An Impossible Encounter: A conversation between Jacques Derrida and Coop Himmelb(l)au (Wolf D. Prix, Helmut Swiczinsky, Regina Haslinger)

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17940083 Archival Interview An Impossible Encounter: A Conversation Between Jacques Derrida and Coop Himmelb(l)au (Wolf D. Prix, Helmut Swiczinsky, Regina Haslinger) The “Jacques Derrida” archive in Irvine holds a French version of a conversation between Derrida and Coop Himmelb(l)au (Wolf D. Prix, Helmut Swiczinsky, Regina Haslinger).1 Clearly, the text was at one time carefully revised and prepared for publication—the handwriting in the margins is only Jacques Derrida’s. Although the text appears ready to be published, it has remained in the archive and has been almost entirely forgotten. The interview was conducted in English, but the original is currently lost; it is, furthermore, unclear whether itsFrenchtranslator, Kenneth Hylton, is still alive. The first citation of any part of the interview, to our knowledge, came fromPetar Bojanićin a paper delivered on October 25, 2012, at the conference “Architecture of Deconstruction: The Specter of Jacques Derrida,” held in Belgrade. Marguerite Derrida was in attendance and gave her consent for the interview to be published. Other participants of the event included people who knew Derrida, worked with him, and were his friends (Bernard Tschumi, Jeffrey Kipnis, Mark Wigley, Maurizio Ferraris, Peter Eisenman, and others). Other than that, the interview was circulated discreetly within a small circle of people (for example, Gerrit Wegener and Andrea Canclini used it for their PhD theses on Derrida, defended in Berlin and Turin respectively). From the interview, it is evident that it was conducted in Paris, shortly after Derrida’s trip to Japan and the conference in which he mentions discussions and disagreements with his new architect friends concerning the role of architecture. In March of this year, the conversation with Wolf D. Prix and people from his office (see interview with Wolf D. Prix in this issue) made clear 1 “Un entretien impossible,” Jacques Derrida papers, Critical Theory Archive, Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, CA, https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ ark:/13030/tf3q2nb26c_aspace_ref894_6yx (accessed 12 September 2025). An Impossible Encounter 146 Khōrein, VOL. III, NO. 2, 2025 that the Derrida/Coop Himmelb(l)au interview must have been conducted in Paris in 1992, during the eponymous exhibition at the Centre Pompidou organized by Regine Haslinger. It is not clear whether Derrida participated in any way in the exhibition or whether the interview was conducted at the Centre Pompidou. We have scanned and here publish the French version exactly as we found it. Furthermore, we have translated it back into English, seeking to preserve its edited form and handwritten interventions. CH/RH: The 1988 MOMA exhibit [cf. introductory text / reference to the 1988 MoMA exhibition] sought to create a connection between deconstructivism and an architecture that would correspond to what we might call – in the absence of a better term – a completely new philosophy. And yet, if we were to ask the architects who took part in the exhibit, they would refuse to say that their architecture is the application of a theory, which is a philosophical notion. Instead, many of them avowed that certain deconstructivist elements seem to play a role in their work, impacting the architectural tradition. In light of this, I would like to open the questions with the following: What are for you the affinities between deconstruction and architecture? On the one hand, deconstructivism is a procedure, an analysis that supposes the existence of a construct, a body or text, whose premises deconstructivism then questions; on the other, architecture, however radical in appearance or questioning its own suppositions – harmony, stability, symmetry – is always close to synthesis in the production. D: Thank you. There are a lot of topics there, lots of strings to pull at. First of all, you used the term affinity, which is easy for me to accept, since it is rather vague and can fall within a number of different categories. Ido believe there is affinity between deconstruction – in the sense of that word that I am interested – and deconstructivism in architecture. What we need to do is establish what is affinity, and what kinds of differences can sustain affinity. I am not trying to avoid the term, but Iwould be careful what I include in it. There’s our first precaution. The second would concern what you have called procedure; here, I must object. Deconstruction is not a procedure. It is not a method. It does not consist of a set of rules that one might apply to something that exists. In A conversation between Jacques Derrida and COOP Himmelb(l)au 147 Khōrein, VOL. III, NO. 2, 2025 deconstruction, as I use it, there are of course preexisting objects or institutions, but deconstruction is also a form of inventing them, producing something new. From this point of view, deconstruction, in