Excerpted from Architectural Design, 59, No. 1–2 (1989), pp. 7–11. Copyright © 1989 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Of circumstantial detail it is perhaps enough to record that this interview was conducted at Derrida’s home near Paris during a two-hour session in March, 1988. …
In so far as one can define, explain or summarise the Deconstructionist project, one’s account might go very briefly as follows. Deconstruction locates certain crucial oppositions or binary structures of meaning and value that constitute the discourse of ‘Western metaphysics’. These include (among many others) the distinctions between form and content, nature and culture, thought and perception, essence and accident, mind and body, theory and practice, male and female, concept and metaphor, speech and writing etc. A Deconstructive reading then goes on to show how these terms are inscribed within a systematic structure of hierarchical privilege, such that one of each pair will always appear to occupy the sovereign or governing position. The aim is then to demonstrate—by way of close reading—how this system is undone, so to speak, from within; how the second or subordinate term in each pair has an equal (maybe a prior) claim to be treated as a condition of possibility for the entire system. Thus writing is regularly marginalised, denounced or put in its place—a strictly secondary, ‘supplementary’ place—by a long line of thinkers in the Western tradition, from Plato and Aristotle to Rousseau, Husserl, Saussure, Lévi-Strauss and the latter-day structuralist sciences of man. But just as often—as Derrida shows in Of Grammatology—writing resurfaces to assert its claim as the repressed other of this whole logocentric tradition, the ‘wandering outcast’, scapegoat or exile whose off-stage role is a precondition of the system. And this curious ‘logic of supplementarity’ operates wherever thinking is motivated by a certain constitutive need to exclude or deny that which makes it possible from the outset.
Now it is not hard to see how such a Deconstructive reading might affect the discourse of current (Post-Modern) architectural thought. Thus Peter Eisenman suggests that: ‘the traditional opposition between structure and decoration, abstraction and figuration, figure and ground, form and function could be dissolved.’ Architecture could begin an exploration of the ‘between’ within these categories. And Derrida has likewise written of an architectural ‘supplementarity,’ a movement of différance between and within concepts that would open up hitherto unthought-of inventive possibilities. The interview has a good deal to say about this in relation to Derrida’s collaborative venture with Eisenman and Tschumi. …
Christopher Norris:
—Perhaps I could start by asking a perhaps rather naive question: Can there be such a thing as ‘Deconstructivist art’ or indeed ‘Deconstructivist architecture’? That is to say, do these terms refer to a given style, project or body of work? Or do they not rather signify a certain way of looking at various works and projects, a perception that would break with (or at least seek to challenge) established ideas of form, value and aesthetic representation?
Jacques Derrida:
Well, I don’t know … I must say, when I first met, I won’t say ‘Deconstructive architecture,’ but the Deconstructive discourse on architecture, I was rather puzzled and suspicious. I thought at first that perhaps this was an analogy, a displaced discourse, and something more analogical than rigorous. And then—as I have explained somewhere—I realised that on the contrary, the most efficient way of putting Deconstruction to work was by going through art and architecture. As you know, Deconstruction is not simply a matter of discourse or a matter of displacing the semantic content of the discourse, its conceptual structure or whatever. Deconstruction goes through certain social and political structures, meeting with resistance and displacing institutions as it does so. I think that in these forms of art, and in any architecture, to deconstruct traditional sanctions—theoretical, philosophical, cultural—effectively, you have to displace… I would say ‘solid’ structures, not only in the sense of material structures, but ‘solid’ in the sense of cultural, pedagogical, political, economic structures. And all the concepts which are, let us say, the target (if I may use this term) of Deconstruction, such as theology, the subordination of the sensible to the intelligible and so forth—these concepts are effectively displaced in order for them to become ‘Deconstructive architecture’. That’s why I am more and more interested in it, despite the fact that I am technically incompetent.
—Could you say a little more about your work with Bernard Tschumi and Peter Eisenman, and some of the collaborative projects under way in Paris at the moment?
