The Origins of Architecture, After De Chirico

Thomas Mical

Giorgio de Chirico's `metaphysical' paintings (1910±1924) establish architecture asthe scene of the appearance and disappearance of its own history, and function asmusings on the unknowable origins of architecture.1 In these works, specificremembered classical forms are situated in the anxious spaces of modernity,repositioning architecture as a `disquieting' subject matter, and transgressing thetraditional representations of architecture (as knowable, measurable and reactiveto context and chronology). De Chirico's painted `architecture' is not as itappears; it is deliberately enigmatic. The persistent appearance of the architecturalexerts a disruptive effect on the viewer, offering a dream-like vision of a`convulsive' urbanism that is both familiar and uncanny. Distorting the inheritedlegacy of the proper spaces of the classical (as ruin or labyrinth), de Chirico'swork proposes a subjective modernity whose genealogy is derived from aNietzschean concept of the classical Stimmung (atmosphere).2 This is theoperative mechanism framing the eruption of the forms of the past into thespaces of the present in de Chirico's metaphysical work, an origin of his style thatis simultaneously a critique of the traditional origins in architectural and art-historical forms of discourse.3

The enigma of de Chirico's architecture, its polyvalence and obscurity, can betraced to de Chirico's period of intense study of Nietzsche around 1909±1910.4 DeChirico's indebtedness led to his confession: `I am the only man to haveunderstood Nietzsche. All of my work demonstrates this.'5 The source of thisvisual language that defamiliarizes and denatures the object of representation lieswithin the Nietzschean aesthetics of a `negative classicism' first explored in TheBirth of Tragedy (1872). During the formative period leading to the metaphysicalpaintings, De Chirico also read Human, All Too Human, Thus SpokeZarathustra, and, above all, Ecce Homo, and, `stirred by Nietzsche's descriptionof Turin's city squares', in 1911 de Chirico `visited the city and saw those squares:they became one of his most important pictorial subjects.'6 In retrospect, heconfirmed, `Turin inspired the entire series of canvases that I painted from 1912 to1915. In all honesty, I should add that these paintings owe a great deal to FriedrichNietzsche, whom I read passionately at the time.'7 After de Chirico's encounterwith the difficult revaluation of the classical period in the writings of Nietzsche,he pursued a persistent agenda of painting `metaphysical' architecture that was`dramatic, typological, and differential'.8

Art History ISSN 0141-6790 Vol. 26 No. 1 February 2003 pp. 78±99

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Nietzsche's modern revision of the classical appears to be the origin of the`metaphysical' world. In the historiography of modern architecture, influentialcritic Manfredo Tafuri saw the question of absolute meaning located in anyabsolute origin as problematic. To think through the difficulty of ascribingabsolute origins, Tafuri turned also to Nietzsche (by way of Foucault's analysis ofa Nietzschean historiography) to propose a departure from historical deter-minism:

In posing the problem of an `origin,' we presuppose the discovery of a finalpoint of arrival: a destination point that explains everything, that causes agiven `truth,' a primary value, to burst forth from the encounter with itsoriginary ancestor. Against such an infantile desire to `find the murderer,'Michel Foucault has already counterposed a history that can be formulatedas a genealogy: `genealogy does not oppose itself to history as the lofty andprofound gaze of the philosopher might compare to the mole-likeperspective of the scholar; on the contrary, it rejects the metahistoricaldeployment of ideal significance and indefinite teleologies. It opposes itselfto the search for ``origins''.'9

For Nietzsche, this `genealogy can only be a Versuch [experiment], an aphoristicand fragmentary game in which various forces confront one another which canonly be expressed provided we acknowledge their dynamic relativity.'10 `Ifgenealogy is the discourse that consists in relating cultural phenomena back to thebody, it only really achieves this as a result of a textual labor and movement,which are irreducible to the systematic unity of discourse.'11 In place of linearhistory and absolute truth, Tafuri describes the spaces of history in a metaphor(suprisingly descriptive also of de Chirico's project of metaphysical urbanism):`not a piece of history complete in itself, but rather an intermittent journeythrough a maze of tangled paths, one of the many possible ``provisionalconstructions'' obtainable . . .'.12 Any investigation of de Chirico's enigmaticimages of architecture, like Tafuri's unmasking of modern architecture, invitesmore than one genealogy, more than one origin, multiple historiographiescomfortable with the realization that `the insignificance of the origin increaseswith the full knowledge of the origin.'13 Truth is elsewhere: the origin (as locus oftruth and source of the discursive power of history) is here an unproductivecontrivance of the enlightenment. It is significant that the figures of the body-space of the enlightenment, with its pinning of the human subject to rationaltables or taxonomies (any Curvier-like science of the subject that `proves' themyth of progress) is deliberately absent from de Chirico's thoughtful hingeing ofthe dual temporalities of the classical and the modern.14 To fuse two distinctperiods convincingly requires a negation of their absolute meanings under the belljar of historical determinism, most easily accomplished by the negation ofepistemic or ontological truths projected from hypothetical origins.

Foucault proposed that `the origin lies at a place of inevitable loss, the pointwhere the truth of things corresponds to a truthful discourse, the site of a fleetingarticulation that discourse has obscured and finally lost.'15 In de Chirico'srepresentations of architecture, and perhaps in all discourse, the origin is a mask

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that merely conceals another origin, regressing to a time before writing, to thedark spaces of the unknowable past.

This vanishing point of de Chirico's metaphysical architecture could also beconceived of as a visual counterpart to Jacques Derrida's proposition of thesupplement. The Derridean `infrastructure of supplementarity' calls for areconceptualization of the real ± as a shell-game masking the impossibility ofany knowable origin that could rise to the status of an absolute truth:

. . . the infrastructure of supplementarity, by knotting together intoone structure the minus and the plus, the lack of origin and thesupplementation of that origin, does not choose between either one ofthem but shows that both functions are dependent on one another in onestructure of replacements, within which `all presences will besupplements substituted for an absent origin' . . ..16

This observation in linguistics should apply to any discursive representation. As avisual language, we would expect painting to communicate also as dialectic ofsubstitutes, masking a lost origin. As the theologian Mark C. Taylor observed,`the origin of that which has no origin is the origin of the work of art.'17

De Chirico's dream-like metaphysical works are constructed scenes that aresimultaneously familiar and estranged, weaving together the potentials oflinguistic and visual signifiers that are simultaneously modern and classical. Seenin their entirety, de Chirico's metaphysical paintings appear as discrete scenesfrom a dreamed labyrinth, enfolding interiority and exteriority into haunting andnostalgic spaces that have not, and could not, ever exist. De Chirico's reliance ona discursive architecture masks not only the obscure origin of painting, butpresents in its place sophisticated musings on imaginary spaces whose origins arealso obscure.

The spaces of the metaphysical body

From the Roman architectural treatise of Vitruvius through the Renaissance (anddifferentially in the modern period), the body has been the traditional bestower ofmeaning forming architectural space. The movement of the body leaves countlessclues to its presence in space: thresholds, stairs, scale and proportion of materials,which persist even when the body is absent. The movements of the body in theevent-spaces of constructed architecture have a long history (in many cultures) asthe origin of pre-modern architecture, as if architecture has developed as anextension of the body. Each culture's idealized body usually functions as theepistemic and ontological origin of that culture's architecture.

De Chirico's representations of spaces, interior and exterior, arefundamentally empty. The figures of the body that are represented in thesemetaphysical spaces fall into four loose categories: absent bodies, shadows(phantasms), statues and fragmented bodies.18 Absent bodies leave their traces inspace before they arrive or after they have departed. Shadows, or phantasms, arenondescript bodies that do not appear to dwell in, but haunt de Chirico's

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paintings ± these bodies without qualities are shadow-like, faceless and uncanny.19

Statues are most common in de Chirico's early metaphysical works; the artistacknowledged that a statue was the enigmatic origin of his metaphysical vision:

One clear autumn afternoon I was sitting on a bench in the middle of thePiazza San Croce in Florence. Of course it was not the first time I had seenthis square. I had barely recovered from a long and painful intestinal illnessand was in a state of almost morbid sensitivity. The whole world aroundme, including the marble of the buildings and fountains, seemed to me tobe convalescing. At the centre of the square stands a statue of Dante,wearing a long tunic and clasping his works to his body, his head crownedwith laurel and bent thoughtfully forward . . . the hot, strong autumn sunbrightened the statue and the facade of the church. Then I had the strangeimpression that I was looking at these things for the first time, and thecomposition of the painting revealed itself to my mind's eye. Now everytime I look at the picture, I see that moment once again. Nevertheless themoment is an enigma for me, in that it is inexplicable. I like also to call thework derived from it an enigma.20

The body eternalized in stone, situated in a space as a persistent form of memory,occurs in de Chirico's metaphysical paintings repeatedly, as a repetition-compulsion of this first vision of metaphysical space.

