Revolution. Two body-snatchers had
been arrested, and whilst being taken to prison had been torn from the
constable by a crowd of the roughest men, who dragged them by their legs
along the muddy and stony road. They were covered from head to foot with
mud, and their faces were bleeding either from having been kicked or from the
stones; they looked like corpses, but the crowd was so dense that I got only a few
momentary glimpses of the wretched creatures.10
The ‘body snatcher’ and the ‘crowd of roughest men’ operate much like the
two Orpheuses in their attempts to breach the divide between the corporeal
and incorporeal. For a ‘body snatcher’ the corpse is a commodity in that it is
able to be sold to medical schools as a training device for the development
of skills that may subsequently be applied to the bodies of the living, albeit
ailing, to keep them from death. For a ‘crowd of the roughest men’ the deep
reverence for the corpse can well be enacted on the living body as an act of
violence that seeks to rid the living body, albeit morally ailing, of that which
dissociates it from the dead. It can be imagined that Darwin removed himself
from a medical career and hid himself in the Cambridge crowd for fear of
the noise of violence which characterizes both ‘bad operations [...] before the
blessed days of chloroform’11 and the harsh on-street urban management of
social and moral illnesses of the time.
The architectural response to the problem of the body snatchers was
at once simple and direct. The graves of individual bodies came to be

protected by heavy table tombstones, mortsafes and vaults.12 Those without
the economic means for such protections placed pebbles and flowers on the
graves as a way to detect disturbances. In Edinburgh and the areas around the
Scottish medical schools, watchtowers were constructed in cemeteries so that
the graves of the newly buried might be watched over for a few days till their
flesh had decomposed to the point where they were no longer valuable to the
medical educators.13 Many cemeteries of urban Britain had large fences and
walls erected to protect the bodies of the newly dead from the medical estab-
lishment. In this regard architecture is therapy. A solution to a problem. An
answer to a pathology (in this case a social more than individual pathology).
And architecture has a long history of positing itself as therapeutic; as
solution; as answer.
There is a sense, however, in which architecture is not therapeutic after-
the-fact, but indeed diagnostic. One could argue that had the cemeteries
of Edinburgh already been designed with tall walls and with watchtowers
to accommodate relatives of the newly deceased then the body-snatching
would not have occurred. This would be something like architecture as
preventative medicine: diagnosing a possible social ill, striking before
symptoms manifest. And architecture also has a long history of posing itself
as diagnostic, as mitigating problems before they occur. Indeed, watch-
towers were also constructed in cemeteries in Northumberland, in the
north of England, where there is no recorded history of body-snatching.
Brompton cemetery in London, where Moraes now lies, is much further
from Edinburgh but is still protected by large fences and gatehouses. The
placing of pebbles and flowers on graves and the construction of walls
around cemeteries today might be one such odd diagnostic: protecting
against an ill, independent of its occurrence; posing an answer independent
of any particularly pressing question.
The therapeutic and diagnostic positioning of architecture persists.
Modernism reignited the Enlightenment fascination with forms of knowledge
that went back to ‘first principles’ and a belief that uncovering a cause would
allow a better articulation of an effect. In modernist architectural manifestoes
this position is often posed as a questioning of architectural traditions and
conventions. Traditional and vernacular forms of architecture were presented
as belonging to realms of faulty logic. They were not necessarily presented

as bad solutions per se but rather as solutions that failed to address real
problems, largely because the problems themselves were not well articulated.
Le Corbusier states the position in Darwinian terms in his manifesto of 1923
Toward a New Architecture:
Architecture is governed by standards. Standards are a matter of logic, analysis

and precise study. Standards are based on a problem which has been well
stated. Architecture means plastic invention, intellectual speculation, higher
mathematics. Architecture is a very noble art. Standardization is imposed by
the law of selection and is an economic and social necessity. Harmony is a state
Symptomatology 107
of agreement with the norms of our universe. Beauty governs all; she is a purely
human creation; she is the overplus necessary only to men of the highest type.14
Le Corbusier’s text, replete with late Victorian humanisms, sexisms and

fixations with the problem/solution dualism, is still a standard on the reading
lists of architecture schools internationally and its version of causality is still
prominent in architectural pedagogy today.15 The ‘problem-based learning’
of most architecture schools relies on the premise that in a question lies a
solution, if only the diagnostic skill of the architect might uncover it.
What I am interested in here is not this play between therapy and diagnosis
nor the dualisms of questions and solutions but rather the manner by which
architecture might constitute a symptomatology. Symptomatology is not
concerned with origination, nor with ‘giving a reason’, nor with causation (as
with etiology). Symptomatology is the study of signs – full stop. Daniel W.
Smith, the Deleuzian scholar and one of the translators of Deleuze’s Essays
Critical and Clinical, suggests that:
What a doctor confronts in an individual case is a symptom or group of

symptoms and his [sic] diagnostic task is to discover the corresponding concept
(the concept of the disease). No doctor would treat a fever or headache as a
definite symptom of a specific illness; they are rather indeterminate symptoms
common to a number of diseases, and the doctor must interpret and decipher
the symptoms in order to arrive at the correct diagnosis.16
Symptomatology as such is an implicating, an infolding and a concern with

what constitutes, constructs and accompanies a particular condition or life
event. Kitchen sinks, blankets and menstrual fluid. Smith suggests that for
Deleuze, ‘while etiology and therapeutics are integral parts of medicine,
symptomatology appeals to a kind of limit-point, premedical or submedical,

that belongs as much to art as to medicine’.17 Deleuze turns to literature (the
critical) as a means of investigating this medical (clinical) notion. He suggests
that writers do not account for, or necessarily represent, the world but
rather construct or compose worlds from indeterminate symptoms. Writers
compose the terrains, interactions, inversions: the sense of alternate worlds
which constitute modes of existence. There is in symptomatology an infolding
of contexts and selves and a constructing, a configuring, of both. A delirium.
For Deleuze, ‘the ultimate aim of literature is to set free, in the delirium, this
creation of a health or this invention of a people, that is, a possibility of life. To

write for this people who are missing’, and Deleuze parenthetically notes that
‘(“for” means less “in the place of ” than “for the benefit of ”)’.18
Symptomatology
Distilling a history for an architecture that posits itself symptomatologically

is far more difficult than isolating the therapeutic and diagnostic positioning
of architecture. Such an architecture would concern itself neither with uncov-
ering underlying or foundational logical structures nor with posing solutions
to commonly stated problems. This is because symptomatology is at once
more concrete-real and more abstract-real. It is concrete-real in its attention
to the actualities of material existence and the temporality of events. It is
abstract-real in that any attention paid to the concrete-reality of the world
necessarily involves an indulgence in the rich complexities, intensities and
contingencies of life. An architecture posited as symptomatology might
engage with the immediacy of the present by exploring and experimenting
within the world and its ‘symptoms’. This architecture would express new
ways of thinking about life and experiment with novel ways of living. Such
an architecture might operate not as a backdrop or stage-set to life but rather
would be implicated in life itself; in a manner that resonates with what Roland
Barthes describes as ‘theatricalization’.
In his book Sade, Fourier, Loyola (1971) Barthes suggests that theatricali-
zation is not simply ‘designing a setting for representation, but unlimiting the
language’.19 When he turns to the literary work of the Marquis de Sade, Barthes
exchanges the word ‘writer’ for the word ‘formulator’ and he suggests that
Sade ‘always sides with semiosis rather than mimesis’.20 That is, for Barthes,
Sade is not an author who refers to things, who answers questions or repre-
sents events or situations, but rather Sade constitutes a new world of elaborate
spaces and machines and populates that world with a new people – for new
and intense acts of sex and violence. In this way Sade is a symptomatologist.
The medical condition sadomasochism, defined by Richard von Krafft-
Ebing some 55 years after the death of Sade, but during the lifetime of the
writer Baron von Sacher Masoch (from which the term ‘masochism’ is
Symptomatology 109
drawn) is a key example engaged by Deleuze to explore the connection of the

critical (in a literary sense) and the clinical (in a medical sense). In Deleuze’s
extended essay ‘Coldness and Cruelty’ (1989) he turns to the ‘differential
mechanisms’ of literature and medicine in the construction of the medicalized
condition of ‘sadomasochism’. There is a very tight logic to the essay.21 The
clinical aspect of Deleuze’s argument in ‘Coldness and Cruelty’ is explicit:
it is foremost a critique of Sigmund Freud’s formulation of sadomasochism
and the reiterated aim of the essay is to establish ‘irreducible causal chains’
for sadism and masochism (as separate mechanisms).22 Deleuze’s argument is
that the relationship between sadism and masochism is one of analogy only
and that ‘in place of a dialectic which all too readily perceives the link between
opposites, we should aim for a critical and clinical appraisal able to reveal the
truly differential mechanisms’.23 This impulse to isolate causes is not, however,
one that pervades ‘Coldness and Cruelty’ where ‘the clinical specification of
sadism and masochism are not separable from the literary values particular
to Sade and Masoch’.24
In Smith’s introduction to Deleuze’s Essays Critical and Clinical, the
question of this link between literature and medicalized life is raised and
Smith suggests it is the ‘symptomatological method’ that makes the link
possible. For Smith:
The fundamental idea behind Deleuze’s ‘critique et clinique’ project is that

authors and artists, like doctors and clinicians, can themselves be seen as
profound symptomatologists. Sadism and masochism are clearly not diseases
on a par with Parkinson’s disease or Alzheimer’s disease. Yet if Krafft-Ebing,
in 1869, was able to use Masoch’s name to designate a fundamental perversion
(much to Masoch’s own consternation), it was not because Masoch ‘suffered’

from it as a patient, but rather because his literary works isolated a particular
way of existing and set forth a novel symptomatology of it.25
In The Logic of Sense (1969) Deleuze describes artists as ‘clinicians of civili-

zation’26 and notes that as with the literary origins of masochism and sadism,
‘from the perspective of Freud’s genius it is not the complex which provides us
with information about Oedipus and Hamlet, but rather Oedipus and Hamlet
who provide us with information about the complex’.27 In these cases it is art
and literature – the critical – that precedes the clinical. Just as the literary
precedes the medical in these cases, it may be argued that the architectural
and urban also precede medicalizations of the body. This is both in the sense
that urban settlements and the architectures of civilizations predate much
of that which we would recognize as medical practices, and in the sense
that architecture housed (constructed) the bodies that came to be dissected
and diagnosed.28 The experimental collecting of, assembling of, asubjective,
asignifying and anorganic elements into a concept or an event that is charac-
teristic of symptomatology is a method that those working in the areas of
tectonic culture well recognize. Architecture, or at least a particular experi-
mental edge of architecture, infolds and implicates materials, geometries,
sites, scales, labour, movement, etcetera, in generating a kind of event we do
not have or cannot as yet have; a future for a people who are not yet. In this
sense architecture operates as a collective enunciation (or utterance): speaking
at once for and in place of a people.
But the relay between philosophical notions and architecture flows both
ways: Deleuze also plays with architectural and urban spaces. There is a
spatial indulgence in Essays Critical and Clinical that makes that work at once
alluring and complex for the architect, for those engaged in a building and
a constructing of worlds. It should be noted that the phrase ‘spatial indul-
gence’ might not, however, be so apt for describing the spatial engagement
of Deleuze. It is not space in or of itself that Deleuze fixates upon; but rather
it is the implicating, the milieus and the trajectories, that are entailed in the
life of space that are the philosopher’s investment. For Deleuze is interested
in the spatial in as much as life is spatial. All of life. And all of life a milieu.
For Deleuze:
A milieu is made up of qualities, substances, powers, and events: the street, for
example. With its materials (paving stones), its noises (the cries of merchants),
its animals (harnessed horses) or its dramas (a horse slips, a horse falls down. A
horse is beaten…). The trajectory merges not only with the subjectivity of those
who travel through a milieu, but also with the subjectivity of the milieu itself,
insofar as it is reflected in those who travel through it.29
And even cemeteries are places of qualities, substances, powers, and events:
milieu, subjectivities and trajectories. It is to one such place for the dead – one
particular architectural edge – that I wish to momentarily turn: Carlo Scarpa’s
Brion-Vega Cemetery of 1968–78 (Figure 6.2).
Symptomatology 111
Figure 6.2 Brion-Vega Cemetery, San Vito d’Altivole. Photograph courtesy of Scott
McLemore (2009).
Delirious architecture
The work of the Italian architect Scarpa was known to Deleuze. Not by travel;
more by visitation than visit.30 In What is Philosophy? (1991) Deleuze and
Guattari refer to the ‘thickness’ (épaisseur) that Hubert Damisch, the philos-
opher of aesthetics and art history, identifies in his theoretical excavations of
the ‘underside’ of painting.31 Deleuze and Guattari suggest that such thickness
is identified by Damisch ‘at the level of the architectural plane when Scarpa,
for example, suppresses the movement of projection and the mechanisms of
perspective so as to inscribe volumes in the thickness of the plane itself ’.32
For Damisch all art is a theoretical object. He points out, in a project not
dissimilar to that of the critical and clinical, that techniques and perceptual
qualities often precede scientific explanation and categorization.33
Scarpa’s Brion-Vega Cemetery is located in San Vito d’Altivole.34 The
Brion-Vega Cemetery is a monumental tomb cum landscape designed for
the Brion family, founders of Brion-Vega (the Italian electronics group). The
architect, Scarpa, is himself buried in this cemetery in the interstitial space,
the thickness, created by the walls of the old and new cemeteries. He fell down
a concrete stair – not here in a cemetery full of concrete steps – but in Japan
in 1978. Scarpa had spent the last ten years of his life realizing this incredible
cemetery and described the work in literary (critical) terms:
I have tried to put some poetic imagination into it, though not in order to
create poetic architecture but to make a certain kind of architecture that could
emanate a sense of formal poetry [...]. The place for the dead is a garden [...]. I
wanted to show some ways in which you could approach death in a social and
civic way; and further what meaning there was in death, in the ephemerality of
life – other than these shoe-boxes.35
There is, in the Brion-Vega Cemetery, the studied and technical configuring
of geometries, scales, compositions, perspectives, fragments and trajectories.
These incompossible elements are examined and arranged as independent
signs or symptoms. Critics of Scarpa’s work often describe these elements in
terms of the ‘fragment’. Scarpa assembles fragments in a manner that does not
suppress the qualities of any element under the authority of the whole. There
is a type of integrity to each element that is maintained irrespective of its
scale or position or role. That is to say, Scarpa assembles fragments as ‘disso-
ciated’ symptoms. Each element is deemed important and is expressive. Every
brass handle, every indent, every piece of now absent formwork, every step
and opening is carefully dealt with in and of itself. And yet the composition
of elements, this assembling of heterogeneous elements, generates a very
particular, perhaps even singular, delirium. For Marco Frascari, the mobile
hectic, hypnotic drawings of Scarpa – of all elements at all scales and all at
once – are emblematic of the fragmentation of Scarpa’s work as a whole. In
1984 Frascari wrote:
Scarpa is a Magister Ludi, and his buildings are texts wherein the details are the
minimal unit of signification. The joints between different materials and shapes
and spaces are pretexts for generating texts. The interfacing of commentaries
with preceding texts in the architecture of Scarpa is always a problem of joints,
and in the joints he achieves the change of conventions.36
By 1991 Frascari had refined this idea, suggesting that it is not by analogy
or ‘the change of conventions’ that the drawing practice of Scarpa relates to
the built work. In his text Monsters of Architecture (1991) Frascari turns to
Symptomatology 113
the literary trope of metonym to describe a type of consistency of incom-

patible elements and scales that an architecture like Scarpa’s generates.37 The
word ‘brass’ would be an example of a metonym. The word operates at once
to describe a metal alloy that may be used in the construction of military
medals and insignia and musical instruments; and the word is then also
used to describe senior military personnel and that section of an orchestra
that blows hard. It’s not metaphor or analogy that is at play, but rather an
acknowledgement of the single component that occupies multiple assem-
blages. Frascari engages the term ‘metonym’ to approximate the intense
collapse that occurs between the individual expressive components of Scarpa’s
architecture and what Deleuze might refer to as the ‘subjectivity of the milieu
itself ’ – the consistency of the overall architectural endeavour. It is worth
noting, that amongst the incompatible elements that configure the milieu of
the Brion-Vega Cemetery are those components which emerge in literature
and art. According to the architectural theorist George Dodds:
These include the garden landscapes of Francesco Colonna’s Hypernotomachia

Poliphili, where the chaste body of Polia is pursued in the dream of Poliphilo;
the garden of Professor Canteral in Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus, where
preserved bodies float in a strange and magical watery substance called acqua
micans; and the funereal landscapes of Edmondo De Amicis whose picturesque
cemeteries are inhabited by young maidens eating and drinking.38
Text and texture are both key components of this cemetery and Scarpa knew
his materials. He knew how to work them, how to push them. He could make
the heavy hover. In Essays Critical and Clinical Deleuze describes Masoch’s use
of words as transforming suspense into suspension. Scarpa achieves something
similar. The most seemingly weighty and stable of elements is made mobile
when part of a trajectory: the concrete gate is poised and requires the lightest
of pressure exerted upon a brass handle to open (Figure 6.3). Scarpa pushes
matter (and not words) to the ‘point of suspension, a song, a cry or silence – a
song of the woods, a cry of the village, the silence of the steppe’, as Deleuze
writes of Masoch.39 For beyond the geometry of the Brion-Vega Cemetery;
beyond the signs; fragments, elements and components; beyond the concrete;
beyond the concrete steps; there is a style or a concept, or a milieu. A milieu
that moans. A distinct deep moan.
Figure 6.3 Concrete gate. Photograph courtesy of Kendra Jaen (2010).
Symptomatology 115
In a manner that resonates with sentiments expressed by Bacon, Deleuze

was to write in Critical and Clinical, ‘to exhaust space is to extenuate its
potentiality by making any encounter impossible’.40 The experience of the
Brion-Vega Cemetery is exhausting. It is not that you cover too much distance
here and it is not that you move at too great a pace. The exhaustion is mellower
than this. It is the exhaustion of all that moves. All Scarpa’s incompatible
fragments, elements, symbols and signs are mobile. They articulate trajec-
tories; always taking you somewhere else: The wall beyond the corn; the corn
and the village beyond the wall; the bridge, the island, the waters and the tomb
beyond the stair. It is an exhaustion of a journey that, whilst moving through
many points, does not end at any precise point. It is hard to speak of this place
in terms such as ‘destination’ or ‘conclusion’. Terms so often associated with
the architecture of the dead. This cemetery makes such terms inoperable. This
cemetery is not a monument to the dead but a construction site. For Deleuze,
‘when sculpture ceases to be monumental in order to become hodological:
it is not enough to say that it is a landscape and that it lays out a place or
territory. What it lays out are paths – it is itself a voyage.’41 The voyages of the
Brion-Vega Cemetery are not, however, voyages taken. They are like Deleuze’s
own travels, ‘intensive’ rather than in extensity, visitations rather than a
visiting. The cemetery has me passing along paths that I can’t take. Many of
the paths of this cemetery are not traversable but nevertheless they take me
somewhere. They take me to you.
The cemetery is exhausting as a replete experience. No. It is beyond
replete and rather an exhaustion like an excess. There is here a weightiness;
a momentum generated by a thickness; a mobility yet to be excavated. That
which Le Corbusier might have referred to as an ‘overplus’. That which

Guattari was to speak of as the ‘partial object’ of art, part of and yet in excess
of the elements themselves.42 An overflow or a heaving sigh; a voice given
to forces and movements. Dodds was to gesture toward the presence of the
figures for which this architecture moans:
In all of these visual and textual narratives the body – typically the body situated
in a landscape or garden – figures prominently. This may help explain why
the design drawings for the Brion sanctuary, more than any of Scarpa’s other
projects, abound with images of nude females. Although these images often
appear somewhat ghostlike, they reflect the manner in which Scarpa imagined
Figure 6.4 Concrete stairs. Photograph courtesy of Ingrid Berniga Dotras (2010).
Symptomatology 117
the living body physically engaging the Brion sanctuary, both directly and as a
site from which to view a distant idealized landscape.43
It is not the ‘living body’ that is at stake here, but rather life itself. Though these
‘ghostlike’ bodies are not alive as such, Scarpa gives them voice by carving
paths they might take and hollowing out the spaces in which they might
speak. The figures of Scarpa’s drawings are ghostlike in order to engage in
both the concrete here and now of the architecture whilst also negotiating the
abstract reality of life and death – to make us a ‘shadow among shadows’, like
the figure of Desnos’ ‘Dernier poème’. The Brion-Vega Cemetery is consist-
ently hollowed out. The cemetery is full of empty and open spaces, niches
and voids that the living cannot occupy, and paths and stairs that they cannot
traverse (Figure 6.4). Hollowing is the device, the dispositif, the structuring
principle. The hollowing occurs at the scale of landscape, the structure and the
ornament. The wilful hollowing out of the spaces of the cemetery generates
openings; leaves it open. It is, in this sense, open for images, imaginings,
dreamings and projections. I imagine you there. The architectural incomple-
tions would seem to be openings for those that rest deep in tombs. In this
sense Scarpa designed, as Deleuze might suggest, ‘for this people who are
missing’ where ‘“for” means less “in the place of ” than “for the benefit of ”’.44
I like to imagine that Deleuze was speaking of Scarpa and the Brion-Vega
Cemetery when he wrote in critique of Sigmund Freud:
[T]he unconscious no longer deals with persons and objects, but with trajec-
tories and becomings; it is no longer an unconscious of commemoration but
one of mobilization, an unconscious whose objects take flight rather than
remaining buried in the ground.45
Bearing
Scarpa’s elements move and harbour my thoughts. There is here, a thick

delirium of selves and spaces. Scarpa’s concrete stairs lead you around the
cemetery but also run you up walls; close in upon themselves, upon you; take
you below water lines; have you enter the sky; have you fly. I cannot walk
these steps. Or at least I cannot walk the steps as one might usually walk a
step. The steps abstract my movement in concrete. Such an architecture plays

