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    A4550 The Body of Architecture: architecture and subjectivity

    History/Theory Lecture
    Andrew Benjamin

    INTRODUCTION
    The aim of this course is twofold. In the first instance there will be the chance to work through a number of important philosophical texts that engage with architecture. Rather than assuming the importance of Descartes, Leibniz, Derrida, Deleuze, Adorno, Freud and Heidegger for a study of architecture, what will be shown is the way in which architecture comes to be thought in their writings. What will emerge from these texts is that a certain subject position is either assumed or deployed in the way the relationship between architecture and philosophy comes to be staged. This will open up the second area of inquiry.
    Rather than a concern that takes the formulation of the architectural as given and where the question of the subject, and the subject's experience, could only ever be posed in relation to the given, it will be the contention of this course that the construction of the subject has already taken place with the architecture/philosophy relation. The important consequence of this is that if it is possible to rethink the economy of domesticity or the economy of pedagogy, for example, then the site of that thinking will be the inter-articulated presence of architecture, philosophy and subjectivity. It is this complex presence that becomes another way of saying that the body is already present within architectural thinking. Consequently thinking through the body will open up the possibility of other modes of architectural thinking.

    CENTRAL TEXTS (listed in the order in which they will be studied)
    Rene Descartes, The Meditations (Any edition)
    Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, Standard Edition, Vol. XIX
    Martin Heidegger, Building, Dwelling, Thinking, in Basic Writings, Harper Collins
    Martin Heidegger, The Nature of Language, in On the Way to Language, Harper and Row
    D. Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women, Free Association Books
    Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Johns Hopkins University Press
    Theodor Adorno, Functionalism Today, in Oppositions 17, Summer 1979
    G. Liebniz, The Monadology (Any Edition)
    G. Deleuze, The Fold, Minnesota

    BACKGROUND READING
    Andrew Benjamin, The Plural Event, Routledge
    Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies
    Mark Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstructio: Derrida's Haunt, MIT Press