Well, what I could do is just a narration of the way things happened. Once I had a phone call from Bernard Tschumi, who I didn’t know at the time, except by reputation. Tschumi told me: ‘Some architects today are interested in your work and would you be interested in working with some of them, or one of them, on a project in La Villette?’ As you know, Tschumi is responsible for all the architecture at La Villette. Of course I was surprised, but my answer was ‘Why not?’ And so I had my first encounter with Tschumi and I began to look at those projects and to read some texts by Tschumi and Eisenman. Then I met Eisenman many times in New York. We worked together, we coordinated everything in discussion, and now there is a book which is soon to be published on these collaborations. My proposal was that we start with a text that I had recently written on Plato’s Timaeus because it had to do with space, with Deconstruction, so to speak, ‘in the universe’. It also had to do with a problem that I was interested in and that concerned, let us say, the economic determination of the way we usually read Plato. This strategic level was extremely important for me. So I gave this text to Peter Eisenman and in his own way he started a project that was correlated with but at the same time independent of my text. That was true collaboration—not ‘using’ the other’s work, not just illustrating or selecting from it … and so there is a kind of discrepancy or, I would say, a productive dialogue between the concerns, the styles, the persons too. And so, after about eighteen months’ or two years’ work, the project is now ready to be ‘constructed’, you might say… to be realised. …
—So it would be wrong to see this as a new ‘turn’ in your thinking, a sudden recognition of connections, affinities or common points of interest between Deconstruction and the visual arts? In fact there are many passages in your earlier writing—and I am thinking here of texts like Force and Significance or Genesis and Structure—where the argument turns on certain crucial (let us say) metaphors of an architectural provenance. The context here was your joint reading of the structuralist and phenomenological projects—more specifically, of Saussure and Husserl—as two, equally rigorous but finally incompatible reflections on the character of language and meaning. Thus you write: ‘The relief and design of structures appears more clearly when content, which is in the living energy of meaning, is neutralised. Somewhat like the architecture of an uninhabited or deserted city, reduced to its skeleton by some catastrophe of nature or art. A city no longer inhabited, not simply left behind, but haunted by meaning and culture.’ And of course these architectural figures and analogies occur more often in your later writings on Kant and the tradition of Classical aesthetics (for instance, ‘The Parergon’ in The Truth in Painting). Thus for Kant, architectonic is defined as the ‘art of systems’, that which articulates the various orders of truth claim and ensures their proper (hierarchical) relationship one with another. So in a sense one could argue that your work has always been crucially concerned with ‘architectural’ models and metaphors. Do you perceive a clear continuity there, or am I just imagining all this?
No, not at all. But I would like to say something about the concept of analogy or metaphor you rightly used a moment ago. Of course there is a lot of architectural metaphor, not only in my texts but in the whole philosophical tradition. And Deconstruction—the word Deconstruction—sounds very much like such a metaphor, an architectural metaphor. But I think that it’s more complex than that, since the word appeared or was underlined in a certain situation where structuralism was dominant on the scene. So Deconstruction shared certain motifs with the structuralist project while at the same time attacking that project. …
But Deconstruction doesn’t mean that we have to stay within those architectural metaphors. It doesn’t mean, for example, that we have to destroy something which is built—physically built or culturally built or theoretically built—just in order to reveal a naked ground on which something new could be built. Deconstruction is perhaps a way of questioning this architectural model itself—the architectural model which is a general question, even within philosophy, the metaphor of foundations, of superstructures, what Kant calls ‘architectonic’ etc. as well as the concept of the arche. … So Deconstruction means also the putting into question of architecture in philosophy and perhaps architecture itself.
When I discovered what we now call ‘Deconstructive architecture’ I was interested in the fact that these architects were in fact deconstructing the essential of tradition, and were criticising everything that subordinated architecture to something else—the value of, let’s say, usefulness or beauty or living—‘habite’—etc.—not in order to build something else that would be useless or ugly or uninhabitable, but to free architecture from all those external finalities, extraneous goals. And not in order to reconstitute some pure and original architecture—on the contrary, just to put architecture in communication with other media, other arts, to contaminate architecture. … And notice that in my way of dealing with Deconstruction I suspect the concept of metaphor itself, in so far as it involves a complicated network of philosophemes, a network that would always lead us back at some point into architecture. …
As you know, I never use the word ‘post,’ the prefix ‘post’: and I have many reasons for this. One of those reasons is that this use of the prefix implies a periodisation or an epochalisation, which is highly problematic for me. Then again, the word ‘post’ implies that something is highly finished—that we can get rid of what went before Deconstruction, and I don’t think anything of the sort. For instance, to go back to the first point of your question: I don’t believe that the opposition between concept and metaphor can ever be erased. I have never suggested that all concepts were simply metaphors, or that we couldn’t make use of that distinction, because in fact at the end of that essay [’White Mythology’] I deconstruct this argument also, and I say that we need, for scientific reasons and many reasons, to keep this distinction at work. So this is a very complicated gesture.