with the laws by which a stair might operate or be operational (symptoma-
tology is abstract-real). At the same time Scarpa constructs a subjectivity of
death and departure and articulates it as an actual problem (symptomatology
is concrete-real). Scarpa’s architectural procedure engages with the present by
reinterpreting the world and its ‘symptoms’. Opening up new ways of thinking
about life and death and in so doing creating new ways of living. The elements
both ‘bear’ and give birth to, ‘bare’, a new people. In this sense Scarpa’s
Brion-Vega Cemetery is posited as, at once, a poignant thanatopolitics: a
politics of death, and a profound symptomatology: a constructing of life.
Indeed, the Edinburgh cemetery constructed in the nineteenth century
also might be posited as a symptomatology; its walls and watchtowers inextri-
cably implicated in the medicalization of the body and the experimental
construction of life. The walls and the watchtowers exist today (and are recon-
structed in new cemeteries); they exist beyond the therapeutic (there are no
more body-snatchers) and beyond the diagnostic (the crowd of roughest men
has surely dispersed). The architecture of the Edinburgh cemetery, in the here
and now, as with the architecture of Scarpa’s Brion-Vega Cemetery, operates
as a set of ‘indeterminate symptoms common to a number of diseases’ and
the pebbles, flowers, walls, steps and watchtowers an intervening, an experi-
menting, in the changing new worlds architecture constructs in concert with
the corpse.
7
Wayfaring
Francis Bacon was after photographs of a nude Henrietta Moraes upon which
to base a painting; but initially she was handed to him naked. John Deakin
had photographed her in a series of stark images. They were black and white,
wide-angle shots with the sharp genital focus of pornography.1 There are many
routes to the heart of things but these photographs weren’t what Bacon had
wanted.
Deakin had come to Moraes’ house at 9 Apollo Place to take the photo-
graphs.2 The house was a stone’s throw from the Thames; a short flight of a
Marvel comic character from ‘this girl called Eleanor’s room’, and; a chilly
winter’s ramble from Lucian Freud’s flat.3 Moraes had inherited the house in
1957 following the suicide of the incommensurable love of her life, the painter
and illustrator Johnny Minton.4 The love was incommensurable only in the
sense that it was not to be consummated. Though not consummated and not
marked by marriage (they weren’t what Johnny had wanted) the relationship
was no less intense and perhaps even more endearing. I imagine Minton
bequeathed the house to Moraes in the hope it might anchor her more than
it had he. She would, however, continue to drift in life as much as he drifted
out of it.
After a drink or two Deakin had Moraes pose for the photographs in her
bedroom on a dishevelled mattress.5 The poses were invasive; focused on what
Luce Irigaray might call the ‘mucous of the carnal’.6 Moraes told Deakin that
she was sure that the images he was taking were not what Bacon would want.
Deakin was a thug of a photographer.7 His work is angry. Hard, harsh and
urbane like asphalt. And he continued unconcerned; ‘[s]nap, snap, snap and
on and on he went’, Moraes tells us.8 Deakin once wrote ‘sitters turn into my
victims. But I would like to add that it is only those with a daemon, however
small and of whatever kind, whose faces lend themselves to being victimised
at all’.9 The qualification further imbrutes the statement. Bacon rejected these
photographs of Moraes, and Deakin was asked to take a second set: ‘the other
way up this time’.10
About a week later Moraes found Deakin selling the original, intrusive,
photographs to sailors in a Soho drinking club for ten bob a pop. The muse
had become an organ of porn, a target for semen at sea. Moraes was not
entirely disaffected. She was no victim. Moraes didn’t hold too tight to this
identity or that. To this organ or that. She seems not to have fought battles to
retain some essential sense of self or place. In these photographs she was less
exposed than in the Bacon paintings. And even the much-contested mucous
membrane was a port of departure.11 She asked Deakin to buy her a large drink
by way of compensation.12 He bought her several. I imagine this was less an act
of generosity on the photographer’s part, than a method to narrow the angle
of view and soften the focus. A method to advance what Paul Virilio would
call the ‘fusion-confusion of eye and camera lens, the passage from vision to
visualisation’.13 Moraes would move on. Photographs too have a mobility that
sail well beyond origins and intentions. This first set of photographs of a naked
Moraes travelled down the Thames, left the Port of London and floated away
with the change of tide.
Moraes would eventually be lost to the Apollo Place house as she was
lost to most things. She was far too Dionysian for Apollo Place. Too much
of the street to be homely. Too much of the milieu to be anything other
than uncanny. Anorganic, asignifying and asubjective in Bacon’s paintings.
Indiscernible, impersonal and then imperceptible in the world. Despite
Bacon’s pinning of the figure with a syringe and the sailors’ attempts to
pin-down the tattered porn pictures to bunks and in lockers, images pass like
bodies and architectures. They are objects of passage. They seem to flow in spite
of content or subject matter. That the content of Deakin’s first set of photo-
graphs was not what Bacon had wanted make the images no less impactful.
That the photographs and their subject matter no longer exist also make them
no less impactful. There is, in the passing of such things, an intense ripple of
matter in flux. The warmest of inframince.14 The glint of the afterimage.15 The
reverberations of a snap, snap, snap of a camera. The loitering smile that the
image spreads over a face. The warm glow left by the carnal. The lingering lap
Wayfaring 121
of labia. The sense of shudder that rolls over the body following the squirt of
semen. The drifting debris of the tide of the river. Such passages aren’t about
the production of meaning. They don’t prompt hard logics and fixed narra-
tives, they just reverberate, glow, linger, shudder and drift; and continue to
pass through us as we pass through them.
In this chapter I want to focus on the manner by which our photographs
and our architectures operate as objects of passage. ‘Photography evades us’,
writes Roland Barthes in his text of 1980, Camera Lucida, and I think archi-
tecture too evades.16 It evades us and in doing so leaves us bare in its wake.
Bare and moving on. It is, in this manner, an object of passage. I will turn to
one particular moment of architectural passage. The fires set by Sami Rintala
and Marco Casagrande’s Land(e)scape project of 1999. This project responds
to Bernard Tschumi’s forgotten call for an architecture to evade and leave
us raw, for an architecture to be ‘conceived, erected and burned in vain’.17
Tschumi made this call in 1974 but our collective ear caught ‘nothing but the
fleeting air’.
Strange attractors
The first set of photographs of Moraes, though lost long ago, maintain a
potency. Though largely unseen and now unseeable the photographs are no
less intense and perhaps even more endearing. That which is unseen, unheard
and unheld, like that which is incommensurable and unconsummated, is
strangely attractive. And particularly so, to art: photography, music, literature
and architecture. The unseen and unheard maintain the potency that Maurice
Blanchot associates with the figure of Eurydice in his essay of 1955, ‘The Gaze
of Orpheus’. Blanchot describes Orpheus’ lost bride as ‘the limit of what art
can attain; concealed by a name and covered by a veil’.18 It is also a potency
like that which Barthes describes in Camera Lucida in terms of the ‘punctum’,
as ‘a kind of subtle beyond – as if the image launched desire beyond what it
permits us to see’.19
In Blanchot’s account of the story of Orpheus, the harpist was to lose his
new bride in a moment when he was joyfully distracted by his art. Orpheus
was concentrating on his music when Eurydice died. In grief however his
focus moves. In grief Orpheus fixates not upon his music but upon Eurydice.
His music now happens only for her sake and takes her as its intense focus.
Blanchot would write of Eurydice as ‘the profoundly dark point towards
which art, desire, death, and the night all seem to lead. She is the instant in
which the essence of the night approaches the other night.’20 Orpheus heads
toward Eurydice in death, he enters Hades, under the aegis of his art. It is the
music, the song, that allows Orpheus to access Eurydice, that ‘causes the night
to open’, and yet Orpheus is unconcerned for his art at this moment.21 The
music becomes a means to an end. At this point Orpheus sacrifices everything
for his fixation, for Eurydice. Blanchot suggests that it was Orpheus’ mistake
to not merely approach this ‘point’ of fixation but to ‘try to bring it back into
the daylight and in the daylight give it form, figure and reality’.22 Orpheus
mistakes a line for a point. He mistakes a line of flight for a point of fixation.
A place of passage for a more tangible and concrete object. Orpheus wants
Eurydice in a way he cannot have her. He mistakes the dead Eurydice for that
Eurydice which could be seen, heard and held.
Blanchot’s depiction of Orpheus is like the eye and I of Georges Bataille’s
‘L’Anus Solaire’ [1927] and the secret melancholia of Julia Kristeva’s ‘Soleil
Noir’ (1987) in its concern for ‘the ultimate thresholds of inscribable dislo-
cation and jouissance’, as Kristeva writes.23 Blanchot’s project is also not far
removed from Sigmund Freud’s account of the lost object, the irretrievable
that we nevertheless desire.24 Eurydice was the unattainable point of desire
and the song of Orpheus was a passage between chaotic pained loss, Blanchot’s
other night, and the relative stabilities of rhythm and territory. But ‘the song
itself is already a skip’, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari suggest, ‘it jumps
from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos and is in danger of breaking

apart at any moment. There is always sonority in Ariadne’s thread. Or the song
of Orpheus’.25 The song has to waver, lest we actually get that which we desire
and then desire no more.
In Camera Lucida Barthes was also focused on the complexity of the
manners by which art, in this case the art of the photograph, might operate
as passage. Camera Lucida was Barthes’ last book. It was written concur-
rently with his ‘mourning diary’ detailing his grief at the loss of his mother,
Henriette. Barthes loved his mother deeply and had lived with her for most
of his life.26 Following her death, Barthes began his own Orphic quest, hoping
Wayfaring 123
to find his mother – in a photograph. Not just her image, but what he would
describe as her air. For Barthes, air ‘is a kind of intractable supplement of
identity, what is given as an act of grace stripped of any “importance”: the air
expresses the subject insofar as that subject assigns itself no importance’.27 Air
thus, would seem to be a raw or bare self. A self stripped bare. A bio beyond an
auto. Or indeed, a zoë beyond a bio. Barthes uses the word ‘animula’ or ‘little
individual soul’ to describe the quality.28 Barthes hoped to find his mother’s
air in a photograph because for him a photograph and its referent are indis-
sociable, infrathin, ‘both affected by some amorous or funereal immobility, at
the very heart of the moving world’.29 He defines air in both anatomical and
ethereal ways: as that ‘tenuous umbilical cord that the photographer gives
life’30 and, in a manner that resonates with the ‘Dernier poème’ of Robert
Desnos, as ‘that luminous shadow which accompanies the body’.31
The air that a photograph may harbour is accessed via a wound, or what
Barthes would describe as the punctum. The punctum is that which causes you
to turn and look again at a photograph. The punctum is described by Barthes
as a piercing or a prick. It is particular and specific. It plays directly with the
neurones and has ‘no preference for morality or good taste’.32 The punctum
operates much like a singularity – in and of itself. That is, it does not offer a
narrative. It is punctuation. It does not speak or articulate – it is expressive
in and of itself, sometimes subtle like a semi-colon and sometimes harder
like an exclamation mark. It reverberates, glows, lingers, shudders and drifts.
Barthes characterizes the punctum as ‘a mark made by a pointed instrument’,33
a compass or a syringe perhaps. And yet these points operate not to pin the
subject or referent of the photograph down.
The punctum operates as a point of passage, an access point to air. This

place of passage is impersonal in the sense it flows through intimate relations.
It operates between you and the referent or subject of the photograph. And
it is asubjective in the sense that it is transformative. We are different now.
We are other. You are different. You are of the other night. For Barthes, the
photograph invigorates the desired and beloved subject of the photograph and
yet accentuates ‘that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph:
the return of the dead’.34 Like Blanchot’s Orpheus, Barthes would suggest he,
himself, ‘must submit to this law: I cannot penetrate, I cannot reach into the
Photograph’.35 For Barthes the punctum ‘cries out in silence’,36 and the air of a
photograph is a promise made that cannot be actualized, it remains a shadow,

albeit luminous.37
I recognize this wound in the two framed photographs of you which sit on
my desk, one colour and one black and white. I stare at these photographs for
hours but ‘I had no hope of “finding” her’, as Barthes wrote of his mother.38
I imagine it is pained grief and a sense of profound longing for that which is
‘beyond what the photograph permits us to see’, that leads Barthes to conclude
that ‘[u]ltimately – or at the limit – in order to see a photograph well, it is best
to look away or close your eyes’.39
Fetishists and wayfarers
The desire for that which we can’t see, hear and hold often leads us to place
something more tangible in our grasp. To have something firm in our hand.
A photograph or a postcard. A syringe or a drink. The right hand in the left.
Stilettos or a piece of blue velvet. Rosary beads or icons. Madeleine for Proust.
Cocaine for Cocteau. These items are not the point. They are the means.
We place flowers on graves and at the edge of the diving platform we hold a
handrail. We don’t want the flowers or the rail; we desire the air. That which
we touch is often a vector pointing toward that which we can’t hold. These
flowers and handrails, these things, are objects of passage. We pass through
them to get elsewhere. Virginia Woolf would pass through a lead pencil to get
to the streets of London:
No one perhaps has ever felt passionately towards a lead pencil. But there are
circumstances in which it can become supremely desirable to possess one;

moments when we are set upon having an object, an excuse for walking half
across London between tea and dinner. As the foxhunter hunts in order to
preserve the breed of foxes, and the golfer plays in order that open spaces may
be preserved from the builders, so when the desire comes upon us to go street
rambling the pencil does for a pretext, and getting up we say: ‘Really I must buy
a pencil’, as if under cover of this excuse we could indulge safely in the greatest
pleasure of town life in winter – rambling the streets of London.
In her essay of 1930, ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’, Woolf notes that
objects often stand in place of less tangible desires.40 The pencil serves to focus
Wayfaring 125
a walk, to foster the desire to ramble. The pencil operates at once in and of
itself as an object – an identifiable concrete object that one can grasp; and as an
object of passage that connects one to an alternate series of elements that form
a trajectory toward what one desires – in this case, the desire to lose oneself
in a city. The desire to haunt.
As concrete objects these elements are often fetishized. The fetishist fixates
upon the object of the fetish irrespective of its traditional function. What
these pencils, photographs and postcards, rosary beads and icons, stilettos and
pieces of blue velvet are is not the point. What matters is what they do. And
what they do is move someone. Take someone somewhere else. Even Freud
was to suggest that fixations with such objects involve a ‘displacement’ of a
kind.41 But for Freud this displacement is born as a distraction. A distraction
from what may be really at stake. In Freud’s take on the fetishized object, the
libido breaches the bounds of the body to invest in objects and associations
well beyond.42 That is, the traditional and habitual fixations with sexual organs
and orifices have been transferred to other objects. The black and white wide
angled photograph in place of a vagina. The sharp point of a stiletto in place
of a castrated penis. A foot for a flaccid phallus. For Freud, the fetish stands
in place of, and is invested with, the intensities of that which was lost. In
particular, it is the transference of the anxiety associated with the loss of the
phallus (noticing that mother hasn’t got one) onto the object or organ that
held one’s attention prior to the startling discovery (the stiletto, the foot, the
hem of mother’s blue velvet dress). For Freud, ‘[i]n all the cases the meaning
and purpose of the fetish turned out under analysis to be the same [...] the
fetish is a penis-substitute’ and ‘not a substitute for any chance penis, but for
a particular quite special penis that has been extremely important in early
childhood but was afterwards lost’.43 For Freud to fetishize is always to negate;
to repress, to sublimate. Orpheus is an anxious Oedipus. Eurydice a complex
Electra.
In economics too this idea of the concrete object that is performative
beyond rational value is referred to in terms of fetishism. In economics
representative money fulfils the promise of exchange in placing of a unit or
value (a dollar) on all objects and subjects, bringing the most incongruous
of elements into relation. Money also allows the most incongruous of trades.
Woolf could trade her work as an author (writing, reading, rambling) for
a pencil, a Singer automobile, a Portable Underwood typewriter and a dog

named Hans, because of representative money. Representative money makes
congruity from the incongruous. Commensurability from the incommensu-
rable. In his text of 1974, Libidinal Economy, Jean-François Lyotard would
identify the extreme assortment of consummations fostered by economies.44
There is, in the insinuation of a banal indicator of value, a dollar, also a devalu-
ation. (Ten bob for a black and white vagina. Several drinks for the pleasure.)
However, commodifications and investments of energy or labour outside
of the monetary economy, are more often than not considered aberrant or
excessive. As aberrant as a sexual fetish. As excessive as a religious fetish. Karl
Marx begins his Capital: Critique of Political Economy (1867) on this very
point:
There is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes,
the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an
analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious
world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent
beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and
the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s
hands. This I call the Fetishism.45
There is a clear correspondence between the fetishisms of the libido, of faith

and of the commodity. Just as the sexual fetish is defined as diversion and
deviance, the religious fetish is prone to the charge of false idolatry, and; the
commodity fetish is aberrant to economic rationalisms and located in the
blackest of markets. We perpetuate myths that relegate these investments as
‘false’, ‘diversional’, ‘deviant’ and ‘aberrant’ and deny the force of that which
is performative beyond rational value. We continue to privilege the pretext

of purchasing a pencil over the most forceful sensations of a winter ramble.
And yet, as Marx would suggest, all the products of one’s hands are, in some
manner, aberrant to the doxa that might otherwise situate them and the
analytical narratives into which they are habitually forced. It is the thuggish
dominance of the (so-called rational) narratives and logics, into which our
most intense of passions and most nuanced of sensations are forced, that lead
Deleuze and Guattari to suggest in the opening pages of Anti-Oedipus that
‘[a] schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the
analyst’s couch. A breath of fresh air, a relationship with the outside world’.46
Wayfaring 127
The fixation of much contemporary discourse concerning the concrete

architectural object often seems to be a narrative of denial recounted from an
analyst’s couch. Freud would note that fetishists ‘do not complain about their
symptom but are “quite content”’47 and far too much architectural discourse
is quite content. This discourse focuses on the autonomous object of archi-
tecture. It focuses on the formal and functional aspects of architecture as one
might focus on a stiletto’s height, diameter, reinforcement, price and resultant
walking speed, when we know the stiletto’s real value is to point – toward
desires. Architecture is not a usual technology of sex, religion and economics.
However, architecture is a tool for a production of a kind. Individual archi-
tectural objects, at their best, operate in a manner that resonates with Marx’s
descriptor, as ‘independent beings endowed with life’ (or indeed as ‘nonor-
ganic life’, to defer to the language of Deleuze and Guattari). Like other
fetishized objects what the architectural object is may be beside-the-point. All
the blogs and all the books and all the posturing on the topic of the architec-
tural object often seem as odd as playing at foxhunting and golf when all one
really wants is a breath of fresh air.
I should be careful to note that the concept of ‘object’ is not at stake. The
key issue is an awareness of the richer life of the object. To ask as Barthes does,
‘[h]ow can an object have a story’?48 Such a fixation ties itself to the concrete
of the object and yet not completely so. In Jacques Lacan’s account of the
objet petit a, the object of fixation is always in a slippery chimeric relation as
‘something from which the subject, in order to constitute itself, has separated
itself off as organ’.49 We can’t have it completely and we never completely lost it.
And yet the objet continues to re-present the subject in the world of objects.50
A pencil can be used to write or be used as a pretext for a walk. A stiletto

can be used to walk or as a pretext to orgasm. A bedroom might at once be
used to orgasm or as a pretext to dream of other nights. The concrete object
is important but these objects are ‘entering into relations’ and taking someone
elsewhere. They are objects of passage. They operate like the songs of the
Sirens. Blanchot would write:
Yes, they really sang, but not in a very satisfactory way. Their song merely
suggested the direction from which the perfect song might come. Yet through
their imperfect song – a song as yet unborn – they lured the navigator towards
the space where singing really begins.51
For Blanchot the song of the Sirens is a vector. That is, the fixation with the
song allows a sailor to make a movement in a certain direction and at a certain
speed. To chart a course in what would otherwise be too difficult, too chaotic.
I imagine the first set of photographs of Moraes were like this. Taking sailors
elsewhere, if only for a shuddering moment. Architecture may be like this
too. A relative holding or harbouring that nonetheless operates as a ‘tenuous
umbilical’. A tentative holding in place that fosters an abstract passage. A
wavering song that points toward a desire. In this way architecture is like
these pencils, photographs and postcards, rosary beads and icons, stilettos
and pieces of blue velvet. It is an object of passage. A wonderful aberration. A
joyous false idolatry. A magnificent wound. When architecture is approached
in this manner, architects by consequence are less fetishists in denial and more
like wayfarers. Haunting cartographies, assembling tools and techniques,
materials, objects and subjects, as a photographer might gently manipulate
bodies, light and lenses, in order to approach the unholdable air.
Woolf too was more wayfarer than fetishist. Woolf would not mistake a
point of fixation for a line of flight. She knew her pencil was not the point.
It was a ‘pretext’, a wayfaring device that led one toward a certain desire. It
was an arrow pointing in a certain direction. Woolf knew this because she
didn’t use her pencil to write. She used ink pens and a typewriter – a Portable
Underwood typewriter. And the typewriter too wasn’t the point. The pencil
and the typewriter, the winter and the streets of London were all parts of,
elements of, a wonderful literary chaosmos. And even the author wasn’t the
point. She too was lost to the drifting tide of her art. Woolf wrote, ‘[t]his
spelling is the spelling of a Portable Underwood – not mine!’52 Oddly, she
wrote this note by hand, but that too is not the point.
Elsewhere
When Orpheus fixated on the Eurydice that could be seen, heard and held
she became an object of passage toward the unseen, unheard and unholdable.
At this same moment Orpheus’ song was transformed from the point into a
wayfaring device and he, himself, became what Deleuze and Guattari refer to
as a Body without Organs: ‘a component of passage’.53 A Body without Organs
Wayfaring 129
is not a body that is without organs per se, but rather a body that is organized
in an alternate manner. It is to look with organs other than eyes or to see via
a blind-spot. It is to gaze rather than observe. It is to liberate the organ from
the organization. Woolf would write of that moment when she left her house
to enter the streets of London as a moment of becoming ‘a central oyster of
perceptiveness, an enormous eye’54 and Deleuze would suggest of Bacon’s
work, ‘[p]ainting gives us eyes all over: in the ear, in the stomach, in the
lungs (the painting breathes …)’.55 As artists, as architects, it is important that
we dis-organ-ize ourselves somewhat, to become a little more object among
objects. A little more animal among animals. A little more shadow among
shadows. It is important that we sufficiently dismantle ourselves and liberate
our faculties in order to allow our work to breathe. This disorganization of
the self is not about loss but rather about ‘moving on’. It is as important as
the departing from preconceptions, traditions and the habits of thought that
otherwise contain us. We do this in order that we can explore and experiment
and approach desires afresh. Intensely afresh.
To become a wayfarer is to enter into relations with all the components
of passage by compromising the marks that distinguish us from that which
we are not. The components of the journey are not brought together in order
to achieve a preordained desire nor to point in a preconceived direction.
Desire too is an assemblage and, as Freud tells us, it is a particularly mobile
assemblage. It is hard to construct and point to that which is itself under
construction and on the move. The relations between the components of
passage are characterized by proximities and valences, configurings and
dispersals. The relations between components of passage and desire are
characterized by reverberations, glow, lingerings and shudders. In this sense

