The Architecture of the Illusive Distance (pdf)

Description

The library, the museum and the movie-theater have been selected for close critical study because, this book argues, each has been instituted to house, ‘domesticate’ and restrain a specific form of representation, with the aim in each being to protect and promulgate the “metaphysics of presence,” as Jacques Derrida expounds the concept. This book proposes that it is against the dangers of unbridled cohabitation and the exposure of the insoluble contradictions in any rigorous distinction between reality and representation that the library, the museum, and the movie-theater have been instituted as safeguards. Each has accomplished its assigned performative task by uniquely domesticating and curtailing the specific deconstructive effect of the representation it is given to administer. This is accomplished through distinct formal and spatial strategies that constitute and characterize each type. In its own unique way, each type has rendered the hierarchic distinction between reality and representation reified and experiential, as the inherent contradictions of this distinction is all but suppressed, if only to return in the figure of the uncanny…