Customer Reviews

Archeticture: Ecstasies of Space, Time, and the Human Body

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This book held out such interesting possibilities. Many a philosopher is exasperated by the etymological speculations used by Heidegger particularly in his latter writings - in a sense using etymology as an epistemological tool. Krell attempts the same, but the book seemed for the most part more difficult to read than Heidegger. Heidegger was known for leading his audience along a hermeneutic path, but he never insulted them like Krell does. The book also tries to be like Derrida's book GLAS, but he hasn't got the style to bring it off. I agree with the previious reviewer, that Krell should be thanked for simply being a translator of Heidegger's work, not a commentator.

There are flashes of genuine talent in some of Krell's earliest works, but things are going downhill fast. This book seemingly exists only because the author thought that arche-ticture was a clever etymological reversal of the common word archi-tecture (it is humorously appropriate that amazon.com overlooked the witticism in its catalog); this allows him to play with the Greek words arkhe and tiktein *ad nauseum*. Such a technique would be insufferable enough at a cocktail party or in a university seminar. In a published book, it's a living nightmare.

Not surprisingly, the speculation on tiktein goes nowhere, and the style is pretentious even by the standards of this author, who is reminiscent of a gifted but lazy basketball star who begins to freelance and coast his way out of the league. The book probably should not have been released in its current form, and the head of the Indiana series really ought to avoid publishing so many books by the members of his own editorial board, since this only gives the appearance of favoritism.

Any charitable reader can see that Krell is capable of doing so much better than this (see his quirky but dazzling biography of Nietzsche in the handsomely produced _The Good European_).

Krell's "Archeticture" takes up a question that still resonates for many contemporary philosophers as much as it did for Plato: How to think nature, or, more specifically, (in Irigaray's words) how to think nature as "at least two?" He does so quite elegantly in terms of a discussion of arche(tec/tic)ture (though, in response to the other reviewers, Krell never claims competence in architecture). Certainly the juxtaposition of texts by Irigaray, Derrida, et al with his own text fails in terms of letting multiple voices speak (as does the diptych of his "Recalcitrant Art"), but isn't that precisely the point? One does begin to wonder at times what a critical engagement of Irigaray's texts would be on Krell's terms, but from the looks of this book such a critique would be well worth the wait. As in his translations, Krell shows remarkable courage without sacrificing rigor, and the reader is all the better for his failures.

The most unfortunate quality of this book is that it is the kind of thing that architects, not knowing any better, sometimes make the mistake of actually reading. Krell spins out the thinnest of theses using post-Heideggerian appeals to "primordial" language and post-Derridean wordplay, yet he completely lacks either thinker's insight. Krell should stick with what he does best, translations, and leave the architectural theory to people who know better, like Karsten Harries and Michael Benedikt.