The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida's Haunt

Front Cover
MIT Press, 1993 - Architecture - 278 pages

Nowhere, Mark Wigley asserts, are the stakes higher for deconstruction than in architecture--architecture is the Achilles' heel of deconstructive discourse, the point of vulnerability upon which all of its arguments depend. In this book Wigley redefines the question of deconstruction and architecture. By locating the architecture already hidden within deconstructive discourse, he opens up more radical possibilities for both architecture and deconstruction, offering a way of rethinking the institution of architecture while using architecture to rethink deconstructive discourse.

Wigley relentlessly tracks the tacit argument about architecture embedded within Jacques Derrida's discourse, a curious line of argument that passes through each of the philosopher's texts. He argues that this seemingly tenuous thread actually binds those texts, acting as their source of strength but also their point of greatest weakness. Derrida's work is seen to render architecture at once more complex, uncanny, pervasive, unstable, brutal, enigmatic, and devious, if not insidious, while needing itself to be subjected to an architectural interrogation.

Wigley provocatively turns Derrida's reading strategy back on his texts to expose the architectural dimension of their central notions like law, economy, writing, place, domestication, translation, vomit, spacing, laughter, and dance. Along the way he highlights new aspects of the relationship between Heidegger and Derrida, explores the structural role of ornament and the elusive architecture of haunting, while presenting a fascinating account of the institutional politics of architecture.

 

Contents

The Translation of Deconstruction
1
Unbuilding Architecture
35
The Slippery Art of Space
59
The Domestication of the House
97
Throwing Up Architecture
123
Doing the Twist
149
Dislocating Space
177
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The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida's Haunt
Mark Wigley
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Common terms and phrases

aesthetic Alan Bass already archi architec architectural discourse architectural figure argument Art of Space attempts building Chicago Press concealed concept constitutes construction Critique of Judgement crypt deconstructive discourse Derek Attridge Derrida argues Derrida's texts Derrida's writing detached Différance displacement disrupts domestic economy edifice effect Emmanuel Levinas explicitly familiar force Freud G. D. H. Cole gesture Grammatology ground Harper and Row Heidegger's Ibid identifies image of architecture Immanuel Kant inasmuch indigestion inhabits inside institution interior interrogation Jacques Derrida Jean-Jacques Rousseau Kant's kind language locate logic Maria Torok marks Martin Heidegger metaphor never simply Note to Pages object ongoing organizes original ornament parasite philosophy political possible Postisms precisely present produces question reading representation repression resists rethinking role Rousseau sense of space Sigmund Freud Slippery Art spatial strange structure subordination sustained tecture thinking tion traces tradition of metaphysics trans Translation of Deconstruction ture uncanny understood University Press violation violence

References to this book

About the author (1993)

Mark Wigley is Professor and Dean Emeritus at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation.

Bibliographic information

TitleThe Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida's Haunt
Mit Press
AuthorMark Wigley
Editionreprint
PublisherMIT Press, 1993
ISBN0262731142, 9780262731140
Length278 pages
Subjects ›  › 

Architecture / Criticism
Architecture / General
Architecture / History / Contemporary (1945-)
Philosophy / Movements / Deconstruction
  
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