The statue brought to pieces, the body dissected and reassembled, andanalogous bodies composed of unrelated objects are all fragmented bodies, whichform the primary figuration of the body in the later metaphysical works. TheNietzschean classical ideal of a disciplined body generating the grand stylebecomes in de Chirico a fragmentary representation of heterological impulses.Specifically, in de Chirico, the fragmented metaphysical body is the privilegedstyle ± generating a fragmentary architecture.21

From Nietzsche and his critics, it is certain that the body is always (a) style.22

Style, a trope of the body, requires a context for the body to point `always to thefact of its own transience and contingency', `amongst time-bound elements'.23 Inall categories of de Chirico's metaphyscial figuration, a deliberate dissonanceexists between the limits of the contingent body and its surrounding pictorialspace. The absence of classical techniques of painting the body, while sustainingthe classical framing of the subject (in modern contexts), enhances thisdissonance.24 In de Chirico's early `metaphysical' work, the tempo of thearchitectural scenes is metronomic and epochal, evidenced in the Lassitude of theInfinite and The Soothsayer's Recompense (1913). The tempo of the body in theruined classical figures of The Uncertainty of the Poet and The TransformedDream (1912) is clearly out of place. These figures resemble figures of antiquity,but their style is fragmentary: like myth, style becomes evident only when it is`broken' or `superseded'.25 These post-classical fragmentary figures hover betweenobject and body. They lack corporeality, they `lack qualities' ± and this lack, thisabsence, is their style.

To return to linguistic theory (specifically the homology of body andlanguage), Berel Lang offers the styleme as the least recognizable element of

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style.26 As the body is always discursive, Lang's identification of style as amovement from classical rhetoric to modern aesthetic is paramount in naming thestyle of the body as a question. De Chirico named his architectural representations(utilizing the four styles of the body) as enigmas. In the classical theories ofrhetoric in antiquity, Trypho defines the trope of the enigma as `speechmischievously contrived for obscurity, concealing that which is to beapprehended, presenting something either impossible or inexplicable'.27

The synecdochic trope of the body, evident in de Chirico's repetition of thefragment in place of the whole body, situates the cut as the origin of the body'sstyles;28 the seams of the fragmented body function as the locus of the incision ofstyle.29 As the absorptive threshold between identity and distances, the seamsimultaneously delimits corresponding absences and presences. Each seam of thefragmentary representation of the body hinges between two contexts and twotemporalities, masking two discrete sets of `missing matter'. The visceral,mimetic, integrated body, whose idealization informed classical values andenvironments, is problematized in de Chirico's representations of the styles of thebody-space. The style of de Chirico's modernism emerges from the firstfragmentation of the body, and consequently this discursive body operates as a`fragmentary writing' of the origins of modern architecture re-assembled from thefragmentary remembrances of the classical past.

Fragmentary writing

What is the result of a fragmentary body, or the persistence of these fragments inde Chirico's metaphysical urbanism? We should consider the possibility of a visuallanguage that is non-linear yet discursive, posited not on timeless deep structures,but the temporary relationship of such fragments. Following the expressed post-structuralist possibilities haunting Tafuri's incomplete `historical project',fragmentary writing could become the proper domain of discursive architecturalthought, specifically if the architectural language proposed is composed not as astructure but as an assemblage of fragments. The fragmentary writing ofmetaphysical architecture in the modern period `resists both systems andstructures . . . its words cannot be unified, assembled, or reduced to ``1''; theyare irrepressibly equivocal because irreducibly plural.'30

For Tafuri, plurality and fragmentation render problematic the possibility ofdeterminist analysis. He claimed `once language has been discovered to be only oneof the ways of organizing the real, it becomes necessary to interject the profoundfragmentation of the real itself.'31 Though the fragmentation of the real shares somesimilarities with the project of cubism (and its influence upon Corbusianmodernism), it is evident that the figures of the body in de Chirico's metaphysicalworks, and the architectural forms that enclose them, are a challenge to the real. Hismetaphysical scenes are formed from discontinuous, `unreal' memories and dreamsof exiled bodies within evacuated spaces, and their lucid representation onlyincreases the compelling suspension of disbelief of unreality that we know in thecinema and in dreaming. These fragments increase in significance in direct pro-portion to the constructed unreality of fragments within the metaphysical paintings.

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Maurice Blanchot has developed a technique of writing called `fragmentarywriting' that draws upon the same Nietzschean sources as de Chirico, and appearsto describe the metaphysical works accurately:

marks of breakage, fragments, chance, enigma: Nietzsche thinks thesewords together . . . wandering among men, he feels a kind of pain at seeingthem only in the form of debris, always in pieces, broken, scattered, andthus as though on a field of carnage or slaughter, unified in a poetic act ofchance; `thus these marks of breakage, these fragments, should not appearas moments of a still incomplete discourse but rather as a language' . . .32

The metaphysical mis-en-sceÁ ne in de Chirico's metaphysical paintings are thedomain of fragmentary architecture, increasingly haunted in later works byfragmentary bodies. De Chirico's paintings of the fragmentary body act as such a`fragmentary writing'. The repetition of the body as fragment in de Chirico(re)produces temporal difference: `in order to keep repeating what is repeated init, it has to keep producing difference ± this is the function of the fragmentary.'33

The repetition of the fragmentary in de Chirico's method is deliberate andsignificant, and its source clearly lies in a Nietzschean origin (that is riddle oforigins): eternal recurrence.

Blanchot's concept of the fragmentary is often a species of repetition; it repeatsafter closure.34 `Fragmentary writing is posed as the writing of the return. In theEternal Return the structure of time is modified, and a writing that is non-discursive is demanded by this time.'35 Eternal recurrence `repeats the ultimateaffirmation in the mode of fragmentation.'36 Blanchot claims:

. . . writing according to the fragmentary, always taking place there wherethere is a place of dying and thus as according to perpetual death, bringson the scene, on a base of absence, semblances of sentences, remainders oflanguage, imitations of thought, simulations of being. Lie that no truthupholds, forgetting that supposes nothing forgotten and that is detachedfrom every memory: with no certainties, ever.37

De Chirico's metaphysical representations of bodies petrified before thearchitectural ruins of time appear turned to stone as memories, as repetitivefragments lost in time. Hal Foster has noted that de Chirico's paintings produce`medusan effects . . . both blind and blinding, fragment and fragmentary'.38 Thistendency of memory to provoke petrification in de Chirico, his `medusa effect', isan effect that `speaks into this shattered language'.39 This repetition of thefragmentary writing of the body and its architectural frame duplicates theconsequence of Nietzsche's claims of the vision of eternal recurrence which `cutsinto stone bodies'.40 In this regard, de Chirico's style of the body originates in theselective remembering of the Nietzschean classical ideal. De Chirico's style(me) ofthe body as a denuded classical body, tending towards absence, ruin andfragment, produces a fragmentary effect through its `fragmentary writing', itscomplicity as an avatar of recurrence. The atmosphere of temporal distance orloss, the ethos of `it was' in these images of the body, anticipates the return of the

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time of the classical, and is in the style of the temporal rhetoric of recurrence ofthe fragmentary.

Sparagmos: architecture's sacrificial tropology

The postulated cut in de Chirico's fragmentary scenes is an historically imaginedcutting of the body. The fragmentary style of the body, within de Chirico's largerrepresentational genealogy of the body's tendency towards petrification in stone(a reciprocity between the body and architecture), duplicates the rhetorical originof architecture in the form of the sacrificed body.41 The style/me, as cut, situatesde Chirico's re-membered `classicism' as a discourse whose apparent origin lies insacrifice, as a vanishing point.42

The body's disappearance into the form of architecture is marked by a sacrificethat originates architecture.43 `The origin lies at a place of inevitable loss, the pointwhere the truth of things correspond to a truthful discourse, the site of a fleetingarticulation that discourse has obscured and finally lost.'44 The disappearance ofthe corporal body operates as the project of de Chirico's representationalgenealogy of the body. It is significant that the disappearance of the body into the`metaphysical' absence of soulless statues and mannequins, as an unrepresented butrepeated event, concludes the promise of the first images of the (classical) body ±the shroud(s), the skin, the surface is removed to reveal (depthless) interiority, asan exteriority.45 It is of extreme significance that this `final' event of disappearanceexactly duplicates the lost `original' event of the body's disappearance intoarchitecture: the sacrifice.46 De Chirico revives and stresses Nietzsche's critique of abloodless, rational classicism with the re-willed (visual) return of this image: theimplicit horror and violence of Nietzschean `classicism'. The stressed body of thisethos ± sacrificed, dismembered and reconstructed in cult practice and myth ±appears to repeat compulsively the unknowable `originary' event in the dis-synchronous temporalities of de Chirico's `classicism'.47 The discursive bodyinitiates the repetition of its unknown origin, as an end.

The body, as an epistemic origin of architecture in de Chirico is not the rationalVitruvian man of the Renaissance; de Chirico's `fragmentary writing' of the bodypoints towards an older, more terrifying historical source: the body of sparagmos,as a foundational discourse and event.48 Sparagmos, the ritual dismemberment anddevouring of the god Dionysus in the hands (and mouths) of the Titans is repeatedas a significant ritual cultural formation in ancient Greece.49 This `division is vitalin sacrifice', as `Greek sacrifice thus involved the deconstruction andreconstruction of the victim's body.'50 The body is cut into pieces, according toset rules, along the seams; it is unhinged and fragmented, as a religiously significantoriginary act.51 The slow catachresis of body into architecture through sacrifice isexamined in Hersey, who writes: `Let us note that many of these myths aboutreconstructed victims are foundation myths for religious rituals; in other words,they are a precondition for the erection of temples.'52

This sacrificial division of the body into parts anticipates their return. The sceneof the cutting of the body generates a fragmentary order of the body that becomesre-membered in architecture. Greek temples were `assemblages of the materials . . .

