Karatani Kōjin

At the time of the disintegration of “actually existing socialism” in the 1990s, it appeared that the inexorable flux of globalization was going to consume the nation-state. However, recent years have witnessed the increasing role of the states in both the Global North and South. The relationship between the state and capital is a frequently traversed subject, but what needs further illumination is the persistence of “many states” and its relation to capitalism as both a national and global formation. While (...) globalization of capital suggests a movement from multiplicity toward a dehistoricized abstraction, a global state has never been actualized. This implies that, unlike capital, the state cannot be dehistoricized or dedifferentiated; therefore, the only way to think about the state is to observe concrete, multiple states. In view of this difference and drawing on Nicos Poulantzas’s and Kōjin Karatani’s inquiries into the states system, this article examines the multi-state system as an internal and external limit to Marxist thought. (shrink)

1. Introducción. -/- 2. Modernización, tradicionalismo y sincretismo en el pensamiento japonés contemporáneo. -/- 3. Liberalismo, conservatismo y primeras corrientes socialistas y feministas (1868-1912): La modernidad filosófica en el Japón Meiji. El debate en torno al término «filosofía». Imperialismo e ilustración. Contexto del liberal-conservatismo. Los reformistas de Meirokusha: liberalismo, gradualismo y evolucionismo social. Conservadurismo: reacción a los peligros de la occidentalización y a la pérdida de identidad. Los prematuros movimientos socialistas, anarquistas y feministas. -/- 4. Subjetividad e ideología (1912-1945): Kitaro (...) Nishida y la pluralidad filosófica en el interior y más allá de la Escuela de Kioto. La significación de Nishida en el panorama filosófico japonés del siglo XX. La denominación de la «Escuela»: Tosaka y su descripción de la «filosofía de la escuela de Kioto». La experiencia pura nishidiana y el paradigma del «no-yo». El cuestionamiento nishidiano de los presupuestos de la epistemología en Estudio sobre el Bien. La filosofía nishidiana del no-yo, la iluminación y sus problemas éticos. La investigación crítica y el análisis del poder ideológico: Tosaka. -/- 5. Pensar la postguerra: memoria y superación del ultranacionalismo. Superación del vacío a través del arrepentimiento: Tanabe. Superación del vacío a través de la comprensión del nihilismo: Nishitani. La autopsia filosófico-política del ultranacionalismo japonés: Maruyama. Movimientos y orientaciones posteriores a los años 1950. Panorama. Filosofía y denuncia del patriarcado y el nacionalismo: Ueno. Transcrítica y república mundial: Karatani. -/- 6. Nota final. (shrink)

Karatani Kojin. La filosofía como intersticio, alteridad y proyección.

Kojin Karatani's Transcritique introduces a startlingly new dimension to Immanuel Kant's transcendental critique by using Kant to read Karl Marx and Marx to read Kant. In a direct challenge to standard academic approaches to both thinkers, Karatani's transcritical readings discover the ethical roots of socialism in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and a Kantian critique of money in Marx's Capital.Karatani reads Kant as a philosopher who sought to wrest metaphysics from the discredited realm of theoretical dogma in order to restore (...) it to its proper place in the sphere of ethics and praxis. With this as his own critical model, he then presents a reading of Marx that attempts to liberate Marxism from longstanding Marxist and socialist presuppositions in order to locate a solid theoretical basis for a positive activism capable of gradually superseding the trinity of Capital-Nation-State. (shrink)

Kojin Karatani's Transcritique introduces a startlingly new dimension to Immanuel Kant's transcendental critique by using Kant to read Karl Marx and Marx to read Kant. In a direct challenge to standard academic approaches to both thinkers, Karatani's transcritical readings discover the ethical roots of socialism in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and a Kantian critique of money in Marx's Capital.Karatani reads Kant as a philosopher who sought to wrest metaphysics from the discredited realm of theoretical dogma in order to restore (...) it to its proper place in the sphere of ethics and praxis. With this as his own critical model, he then presents a reading of Marx that attempts to liberate Marxism from longstanding Marxist and socialist presuppositions in order to locate a solid theoretical basis for a positive activism capable of gradually superseding the trinity of Capital-Nation-State. (shrink)

Nation and Aesthetics shows curious connections between nationalism and aesthetics through examining various fields such as art, language, and religion. This connection is not accidental, but inherent. Nation connects capitalism and the state, thus creating the problematic modern social formation of capital-nation-state.

In _Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy_—published originally in Japanese and now available in four languages—Kojin Karatani questions the idealization of ancient Athens as the source of philosophy and democracy by placing the origins instead in Ionia, a set of Greek colonies located in present-day Turkey. Contrasting Athenian democracy with Ionian isonomia—a system based on non-rule and a lack of social divisions whereby equality is realized through the freedom to immigrate—Karatani shows how early Greek thinkers from Heraclitus to Pythagoras were (...) inseparably linked to the isonomia of their Ionian origins, not democracy. He finds in isonomia a model for how an egalitarian society not driven by class antagonism might be put into practice, and resituates Socrates's work and that of his intellectual heirs as the last philosophical attempts to practice isonomia's utopic potentials. Karatani subtly interrogates the democratic commitments of Western philosophy from within and argues that the key to transcending their contradictions lies not in Athenian democracy, with its echoes of imperialism, slavery, and exclusion, but in the openness of isonomia. (shrink)