all the components of passage are like the drifting debris of the river that
desires the tide. They move and they are moved. They move as they are moved.
They are the inframince of a moving on. This is why the word ‘wayfaring’
may be a more accurate descriptor than ‘navigating’ to describe procedures of
art: photography, music, literature and architecture. Blanchot would refer to
this anti-teleological aspect of literature – this experimental and exploratory
character – in terms of the ‘inspired and unconcerned’ manner of Orpheus’
gaze.56 Blanchot suggests that ‘[t]he act of writing begins with Orpheus’ gaze,
and that gaze is the impulse of desire which shatters the song’s destiny and
concern, and in that inspired and unconcerned decision reaches the origin,
consecrates the song’.57 I think the act of architecture too may begin with such
a gaze and end in such a song.
Casagrande and Rintala’s Land(e)scape project is a case of inspired
unconcern. This project was a gesture beyond itself. A wayfaring device that
took us elsewhere. This journey commenced in the fields of Savonlinna in
the south-east of Finland, north-east of Helsinki, in the last months of the
twentieth century. The fields had largely been abandoned and suburbs and
light-industry were encroaching. The population of farmers had taken to the
adjacent highways and were involved in a migration toward the cities. Along
with the farmers went the animals and the crops. The old timber barns of
the Finnish countryside were also disappearing. Despite the solidity of their
construction, the barns were decaying, rotting ever-so-slowly into the earth.
Casagrande tells us that three barns ‘[d]esolate, longing after their farmers
[…] have abandoned their primeval union with the soil and have now risen
on their legs and are swaying towards the cities of the South’ (Figure 7.1).58 The
barns sit poised on their long legs. Four legs each, and each askew. The legs
were approximately 400 millimetres in diameter and held the barns approxi-
mately 8 metres into the sky. Though no one measured them. There were
metal cross-wires, bracing the legs; running from the top of one leg to the
bottom of the next. It either helped the barns stand or restrained the creatures.
The three elevated barns appeared as a herd of rogue animals, ancient verte-
brates, in slow motion, on a slow march. The capacity to become animula is an
important creative source for art and architecture – and these barns had their
own small souls. Endowing them with such life was already a move toward the
unknown. Just because they’d resided on farms did not mean these barns were
at all domesticated. The enormous power of apportioning is invoked. These
objects make us a little more object as we make them a little more animula. It
is not metaphoric. It is literal. It is as literal in a critical sense as it is anatomical
in a clinical sense.
There is a simple diagnostic here: the depopulating of the land and the
death of a way of life. There is also a simple therapy: allowing the barns the
mobility of the farmers. But the symptomatology, the clinical impulse, was
violent and invasive. It was less for the benefit of a ‘people to come’ than a
people who’d already departed. The project was bound to haunt.
Wayfaring 131
Figure 7.1 Barns against the sky. Photograph courtesy of Marco Casagrande
(1999).
Barthes would speak of a photograph as ‘a kind of primitive theater, a kind

of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath
which we see the dead’.59 The Land(e)scape project operated in a similar
manner. The barns stood against the sky and it was not always possible to
discern the movement of the clouds from the movement of the creatures.
Casagrande and Rintala’s barns achieved an ‘intense immobility’.60 There was a
composing of the silent and motionless that was louder and more animate for
being mute and immobile. There was a figuration; an assembling and organ-
izing of components, an orgonology, that was ‘all the more alive for having
no organs’.61 Despite the motionless theatrical character of the event (tableau)
there is a raw force here. A potency (vivant). It is the potency of that which is
beyond the frame of a photograph or ‘beyond what we are permitted to see’.
A punctum. It is a life beyond the control of the architects. And well beyond
the metaphoric narratives the architects spun to the architecture journals.
Sensation always precedes the sensible. These huge creatures with small souls
were moving on.
For Blanchot, the impulses of art are complicated. Orpheus may have
descended to Hades to retrieve Eurydice but ‘Orpheus does not want to make
her live, but to have the fullness of death living in her’.62 Likewise, Casagrande
and Rintala breathed life into these barns not to make them live, but, to have
the fullness of their death. Their experiment was a painful one. More biology
than chemistry. More vivisection than injection. More evisceration than
surgery. The barns, poised on their stilt legs, were doused in petrol and set
alight on Saturday 2 October 1999 (Figure 7.2).63
The death of the barns was both a ritual sacrifice and a clinical sadism.
The choreographer and dancer, Reijo Kela, was engaged to light the fires.
Kela stumbled through a drunken dance to strained music from a lonely
accordion.64 It was an imperfect song. The architects gave over control. They
watched from an edge and were absorbed into the audience like Woolf on a
London street. The architects invoked what Barthes might call the ‘second
sight’ of the photographer.65 For Barthes the piercing wound of a photograph
cannot be manufactured or controlled and the photographer must be oddly
unconcerned with the point of the photograph. What Barthes refers to as
the ‘second sight’ of the photographer is a form of unconcern. Deakin was a
thug of a photographer, cruel and unconcerned, but this was perhaps what
Figure 7.2 The burning. Photograph courtesy of Marco Casagrande (1999).
Wayfaring 133
made him ‘a photographer with extraordinary eyes’.66 Such photographers

invoke a gaze rather than a focus. A seeing that is practised without habitual
intent; or indeed a seeing through organs other than eyes. For Barthes, ‘[t]he
Photographer’s “second sight” does not consist in “seeing” but in being there.
And above all, imitating Orpheus, he must not Turn back to look at what
he is leading.’67 As the audience watched on, Kela lit fire-sticks, torches of
a kind, then hoisted them up into the undersides, the underbellies, of the
barns. Tschumi would write that ‘[t]he greatest architecture of all is the
fireworker’s: it perfectly shows the gratuitous consumption of pleasure’.68 It
may also perfectly show the gratuitous consumption of pain. Immobility can
be amorous or funereal.
Some six thousand people reportedly came to the fields to witness the
aberration.69 Parents with a drink in their hands and children with balloons
were there to celebrate the slaughter. There was much rowdy laughter and
screams – of joy – before the fires were lit. When it came to it though – when
the fires burnt – no one celebrated. The barns clearly roared when the flames
tore a violent path through their timbers. They cried out. No one could hear
the accordion over the pained roar. The barns slowly collapsed, were burnt
to skeleton and then ash. The audience of this event were made naked in the
wake of the flames. There was gasping for air. A crying. Unable to look away
but also unable to look, many closed their eyes. A psychoanalytic reading
would suggest that the audience saw their own deaths in the burning of the
barns. That the repressed returned in this ritualistic frenzy. A psychoanalytic
reading would find penetrative violence in the flames and exchange a lit torch
for an engorged penis. An immobilized creature for a castrated stiletto. A field
of Finnish Oedipuses clawing at their eyes. Such narratives are correctives to

an aberration. But here, in the fields of Savonlinna, it is the aberration that is
operative. The audience didn’t see death as such. They saw flames that glowed
toward the absolute darkness of the night. They heard the cry of an object
that shuddered toward the profundity of absence. We travel through anxiety
and upset, as trauma and pain travel through us, and the most compelling of
movement occurs between intensity and extensity. Forceful and terrifying.
Intense and brilliant in the sky. So still as to scintillate. The burning barns
were, as Cocteau described of cocaine withdrawal, a ‘wound in slow motion’70
but it wasn’t my wound or yours. It didn’t belong to any person or singular
architecture though it lingered in both. In this moment so much burnt. So

much rhetoric was burnt away. Habitual narratives and traditional logics were
burnt away. Our sense of self was burnt away. Architecture and selves became
rawer and barer and indissociable in that rawness and bareness. Shadows
amongst shadows. Such events aren’t contained or controlled; they sweep us
up and take us elsewhere. The architects drifted in the audience and like the
audience they too were swept away by the event. Gliding like cinders in the
night sky.
The conclusions are not so easily inscribed because they aren’t of text; they
are ‘pretext’ as Woolf might say, ‘inscribable’ as Kristeva might say, ‘exscribed’
as Nancy might call it. The conclusions are the product of a gaze that does
not settle so easily into a singular point of view or a fixed narrative. As such,
I think of Casagrande and Rintala’s project not as a celebration of death,
of ends, but as a powerful gesture toward where architecture itself begins.
It burnt away so much of the artefactual marks of distinction that separate
bodies from objects, organs from inorganics, life from shadow and me from
you. There is, in the Land(e)scape project, a consecration of architecture. And
this consecrated architecture, this bare architecture, starts not in shelter and
not in territory, but in passage.
8
Speaking
When the photographer John Deakin died he left his body on one bed and
a box of photographs and negatives under another. Deakin died in the Old
Ship Hotel on the seafront of Brighton on Thursday 25 May 1972. He had
listed Francis Bacon as his next of kin.1 Bacon, thus, had to identify the body.
The painter, who preferred to work from photographs rather than bodies
directly, would describe this as ‘the last dirty trick’ that Deakin would play
on him.2 Pretexts, the inscribable and the exscribed are themselves prone to
text and script. Dedications and acknowledgements, suicide notes, wills, legal
documents, engravings on headstones and labels on the back of photographs
are all attempts to speak when speech is no longer an option. Deakin died of
a heart attack following surgery related to lung cancer. He was recuperating at
the Old Ship Hotel at Bacon’s expense at the time. Though ‘recuperating’ is, in
retrospect, not the right word.
When Deakin died he left a box under his bed at 68 Berwick Street, Soho,
full of black and white photographs and piles of negatives. The negatives
were ‘dust covered, curling and scratched’.3 They were cut and separated and
not connected to rolls of film.4 The picture editor and writer Bruce Bernard
salvaged the box after Deakin died.5 Amongst the negatives were those of a
naked Henrietta Moraes from the photographic sessions that had taken place
ten years earlier at Apollo Place. Bernard sent some negatives to Moraes’ son,
Joshua Bowler (yet another child in the dark).6 The remainder of the negatives
of Moraes were, as with the other contents of the box, to form the basis of the
John Deakin Archive. Establishing the archive was an act of recuperation.
There are 12 negatives of Moraes in the archive: one of Moraes sitting up on
her bed smiling; two invasive images where Moraes is lying on her back with
her legs spread wide; four with Moraes positioned on her side or stomach
posing in a manner that relates to the Bacon paintings Portrait of Henrietta

Moraes (1963) and Henrietta Moraes (1966); four with Moraes lying on her
back and shot from behind her head that relate to the Lying Figure paintings,7
and; one – the most odd of them all – a double exposure (Figure 8.1).
One layer of the double exposure is an image of Moraes on her bed. There’s
sheets and pillows and what looks like an Indian satin cover on the bed. I
assume it’s satin because of the reflectivity of the fabric. I assume it’s Indian
because of the patterning; a layered diamond pattern. I imagine it is red;
though it is not possible to discern a colour – black and white images tend not
to betray colour. To the side of the bed there is a simple wooden bedside table.
On it there is what appears to be two wine glasses. Red wine glasses; though
neither contains red wine. One has a flower in it; the other what could be
white wine; though I can’t be sure. There is what appears to be a glass ashtray
on the edge of the bedside table, slightly overhanging. I imagine this makes
it perfectly placed for reaching from the bed to stub out a cigarette. One wall
is visible, though I imagine there are another three around this room. Part of
the visible wall is bathed in light, which I imagine comes from a south-facing
window that is also out of the frame. We can see in this image a section of
skirting board and a small triangle of floor. These things, all these things, are
what might constitute the ‘background’ of the image and our eyes tend to find
them well after they find a body – or two.
Moraes is lying naked on the bed, on her stomach, looking back over her
shoulder at Deakin’s camera. One leg is bent at the knee, the sensitive sole
of one foot is prominent and though her buttocks are slightly raised there is
no visible genitalia. It is nevertheless a pose of scopophilic pleasure. A pose
repeated ad nauseam in pornography. It is the pose of a body poised to be

entered from behind. Tentative eye contact from her. The fixated eye of a
camera from him. An asymmetrical voyeuristic play between two bodies. Or
at least it would be, if there weren’t a third object in this layer of this image:
an objet petit a to make of this dualism a ménage à trois. This third object is a
radio peeping out from behind Moraes’ pillow. It is a small, rectangular, black
radio with a strap that likely makes it easy to carry.
This radio is a hole or a wound in the photograph but it is also a pleasurable
surplus. There is a depth to this radio that exceeds other elements in the image
and through which other elements might escape. When we notice this radio
Speaking 137
Figure 8.1 John Deakin, Double exposure. John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes at 9
Apollo Place, c. 1963, © The John Deakin Archive. Licensed by Getty Images, 2016.
we also notice that Moraes has her hand on it. She might be adjusting a knob.
Tuning into another frequency or radioing-out for assistance.
Exposed either over or under this image is another. This second layer is
only ‘second’ in the sense that we tend to see it after we see Moraes’ body. This
second layer is a little harder to discern. It appears to be an image of a young
man asleep on a bed. The photographer, Deakin, doesn’t capture his whole
body. Just his head, shoulders and upper torso. This lying figure is not naked,
but wearing a shirt buttoned high. You can clearly make out the buttons.
His eyes are closed and his eyelids are dark. The young man lies peacefully
on one side and there is nothing poised about the position. He seems to
be asleep diagonally and the corner of a bed is visible and defined, like the
demarcation of ‘place’ in a Bacon painting. It appears to be the same bed that
Moraes is photographed on. The cover seems to have the same reflectivity and
diamond patterning and there is the sense that the light is entering the space
in a similar manner – shining through an unseen window in an invisible wall.
The sleeping head of this young man is superimposed over Moraes’ buttocks
and feet, which makes him strangely identifiable. The light that falls upon
Moraes’ body allows this superimposed face to be discerned. The positioning
of the two images gives the impression that this young man is indulging in a
most joyous daydream. I thought this sleeping face might belong to Moraes’
son Joshua, now a psychoanalyst. He knew better – and suggested that it
was likely Moraes’ boyfriend of the time, Joe Lloyd. ‘And there would be no
reason why he wouldn’t be passed out in the middle of the afternoon’, Joshua
wrote, ‘he was a fully fledged drug addict’.8 A double exposure often leads to
overexposure.
Roland Barthes says of the ‘good’ photograph: ‘[t]he object speaks, it induces
us, vaguely, to think’.9 It is a quality of even a bad negative, a double exposure.
This dusty, curling and scratched object from a box under a bed, and now
part of an archive, captures the world in a moulded kind of way. It forms a
negative imprint. A deep indexical footprint of now immobile souls. There
is a certain vague ‘thinking’ to this negative. In one sense the negative is a
type of incursion in memory that prompts thought. In another, perhaps more
fundamental sense, the negative is a form of thinking that occurs well outside
the bodies depicted and beyond the voyeuristic eye of the spectator. It is this
form of thinking that may leak into a speaking: ‘the object speaks’. Even a bad
negative can whisper from under one bed about the top of another. It speaks
on its own once speech is not possible: after the photographer’s recuperation
fails; when the model’s liver collapses, and; when the addict cannot be woken.
It is a speaking that is, thus, in excess of the selves involved. In excess of
speech. This chapter will turn to the idea of speaking beyond speech and to
one particular object that induces us to think, vaguely. I turn to the objet petit
architecture of the Berlin-based international collective Raumlabor. Their
sauna project for Göteborg, Sweden, is a spatial oddity that landed on an inner
harbour of the river Göta älv in 2015. It is an architecture that speaks of the
passing of selves as it recuperates and exposes a very deep interior.
Speaking 139
Coitus and crime
In many ways the gift of losing the self is in the handing over of logics to
that which thinks for you. Jacques Derrida suggests as much in his text of
1992, The Gift of Death.10 When the photographer, the painter and the author
fail to speak; when the architect blends with the crowd, flees, leaves or takes
flight, the prejudices of authority tied to authorship fade. In many ways this
is the handing back of logics to that which was already expressing itself.
Bacon’s Pope was always screaming. But this Pope screams even louder since
Bacon’s heart stopped. It is louder because we listen more carefully once the
artist or the author is silent. The stories that artists and authors tell of their
work is, as Derrida might call it, a ‘provisional’ interiority and exterior to the
body there is much that speaks, intensely.11 When the logic of a work of art
is given back to the work itself there is a spilling over of something intensely
deep. Incursive. Entoptic. There were things in Deakin’s box under his bed in
London that didn’t die on a bed in Brighton. There is music that a radio plays
that exceeds the life of any musician.
The idea of giving (our)selves over to that which we think of as ‘exterior’ is
not a new one. Previous chapters of this book sought to dissolve the bound-
aries between selves and identities (the impersonal), selves and worlds (the
indiscernible) and selves and shadows (the imperceptible), to allow ourselves
and our architectures to reconnect with the intensities of others and outsides;
with the Real and the Earth. Dissolving such boundaries makes exterior of the
body. Making selves objects among objects. This making exterior of the self
tends to involve a certain violence to the interior, to interiority. When Bacon
rubs away at a face to reveal a head it is not that the flesh and bone were not
already there – they were just quieter when under the skin. An autopsy or a
self-mutilating cut, like much art, allows a making visible of the invisible. A
making exterior of insides and intensities. If interiority is constituted by what
one thinks they are, then there is a necessary violence against that interior in
order for one to be otherwise (or whatever).
This story of the conjunction of the violence to, or the death of, selves
and the passing of interiority is also well rehearsed. Georges Bataille’s ‘L’Anus
Solaire’ of 1927 is perhaps a recuperation of the story that Plato’s Phaedrus had
told of a second Orpheus.12 Bataille would invoke a man, a man just called ‘he’,
who ‘suffers from the mental darkness that keeps him from screaming that
he himself is the girl who forgets his presence while shuddering in his arms’.13
For Bataille, in order that one might access others and the ‘celestial fertility’ of
the cosmos, the interior that cries out ‘I’ must necessarily be forsaken.14 The
eminent prehistorian André Leroi-Gourhan would problematize interiority
at a very different scale. In 1964 Leroi-Gourhan would write that ‘[t]he whole
of our evolution has been oriented toward placing outside ourselves what in
the rest of the animal world is achieved inside’ and would note the means to
do so comes from both the ‘“freeing” of tools’ and the ‘freeing of the word
and our unique ability to transfer our memory to a social organism outside
ourselves’.15 In this sense, art and architecture, as social organisms, are as
much a sign of the liberation of memory as the passing of the self, or at least
the self as we know it. Also in 1964, as the coveted notion of the ‘individual’
gave way to the concept of individuation, Gilbert Simondon told us ‘interi-
ority and exteriority are everywhere’.16 In announcing the death of the author
a few years later Barthes spoke of the ‘pure superstition’ of interiority.17 The
author may have died but the interior continued to rise from graves. In
1972 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would deploy schizoanalysis against
what they identify as ‘the interior colony’ of psychoanalysis and its capacity
to generate ‘internal suffering’.18 Jean-François Lyotard would conduct an
autopsy with dress-maker’s scissors in 1974 to introduce us to what he refers
to as the ‘alleged interior’.19 In 1977 Deleuze told of a ‘secret link which resides
in the critique of negation, the cultivation of joy, the hatred of interiority,
the exteriority of forces and relations, the denunciation of power, etc.’.20 It
was a link that predated Bataille and the linguistic turn and that was shared
by Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza and Nietzsche. In 1994 the bandit philosopher

Bernard Stiegler would draw upon the work of Leroi-Gourhan and Simondon
and attempt to file the coroner’s report on interiority stating ‘interiority is
nothing outside of its exteriorisation – but that of an originary complex in
which the two terms, far from being opposed, compose with one another’.21
The ‘curtain of objects’ beyond our bodies, that Derrida had described as
‘supplementary’ would, according to Stiegler, be the essential tools by which
the human came into being.22 ‘Epiphylogenesis’ was the word Stiegler used
for the manners by which that which is outside the body speak and cause us
vaguely to think.23
Speaking 141
In 1980 Deleuze and Guattari would again challenge the dualism of the
exterior and the ‘so-called interior’, but they would do so in an act that was
more eros than thanatos. More love than death:24
The distinction to be made is not at all between exterior and interior, which
are always relative, changing, and reversible, but between different types of
multiplicities that coexist, interpenetrate, and change places – machines, cogs,
motors, and elements that are set in motion at a given moment, forming an
assemblage productive of statements: ‘I love you’ (or whatever).25
Deleuze and Guattari remind us that the death of the interior is not merely a
destructive act. In turning to the expression of love, the philosopher and the
psychoanalyst engage Bataille’s ‘L’Anus Solaire’ formula: ‘[c]oitus is the parody
of crime’.26 It is the link between a violence to self and an erotics that makes
‘L’Anus Solaire’ a recuperation of the second Orpheus. Each is dedicated as
much to the idea of love as to the idea of death.27 Bataille’s eulogy to the death
of interiority, or at least the interior self, is joyfully erotic. Bataille suggests
that it is not possible to connect to others and the outside when shouting your
own name or screaming the word ‘I’. For the act of exteriorization, indiscern-
ibility is as necessary as distinction. Forgetting as necessary as remembering.
Bataille would ‘rediscover indifference (allowing her to leave me) when I fall
asleep, through an inability to love what happens’.28 Bataille reminds us that we
don’t look into a lover’s eyes to see the reflection of ourselves and to remember
who we are. We don’t make love in order to please the self. Connection to the
other, to ‘compose with one another’, always involves a giving over, an exteri-
orization, of the self. A small death in every orgasm (la petite mort). I imagine
this is why Bataille would suggest that when one gives up on the shout of ‘I’,
‘love then screams in my throat’.29