my account, must produce new events, rather than content itself to think critically about already existing things; although of course a memory of things past, that something was already there, is indispensable. Which is not a mere act of remembering. Deconstruction in my view produces new information, structures, writings, texts. This then is my second precaution. But let us return to the exhibit that you opened with [in MoMA]. First, I was very, very happy and reassured not to see any mention of my own work in the accompanying texts. This was already interesting. Mark Wigley, the organizer, avoided all specific references to justificatory terms or official affiliation, since the exhibit was rather heterogenous and strong enough to be able to dispense with any “protocol” or theoretical legitimation. This I already thought a good thing. This does not mean that there was no affinity among the various architects who took part. They were not all doing the same thing – they were rather different one from another – but there was undoubtedly an attraction between them and deconstruction at the level of discourse or philosophy of the kind I and some others are at pain to try to conduct. Now, what is this affinity? What does it consist of? I am certain there is one, but it is difficult to grasp, nor should we be too hasty to define it. We should preserve a shadow zone – something that remains to be determined. This attraction draws us to the future, to the extent that we do not know where it all leads. If we wished to put a finger on this attraction, we could say, first, that in architecture, as in other domains, such as philosophy, literature, law, painting, politics, institutions, etc. – the common trait would be a kind of rethinking history and he premises that we hold, the implicit norms, the institutions that regulate our work. We must try to analyze, to isolate that which is absolutely specific to a field, given, not with purity in mind, nor to isolate architecture from all contamination. For example, a possible path might consist of discerning (missing in original), let us take architecture, for this is our case. Architecture in itself need not be uniquely functional – even if it must be An Impossible Encounter 148 Khōrein, VOL. III, NO. 2, 2025 useful, this is not the main goal. Functionality is not the essence of architecture, nor its religious dimension. Traditionally, the architecture of temples, churches, sacred places, of the genius loci was a question of divine presence, in one way or another presence of God. This is entirely unavoidable, I would say, even in a New York building today; yet, it is not the essence of architecture. Beauty and harmony, aesthetic norms are not essential to architecture either, though. And dwelling, even though indispensable, is not the only thing created by architecture. Once we have abstracted using all these criteria, removed all these ends, what remains is almost nothing. Yet, this almost nothing is possibly that which is closest to architecture in itself. All of which is to say that architecture does not have to deconstruct all its implicit or unexamined norms in order to be a purely architectural architecture. This first gesture, an analytical step, which leaves an abstraction of architecture, does not offer a residue of a pure architecture, but rather something that we could then – and only at this moment – put in conversation or contact with comparable domains, such as cinema, literature, philosophy, seeking to relate it to other deconstructions. This does not mean that what we build need be ugly or less than functional or aesthetically pleasing or simply unlivable or uninhabitable; rather, it is a matter of something that ultimately is not constrained by beauty, livability, etc. We could graft this architectural writing onto other forms of writing – music, cinema, literature, politics – since it is often necessary to keep in mind what history, the actual political context, and technology could introduce into this space. At such a moment, the question of affinity returns. CH: A question came to me while listening to you. Is there a link between philosophy and architecture? In other words, do you think one could build with philosophy, or conversely, could architecture be a philosophy. How are these two terms positioned within a larger frame of reference? You spoke of functionality and of beauty; have these terms not been rendered ineffectual, or are they still used in philosophy? Do we need to redefine all these terms, as you seem to think, or perhaps simply erase them from our memory? D: To begin with, we must remember that there is a long tradition, a wealth of ties between philosophy and architecture. For, within philosophy, we find architectural metaphors that have always been at work. A conversation between Jacques Derrida and COOP Himmelb(l)au 149 Khōrein, VOL. III, NO. 2, 2025 When we speak of foundations, of systems – in the sense of a way to construct, to develop discourse, grounded concepts, a covering term, and circulation among various spaces – there is always a