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The Rune of the Ruinous Ruin
"Each epoch not only dreams the next, but also, in dreaming, strives toward the moment of waking. It bears its end in itself and unfolds it- as Hegel already saw- with ruse. In the convulsions of the commodity economy we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled."- Walter Benjamin
"The crypt is thus built…through the double pressure of contradictory forces: It is erected by its very ruin, held up by what never stops eating away at its foundation."- Jacques Derrida
"We shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well. But the only way I can see of doing that is to use them to put up a lot of fine, well-designed buildings."- Alfred Jarry
"The ruin does not supervene like an accident upon a monument that was intact only yesterday. In the beginning there is ruin. Ruin is that which happens to the image from the moment of the first gaze. Ruin is the self-portrait, this face looked at in the face as the memory of itself, what remains or returns as a specter from the moment one first looks at oneself and a figuration is eclipsed. The figure, the face, then sees its visibility being eaten away; it loses its integrity without disintegrating. For the incompleteness of the visible monument comes from the eclipsing structure of the trait, from a structure that is only remarked, pointed out, impotent or incapable of being reflected in the shadow of the self-portrait."- Jacques Derrida
"Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate . . . but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins."- Franz Kafka
"The ruin is not in front of us; it is neither a spectacle nor a love object. It is experience itself: neither the abandoned yet still monumental fragment of a totality, nor, as Benjamin thought, simply a theme of baroque culture. It is precisely not a theme, for it ruins the theme, the position, the presentation or representation of anything and everything. Ruin is, rather, this memory open like an eye, or like the hole in a bone socket that lets you see without showing you anything at all, anything of the all. This, for showing you nothing at all, nothing of the all. 'For' means here both because the ruin shows nothing at all and with a view to showing nothing of the all."- Jacques Derrida
"Fragments of architecture (bits of walls, of rooms, of streets, of ideas) are all one actually sees. These fragments are like beginnings without ends. There is always a split between fragments that are real and fragments that are virtual, between memory and fantasy. These splits have no existence other than being the passage from one fragment to another. They are relays rather than signs. They are traces. They are in-between."- Bernard Tschumi
"He knew that this temple was the place required by his inflexible purpose; he knew that the incessant trees had not been able to choke the ruins of another such propitious temple down river, a temple whose gods also were burned and dead; he knew that his immediate obligation was to dream."- Jorge Luis Borges, The Circular Ruins
"It is not with impunity that one becomes initiated into a foreign language, and every one of the future words one pronounces will necessarily break some link with the time of the effective present. The meaning of each term, were it to remain totally undeciphered, could not fail to exercise an influence comparable to a comprehensible injunction, but if a word of traditional magic never provides any access other than to a world fallen in ruins of which it is a vestige, the future word, by raising us up towards that which is still intact, obliges us to invent, outside of any precedent and , by the same token, any etymology, the wholly new meaning that glimmers in the distance." - Encyclpedia Da Costa, eds. Robert Lebel & Isabelle Waldberg
"It is the gaze of the flaneur, whose mode of life still surrounds the approaching desolation of city life with a propitiatory luster."- Walter Benjamin
"Whence the love of ruin. And the fact that the scopic pulsion, voyeurism itself, is always on the lookout for the originary ruin. A narcissistic melancholy, a memory- in mourning- of love itself. How to love anything other than the possibility of ruin? Than an impossible totality?"- Jacques Derrida
"Oh Time! the beautifier of the dead,
Adorner of the ruin, comforter
And only healer when the heart hath bled;
. . . Time, the avenger!"- Lord Byron
"Mankind which began in a cave and behind a windbreak will end in the disease-soaked ruins of a slum."-H. G. Wells
"We moralize among ruins."- Benjamin Disraeli
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