Deleuze would suggest that ‘only art gives us what we vainly sought from a
friend, what we would have vainly expected from a beloved’.30 The statement
‘I love you’ is liberated from lovers once it becomes the subject of paint and
pencils, notebooks, beds and boxes, condoms and coitus, throats and thighs,
dedications and acknowledgements, suicide notes, wills, legal documents,
engravings on headstones and labels on the back of photographs. Losing
the self is never loss but connection with that which is beyond you. Other.
Outside. So that dualism of interiority and exteriority; of finding the self and
losing the self; that simultaneity with which this book has concerned itself, is
indeed one movement: connection. Connection to the here and now and to
the other and outside. Intense and immediate. Intense and extensive.
Ever posthumous
Maurice Blanchot knew of the necessity of the passing of the self in connecting
to a life beyond. In 1944 the author was taken outside a large house, a château,
and was placed in front of a Nazi firing squad.31 When the squad were
distracted Blanchot would escape and flee to a forest, Bois des Bruyères, where
‘he rediscovered a sense of the real’.32 This near miss (if ‘to miss’ is the opposite
of ‘to hit’) had a profound effect on Blanchot. In 1994, Blanchot wrote to
Derrida, ‘[f]ifty years ago, I knew the happiness of nearly being shot to death’.33
The dual sensation, the double exposure, of finding and losing oneself is not
banal. It is hard, deep and intense. Intensive. It is an intensity that is not of
the interior though. Lives pass through châteaus as bullets fly through lives.
Bodies flee to the chaos of nearby forests and this exterior becomes shelter.
There is, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, a coexistence, an interpenetration
and a changing of places between interiors and exteriors. In a very real sense
the hit and the miss are more products of proximity than interiority. Blanchot
would write of the proximities of his experience to suggest ‘this unanalyzable
feeling changed what there remained for him of existence. As if the death
outside of him could only henceforth collide with the death in him.’34 Even
the self becomes proximate in Blanchot’s story of his near miss. He would use
the word ‘him’ to speak of himself. In 2003 Derrida would offer a eulogy at
Blanchot’s funeral. Blanchot would, however, consider all his writing to have
been, to already have been, posthumous. Indeed he would consider all writing
since the Holocaust to be posthumous.35
Death operates in the work of Blanchot as a freeing and opening. ‘[F]reed
from life? the infinite opening up?’ Blanchot writes.36 Much of this freeing
and opening is to forests, to clouds and to stars and sky. To the air and the
sea. To the ‘sense of the real’. He was engaged in this task prior to his own
near miss. In Blanchot’s first published novel, Thomas the Obscure of 1941,
the eponymous character, Thomas, dived and swam and ‘his limbs gave him
Speaking 143
the same sense of foreignness as the water in which they were tossed’.37 That
is, his body came to be as other as the exterior. Thomas dived and swam into
a deeper outside than his inside. Blanchot writes of Thomas that ‘[t]he intoxi-
cation of leaving himself, of slipping into the void, of dispersing himself in the
thought of water, made him forget every discomfort’.38
Despite the brevity of the text, it is not quite possible to summarize Thomas
the Obscure in simple ways. I’ve tried. Every simplification seems to generate
contradiction. However, for the sake of communication it might be said that
the novel is inostensibly concerned with a man, Thomas, and the death of the
woman he loved, Anne. It might also be said that Thomas operates much like
a second Orpheus in the manner by which he connects with that which he
has lost. This reconnection, or collapsing of the dualisms of the corporeal and
incorporeal, involves less the retrieval of Anne than the disposal of Thomas.
In Blanchot’s novel this process of connecting with that which was lost occurs
as a process of exteriorization; undertaken in imperceptibly fine increments.
Though ‘increments’ is not the right word. The process is more a slide of a kind.
It’s a slide that starts with a leak. The water in which Thomas swims becomes ‘the
thought of water’. The inside, thought itself, leaks slowly into the liquid exterior.
When Blanchot complicates the relation between the thought of something –
‘the thought of water’ for example – and the object that was the focus of that
thought – ‘water’ in this case – he is complicating the divisions of interior and
exterior, intensity and extensity. The signifier and signified also swirl together
in such a linguistic construct. Blanchot’s language continues to slide in this
direction in then exteriorizing the self directly in text: in exscription. That is,
Blanchot takes Thomas out of himself via inscription and then deals with the
exscripted in connection to objects beyond the self. Blanchot writes of Thomas:
He was reading. He was reading with unsurpassable meticulousness and

attention. In relation to every symbol, he was in the position of the male
praying mantis about to be devoured by the female. They looked at each other.
The words, coming forth from the book which was taking on the power of life
and death, exercised a gentle and peaceful attraction over the glance which
played over them. Each of them, like a half-closed eye, admitted the excessively
keen glance which in other circumstances it would not have tolerated. And so
Thomas slipped toward these corridors, approaching them defencelessly until
the moment he was perceived by the very quick of the word.39
Thomas’ concentration made him, himself, a point of fixation. ‘To look’

becomes ‘to be looked at’ in the manner of Jacques Lacan’s objet petit a.
Incorporeal words take on ‘the power of life and death’. There is here what
Leroi-Gourhan might describe as a ‘freeing of the word’, a liberation of words
from interiors that allow words to reconnect to a ‘social organism outside
ourselves’.40 Thomas and text come to be described as ‘each’, and each a Body
without Organs, a ‘half-closed eye’. One imagines that a half-closed eye is a
half-closed ‘I’. Deleuze would describe the movement Blanchot makes from
the interiority of ‘I’ to the intensity of the exterior:
Blanchot starts from the ‘I’ and the ‘you’, overtakes them toward ‘he’, overtakes
the ‘he’ toward an irreducible ‘he’. [… In] Blanchot’s case, there is what I would
call the language, a processing of the language which is subjected to a tension,
I would almost say, to use a term of physics, a superficial tension, a surface
tension. A superficial tension which carries it away to its periphery and which
tends toward this mysterious ‘he’, this ‘he’ that is of no person anymore.41
When the subject is exteriorized as ‘no person anymore’ the exterior (the city,
architecture and landscape) becomes very intense indeed. Architecture speaks
post speech. In the work of Blanchot such a speaking is not a demarcating nail
which pins a subject down, but a nail through which it passes; transformed. In
Thomas the Obscure, Blanchot generates an exterior that is urban; urban yet
oddly unpopulated. He writes of ‘cities made of emptiness and thousands of
stones piled on one another’,42 ‘prodigious cities, ruined fortresses’,43 ‘immense
unbuilt cities’,44 and ‘[t]he city which spoke to itself ’.45 Blanchot also gives us
an architecture that is impersonal and intense. He writes of ‘insurmountable
walls’,46 ‘uninhabitable rooms’,47 ‘nomads in their homes, living nowhere’.48
Labyrinths, doors and windows are reoccurring images in Blanchot’s work.

The work is also populated with stairs, upstairs and downstairs, tombs and
graves, and corridors: ‘Thomas slipped toward these corridors’.49 In the work
of Blanchot the city, architecture and its elements are particular exterior
conditions into which selves bleed. But these exteriors tend not to reconstitute
interiors. Blanchot finds in the city neither community nor civilization. He
finds in architecture neither home, habit, protection nor shelter. He finds
in architectural elements neither stability nor functionality. In the work of
Blanchot, cities, architectures and architectural elements are impersonal,
indiscernible and ultimately imperceptible. Blanchot engages architectures
Speaking 145
and cities not as backdrops or backgrounds but as wayfaring devices. The

cities, architectures and architectural elements all slide with subjectivities.
Blanchot would lament others, other authors, who ‘neglect even to construct
the burrow, for fear that by protecting them this shelter will protect in them
that which they must surrender’.50 When Blanchot surrenders the interior of
the subject to architecture, it is to an equally raw and bare architecture. An
architecture of discomforts and whispers. Rooftops lifted, doors which are ajar
and windows half-open. Architectures that also slip toward that to which the
subject must slip. Michel Foucault, ever fixated with the outside, was to write:
No doubt, this is the role that houses, hallways, doors, and rooms play in almost
all of Blanchot’s narratives: placeless places, beckoning thresholds, closed,
forbidden spaces that are nevertheless exposed to the winds, hallways fanned
by doors that open rooms for unbearable encounters and create gulfs between
them, across which voices cannot carry and that even muffle cries; corridors
leading to more corridors where the night resounds, beyond sleep with the
smothered voices of those who speak, with the cough of the sick, with the death
rattle of the dying with the suspended breath of those who ceaselessly cease
living; a long and narrow room, like a tunnel, in which approach and distance –
the approach of forgetting, the distance of the wait – draw near to one another
and unendingly move apart.51
The happiness of death that is naked in Blanchot’s writing is a joy that also tears
through architecture. Derrida would speak of the dual necessity and impossi-
bility of speaking in the work of Blanchot as ‘where the sense of fiction begins
to tremble’.52 Though the body is implicated, this tremble isn’t a trembling self.
Blanchot has emptied the self; the work is of ‘no person any more’, as Deleuze
suggests. Though architecture is implicated, this trembling isn’t a trembling of

cities, rooms and corridors. Corridors speak, cough, rattle and breathe when
we cannot, but not as we do. What is at stake here is not merely the death
of the self in order to give over that life to the exterior posthumously, but;
to poignantly concede to the exterior that intensity that is habitually located
within.53 That is, to allow the exterior the intensive dimension it is denied
when the interior remains closed.
And this exterior must also leak. It leaks to an outside. The distinction
between interior and exterior is very different from the distinction between
interior and outside. The exterior is always in relation with an interior. The
outside, on the other hand, is of a different order altogether. It’s a ‘world night’
and of the order of Eurydice. The outside pays no respect to either interiors
or exteriors. The outside is perhaps most simply described as that which is
beyond us. Blanchot points to where architecture as an exterior fails to speak,
fades and is lost to the outside, to fields of images, much like a body might
flee to a forest or drown in a sea: ‘The city which spoke to itself in a dazzling
monologue of a thousand voices rested in the debris of illuminated and trans-
parent images.’54 Fundamentally, in Blanchot, architecture too must come to
pass – lest it reconstitute an interior. Lest it constitute a safe inside – a repos-
itory for the self as defined and as autonomous as the self was once considered.
When all is stripped away and made bare then language itself trembles. Lars
Iyer, the British novelist and philosopher, suggests of Blanchot that ‘[t]he
rumbling that disturbs our rooms and corridors also threatens to tear language
apart, too’.55 I imagine this tearing is from the inside out and we might exhaust
the thought of an architectural language in order to slip further still.
Agalma
The Göteborg sauna slips. At the invitation of the municipal company

Älvstranden Utveckling the Berlin-based collective Raumlabor were engaged
to rethink the Free Port on the northern bank of the river Göta älv.56 The
sauna is part of the port project which is, in turn, part of a larger redevel-
opment of the Jubilee Park area of Frihamnen into a bathing culture precinct.
The longer-term plan for Frihamnen is for an entirely new town to be built
in the area surrounding the park, that surrounds the port, that surrounds the
sauna. In this sense the sauna is germinal. It is a seed that might spawn a new
town. According to January Liesegang, an architect at RaumlaborBerlin, ‘[i]t
is important to take people to the area before a town is built here. In this way
the site will be all their own image of the area and their own ideas.’57 Whilst
some architecture might be, as Deleuze suggests of literature, ‘for this people
who are missing’, this sauna is for a place that is yet to come.58
Frihamnen is at the point at which the stream Kvillebäcken joins the river
Göta älv.59 The river outlet is nearby. It was this access to the North Sea and
the Atlantic Ocean that made Frihamnen, and much of Göteborg, a point
Speaking 147
of industrial condensation. Water, earth, materials and populations flowed

through this place and much of the riverfront is a type of debris left behind.
The approach to the Göteborg sauna is down roads that pass remnants of
shipping and fishing industries. The route is lined with chainmail fences
and punctuated by security gates that once secured imported materials and
containers of goods awaiting export. The roads still carry occasional trucks
that, in turn, carry shipping containers. There are large expanses of asphalt
upon which containers once stood and there are signs everywhere. I can’t read
them, but the graphic tends to indicate caution and control. The industrial
buildings dotted over this area are composed of brick and metal sheet. The
logic of these buildings seems to be: to contain as large a volume as possible
with minimal material expended. They are designed to hold, if only tempo-
rarily, that which is more valuable than themselves. Above the asphalt and
above the industrial buildings the sky is pierced by a series of cranes that mark
the river’s edge. Most are still. Göteborg is no different from many industrial
cities in a post-industrial age. The dream of the city as a well-organized indus-
trial machine has been usurped by an image of the city as inhabited debris. It’s
far more machinic than mechanical. Far more organon than organized.
The Göteborg sauna site is littered with a collection of containers; timber
walkways; an odd structure of recycled windows; a bridge; a few aslant birch
trees; and, over the water on a solid pier, the sauna proper (Figure 8.2). The site
strikes you as being familiar, and yet not entirely so. It is industrial but not given
to producing any particular product. It is organic but not whole. The sauna and
the surrounding structures appear to be utilitarian – and yet, like the cranes on
the horizon, not currently useful. The aesthetic at play thus might be described
as a type of retrograde utilitarianism. That is, the aesthetic is suggestive of a type

of industrial functionality, but it is a functionality that is quizzically unrelated
to the current purposes of the architecture.60 The sauna looks like a remnant
of a crane. Or a disused shipping lookout. Or an abandoned silo that once may
have held grain. Whilst all the references to the industrial past of this site are
here, there is also an odd embryology at stake. This sauna might reference a
past but it gestures to a future. It is becoming something.
Walls of recycled glass bottles curve around me and tentatively hold a space
in which I shower, before approaching the sauna. Adjacent to the shower area
there is a series of recycled wood lockers. I place folded jeans with car keys in
pockets into a locker. Volvo started in Göteborg. I dearly miss my Saab. The
keys open a Volkswagen. The change-room leads to a simple timber and metal
bridge with a balustrade of weathering steel and chainmail. The parts that
compose the bridge are aged but the configuration appears fresh. The bridge
is approximately 10 metres long. It extends from the land over the water to the
heavy pier upon which the sauna stands. The bridge is approximately 1 metre
wide. Bodies that pass each other pass closely over this bridge.
The bridge extends toward an anchoring pier that was used by vessels calling
at the Free Port.61 The pier is square in plan and approximately 4 metres long
and wide. It is about 800 millimetres thick and sits around 1 metre above the
water. The pier is many decades old and there are signs that the reinforcing
within the concrete is rusting. They call this ‘concrete cancer’. There are 20 or so
thick concrete legs that support this pier but none are vertical. Ten pairs of legs
run down into the water at about 30 degrees akimbo. It appears as if the pier is
marching through the water. On top of this pier there is a triangular metal bollard
with rounded corners to which a large ship might be moored with rope. The pier
is both an anchoring point and a landing site. The boats that once docked no
longer anchor, but a sauna has landed upon the pier. It’s a recuperation of a kind.
Figure 8.2 Göteborg sauna. Photograph courtesy of Raumlabor (2015).
Speaking 149
The sauna that stands tentatively on the pier has an odd angular geometry
(Figure 8.3). It’s not a geometry of order and stability. Nothing here is
completely erect and permanent. The architecture is somewhat crumpled
and decayed. It is asymmetrical and of sliding dimensions. It is clunky and
awkward and rises approximately 8 metres into the sky. That which at a
distance looked like a remnant of a crane; or a lookout; or a silo for grain,
appears from the bridge and the platform to be a displaced organ. The huge
heart of an iron man. An organ that either Ted Hughes or Titans might have
scattered upon a riverbank. This affecting mixture of industrial organism and
alien organ makes you wonder whether you are looking at it or if it is here
to observe you. High in the structure a small square window extends over a
stair and peers down the river. The cranes in the distance stand symmetrical
and tall on 4 legs. This sauna stands on a marching pier of about 20 legs and
then on 3 legs of its own. Four would have made it stable but stability is not
the point.
The 3 legs are approximately 4 metres high and each is of different dimen-
sions. The legs assume various functions that they do not appear to have
been specifically designed to perform: structural support, holding lifebuoys,
accommodating services, drainage and some lighting. The legs, as with the
main body of the sauna with which they merge, are covered in corrugated
steel sheet. The corrugated steel is less like a skin and more like a bandage. The
sheet metal runs at an angle. The metal is rusting and has come to coat this
structure from a life elsewhere. It is a bandage that once covered other wounds
or secured other valuables.
An industrial metal and chainmail stair moves from the pier out over the
water and around the thickest of the 3 legs upon which the sauna stands.
The stair is also of weathered steel. It clunks. Landings mark the points at
which you turn up this stair as you ascend the leg of the sauna. The stair sits
out from the leg roughly half a metre. It’s exposing. The whole approach has
been exposing. You’re soft and near naked in a metal, industrial landscape.
Foucault might have been describing this sauna when he wrote of Blanchot’s
‘closed, forbidden spaces that are nevertheless exposed to the winds’.62 You
are exposed above a river more disposed to fishing and shipping than
recreation. More disposed to drowning than swimming. On this ‘walking
staircase’ it’s just you, your towel and the semi-erect structure.63 You imagine
Figure 8.3 Svettekörka. Photograph courtesy of Gallasato, Raumlabor (2015).
Speaking 151
you can hear muffled laughter carried by the wind. It’s the paranoia of
exposure that sits as a counterpoint to this schizo architecture. The locals
call this place ‘Svettekörka’. It translates as ‘sweat church’. It is more temple
than church. And more box than temple. The sauna is an agalma – a box
of questionable worth that harbours something precious, like the love
Alcibiades, the statesman of Plato’s Symposium, finds in the ragged and
flaccid body of Socrates. Having heard stories of love and loss, of Orpheus
and Eurydice, the drunken statesman describes Socrates as ‘this wonderful
monster in my arms’ and this sauna is similarly alien and intimate.64 The
odd excess of form and poise of this architecture has as its corollary a
surplus of meaning. There are too many disjunctive references, too many
points of connection, and yet this architecture is resistant to a totalizing
image. The architecture operates as Deleuze would speak of a literature ‘far
from equilibrium’, where ‘disjunctions become included or inclusive, and the
connections, reflexive’.65 It is the resistance to totalizing images and stabi-
lizing equilibriums that makes the architecture more gesture than reference.
More speaking than speech.
The geometry of the sauna chamfers inward at the point the stair meets
the entrance. It’s a ‘beckoning threshold’ and an odd concession to function
in an architecture that concedes little to any fixed use. Entering and then
tentatively occupying this sauna is intense. A sensory overload like an erotic
act. It is erotic in that it stimulates, it is ripe with possibilities, corporealities,
encounters, sexual promise. Organs within organs. Life is made barer here.
Nude. No. Naked. Blanchot would suggest of the obscure Thomas both an
‘absolute nakedness’ and a ‘naked absence’.66 One imagines the two are not
commensurable. They don’t have to be. There is something incommensu-

rable and irrational about baring ourselves. Oddly it is in nakedness that we
lose ourselves. In exposures, double exposures and overexposures. We give
ourselves over to that which might speak for us in order that we may be free,
otherwise or whatever.
The interior of the sauna is lined with long near-rectangular strips of
timber veneer. Thin and layered like shingles that might be laid to shift
rainwater from the exterior of a building (Figure 8.4). But here it is of the
interior, as much as this leaking vessel constitutes an interior. I imagine the
strips of timber bend with the hot mist. I sit on one of the timber benches.
Figure 8.4 Sauna interior. Photograph courtesy of Raumlabor (2015).
The benches are on two levels and unfold around three sides of the interior. A
fourth side, not that the interior is rectangular at all, is where the hot stones,
over which water is poured, sit in two black metal trays.
Euclidean coordinates are inept in describing this interior. It’s simply
occupied but not so simply thought or described. I sat where I sit because
other spaces were occupied by other bodies. You can sit either with your feet
on the ground, lie, lounge or sit higher up. The air is thicker and hotter higher
up. Through one aluminium-framed window you see the motionless cranes
on the bank opposite. You can also see shipping containers and the tall light-
poles that keep the riverbank illuminated. The view is not clear though. The
window is dripping with condensation. There is another small square window
that sits higher – it is the odd eye you saw from the river bank and the discon-
nected artery of the organ you are now within. Through the steam and the
dripping condensation you can see the sky and you think. ‘Something in the
world forces us to think’, Deleuze writes:67
This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter.

What is encountered may be Socrates, or a temple or a demon. It may be grasped
Speaking 153
in a range of affective tones: wonder, love, hatred, suffering. In whichever tone,

its primary characteristic is that it can only be sensed.68
Sometimes what architecture harbours as a germinal force is the chaos of

erotic encounters. Sometimes what architecture harbours is equally wild and
wayward thoughts. Such thoughts are never of the inside of heads or of the
interiority of architecture. When that thing that forces us to think is bare …
has a bareness to it – when it is not totalizable, when it is neither symbolic
nor meaningful in any fixed or preordained manner – then that bareness
of sensation coincides with a bareness of thought. Deleuze would describe
thought as ‘a power that has not always existed, […] born from an outside
more distant than any external world, and, as power which does not yet exist,
confronts an inside’.69 What Stiegler had said of the dualism of interior and
exterior, is similarly true of the relation between sensation and thought, ‘far
from being opposed’ they ‘compose with one another’.70 It is the composing of
one with the other that generates the bare stammering voice of architectural
language. This sauna is an architecture parlante, but a parlante of the post-
linguistic turn. The sauna operates as Foucault speaks of literature as a ‘void
language takes as its space when it articulates itself in the nakedness of “I
speak”’.71 The sauna operates as Deleuze speaks of literature, as a ‘milieu that
acts as the conductor of words’.72 This sauna is a composition of singularities,
intensities, words and temples, a rich and complex machinery in which we
too are implicated. A bare architecture generates equally bare propositions: ‘I
love you’ (or whatever).
The lack of a correspondence of a fixed structure to any fixed function –
this passing of function – resonates with the lack of a correspondence of any
fixed meaning to any fixed sensation or desire – the passing of the subject; or
at least the subject as we knew it.73 In this sauna our eyes tend to find timber,
steam and condensation well after they find organs and organisms. Sweating
skin, smiling lips, arms, cleavage, thighs and feet. Some legs outstretched,
crossed and akimbo, others bent at knees. There’s no exposed genitalia here,
but much erotic pleasure. A birch leaf sticks to the exposed sole of one foot. I
want to lick it off. This architecture isn’t defined in and of itself but in assem-
blage with the barer and more exposed people and place it speaks for. A bare
architecture holds that which we can’t continue to relegate to the inside. It’s
an imperfect container. Just as an archive must deteriorate lest we keep every-

thing always, so too our architecture must leak.
I close my eyes. I breathe deeply. The intimate muffled words from the other
bench are in a language I don’t understand but in tones that I do. Such expres-
sions are at once about the source of the sound and the space in which they are
expelled and circulate. There is no reason to oppose an interior to an exterior.
No reason to think of breath and air or of speaking and speech as alternate.
Everything said in here is a stutter. The words are thick and hot in the air and
they take me somewhere new. My own suspended breath is equally loud here.
Deleuze would note a moment in poetry where ‘[t]he entire language spins
and varies in order to disengage a final block of sound a single breath at the
limit of the cry, JE T’AIME PASSIONNÉMENT (“I love you passionately”)’.74
We free ourselves via the freeing of the word and by the freeing of tools and
architectures. We came here as one thing. We leave as another. If interiority is
constituted by what one thinks they are, then there is a necessary opening of
that interior in order for one to be otherwise (or whatever). We move outside
ourselves by fixating on the poetry of the phrase or the soft line of a timber
bench against the curvature of a wet thigh. This sauna might say I love you,
not as a lover does; but as intensely as a lover might.
Postscript
In the text The Logic of Sense (1969), Gilles Deleuze notes a moment in which
‘dreams of accelerated gliding replace the painful nightmare of burial and
absorption’.1 Deleuze finds this moment in literature. It can equally be found
in music and in art. It is this moment that I find in architecture, and particu-
larly that architecture which I refer to as bare architecture. This moment
involves a liberation from selves, and in particular myself. This moment also
involves a flight from death. Particularly your death. Bare architectures strike
raw sensations and prompt rawer thoughts. These are architectures that strip
one bare and allow one to be apportioned to others and outsides. These archi-
tectures fail to reconstitute subjects. Instead, we are set adrift like the clouds
and the tides that these architectures make proximate. These architectures
operate like diving towers encouraging us to breathe in deeply and then let go.
There is a diving tower, a plongeoir, that at high tide stands in Mont-Saint-
Michel bay (Figure 9.1). Mont-Saint-Michel bay occupies an edge of the
English Channel or ‘La Manche’, depending upon the shore upon which one
stands. When one approaches from England it is definitely the English Channel
and when one approaches from France this water becomes La Manche. The
channel is the narrow arm or ‘sleeve’ of the Atlantic Ocean. At low tide this
diving tower does not stand in Mont-Saint-Michel bay but, instead, stands on
the beach of Granville, Normandy. Granville is on the Cotentin Peninsula on

the north-west coast of France. But it wasn’t always so.
Like the channel, the town of Granville itself passes between England and
France. The landscape here is an odd layering of rock and stone fortifications.
The earth and the architecture are hard to discern. Both are attempts to secure
that which surges. Most prominent are the fortifications built by the English
in 1437. The walls didn’t stop the surge. Granville has been French since 1441.
Although, there was one notable moment in 1793 when the monarchical
impulse of the English and French almost coincided. As it was, this battle
occurred within the walls of the town. The republicans were victorious.
156 Postscript
Victorious, but not consistently so. In World War II a German raiding force
momentarily occupied Granville. The coast guard still uses a German Gun
Battery as a lookout tower. Defending territory often puts one in contact with
the outside: the chaos of the sea and sky; as much as the other: the foreign
and foreigner. What exactly was fortified and what was liberated in Granville
is hard to say.
I came to Granville to see the rare editions of Jean Cocteau at the Musée
d’Art Moderne Richard Anacréon. You can see the diving tower from the
Musée. In lieu of the deep interiors of the Musée and the intensity of Cocteau,
I head outside and move on to the steps that adjoin the park, the elevated
promenade that adjoins the sea, and the diving tower that seems to be without
adjacency. The tides are extreme here. The bay runs up to the walls of the
promenade when the tide is high and at least 200 metres from the edge of the
promenade when low. This is a place of strong currents and flows. Why the
tide is so extreme here, I do not know.
This diving tower is as raw as such a structure might be: a single concrete
column, a ladder, an inverted stainless steel cone that forms a platform,
and a railing. The concrete column is approximately 6 metres high and has
Figure 9.1 Gliding, Plongeoir, Granville. Photograph courtesy of Aliocha

