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The Passage to the Verb

by | Vol 29 (3/4) 2011

This paper discusses architecture and the place (lieu) not as conceptualised by philosophy, by physics or even popularly as a milieu, an environmental continuum but rather as the effect of an operation: An operation of division, of a cut, as psychoanalyst; an operation that gives birth to the subject as a place (lieu) and not as a substance. We are there in another universe which is not the one of the strong ego. An operation of inscription and a distancing of the impact of the real, according to the architect who generates with his work, emptiness where things have a place (avoir lieu). In other words, we will speak about space, which we conceive of as the effect of the passage of the signifiers (significant) (“S passe”), but also as the opening where the verb is passing which is holding us in its passage.

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