Tracce divergenti. Peter Eisenman interprete della decostruzione

The paper aims to account for Peter Eisenman’s reading of deconstruction as a source of his architectural work. As is well known, during the 1980s Peter Eisenman and Jacques Derrida collaborated in an architectural project at the La Villette Park in Paris, called Chora L Work and never realized. After the initial enthusiasm appeared some divergence that culminated in a polemical exchange of letters, documented by the proceedings of the conference Critical Architecture and Contemporary Culture (Irvine, California, 26-28 October 1989). Throughout the reading of these documents, the paper aims to show that what is at stake in this polemic is a very different understanding of what “presence” means for Derrida and Eisenman. In particular, it accounts for Derrida’s criticism of Eisenman’s reference to the notion of “presentness” to justify his work in relationship with deconstruction. In such criticism, Derrida recalls the deconstruction of the phenomenological determination of “presence” (“Living present”) as an irreducible issue of his work, necessary to understand the meaning of his reference to the “trace” as the condition of the constitution of “presence”. In this way he can demonstrate that Eisenman uses “presence” and “trace” in the traditional fashion: the trace as attestation of a past presence, a traditional fashion that deconstruction shows to be ungrounded, requiring the reformulation of this notions. In conclusion, the paper hypothesizes that Eisenman’s wrong reading of deconstruction was influenced by On Deconstruction (1982), a Jonathan Culler’s book, that read Derrida’s work in the horizon of literary theory, completely twisting its philosophical grounds.