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September 11, 2004
I'm really struggling with Klossowski's reading of Nietzsche and I have very little idea of what is going on. Al the references are to Nietzsche's collected works in German, so I cannot follow them up and orientate myself withe texts that I know. It is like reading Bataille on Nietzsche: I'm all at sea. without a compass.
So I am going to go back and reconnect with Heidegger's building dwelling essay. Most of the architecture in Adelaide where I live is marked by the poverty of an architectural practice that is dominated by the technology of buiilders and the calculative instrumental thinking of the developers. It is all about dollars, junk buildings and slick marketing. It has little to do with dwelling at all and more to do with pragmatic shelter (engineering and technology) overlaid with an aestheticization of shelter that is identical to fashion and the dictates of consumerism.
Hence my turn to Heidegger. He asks:
"In what way does building belong to dwelling? The answer to this question will clarify for us what building, understood by way of the nature of dwelling, really is. We limit ourselves to building in the sense of constructing things and inquire: what is a built thing? A bridge may serve as an example for our reflections."
This is what he says about the bridge:
"The bridge swings over the stream with case and power. It does not just connect banks that are already there. The banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream. The bridge designedly causes them to lie across from each other. One side is set off against the other by the bridge. Nor do the banks stretch along the stream as indifferent border strips of the dry land. With the banks, the bridge brings to the stream the one and the other expanse of the landscape lying behind them. It brings stream and bank and land into each other's neighborhood. The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the stream. Thus it guides and attends the stream through the meadows. Resting upright in the stream's bed, the bridge-piers bear the swing of the arches that leave the stream's waters to run their course. The waters may wander on quiet and gay, the sky's floods from storm or thaw may shoot past the piers in torrential waves-the bridge is ready for the sky's weather and its fickle nature. Even where the bridge covers the stream, it holds its flow up to the sky by taking it for a moment under the vaulted gateway and then setting it free once more.
The bridge lets the stream run its course and at the same time grants their way to mortals so that they may come and go from shore to shore."
What then is the significance of this?
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