Now as for architecture, I think that Deconstruction comes about—let us carry on using this word to save time—when you have deconstructed some architectural philosophy, some architectural assumptions—for instance, the hegemony of the aesthetic, of beauty, the hegemony of usefulness, of functionality, of living, of dwelling. But then you have to reinscribe these motifs within the work. You can’t (or you shouldn’t) simply dismiss those values of dwelling, functionality, beauty and so on. You have to construct, so to speak a new space and a new form, to shape a new way of building in which those motifs or values are reinscribed, having meanwhile lost their external hegemony. The inventiveness of powerful architects consists I think in this reinscription, the economy of this reinscription, which involves also some respect for tradition, for memory. Deconstruction is not simply forgetting the past. What has dominated theology or architecture or anything else is still there, in some way, and the inscriptions, the, let’s say, archive of these deconstructed structures, the archive should be as readable as possible, as legible as we can make it. That is the way I try to write or to teach. And I think the same is true, to some extent, in architecture …
I wouldn’t want to call Deconstruction a critique of modernity. But neither is it ‘modern’ or in any sense a glorification of modernity. It is very premature to venture these generalisations, these concepts of period. I would say that I just don’t know what these categories mean, except that of course I can tell more or less what other people mean them to signify. … But for me they are not rigorous concepts. Nor is Deconstruction a unitary concept, although it is often deployed in that way, a usage that I find very disconcerting. … Sometimes I prefer to say deconstructions in the plural, just to be careful about the heterogeneity and the multiplicity, the necessary multiplicity of gestures, of fields, of styles. Since it is not a system, not a method, it cannot be homogenised. Since it takes the singularity of every context into account, Deconstruction is different from one context to another. So I should certainly want to reject the idea that ‘Deconstruction’ denotes any theory, method or univocal concept. Nevertheless it must denote something, something that can at least be recognised in its working or its effects. …
Of course this doesn’t mean that Deconstruction is that ‘something’, or that you can find Deconstruction everywhere. So on the one hand we have to define some working notion, some regulative concept of Deconstruction. But it is very difficult to gather this in a simple formula. I know that the enemies of Deconstruction say: ‘Well, since you cannot offer a definition then it must be an obscure concept and you must be an obscurantist thinker.’ To which I would respond that Deconstruction is first and foremost a suspicion directed against just that kind of thinking—‘what is…?’ ‘what is the essence of…?’ and so on.
—Could we perhaps take that point a bit further? Some theorists of the Post-Modern (Charles Jencks among them) have rejected what they see as the negative, even ‘nihilist’ implications of the Deconstruction movement in contemporary art. According to Jencks, ‘Architecture is essentially constructive. It builds up structures, depends on joint endeavours of mutual confidence, the combination of foresight, goodwill and investment—all of which Deconstruction undermines, if not totally destroys.’ I thought you might like to comment on this and similar responses, especially in view of current debates—taken up in the American and British press—about the ‘politics of Deconstruction’ and its supposed nihilist leanings. I’m sure you would say that they have misunderstood.
Absolutely, absolutely. … There has been much criticism, many objections that we find in the newspapers, in the bad newspapers. … Which doesn’t just mean that the people who write such things are jealous. Often they are academics who don’t read the many texts in which not only I but many people insist on the fact that Deconstruction is not negative, is not nihilistic. Of course it goes through the experience and the questioning of what nihilism is. Of course, of course. And who knows what nihilism is or isn’t? Even the people who object don’t raise the question ‘What is nihilism?’ Nevertheless, Deconstruction is or should be an affirmation linked to promises, to involvement, to responsibility. As you know, it has become more and more concerned with these concepts—even Classical concepts—of responsibility, affirmation and commitment. … So when people say it’s negative, nihilistic and so forth, either they don’t read or they are arguing in bad faith. But this can and should be analysed. …
—In the Aphorisms you refer to an ‘ageless contract’ that has always existed between architecture and a certain idea of dwelling or habitation. And of course this points toward Heidegger and a whole thematics of building, dwelling, and poetic thinking. You also remark—in a slightly different but related context—that ‘there is no inhabitable place for the aphorism’, that is to say, no place within the kind of large-scale conceptual edifice that philosophy has traditionally taken for its home. Thus: ‘The aphorism is neither a house, nor a temple, nor a school, nor a parliament, nor an agora, nor a tomb. Neither a pyramid nor, above all, a stadium. What else?’ Could I ask you to pursue this particular line of thought in whatever direction you wish, and perhaps suggest also what connections it might have with your latest writings on Heidegger?
