Derrida writing architectural or musical form

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Volumn 26, Issue 3, 2003, Pages 70-85

  Dayan, Peter ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 61149548564     PISSN: 02648334     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3366/para.2003.26.3.70     Document Type: Article

References (17)

1. Volume 19, 68-79.
2. Including, notably, the essay 'Point de folie - maintenant l'architecture', published in English in AA Files (Annals of the Architectural Association School of Architecture) volume 12 (Summer 1986), 65-75.
3. As we shall see, later in the book Derrida allows music to join architecture among the exceptions.
4. All page references thus given in brackets in my text are to: Chora L Works by Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman, edited by Jeffrey Kipnis and Thomas Leeser (New York, The Monacelli Press, 1997). The layout of this book is playful and unconventional in many ways to which I am unable to do justice; for example, every page has nine or ten holes in it, which means that some words have bits missing, and have to be guessed rather than read.
5. Between Derrida and Kipnis.
6. The dates of the 'Afterword' and of Eisenman's letter are, however, not given; and since the texts in the book are not in rigorously chronological order, the possibility remains that one could imagine the 'Afterword' was composed last.
7. It will be plain that I, like Eisenman, have been fisghting shy of this word. I could, maybe I should, have structured this essay around the premiss that architecture (like music, perhaps) is the supplement of deconstruction: something at once outside it, and central to it; its source and its other. Certainly, the word surfaces obstinately when Derrida passes from writing to music, as in his analysis of Laporte's Fugue/Supplément, to which I refer below, or, most pertinently, in 'Les morts de Roland Barthes', which I would have discussed here, as it contains Derrida's most sustained reflection on the composition of music, if I had had space. But the peculiar twist which, as we shall see, music and architecture introduce into the deconstructive operation, twists also the concept of the supplement. It would take another six thousand words to follow through in a scholarly manner what happens to the supplement as this limit of deconstruction is reached; it would be unwise of me to attempt to hasten through this reasoning, and I shall resist the temptation.
8. Kipnis does try to introduce such a distinction (167), but Derrida is plainly not very interested in pursuing it.
9. Perhaps I may be allowed, here, to say that this is certainly not meant as a criticism of Derrida. On the contrary: my intention, rather, is to suggest that the post-romantic question of 'music and letters', though explicit discussion of it has not been fashionable for many decades, is still as unresolved as ever, and still as fundamental to our appreciation of what art might be; so I am grateful to find it emerge so clearly in Chora L Works.
10. I have not found a published translation of this extraordinary article (in Psyché (Paris, Galilée, 1998), 95-103; all my quotations are from the last two pages, and the translations are mine). Its title is a Derridean catchphrase, echoed in several of his works.
11. Roger Laporte, Fugue/Supplément (Paris, Gallimad, 1973).
12. In Writing and Difference translated by Alan Bass (London, Routledge, 1978), p. 18.
13. Hence the title of the article: 'Force et signification' is Derrida's revision of Forme et signification, a work of criticism by Jean Rousset which Derrida interprets as a paradigm of structuralism.
14. This translation is mine (see L'Ecriture et la différence (Paris, Seuil, 1967), 45); Alan Bass, in his translation, omits about a third of this passage, including the reference to music. The italics are Derrida's; the bold is mine.
15. 'Force et signification', as the quotations above demonstrate, already exemplifies Derrida's virtuosity in maintaining this paradox: he argues that beauty can only be force, and not form; yet at the same time, he suggests that this force can only be conceived of as form - as another kind of form; a kind we do not possess.
16. Every one of Laporte's words here - in French, 'glorieux tombeau à la mémoire de rien' - is a homage to Mallarmé; all recur endlessly as Mallarmé constructs his theory of literature as a monument to that which escapes our grasp as if in death.
17. It is, I think, fair to say that two phrases haunt the whole of Derrida's work. One we have already seen: 'ce qui reste à force de musique' (or 'a force de musique'). The other, even more obsessive, is: 'il y a là cendre'; there are ashes.