Abstract

Jacques Derrida, in Of Grammatology, addresses Rousseau’s concept of the primitive outlined in the Essay on the Origins of Language. In place of Rousseau’s classical derivation of language from the spoken word, Derrida famously proposes the mark or trace as a non-originary “origin”. This in turn leaves any notion of the primitive as ready for a deconstructive reading; that is, it posits that any notion of “the primitive” is a constructed (ie non-primitive) idea with a history and political intent. This paper will address to what extent does this theory of the mark and the questioning of the possibility of an origin present us with an essentially positive possibility of recasting architectural meaning outside a metaphysics which privileges the linguistic above certain of its “others”, for instance, materiality.