The 'twelfth camel' and the inheritance of the deconstruction in architectural practices.

Most of recent anthologies on architectural theory concede that the encounter between architects and the derridean philosophy of deconstruction has marked a kind of turning point in our architectural practices (Sykes, 2010; Mallgrave, Goodman, 2011; Greig, Cairns, Heynen, 2012). Yet this specific episode of our late history seem still provoke a kind of discomfort in the French-speaking part of the contemporary architectural debate. It is as if no one could take on what this disciplinary crossing of the mid-eighties both has produced and has not succeeded in producing. So now, thirty years later, how to be the heirs of such a theoretical experiment?

“Inheritance is never a given; it is always a task. It remains before us” (Derrida, 1994).

The present paper will attempt to develop what is at stake in the question of the inheritance of deconstruction in architecture. But if inheritance is a “task”, the concern is not here to simply describe it but to take on this task; the concern is to take part at the always ongoing building of this theoretical inheritance. Based on a thesis research still in progress, the paper will present some of the methodological experiments (Despret, 2001) set up in order to build an inheritance for deconstruction in the French-speaking part of architectural debate, and more specifically the original French translation of Wigley's essay, “The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida's Haunt”.

The translation is here to be understood as an artifact from which new ways to inherit this historical turning of architectural theory can be built. But how to build such an inheritance in a way that doesn't erase its contradictions? And what does it mean to build it today ? The entire methodological apparatus of this attempt of translation will be display as a speculative process, considering theory as a living material for architectural creation.