Architecture and deconstruction: translation as a matter of speculative theory

If this conference proposes to explore the singular and minor expressions of architectural theory, it could at first seem strange to propose here a paper about the so-called derridean years of architecture. Rather, the vast body of literature produced on this specific episode argues that the encounter of architectural discourses with derridean deconstruction played a major role into the implementation of "the gilded age of theory" (Mallgrave, Goodman, 2011). But such an "age" needs now to be redefined in regard with its own cultural boundaries. What the decon has produced in the Anglo-American field of architectural theory is not what the deconstruction has produced on the French-speaking part of the debate (following the argument of Cusset, 2005).
In France, the question of the effects of the Derrida's philosophy on the contemporary architectural discourses and practices still causes a kind of discomfort. "As if" no one could face with what this disciplinary cross-over of the mid-eighties both has produced and has not succeeded in producing; "as if", failure or not, this experimental encounter could had been no effects or consequences on the theories and practices which succeeded it.
From one cultural context to another, we have two different versions of a same history. Different but not unrelated. The proposition is here to invest the productive gap between these overlapped versions, in order to question their respective modes of construction but also to re-open their ways of being transmitted. From an original translation of Derrida's Haunt (Wigley, 1993) in French, I would present a methodological approach (Despret, 2001) which attempts to create the conditions of a renewed relation between different versions of what the deconstruction could have produced in architecture. The exercise of the translation is seen as a way to question the co-existence of these different possible versions; a way to slow down the multiple gestures which hastily sweep the hesitations in the shared course of their history.