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used in sacrifice'.53 As a visual memory of their origin in death, they mark thedisappearance of the body (through cutting) and the emergence of architecture as itsimmanent `alterior' body. Sacrifice establishes the sanctity of temples and the polis;it pronounces `the truth of the violence on which politics and the social contract arebased'.54 As `a very simple piece of savage logic', it was repeated on `unlucky andblack days'.55 The form of architecture duplicated the sacrifice in stone, `carvedwith replicas of these remains to immortalize the sacrifice made that day'.56 Thisorigin of classical architecture re-members the sacrificial body; it embodies in stonethe sacrificed (absent) body that originates it. The `classical' figure of architecturetherefore marks an absence, an abyss, and, as in Nietzsche's theory of eternalrecurrence, this (immanent) void is its `deadly risk and secret'.57

Sacrifice, as a differential logic of the seam, condenses distances (betweeninteriority and exteriority, between past and present, gods and mortals).58 Bataille,in writing of sacrifice, but implicating architecture, speculates,

All the differences that the sacrifice brings in for the sole purpose of erasingthem, are tied to this system. The first of these differences is that betweenthe one performing the sacrifice and the victim, permitting distance to betaken (the distance that theory will be based on). Yet sacrifice excludes thepossibility of maintaining this distance to the very end: there is no sacrificeunless the one performing it identifies, in the end, with the victim. Unlessthis distance is sacrificed as well.59

And this collapsing of (temporal-causal) distances (distances re-created by deChirico's fragmentary bodies) allows the polyvalent images and scenes of sacrifice tooperate as a `convulsive' origin of (architectural) meaning. Bataille describes sacrificein these terms: `such an action (i.e. sacrifice) would be characterized by the fact thatit would have the power to liberate heterogeneous elements and to break the habitualhomogeneity of the person. . . .'60 In this proposed origin, the `convulsive' effect of(sacrificial) architecture must in part derive from its violent origin, as Nietzscherecognizes in his description of the effect of classical architecture:

The stone is more stone than before. In general we no longer understandarchitecture, at least by far not in the way we understand music. We haveoutgrown the symbolism of lines and figures, as we have grownunaccustomed to the tonal effects of rhetoric . . . originally everything abouta Greek . . . building meant something, and in reference to a higher order ofthings. This atmosphere of inexhaustible meaningfulness hung about thebuilding like a magic veil. Beauty entered the system only secondarily,impairing the basic feeling of uncanny sublimity, of sanctification by magicor the gods' nearness. At the most, beauty tempered the dread ± but thisdread was the prerequisite everywhere.61

The turning of this dread (associated with the figure of the sacrificed victim) intobeauty is the primary tropos of Nietzsche's classicism.62 After the sacrificial scene,the fragmented body returns in built stone as a trope, which Hersey identifies asthe form of the sacrificial origin of architectural language.63 The possibility of

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architecture duplicates the body as a category of rhetoric, its tropologyreconstructing the obscure or absent body through the technique of metonymyor catachresis.64 Conceptually, though, these tropological figures of architectureare `turned towards that which turns away (tourne vers cela qui de tourne)'.65

In many of de Chirico's paintings, the remnants of the scene of sacrificialarchitecture support this tropology of architecture and the body troped (`turningaway') into each other.66 `The visible becomes a screen revealing and concealing anon-visible alterity.'67 These three symptoms of the disappearance of the bodyinto architectural form are clearly different in form to those of the classical model,but the metaphoric operation of sacrificial cutting of the body, and its recon-struction from fragments, sustains the classical body and architecture as agrammar of parts.68

This cross-troping binds the classical body into a network of signification,skewed by Nietzsche towards the dark, violent and suppressed origins of anti-quity's forms. The persisting tropes of classical sacrifice become a recombinant setof self-referential signifiers reconstructed as the architectural body; its interioritysacrificed to exteriority.69 The body's style is legible as the cuts of architecture,and the image of the architectural form that invokes its sacrificial bodily originhaunts its context with the resonance of its parts. As in de Chirico's fragmentarywriting of the body, such a form constructs a transgressive vision of time. Thesacrifice of the body sacrifices it to time, to the return of time. The re-memberingof the sacrifice is the `spasm of the infinite' that is de Chirico's architecture.70

The relation between architecture and sacrifice is the dual attempt to recon-figure the relation between moment and eternity. Sacrifice acts in time to sacrificethe meaning of time, the contracting and obscuring of time, and the distancing oftime.71 In this ethos, classical architecture is the fatal reconstruction of timethrough the reconstruction of the body. But time is always the `unsettlingremainder' of sacrifice, its `excess'.72 Sacrifice repeats the fragmentation of timethrough a fragmentation of the body; architecture re-membered thus recoverstime, and its classical `awe, joy, and terror'.73

De Chirico's re-membered architecture sustains the `eruption' of exteriority(that is the eternity outside time) in the sacrificial body; it is a convulsiverepresentation; its style is cutting.74 The originary vanishing point of classicism,and its architecture as the `first stirring of separated limbs', requires afragmentation of the body to remember.75 And this is the schema of the eternalrecurrence. To reprise, I turn instead to Bataille who, in his reading of Nietzsche,

sacrifices the notion of the eternal return such that it makes a way, not fora philosophy of time, but for the experience of sacrifice. In this operation,it will become evident that the return is in itself always the return ofsacrifice because it implies the loss of identity on the part of oneexperiencing it; that the return, like sacrifice, leads first of all to thedeterioration of personal identity.76

This expanded significance of sacrifice is the repetition of the birth of the `it was'that Nietzsche's theory of eternal recurrence seeks to recuperate throughrepetition.

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Dis(re)membering the body of architecture

De Chirico's re-membered classicism, its fragmentary body as disrupted ruin withlegible seams (the style[me]), reinvents antiquity in the `moment' of representa-tion. It is in this moment that the possibility of remembering and forgetting theorigins of architecture allow the image of architecture to live, not as an image, butas an effect.77 This movement of the origin between remembering and forgettingduplicates neatly the process of the making of the sacred effects associated withclassical architectural form.78 And this movement is most accurately calleddis(re)membering.

In his essay on Nietzsche's style entitled `Dismembering and Dis(re)mem-bering', J. Hillis Miller situates the cutting of the body in this process ofdis(re)membering:

However logical man tries to make the hierarchical system of conceptswithin which he lives, cutting everything neatly, like the sharp corners of adie, numbering everything, and fitting each thing into its proper pigeonhole,like coffins shelved in a Roman columbarium, this cutting and fittingreverses itself. The cutter is cut, as in all those images of grotesquemutilation which run through this essay and which describe man as aboutto be eaten by a tiger, or as like a deaf musician, or as like a painterwithout hands. He may be eaten. He has already been dismembered. Thisdismembering figures his disremembering, his inability to keep a totalpicture of his condition clearly present in his mind.79

Dis(re)membering, following dismembering, is a second recuperative strategy,posited on a near equivalence of the body and memory, both in language and intime. The body, as the domain of memory, is immobilized in the Nietzscheanscheme through memory.80 This immobility, making the living body statue-like,situates the body temporality in two times, two languages, simultaneously. Andthis is the image of the body's alterity in de Chirico's metaphysical architecture.81

The images of these fragmented stone bodies, torn between times and languages,echoes the images of the sacrificial architectural forms of classical figurativecolumns.82

De Chirico's (Nietzschean) imperative is `what is remembered in the body iswell remembered.'83 Memory and forgetting in Nietzsche are corporal processes,defining the consciousness, not subject to it. The domain of the effect is entirelywithin the body ± memory is a process of the body, an eruption.84 In de Chirico'smetaphysical art, the alterity of the body, its objectification and repetition in timeduplicates the process of memory that generated it, including the classicaldialogue of beauty with dread. The re-membered bodies appearing in the latermetaphysical paintings, re-members fragments, both corporal and architectonic,to approximate semiotically a complete body, establishing discrete isolatedphenomena from multiple scales of time into a single image, as a forgetting of the`excess' of re-membering.85 As a dis(re)membering, they acknowledge the originalbody as a whole, they acknowledge the pulling apart of the body as an originaryevent, and they invoke the memory of this event architecturally, in the language of

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dis(re)membering. This literary term, ostensibly used to describe a process ofreading, names the process of remembering and forgetting invoked in the form ofthe architectural body as a symptom of memory. The `dis-' of `dis(re)membering'therefore refers not to the resistance, reversal, or negation of reflective perception,but here means the bodily procession of active forgetting as `effect', Dis(re)mem-bering informs and deforms the body into an obscurity in de Chirico's`metaphysical' work three times nor: as a means of constructing an alterior`classical' body, as a process implicated in viewing, and as the irrational effect inwhich this seeing operates in (to see such figures requires a selective forgetting ofthe apparatus of representation and the boundary of the self transgressed by theeye.

Dis(re)membering a body reverses the chronological time of sacrifice; thefragmentary writing of the absent originary scene returns to haunt the image ofthe body. The disruptive effect of (spontaneous) memory, empowered by thelength and repetition of its deferral in classicism, is the `murmur' in de Chirico'sdisquieting representations.86 The language of dis(re)membering, with its `visiblefigures and effaced, stammering, distorted form', is of figures `inscription halfworn away'.87 This is also the technique of de Chirico's representation of thebody's obscurity; the `murmur' in his `metaphysical' work ± the echo of the first`time'. Klossowski observes: `Representations are nothing but the reactualizationof a prior event, or the reactualizing preparation for a future event. But in truth,the event in turn is only a moment in a continuum which the agent isolates inrelation to itself in its representations . . . a result . . . a beginning.'88

`One can never have done with the past.'89 Yet forgetting, as the origin of art,is the primary deferral that allows art to erupt.90 The absent body, disappearedfrom figuration in the `metaphysical interiors', is a most extreme form offorgetting, and within the Nietzschean schema of memory, and de Chirico'sreiteration of this schema, memories forgotten are merely deferred, a sacrifice intoabsence to bring the return.91 The body as a memory in de Chirico operates aseither obscure or `convulsive'.92 The convulsive body is wounded in remem-bering.93 The body as statue, ruined or as fragment, traces the convulsive eruptionof memory with the image of the sacrificed trophy. It repeats this fragmentaryeffect as an offering to the distant origin of architectural form.

