Poetics of the City: an Open-Air "Chantier"

Abstract

Without forming a “concept” of the philosophy of Jean-luc Nancy, the french term “chantier”, which is difficult to translate into Spanish, is used in this paper to account for the treatment that Nancy has given to the city in the texts with which he has been defining its specific features and particular characteristics for over twenty years. Beyond its conceptual unity, the city is revealed as the plurality of the “ways of making and producing” (poetics) that allow Nancy to transcend disciplinary compartments. With very few occurrences in his work, in this paper we show that “chantier” is a privileged term that, paradoxically, accounts for how work under cons truction (provisional translation of the term) destabilise the “constructivist” architectural paradigm with which the complete scheme of representations of Western thought have been configured.