Bernard Cache: Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories (1995)

Earth Moves, Bernard Cache’s first major work, conceptualizes a series of architectural images as vehicles for two important developments. First, he offers a new understanding of the architectural image itself. Following Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson, he develops an account of the image that is nonrepresentational and constructive—images as constituents of a primary, image world, of which subjectivity itself is a special kind of image. Second, Cache redefines architecture beyond building proper to include cinematic, pictoral, and other framings.

Complementary to this classification, Cache offers what is to date the only Deleuzean architectural development of the “fold,” a form and concept that has become important over the last few years. For Cache, as for Deleuze, what is significant about the fold is that it provides a way to rethink the relationship between interior and exterior, between past and present, and between architecture and the urban.

Translation of an unpublished French manuscript written in 1983 under the title Terre meuble.
Translated by Anne Boyman
Edited by Michael Speaks
Publisher MIT Press, 1995
Writing Architecture series
ISBN 0262531305, 9780262531306
153 pages

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Catherine Malabou, Jacques Derrida: Counterpath: Traveling with Jacques Derrida (1999/2004)

“Counterpath is a collaborative work by Catherine Malabou and Jacques Derrida that answers to the gamble inherent in the idea of “travelling with” the philosopher of deconstruction. Malabou’s readerly text of quotations and commentary demonstrates how Derrida’s work, while appearing to be anything but a travelogue, is nevertheless replete with references to geographical and topographical locations, and functions as a kind of counter-Odyssey through meaning, theorizing, and thematizing notions of arrival, drifting, derivation, and catastrophe. In fact, by going straight to the heart of the Derridean idea of “spacing,” she finally makes it seem as though Derrida has never written about anything but travel.

Malabou’s text is punctuated by a series of postcards received by Derrida from destinations such as Istanbul and Porto, Laguna Beach and Athens, which are inspired by his reading of her evolving discussion. Writing in a familiar and unguarded manner, as if he were “on vacation” from his own writing, Derrida still remains totally faithful to that work and invites the reader to reflect on much of what haunts his texts as well as his daily life, questions of distance and death, the relation to the other, and exile..”

First published as La Contre-allee, 1999.

Translated by David Wills
Publisher Stanford University Press, 2004
Cultural Memory in the Present series
ISBN 0804740410, 9780804740418
330 pages

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Christoph Menke: The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida (1988–)

“Recent discussions of aesthetics, whether in the hermeneutic or the analytic tradition, understand the place of art and aesthetic experience according to a model of “autonomy”—as just one among the many modes of experience that make up the realm of reason, situated beside the other “spheres of value.” In contrast, Theodor Adorno and Jacques Derrida view art and aesthetic experience as a medium for the dissolution of nonaesthetic reason, an experientially enacted critique of reason. Art is not only autonomous, following its own law, different from nonaesthetic reason, but sovereign: it subverts the rule of reason.

In this book Christoph Menke attempts to explain art’s sovereign power to subvert reason without falling into an error common to Adorno’s negative dialectics and Derrida’s deconstruction. The error, which already appeared in romanticism, is to conceive of the sovereignty of art as reflecting the superiority of its knowledge. For art entails no knowledge and its negativity toward reason cannot be articulated as an insight into the nature of reason: art is sovereign not despite, but because of, its autonomy. Menke brings to his arguments a firm grounding in both philosophy and literary studies, as well as familiarity with German, French, and American sources.”

First published in German as Die Souveränität der Kunst: Ästhetische Erfahrung nach Adorno und Derrida, Athenäum, Frankfurt am Main, 1988.

Translated by Neil Solomon
Publisher MIT Press, 1998
Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought series
ISBN 0262631954, 9780262631952
310 pages

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