Abstract

This research proposes a fragmentary writing of the Nietzschean influence in the enigmatic architectural representations haunting de Chirico's "metaphysical" paintings of 1911--1917. The post-structuralist interpreters of Nietzsche's unresolved doctrine of eternal recurrence originate three episodic genealogies that trace the significance of repetition of the Nietzschean "classical" ideal in the emergence of de Chirico's modern architectural subject. ;The genealogy of the body moves from the projected subject's convulsive body of semiotic impulses towards the architectonic body of fragment, ruin, and absence. The genealogy of vision situates tropes of blindness in the expanded definition of the vanishing point, mobilized in de Chirico's Nietzschean perspectiv/ism and near-anamorphosis. The genealogy of the spacing of time follows the exile and detours of the convulsive urbanism of de Chirico's tragic polis as the disquieting museum of oracular objects, anticipating the chiasmic metaphysical interiors. ;The conclusion supplements the three genealogies with a vision of eternal recurrence the first time that challenges the teleological truth of architectural historical discourse through its "terrifyingly ancient" origin/s