Transcritique: On Kant and Marx

Introduction

Transcritique appeared in Japanese in 2001 and in English, revised, in 2003. Karatani reads Kant through Marx and Marx through Kant. From Kant he takes the idea of critique as a movement between perspectives – a “pronounced parallax” – and the realm of ends as a practical task; in Marx’s analysis of the value form he finds a transcendental critique of capital. Since capital, nation and state support each other, resistance must work on all three; he proposes associations of producers and consumers and the consumer boycott as forms of resistance. The book combines philosophy, economics and political theory.

Connections

Builds on

• Critique of Pure Reason1781 · Immanuel Kant
• Capital1867 · Karl Marx

Taken up in

• The Structure of World History2010 · Karatani Kōjin

More works by Karatani Kōjin

• 1980Origins of Modern Japanese Literature
• 2010The Structure of World History