“I do not see ruin as a negative thing […] What else is there to love, anyway? One cannot love a monument, a work of architecture, an institution as such except in an experience itself precarious in its fragility: it hasn’t always been there, it will not always be there, it is finite. And for this very reason I love it as mortal, through its birth and its death, through the ghost or the silhouette of its ruin, of my own—which it already is or already prefigures. How can we love except in this finitude? Where else would the right to love, indeed the love of right, come from?”
- Jacques Derrida, Force of Law.