Appendix: Letter from Jacques Derrida to Peter Eisenman

Eisenman, Peter

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Appendix: Letter from Jacques Derrida to Peter Eisenman

Peter Eisenman

Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004

I am simultaneously sending this letter with the accompanying cassette to Hillis, who was supposed to join us during this seminar. Since he is also supposed to ‘moderate’ and lead it, but for other reasons as well...

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Peter Eisenman

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31885

Appendix: Letter from Jacques Derrida to Peter Eisenman

My dear Peter,

I am simultaneously sending this letter with the accompanying cassette to Hillis, who was supposed to join us during this seminar. Since he is also supposed to ‘moderate’ and lead it, but for other reasons as well, Hillis is therefore, along with you, “the first addressee” of these few questions. He is more comfortable in the labyrinth than anyone else, as we all know. For what I am going to say to you will probably reverberate in a sort of labyrinth. I am confiding in the “record” of the voice or of the letter, that which is not yet clear to me and which cannot yet guide my steps toward an exit and hardly towards an “issue.” I am not even sure that what I am sending you “stands,” that it holds up. But that is perhaps by design—and maybe of the type that I have heard you discuss. In any case, I greatly regret having to refrain from participating in this gathering with you, you both, all of you.

But now don’t worry, I will not create a scene. And I am not going to take advantage of my absence, not even to tell you that you may believe in it—in absence—too much. This reference to absence is perhaps one of the things (for there are others) that has most troubled me in your discourse on architecture, and that were it my first question, you can perhaps benefit from my absence to discuss it: absence in general and the role that this word ‘absence’ could play in what you believed you could say if not do in your architecture. One could provide multiple examples of this, but I will limit myself to what you say regarding the “presence of absence” in Moving Arrows, Eros and Other Errors and regarding the castle of Romeo as “a palimpsest and a quarry.” This discourse regarding absence or the “presence of absence” puzzles me, not only because it deploys so many ruses, complications, and traps that the philosopher, particularly if he is a bit of a dialectician, knows too well and fears finding you “caught up in,” but also because it authorizes many religious interpretations—if not to say vaguely Judeo-transcendental ideologizations—of your work. I suspect you of having somewhat enjoyed and encouraged these interpretations, even as you discreetly denied it with a smile, ensuring that the misunderstanding remains more or less a misunderstanding. My question has to do not only with absence or the presence of absence but also with God. There—if I did not come, it was not only because I was tired and overworked, “held up in Paris,” but precisely to have the opportunity to ask you directly a question regarding God, something which I would never have dared do in Irvine if I had been there in person, but I am glad that this question comes to you by way of this voice, that is to say, on tape. This same question brings up others, a whole group of closely related questions, for example, at the risk of shocking you, whether it concerns houses, museums, or university research labs, what distinguishes your architectural space from that of the temple or a synagogue (by this I mean a Greek word serving a Jewish concept)? Where would be the difference on this matter, if there is one, if there had been one, in your work and in the work of those architects with whom you feel to be in good company? I remain very perplexed by this topic, and if I had been there, I would have been a difficult interlocutor. If you build a religious space, Buddhist, for example, or a cathedral, a mosque, a synagogue (a hypothesis which you are not obligated to accept—but why wouldn’t you), what would be your primary concern today? I will allude to the Libeskind project for the Jewish Museum in Berlin. We spoke of it the other morning in New York, but let us leave that aside for the moment.

Naturally, this question also concerns your interpretation of chora in “our” “work,” if one can say this in quotations, our work “in common.” I am not certain that you have de-theologized and de-ontologized the notion of chora as radically as I would have expected (chora is neither the void, as you sometimes suggest, nor absence, nor invisibility: nor certainly the contrary, which—and this is what interests me—has a large number of consequences). It is true that for me it was easier in a certain way, I did not have to “do” anything and would have been unable to do anything, I mean, for the city of Paris, for La Villette. You see what I mean (and it is perhaps the whole difference between us), but I would like you to say something about it to our friends in Irvine, while speaking to them about the difference in our respective relationships to discourse, on the one hand, and to the function of architecture and its realization on the other. Take advantage of my absence to speak freely. Well, don’t just say anything, since everything today is “recorded,” and memory, which is always the same, is no longer the same, I will know all that you will have said publicly. I had the feeling, and I think you mentioned it here or there, that you found me too reserved in our “choral work”—a little bit absent, in short, entrenched in discourse, without obliging you to change, to changing places—in sum, not disturbing you enough. This is no doubt true, and there would be much to say on this subject, which is complicated, because it is that of place (chora) and displacement at the same time. If I had come, I would perhaps have spoken of my own displacement in the course of the “choral work,” but here it is you who should speak of it. So tell me, if, after Choral Work (as you yourself said at Irvine in the spring), your work effectively took a new direction, what indeed happened? What did this time mean for you? This history? How would you define or match it? When did we really begin to work together, if we ever did, on this Choral Work, which is not yet built but which we see and read about everywhere? When will we stop?

