At and with the Sea: Le Corbusier's Path towards a “Desiring-Machine”

This paper aims to place Le Corbusier's thought and work in a contemporary realm with the aid of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's philosophy, using the poet and essayist Paul Valéry as an intermediary. From the sea to Paul Valéry, to Le Corbusier and to architecture. From the machine as a mechanism ? so loved by Le Corbusier ? to the desiring-machine of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari as a machinic instrument. From an immemorial past ? the sea ? to a recent past ? Valéry and Le Corbusier; and to a future ? an architecture that works the materials of expression of the body, to a duplicate of that very body; a body inhabited by itself in itself. As a desiring-machine. As an apparatus. The apparatus as a reflection of Le Corbusier's longing for the Mediterranean Sea ? and for the objet à reaction poétique. We can assume this object (à reaction poétique) to be a conductor of the immanent possibility of a non-preconceived form, as the conductor of an “open” thing that thrives, as an intrastructure, for the machinic. Something that goes beyond the traditional antinomies of modernism. Again, something for a future: a living-in-a-living-body.