topology. There would be no philosophy without spatial organization of its discourse. Philosophers have always referred to architecture in order to define their efforts. For example, Aristotle mentions the architect as the one who knows the foundational principles (the arche), and who is thus capable of giving or - ders to slaves or workers who are performing the work in the city. This is thus a metaphor for philosophy, for politics and architecture – and of course, a metaphor for the city. Kant defines the system, and what he called the art of the system, as a construction of order of topics (systema means to hold something), as the architectonic, the art of building a philosophical system. Using politics as the blueprint, the philosopher of course constructs systems, just like an architect: starting with the arche, from the beginning, they construct their system from the bottom up. And then we have the metaphor of the foundation, from which rises the rest of the construction, or on which it rests – the idea of standing is important here. Being is to be standing. Heidegger, for example, never ceased to remind us that the ethnological being stands, vertical, from the bottom up. Thus, these are not mere metaphors, rather, they are essential, implying that philosophical discourse is itself a spatial discourse. Heidegger said that spatiality of language is not an accident, but rather that any concept contains a spatial aspect. Spatialization is not accidental. In this sense, there has always been an affinity between philosophy and architecture. Nietzsche often compared philosophers to architects. He compared Spinoza not only to someone who constructs, but weaves (playing on the German word for spider, Spinne, Spinoza). And of course, in the philosophical classification of art – specifically, in Hegel – there is a profound interest in architecture, an attempt to place it within the systematization of the arts. Thus, there is an understanding of architecture as interior to philosophy. Now, to return to deconstruction, here we have another way of, let’s say, scrutinizing (suspecter) this affinity between philosophy and architecture. Deconstruction asks questions about the metaphor of the foundation of the arche, the primary cause. Deconstructivism would in that sense be a deconstruction of philosophy and architecture, of their common roots, so to speak. It is a way of posing questions about the validity or legitimacy of the metaphor of foundations. This is not in order to leave either philosophy or architecture hanging in the air, but to wonder: why do we seek this An Impossible Encounter 150 Khōrein, VOL. III, NO. 2, 2025 Sicherheit, the security of the ground? Again, this is not to render them groundless, but to call the foundation into question. What does it mean to found? Founding is begründen, finding an articulation. Deconstruction is a means to disarticulate and thus dislocate (desarticulé) the fraternity of philosophy and architecture. Which is also why it is sometimes considered dangerous for both. CH/RH: I want to give an example that ties the two disciplines, writing and architecture, in an entirely different way: the Tower of Babel. The construction of the Tower illuminates the gift or the foundation of naming. Until the endeavor is interrupted, it encapsulates not only architecture, but also language, which is thus modified. Now, the principle of interruption, I see it as important for deconstructivism to the extent it does not presuppose that there was a beginning, a real origin. Instead, it proposes an arbitrary border, a demarcation, by which a structure could become visible. I would like to know how this opening of space might be applied to architecture? D: I see. Let us look at what you first said about the Tower of Babel. It is interrupted when God stymies the will of the builders, who wished to have a single language and name for the whole world. This interruption opens up to a multiplicity of languages, to translation. I have already written a lot on this subject, so I will not return to it, but I would like to underline one thing. The interruption is not entirely negative, meaning that it does not mark an end or limit, rather opens the possibility of language, and ultimately, the language of building. Let us leave this principle of interruption – of dysfunction, disconnection, demarcation – and return to our initial question of affinity, which there can be between all these architects and deconstruction. What they have in common is taste, not just taste, but a common relation to the necessity of the interruption, to construct by way of disjointing blueprints, and not beginning at the beginning, stopping at the end, but operating with transversal disconnections. They begin in the middle with an interruption, and end with another interruption instead of an accomplishment, fulfilling something that is self-contained without an absolute beginning or absolute end. Thus, the suspension of this relation is perhaps that which is common to all deconstructivist architects. Nothing begins with the arche, the