Karatani Kōjin

Works

• 1980Origins of Modern Japanese Literature

  “Landscape”, “interiority”, the confession and the child are not timeless givens but were invented in Meiji literature; once established, the origin of these forms is forgotten.

• 2001Transcritique: On Kant and Marx

  Kant is read through Marx and Marx through Kant: a “transcritique” moves between perspectives, and the realm of ends becomes a practical task of associations of producers and consumers.

• 2010The Structure of World History

  World history as a sequence of dominant modes of exchange: reciprocity, plunder and redistribution, commodity exchange, and a future mode D in which reciprocity returns at a higher level beyond capital, nation and state.

Position

In “Origins of Modern Japanese Literature” (1980) Karatani argued that “landscape”, “interiority”, the confession and the “child” were not discovered by Meiji writers but produced by an inversion through which an inward-turned self began to see the world as landscape; once established, these forms appear natural and their origin is forgotten. In the 1980s he turned to formal systems and self-reference and, in “Exploration” (1986), to Wittgenstein’s problem of rule-following and the situation of teaching or selling to an other who does not share one’s rules. “Transcritique” (2001) reads Kant and Marx through each other: Kant’s critique is a movement between perspectives (a “pronounced parallax”), and Marx’s analysis of the value form is a transcendental critique of capital; the Kantian realm of ends becomes the task of associations of producers and consumers. “The Structure of World History” (2010) replaces modes of production with modes of exchange: reciprocity of the gift (A), plunder and redistribution by the state (B), commodity exchange (C), and a mode D that would restore reciprocity at a higher level beyond the interlocking knot of capital, nation and state. Critics have questioned whether mode D is more than a regulative idea; Karatani himself presents it as such, in Kant’s sense.

Life & context

Karatani Kōjin was born on 6 August 1941 in Amagasaki near Osaka. He studied economics at the University of Tokyo and then English literature; as a student he was active in the radical left during the protests of 1960 against the security treaty with the United States. In 1969 he won the Gunzō prize for criticism with an essay on Natsume Sōseki and became one of the best-known literary critics in Japan. He taught at Hosei University and later at Kinki University, and spent long periods as a visiting scholar at Yale, where he came into contact with Paul de Man, and at Columbia. With Asada Akira he edited the journal Hihyō kūkan (Critical Space) from 1991 to 2002. In 2000 he founded the New Associationist Movement, a short-lived network intended to put the ideas of “Transcritique” into practice. In 2022 he received the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture.

Further main works

• Architecture as Metaphor (Inyu to shite no kenchiku, 1983)
• Exploration I and II (Tankyū, 1986, 1989)
• Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy (Tetsugaku no kigen, 2012)
• Power and Modes of Exchange (Chikara to kōkan yōshiki, 2022)