ABSTRACT
Taking up the notion of ‘Transcritique’ advanced by Kojin Karatani discussed in the previous chapter, combined with philosophical reading of Marx and the conceptions of Critique in conjunction with the theory of Revolution, this chapter mainly attempts to extend their ‘applications’ and expand on their relevance for a critique of architecture. It is in this chapter that the Marxian theory of critique and psychoanalytical critique meet in an expanded field of critique and theory in architecture. The underlying concern here is the conviction that the forgotten legacy of radical critique in the discipline inherited from the 1960s must be revived but must be put on a new foundation related to the present conjuncture. The main theoretical gap in that legacy, at least in the architecture field, was a total absence of a serious reading of Capital compounded by a neglect of the Lacanian theory. Guiding the investigation in this chapter is Marx’s key argument in Chapter 1 of Capital where he famously wrote: ‘A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties’.