The `fragmentary writing' of the body in de Chirico, the fragment as a point inthe genealogy of the body's disappearance into architecture, and the occasion ofarchitecture to record and re-member the sacrificed body that originates it, aredifferent perspectival views of the same phenomena. For example, the obscurebody of memory, as in the shrouded figures from the period 1910±1915, repeats are-membered image sustaining its obscurity through repetition.94 This negativerepetition desires the obscurity of the inaccessible past. In de Chirico's`metaphysical' work, memory is constructed as the most obscure body.95 DeChirico's post-classical dis(re)membering requires him to paint repeatedly, thereturn to the classical sources of the alterior body, to figure the scenes of his`metaphysical' work as always a premonition and amnesia.96 Dis(re)membering inde Chirico collapses the sequence of the body's movement into architecture: manbecomes body becomes sacrifice, sacrifice becomes architecture, alterior bodieshaunt architecture, as memory ± repetitively.

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De Chirico's metaphysical architecture, as `conjurer of the dead', is therepetitive search for an unrecoverable original history.97 Death is proximate to theunknowable origin of this architecture, and its unknowable historical function.For Bataille, `architecture retains of man only what death has no hold on.'98 DeChirico's architecture projects this excess as a disruptive effect (of history): in theabsence of a teleological truth or progressive history, repetition is repetition of thepast, the unknowable origin, and architecture appears as a lingua morta (languageof the dead).

The probable origin of history lies in the funeral eulogy, as loss.99 Thisoriginary limit-experience is a temporal accounting, involving promises,memories, indebtedness and reparations; it speaks of loss, of the incomplete,but not of the cause. Funerary speech signifies death through a silence. ForBlanchot, all language itself brings death, `and we speak only from it . . . beforeany speech, there is the offering of a dying and the offering of my own dying.'100

`For Blanchot, the annihilation through which signification comes about inlanguage is in the last resort a function of a human being's mortality.'101 Blanchotwrites,

my speech is a warning that at this very moment death is loose in theworld, that it has suddenly appeared between me, as I speak, and the beingI address: it is there between us as the distance that separates us, but thisdistance is also what prevents us from being separated, because it containsthe condition for all understanding.102

The origin of history in death, as a discourse to overcome the significance ofdeath, is revealed in de Chirico as a panegyric history.103 `The drama of historystages the flight from death.'104 The remains of history in de Chirico'sarchitecture, after repetition and recurrence, reverse this flight, offering a fatalhistory `in which beginning and end mirror each other'.105 The suppressed fatalorigin of history returns in every repetition in de Chirico's architecture, renderinghistory panegyric and alterior, with loss as the transparent centre. It speaksaround death, `the last form of the problematic, the source of problems andquestions, the sign of their persistence over and above every response'.106 DeChirico writes of architecture, `there is no use citing history and the causes of thisand that; this describes, but it explains nothing for the eternal reason that there isnothing to explain, and yet the enigma always remains.'107 This enigma ofarchitecture is present in the spaces of death, the empty theatres, the silentspacings of exile as the `dwelling-place of the absence of the gods'.108

De Chirico's anti-teleological representations of architecture, a history as aclosed language, in dying without decease, exiles the `subject' in the possibility ofdeath (as origin). `The experience of exile and estrangement presupposes anunderstanding of lack as loss or defect(ion) . . . ``exile'' is ``original'' and is notsubsequent to an antecedent time that was unsustained by the agony of ``loss'' anduntainted by the tension of ``estrangement''.'109 The fatality of a circular historyreturns to collapse the mimetic distance of the `subject' and its `others' withinarchitecture's funerary discourse. The history of this architecture is the history ofinternment.

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The possible eternity of stone (funerary) architecture dis(re)members theclassical body of flesh: `the funerary monument recomposes the sign of the body . . .as the prosthesis of memory.'110 In Nietzsche, `memory is always in some ways theloser in its bargains with time; and the most profitable compromise with itsrapacious flights into forgetfulness may well be those in which the material to bestored up has been gradually changed into forms that are, as articulations, moredurable.'111 De Chirico's bodies tending towards architecture tend towards thediscursive image of their deaths ± the Medusa effect. As `phantasmic' statues theyhaunt the topos of death, the `metaphysical' scene locked in repetition. The ruptureof pure exteriority into the interior space of the `subject' is the enigma of fatalitythat is (both) the effect of architecture (and the promise of eternal recurrence).

The tragic is distinct from history, yet in both the topography of the body isstructured around places of death.112 In `the modern correspondence betweenfunction and sign', funerary discourse is a correspondence `in the same placebetween sema (the sign of the body: tomb, grave) and soma (the corpse), a newthinking machine that unites . . . the topological, the semiotic, and the somatic'.113

Death, as a building type, is de Chirico's archetype ± re-assembled fragments of(alterior) time troped in architectural stone.114 Between the tragic and the modern,between stone and flesh lies alterity.

When Aldo Rossi, whose architectural representations were significantlyinfluenced by de Chirico, states `architecture becomes the vehicle for an event wedesire', he does not indicate if this event is future or past.115 In de Chirico's work,the ruin of the body in time reciprocates the ruin of time in the recurrence ofclassical architecture. The ruin, as incomplete, constructs a space of waiting.116 Inde Chirico's tragic polis, the near-proximity of the unseen is awaited, either theimpending catastrophe or `for time to become meaningful again'.117 In losing theabsolute referent of the epistemological origin, temporality and history becomediscourses on the absence of meaning.

The architectural type of death bears witness, outside time: it is always therebefore us, witnessing our perishing. For Bataille, its ideal form of architecture wasthe pyramid `taking on the immobility of stone and watching all men die, one afterthe other . . . transcend the intolerable void that time opens up under men's feet . . .they maintain what escapes from the dying man.'118 In Nietzsche's metaphoricarchitecture, the pyramid retains traces of life ± the compulsive architecture ofdeath is Nietzsche's `Roman columbarium'.119 They retain everything of man, asashes: `ashes mean that any effigy has been completely effaced, any singularityvolatized . . . the columbarium ends up burying its constructor.'120 De Chirico paintsno pyramids (no transcendence); he paints no columbariums (no classifications) buta repetitive lingua morta that foregrounds alterity before typological history. Inplace of the Vitruvian man, de Chirico's architecture centres the ruin of time inrecurrence, as a document of loss, a void in the place of an origin.

De Chirico's metaphysical representations of architecture can be seen asexplorations of the Nietzschean theory of eternal recurrence, as when he writes`the greatest singer has arrived, speaking of the eternal return, and his song has thering of eternity only with Nietzsche can a true life be said to have begun.'121

Eternal recurrence problematizes history; in convulsing the telos of thehistorical `subject', history as a master narrative is lost. The eternal recurrence of

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history is thus the end of history.122 `Affirming eternal recurrence amounts toperforming the exact recurrence of history to any variation on it.'123 Thesingularity of history thus volatized, its origin in death is exposed in the fate of theperishable body, a perishing that is infinitely repeated. This fatality replaceshistory with the time of the chance combination, with a repetition of repetition.Forgetting and sacrificial violence at the origin of architecture return in the deadlanguage of de Chirico's architectural discourse, always at the end of its ownhistory.

The loss of history is the closure of the possibility of differential history, wherethe originary difference is no longer. `History is completed precisely at themoment when the originary difference no longer functions . . . when identity canbe reaffirmed in spite of difference: the identity of identity and difference.'124

Foucault notes a similar loss in the origin in discourse: `the origin lies at a place ofinevitable loss, the point where the truth of things corresponds to a truthfuldiscourse, the site of a fleeting articulation that discourse has obscured and finallylost.'125 For Nietzsche, `the end of history is a non-event marked only by alanguage that is no longer ``discourse'' '; it is the end of closure itself.126 Blanchotnotes that at the end of history, language closed to discourse is `the mark of aninterruption or a break there where discourse falters, in order, perhaps, to receivethe affirmation of Eternal Recurrence'.127 The originary limit-experience offunerary discourse is also the vanishing point of the originary telos of history. Theend of history, as a single event, is a loss of memory; the repeated ends of historyclear the balance sheet of any concepts or remainders. In Nietzsche's critique ofmodernity, its historical providence and resolve is undercut most explicitly in thecatastrophic thought of eternal recurrence (where time and history are ruined).The end of history cannot be another historical event; it erupts in every repetitionthat erodes identity and difference.

The enigmas of de Chirico's architectural representations posit repetitively theend of history as a disappearance into the unknowable vanishing point of theabsolute past. The origin and the end repetitively achieve unity, make the thoughtof eternal recurrence into a series of fragmentary spaces disturbingly outside lineartemporality. The assumption of the origin of architecture, not in dwelling but insacrifice, of eternalizing the body into stone, duplicates the Medusa effect thateternal recurrence had upon Nietzsche, which posits the eternalization of themoment, and renders the origin and end of history as points revisited in an endlessjourney or exile.