foundation, origin, ground; nor does anything become fulfilled with a total accomplishment. These architects privilege disconnection, disjunction, A conversation between Jacques Derrida and COOP Himmelb(l)au 151 Khōrein, VOL. III, NO. 2, 2025 incompleteness, disproportion (dissymétrie) – values that range from interruption to relation. As soon as we give up on the reassurance and certitude of Sicherheit of ground, the beginning of arche, origin, we can glean buildings that “begin” from the middle, with impassable disconnections within the very discontinuity of their structures – dissociation and deconstruction are analogous values. And of course, you were right to bring up the Tower of Babel, which is a problem of translation, a multiplicity of languages, a transposition or grafting of cultures or different languages upon one another. Grafting here provides a good blueprint. The multiplicity of culture, of references, codes, languages is irreduc - ible. And architects perhaps have a common way of not belonging, or attempting not to belong, entirely to their culture. When Isozaki constructs something, it is at once Japanese and Californian and Spanish – he is trying to use anything that could be used to build the Tower of Babel. This is not to say that he forgets or erases reference to Japanese culture, but that he is playing around with grafting; this transfer, translation, the means of travel between different cultures, is equally political, it implies a politics. CH: You seem to be saying that philosophy and architecture share the same foundation, the same root. But when I look out the window, Isee many buildings inspired by reasons, origins, conditions other than philosophy. D: Are you certain that there is no philosophy here? I think it is full of philosophy. CH: Yes, but it is an obsolete philosophy. Let us return to the image of the Tower of Babel. If I understand you well, we can look at those events described from two points of view. I suppose we are suspicious of buildings that try really hard to simulate an impression of social stability. In that sense, architecture has always constituted a means of a sham politics. Yet, on the other hand, we could say – and this is the image that I had in my mind when you brought up interruption as a means to open up, to acquire different perspectives, spatial-temporal relations, among various things that had not been previously in contact – the notion of a multicultural society, comprising different languages. From that point on, the problem of translation, its imprecisions and impossibility of it being perfect, can be seen as a process that emerges from this event. Which is why An Impossible Encounter 152 Khōrein, VOL. III, NO. 2, 2025 we were wondering – since architecture is what interests us – why is it obsolete compared to art and philosophy, at least since the beginning of the twentieth century. D: Yes, I suppose the rhythms and transformations of architecture cannot be the same as in, let’s say, music or painting, and there are reasons for this, which are related to society, the city, politics. Architecture cannot be renewed – at least not the kind that is tied to the urban. It is easy to transform the architecture of individual houses, but not that of a major city – or something of the kind. That is political, tied to the political history of capitalist society, of course. CH: But I do think it is possible in architecture and in urban studies, to make the distinction between an architecture considered as a means to achieve stability and foresee the uncontrollable, and another that accepts the world as changing and affirms this change. One of the main purposes of art is to provide a new way of looking at things, in order to better function. Of course, there are old traditions, entirely lacking in stability, such as the architecture of nomads, or the Turkish house, which is differently dwelled in, depending on the seasons. D: I have another model. Since my visit to Japan a few months ago for a lecture on architecture, I noted that Japanese temples [for example] are regularly reconstructed using the same blueprint. This does not mean that the building must remain the same across the centuries; rather, the Japanese reconstruct it regularly with new materials. That way the building – the temple – always remains the same. It is another way to conceive of reconstruction and transformation. They do not modify the architecture, they modify the substance – not the form – but the substance, the content, the material. This is neither nomad, nor sedentary, nor any other form of reconstruction. What does it mean to reconstruct? CH: It is the metaphorical need to demolish and rebuild in the same garden. D: In Western cultures, when we reconstruct, we construct something new. We do not construct the same, or nearly the same. In Japan, they are not unhappy to build the same thing. A conversation between Jacques Derrida and COOP Himmelb(l)au 153 Khōrein, VOL. III, NO. 2, 2025 CH: Returning to philosophy of seeing. I am very intrigued by the idea that everything we see has a philosophical grounding, that