This brings me directly to the next question, which also concerns a certain absence. Not mine today at Irvine, where I would have so much enjoyed seeing you and other friends—especially as I was one of those who organized this gathering (and thus ask you to excuse my absence and to have the others also pardon me)—but absence like the shadowed sound of the voice—you see what I mean by this. What relationship (new or archi-ancient, different in any case) does architecture, yours in particular, maintain, or should maintain, with the voice, with the capacity of the voice, but also with the telephonic devices of all kinds which structure and transform our experience of space on a daily basis? It is a question of a phone call—almost immediate, of course, virtually immediate I would stress, but also the vocal recording, as in the case here, incorporating the gap in time which this presumes and establishes simultaneously. If one can imagine an entire labyrinthian history of architecture guided by the braided thread of this question, where would one—and you—stand today and tomorrow? This question of history, like the history of making space, like the spacing of time and the voice, cannot be separated from the history of visible (immediately mediated), that is to say, from the entire history of architecture; which is so great that I would not even dare to touch on it, but I will “address” this question, as you say in English, through economy and through metonymy in the form of a single world, glass (glas, glass).

And what is there of glass in your work? What would you say about it? What would you do with it? How does one talk about it? In terms of its optical or tactile qualities? (Speaking of tactility, it would be good if—to add to what we were discussing the other morning in New York—you spoke to our friends of the erotic ruses, the appeal to desire, or dare I say the “sex-appeal” of the architectural forms which you invent, with which you work, to which you submit. Whether these directions are new or not, is this seduction a supplement, into the bargain, like a “bonus of seduction” or a “bonus of pleasure”? Or is it essential? Is it rather that the bonus itself is essential? But then what is the bonus itself? A reward? What is, for the author of Moving Arrows, Eros and Other Errors, the relationship between the bonus and the rest, amidst the calculations and negotiations of the architect? Could you elaborate on that, as my American students sometimes ask me so disarmingly?) I return to my question after this long parenthesis regarding your desire, from which my question on glass may not be so far off. In what terms does one discuss glass? In terms of technology and materials? Economic terms? Urbanism? Social relations? In terms of transparency and immediacy, of love or supervision, of the potentially effaced boundary between public and private, etc.? And further, “glass” is an old word, and if I think that you are interested in glass, that you may in fact appreciate it, am I mistaken? Or is it only a matter of new materials which resemble glass but aren’t glass any longer, etc.? Before letting you discuss glass, I would remind you of one of Benjamin’s texts, Erfahrung und Armut, Experience et pauvreté, with which you are certainly familiar (it also concerns architecture and was published in 1933, which is not just any date in Germany or elsewhere). I will cite only that which our friends would certainly like you to comment on:

“But Scheerbart—to return to him—places the greatest importance to lodging these people, and following their model, their fellow citizens are lodged in apartments corresponding to their status: in glass houses, mobile and sliding, of the type that Loos and Le Corbusier have constructed. It is not an accident that glass is so hard and smooth a material that nothing can cling to it. It is also a cold and sober material. Things made of glass do not have an ‘aura’ (Die Dinge aus Glas haben keine ‘Aura’). Glass is generally the enemy of secrecy, it is also the enemy of possession. The great poet André Gide once said, ‘Everything which I want to possess becomes opaque to me.’”

(Here we return then to the question of desire and glass, the desire of glass; I had tried elsewhere to trace this experience of desire as the experience of glass in Blanchot, notably in La Folie du Jour and L’Arret de mort.)

