상세정보

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.

About the Author

정보제공 :

CONTENTS

Introduction : A Map of Crises / by Arata Isozaki = ⅶ

Translator's Remarks = xv

Introduction to the English Edition = xxxi

Part One Making

 one The Will to Architecture = 5

 two The Status of Form = 15

 three Architecture and Poetry = 23

 four The Natural City = 29

 five Structure and Zero = 37

 six Natural Numbers = 47

Part Two Becoming

 seven Natural Language = 61

 eight Money = 67

 nine Natural Intelligence = 73

 ten Schismogenesis = 81

 eleven Being = 93

 twelve The Formalizatin of Philosophy = 101

Part Three Teaching and Selling

 thirteen Solipsism = 109

 fourteen The Standpoint of Teaching = 115

 fifteen Architecture as Metaphor = 125

 sixteen On Rules = 133

 seventeen Society and Community = 143

 eighteen The Linguistic Turn and Cogito = 149

 nineteen Selling = 159

 twenty Merchant Capital = 169

 twenty-one Credit = 177

Afterword = 185

Notes = 189

Illustration Credits = 200