Architectures of Difference

Abstract

Architectures of Difference explores the notion of difference in order to provoke a thinking of architecture differently. The thesis draws on the writing of Gilles Deleuze in Difference and Repetition, (1968), and Maurice Blanchot in The Infinite Conversation, (1969), to navigate an ungrounding of conventional systems of thought by way of difference. The research sets out to pose an ethico-political thinking before a thinking of architecture as some ‘thing’, as a critical questioning for an architecture-to-come. The project works across the disciplines of philosophy, literary-criticism, and architecture to bring to the fore the complex task of thinking difference before approaching the implications of such thought for architecture. The research is theoretically situated within the field of architectural theory yet draws its argumentation from the differentiated writings of Deleuze and Blanchot. Out of these writers what emerges is a fractious folding of difference that doubles over in an eternal differentiation as difference in-itself and for-itself. Difference as an affirmative production of force, and a power that enables the making of an arkhe (original ground) and its process tekhne (a gathering and know-how) in an originary differentiation. By considering difference as creative, rather than mediated by representation and identity, the thesis points to the radical repercussions this has for a thinking of space, time and an understanding of architecture. The thesis does not set out to undermine the productive accomplishments of the discipline of architecture, as these accomplishments are recognizable, formidable and valuable. Rather the thesis sets out to pose an affirmative articulation of a Deleuzian and Blanchotian difference, in its differentiation, as a sequence of complex conditions that not only account for the ‘real’ (that is architecture) but open to the horizons of thinking architecture.