{"id":4979,"date":"2021-06-30T14:20:28","date_gmt":"2021-06-30T14:20:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/new.michalgovrin.com\/publications\/body-of-prayer\/"},"modified":"2023-05-31T16:37:55","modified_gmt":"2023-05-31T16:37:55","slug":"body-of-prayer","status":"publish","type":"publications","link":"https:\/\/michalgovrin.com\/en\/publications\/body-of-prayer\/","title":{"rendered":"Body of Prayer"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Jacques Derrida, Michal Govrin, David Shapiro<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Design: Kim Shkapich<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Read and download the full book<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The “Advanced Concepts” course has been an integral component of the education of architects within The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Uniun, researching the parallel disciplines of writing, art, sound, and their relations to architecture. Poet and professor David Shapiro, invited Michal Govrin, Israel\u2019s great writer and theater director, to lecture on certain spatial problems of the sacred. She, in turn, invited Jacque Derrida, the celebrated French philosopher, to elaborate questions. Their visit coincided with the English publication of The Name<\/a><\/strong><\/em>, a novel \u201cvoiced\u201d as a prayer, which became the starting point for this meditation on prayer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Body of Prayer is a rare trialogue recorded October 14, 1998. It is also a book of reverberation, containing parallel writings, poems, and fragments of novels by three participants and an almost silent host, the late dean of the school, John Hejduk. A chapel, built not by bricks but by \u201cblocks\u201d [teivot; teiva; Hebrew synonym for words] \u2013 with crossing motifs, so many and so startling. Prayer and mothers. Death of mothers. Mothers and sons, and daughters. Death and life. And the body \u2013 so present. Skin and Eros. Body in prayer. Body as prayer. Body of prayer. What is prayer? Invocation, petition, self-reflection, praise, lament? \u2013 or what Kant regarded as a \u201cdisagreeable bending of the knee to beg an intervention?”. Discussing the poetics of prayer, and the spiritual tradition in Judaism of the woman of prayer; interrogating guilt, prayer without hope, when the addressing is always on the edge, never with certainty that there is a listening, a reception. An extreme moment of the uncertainty of the addresser, an outrageous hope that the \u201cI\u201d will be confirmed, will take shape, will voice itself by the mere outburst of prayer and by the listening, the reception, the reverberation. The multiple \u201cI\u201d, with all its hidden overtones. The dizzying archeology of book and\/as sky. From Saint Augustine and his quote from Revelation: \u201cThe heavens shall be folded together as a book\u201d, spliced with a quote from Psalms 104:2 (used in Jewish Liturgy) [covering Thyself with light as with a robe and] stretching out the skies like a tent. (The homonym in Hebrew between \u2018light\u2019 and \u2018skin\u2019, and the tent here is made of skin). And then again, the expression from Revelation, echoing Isaiah 34:4 “…and the skies shall be rolled up like a scroll [a book in Hebrew]”. Body of Prayer is the latest work published by The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of the Cooper Union.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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