The Last Fortress of Metaphysics

Jacques Derrida and the Deconstruction of Architecture

Francesco Vitale, Mauro Senatore

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781438469379
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Deconstruction in Philosophy

Between 1984 and 1994 Jacques Derrida wrote and spoke a great deal about architecture both in his academic work and in connection with a number of particular building projects around the world. He engaged significantly with the work of architects such as Bernard Tschumi, Peter Eisenman, and Daniel Libeskind. Derrida conceived of architecture as an example of the kind of multidimensional writing that he had theorized in Of Grammatology, identifying a rich common ground between architecture and philosophy in relation to ideas about political community and the concept of dwelling. In this book, Francesco Vitale analyzes Derrida's writings and demonstrates how Derrida's work on this topic provides a richer understanding of his approach to deconstruction, highlighting the connections and differences between philosophical deconstruction and architectural deconstructivism.

1

THE LAW OF THE OIKOS

Jacques Derrida and the Deconstruction of the Dwelling

DERRIDA’S CONCERN FOR ARCHITECTURE IS JUSTIFIED BY the specific question of dwelling. As I aim to demonstrate, this question is at the very origin of deconstruction and, ultimately, the deconstruction of architecture is a necessary moment of deconstruction itself. To this extent, quoting Derrida from “No (Point of) Madness—Maintaining Architecture,” I recall that “[a] consistent deconstruction … would do little if it did not take on architecture.”1 Then, Derrida argues that architecture is “the last fortress of metaphysics.”2 However, he also says that what we consider the essence and sense of architecture is indeed the legacy of a specific, historical determination:

Let us not forget that there is an architecture of architecture. Down to its archaic foundation, the most fundamental concept of architecture has been constructed. This naturalized architecture is bequeathed to us: we inhabit it, it inhabits us, we think it is destined for habitation, and it is no longer an object for us at all. But we must recognize there an artifact, a constructum, a monument. It did not fall from the sky; it is not natural, even if it informs a specific scheme of relations to physis, the sky, the earth, the mortal, and the divine. This architecture of architecture has a history; it is historical through and through. Its heritage inaugurates the intimacy of our economy, the law of our hearth (oikos), our familial, religious, and political oikonomy, all the places of birth and death, temple, school, stadium, agora, square, sepulcher. It penetrates us [nous transit] to the point that we forget its very historicity: we take it for nature. It is good sense itself.3

Therefore, architecture is not merely “the last fortress of metaphysics” as such, by essence or necessity. It has become what it is when submitted to a specific law of dwelling:

The experience of meaning must be the dwelling [habitation], the law of the oikos, the economy of men or gods. … The arrangement, occupation, and investment of locations should be measured against this economy. … Centered and hierarchized, the architectural organization will have had to fall in line with the anamnesis of its origin and the basis of a foundation. Not only from the time of its founding on the ground of the earth, but also since its juridico-political founding, the institution that commemorates the myths of the city, the heroes or founding gods. Despite appearances, this religious or political memory, this historicism, has not deserted modern architecture. Modern architecture is still nostalgic for it: it is its destiny to be a guardian. An always hierarchizing nostalgia: architecture will have materialized this hierarchy in stone or wood (hylē); it is a hyletics of the sacred (hieros) and the principle (archē), an archihieratics.4

Here Derrida refers to a specific law of dwelling, which is historically determined: the law of the Greek oikos. A law that is rooted in an archaic or mythico-religious experience of space and place, which is so powerful as to govern still the distribution of spaces and places that identify individuals and a community with a certain territory. In order to grasp the bearings of that law, it is worth remarking that, for Derrida, it does not work only for architecture; yet, all aspects of our culture and thus of philosophy are subjected to this law. The reason why architecture is so important for Derrida is that