is, saying that a philosophy hides behind all reasoning. D: I would not say that all seeing is philosophy, but that it implies something philosophical. Would you like me to tell you how philosophy is incarnated here [in Paris]? CH: Gladly. D: Well, I will have to improvise. I was not prepared for such a question, but allow me to improvise. First of all, what is most visible are the religious buildings; this is not philosophical in itself, but there is an implicit philosophy in the fact that the city of Paris wishes that its buildings remain standing. Religion exists due to the law that says religious structures should endure. There is a long story behind this, since certain churches were destroyed during the Revolution, but others were not; and now, we have arrived at a time, both religious and political of course, that wishes its churches remain standing, that wishes them restored, made visible, that they be seen by a certain number of people, etc. Thus, there is a religious memory, and not only memory, but activity; and the philosophy implicit in the French Constitution is to respect religion, ok? And then we have the Pantheon. It is a temple for great minds, great military leaders, and politicians in French memory. The issue of who ought to be buried there is of the greatest importance. When Mitterand became president – the first leftist president in two centuries, it should be said – his first act was to go to the Pantheon. Thus, here again, there is a philosophy. Not religious, but a religion of a nation, of the republican tradition, which is a philosophy. The philosophy of French politics – the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, etc. – is incarnated in the Pantheon. Now, there are a few other religious buildings that rise above the others, and there is a law that forbids further construction of taller buildings. Such a philosophy implies that the physical size of a human – normal, average, anthropologically speaking – must not be crushed by skyscrapers. Thus, there are practically no skyscrapers. Of course, there are one or two, more to remind us why there should not be any more, right? And this too, this is a philosophy, a kind of ethics. An Impossible Encounter 160 Khōrein, VOL. III, NO. 2, 2025 Berlin, with such and such a city” – and I believe them. Still, struggling against the authorities in Los Angeles, in Berlin, is not exactly the desired aim, however important these struggles are. Thus, I think we need to elaborate a new political discourse. No one is ready to do this. Old, Marxist schemes are, of course, no longer entirely useful, even if they are not entirely dead and gone, not simply out of fashion, yet, we need to find a new way with this old cause. CH: Is there a comparable problem in philosophy today? D: Comparable, yes. Of course it would require a bit of thinking to determine the exact affinity. There are analogous problems, but also dif - ferences. We do not build, so we do not need as much money, we do not grapple with policy makers, or not in the same way. An architect, as soon as they build something, must meet with the mayor, a representative of the government, the president of the country, economic power brokers, etc. The poor philosopher must only convince an editor or their students. CH: In what concerns architecture, we could say that politicians and other people who hold power and have influence over architecture are not interested so much in philosophy, that they are disdainful of aesthetics. D: That depends. In Berlin or in Prague, for example, I took part in conferences organized by the Senate of Berlin, or by politicians in Prague, and I recall them wanting to have something like a philosophical concept of what their cities ought to look like in the future. What they do with this is another problem, but at least they cared to hear a philosopher’s point of view, to take stock of the possibilities. CH: When you say that we need to elaborate new political thinking, does this lead us towards utopia? D: Oh, utopia is a huge problem. Not necessarily in the form of utopia, although I am not pushing this aside either, utopia could have a certain value, but you know, it is very difficult… CH: Yes, perhaps that is not the right word; let us say, imagining the future? A conversation between Jacques Derrida and COOP Himmelb(l)au 161 Khōrein, VOL. III, NO. 2, 2025 D: Yes, even if it seems impossible, even if you do no more than write it or draw it, without any power to construct it, it remains effective. Even if you imagine or invent something that is impossible to build today, whether a discourse or a drawing, the fact of having written it or sketched it could have an effect on that which will be built in the future. Therefore, we should not denounce utopia or abstract, impossible projects. Somewhere, I wrote – although I do not like to cite myself – that the only possible invention is the invention of the impossible. This could be a good place to end this impossible encounter. CH: Yes, thank you very much. D: No, thank you. Translated by Edward Djordjevic and Andrea Perunović.