Photographie (2009).
Postscript 157
a diameter of about 800 millimetres. There is a small concrete annulus – a

small circular platform – approximately halfway up the column that extends
outward about 500 millimetres horizontally. The annulus corresponds to
something like a medium-tide mark. Below the annulus there is one single
circular section metal rung that you might have grabbed to hoist yourself
from the water. The concrete cylinder is painted red from its base to approxi-
mately 1 metre below the annulus. It seems to signal danger and I imagine
that when the tide is low and the red paint is exposed, that caution should be
exercised. The more red, the greater the level of caution involved – though
it’s not specific and the height of the first rung of the ladder itself means that
when the tide is low the tower is impossible to climb. It was approaching high
tide that Tuesday and the red paint was only just visible above the waterline.
Above the annulus there is a ladder. A stainless steel ladder that is nevertheless
slowly staining. The ladder is about 600 millimetres wide and about 10 rungs
high. The ladder is fixed to the concrete column. The ladder rises and passes
though the inverted stainless steel cone platform that sits atop the concrete
column. There is a slot cut from one part of the cone; it’s a rectangular slot
(in plan) and a triangular slot (in section). A ladder and bodies pass through
this slot in order to access the platform. The circular top of the inverted
cone is approximately 2 metres in diameter. Ten bodies might stand on this
platform comfortably. Or as comfortable as one can be wet and half naked
with 20 arms and legs. But that day, I was wet and half naked and very alone.
A smaller column of stainless steel, approximately 150 millimetres in diameter
and 1 metre high sits at the centre of the platform. This small column has
small rungs that are useful in assisting bodies to move from the ladder to the
platform. A stainless steel handrail runs around one-half of the circumference

of the circular platform. You would have held it in order to steady yourself – to
acclimatize to the height and to prepare for the leap you were about to make.
Between the promenade and the diving tower, when I wade into the cool
water, there is a moment in which the gentle breeze and the clouds and the
rhythmic and surging chaos of the shoreline spasms. It is a moment when I
feel the force of the Earth directly and when the intensity of the outside pulses
over every surface. This moment occurs when the stainless steel platform
becomes triangular; when the concrete annulus becomes a thick line and
when the line between concrete and red paint which runs around the column
158 Postscript
sits as a perfectly horizontal tangent to the gentle arc of the horizon beyond. At
this moment the three-dimensionality of the object collapses into two dimen-
sions. The architecture becomes a datum line. As the architecture collapses
into two dimensions the Earth surges. It feels as if the water is suspended
in the sky. It’s not flat and laid out horizontally but rather flat and vertical.
The horizon line, composed of water to the left and to the right of the diving
platform, bends to the curvature of the Earth itself. The cirri in the distance
become more intense, more poignant, as if painted by Turner. It is moments
like this that allow me to feel completely aligned with that which is beyond
me. As if the sensation wades with me. Everything drifts like a school of fish
in the wake and wave of Virginia Woolf. It is a surface effect, an exteriority, but
a deeply affecting one. It is moments like this that place bodies in proximity
to ‘an unthinkable or unthought deeper than any internal world’, as Deleuze
prompts.2 These are moments when the complexity of existence spills into a
singularity. The singularity of being here. Only here. And now. Only now.
This singular sensation is intense. An extensive intensity. It is a spatial
unfolding of a kind, a spasm of depth into intense surface. It is also a spasm
of self and selves. I’m not aware of myself at these moments. And for a
moment I forget you too. I always feel guilt when this happens. No, I always
feel guilt after this happens. At the time, in these moments, I’m joyously lost,
lost as a ‘mysterious “he”, this “he” that is of no person anymore’, as Deleuze
writes of Maurice Blanchot.3 I am lost as you are lost. It is an arbitrary plane
of departure but a departure no less. Such moments carry me far and they
implicate everything. This diving tower is like a pin-pointing. A singular leg.
A singular athleticism. A syringe in the outstretched arm or sleeve of the
Atlantic Ocean through which I might pass, transformed. This is a moment

where ‘dreams of accelerated gliding replace the painful nightmare of burial
and absorption’.4 It is a passing moment. A ‘gliding atmosphere’.5 It passes too
quickly because I cannot help but think again. Sensation may always precede
sense but this sensation, this ‘something’, says Deleuze, ‘forces us to think’.6 I
pull myself from the water and ascend the diving tower. Alone. Alone and not
quite whole and thinking of you.
I flew when you died. All of my flights have become this flight. I wasn’t
home that world night. I was at a symposium giving a paper. The paper was
focused on Cocteau, the Room of Les Enfants Terribles and the intensities of
Postscript 159
interiors. And I had to fly home knowing you were dead. Or at least part of me
flew home. I always felt that when you died; when your heart stopped warm
on my side of our bed; I always felt, I was altered. And it wasn’t superficial.
The rhetoric of that time, provided by 100 Hallmark cards and clichés attached
to bouquets of flowers, was that: you will live on in my memories. It would
seem that we have to descend into rhetoric and cliché in order to deal with
such intensities. ‘She will live on in your memories’. She. Whilst there may be a
truth to such sentiments, it’s a trifling truth. You may live on in my memories
but the bigger sense I had, I have, is that when you died so did part of me. I
don’t know which organ it is, or which portion of every organ; but part of me
is dead. And there are times when I am joyous about this. I’m joyous because
in that organ and in this portion: There you are. That part of me that is dead
was yours. Will always be yours. It was the part of me that moved with you.
On my side of the bed and yours and indiscernibly between.
My thinking on this platform, on this diving tower, has nothing to do
with the oppositional construction of absence or presence. So little these
days falls into an either this or that logic. To have been touched intensely is
always to have been touched. To have lost you that night is to wake afresh
each day to absence. The profundity of absence. The presence of absence; in
every memory and instant – and thus it is not a distinguishing or distinct
feature. I am left operating between absence and presence. Between a thanat-
opolitics and creative choasmosis. This is what schizoanalysis is. A constant
constructing in that which tears me apart.
I took to the air when you died. Orpheus took a tunnel. Cocteau a Room.
Roland Barthes a street. Deleuze took a window. Blanchot would take a long
corridor. Some take texture, some text. When Henrietta Moraes died she was
searching for a quote from Oscar Wilde. It was: ‘This wallpaper and I are
fighting a duel to the death. Either it goes or I do’. It was her. Cirrhosis of the
liver. Woolf took to a pen before taking to a river with pockets full of stones.
She wrote a letter, by hand, to Leonard Woolf. It was the third suicide letter
she’d written. ‘I can’t read’, she wrote. ‘If anybody could have saved me it would
have been you’.7 The letter is just headed ‘Tuesday’. It could be any Tuesday.
Words run the gap between the self as lost and the self as found. Between the
desire cast afar and the object of passage. The text of the world often occupies
that between just as bodies do. Just as bare architecture does. When I’m here at
160 Postscript
the edge of this platform, on this diving tower, above this sea, in this air; and
you’re not – there is always a part of me that’s also not here. I am, as Blanchot
writes, ‘in constant contact with two shores’.8
I took to the air as you took to the earth. It wasn’t that I loved less but that
I loved more. I hoped the plane would crash. But I also knew it wouldn’t. I
knew there was a job to be done. Children to raise. Our four. Erasing myself
wouldn’t have raised them. Or so I told myself and whispered to you. I remain
terrified that this was the conceit of a second Orpheus, unable to collapse the
difference between life and death by taking one’s own life. Thereafter to be
punished by the gods. And torn to shreds by Titans.
It is best to dream of accelerated gliding. When literature sweeps me away.
When music sweeps me away. When architecture sweeps me away; and I lose
myself in the here and now; I get closer to you. I get closer to you because I get
closer to the Earth and to the Real. To feel the beating heart of the planet and
to be held by all clouds. A diving tower, a plongeoir, is never about a plummet.
It’s about flight. And each time I dive I imagine an arc cast into the air – a
hyperbolic arc – that might sweep us away.
Notes
Prologue
1 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 499. Translation of Mille plateaux, vol. 2
of Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1980), by Brian
Massumi.
2 Gilbert Simondon, L’Individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1964), 44.
3 Madeline Gins and Shusaku Arakawa, Architectural Body (Tuscaloosa, AL and
London: The University of Alabama Press, 2002), 76–7.
Chapter 1: Lying figures
1 Francis Bacon, Lying Figure, 1969. Oil on canvas. 1920 × 1475mm. © Estate of
Francis Bacon. All rights reserved/DACS. Licensed by Viscopy, 2016.
2 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minnesota,
MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 17–19. Translation of Kafka: pour
une littérature mineure (Paris: Minuit, 1975), by Dana Polan.
4 Georges Bataille, ‘L’Anus solaire’ (Paris: Editions de la Galerie Simon, 1931).

Written in 1927.
5 David Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon (London: Thames and Hudson,
2000), 224.
6 Henrietta Moraes cited in, Philip Hoare, ‘Obituary: Henrietta Moraes’,
Independent, 16 January 1999. www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/
obituary-henrietta-moraes-1074162.html (accessed 27August 2013).
7 According to Philip Hoare, ‘Bacon produced two dozen studies by her [Moraes’]
reckoning’. Hoare, ‘Obituary: Henrietta Moraes’.
8 Aida Edemariam, ‘Francis Bacon: Box of Tricks’, Guardian, 5 September 2008.
162 Notes
www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2008/sep/05/francis.bacon (accessed 26
September 2014).
9 Francis Bacon cited in, David Sylvester, Francis Bacon: Interviews by David
Sylvester (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975), 78.
10 Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (New York: Continuum,
2003). Translation of Francis Bacon: logique de la sensation (Paris: Éditions de la
Différence, 1981), by Daniel W. Smith.
11 Gilles Deleuze in the ‘Author’s Preface to the English Edition’, Francis Bacon: The
Logic of Sensation (New York: Continuum, 2003), x.
12 Christopher Fynsk, ‘What Remains at a Crucifixion’, in Sue Golding ed., The
Eight Technologies of Otherness (London: Routledge, 1997), 93.
13 Fynsk, ‘What Remains at a Crucifixion’, 94. Reference is to Jean-Luc Nancy,
‘Exscription’ in The Birth to Presence (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1993), 319–40. Translation by Brian Holmes.
14 Bacon cited in, Sylvester, Francis Bacon, 78.
15 Deleuze, Bacon, 17–18.
16 Ibid., 12.
17 Ibid., 13.
18 Ibid., 15.
19 Ibid., 14.
20 Ibid., 15.
21 Ibid., 12.
22 Vitruvius, De architectura (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931),
Book IX, Ch. 8, sec. 15. Translated by Frank Granger.
23 The discourse of architectural figurality has consumed itself with an attack
on the individual constructs that serve as signs to the existence of the line
of genealogical descent. It is the normal (and normally Vitruvian) body that
contemporary theorizations have chosen as the site upon which to inscribe
their denunciation rather than the genealogy, or what the architectural

historian and theorist Dalibor Vesely refers to as the ‘primary tradition’, that the
body signifies. Dalibor Vesely, ‘The Architectonics of Embodiment’, in George
Dodds and Robert Tavernor eds, Body and Building: Essays on the Changing
Relation of Body and Architecture (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press,
2002), 28–43.
24 Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological (New York: Zone
Books, 1991), 139. Translation of Le Normal et le pathologique (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1966), by Carolyn R. Fawcett and Robert S. Cohen.
25 Vitruvius, De architectura, 3.1.
Notes 163

27 Peter Zumthor, Thinking Architecture (Baden: Lars Müller Publishers, 1998), 32.
28 Bataille, ‘L’Anus solaire’.
29 Zumthor, Thinking Architecture, 11.
30 Barbara Dawson cited in, Aida Edemariam, ‘Francis Bacon: Box of Tricks’.
31 Dawson, ‘Francis Bacon: Box of Tricks’.
32 Deleuze, Bacon, 50.
Chapter 2: Earth and territory
1 Henrietta Moraes, Henrietta (Hamish Hamilton: London, 1994). Refer also

to: ‘Oiled: A Portrait of Henrietta’, Radio 1 documentary. Produced by Joe
Kearney. First broadcast Saturday 26 January 2013. http://www.rte.ie/radio1/
doconone/radio-documentary-podcast-portrait-of-henrietta-moraes-francis-
bacon-Lucian-freud-marianne-faithfull-roundwood-house-laois.html (accessed
3 September 2013).
2 Bacon would suggest that ‘[e]ven in the case of friends who will come and pose,
I’ve had photographs taken for portraits because I very much prefer working
from the photographs than from them […] if I both know them and have
photographs of them, I find it easier to work than actually having their presence
in the room. […] if I have the presence of the image there, I am not able to drift
so freely as I am able to through the photographic image’. Francis Bacon cited in
David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon (London: Thames and Hudson,
1980), 38.
3 Peta Malins, ‘An Ethico-Aesthetics of Heroin Chic’, in Laura Guillame and Joe
Hughes, eds, Deleuze and the Body (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2011), 169.
4 Francis Bacon cited in David Sylvester, Francis Bacon: Interviews by David
Sylvester (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975), 78.
5 Michel Serres, ‘Language and Space: From Oedipus to Zola’ and ‘Lucretius:
Science and Religion’, in Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy (Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 39–53, 98–124. Translation by
Josué V. Harari and David F. Bell. Refer also to: Michel Serres, The Birth of
Physics (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000). Translation of La Naissance de la
physique dans la texte de Lucrèce (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1977), by Jack
Hawkes.
164 Notes
6 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber and Faber, 1939), 21–3, 118.
7 Serres, Hermes, 83.
8 Ovid, Metamorphoses (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Translation by
A. D. Melville.
9 Ted Hughes, Tales From Ovid (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), 3.
10 Andrew Ballantyne and Chris L. Smith, ‘Fluxion’, in Ballantyne and Smith, eds,
Architecture in the Space of Flows (London: Routledge, 2013), 13.
11 Serres, Hermes, 83. Serres was to later suggest that such pockets of order
were less ‘islands’ than themselves oceans: Michel Serres and Bruno Latour,
Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time (Ann Arbor, MI: University
of Michigan Press, 1995), 16, 129–30. Translation of Éclaircissements: cinq
entretiens avec Bruno Latour (Paris: Editions François Bourin, 1990), by
Roxanne Lapidus and Michel Serres, ‘Literature and the Exact Sciences’, in
Substance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism 18 (2) (1989): 3–34. Bruno
Latour was to later describe this sense of the world: ‘The world is not a solid
continent of facts sprinkled by a few lakes of uncertainties, but a vast ocean
of uncertainties speckled by a few islands of calibrated and stabilized forms.’
Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor Network Theory
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 245.
12 Chris L. Smith and Andrew Ballantyne, ‘Flow: Architecture, Object, Relation’ in
Architectural Research Quarterly (ARQ) 14, Cambridge University Press (2010):
21–7.
14 Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book VIII. Italics by the author.
15 André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993),
309. Translation of Le Geste et la parole (Paris: Albin Michel, 1964), by Anna
Bostock Berger.
16 Ballantyne and Smith, ‘Fluxion’, 1–39.
17 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis, MN:

Massumi.
London: University of Alabama Press, 2002), 48.
19 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 314.
20 Ibid., 311.
21 Jacques Lacan, ‘The object relation and the intersubjective relation’, in The
Seminars of Jacques Lacan, Book I (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press,
Notes 165
1988). Translation of Le Séminaire I (Paris, Les Éditions du Seuil, 1975), by John

Forrester.
23 Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I
as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’, 4, in Écrits (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1977). This talk was delivered at the 16th International Congress of
Psychoanalysis, Zurich, 17 July 1949.
24 Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage’, 4.
25 Sigmund Freud, ‘Twenty-Fifth Lecture: General Theory of Neuroses’, in A
General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (New York: Horace Liveright, 1920),
352. Translation of Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse [1916], by
G. Stanley Hall.
26 Freud, ‘Twenty-Fifth Lecture: General Theory of Neuroses’, 352–3.
27 Sigmund Freud, ‘First Lecture: Introduction’, in A General Introduction
to Psychoanalysis (Horace Liveright: New York, 1920), 7. Translation of
Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse [1916], by G. Stanley Hall.
28 Freud, ‘Twenty-Fifth Lecture: General Theory of Neuroses’, 352.
29 Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). Reference is primarily to the chapter
‘Architecture Dismembered’, 69–82.
30 The position is carefully articulated by Robert McAnulty, ‘Body Troubles’
in John Whiteman, Jeffrey Kipnis and Richard Burdett, eds, Strategies in
Architectural Thinking (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 180–97.
31 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, 79.
32 Ibid.
33 Julia Kristeva recognized Georges Bataille as the first philosopher to have
‘specified that the plane of abjection is that of the subject/object relationship
(and not subject/other subject)’. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on
Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 64. Translation of

Pouvoirs de l’horreur (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1980), by Leon S. Roudiez.
34 Lacan, Écrits, 2.
35 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 1991), 35. Translation of La Communauté désoeuvrée (Paris:
Christian Bourgois, 1986), by Peter Connor, Lisa Gartbus, Michael Holland and
Simona Sawhney.
36 Georges Bataille, ‘The “Old Mole” and the Prefix Sur in the Words Surhomme
[Superman] and Surrealist’ in Allan Stoekl, ed., Visions of Excess: Selected
Writings, 1927–39 (University of Minnesota Press, MN: Minneapolis, 1988),
166 Notes
40–2. Translation of ‘La Vieille Taupe et le préfixe sur dans les mots surhomme
et surréaliste’ in Œuvres Complètes, II: Écrits posthumes 1922–1940 (Paris:
Gallimard. 1970 [1930]), by Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie.
37 Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book VIII.
39 The concept comes to be applied to a variety of different domains by Deleuze
and Guattari, including the analysis of painting and music. Painting becomes
the deterritorialization of faces and landscapes, flesh and figure; music the
deterritorialization of the refrain of the human voice. Architecture, in this sense,
may be the deterritorialization of home and all the habitual relations that this
implies. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 300–2.
40 Ibid., 314.
41 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The House of Asterion’, in Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby,
eds, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (London: Penguin, 1964),
170–2. Translation of ‘La casa de Asterión’, in Los anales de Buenos Aires (May
1947).
42 Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book VIII.
43 Borges, ‘The House of Asterion’, 172.
Chapter 3: The impersonal
1 Henrietta Moraes, Henrietta (Hamish Hamilton: London, 1994).

2 Ibid., 85.
3 Jean Cocteau, Opium: The Diary of His Cure (London: Peter Owen, 2001),
37. Translation of Opium: journal d’une intoxication (Paris: Stock, 1930), by
Margaret Crosland.
4 Moraes, Henrietta, 85.

5 Ibid., 87.
6 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994), 204–5. Translation of Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris:
Les Éditions de Minuit, 1991), by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell.
8 Erin Manning and Brian Massumi write ‘[t]he site is in the process of
apportioning itself out, as the body is apportioning itself to it’. Erin Manning
and Brian Massumi, ‘A Perspective of the Universe’ in Inflexions 6, ‘Arakawa
and Gins’ (January 2013): 449. www.inflexions.org/n6_manning_massumi.pdf
(accessed 24 September 2013).
Notes 167

London: University of Alabama Press, 2002), 5.
10 Jean Cocteau, Les Enfants terribles (London: Vintage, 2003), 3. Translation of
Les Enfants terribles (Paris: Éditions Bernard Grasset, 1929), by Rosamund
Lehmann.
11 Ibid., 3.
12 Ibid., 29.
13 Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XIV (London: Hogarth, 1953),
243–58. Translation by James Strachey.
14 Sigmund Freud, ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’, in The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, VII (London:
Hogarth, 1953), 123–243. Translation by James Strachey.
15 William James, The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to Pragmatism (London:
Longmans, Green and Company, 1909), 102–20. Extract from ‘A World of Pure
Experience’, The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 29
September 1904–2 March 1905.
16 Dennis Rawlins, ‘Amundsen’s “Nonexistent” S. Pole Aiming Data’, in DIO: The
International Journal of Scientific History (and the supplemental Journal for
Hysterical Astronomy) (2/2, August 1992): 55–85.
17 Michel Foucault, ‘Des espaces autres’, conférence au Cercle d’études
architecturales, 14 March 1967, in Architecture, mouvement, continuité
(5 October 1984): 46–9.
University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 406–7. Translation of Mille plateaux,
volume 2 of Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1980),
by Brian Massumi.
19 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minnesota,
MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 56. Translation of Kafka: pour une
littérature mineure (Paris: Minuit, 1975), by Dana Polan.
20 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (Minneapolis, MN: University
of Minnesota Press, 1983). Translation of L’Anti-Oedipe (Paris: Les Éditions de
Minuit, 1972), Capitalisme et schizophrénie, vol. 1, by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem
and Helen R. Lane.
21 Ibid., 96.
22 Jean-Jacques Leclercle, Philosophy Through the Looking Glass (La Salle, IL: Open
Court, 1985), 173.
23 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 1.
168 Notes
24 Chris L. Smith and Andrew Ballantyne, ‘Flow: Architecture, Object, Relation’, in

Architectural Research Quarterly (ARQ) 14 (1), Cambridge University Press 14,
no.1 (2010): 21–7.
26 Georges Canguilhem, ‘Machine and Organism’, in Jonathan Crary and Sanford
Kwinter, eds, Incorporations (New York: Zone, 1992), 45.
27 Samuel Butler, ‘Darwin among the Machines’, in The Press (Christchurch, 13
June 1863). Butler published the piece under the pseudonym Cellarius.
29 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 57.
30 Lewis Mumford, ‘The First Megamachine’, in Diogenes 55 (July–September
1966): 3. Deleuze and Guattari quote this section but the translation of the last
sentence reads (in English): ‘then the human machine was a real machine’ (their
italics); Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 457.
31 Ibid., 457.
33 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, IV (London: Hogarth, 1953),
320. Translation by James Strachey.
34 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 81.
35 Cocteau, Opium, 18.
36 From Cocteau’s dedication of the book, Opium, to Jean Desbordes.
37 Cocteau, Les Enfants terribles, 72.
38 Ibid., 38.
39 Ibid., 83.
40 Brendan Gill, A New York Life: Of Friends and Others (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1991).
41 Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs (New York: George Braziller, 1972), 129.
Translation of Proust et les signes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964),

by Richard Howard.
42 Ibid., 128–9.
43 Ibid., 138.
44 Ibid., 136.
45 Cocteau, Les Enfants terribles, 3–4.
46 Ibid., 5.
47 Georges Bataille, ‘Architecture’ [1929], in Denis Hollier, Against Architecture:
The Writings of Georges Bataille (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992): 46–7.
Translation of La Prise de la concorde (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1974), by Betsy
Wing.
Notes 169
48 Douglas Darden, Condemned Building (New York: Princeton Architectural

