In Architecture as Metaphor, Kojin Karatani detects a recurrent
"will to architecture" that he argues is the foundation of all
Western thinking, traversing architecture, philosophy, literature,
linguistics, city planning, anthropology, political economics,
psychoanalysis, and mathematics. Kojin Karatani, Japan's leading
literary critic, is perhaps best known for his imaginative readings
of Shakespeare, Soseki, Marx, Wittgenstein, and most recently Kant.
His works, of which Origins of Modern Japanese Literature is the
only one previously translated into English, are the generic
equivalent to what in America is called "theory." Karatani's
writings are important not only for the insights they offer on the
various topics under discussion, but also as an example of a
distinctly non-Western critical intervention. In Architecture as
Metaphor, Karatani detects a recurrent "will to architecture" that
he argues is the foundation of all Western thinking, traversing
architecture, philosophy, literature, linguistics, city planning,
anthropology, political economics, psychoanalysis, and mathematics.
In the three parts of the book, he analyzes the complex bonds
between construction and deconstruction, thereby pointing to an
alternative model of "secular criticism," but in the domain of
philosophy rather than literary or cultural criticism. As Karatani
claims in his introduction, because the will to architecture is
practically nonoexistent in Japan, he must first assume a dual
role: one that affirms the architectonic (by scrutinizing the
suppressed function of form) and one that pushes formalism to its
collapse (by invoking Kurt Godel's incompleteness theorem). His
subsequent discussions trace a path through the work of Christopher
Alexander, Jane Jacobs, Gilles Deleuze, and others. Finally, amidst
the drive that motivates all formalization, he confronts an
unbridgeable gap, an uncontrollable event encountered in the
exchange with the other; thus his speculation turns toward global
capital movement. While in the present volume he mainly analyzes
familiar Western texts, it is precisely for this reason that his
voice discloses a distance that will add a new dimension to our
English-language discourse.
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