[o]n the other hand, architecture forms its most powerful metonymy; it gives it its most solid consistency, objective substance. By consistency, I do not mean only logical coherence, which implicates all dimensions of human experience in the same network: there is no work of architecture without interpretation, or even economic, religious political, aesthetic, or philosophical decision. But by consistency I also mean duration, hardness, the monumental, mineral or ligneous subsistence, the hyletics of tradition. Hence the resistance. the resistance of materials like the resistance of consciousness and unconsciousness that establishes this architecture as the last fortress of metaphysics.5

Deconstructing architecture means, therefore, deconstructing the law of the oikos that determines the essence of architecture in our tradition, as well as realizing the most general aim of deconstruction. It is from this perspective, I argue, that Derrida proposes to Peter Eisenman to start their collaboration through a reading of Plato’s Timaeus and of his commentary on this work. The reference is to Khōra.6 The choice of Timaeus is evidently accurate: this is one of the foundational texts of the philosophical as well as of the architectural tradition (in particular, of one of the latter’s highest moments, the Renaissance). In the Timaeus we find the metaphor of the demiurge as “divine architect” who brings the ideal into the sensible through calculation and geometry. But we also find a paradigmatic analogy between the human body and the structure of a building and a city, an analogy that goes back to the medical school of Cos, which, through Plato, imposes the law of central and hierarchized symmetry to the construction of discourse as well as to sculpture and architecture. More generally, it is in the Timaeus that the question of khōra establishes the coordinates of Western speculation on space, from Aristotle’s criticism up to the Cartesian notion of space as the condition of the res extensa and thus to Heidegger, who sees Plato’s khōra at the origin of the metaphysical determination of space.7 For this reason, Heidegger deemed it necessary to go back to the originary Greek conception of dwelling in order to gain an experience of space that would be nonmetaphysical and to start from there a reconsideration of dwelling itself. In my view, Derrida suggests a return to khōra in order to acknowledge that both philosophy and architecture have been submitted to the archaic law of dwelling, the law we must not go back to, as Heidegger suggested, but which we must deconstruct and conjure away, in view of another dwelling, a dwelling to come. In “No (point of) Madness—Maintaining Architecture,” Derrida precisely demarcates his position from that of Heidegger on the question of the law of the oikos:

Heidegger still alludes to it when he interprets homelessness (Heimatlosigkeit) as the symptom of ontotheology and, more precisely, of modern technology. … This is not a deconstruction, but rather a call to repeat the very fundamentals of the architecture that we inhabit, that we should learn again how to inhabit, the origin of its meaning.8

Before returning to Khōra, I want to remark that Derrida began to deal with the law of the oikos much earlier than the time at which he began to meet architects. We may reframe the whole path of deconstruction in the wake of this question. This is particularly evident in “Plato’s Pharmacy,” which ends up announcing the work on khōra Derrida will complete twenty years later. First, Derrida makes a bold and, in my view, important point: the system of conceptual opposition that constitutes Platonic metaphysics rests on a nonconceptual opposition, which Plato himself does not develop in conceptual terms, as it cannot be done:

In order for these contrary values (good/evil, true/false, essence/appearance, inside/outside, etc.) to be in opposition, each of the terms must be simply external to the other, which means that one of these oppositions (the opposition between inside and outside) must be already accredited as the matrix of all possible opposition. And one of the elements of the system (or of the series) must also stand as the very possibility of systematic or seriality in general.9

At the foundations of the system of metaphysics there is a spatial opposition, the inside/outside opposition, which is not purely conceptual but sensible, empirical, coming from an ordinary experience that appears obvious to Plato himself. According to Derrida, we can find the testimony of this experience of space in the archaic rituals of purification of the city, which survive in the polis of the classic age. Derrida writes:

The Character of the Pharmakos has been compared to a scapegoat. The evil and the outside, the expulsion of the evil, its exclusion out of the body (and out) of the city—these are the two major senses of the character and of the ritual. … The city’s body proper thus reconstitutes its unity, closes around the security of its inner courts, gives back to itself the word that links it with itself within the confines of the agora, by violently excluding from its territory the representative of an external threat or aggression. That representative represents the otherness of the evil that comes to affect or infect the inside by unpredictably breaking into it. Yet the representative of the outside is nonetheless constituted, regularly granted its place by the community, chosen, kept, fed, in the very heart of the inside. … The ceremony of the pharmakos is thus played out on the boundary line between inside and outside, which it has as its function ceaselessly to trace and retrace. Intra muros/extra muros.10

This is the origin of the law of the oikos: the mythico-religious experience that still survives in the organization of the space of the polis, and, at the same time, constitutes the paradigm of ontological identity understood as a permanent and stable presence, independent and autonomous from the alterity to which it is detached as the inside from the outside. But it is necessary to return to Khōra to understand the phantasmatic ground (which is powerful as much as it is illusory), that, according to Derrida, still haunts our dwelling. At least this is the hypothesis I will test in the next section.

Politics of Khōra

In order to grasp the political dimension of the Timaeus and of the ontological question posed in Khōra, it is necessary to refer to other texts by Derrida, which are still unpublished and which I had the opportunity to read in the Derrida archives. In particular, I refer to a seminar of 1985–1986 entitled “Nationalité et nationalisme philosophique: mythos, logos, topos,” whose first six sessions focus on the Timaeus and the question of khōra.11 In fact the text proposed to Eisenman is a quite bizarre editing of excerpts from this seminar. Here we can see that the stakes of Derrida’s reading are political. In fact, the Timaeus continues a dialogue that took place the day before, where Socrates described “the ideal polis and its constitution,”12 and that can be identified with the Republic. From the first conversation, we know that the dialogues take place during the Pan-Athenian celebrations, which had the character of a national celebration and involved the entire population. The celebration is devoted to Athena, the goddess, founder and protector of the city. A spectacular procession used to climb the Acropolis up to the temple of Athena where an impressive sacrifice celebrated the divine origin of the city and renewed the alliance with the protector goddess. The core of the cult was the myth of the autochthony of the Athenians’ ethnicity, that is, the myth of Erichthonius, who was born directly from earth, not from a woman, but from the soil fecundated by the seed of Hephaestus, dispersed after his clumsy attempt to possess Athena. At the top of the Acropolis, in the archaic age, the Erecteion was the oldest temple and was dedicated to these myths of foundation and thus also to the cult of Erichthonius, the king-God of the origins. When in the classical age it was rebuilt in another place, the original foundations were retained. Therefore, during the Pan-Athenian celebrations, the people of Athens, the sons of the earth, celebrated at the same time the divine and autochthonous origin of their genos, which made them exceptional and superior with respect to the other Greeks.13As it is well known, first Cimon and then Pericles invested huge amounts of capital to rebuild the Acropolis after its destruction by the Persians, in order to restore its symbolic value and thus to remove the trauma inflicted on Athenian identity by the foreign invasion. The most important architects of the age were involved in the work of reconstruction, which can be seen as a paradigm of Western architecture. The whole architectural organization seems structured according to that symbolic project, which found in the Pan-Athenian celebrations its concrete and spectacular realization. In particular, in the processional ascension we find represented a divine procession in the extraordinary, internal frieze of the Parthenon, realized by Phidias and his disciples.14 In the seminar devoted to the Timaeus, Derrida lingers on this celebration, on its spatial organization and its archaic cause, at the roots of the myth of autochthony. In particular, he focuses on the itinerary of the procession along the sacred way. The procession leaves from the lower city, namely, the Ceramic, where the famous Athenians are buried, passes by the agora, the secularized space of the political, goes up to the Acropolis, and ends before the impressive statue of Athena. The following remark by Derrida is the key to understanding what is at stake here: “At the Ceramic, in the civic ground (khōra) they come from, the sons of the polis are buried: time annihilates through the return of the end to the origin.”15

I emphasize the word between parentheses: the civic ground is called khōra. We should read the Timaeus from this perspective. T...