“Do people like Scheerbart dream of glass buildings (Glasbauten) having recognized a certain new poverty (Bekenner einer neuen Armut)? But perhaps a comparison here will reveal more than the theory. When one enters a room from the eighties, and despite the ‘comfortable intimacy’ (Gemütlichkeit) which reigns therein, perhaps the strongest impression one has is: ‘You have nothing to look for here.’ You have nothing to look for here because there is no ground here upon which the inhabitant would not have already left a trace: by the knickknacks on the mantle, by the doilies on the upholstered armchair, by the sheer curtains at the window or even by the screen in front of the fireplace. A saying of Brecht’s is useful here: ‘Erase the traces!’ (Verwisch die Spuren!), reads the refrain of the first poem of the Anthologie pour les habitants des villes. . . Scheerbart and his glass, and the Bauhaus and its steel have opened the way: they created spaces in which it is difficult to leave traces. ‘After all that has been said,’ declared Scheerbart twenty years later, ‘We can surely speak of a “culture of glass” (Glaskultur). The new environment of glass will completely change man. And the only thing left to hope for now is that the new glass culture will not encounter too many opponents.’”

What do you think, Peter, of these propositions? Would you be an “opponent,” a partisan, or, as I would suspect but am perhaps mistaken, neither one nor the other? In any case, could you say something about it and why?

This text of Benjamin’s literally addresses, as you saw, a “new poverty” (homonym, if not a synonym, of a new expression, of a new French concept, designating an errant mass of poor, indeed of the “homeless,” irreducible to categorization or classification and to longstanding marginality or of the social ladder: the low income, the proletarian class, the unemployed, etc.). And the new poverty of which Benjamin speaks, none other, should be “our” future, already our present. From this fascinating text, so politically ambiguous and which should not be fragmented further, I would extract this passage as well:

“Scheerbart is interested in the question of understanding what our telescopes, our airplanes and our rockets do to men of the past, in transforming them into entirely new creatures, worthy of being noticed and admired. Furthermore, these creatures already speak in an entirely new language. And what is Decisive (das Entscheidende) in this language, is the tendency towards an Arbitrary Construct (zum willkürlichen Konstruktiven); a tendency which opposes the organic. It is because of this tendency that the language of men, or rather, people like Scheerbart, cannot be mistaken for any other, for these men object to this principle of humanism that calls for interaction among men. Even in their very names. . . Poverty of experience (Erfahrungsarmut): one must not understand by this that these men desire a ‘New Experience.’ No, they want to be freed from experience, they desire a world in which they can recognize their poverty, externally and also internally, in a manner that is so pure and distinct that something fitting emerges. And they are not always ignorant and inexperienced. One could say the contrary: they have ‘stuffed themselves’ (gefressen) with all of that: ‘culture’ and ‘mankind’ to the point of being sated and tired. . . We have become impoverished. Of the heritage of humanity, we have abandoned one part after another, and we have pawned it at the mount of piety of one hundredth of its value, in order to receive as an advance a few coins of the ‘Present’ (des Aktuellen). In the door stands economic crisis, beyond that a shadow of approaching war. To hold on today has become the business of a small number of powerful people, and God knows if they are not more human than the majority, for the most part more barbarous, but not in the good sense (nicht auf die gute Art). Others, meanwhile, have to start over another time with Little. They relate it to the men who have created the Fundamentally New (das von Grund auf Neue zu ihre Sache gemacht), founded on understanding and renunciation. In its buildings (Bauten), its paintings, and its histories, humanity prepares itself to survive (überleben), if necessary, culture. And most important, humanity does this while laughing. Perhaps this laugh sounds barbarous. Good (Gut). Since he who is alone (der Einzelne) at times brings to this mass a humanity which, one day will be returned to him with interest.” (trans. Ph. Beck et B. Stiegler).

What do you think of this text, Peter, in particular of poverty which should not allow another to be forgotten? What do you think of these two barbarities that must not be confused and, as much as it is possible—is it possible—not be allowed to contaminate each other? What do you think of what Benjamin calls here the “present” and of his “currency”? What, for you, would be the “good” barbarity in architecture and elsewhere? And the “present”? I know of a present which you do not want, but what ruptures most effectively (today? tomorrow?) with this present? And would you remove architecture from the measure of man, from his scale even, how do you understand this “destructive” in Benjamin’s sense, discourse in the mouth of “these people [who] object to this principle of humanity that calls for [architecture’s] correspondence with humanity. Even by their very names”?