Press, 1993), 145.
49 Ibid., 145.
50 Ibid., 148.
51 Marcel Proust, ‘Swann’s Way’, In Search of Things Past, Volume 1 (New York:
Henry Holt and Company, 1922). Translation of ‘Du côté de chez Swann’, in
À la recherche du temps perdu (Paris: Grasset, 1913), by C. K. Scott Moncrieff.
52 Alice Jardine, ‘Woman in Limbo; Deleuze and His Br(others)’, SubStance 13
(3–4) (1984): 49.
54 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990),
197. Translation of Logique du sens (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1969). Edited
by Constantin V. Boundas and translated by Mark Lester and Charles Stivale.
Refer also to Félix Guattari, ‘To Have Done With the Massacre of the Body’ in
Sylvère Lotringer ed., Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972–1977 (Los Angeles:
Semiotext(e), 2007), 207–14. Translated by David L. Sweet, Jarred Becker and
Taylor Adkins. Refer also to Gilbert Simondon, L’Individu et sa genèse physico-
biologique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964), 263.
55 Proust, ‘Swann’s Way’, 168.
56 Bataille, ‘Architecture’, 46–7.
2003), 40. Translation of Francis Bacon: Logique de la Sensation (Paris: Éditions
de la Différence, 1981), by Daniel W. Smith.
58 Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book XI: ‘with his songs, Orpheus, the bard of Thrace,
allured the trees, the savage animals, and even the insensate rocks, to follow
him’.
Chapter 4: The indiscernible
1 Virgil, ‘Book IV: Bee-Keeping (Apiculture)’, in The Georgics of Virgil in English

Verse (London: Macmillan and Co., 1912), 110–16. Translation by Arthur S. Way.
2 Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book X, Fable 1.
3 Ibid.
4 Plato, Symposium, Translation by Benjamin Jowett. The Project Gutenberg
(2008). https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1600/1600-h/1600-h.htm (accessed 27
November 2013).
5 Ibid.
170 Notes
6 It is worth noting that Virgil’s account, through less cutting, refers to Orpheus
as ‘hapless’. Virgil, ‘Book IV: Bee-Keeping (Apiculture)’, 111, 113.
7 Plato, Symposium.
8 Bernard Tschumi, ‘Advertisements for Architecture’, in Architecture Concepts:
Red is Not a Color (New York: Rizzoli, 2012), 46. Refer also to Bernard Tschumi,
‘Advertisements for Architecture’, Ad no. 8 in Architecture and Disjunction, 121.
9 This character is identified by Charles Comte’s early definition of appropriation
in Traité de la propriété (1834) where he suggests, ‘by this action (of connecting)
he appropriates (things) to himself. He transforms them into a part of himself,
in a way that one could not detach them from him without destroying him.’
Charles Comte, Traité de la propriété, 2 vols (Paris: Chamerot, Ducollet, 1834),
51.
London: University of Alabama Press, 2002), 5, 23.
11 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies
(London: Routledge, 2002). Translation of Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de
l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques in Sociologie et Anthropologie 1923–1924
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954), by W. D. Halls.
12 Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy (London: Continuum, 2004).
Translation of Économie libidinale (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1974), by Iain
Hamilton Grant.
13 Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Exscription’, in The Birth to Presence (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1993), 319–40. Translation by Brian Holmes.
14 David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon (London: Thames and Hudson,
1980), 13.
15 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (London: Athlone Press, 1983), 143.
Translation of Nietzsche et la philosophie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1962), by Hugh Tomlinson.

Massumi.
17 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Chapter XIV (1817).
18 Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as
Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’, 4, in Écrits (New York: W. W. Norton,
1977).
19 Nancy, ‘Exscription’, 65.
20 Virginia Woolf in Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann eds, The Letters of
Notes 171
Virginia Woolf: A Change of Perspective, Vol. III: 1923–8 (London: The Hogarth
Press 1937), 550.
21 Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (London: Penguin Popular Classics, 1996), 213.
22 Chris L. Smith, ‘Text and the Deployment of the Masochist’, in Angelaki:
Journal of Theoretical Humanities, Special Issue: ‘Shadows of Cruelty: Sadism,
Masochism and the Philosophical Muse- Part One’ 14 (3) (2009): 45–57.
23 Jean Cocteau, The Blood of a Poet (1930), Orpheus [Orphée] (1950) and
Testament of Orpheus (1960).
24 Marcel Proust, ‘The Guermantes Way’, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 3 (New York:
Penguin, 2002), 323–4. Translation of ‘Le côté de Guermantes’, in À la recherche
du temps perdu (Paris: Grasset, 1913), by Mark Treharne.
25 Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf: A Change of Perspective, 550.
26 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act
(New York: Cornell University Press, 1981), 10.
27 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 3.
28 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994), 19. Translation of Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris:
Les Éditions de Minuit, 1991), by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell.
30 Tschumi, ‘Advertisements for Architecture’, 46.
31 Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal in conversation with Mathieu Wellner,
‘Surplus’ in Muck Petzet and Florian Hellmeyer eds, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle,
catalogue for the German Pavilion, 13th International Architecture Exhibition,
La Biennale di Venezia 2012, 13. Refer also: María José Marcos and Gonzalo
Herrero Delicado, ‘Trebamo li doista (nove) gradevine u svojim gradovima? /
Do we really need (new) buildings in our cities?’, Oris 75 (2012): 116.
32 Lacaton, ‘Do we really need (new) buildings in our cities?’, 116.
33 Lacaton and Vassal, ‘Surplus’, 13.
34 Lacaton, ‘Do we really need (new) buildings in our cities?’, 116.

36 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 19.
37 Tschumi, ‘Advertisements for Architecture’, 45.
172 Notes
Chapter 5: The imperceptible

2 Ibid.
3 Michel Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1982). Translation by Josué V. Harari and David F.
Bell.
4 Serres, Hermes, 83. Refer also to Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations
on Science, Culture, and Time (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan
Press, 1995), 16, 129–30. Translation of Éclaircissements: cinq entretiens avec
Bruno Latour (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), by Roxanne Lapidus.
University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 498–9. Translation of Mille plateaux,
Capitalisme et schizophrénie, vol. 2 (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1980), by
Brian Massumi. Refer also to Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 51. Translation of Dialogues (Paris:
Flammarion, 1977), by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam.
6 Aristotle, On Sense and the Sensible [De Sensu et Sensibilibus]. Published as part
of The Works of Aristotle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931), sec. 2. Translation by
J. I. Beare.
7 Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book V section 2. Physics, Book II, sec. 3.
8 Aristotle, On Sense and the Sensible, sec. 2.
9 Aristotle, On The Heavens, ii.9. http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/heavens.2.ii.
html (accessed 27 November 2012). Translation by J. L. Stocks.
10 Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1984), 75–6 and 186. Translated from Éthique de la différence sexuelle
(Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1984), by Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill.
Refer also to Luce Irigaray, ‘The Wedding Between the Body and Language’, in
Luce Irigaray: Key Writings (New York: Continuum, 2004), 18.
11 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1962), 92. Translation of Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris:
Gallimard, 1945), by Michael Smith.
12 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1968), 133. Translation of Le Visible et l’invisible
(Paris: Gallimard, 1964), by Alphonso Lingis.
2003), 12–18. Translation of Francis Bacon: logique de la sensation (Paris:
Éditions de la Différence, 1981), by Daniel W. Smith.
Notes 173
14 Félix Guattari, Schizoanalytic Cartographies (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 36.

Translation of Cartographies schizoanalytiques (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1989), by
Andrew Goffey.
16 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber and Faber, 1939), 482: 34–6.
17 Jacob von Uexküll, ‘A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture
Book of Invisible Worlds’ in Claire H. Schiller, ed., Instinctive Behavior: The
Development of a Modern Concept (New York: International Universities Press,
1957), 5–80. Translation of ‘Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und
Menschen’ (1934) by Claire H. Schiller. The essay also appeared in Semiotica 89
(4) (1992): 319–91.
18 Uexküll, ‘A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men’, 5.
19 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 314. Refer also to 51, 257.
20 Ibid., 46.
21 Uexküll suggests, ‘there are, then, purely subjective realities in the Umwelten;
and even the things that exist objectively in the surroundings never appear there
as such’. Uexküll, ‘A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men’, 72.
22 Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies (I) (London
and New York: Continuum, 2008), 111–17. Translation of Les cinq sens (Paris:
Éditions Grasset et Fasquelle, 1985), by Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley.
23 Ibid., 141–3.
24 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The House of Asterion’, in Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby,
eds, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (London: Penguin, 1964),
170–2. Translated from ‘La casa de Asterión’, in Los anales de Buenos Aires (May
1947).
25 Serres, The Five Senses, 111.
26 Ibid., 129.
27 As with much of my thinking, I should note that on this point I am indebted to
Andrew Ballantyne. This particular point is distilled from a presentation that

we worked upon together for a seminar on the topic of ‘Music Machinic’, held
at the University of Newcastle, UK, in 2005. The chamber was designed and
constructed in 1943 by Leo Beranek, Director of Harvard’s Electro-Acoustic
Laboratory and later Professor and Technical Director of Electro-Acoustics at
MIT. The chamber was dismantled in 1971. It is now silent.
28 John Cage, ‘How to Pass, Kick, Fall, and Run’, in A Year From Monday: Lectures
and Writings (New York: Calder and Boyars, 1968), 134. Cage first spoke of
the experience in a 1958 lecture titled ‘Indeterminacy’ in Brussels. The space
inspired Cage’s 4’33”.
174 Notes
29 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘The Birth of Tragedy’, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New

York: Modern Library, 2000), 127. Translation of Die Geburt der Tragödie (1872)
by Walter Kaufmann.
30 John Cage, ‘Rhythm etc.’, in A Year From Monday, 122. ‘Native American’
has been modernized from ‘Indian’ in the original. ‘Rhythm Etc.’ was written
in 1961–2 for a publication by Gyorgy Kepes, Professor of Visual Design at
MIT, Module, Proportion, Symmetry, Rhythm (1966), as part of a series of books
exploring problems of form in architecture. As above, this point is drawn from
work conducted with Andrew Ballantyne.
31 Nietzsche, ‘The Birth of Tragedy’, 126–7.
32 Ibid., 126.
37. Translation of Opium: Journal d’une intoxication (Paris: Stock, 1930), by
Margaret Crosland.
34 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Zarathustra’s Prologue’, sec. 5, in Adrian Del Caro and
Robert B. Pippin, eds, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 9. Translation of Also sprach
Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen (Chemnitz: Ernst Schmeitzner,
1883–91) by Adrian Del Caro. Antonin Artaud, ‘To Have Done With the
Judgement of God’, in Susan Sontag, ed., Selected Writings (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1976), 571.
35 Francis Bacon cited in David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon (London:
Thames & Hudson, 1980), 13.
36 John Cage cited in Clark Coolidge, ed., Philip Guston: Collected Writings,
Lectures, and Conversations (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 2010), 30.
37 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New
York: Penguin Books, 1977). Originally published in 1963. Arendt sat through
the 1961 Eichmann trial, as did Henrietta Moraes. Moraes was with her new
husband Dom Moraes who was reporting the trials. Arendt took to the pen
following the trial. Moraes took to amphetamines.
38 Theodor Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, in Prisms (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1981), 34. Translated by Samuel and Shierry Weber Nicholsen.
39 Serres, The Five Senses, 107.
40 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and Invisible, 133–4.
41 Ibid., 136.
43 Robert Desnos, Domaine publique (Paris: Gallimard, 1953), 408.
Notes 175
44 Alan Ramon Clinton, Mechanical Occult: Automatism, Modernism, and the

Specter of Politics (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 29.
45 Katherine Conley, ‘The Myth of the “Dernier poème”: Robert Desnos and
French Cultural Memory’ in Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe and Leo Spitzer, eds,
Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Hanover, NH: University Press of
New England, 1999), 134–47.
46 Katherine Conley, Robert Desnos, Surrealism and the Marvelous in Everyday Life
(Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 203.
Chapter 6: Symptomatology
1 Henrietta Moraes, Henrietta (Hamish Hamilton: London, 1994), 31.

2 Ibid., 30.
3 Celia Paul cited in Geordie Greig, Breakfast with Lucian: A Portrait of the Artist
(London: Jonathan Cape, 2013), 142.
4 The oft-cited quote assigned to Lucian Freud is: ‘The longer you look at an
object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real’.
6 Ibid.
2003), 50. Translation of Francis Bacon: logique de la sensation (Paris: Éditions
8 Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 11.
Translation of Théorie de la religion (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1973), by Robert
Hurley.
9 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Coldness and Cruelty’, in Masochism (New York: Zone, 1989),
3. Translation of ‘Le Froid and le Cruel’, in Présentation de Sacher-Masoch

(Paris: Minuit, 1967), by Jean McNeil. This essay is an expansion of ideas
first developed in ‘De Sacher-Masoch au masochisme’, in Arguments 5 (21)
(January–April 1961): 40–6.
10 Charles Darwin cited in Francis Darwin, ed., The Autobiography of Charles
Darwin and Selected Letters (New York: Dover Publications, 1958), 23.
11 Ibid., 12.
12 Geoff Holder, Scottish Bodysnatchers (Stroud: The History Press, 2010), 9–10.
13 Holder suggests that all communities in proximity to the schools of medicine
in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen engaged means of protecting the
dead. Mortsafes and watching were key measures taken. Extant examples of
176 Notes
watchtowers include Dalkeith Cemetery, near Edinburgh, and the New Calton
Burying Ground, Edinburgh. Watch-houses were also constructed in remoter
Scottish areas and in Northumberland. In Udny Green, in Aberdeenshire, there
is a unique rotating morthouse. Holder, Scottish Bodysnatchers, 98–9.
14 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (London: The Architectural Press,
1927), 135–8. Translation of Vers une architecture (Paris: Les Éditions G. Crès,
1923), by Frederick Etchells.
15 Le Corbusier, Toward a New Architecture, 10, 102. For example: ‘Standards
are a matter of logic, analysis and minute study; they are based on a problem
which has been well “stated”’ (10); ‘The lesson of the airplane lies in the logic
which governed the enunciation of the problem and which led to the successful
realization. When a problem is properly stated, in our epoch, it inevitably finds
its solution’ (102).
16 Daniel W. Smith, ‘Critical, Clinical’, in Charles Stivale, ed., Gilles Deleuze: Key
Concepts (Chesham: Acumen, 2005), 183.
17 Daniel W. Smith, ‘Introduction: “A Life of Pure Immanence”: Deleuze’s “Critique
et Clinique” Project’, in Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical (Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), xvi. Translation of Critique et
clinique (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1993) by Daniel W. Smith and Michael
A. Greco.
18 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 4.
19 Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1997), 5–6. Translation of Sade, Fourier, Loyola (Paris: Éditions
du Seuil, 1971), by Richard Miller.
20 Ibid., 37.
21 Chris L. Smith, ‘Text and the Deployment of the Masochist’, in Angelaki: Journal
of Theoretical Humanities, Special Issue: Shadows of Cruelty: Sadism, Masochism
and the Philosophical Muse – Part One 14 (3) (2009): 45–57.
22 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Coldness and Cruelty’, Masochism (New York: Zone Books,
1989), 14. Translation of ‘Le Froid and le cruel’, Présentation de Sacher-Masoch
(Paris: Minuit, 1967), by Jean McNeil.
23 Ibid., 14.
24 Ibid.
25 Smith, ‘Introduction: “A Life of Pure Immanence”’, xvii.
26 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (London: The Athlone Press, 1990), 273.
Translation of Logique du sens (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1969). Edited by
Constantin V. Boundas and translated by Mark Lester and Charles Stivale. This
follows Nietzsche’s description of the philosopher as the ‘physician of culture’.
Notes 177
Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks

of the early 1870s (Atlantic Highlands NJ: Humanities International Press,
1979), 175. Translation by D. Breazeale.
27 Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 237.
28 Architecture and urban settlement were also important in the locating of
anatomical dissections. One of the distinctive features of the images of the
sixteenth-century Flemish anatomist, Andreas Vesalius, was the distinct
relationship established between the corpse and urban settlement.
30 Deleuze would suggest that his travels were more in intensity rather than
extensity. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues (London: The Athlone
Press, 1987), 37. Translation of Dialogues (Paris: Champs Flammarion, 1977), by
Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam.
31 Hubert Damisch, Fenêtre jaune cadmium, ou les dessous de la peinture (Paris:
Seuil, 1984), 99–120. Translation by Mick Finch.
32 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 195.
33 Hubert Damisch, L’Origine de la perspective (Paris: Champs Flammarion, 1987).
Herein Damisch points out that perspective in art preceded its formalization in
science.
34 It may be noted that the recorded history of the body-snatchers began in
Bologna (in 1319). Body snatching co-evolved with the study of human
anatomy at the University of Bologna and the first recorded body-snatchers
were (not surprisingly) medical students. Julia Bess Frank, ‘Body Snatching: A
Grave Medical Problem’, The Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine 49 (1976):
399–410.
35 Carlo Scarpa, ‘Can Architecture be Poetry’, in Peter Nover, ed., The Other City:
‘Carlo Scarpa: The Architect’s Working Method as Shown by the Brion Cemetery
in San Vito D’Altivole’ (Berlin: Ernst & Sohn, 1989), 17–18.
36 Marco Frascari, ‘The Tell-the-Tale Detail’, VIA 7 (1984): 31.

37 Marco Frascari, Monsters of Architecture: Anthropomorphism in Architectural
Theory (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991). Portions of the text were
presented at the ‘Space Symposium’, in Andros, Greece, in August 1985, at
the Special Session on ‘Architectural Monsters’, at the Annual Meeting of
the Semiotics Society of America in October 1985, and in a lecture at the
Architectural Association in London in 1985, an excerpt of which is published
as; Marco Frascari, ‘Some mostri sacri of Italian architecture’, AA Files 14
(Spring 1987): 42–7.
38 George Dodds, ‘Desiring Landscapes/Landscapes of Desire’, in George Dodds
178 Notes
and Robert Tavernor, eds, Body and Building: Essays on the Changing Relation of
Body and Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 247.
40 Ibid., 160, 163.
42 Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, 1995), 13. Translation of Chaosmose (Paris: Galilée,
1992), by Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis.
43 Dodds, ‘Desiring Landscapes/Landscapes of Desire’, 247.
45 Ibid., 63.
Chapter 7: Wayfaring
1 Henrietta Moraes, Henrietta (Hamish Hamilton: London, 1994), 72.

2 Ibid., 71.
3 Ibid., 85.
4 Patrick Garland noted of Moraes, ‘the real love of her life was Johnny Minton.
He was in love with [Norman] Bowler, and the nearest Henrietta could get
to Minton was to marry Bowler.’ Garland is cited in, Philip Hoare, ‘Obituary:
Henrietta Moraes’, Independent, 16 January 1999.
6 Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference (New York: Cornell University
Press, 1993), 162. Translation of L’Éthique de la différence sexuelle (Paris: Minuit,
1984), by C. Burke and G. C. Gill.
7 Barbara Hutton, the Woolworth heiress, reportedly described Deakin as ‘[t]he
second nastiest little man I have ever met’. Cited in Robin Muir, Under the
Influence: John Deakin, Photography and the Lure of Soho (London: Art/Books,
2014), 9.
9 John Deakin cited in Muir, Under the Influence, 12.
10 Francis Bacon cited in Moraes, Henrietta, 72. Moraes remembered two distinct
photographic-sessions with Deakin – punctuated by instructions from Bacon:
‘the other way up this time’. The negatives held in the John Deakin Archive
suggest as much. The accoutrement of the bedside table that exists in the
negatives that are more invasive are not present in the images taken ‘the other
way up’. The bed sheets are reordered in the different sets of images. There is
Notes 179
also a double exposure image amongst the negatives that may mean that Deakin
failed to wind the negative through the camera at the end of one photographic
session.
11 Félix Guattari, ‘To Have Done With the Massacre of the Body’, in Chaosophy:
Texts and Interviews 1972–1977 (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009), 207–14.
Translation of the anonymously published ‘Three Billion Perverts’, in Recherches
(March 1973), by David L. Sweet, Jarred Becker and Taylor Adkins.
13 Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
1994), 13. Translated from La Machine de vision (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1988),
by Julie Rose.
14 ‘Inframince’ is a notion developed by Marcel Duchamp. It refers to an
imperceptible thickness (épaisseur), a separation or a difference between two
things that can be imagined but not perceived. Refer to Harriet and Sidney
Janis, ‘Marcel Duchamp, Anti-Artist’ in View 5 (1) (March 1945): 18–24.
15 Brian Massumi describes an ‘afterimage’ related to the ‘plateau’ evoked by
Deleuze and Guattari. For Massumi, ‘a plateau is reached when circumstances
combine to bring an activity to a pitch of intensity that is not automatically
dissipated in a climax. The heightening of energies is sustained long enough
to leave a kind of afterimage of its dynamism that can be reactivated or
injected into other activities, creating a fabric of intensive states between which
any number of connecting routes could exist.’ Brian Massumi, ‘Translator’s
Foreword’, in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), xiv.
16 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (London: Vintage
Books, 2000), 10. Translation of La Chambre claire (Paris: Éditions du Seuil,
1980), by Richard Howard.
17 Bernard Tschumi, ‘Fireworks’ [1974], extract from Space: A Thousand Worlds
(London: Royal, 1975). Cited in Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction

(Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1994), 262.
18 Maurice Blanchot, ‘The Gaze of Orpheus’, in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader:
Fiction and Literary Essays (New York: Station Hill Press, 1999), 437. Translation
of ‘Le Regard d’Orphée’ in L’Espace littéraire (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1955),
by Lydia Davis, Paul Auster and Robert Lamberton.
19 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 59.
20 Blanchot, ‘The Gaze of Orpheus’, 437.
21 Ibid., 437.
22 Ibid.
180 Notes
23 Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1989), 27. Translation of Soleil noir: dépression et mélancolie
(Paris: Gallimard, 1987), by Leon S. Roudiez.
24 Freud would use the word ‘clinging’ to refer to the manner by which the subject
relates to the lost object. Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ in The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XIV
(London: Hogarth, 1953), 244. Translation by James Strachey.
University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 311. Translation of Mille plateaux, volume
2 of Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1980), by Brian
Massumi.
26 Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary: October 26, 1977–September 15, 1979 (New
York: Hill and Wang, 2010). Translation of Journal de deuil (Paris: Éditions du
Seuil, 2009), by Richard Howard.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., 5–6.
30 Ibid., 110.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid., 43.
33 Ibid., 26.
34 Ibid., 9.
35 Ibid., 106.
36 Ibid., 53.
37 Barthes, however, didn’t look away. He writes in Camera Lucida that he found a
photograph which he felt had the air of his mother. It was taken when she was
five years old and visiting the Winter Garden in Paris with her (then) seven-
year-old, brother. Barthes had, of course, not known his mother at that time of
her life. And yet the photograph harboured something of her, that ‘intractable
supplement of identity’. Barthes didn’t reproduce the Winter Garden photograph
of his mother in his book. He would write simply ‘for you, no wound’. Barthes,
Camera Lucida, 73.
38 Ibid., 63.
39 Ibid., 53.
40 Virginia Woolf, ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’ [1930] in The Death
of the Moth and Other Essays (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1942),
20–36.
41 Sigmund Freud, Two Case Histories (‘Little Hans’ and the ‘Rat Man’), ‘Analysis
Notes 181
of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy (1909)’ in Standard Edition of the Complete

Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 10 (London: The Hogarth Press and
the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1955), 115.
42 Sigmund Freud, ‘Fetishism’, Miscellaneous Papers, 1888–1938. Vol. 5 of Collected
Papers (London: Hogarth and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1924–50), 198–204.
43 Freud, Complete Psychological Works, v10, 203.
44 Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy (London: Continuum, 2004).
Translation of Économie libidinale (Paris: Les Éditions De Minuit, 1974) by Iain
Hamilton Grant.
45 Karl Marx in Friedrich Engels, ed., Capital: A Critique of Political Economy,
Vol. 1, part 1, ‘The Process of Capitalist Production’ (New York: Cosimo, 2007),
83. Translation of Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Hamburg:
Verlag von Otto Meissner, 1867) (based on the 4th edn [1890]), by Samuel
Moore, Edward B. Aveling.
of Minnesota Press, 1983), 2. Translated from L’Anti-Oedipe (Paris: Les Éditions
de Minuit, 1972), volume 1 of Capitalisme et schizophrénie, by Robert Hurley,
Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane.
47 Sigmund Freud, ‘On Fetishism’, in Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
[1927], 710.
48 Roland Barthes, ‘The Metaphor of the Eye’, in Critical Essays (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1972), 239.
49 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, the Seminar of
Jacques Lacan, Book X (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 103. Translation of Les
Quatre Concepts de la psychanalyse, Le Séminaire XI (Paris: Éditions du Seuil,
1973). Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller and translated by Alan Sheridan.
50 Jacques Lacan, Encore, the Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX (1972–3) (New
York: W. W. Norton, 1998). Translation of Le Séminaire, Livre XX: Encore (Paris:
Éditions du Seuil, 1975). Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller and translated by Bruce

Fink.
51 Maurice Blanchot, ‘The Song of the Sirens: Encountering the Imaginary’, in The
Station Hill Blanchot Reader: Fiction and Literary Essays (New York: Station
Hill Press, 1999), 443. Translation by Lydia Davis, Paul Auster and Robert
Lamberton.
52 Virginia Woolf in Nigel Nicolson ed., A Change of Perspective: The Letters of
Virginia Woolf, Vol. III, 1923–8 (London: The Hogarth Press 1937), 550.
53 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 158. The reference here is to the
Body without Organs as a ‘component of passage’.
182 Notes
54 Woolf, ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’, 21–2.

