"“Western thought is marked by a will to architecture that is reiterated and renewed at times of crisis.” – Kojin Karatani The Challenge of Architecture (as Metaphor): There is a spectre haunting capitalist societies, the spectre of that which is repressed by “the will to architecture.” The romantic interpretation of such implicitation would be to suppose that there is an insistent “truth” that is concealed by mystification, or ideology, or abstraction, or some other easily identifiable enemy that would retain a pure positionality for the cognizer. This is precisely the target of Postone’s critique of “traditional Marxism,” the latter which romanticizes the purity of transhistorical labor. It is also the matter of Sartre’s critique of Lukács, who romanticizes an historical “meta-subject” that would putatively adequately realize totality. Both of these objects of criticism are defined by a certain metaphysical assumption; they identify an Archimedean point from which revolutionary projects are meant to be built. In Sartrean terms, they place essence before existence. However, there is a more substantive way to engage this issue that might also reveal a certain logic to the tendencies facing our world(s) at present. In his essay “The Will to Architecture,” heretical Kantian-Marxist Kojin Karatani investigates a primary crisis condition. Explication reveals that Karatani intimates that Western thought is crisis-ridden precisely because of its tendency to use the architectural metaphor. However, this is not merely a lexical semantic concern but something more fundamental. Architecture as metaphor pertains to a tendency of Western thought to view itself 1) as controlling becoming (homo faber) and 2) as essentially constructive (fabrica mundi). In controlling becoming, Karatani notes that it was Plato who proposed the architectural metaphor in contradistinction to pre-Socratic philosophy’s view of the world as becoming. Thus, Plato erects a dialogic system by which the logoi would usher thought through various “makings” (ie poiesis) in order to withstand becoming. Here, Karatani mentions Nietzsche’s romantic critique of this tendency, which instead seeks to ground an alternative orientation that is faithful to the becoming of pre-Socratic thought. The reason this romantic critique falters is that it inadequately critiques the foundationalism of Platonic idealism, by misidentifying the source of crisis inherent in the Platonic system. That is, while Nietzsche rightly identifies the obsessive irrationality of Platonic system-building in concealing becoming, what Nietzsche ignores is the incessant return of the repressed endemic in the architectural metaphor per se. This is something that Deleuze also notices in the opening chapter of Difference and Repetition when he points out a tension in Plato between accurate copies of Forms and simulacra. That is, how are we able to adequately distinguish between a copy that is faithful to the Form and that copy that is a more degraded copy (perhaps a copy of a copy of a copy, ad infinitum)? On a possible resolution of this aporia, Plato remains skeptical. The point in all of this is to note that there is something inherently dissonant in the architectural desire. And this dissonance is integral if we are to understand a particular challenge that should [...]"