Therefore, Peter, I would like, and your audience at Irvine, I imagine, would perhaps like to hear you speak about the shift in the relationship of architecture today and poverty, all poverties, that of which Benjamin speaks and the other, between architecture and capitalism (the equivalent today of the “economic crisis” of the 1930s “in der Tür,” “in the doorway”), between architecture and war, today’s equivalent to the “shadow” and of that which “comes” with it), the scandals of public housing, “housing” in general (without forgetting that which we discussed, you and I, and which is a little too complicated for a letter, of the habitable and the inhabitable in architecture), and the “homeless” and “homelessness” today in the United States and elsewhere.

This letter is already too long. I shall speed up a little to touch on other questions linked to what was written above. I cited these texts by Benjamin, among other reasons, to lead you to ruin and destruction. As you know, what he says regarding the “aura” destroyed by glass (and by technology in general) is articulated in a complex discourse on “destruction.” On the other hand, in the Trauerspiel (and surely elsewhere but I have forgotten where), Benjamin speaks of ruin, notably of the “baroque cult of the ruin,” “the most noble material of the Baroque.” In the photocopied pages which I have enclosed, he declares that for the Baroque, “the antique heritage is comparable, in each of its components, to the elements from which they concoct a new totality. No, they build it, for the complete vision of this new thing is this: the ruin . . . the work affirms itself as a ruin. In the allegorical edifice of the Trauerspiel, these ruined forms of the salvaged work of art clearly have already come unfastened.” I will not comment on the Benjaminian concept of the ruin, which is also the concept of a certain mourning in affirmation, indeed the salvation of the work of art, but I will use it as a pretext to ask you this:

First, is there a relationship between your writing on the palimpsest, your architectural experience of memory (for example, in Choral Work but also elsewhere) and “something” like the ruin which is no longer one thing? And what would you say—and would you even say it—is your calculation, reckoning of memory not Baroque in this Benjaminian sense, despite certain appearances? Second, if all architecture is finished, if it carries within itself, each time in an original style, the traces of its future destruction, the future anterior of its ruin, if architecture is haunted, that is to say, marked by the spectral silhouette of this ruin, at work even in its base of stone, in its metal or glass, what brings the architecture of “these times” (just yesterday, today, tomorrow: use whatever words you may, modern, postmodern, post-postmodern or a-modern, etc.) back to the ruin, to the experience of “its own” ruin? In the past, the major architectural achievements incorporated their essential destructability, even their fragility, even as a resistance to destruction or like a monumentalization of the ruin itself (the Baroque, according to Benjamin). A new image of ruin has come to trace itself in the design of architecture which we would like to recognize as that of our present day, of our future, if one can still say that, in the design of your architecture, in the future anterior of its memory just as it is designed or calculated already, just as it leaves its future trace in your projects. Considering what we said above regarding Man (and of God), will we be able to speak of the “memory of man,” as we say in French, for this architecture? In relation to the ruin, fragility, destructibility, and therefore to the future, could you return to what we were discussing the other morning in New York regarding excess and “weakness”? Each time that excess presents itself (but it never presents itself except in the context of ontological oppositions), I myself hesitate to employ words of force or weakness. But it is certainly inevitable once this has presented itself. This is nothing more than a pretext for you to discuss this, you and Hillis.

Finally, from fragility I would turn to ashes, the other name for me of the essence (not the essential) of the step, of the trace or of writing, the nonplaced place of deconstruction. That is where it is written. (In “Feu la Cendre,” forgive this reference from almost twenty years ago—this conception of ashes, like the trace itself, was notably destined or rather submitted to the “total fire” and to the “holocaust.” To retrace our steps, and to hear once again the fragile words “fragility,” “ashes,” “absence, “invisibility,” of “Jewish” or not “Jewish” architectural space, what do you think of the “Berlin Museum Competition,” which we also discussed the other morning in New York? In particular, what do you think of the words of Libeskind, the “winner” of the “competition” as printed in a recently published interview with him in the journal of Columbia’s architecture school? I will just cite it here:

“And in turn, the void materializes itself in the space outside as something that has been ruined, or rather as the solid remainder of an independent structure, which is a voided void. Then there is a fragmentation and a splintering, marking the lack of coherence of the museum as a whole, showing that it has come undone, in order to become accessible, functionally and intellectually . . . It’s conceived as a museum for all Berliners, for all citizens. Not only those of the present, but those of the future and the past who find their heritage and hope in this particular form, which is to transcend passive involvement and become participation. With its special emphasis on housing the Jewish Museum, it is an attempt to give voice to a common fate—to the contradictions of the ordered and the disordered, the chosen and the not chosen, the vocal and the silent. In that sense, the particular urban location of Lindenstrasse, of this area of the city, becomes the spiritual site, the nexus, where Berlin’s precarious destiny is mirrored. It is fractured and displaced, but also transformed and transgressed. The past fatality of the German Jewish cultural relation to Berlin is enacted now in the realm of the invisible. It is this invisibility which I have tried to bring to visibility. So the new extension is conceived as an emblem, where the invisible, the void, makes itself apparent as such. . . . It’s not a collage or a collision or a dialectic simply, but a new type of organization which is really organized around a void, around what is not visible. And what is not visible is the collection of this Jewish Museum, which is reducible to archival material, since the physicality of it has disappeared. The problem of the Jewish Museum is taken as the problem of Jewish culture itself—let’s put it this way, as the problem of an avant-garde of humanity, an avant-garde that has been incinerated in its own history, in the Holocaust. In this sense, I believe this scheme joins architecture to questions that are now relevant to all humanity. What I’ve tried to say is that the Jewish history of Berlin is not separable from the history of modernity, from the destiny of this incineration of history; they are bound together. But bound not through any obvious forms, but rather through a negativity; through an absence of meaning and an absence of artifacts. Absence, therefore, serves as a way of binding in depth, and in a totally different manner, the shared hopes of people. It is a conception that is absolutely opposed to reducing the museum to a detached memorial.”

Once again the void, absence, negativity, in Libeskind as in your own work. I will let you figure this out by yourself, dear Peter, dear Hillis, I will tell you what I think some other time, but I suggested what I think at the beginning. I have again spoken too much, and naturally, I take advantage of my absence, I’ll admit it, as a sign of affection. Excuse me, Hillis and you, and ask our friends, your audience, to excuse me for not being there to speak with them and to listen to you.

With affection, Jacques

P.S.1. This cassette was recorded and transcribed when I read, at the conclusion of an interview (in the special edition of the Spanish journal Arquitectura [270] on “Deconstruction”—that is the title of the introduction) these lines of yours which already anticipated my questions: “I never talk about deconstruction. Other people use that word because they are not architects. It is very difficult to talk about architecture in terms of Deconstruction, because we are not talking about ruins or fragments. The term is too metaphorical and too literal for architecture. Deconstruction is dealing with architecture as a metaphor and we are dealing with architecture as a reality. . . . I believe Post-Structuralism is basically what I mean by Post-Modernism. In other words, Post-Modernism is Post-Structuralism in the widest sense of the word.” I think that I do not believe any of these statements, any of these 7 phrases, not 1, not 2, not 3, not 4, not 5, not 6, not 7. But I cannot explain that here and I, really, I never talk much about Deconstruction. Not spontaneously. If you wish, you can demonstrate 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 in front of your audience, try to convince them in refuting contrary propositions, or just let this postscriptum drop.

P.S.2. I forgot the fundamental question, of course. In other words, that of the foundation, of what you do at the foundation of the foundation, or at the foundations of your architectural design. Let’s talk about the center of the earth even. I questioned you directly on God and Man. I’m thinking here of the Sky and the Earth. What is architecture, and first of all your own, supposed to see and do with experience, that is to say, with the voyage opening well beyond the earth? If we do not renounce architecture, and I believe that we do not renounce it here, what are its effects on the very “design” of terrestrial architecture, today, of this possibility? Of this definite possibility from now on of leaving the terrestrial soil? What would we say of the architecture of a rocket and that of aeronautics in general (already touched on by literature, well before becoming “effective”) that it dispenses with the idea of foundations and therefore of “standing,” “of the “standing up,” of “standing up,” of the vertical stance of man or building in general? Or do these architectures recalculate foundations and does the calculation remain a terrestrial difference—which I doubt somewhat? What would be an architecture which, without standing and without holding up, in a vertical fashion, does not yet fall into ruins? How are all of these possibilities and even these questions (those of holding up, holding together, standing—or not) registered if you think that they can be? What traces are already left in what you are currently building on the earth, in Spain or in Japan, in Ohio, in Berlin, in Paris, and tomorrow, I hope, in Irvine?

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