Thomas MicalUniversity of Oklahoma

Notes

1 The `architectural subject' is a double-figure thatdeliberately superimposes the `subject'constructed through perspectival representationwith the architecture that is the `subject' ofrepresentation in de Chirico's work. The

inclusive dates of the `metaphysical' paintingcorresponds to the conventional distinction, butthe actual parameters included in this analysisbegin with the appearance of the architecturalsubject matter until its dissipation in the later

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postwar works. In writing this essay, I haveavoided utilizing specific examples orillustrations in favour of identifying overarchingthemes as a basis for developing a reading of the`architectural figurations of eternal recurrence'.Though there is some question of the exactnumber and identity of the body of workcomprising de Chirico's metaphysical period,examples are well documented in PaoloBaldacchi's De Chirico: The MetaphysicalPeriod, 1888±1919, Boston, 1997.

2 The `Stimmung' of Nietzschean classicism,described by de Chirico as `atmosphere in themoral sense', profoundly influenced his readingof the classical figures and representation. `Thetrue novelty discovered by this philosopher . . . astrange and profound poetry, infinitelymysterious and solitary, which is based on theStimmung (I use this very effective Germanword which could be translated as atmospherein the moral sense) . . .' Giorgio De Chirico, TheMemoirs of Giorgio De Chirico, trans. MargaretCrosland, New York, 1994, p. 55.

3 `Signifier (building) signifies (type) in a mimeticrelation whose telos is truth. What classicismfails or refuses to acknowledge is that true formor the transcendental signified is really a fiction. . . Nietzsche insists that truth is an illusion thathas forgotten it is an illusion'. Mark C. Taylor,`Nuclear Architecture', in Assemblage ± ACritical Journal of Architecture and DesignCulture: 11, Cambridge, Mass., April 1990,p. 11. Using Nietzschean classicism to relocatethe post-structuralist project of architecture as asubversion of the modern through the classical,Taylor defines a problematic that de Chirico'swork contributes to understanding.

4 `De Chirico's early education was morephilosophical than pictorial. . . above allNietzsche. . . through his philosophers andlengthy, silent experimentation, de Chiricodiscovered his method of the enigma.' MaurizioFagiolo Dell'Arco, `De Chirico in Paris, 1911±1915', in William Rubin (ed.), De Chirico:Essays, New York, 1982, p. 12.

5 De Chirico, in private correspondence to FritzGratz. The full citation of this letter istranslated in Paolo Baldacci, `The Function ofNietzsche's Thought in de Chirico's Art', inAlexandre Kostka and Irving Wohlfarth (eds),Nietzsche and `An Architecture of Our Minds',Los Angeles, CA, 1999, p. 92.

6 Uwe M. Schneede, `Proto-Surrealism ±``Disquieting Dream Reality''' in Surrealism,trans. Maria Pelikan. New York, 1973, p. 21.The source of de Chirico's reading list is IvorDavies, `Giorgio de Chirico: the sources ofmetaphysical painting in Schopenhauer andNietzsche' in Art International, vol. 26/1, Jan±Mar 1983, pp. 53±60.

7 Giorgio De Chirico, `Some Perspectives on MyArt', in Hebdomeros, trans. Margaret Crosland,

London, 1968, p. 252.8 Marielle Blanche Alice Rainbow-Vigourt, `TheVision of Giorgio de Chirico in Painting andWriting', unpublished PhD dissertation, SyracuseUniversity, 1989, p. 316, identifies thisNietzschean approach as the influence of deChirico's writing and painting, though itsimplications for architecture are noteworthy,specifically her assertion that in followingNietzschean thought, de Chirico's work becamethe `negation of a negation'. The correspondencebetween de Chirico and Fritz Gartz, documentedin Baldacci's essay `The function of Nietzsche'sThought in de Chirico's Art' in Kostka andWohlfarth, Nietzsche and `An Architecture ofOur Minds, leads to a discussion of the semioticrole of de Chirico's metaphysical art as a systemof enigmatic signs, though most analysis of deChirico's art has examined these signs withlesser emphasis on the semiotic meanings of thespatial mis-en-scene.

9 Michel Foucault, `Nietzsche, Genealogy,History', in Language, Counter-Memory,Practice, Ithaca, 1977, p. 140. Manfredo Tafuri,The Sphere and the Labyrinth, Cambridge,Mass., 1987 [1980], pp. 3±4.

10 Eric Blondel, Nietzsche: The Body and Culture,trans. Sea n Hand, Stanford, 1991, p. 86.

11 Blondel, Nietzsche, p. 258.12 Tafuri, The Sphere and Labyrinth, p. 21.13 Nietzsche, The Dawn, section 44, cited in

Gianni Vattimo, `The End of Modernity: TheEnd of the Project', in Architecture andPhilosophy, issue of Architectural Design,December 1990, pp. 74±7.

14 Concerning this event, dell'Arco writes `hereinlies the whole meaning of Metaphysical art: tosee something and go beyond it.' Dell'Arco, `DeChirico in Paris, 1911±1915', p. 11. Thisdoubling of vision, one corporal and one `other'is telling.Hal Foster writes of this event: `however

enigmatic, this scene has its own sense. Thespace of the piazza is transformed by twotemporalities that coexist within it: an event of``not the first time'' . . .' that triggers thememory of `the first time'. . .' though heconcludes with `a structure characteristic ofdeferred action in primal fantasy . . . here deChirico rewrites a traumatic initiation intosexuality into an origin myth of art.' Hal Foster,`Convulsive Identity', in Compulsive Beauty,Cambridge, Mass., 1990, p. 64. Though thisassertion of two temporalities appears correct,the excessive Freudian reading has noconvincing support in de Chirico's writings,where Nietzsche is always present.

15 Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice,p. 143.

16 Jacques Derrida, Disseminations, Chicago, 1991,p. 167 quoted in Rodolphe Gasche , The Tain ofthe Mirror, Cambridge, Mass., 1986, p. 210.

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17 Mark C. Taylor, Alterity, Chicago, 1987, p. 246.18 For a thorough description of the absent body,

see Drew Leder, The Absent Body, Chicago,1990.

19 `Unbearable lightness' is Kundera's term forbodies not selected to return in Nietzsche'seternal recurrence. See Milan Kundera, TheUnbearable Lightness of Being, New York, 1984,pp. 3±7. The Nietzschean project of denyingmetaphysics, and De Chirico's troping of theterm, would situate this `unbearable lightness' asan alterity in the visible realm. The image of thedistant or alterior bodies make this separationlegible, in that they become spectral, or inBlanchot's terminology, `phantasmic'.

20 Giorgio De Chirico, `Meditations of A Painter'(1912), in Herschel B. Chipp, Theories ofModern Art, Berkeley, CA, 1968, pp. 397±8.

21 The question of the style of the fragment iscontingent upon its distinction from its context,its imperviousness to the changes in context.This condition is perhaps a consequence of theNietzschean influence on De Chirico, in thatNietzsche's style of writing appears fragmentary,but the aphorisms are sequenced in the contextof a larger issue. The scope of the larger issue isto be inferred by the blank spaces between thepieces of writing. Contrast this with Nehemas,citing the Derridean fragment and style as otherthan Nietzsche's: `. . . Derrida claims thatprecisely because they lack a context, fragmentsalso lack a style, for style depends on theexistence of interconnections of pieces oflanguage that, insofar as they areinterconnected, are no longer fragments in hissense.' Alexander Nehemas, Nietzsche: Life asLiterature. Cambridge, Mass., 1985, p. 17.

22 De Chirico's style, broadly defined, isunmistakable for its dream-like clarity andhaunting effect, as if the ideal Nietzschean bodyreturned as a phantasmic body. Simplisticattempts to define de Chirico's style frequentlyinvoke the image of the body as illustrative,without engaging the possibility that the bodyitself is style. For a sustained discussion of thebody as style, see Blondel, Nietzsche: The Bodyand Culture, pp. 108±13.

23 Blondel, Nietzsche, pp. 167, 180 and 182.24 This simplified description of classical

techniques means Foucault's term for a periodof representation before the discourse of manemerged as a subject in representation. Theclassical body, so painted, would not beconceptually `other' than its context. Inportraiture, for example, the likeness of theimage to the surface of the body representedand its prominent centrality within the frameare in De Chirico separated ± the first isabandoned, the second sustained. Hisrepresentation then is hinged between theschematic differentiation between classical andmodern.

25 Berel Lang (ed.), The Concept of Style,Philadelphia, 1979, p. 178.

26 Atomistically conceived as the aestheticequivalent of the linguistic phoneme ormorpheme. See Lang, The Concept of Style,p. 175.

27 Trypho, cited and translated in P. B. Rollinson,Classical Theories of Allegory and ChristianCulture, Pittsburgh, PA, 1991, p. 127.

28 `Since stylemes, moreover, are no more than thefunctions of even these not-so-individualartifacts, the prospective discourse of stylemicsturns out then not only to be a science but aversion of fiction ± a narrative form ± tied tothe literary trope of synechdoche in which onefeature is an ingredient in all the others.' Lang,The Concept of Style, p. 182.

