ABSTRACT
This chapter takes as its focus a note of 1977 titled “Desire and Pleasure” [“Désir et Plaisir”], in an exploration of affective politics of an architectural event. The note was passed from Gilles Deleuze to Michel Foucault. The note is important not only in establishing the relation between Foucault’s idea of power and Deleuze’s own concept of desire, but also in establishing a politics of affect that might help us speak of the political force of architecture. The architectural event I am concerned with is itself explicitly concerned with fascism. The event is the demolition of three concrete stairwells of the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. These concrete monoliths stood between the winters of 1997 and 2004 on an urban field that was once the site of the offices of the Protection Squad of the Nazi party (SS), the Security Service of the SS, the Reich Security Main Office (SD), and the Secret State Police (Gestapo), on Niederkirchnerstraße, Berlin. The demolition of these concrete monoliths confounds our sense of both desire and power and may help us understand why, for Deleuze, power is conceived as “an affection of desire”.