2003), 52. Translation of Francis Bacon: logique de la sensation (Paris: Éditions
56 The French word ‘le regard’ as in ‘Le Regard d’Orphée’ poses difficulties for
translation into English. It is noted that the term ‘gaze’ does not have the
abstract connotations that the word has in French.
58 Marco Casagrande, ‘Cross-over Architecture and the Third Generation City’,
Epifanio 9 (2008). http://www.epifanio.eu/nr9/eng/cross-over.html (accessed 8
January 2015).
60 Ibid., 49.
63 It was the night immediately prior to Saint Michael’s Day (Mikkelin Paiva).
Mikkelin Paiva replaced the previous festival, known as Kekri in which farmers
made offerings to the spirits of the dead: the Kekri.
64 ‘Land(e)scape’, footage uploaded on 27 May 2008. https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=fqzx1Nj_6SU (accessed 8 January 2015).
66 Elizabeth Smart cited in Muir, Under the Influence, 15. It might be noted that
Muir used the phrase ‘a maverick eye’ for the title of his 2002 text on Deakin’s
photography. Robin Muir, A Maverick Eye: The Street Photography of John
Deakin (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002).
68 Tschumi, ‘Fireworks’, 262.
69 Video footage would suggest less. ‘Land(e)scape’. https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=fqzx1Nj_6SU (accessed 8 January 2015).

18. Translation of Opium: journal d’une intoxication (Paris: Stock, 1930), by
Margaret Crosland.
Chapter 8: Speaking
1 Robin Muir, A Maverick Eye: The Street Photography of John Deakin (London:
Thames and Hudson, 2002), 7.
Notes 183
2 Daniel Farson, The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon (London: Century, 1993),
190.
3 Robin Muir, Under the Influence: John Deakin, Photography and the Lure of Soho
(London: Art/Books, 2014), 11.
4 Paul Rousseau (from the John Deakin Archive), personal correspondence of 2
March 2015. Of the twelve individual negatives Rousseau suggests, ‘it’s my sense
that we have one roll of twelve images, catalogued under 2 numbers for some
reason, and that as I recall there is another image we do not have the neg for,
there may well have been either another roll, or one more shot, the neg(s) of
which are lost’.
5 Robin Muir, Under the Influence, 11.
6 Joshua Bowler, personal correspondence of 2 March 2015.
7 Reference is to Francis Bacon’s works: Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe
(1963); Lying Figure (1966); and; a version number 2, Lying Figure with
Hypodermic Syringe (1968), and Lying Figure (1969).
8 Bowler, personal correspondence of 2 March 2015.
9 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (London: Vintage
Books, 2000), 38. Translation of La Chambre claire (Paris: Éditions du Seuil,
1980), by Richard Howard.
10 Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Translation of Donner la mort in
l’éthique du don, Jacques Derrida et la pensée du don (Paris: Métailié-Transition,
1992), by David Wills.
11 Ibid., 90.
12 Georges Bataille, ‘L’Anus solaire’ (Paris: Editions de la Galerie Simon, 1931).
Written in 1927.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993),
236. Translation of Le Geste et la parole (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 1964), by
Anna Bostock Berger.
16 Gilbert Simondon, L’Individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (Grenoble: Jérome
Millon, 1995), 159.
17 Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image-Music-Text (London:
Fontana, 1977), 144. Translation of ‘La Mort de l’auteur’ [1977], by Stephen
Heath.
of Minnesota Press, 1983), 170, xx, 4 (respectively). Translated from
184 Notes
L’Anti-Oedipe (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1972), Capitalisme et schizophrénie

vol. 1, by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane.
19 Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy (London: Continuum, 2004), 1–3.
Translation of Économie libidinale (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1974), by Iain
Hamilton Grant.
20 Gilles Deleuze, ‘I Have Nothing to Admit’, Semiotext(e) Anti-Oedipus 2 (3)
(1977): 112. Translation by Janis Forman.
21 Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1998), 152. Translation of Le Technique et le temps, 1:
La faute d’Epiméthée (Paris: Galilée, 1994), by Richard Beardsworth and George
Collins.
22 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1997), 281. Translation of De la grammatologie (Paris: Les
Éditions Minuit, 1967), by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Derrida suggests ‘if
supplementarity is a necessarily indefinite process, writing is the supplement par
excellence since it proposes itself as the supplement of the supplement, sign of a
sign, taking the place of a speech already significant’ (281).
23 Bernard Stiegler, ‘Who? What? The Invention of the Human’, in Technics and
Time, 1, 134–79.
Massumi.
25 Ibid., 36.
26 Bataille, ‘L’Anus solaire’.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid. I also imagine this is why Bacon chose not to turn back and re-examine
Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velásquez’s painting of Pope Innocent X, when it

came to painting his own screaming Pope some three centuries later.
30 Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs (New York: George Braziller, 1972), 42.
Translation of Proust et les signes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964)
by Richard Howard.
31 Maurice Blanchot, The Instant of my Death/ Demeure (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2000). Translation of ‘L’instant de la mort’ by Elizabeth
Rottenberg.
32 Ibid., 7.
33 Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony (Stanford, CA: Stanford
Notes 185
University Press, 2000), 47. Translation of ‘Demeure’ by Elizabeth Rottenberg.

The letter is of 20 July 1994.
34 Blanchot, The Instant of my Death, 9.
35 Douglas Johnson, ‘Maurice Blanchot’ Guardian, 1 March 2003. http://www.
theguardian.com/news/2003/mar/01/guardianobituaries.booksobituaries
(accessed 25 February 2015).
36 Blanchot, The Instant of my Death, 8.
37 Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure (New York: Station Hill Press, 1988),
8. Translation of Thomas l’obscur (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1941), by Robert
Lamberton.
38 Ibid., 8.
39 Ibid., 25.
40 Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, 236.
41 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Anti-Œdipus and other reflections’, class of 3 June 1980. Last
session at Vincennes, traduction: C. Gien Duthey point 10. http://www2.
univ-paris8.fr/deleuze/article.php3?id_article=401 (accessed 10 March 2015).
42 Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure, 16.
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid., 115.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid., 13.
47 Ibid., 78.
48 Ibid., 115.
49 Ibid., 25.
50 Maurice Blanchot cited in John Paul Ricco, The Logic and the Lure (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2002), 8.
51 Michel Foucault, ‘Maurice Blanchot: The Thought of the Outside’, in Foucault/
Blanchot (New York: Zone Books, 1990), 24. Translation of La Pensée du dehors
(Paris, Éditions Fata Margana, 1986), by Jeffrey Mehlman and Brian Massumi.
52 Jacques Derrida, speaking in the documentary film On Maurice Blanchot
(1998). Directed by Hugo Santiago. Translated by K. Pender and P. Salmon.
53 This concession is not one that operates in a unidirectional manner for
Blanchot. In The Infinite Conversation Blanchot suggests that ‘[t]o see is perhaps
to forget to speak; and to speak is to draw from the depths of speech an
inexhaustible forgetfulness’. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, Theory
and History of Literature, Volume 82 (Minneapolis and London: University
of Minnesota Press, 1993), 29. Translation of L’Entretien infini (Paris: Editions
Gallimard, 1969), by Susan Hanson.
186 Notes

55 Lars Iyer, ‘The Unbearable Trauma and Witnessing in Blanchot and Levinas’,
Janus Head 6 (1) (2003): 53.
56 Francesco Apuzzo and January Liesegang were the main architects and the
project also drew upon the skills of Jordane Coquart, María García Pérez,
Marius Busch, Sam Dias Carvalho.
57 January Liesegang cited in, Anne Johansson, GP, published 17 February 2015.
http://www.gp.se/nyheter/goteborg/1.2632029-nybyggd-bastu-med-hamnutsikt
(accessed 12 June 2015).
58 Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 1997), 4. Translation of Critique et clinique (Paris: Les Éditions
de Minuit, 1993), by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco.
59 City of Gothenburg, ‘Program Frihamnen and Parts of Ringön: Rivercity
Gothenburg’. http://alvstaden.goteborg.se/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/
program2021_final130131low.pdf (accessed 15 June 2015).
60 Jessica Segerlund, project manager for the riverbank development, cited in,
Anne Johansson, GP, published 17 February 2015. http://www.gp.se/nyheter/
goteborg/1.2632029-nybyggd-bastu-med-hamnutsikt (accessed 12 June 2015).
61 Johansson, GP.
62 Foucault, ‘Maurice Blanchot: The Thought of the Outside’, 24.
63 Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’, in The Work of Fire
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 336. Translation of La Part de
feu (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1949) by Charlotte Mandell.
64 Plato, Symposium. Translation by Benjamin Jowett. The Project Gutenberg
(2008).
67 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press,
1994), 139. Translation of Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses Universitaires

de France, 1968), by Paul Patton.
68 Ibid.
69 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-image (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 2007), 278. Translation of Cinéma 2: L’Image-temps (Paris: Les
Éditions de Minuit, 1985), by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta.
70 Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, 152.
71 Foucault, ‘Maurice Blanchot: The Thought of the Outside’, 12.
72 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 108. Deleuze is specifically referencing the
literature of Herman Melville, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and Franz Kafka.
Notes 187
73 Bataille recognized the necessary spilling over of intensity into extensity. He

writes that ‘[a] world that can’t be loved to death – in the same way a man loves
a woman – represents nothing but personal interest and the obligation to work’.
Georges Bataille, ‘The Sacred Conspiracy’ (1936). Translation by Mitch Adabor.
74 Deleuze, Critical and Clinical, 110.
Postscript
1 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (London: The Athlone Press, 1990), 24.
Translation of Logique du sens (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1969). Edited by
Constantin V. Boundas and translated by Mark Lester and Charles Stivale.
2 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-image (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 2007), 278. Translation of Cinéma 2: L’Image-temps (Paris:
Les Éditions de Minuit, 1985), by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Deleuze
would also refer to ‘an inside that lies deeper than any internal world’, in
reference to Foucault’s critique of interiority. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (London:
Continuum, 1988), 80. Translation of Foucault (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit,
1986), by Seán Hand.
3 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Anti-Œdipus and Other Reflections’, class of 3 July 1980. Last
session at Vincennes, traduction: C. Gien Duthey point 10. http://www2.
uni-paris8.fr/deleuze/article.php3?id_article=401 (accessed 21 May 2015).
4 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 24.
University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 112 and 120. Translation of Mille
plateaux, Capitalisme et schizophrénie, vol. 2 (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit,
1980), by Brian Massumi.
6 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press,
1994), 139. Translation of Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 1968), by Paul Patton.
7 Virginia Woolf cited in Phyllis Rose, Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf
(London: Routledge, 1986), 243.
8 Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure (New York: Station Hill Press, 1988),
96. Translation of Thomas l’obscur (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1941), by Robert
Lamberton.
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Index
Aalto, Alvar 82–3, 92, 96–7 asignifying 79, 96, 104, 110, 120
abjection 31, 165 n.33 assemblage 39, 44–5, 50, 57, 103–4, 113,
abstract real 101, 108, 117–18 129, 141, 153
Adorno, Theodor 91 asubjective 39–41, 47, 61, 104, 110, 120,
affect 5, 32, 74, 79–80, 83, 153, 158 123
agalma 146, 151 athleticism 9–10, 79, 158
Agamben, Giorgio xvi
air Bacon, Francis 3–4, 6–11, 16–19, 39–40,
in Barthes xvi, 123–4, 128 42, 61, 68–9, 73, 78, 90, 101, 103,
fleeting air (in Ovid) 32, 63, 78, 79–81, 115, 119–20, 129, 135–6, 138–9
121 Henrietta Moraes (1966) 7, 136
flight 159–60 Lying Figure (1966) 7
fresh air (in Deleuze and Guattari) 54, Lying Figure (1969) 3–4, 6–8, 19, 68–9,
126–7 136
material xvi, 52, 58, 69, 95, 133, 142, Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe
152, 154 (1963) 7–8, 18–19
Alcibiades see Plato Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe
anatomy 34, 49, 58–9, 123, 130, 177 n.34 (version number 2) (1968) 7
anchor xiii, xv, 6, 25–6, 44, 119, 148–9 Portrait of Henrietta Moraes (1963) 7,
anechoic chamber, Harvard University 136
86 Studio, 7 Reece Mews, South
animals Kensington 7, 11, 16, 39, 42, 69
birds 74, 84–5, 88–9, 94 banality 91
other non-human animals 21, 27, 35, bare
84–5, 87, 90, 110, 129–31, 140 architecture xvi–xvii, 5, 53, 61, 94, 98,
animula 123, 130 118, 121, 134, 145–6, 153, 155
anthropocentrism 10, 68 life xvi, 11, 18, 61, 71, 78, 98, 118, 121,
anus 18, 53, 103 123, 134, 145–6, 151, 153

Apollo place, Chelsea 20, 68, 119–20, 135, Barthes, Roland xvi, 108, 121–4, 127,
137 131–3, 138, 140, 159
apportioning 41, 53, 67–9, 71–3, 77–8, Camera Lucida (1980) 121–4
130, 155 Bataille, Georges xvi, 5, 14, 32, 52–3, 61,
Arakawa, Shusaku xvii, 26, 41, 68 104, 122, 139–41
architectural procedure 99, 104, 118 ‘L’Anus Solaire’ [1927] 122, 139, 141
Arendt, Hannah 91 Beckett, Samuel 18
Ariadne 25, 35–6, 97, 122 Bernard, Bruce 135
Aristotle 80–1, 86 between (the) 67, 73–5, 77–8, 90, 123,
arm/s xiii, xv–xvi, 7, 14, 42, 63, 65, 67, 70, 159–60
74, 101, 140, 151, 153, 155, 157–8 birds see animals
art gallery 3, 16, 68–9, 74, 77 Blanchot, Maurice xvi, 121–3, 127–9, 132,
Artaud, Antonin 19, 89 142–6, 149, 151, 158–60
200 Index
‘Gaze of Orpheus’ (1955) 121–2, 129 48–9, 63–4, 71, 73, 79, 122, 128,
Thomas the Obscure (1941) 142–4, 142, 153, 156–7
151, 160 chaosmos 21, 31, 40–1, 48–9, 51–2, 61,
see also inspired and unconcerned 71, 79, 128
body xvi, 5–6, 8–11, 18–19, 28, 30, 34, chiasm 90
41–2, 46, 49–51, 53–4, 57–8, 61, 63, clinamen (Lucretius) 21
69, 72–3, 81, 86, 89–91, 94–5, 103, clouds xiii, xvi, 5, 11, 42, 92, 94, 98, 131,
105–6, 110, 113, 115, 117–18, 121, 142, 155, 157, 160
123, 125, 129, 135–40, 143, 145–6, Cocteau, Jean 40–2, 48–53, 61, 72, 89,
149, 151 124, 133, 156, 159
body snatching 105–6, 118 Les Enfants Terribles (1929) 41–4, 46,
flesh 6–8, 10, 27, 31, 53, 61, 69, 82–3, 48–50, 52, 61, 159
91, 105, 139 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 21, 69
meat 6–7, 69 concrete
see also corporeality here and now (Simondon) xvii, 9, 10
Body without Organs 19, 28, 34, 50, 128, material 5, 25, 61, 76, 91–2, 94–6, 98,
144, 181 n.53 112–18, 148, 157–8
Bois des Bruyères 142 real (Deleuze and Guattari) 8, 10, 58–9,
Borges, Jorge Luis 35, 86 98, 108, 117–18, 122, 125, 127
Bowie, David 25 real (Marx) 9
Bowler, Joshua 135 corporeality 31, 40, 50–1, 53, 57, 63–5,
boxes 13–14, 16, 42, 86, 90, 112, 135, 67, 74, 77, 95, 105, 143, 151 see also
138–9, 141, 151 body; flesh; meat
breath xiii, xvii, 25, 28, 33, 35, 41, 45–6, Cowell, Simon 73
52–4, 57, 59, 61, 63, 67, 74, 79, 96, cut (coupure) 14, 16, 31, 42, 44–5, 47–50,
126–7, 129, 132, 145, 154–5 54, 57–9, 61, 91–2, 94, 96–8, 135,
breast/s 27, 46, 61, 101, 103 139, 157
Breton, André 32
Brion Vega Cemetery, San Vito d’Altivole Da Vinci, Leonardo 10, 12
(Scarpa) 65, 110–18 Daedelus 26
Bruder Klaus Chapel (Zumthor) 5 Dalí, Salvador 19
bubbles 43, 84–7, 90 Damisch, Hubert 111
Butler, Samuel 46 Darden, Douglas 54–61 see also Oxygen
Byron, George Gordon (Lord) 21 house
Darwin, Charles 46, 84, 104–6
Cage, John 86, 88, 90 Deakin, John 6, 20, 69, 119–20, 132,
Canguilhem, Georges 10, 46 135–7, 139
Carnac, France xiii–xv death 40, 47, 49–51, 54, 58, 63–5, 67–8,
Casagrande, Marco 121, 130–2, 134 see 72, 74–5, 77–8, 80, 89, 98, 104–5,
also Land(e)scape, Savonlinna 108, 110, 112, 115, 117–18, 122–3,
(1999) 130–4, 139–45, 155, 159–60
cemeteries Deleuze, Gilles xvi, 3, 6–10, 18, 25–6, 33,
Brion-Vega see Brion Vega Cemetery, 40, 42, 44–8, 51–2, 57–8, 61, 69,
San Vito d’Altivole 73, 80, 83, 85, 95, 103, 104, 107–11,
Brompton 106 113, 115, 117, 122, 126–9, 140–2,
Edinburgh 105–6, 118 144–6, 151–8, 158–9
also see graves ‘Coldness and Cruelty’ (1967) 109
cervix 103 Difference and Repetition (1968)
chaos xiii, xv, 20–6, 29, 32–6, 39, 40, 44–5, 152–3, 159
Index 201
Essays Critical and Clinical (1993) 104, elsewhere 95, 124, 127–8, 130, 134, 149
107–8, 109–10, 113, 115, 117 encounter 11, 115, 145, 151–3
Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation epiphylogenesis 140
(1981) 7–10, 103 eros 35, 64–5, 73, 141
Logic of Sense, The (1969) 109, 155 erotic (the) 16, 21, 23, 61, 80, 92, 141, 151,
Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962) 73 153
Proust and Signs (1964) 51 Euclidean geometry 10, 154
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix xvi, 3, Eurydice 42–3, 63–4, 67, 78–9, 89, 121–2,
25–6, 33, 40, 42, 44–8, 57, 69, 73, 125, 128, 132, 146, 151
80, 85, 95, 111, 122, 126–8, 140–2 excess xvi, 34–5, 103, 115, 126, 138, 151
Anti-Oedipus (1972) 42, 45, 72, 126 exhaustion 9, 90, 115
Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature exscription xvi, 8, 71–2, 77, 143 see also
(1975) 3 inscription
Thousand Plateaus, A (1980) 73 extensity 27, 79, 89, 115, 133, 142–3,
What is Philosophy? (1991) 111 158
delirium 48–9, 103, 107, 112, 117 exteriority 14, 16, 26–7, 82–3, 139–46,
Derrida, Jacques 139–40, 142, 145 153–4, 157–8
desire xv, 29, 32–5, 43–5, 47–50, 53, 57, 59, extraction 22–3, 26–9, 32, 34, 39, 44–5,
61, 72, 88, 121–5, 127–9, 153, 160 51, 57, 73, 79
Desnos, Robert 96–8, 117, 123 eye/s 5, 9, 14, 23, 34–5, 53, 67–8, 72, 81,
‘Dernier poéme’ 97–8, 117, 123 83, 96, 120, 122, 124, 126, 129, 133,
deterritorialization see territorialization 136–8, 141, 143–4, 152–4
diagnostics 104, 106–8, 110, 118, 130
Diller, Elizabeth 54, 65 feet 153
discernibility 19–20, 25–6, 70, 131, 136–8, fetish 124–8
155 see also indiscernibility commodity fetishism 125–6
diving tower in religion 124, 126
Carnac xiii–xvi sexual 124–7
Granville 155–60 figure (the) 6–11, 14, 16–19, 69, 101, 122,
Dodds, George 113, 115 137
Domenig, Gunther 54 in Scarpa 115, 117, 120
double exposure see photograph/s finding the self see self
drift xiii, xvi, 8, 19, 21, 23, 26, 29, 32, finger 5, 11, 82
34–5, 40–1, 44, 53, 69, 71, 73, 80, fingernail 5, 9, 35
83, 89–91, 98, 119, 121, 123, 128–9, Finlandia Hall, Helsinki 82, 92
134, 155, 158, 163 n.2 flesh see body

