Life & Wisdom Quote by Alfred Jarry

Total destruction is never total, Jarry needles, because even ruins have a stubborn afterlife: they become scenery, nostalgia, proof that something once stood. The line pretends to advocate the purest kind of negation - don’t just topple the old order, pulverize its debris - then swerves into a provocation: the surest way to erase ruins is to build with them. It’s an anarchist joke with an architect’s punchline.

Jarry, the patron saint of avant-garde misbehavior, understood that modernity loves the romance of wreckage. Ruins invite reverence; they let yesterday keep haunting today. His “demolishing everything” echoes the turn-of-the-century appetite for upheaval - political, aesthetic, technological - but the real target is the fantasy that you can cleanse history by smashing it. The rubble remains, and rubble turns quickly into a monument.

So he proposes an act that looks practical and is actually philosophical: reuse. Not preservation, not sentimental restoration, but appropriation. “Fine, well-designed buildings” is doing double duty here. It’s a jab at bourgeois taste (even the revolution ends up wanting nice facades) and a serious claim that creation is the only demolition that sticks. If you want the past to stop dictating the present, you don’t just reject it; you metabolize it.

The subtext is that revolutions fail when they become curators of their own wreckage. Jarry’s wit insists on a harsher, more interesting ethic: build something so compelling out of the remnants that the ruins can’t keep posing as truth.