Mobility is the key to overcoming the capital-nation-state. It can be divided into two types: the mobility of pastoral nomads and original hunter-gatherers. It is impossible for us to find a society of nomadic hunter-gatherers in today’s world, but we can have a thought experiment by observing existing wandering band societies. Yanagita Kunio is a thinker in Japan who drew attention to nomads. He has examined various types of nomads since his earlier years but is ridiculed for insisting on the (...) existence of mountain nomads. Nonetheless, he has never given up on the reality of mountain nomads. Even though he later focuses on farmers with fixed settlements, or the common people, he still continues his search for the possibility of the existence of mountain nomads. Eventually, he came to look for traces of mountain nomads in indigenous beliefs. These indigenous beliefs were not limited to the Japanese. (shrink)

First, this article seeks to demonstrate why Karatani Kōjin’s The Structure of World History offers a unique and pioneering contribution to Marxist theory in particular and radical thought more generally. In so doing, it examines Karatani’s key conceptual innovations that enable to him to open up a novel perspective on world history and propose a revolutionary political program—one drawing from Kantian anarchism as much as Marxian communism. Particular attention is paid to the central concept that Karatani deploys in this work—exchange (...) or intercourse, which is derived from Marx’s use of the term Verkehr—in order to examine critically the formidable case he makes for replacing the classical Marxist concept of the “mode of production” with the “mode of exchange.” The article argues that Karatani’s novelty and attraction lies in his production of a new concept of history by means of a new concept of social totality, which invites him to be read alongside other leading thinkers in the orbit of Marxism such as Hegel, Althusser, Braudel, and Lefebvre. In conclusion, the article highlights an illuminating ambiguity in Karatani’s conception of exchange, arguing that it is in the light of this that his political conclusions are most productively studied. (shrink)

In this article Kobayashi Toshiaki discusses the importance in all periods of Karatani’s oeuvre of the notion of an “exterior” that necessarily falls beyond the bounds of a system, together with the notion of “singularity” as that which cannot be contained within a “universal.” The existential dread vis-à-vis the uncanny other that Karatani in his early works of literary criticism had initially found to be the underlying tone in Sōseki’s works remained with Karatani himself throughout his career and is what (...) had drawn him closer to philosophy. This sense of the “exterior” to—or other than—the normality of consciousness and the meaningfulness of the world is then extended and applied as the “exterior to systems” in his analyses of logical, mathematical, and linguistic systems, in his reading of Marx’s discussion of capitalist economics, and most recently in his analysis of commodity exchange between communities. (shrink)

Kojin Karatani, one of Japan's most influential thinkers, wrote the essays collected in History and Repetition during a period of radical historical change, triggered by the collapse of the Cold War order and the death of the Sh?wa emperor ...

L’attitude que Soseki a définie comme étant fondamentale à l’écriture du shaseibun est ce que Freud nomme «humour». Par ailleurs, l’humour en tant qu’un «sens du monde» devrait être distingué du carnavalesque selon Bakhtin. Pour Freud, la plaisanterie, en tant qu’une «contribution au comique au moyen de l’inconscient», doit être différenciée de l’humour, «la contribution faite par le comique par l’intermédiaire du surmoi». Pour moi l’humour peut entretenir quelque rapport à la psychose et le shaseibun de Soseki peut être lié (...) à une sorte de souffrance qui ne peut facilement guérir à l’aide de plaisanteries ou de la catharsis tragique. Ce n’est pas la souffrance de la névrose, mais de la psychose. C’est la souffrance de la personne moderne. Et pourtant elle ne peut être totalement racontée dans le style du roman moderne. Selon les normes de la littérature moderne, les longs romans de Soseki sont des échecs. Et pourtant, il n’y a aucune raison pour nous de voir les romans de Soseki comme des échecs. Ils ont constitué, bien plutôt, la lutte de Soseki contre le type de fiction par laquelle la littérature moderne cherchait à résoudre et à trouver la synthèse pour de tels dérapages. (shrink)

L’attitude que Soseki a définie comme étant fondamentale à l’écriture du shaseibun est ce que Freud nomme «humour». Par ailleurs, l’humour en tant qu’un «sens du monde» devrait être distingué du carnavalesque selon Bakhtin. Pour Freud, la plaisanterie, en tant qu’une «contribution au comique au moyen de l’inconscient», doit être différenciée de l’humour, «la contribution faite par le comique par l’intermédiaire du surmoi». Pour moi l’humour peut entretenir quelque rapport à la psychose et le shaseibun de Soseki peut être lié (...) à une sorte de souffrance qui ne peut facilement guérir à l’aide de plaisanteries ou de la catharsis tragique. Ce n’est pas la souffrance de la névrose, mais de la psychose. C’est la souffrance de la personne moderne. Et pourtant elle ne peut être totalement racontée dans le style du roman moderne. Selon les normes de la littérature moderne, les longs romans de Soseki sont des échecs. Et pourtant, il n’y a aucune raison pour nous de voir les romans de Soseki comme des échecs. Ils ont constitué, bien plutôt, la lutte de Soseki contre le type de fiction par laquelle la littérature moderne cherchait à résoudre et à trouver la synthèse pour de tels dérapages. (shrink)

Teaching has been one of the central themes in educational research. Not only empirical researchers of education but also philosophers of education inquire into the activity. Philosophers used to analyse the concept of teaching. The merely analytic approach, however, is no longer the main one in educational research. Will philosophical consideration of teaching, then, never contribute to our educational activity or any other activities in our life at all? In order to explore the possibilities for philosophical consideration of teaching, I (...) will examine three philosophers' distinction between teaching and telling. The philosophers are Israel Scheffler, Karatani Kojin, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. I will conclude that Wittgenstein deconstructs the distinction between teaching and telling, and that he requires us to change our attitude to the recognition of the others. (shrink)

A genuine Copernican turn in Kantian and Marxist theory and practice.