ABSTRACT
The main objective in this chapter is to advance a ‘Marxian pedagogy’ for critique of architecture linked to the central thesis that ‘Revolution is critique of architecture’. This pedagogy is intended to pose a major challenge to the prevailing pedagogy in the liberal–conservative architecture academy. It is necessary to point out that the return to Marx is a conditioned one. It is distinctly a philosophical return based on readings that recently have been rendered by contemporary radical thinkers. In laying down a ‘Philosophical Foundation of Reading Marx’, this chapter provides a historical precedent for the philosophical reading of Marx conducted by Althusser and his colleagues-students at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris out of which came the influential collection entitled Reading Capital. All the subsequent philosophical readings of Marx are indebted, with certain reservations, to Althusser and his colleagues at the École. This chapter in particular discusses the singular contribution by Kojin Karatani in his seminal Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, in which Karatani reads Marx through Kant and Kant through Marx.
