Building,Thinking, and Politics: Mies,Heidegger, and the Nazis

The Djoser funerary complex was meant to be a house for a god and a metaphor for the sky. Today, it is usually understood that this original work of classical architecture is a vacant house of stone “from which the gods have fled.”

This difference does not have to be understood as a further sign of an irrecoverable loss of meaning. It is a historical doubling of meaning, or a duplicity. This article explores the duplicity of meaning of the Djoser complex by comparing references to architecture in the Pyramid Texts with texts of contemporary criticism, in particular, “The Pit and the Pyramid” by Jacques Derrida.