29 Style, historically derived from the originalstylet, a writing instrument that cuts or inscribesthe soft surface, as in cuneiform texts; Langarticulates this linguistic origin of style inwriting: `enough is known in any event of itsmetonymic derivation from the stylus, aninstrument for inscribing, to suggest thehistorical pressures that yielded the concept ±the relation between writing instrument andauthorial hand, on the one side, and the shapedexpression, on the other.' (Lang, Looking forthe Styleme, p. 176.) In Nietzsche, the styletoperates as both writing and cutting ± seeMichael Newman, `The Trace of Traume:Blindness, Testimony and the Gaze in Blanchotand Derrida', in Maurice Blanchot: TheDemand of Writing, ed. Carolyn Bailey Gill,New York, 1996 p. 161. See also JacquesDerrida on Nietzsche's style, as spur, eÂperon,stylate throughout Jacques Derrida, Spurs:Nietzsche's Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow,Chicago, 1979.

30 Taylor, Alterity, p. 250.31 Tafuri, The Sphere and Labyrinth, p. 5.32 Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation,

trans. Susan Hanson, Minneapolis, 1993, p. 167.33 Lycette Nelson, `Maurice Blanchot: The

Fragment and the Whole', unpublished PhDdissertation, SUNY-Buffalo, 1992, p. 58

34 Nelson, `Blanchot', p. 47.35 Nelson, `Blanchot', p. 44.36 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 159.37 Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, Albany, 1992,

p. 52.38 These comments were made in relation to a

single painting, and framed within his particularFreudian revisionist agenda. In de Chirico's TheSeer the disturbing figure of the body situatedwithin a perspective is represented in eyelessreflection of a perspective-within-perspective(Foster, Compulsive Beauty, p. 67).

39 Nelson, `Maurice Blanchot: The Fragment andthe Whole', p. 58.

40 Rodolphe Gasche , `Ecce Homo or the WrittenBody,' in Laurence A. Rickels (ed.), Looking

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After Nietzsche, Albany, NY, 1990, p. 119.41 George Hersey's thesis in The Lost Meaning of

Classical Architecture, Cambridge, Mass., 1988,is used here to clarify the relation between thefragmentary body, the rhetoric of Nietzsche andDe Chirico, and the style of the body as thefoundation of Western architecture, that in DeChirico, returns in the body's tendency towardsarchitecture (in representation).

42 In that the origin of any discourse isunknowable ± the vanishing point as an originimplicates the perspectivally construed knowingas seeing. The vanishing point also implicatesthe repressed violence of the origins of theclassical, which returns in Nietzsche's work tochallenge the dominant nineteenth century`bloodless' view. The vanishing of this vanishingpoint is here identified, after Hersey, as theviolence of sacrifice, that plays on the vanishedbody reconstructed to become architecture. Inthese regards, the vanishing point of the originof this (any) discourse must not be considered aneutral, passive thought, but a sacrificialgesture.

43 The status of sacrifice, history and myth as`false' origins in classical Greek culture isdescribed in Dennis D. Hughes, `Sacrifice andRitual Killing', in Human Sacrifice in AncientGreece, New York, 1991, pp. 1±12, 90. It wouldbe more accurately described as a cross-tropingin language condensed around an un-historicalviolent event that masks the absence of anorigin. The impossibility of knowing or sayingthe first sacrifice, first myth, of first event ofhistory is obvious; these three culturalformations, with their unknowable origins, areintersected in the narrative unearthed inHersey's research.

44 Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice,p. 143.

45 Usually the shrouded figure of Ulysses, aslearned from BoÈ cklin's iconography.

46 Though De Chirico's writings do not go at anylength to trace the origins of architecture insacrifice (nor does it appear overtly inNietzsche), we shall see that the effect of suchan originary event gives rise to a vision ofarchitecture and the body that is identical to DeChirico's representations of the body'sdisappearance and re-memberment inarchitecture, through the fragmentary effect.

47 The discussion of de Chirico's classicism as acritique of classicism in William Rubin, `DeChirico and Modernism', in De Chirico: Essays,pp. 55±80, applies also here, in that repetition inits pure form performs a critical revaluation ofthe spacing of time, proposing the origin as afuture event. For a simple example of the literalevidence of the sacrificial origin of architecturein de Chirico's work, see the repetition of theunique form of the `engaged' / embeddedcolumn, phantasmic in its ability to disappear

entirely into the mass of the architectural form,repeated in The Joys and Enigmas of a StrangeHour and The Anguish of Departure. Hersey, inThe Lost Meaning of Classical Architecture,pp. 54±67, describes the evidence for the body'sdisappearance into architecture in the trope ofthe column. The disappearance proposed in thisresearch is of a grander (`metaphysical') scale.

48 Sparagmos, the original Greek term for ritualcult sacrifices, associated with Dionysus, andopposed to omophagos, ritual hunting andslaughter. Operating most consistently in thecult of Dionysus (see Marcel Detienne, DionysusSlain, Baltimore, 1979), it also occurred inrelation to the cult of Apollo and others. Thefoundational aspect of this sacrifice is welldocumented, though in relation to architecture itremains a point of informed historicalspeculation. This research relies heavily onHersey's foundation myth of architecture, ontwo counts: it proposes a corporal relationbetween body and architecture, and itforegrounds the disappearance of the body intolanguage (tropes), conditions consistent withNietzsche's and de Chirico's works. Otherfoundation myths offer little to the discussion.

49 The topic has received considerable researchattention, and conflicting interpretations. SeeE.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational,Berkeley, CA, 1951, pp. 276±8, for aninterpretation of the historical evidence inPlutarch and primary sources, and also aninterpretation derived from Frazer. Burkert'sHomo Necans is a invaluable and influentialinterpretation of sacrifice as the sacrifice ofdeath for life. The first four essays in TheCuisine of Sacrifice Among the Greeks, edsMarcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, trans.Paula Wissing, Chicago, 1989, offer the mostcontemporary interpretations of the meaning ofthe sacrificial act. Hersey briefly acknowledgesthe influence of the vast research on the topic,but the thesis of its place as the origin ofclassical architectural form and language isoriginal.

50 Ruth Padel, In and Out of the Mind: GreekImages of the Tragic Self, Princeton, 1992, p. 16.`This division of parts occurs also as breakingapart, a parting, a distinguishing, a demarcating,a determining, and a deciding.' Hersey, TheLost Meaning of Classical Architecture, p. 16.See also the similarities of Meuli's theory of thereconstructed animals of sacrifice in Hughes,`Sacrifice and Ritual Killing', in Human Sacrificein Ancient Greece, pp. 4±5.

51 `Yet the body that is dismembered according tothe strict rules of carving reveals the formercohesion of life in a primary state . . . itsmovement back and forth from life to death,informs the philosopher's image. The secretheart of sacrifice beats deep within the Greekimagination. The body must be dismantled, but

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according to recognized steps that will graduallytransform it . . .,' Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand,`Greek Animals: Toward a Typology of EdibleAnimals', in Detienne and Vernant (eds), TheCuisine of Sacrifice Among the Greeks, p. 101.

52 Hersey, The Lost Meaning of ClassicalArchitecture, p. 16.

53 Hersey, The Lost Meaning of ClassicalArchitecture, p. 2.

54 Marcel Detienne, `The Feast of Wolves or theImpossible City' in Detienne and Vernant (eds),The Cuisine of Sacrifice Among the Greeks,pp. 162±3, for a description of the sacrifice inthe Apollonian oracle of Delphi.

55 Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 277,interpreting Frazer in the first instance andciting Euripides in the second.

56 Hersey, The Lost Meaning of ClassicalArchitecture, p. 42.

57 John Knesl, `Architecture and Laughter', inArchitecture and the Body, New York, 1988,n.p.

58 For an examination of this condensation ofdistance in the related discourse of the funerary,see George Teyssot, `Fragments of FuneraryDiscourse', Lotus International, no. 38, 1983,p. 14. Also, for a more general history of thefunerary discourse in classical Greek culture andimages, see Robert Garland, The Greek Way ofDeath, Ithaca, 1985. Marcel Detienne identifiesthis distance between mortals and men in thecult of Dionysus in Dionysus At Large, trans.Arthur Goldhammer, Cambridge, Mass., 1989,p. 62.

59 Dennis Hollier, Against Architecture: TheWritings of Georges Bataille, Cambridge, Mass.,1989, p. 166.

60 Bataille cited in Taylor, Alterity, p. 138. Bataille,as a near contemporary of De Chirico, andfamiliar with his work through the surrealistpublication Documents, sustains a specificrelation between sacrifice and architecture thatinvolves the construction of the sacred. Theclassical sources of this belief in Bataille arereturned into the question of the modern,specifically in his writings on the building typesof the slaughterhouse and museum.

61 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human,Cambridge and New York, 1986, section 218.As stated previously, this book was crucial inDe Chirico's development in influencing the`metaphysical' paintings.

62 The discussion of Nietzsche and classicism is avast topic; his re-presentation of the classicalideal, especially its grand style, operates withinhis tropical theory of language, in which thebody and its parts are enmeshed in a network ofinterconnected meanings and figures of speech.The Nietzschean body is the primary figure ofthe classical ideal ± see Blondel, Nietzsche: TheBody and Culture, for an effort to situate thisideal as the motivator of his `untimely' modern

philosophy.63 Onians first identifies the relation between

trophies and tropes, in R.B. Onians, TheOrigins of European Thought, about the Body,the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate,Cambridge, 1988 (1951), p. 375. See also Hersey,The Lost Meaning of Classical Architecture,p. 9: `In Greek, tropos means style, turn, twist,hence the twisting of words. It is also connectedwith `trophy' ± for trophies were originallyerected at the point where the tide turnedagainst the losers. Trophies, that is to saymannequins formed of the arms, weapons, andhelmets of the slain enemy, were set up toappease their shades and to prevent the godsfrom punishing the victors who had killed them.Their deaths were thus ``turned,'' troped, frommurders into sacrifices.' This rich description ofthese forlorn sacrificial figures, echoed in deChirico's images of the mannequin, points to theselective use of the troping of the body thatallows it to approximate the durability ofarchitecture in stone. If de Chirico's paintingsare scenes, they are not scenes of the crime ofmurder but the memory of the sacrifice thatproduces architectural form.