Ah, that’s a very difficult question…
—Yes, I’m sorry…
No, no, not at all. Difficult questions are necessary. The fact that architecture has always been interpreted as dwelling, or the element of dwelling—dwelling for human beings or dwelling for the gods—the place where gods or people are present or gathering or living or so on. Of course this is a very profound and strong interpretation, but one which first submits architecture, what we call architecture or the art of building, to a value which can be questioned. In Heidegger such values are linked with the question of building, with the theme of, let’s say, keeping, conserving, watching over, etc. And I was interested in questioning those assumptions in Heidegger, asking what this might amount to, an architecture that wouldn’t be simply subordinated to those values of habitation, dwelling, sheltering the presence of gods and human beings. Would it be possible? Would it still be an architecture? I think that what people like Eisenman and Tschumi have shown me—people who call themselves Deconstructivist architects—is that this is indeed possible: not possible as a fact, as a matter of simple demonstration, because of course you can always perceive their architecture as again giving place to dwelling, sheltering, etc.: because the question I am asking now is not only the question of what they build, but of how we interpret what they build. Of course we can interpret in a very traditional way—viewing this as simply a ‘modern’ transformation of the same old kinds of architecture. So Deconstruction is not simply an activity or commitment on the part of the architect; it is also on the part of people who read, who look at these buildings, who enter the space, who move in the space, who experience the space in a different way. For this point of view I think that the architectural experience (let’s call it that, rather than talking about ‘buildings’ as such) … what they offer is precisely the chance of experiencing the possibility of these inventions of a different architecture, one that wouldn’t be, so to speak, ‘Heideggerian’…
—You have talked about the relationship between ‘modernity’ in art, architecture, philosophy etc., and a certain idea of the modern university, one that took hold in Germany a couple of centuries back and which still exerts a great influence on the way we think about disciplines, subject-areas, questions of intellectual competence, and so forth. And this would perhaps take us back to what you said previously about Kant’s ‘architectonic’, his doctrine of the faculties, that which enforces a proper separation of realms between pure and practical reason, theoretical understanding, aesthetic judgement and their various modalities or powers. … To some extent your work in the International College is a way of deconstructing those relations, showing how they give rise to endless litigation or boundary-disputes, often played out in very practical terms as a matter of institutional politics…
Oh yes, I agree with your definition of what is going on. Deconstructing not only theoretically, not only giving signals of the process at work, but trying to deconstruct in a practical fashion, that is, to set up and build new structures implying this work of Deconstruction. It’s not easy, and it is never done in or through a single gesture. It takes a long time and involves some very complicated gestures. It is always unfinished, heterogeneous, and I think there is no such thing as a ‘pure’ Deconstruction or a deconstructive project that is finished or completed.
—Isn’t there a risk that Deconstruction might become mixed up with that strain of Post-Modern or neo-pragmatist thought which says that philosophy is just a ‘kind of writing’, on a level with poetry, criticism or the ‘cultural conversation of mankind’? That these distinctions are merely ‘rhetorical’ or imposed by an obsolete ‘enlightenment’ doctrine of the faculties, so that we had best get rid of them and abandon any notion of philosophy as having its own special interests, distinctive truth-claims, conceptual history or whatever? Do you see that as a constant risk?