drugs 7, 19, 22, 40, 42–4, 46–7, 49, 138 flow 9, 21, 23, 32, 35, 45–7, 58, 86, 90, 98,
cocaine 51, 89, 124, 133 110, 115, 120, 123, 147
heroin 19 formless (enforme) xvi
methedrine 40, 46–7, 53 Foucault, Michel 44, 145, 149, 153
fragment 23, 69, 87, 112
ear/s 79–80, 83, 86–9, 95, 98, 121, 129 fragmented architecture 26, 29–30,
Earth xiii–xv, 7, 19–23, 25–7, 31–5, 57, 112–13
63–4, 73, 80–2, 84, 95–6, 98, 130, fragmented body 28–30
139, 147, 155, 157–8, 160 Frascari, Marco 112–13
Einaudi, Ludovico 85–6, 88 Freud, Lucian 101–3, 119
Eisenman, Peter 91 Girl in a Blanket (1953) 101–3
Eleanor (of Oakley street, Chelsea) 39–40, Freud, Sigmund 28–30, 33, 43–4, 48,
43–4, 47, 119 72–3, 109, 117, 122, 125, 127, 129
202 Index
fetish 125–7 indiscernible (the) xvi, 14, 18–20, 63, 67,

lost object 43, 122 69, 72–3, 76, 82, 104, 120, 139, 141,
Fynsk, Christopher 8 144, 159
zone of indiscernibility 67, 72–4
gaze 27, 63, 70, 129–30, 133–4 see also discernibility
of Orpheus (Blanchot) 63, 121–2, individuation xvii, 140
129–30 inframince 120, 129, 179 n.14
geography xv, 9, 39, 41 inorganic life 80, 83, 94, 98, 134 see also
geometry 10–11, 23, 29, 34, 61, 110, nonorganic
112–13, 149, 151 inscription 8, 73, 77, 92, 143 see also
germinal forces 26, 34, 146, 153 exscription
Gill, Brendan 51 inspired and unconcerned (Blanchot)
Gins, Madeline xvii, 26, 41, 68 129–30
Girl in a Blanket (1953) see Freud, Lucian intensity 5–6, 18, 34–5, 50, 57, 59, 74, 77,
gods xv, 64–5, 89, 160 79–80, 83, 86, 133, 142–5, 156–8
graves 58, 105–6, 124, 140, 144 also see interiority 16, 26, 30, 138–46, 151–4, 159
cemeteries in Barthes 140
Guattari, Félix xvi, 3, 25–6, 33, 40, 42, in Bataille 140–1
44–8, 57, 69, 73, 80, 83, 85, 95, 111, in Deleuze 140–1, 144, 187 n.2
115, 122, 126–8, 140–2 see also in Deleuze and Guattari 26, 140–2
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix in Derrida 139
in Foucault 145
hand/s xvi, 11, 47, 64, 82–3, 92, 96, 124, in Leroi-Gourhan 140, 144
126, 128, 133, 137, 159 in Lyotard 140
hardening 90–2, 98 in Simondon 140
Häring, Hugo 53 in Stiegler 140, 153
heart 16, 25–6, 40, 42, 47, 61, 67, 71, 78, invisibility 79, 82, 84, 96, 138–9
88, 91, 103, 119, 123, 135, 139, 149, Irigaray, Luce 81, 119
159, 160 Iyer, Lars 146
Hejduk, John 54
here and now xiii, xvii, 9–10, 117–18, 142, James, William 43–4
158, 160 Jameson, Fredric 73
hodology 115 Joyce, James 21, 40, 83
home 24, 26, 28, 30, 41–2, 57, 67, 75, 88,
91, 98, 120, 144, 159 Kafka, Franz 3, 21
Hughes, Ted 21, 149 Kensington Gardens, London 11, 13, 16

hypodermic syringe 7–8, 10–11, 18–19, knee/s xiii, xvi, 136, 153
29, 42, 47, 103, 120, 123–4, 158 Kristeva, Julia 122, 134, 165 n.33 see also
inscription
Icarus 32
Île de la Cité, Paris 80, 91–2 labia 44, 53, 121
imperceptible (the) 79–80, 83–4, 87–91, labyrinth 23, 24, 26, 34–5, 86, 144
94, 98, 104, 120, 139, 144 Lacan, Jacques 27–33, 42–3, 71, 73, 127, 144
impersonal (the) 39–40, 46–7, 50, 61, 98, non du pére 31–3, 73, 88
104, 120, 123, 139, 144 see also mirror stage; objet petit a;
impossibility xv, 35, 69, 88–90, 115, 157 symbolic
incorporeality 31, 40, 50–1, 53, 57, 61, Lacaton, Anne 54, 65, 75–7 see also Place
63–5, 67, 74, 77, 95, 105, 143–4 see Léon Aucoc, Bordeaux
also corporeality Land(e)scape, Savonlinna (1999) 121, 130–4
Index 203
language 16, 31–2, 34–5, 49–50, 52, 59, menstrual fluid 101, 103, 107
61, 67, 86, 95, 108, 127, 143–4, 146, methedrine see drugs
153–4 metonym 113
Le Corbusier 76, 106–7, 115 milieu 110, 113, 120, 153
leg/s xiii–xiv, 87, 105, 130, 132, 135–6, mimesis 10, 74, 108
148–9, 153, 157–8 Minotaur
Leroi-Gourhan, André 24, 140, 144 in Borges 35–6
Leque, Jean-Jacques 53 in Ovid 23
libido xv, 27, 29, 68–9, 125–6 Minton, John 119, 178 n.4
libidinal economy (Lyotard) 68, 126 mirror stage 27–8, 30 see also Lacan,
Liebeskind, Daniel 26 Jacques
Liesegang, January 146, 186 n.56 modulation 5, 11, 82
linguistics see language Moraes, Henrietta 6–7, 19–20, 39–40, 68,
lips 27, 29, 44, 58, 73, 153 101, 103, 106, 119–21, 128, 135–8,
losing the self see self 159
lost object see object/s 9 Apollo Place see Apollo place, Chelsea
love 5, 9, 63–5, 67, 74, 76–8, 80, 88, 91, Eleanor’s room see Eleanor (of Oakley
97–8, 103, 119, 122–3, 141, 143, Street, Chelsea)
151, 153–4, 160 moulding 5, 11
Lucretius, Titus Lucretius Carus 21, 140 mouth 18, 27, 46–7, 53, 95–6, 103
Ludwig II of Bavaria 53 moving on 121, 129, 131
lung/s 41–2, 44, 46–8, 51, 53–5, 58, 61, mucous membrane 58
129, 135 mucous of the carnal 119–20
Lying Figure (1969) see Bacon, Francis Mumford, Lewis 48, 168 n.30
Lyotard, Jean Francois 68, 126, 140 murder 65, 74, 77, 104
music 47–8, 83, 85–8, 91–2, 113, 121–2,
machinic xvi, 42, 44, 45–8, 50–1, 53, 57, 129, 132, 139, 155, 160
68, 141, 147, 153 mutant 83
work of art as machine 51–5, 57–61
Malins, Peta 19 nailing 7–8, 11, 18
Manning, Erin 166 n.8 naked xvi, 6, 68–9, 71, 77, 119–20, 133,
Masoch, Leopold von Sacher- 108–9, 113 135–7, 145, 149, 151, 153, 157
masochism 16, 73, 77, 108–9 Nancy, Jean-Luc xvi, 8, 32, 68, 71, 134
Massumi, Brian 166 n.8, 179 n.15 navel 11
Marx, Karl 9, 126–7 negatives see photograph/s
Mauss, Marcel 68 Nietzsche, Friedrich 73, 87–9, 140, 176

meat see body n.26
Mémorial des Martyrs de la Deportation, nipple/s 27, 29, 31, 43, 46–7, 58, 61, 73
Paris (1962) 80, 91–8 nonorganic 127
memorials (Holocaust) 90–1 normal 10, 88
Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial, normal man (Canguilhem) 10, 162
Vienna 91 n.23
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of
Europe, Berlin 91 Oakley street, Chelsea 39–40
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 81–3, 92, 94 objectivity 17, 49, 83
Phenomenology of Perception (1945) 81 object/s 13–14, 27, 39, 42–4, 51, 55, 57,
Visible and the Invisible, The (1964) 65, 67, 73, 81–3, 90, 94, 103–4, 111,
82, 92 116, 122, 125, 127–30, 133–4, 136,
medicine 10, 46, 104–10, 118 138–40, 143, 152, 158
204 Index
lost object 43, 122 objects of passage see object/s

objects of passage 120–1, 124–5, place of passage 94, 122–3
127–8, 160 see also Blanchot, Paul, Celia 101
Maurice ‘Gaze of Orpheus’ penis/phallus 53, 125, 133
objet petit a 43, 127, 136, 138, 144 see people
also Lacan, Jacques unborn people 69
partial objects 103, 115 who are missing 108, 117, 146
Oedipal complex 33–4, 42, 45, 49, 109 yet to come 69
Oedipus 28–9, 33, 49, 72, 109, 125, 133 perception 81–5, 87, 90, 94, 96 see also
Old Ship Hotel, Brighton 135 imperceptibility
organism 80, 84, 90, 140, 144, 149, 153 see Phaedrus see Plato
also body; corporeality; flesh; meat; phallocentrism 10
organic phenomenology 52–3, 81, 84, 88
organon 147 photograph/s 6, 11, 19, 39, 42, 44, 49, 51,
organs xvi, 18, 27, 34, 44, 46–7, 49, 53, 55, 69, 85, 87, 98, 119–25, 128, 131–2,
61, 67–9, 80–1, 83, 86, 89–90, 98, 135–6, 138, 141, 163 n.2
103, 120, 125, 127, 129, 131, 133–4, double exposure 136–8, 142, 151
149, 151–3, 159 see also anus; negatives 135, 138, 178–9 n.10
arm/s; breast/s; ear/s; eye/s; feet; photographer/s 41, 51, 128, 132–3,
finger; fingernail; hand/s; heart; 135, 137–9
knee/s; labia; leg/s; lips; lung/s; photography 121, 129
mouth; navel; nipple/s; orifice/s; Pingusson, Georges-Henri 80, 91 see
penis/phallus; prosthesis-organ; also Mémorial des Martyrs de la
skin; stomach; thigh/s; toe/s; torso; Deportation, Paris (1962)
urethra; vagina Place Léon Aucoc, Bordeaux 65, 75–7
organ-machine 46 Plato 64–5, 139, 151
orgasm (la petite mort) 67, 127, 141 Alcibiades 64, 151
orifice/s 18, 27, 125 see also anus; ear/s; Phaedrus 64–5, 67, 74, 139
lips; mouth; navel; penis/phallus; Socrates 64, 151, 153
urethra; vagina poetry 21–3, 25, 31–5, 63, 88, 97–8, 112,
Orpheus 25, 42, 48, 63–5, 67, 72, 74, 77–80, 117, 123, 154
86, 97, 105, 121–3, 125, 128–9, point (the) 18, 103, 128
132–3, 139, 141, 143, 151, 159–60 compass point 11, 123
Osbourne, Sharon 73 piercing 5, 7, 39, 72, 79, 123, 132, 147
other (the) xiii, xv, 28, 30, 34, 41, 43–4, pin-pointing 5, 7, 9, 11, 19, 34, 39, 42,
46, 49, 67–8, 72–4, 84, 122–3, 45, 48–9, 53, 69–70, 83, 103, 120,
139–43, 151, 155–6 123, 144, 158
other spaces (Foucault) 48 see also hypodermic syringe
otherwise and whatever xiii, 34, 139, 151, pornography 119–20, 136
154 pragmatics 39, 46, 48, 57, 80, 88–9
Oudolf, Piet 11 pretext 112, 124, 126–8, 134–5
outside (the) xvi, 26, 33, 41–3, 48–9, 58, prosthesis-organ xvi, 8, 11, 18, 53, 55, 61
69, 71, 80, 126, 139, 140–6, 153–6 Proust, Marcel 51, 57, 61, 72, 124 see also
Ovid 21, 23, 35, 63–4, 67, 72–3, 77, 79–80 Deleuze, Gilles, Proust and signs
Oxygen house (1993) 54–61 (1964)
proximity xiii, 18, 41, 44–5, 55, 57, 83–5,
partial objects see object/s 129, 142, 155, 158
passage xiii, 5, 17–18, 94–5, 103, 120–4, psychoanalysis 27–9, 33–4
127–9, 134, 181 n.53 critique of 29, 33, 140
Index 205
see also Freud, Sigmund; Lacan, section (architectural) 57–8

Jacques; Oedipal complex self xiii–xvii, 5, 19–20, 28–31, 41, 44, 47,
punctum 121, 123, 131 52, 64, 67–9, 72, 77, 83, 86, 90, 120,
Pygmalion 71, 73 123, 125, 129, 134, 139–43, 145–6,
158, 160
Raumlabor 138, 146 see also sauna, finding xiii, 5, 28, 81, 141–2
Göteborg Sweden losing xiii, xvi, 5, 20, 28, 35, 53, 64,
Ray, Man 51 139, 141–2
Real (the) xvi, 3, 27–8, 30–2, 34, 42, 44, sensation xiii, xvi, 7, 11, 16–17, 27, 40, 61,
139, 142, 160 83–4, 86, 98, 126, 131, 142, 153,
Reiser, Jesse 54 155, 158
Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 72 sense 3, 16, 41, 48–50, 73, 109, 141–2,
resonance 30, 50, 52, 81–2, 96 153, 155
‘system of internal resonance’ senses 80–4, 86, 153
(Simondon) 11, 16 Serpentine Gallery pavilion, London
reterritorialization see territorialization (2011) 11, 13–17
Reuleaux, Franz 48 Serres, Michel xvi, 20–3, 25, 33–4, 79,
reversibility 92, 141 86–7, 89, 91, 164 n.11
revolution 3, 71, 105 shadow 16, 25, 49, 54, 97–8, 117, 123–4,
of desire 33 129, 134, 139
revolutionary force 3, 104 silence xiii, 13, 52, 63, 68, 77, 80, 86,
Rintala, Sami 121, 130–2, 134 see also 89–92, 94, 96, 98, 113, 123 see also
Land(e)scape, Savonlinna (1999) imperceptibility
ritournelle 16, 63, 86 Simondon, Gilbert xvii, 5, 9, 11, 58, 140
river 23, 121, 129 singularity xvii, 9–10, 18, 42, 45, 50, 53,
Göta älv, Göteborg 138, 146–7, 149, 69, 72, 74, 79, 98, 103–4, 112, 123,
152 133–4, 153, 158
Ouse, Yorkshire 77, 159 sirens 86, 88, 91, 127–8
Seine, Paris 91–2, 94, 98 skin xiii, xvi, 82, 86, 139, 149, 153
Thames, London 39, 120 Slöterdijk, Peter 84
rhythm xiii, 23–5, 32–5, 50, 84, 96, 122, Smith, Daniel W. 107, 109
157, 174 n.30 Socrates see Plato
solar anus see Bataille (L’Anus Solaire)
Sade, Marquis de 108–9 sonority 25–6, 35, 48, 86, 90, 122
Saint-Hilaire, Étienne Geoffroy 85 spasm 6, 10, 18, 61, 83, 89, 157–8
sauna, Göteborg Sweden 138, 146–54 speaking 23, 46, 61, 68–9, 79, 88, 96, 110,
scale 23, 57, 82, 89, 110, 112–13, 117, 140 117, 123, 135, 138–40, 142, 144–6,
Scarpa, Carlo 53, 65, 110–13, 115, 117–18 151, 153–4
see also Brion Vega Cemetery, San architectural parlante 144, 151, 153
Vito d’Altivole stars 5, 23, 26, 33–5, 42, 47, 81, 89, 142
schizoanalysis xvi, 71, 140, 159 Stiegler, Bernard 140, 153
science (in Serres) 20, 22–3, 29, 33, 35, 84 stomach 18, 103, 129, 135–6
Scofidio, Ricardo 54, 65 stratification 19–20, 34, 49
Scott, Robert Falcon 39, 44 stutter 35, 61, 154
scream 21, 31–3, 35, 68, 77–9, 88–9, 91, subjectification 47, 52
133, 140–1 suicide 71, 77, 119, 135, 141, 159
screaming Pope (Bacon) 68, 77–8, 139 surface xvi, 26, 63, 80, 82, 89, 92, 144, 158
sea xv–xvi, 21–4, 26, 35, 44, 120, 135, 142, suspension 68–9, 71, 77, 113
146, 156, 160 wilful suspension (Coleridge) 69, 77
206 Index
Sylvester, David 6–7, 69 umwelt 84

symbolic order 32–4, 48 uncanny (the)
symptomatology 101, 104, 107–10, 118, in Freud (unheimlich) 30, 120
130 in Vidler 30
symptom/s 103–4, 106–8, 112, 118, 127 urethra 9
syringe see hypodermic syringe
vagina 53, 125–6
terminus 43–4 Vassal, Jean-Philippe 54, 65, 75, 77 see
territorialization xv, 19, 26–7, 30–2, 34 also Place Léon Aucoc, Bordeaux
deterritorialization 19, 33–4, 166 n.39 Venturi, Robert 26
reterritorialization 19, 35 Vera, Wendy 73
territory xv, 8, 19, 22–4, 26–7, 34, 36, 57, Vidler, Anthony 30
84, 115, 122, 134, 156 violence 11, 16, 31, 43, 49–50, 57, 61, 71,
text 3, 71, 96–7, 104, 112–13, 115, 134–5, 80, 88, 90, 105, 108, 133, 139, 141
143–4, 159–60 see also language Virgil 63–4, 170 n.6
texture 82, 92, 96–7, 113, 159 Virilio, Paul 120
thanatos 118, 141, 159 Vitruvian man 10–11
theatre 63–5, 68–70, 72, 74, 77–8, 83, 88, Vitruvius 10–11
131
theatricalization 108 wayfaring xv, 119, 124, 128–30, 145
thickness (épaisseur) 101, 111–2, 115, 179 Whiteread, Rachel 91
n.14 Wilde, Oscar 39, 159
thigh/s 54, 141, 153–4 Woods, Lebbeus 54
threshold 77, 122, 145, 151 Woolf, Virginia 71–2, 85, 124–6, 128–9,
of indiscernibility 73, 76 132, 134, 158–9
tide xiv–xvi, 120–1, 128–9, 155–7 Mrs Dalloway (1925) 17, 71–2
toe/s 11 ‘Street Haunting’ (1930) 124–5, 129
torso 137 Waves, The (1931) 85
trace 25, 29–30, 48, 54, 73 Wright, Frank Lloyd- 26
trauma 31, 42, 61, 133
Tschumi, Bernard 65, 74, 76–7, 121, 133 Zumthor, Peter 6, 11, 13, 16–17 see also
Bruder Klaus Chapel; Serpentine
Uexküll, Jacob von 84–5 Gallery pavilion, London (2011)
Umemoto, Nanako 54

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Schizoanalysis and Ecosophy, edited by Constantin V. Boundas

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First published 2017

Copyright © Chris L. Smith, 2017

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Part 1 Bodies and Architectures

2 Earth and Territory 19

Part 2 Poststructural Virtues

Part 3 Architectural Procedures

In the text Schizoanalytic Cartographies (1989), the psychoanalyst Félix

I am ever grateful for the magnificent mentoring and warm friendship I

Joshua Bowler for identifying a figure in a double-exposed photograph that,

0.1 Diving, Plongeoir, Carnac. Photograph courtesy of David Collins

1.3 Exterior of Serpentine Pavilion. Photograph by author (2011). 13

1.4 Interior corridor. Photograph by author (2011). 15

1.5 A garden within. Photograph by author (2011). 17

2.1 John Deakin, Lying Figure Photograph. John Deakin, Henrietta

Moraes at 9 Apollo Place, c. 1963, © The John Deakin Archive.

2.3 Rhythm. Photograph courtesy of Frederick Sarran, ‘Labyrinth’

2.4 Empty Warehouse. Photograph courtesy of Ashley Albin, ‘These

3.1 Douglas Darden, Plan at nurse’s level. Image courtesy of Allison

3.2 Dis/continuous Genealogy. Image courtesy of Allison Collins, 2016. 56

3.3 ‘Anatomical section’. Image courtesy of Allison Collins, 2016. 59

3.4 Douglas Darden, Frontispiece. Image courtesy of Allison Collins,

4.1 Bernard Tschumi, Advertisements for Architecture, Ad no. 8.,

4.2 Orpheus in the Underworld. Photograph courtesy of Jean-Étienne

4.3 Place Léon Aucoc, Bordeaux. Photograph courtesy of Lacaton and

5.1 The stair, Mémorial des Martyrs de la Deportation. Photograph by

5.2 The bunker. Photograph courtesy of Kieran Richards (2015). 95

5.3 Entrance to the chamber. Photograph courtesy of Kieran Richards

6.1 Lucian Freud, Girl in a Blanket, 1953. Oil on canvas. Private

6.2 Brion-Vega Cemetery, San Vito d’Altivole. Photograph courtesy of

6.3 Concrete gate. Photograph courtesy of Kendra Jaen (2010). 114

6.4 Concrete stairs. Photograph courtesy of Ingrid Berniga Dotras

7.1 Barns against the sky. Photograph courtesy of Marco Casagrande

7.2 The burning. Photograph courtesy of Marco Casagrande (1999). 132

8.1 John Deakin, Double exposure. John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes at

8.2 Göteburg sauna. Photograph courtesy of RaumLabor (2015). 148

8.3 Svettekörka. Photograph courtesy of Gallasato, RaumLabor (2015). 150

8.4 Sauna interior. Photograph courtesy of RaumLabor (2015). 152

9.1 Gliding, Plongeoir, Granville. Photograph courtesy of Aliocha

I’m not imagining that there is something, an individual, an essential self, to

Bodies and Architectures

a sense of self in respect to architecture: moments of being pinned down and

The title of Bacon’s painting Lying Figure operates as an illusory anchor. It

Where a scene is constituted in such a way as to define what Deleuze terms ‘a

We should not, however, make the mistake of thinking of this singular

origins it remains difficult to escape. There is no lack of will on the part of

Trepidation aside, on Sunday 10 July the first engagement we have with

Figure 1.3 Exterior of Serpentine Pavilion. Photograph by author (2011).

Figure 1.4 Interior corridor. Photograph by author (2011).

space, walk at a different pace. Rely on the ritournelle of the foot-stepping, in

Figure 1.5 A garden within. Photograph by author (2011).

accompanied by intellectual rigour, and an insistent attempt at objectivity’.30

more than just a limit or a nailing, this architecture operates as a prosthesis-

In turning to the figures of Bacon and the literary characters of Samuel

Earth and Territory