64 For a description of the catachresis ofarchitectural tropes of the body, see Hersey, TheLost Meaning of Classical Architecture, p. 4. Seealso the discussion of the trope as literary figurein Nietzsche's language explored in Paul deMan, Allegories of Reading, New Haven andLondon, 1979, p. 105.

65 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 32.66 This technique recurs primarily in the fragments

of Heraclitus's writings. In Heraclitus, the joinor seam between tropes is intended to produce aharmony that conceals the possibility of two ormore interpretations. See C.H. Kahn, The Artand Thought of Heraclitus, Cambridge, 1979,p. 196 for an examination of this.

67 Ostensibly a description of the role of the imagein Blanchot's thinking, it here applies as afragmentary critique of the Nietzschean veil ofclassical architecture. See Newman, `The Traceof Traume: Blindness, Testimony and the Gazein Blanchot and Derrida', p. 157.

68 This reading of the classical cannon is common.See, for example, Taylor's description of thetheory, grammar, and persistence of classicismin `Nuclear Architecture', p. 11. Following theNietzschean agon between beauty and dread inthe classical, Taylor adds: `The terrifyingbetween is not only unseeable, it is alsounspeakable. The beauty of classical architectureis constructed to repress ``the negative pleasure''of terror' (p. 17). For a rational and bloodlessstructural linguistic variant of classical grammar,see A. Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, ClassicalArchitecture: The Poetics of Order, Cambridge,Mass., c. 1986. De Chirico's classicism, it mustbe remembered, sustains these classical methods

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and origins, but substitutes a deliberatelydisturbing modern set of images, creating thepolyvalence of sacrificial images that arepolyvalent in their epochs, not merely theirmeanings. Modern and classical, their twotemporalities are in agonized coexistence.

69 The related `inevitable interiority of exteriority',as a self-sacrifice of identity, for the sacrificedbody, is discussed in Mark C. Taylor, Erring: aPostmodern A/theology, Chicago, 1984, p. 144.

70 The momentary time of the mortal body isterminated in sacrifice, and the eternal time ofthe gods erupts into the fractured remnants ofthe body. This attempt to invoke and controleternity is seen in the re-assemblage of thefragmentary body, most explicitly when itbecomes the stone body or its architecturaldouble. De Chirico's term vividly duplicates thisscene. See de Chirico, `Eluard Manuscript' inHebdomeros, p. 193. This representation ofarchitecture may operate as infinite: `infiniterepresentation is the object of a doublediscourse: that of properties, and that ofessences', Gilles Deleuze, Difference andRepetition. trans. Paul Patton, New York, 1994(1968), p. 49. The possibility of essences isprecluded by de Chirico's Nietzschean`metaphysical' belief, and the double discourseof body and architecture would therefore becloser to the intersection of the discourse ofproperties and the discourse of absences.

71 Nietzsche is the source here; for a descriptionof destruction as a means of coming toeternalization, see Joan Stambaugh, TheProblem of Time in Nietzsche, trans. John F.Humphrey, Lewisburg, 1987, p. 186.

72 Taylor, Alterity, p. 285 and also Newman, `TheTrace of Traume: Blindness, Testimony and theGaze in Blanchot and Derrida', p. 166.

73 Vincent Scully, The Earth, the Temple, and theGods: Greek Sacred Architecture, New Havenand London, 1962, p. 212. This description ofthe ethos of the classical will return in thisresearch without citation, as the words will takeon their own significance in relation to deChirico's Nietzschean classicism.

74 Convulsive here in Foster's sense, sustainedthroughout Foster, `Convulsive Identity'. DeChirico's reliance on the logic of the seam toconnect fragments is duplicated by the tracing of(frequently dashed) lines on the figural bodies,which is contemporaneous with his painting ofthe image of the linear perspectives, derivedfrom his readings of Renaissance treatises. Theselines may also be complicit in the body's style ascutting: in The Troubadour, discussed above,one prominent line divides the form of the headin two, marking the significant division of theseat of reason and seeing.

75 This stirring of limbs, in the Dionysian dual-birth, dual-death myth, represents the seeping ofthe excess of time back into these limbs as the

body of Dionysus reforms. Frazer identifies thisas a myth corresponding to the annual harvestcycle in The Golden Bough. The dualtemporalities in de Chirico, `the first time' and`not the first time' identified in Foster and herereinterpreted through Nietzsche's eternalrecurrence, echoes the meaning in this context.Architecture can be read as an attempt toeternalize this moment, and its persistence inerosive time as the encoding of the struggle toremember the sacrificial origin.

76 Denis Hollier, `From Beyond Hegel toNietzsche's Absence', in Leslie Anne Boldt-Irons(ed.), On Bataille: Critical Essays, Albany, NY,1995, p. 69.

77 Remember Nietzsche's distinction betweenremembering and forgetting in the act of living(see Nietzsche, `The Use and Abuse of Historyfor Life', section 1, Untimely Meditations,Cambridge and New York, 1983). Theforgetting of the origin of classical architecturalform does not end the presence of the origin; itshifts it outside memory, into forgetting,therefore into its effect ± where it may beremembered again.

78 In classical Greece, sacrifices must beremembered and recorded ± see Hersey, TheLost Meaning of Classical Architecture, p. 2.

79 He continues: `This dangerous incoherence isrepeated by the reader of Nietzsche's essay. Aninterpretation of it can never be clear orcomplete. The laws of forgetting and of self-mutilation apply to any reader as well as to theauthor. Insofar as he thinks he is clear, distinct,and coherent reading of the essay, he hasforgotten some important part of it. He too istaking bare metal as valid coin, or what isworse, taking bare metal as bare metal, as thenaked truth behind illusion.' The powerful effectof Nietzsche's writing style, and its influence onde Chirico's style/me, is accurately describedhere. See J. Hillis Miller, `Dismembering andDisremembering in Nietzsche's ``On truth andLies'' in a Nonmoral Sense', Why NietzscheNow? Bloomington, 1985, pp. 41±54.

80 Nietzsche, `The Use and Abuse of History forLife', section 1.

81 The sophisticated range of representations ofalterior bodies, and the significance of theirrepetition, implies a typology of the bodyderived from the tropology of Nietzsche. Thealterior body, in any of its modes in de Chirico,hovers between theses two temporalities andlanguages of representation.

82 This imagery is discussed at length in Hersey,The Lost Meaning of Classical Architecture,pp. 69±75.

83 This citation, from a different context,accurately situates the operation of thought asbodily processes. See Elaine Scarry, The Body inPain, New York, 1985, p. 110.

84 The body central position in Nietzsche's

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`epistemology', as interpreter and arbiter ofdiscrete impulses, is here rendered as anhistorical body in that the processes ofremembering and forgetting exist prior tothinking, and the process of rememberingconstructs man as an historical being. SeeNietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History forLife, New York, 1st edn (1997), section 1. Theimage of memories as eruptions deliberatelyevokes the violent origin of architecturalmemory in sacrifice, and is instrumental inBataille's writings of the body as `eruptive'.Foster also implicates this in his use of the term`convulsive' to describe the form of identity ofthe body in de Chirico. See Foster, `ConvulsiveIdentity'. In all these schemas, the body as thesite of the eruption of memory, and its ability todistress make alterior the identity chained to thebody is clear.

85 The moment of their being seen by the viewingsubject is crucial for their production of theunhingeing effect, in that the slow, deliberatehistory of the body's evolution into architectureis re-presented in an instantaneous moment. Thefragments, so assembled, increase this effect bythe impossibility of their ever having occupiedthe same body at the same time in someirrecoverably past moment. The seams thathinge discrete periods of times and possiblecontexts are complicit in this process.

86 Murmur being the subtle transgression of silenceand the first sound of `the stirring of limbs' inthe mythical form of eternal recurrence; theterm `disquieting' is De Chirico's idiom in thelanguage of the corporal memory, and should beexpanded (troped) to include this secondreading.

87 J. Hillis Miller, `Dismembering andDis(re)membering', p. 50.

88 Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche and the ViciousCircle, trans. Daniel W. Smith, Chicago, 1997,p. 256.

89 Nietzsche, cited in Babette E. Babich,Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science, Albany, NY,1994, p. 294, but implicated in this entireresearch.

90 This origin of art is from Paul de Man,Blindness and Insight, Minneapolis, 1983,pp. 66±7, though it is a very old idea.

91 When the absent body will return, at a futurepoint outside this momentary `scene', and its`alterity' in appearance is perhaps a secondaryreading of de Chirico's canvases: both forgettingand re-willing the return of the forgotten, theypresent a premonition and amnesia of the pastand future intervals outside the near-frozeninterval that is the canvas.

92 The two versions of memory articulated heremay roughly correspond to the two versions ofmemory in Nietzsche, as articulated in Deleuze.Deleuze, using Nietzsche's term for thememories that create rancour, that create

wounds, is ressentiment. The alternative,proposed by Deleuze's understanding ofNietzsche's life-affirming philosophy ofrecurrence, he names `promissory'. Both can beseen as a mobilization of effect after the thoughtof eternal recurrence, and its negative(ressentiment) or positive (promissory) effect. Inde Chirico, the convulsive body as memory, andthe obscure body as memory, may follow such adistinction. The fact that both are repeated, anddefine separate styles of repetition, precludesintroducing the repetitive body as a category.Indeed, repetition is, within this research, seenas related to the idea of eternal recurrence, andnot exclusively the body.