There are many risks and this is one of them. Sometimes it is an interesting risk, sometimes it opens doors and spaces in the fields which are trying to protect themselves from Deconstruction. But once the door is open, then you have to make things more specific, and I would say, following your suggestion, that no indeed, philosophy is not simply a ‘king of writing’; philosophy has a very rigorous specificity which has to be respected, and it is a very hard discipline with its own requirements, its own autonomy, so that you cannot simply mix philosophy with literature, with painting, with architecture. There is a point you can recognise, some opening of the various contexts (including the philosophical context) that makes Deconstruction possible. But it still requires a rigorous approach, one that would situate this opening in a strict way, that would organise, so to speak, this contamination or this grafting without losing sight of those specific requirements. So I am very suspicious—and this is not just a matter of idiosyncrasy or a matter of training—I am very suspicious of the over-easy mixing of discourses to which your question referred. On the contrary, Deconstruction pays the greatest attention to multiplicity, to heterogeneity, to these sharp and irreducible differences. If we don’t want to homogenise everything then we have to respect the specificity of discourses, especially that of philosophical discourse.
—There is one particular essay of yours which I think may help to focus some of these questions. It is called ‘Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy,’ a title that you borrow (or cite) verbatim from Kant, and it strikes me that there are two very different things going on throughout this text. In fact it is often hard to know whether you are writing, as it were, ‘in your own voice’ or whether the passage in question is sous rature or to be read as if placed within quotation marks. Sometimes you write of the need to maintain ‘Enlightenment’ values, to preserve what you call the ‘lucid vigil’ of Enlightenment, critique and truth. In this sense the essay appears to side with Kant against the adepts, the mystagogues, the fake illuminati, those who would claim an immediate or self-present access to truth by virtue of their own ‘inner light’, without submitting their claims to the democratic parliament of the faculties. Elsewhere you adopt your own version of the ‘apocalyptic tone’—a series of injunctions, apostrophes, speech acts or performatives of various kinds—as if to defend the right of these characters not to go along with Kant’s rules for the proper, self-regulating conduct of philosophic discourse. It does seem to me a profoundly ambivalent essay. On the one hand it is establishing a distance—even an antagonism—between Deconstruction and the discourse of Enlightenment critique. On the other it is saying that the Kantian project is somehow indispensable, that it is bound up with the very destiny of thought in our time, that we cannot simply break with it as certain Post-Modernist thinkers would wish—or have I misread your essay in some fairly basic way?
No, no, you read it very well. I agree with everything you said. It is a very, very ambivalent essay. I tried—as I often do—to achieve and say many things at once. Of course I am ‘in favour’ of the Enlightenment: I think we shouldn’t simply leave it behind us, so I want to keep this tradition alive.
But at the same time I know that there are certain historical forms of Enlightenment, certain things in this tradition that we need to criticise or to deconstruct. So it is sometimes in the name of, let us say, a new Enlightenment that I deconstruct a given Enlightenment. And this requires some very complex strategies; requires that we should let many voices speak. … There is nothing monological, no monologue—that’s why the responsibility for Deconstruction is never individual or a matter of the single, self-privileged authorial voice. It is always a multiplicity of voices, of gestures. … And you can take this as a rule: that each time Deconstruction speaks through a single voice, it’s wrong, it is not ‘Deconstruction’ any more. So in this particular essay, as you rightly said a moment ago, not only do I let many voices speak at the same time, but the problem is precisely that multiplicity of voices, that variety of tones, within the same utterance or indeed the same word or syllable, and so on. So that’s the question. That’s one of the questions.
But of course today the political, ideological consequences of the Enlightenment are still very much with us—and very much in need of questioning. So a ‘new’ enlightenment, to be sure, which may mean Deconstruction in its most active or intensive form, and not what we inherited in the name of Aufklärung, critique, siècle des lumières and so forth. And as you know, these are already very different things. So we have to remember this.
—I suppose I’m looking for some kind of equivalence between what we call ‘Modernism’ in philosophy, let’s say Kantian philosophy, and the term ‘Modernism’ as conventionally applied in architecture and the visual arts. You might compare the attitude that Deconstructivist architects take toward Modernism—not simply one of rejection or supersession, but a critical attitude directed toward that particular form of Modernist critique. …
Of course. That’s why I’m reluctant to say that Deconstruction is Modern or Post-Modern. But I should also be reluctant to say that it’s not Modern, or that it’s anti-Modern, or anti-Post-Modern. I wouldn’t want to say that what is Deconstructive, if there is such a thing, is specifically Modern or Post-Modern. So we have to be very careful with the use of these epithets.