Os debo una explicación

Abstract

This is the short story of a promise, the promise of (the payment of) a debt and the promise of a promise: the promise of architecture, maybe. I say: I owe you an explanation. About what? Who, I? What? An explanation? Explanation comes from Latin explanare, ‘to make level, smooth out’ hence the ‘make clear’ meaning. But in some languages, like Spanish, English ‘explanation’ translates into ‘explicación’ that also comes from Latin, this time from explicare: to unfold. This explanation, then, will try to unfold, to expand or to unfurl, even to reveal, I hope, some hidden or masked meanings of the (present) debt. And at the same time it will try to erase the great contemporary misunderstanding: that which says that debts should be paid, that our future is to be devoted to reciprocate a debt that. A debt that, in CAPITAL letters, we never promised…* This paper will propose, in its first part, a genealogy of the debt that finds its point of departure in Friedrich Nietzsche (his Second essay On the Genealogy of Morality) and goes through Marcel Mauss and Jacques Derrida to Maurizio Lazzarato. Follows a shorter second part that proposes, from the standpoint of the promise (the counterfeit of the debt), a certain opening to what is to come. And this opening, I guess, is the place for architecture.