93 The eruption of a wound, not in the Christianiconography of the stigmata, is here identified asthe re-membering of the fragmentary bodyidentified by the seams that hinge the fragmentsand simultaneously define the body as (a) style.

94 . . . and culminating in its forgetting.Klossowski, in expanding upon the Nietzscheanvision of the body, articulates the relationbetween the (semiotic) impulses and theirforgetting (in the body). See Klossowski,Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, p. 27.Detienne, in Dionysus Slain, (pp. 4±5), identifiesthe appearance of the god as `epidemic,' atechnical term for the category of sacrificemandated by its appearance. `Apodemic'describes the departure, and is similarly derived.In this case, the coming and going of the godswithout cause or premonition may beappropriate here. This apodemic and epidemicmemory gives over of memory over the body,and is therefore believed to participate in deChirico's `Nietzschean method' of suppressingman as a symbol.

95 Sustaining the initial interpretation that thebody is obscure, unknowable to reason, it ishere extended to include the transitory(convulsive) effects that memory has on thebody, and its conceptual equivalence in thecutting of the body to produce style.

96 These are premonition and amnesia in that thepainted scenes portray discrete moments is thelarger question of the relation of body, and thebody's registration of the effect of architecture,that is never complete or finished within anyone such representation. As in a genealogy, themovements are too small to be noted in specificinstances, and require a comparativeexamination of the interconnections, specifically,following Foucault's understanding ofNietzschean genealogy, that resist ascribing thevalue of `truth' to any singular (specificallyteleological) reading. This identification of theorigin and possible end as identical follows thesimple circular schema of eternal recurrence.

97 This history, that searches for origins throughrepetition, not exegesis, is inseparably bound tothe question of fatality and death.

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98 Hollier, Against Architecture, p. 55.99 Nietzsche, writing of the necessity of

incompletion in art, turns towards thisprecedent: `incompleteness as an artisticstimulation ± incompletion is often moreeffective than completeness, especially ineulogies . . . completion has a weakening effect.'Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, section199.

100 Christopher Fynsk, `Crossing the Threshold: On``Literature and the Right to Death'',' inMaurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing, ed.Carolyn Bailey Gill, New York, 1996, p. 73.

101 Rodolphe Gasche , `The Felicities of Paradox,' inGill (ed.), Maurice Blanchot: The Demand ofWriting, p. 52.

102 Maurice Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus,Barrytown, N.Y., 1981, p. 43.

103 After Cicero, the panegyric mode of rhetoric (inGreek epideictic) is proper to funerals, as abalancing of (ethical) accounts.

104 Taylor, Erring, p. 151.105 Taylor, Erring, p. 153. This description of the

narrative tripartite historical schema of`creation, fall, redemption' in Taylor's work ischallenged with the concept of alterity (erring,estrangement) that negates the power of originsand ends, and especially teleological thought. DeChirico's exposure of suppressed origins, as thatwhich must return, appears to follow thisstructure, yet the presence of repetition (finiteand infinite) is the disruptive cause ofateleological thought. Repetition, as consideredin Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, as atendency towards an originary (fatal) state,problematizes any simple historical schema. Thesuppressed origin of history in death returns inevery repetition in de Chirico, as both panegyricand alterior `history', with loss at thetransparent centre.Klossowski describes the effect of eternal

recurrence as a `new fatality' that he names the`vicious circle', `which suppresses every goal andmeaning, since the beginning and the end alwaysmerge with each other' (Klossowski, Nietzscheand the Vicious Circle, p. 30).

106 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 112.Deleuze here utilizes Blanchot's writing aboutdeath within language to understand the deathwithin repetition. He cites Blanchot on thesecond aspect of death, the impersonal that isthe risk of the personal: `it is inevitable butinaccessible death; it is the abyss of the present,time without a present, with which I have norelationships; it is toward which I cannot goforth, for in it I do not die, I have fallen fromthe power to die. In it they die, they do notcease, and they do not finish dying . . .' (MauriceBlanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. AnnSmock, Lincoln, Nebraska, 1982, pp. 106, 154±5.

107 De Chirico, `Eluard Manuscript' inHebdomeros, p. 186.

108 The full Blanchot citation concerns specificallythe work of art `in the work of art the godsspeak, in the temple the gods dwell, butdisguised, but absent . . . the work utters thegods, but utters them as unutterable, it is thepresence of the absence of the gods and, in thisabsence, it tends to become itself present, tobecome no longer Zeus, but a statue . . . andwhen the gods are overthrown, the temple doesnot disappear with them, but rather it begins toappear, it reveals itself by continuing to be whatbefore it was only unknown to itself: thedwelling-place of the absence of the gods'(Blanchot, cited without reference in Teysott,`Fragments of a Funerary Discourse', p. 13). Thelanguage of this text recalls clearly the`metaphysical' works of de Chirico.

109 Taylor, Erring, pp. 154±5. Taylor's descriptionof this alterior history presupposes anacknowledged relation between `the death ofGod, the disappearance of the subject, and theends of history' (p. 154), a relationship derivedpartially from Nietzsche's insights, and relevantto the question of the place of death withinarchitectural history painted by De Chirico.

110 Teyssot, `Fragments of a Funerary Discourse',p. 6.

111 Erich Heller, `Nietzsche's Terrors: Time and theInarticulate' in The Importance of Nietzsche,Chicago, 1988, p. 178.

112 See Nicole Loraux, Tragic Ways of Killing aWoman, Cambridge, Mass., 1987, p. 49.

113 Teyssot, `Fragments of a Funerary Discourse',p. 6.

114 The arch duplicates the Nietzschean gateway asan enigma of fatality, and is here always presentin De Chirico's representations of architecture.Outside the constraints of functionalism, theypropose a compelling question of theirsignification, and death as a type is intended todescribe this network of relations.Kofman proposes a reading of Nietzschean

(monumental) history that replaces the`evolutionary' model of history with a`typological' one utilizing Nietzsche's privilegingof the Presocratic philosophers: `the Presocraticsbelong to a rare type; they are irreducible to anyother. To reconstitute their image, it is best to``paper the walls with them a thousand times''.'(Sarah Kofman, `Metaphor, Symbol,Metamorphosis' in The New Nietzsche,Cambridge, Mass., 1985 (1977), p. 212. DeChirico's history is here also typological, anddeath is the originary apparatus.

115 Aldo Rossi, A Scientific Autobiography, trans.Lawrence Venuti, Cambridge, Mass., 1981, p. 2.

116 See Giorgio Grassi, Architettura, Lingua Morta:Architecture, Dead Language, Milan, 1988,p. 135.

117 This observation is from James Thrall Soby,The Early Chirico, New York, 1941, p. 38; it isleft unexplored in the text, and occurs in

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relation to the painting Melancholy ofDeparture. This effect is not localized to thispainting, but the majority of de Chirico's work.

118 Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess. SelectedWritings, 1927±1939, trans. Allan Stoekl, withCarl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr, ed.Allan Stoekl, Minneapolis, 1985, p. 216.

119 See Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor,trans. Duncan Large, Stanford, 1993, pp. 66±7.Nietzsche uses the metaphoric Romancolumbarium to illustrate the completeexhaustion of logical systems of classification,contra his perspectivism: `Whereas eachperceptual metaphor is individual and withoutequals and is therefore able to elude allclassification, the great edifice of conceptsdisplays the rigid regularity of a Romancolumbarium and exhales in logic that strengthand coolness which is characteristic ofmathematics. Anyone who has felt this coolbreath will hardly believe that even the concept. . . is merely the residue of a metaphor, and thatthe illusion which is involved in the artistictransferal of a nerve stimulus into images is, ifnot the mother, then the grandmother of everysingle concept.' Nietzsche, Philosophy andTruth, p. 84 cited and translated in Kofman,Nietzsche and Metaphor, p. 68.

120 Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor, p. 67. TheRoman concept of memory as a treasure-houseis inverted in the columbarium, where the gridequalizes all lives as indiscriminate ashes.

Nietzsche's use of ashes to signify theexhaustion of metaphors into rigid conceptssituates the columbarium as the epitome ofperspectival reason, contra De Chirico'sarchitectural dead language that situates thepossibility of death within near-anamorphicfatal arcades.

121 De Chirico, correspondence with Gartz, in PaoloBaldacchi, `The Function of Nietzsche's Thoughtin de Chirico's Art', in Kostka and Wohlfarth,Nietzsche and `An Architecture of Our Minds,p. 93.

122 This assertion by Blanchot is the thesis of TheInfinite Conversation, and this assertion isexamined in Nelson, `Maurice Blanchot: TheFragment and the Whole', pp. 17±20.

123 Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth andPhilosophy, Cambridge, 1990, p. 279.

124 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, The Subject ofPhilosophy, trans. Thomas Trezise, Minneapolis,1993, p. 4. Lacoue-Labarthe is here examiningthe Hegelian notion of the end of historythrough the critique of Nietzsche, specifically byundercutting the `metaphysical' assumptions inteleological history. Nietzsche's eternalrecurrence erodes the sanctity of origin and end,positing them as possible identities.

125 Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice,p. 143.

126 Nelson, Maurice Blanchot: The Fragment andthe Whole, p. 34 and p. 17.

127 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 272.

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