In Specters of Marx (1993) Jacques Derrida stated categorically: ‘It will be always a fault not to reread and discuss Marx’.3 But almost two decades earlier, in 1974, a small volume put forward not just a rereading or discussion, but rather a reconstruction of Marx. Originally published in Japanese in 1974, Kōjin Karatani’s book, Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility, was published in English in 2020.4 Karatani’s reconstruction of Marx was grounded in a reconstruction of Capital. After this initial attempt, Karatani forged a larger project that culminated in the groundbreaking The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange. Paraphrasing Derrida, we might say: ‘It is a fault not to read and discuss Karatani’. Any self-proclaimed Marxist or Marxian thinker would be at fault not to read Karatani.
Karatani’s comprehensive reconstruction of Marx is achieved under the leading categorical term modes of exchange as perfected in The Structure of World History. It is an extraordinary theoretical achievement. It is a work which is philosophically grounded and remains, to this day, unparalleled in Marxian scholarship. Karatani informs us that when he wrote Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility, he was a ‘literary critic’. Later, he abandoned this position and ventured to ‘construct a theoretical system’. He confronted a problem that had to be explicated systematically. We must take his word for it. In order to be appreciated, his work must be read and reread, studied and discussed with the same systematicity that he himself studies Marx. In an effort to do so, this study will endeavour to explicate the systematic nature of the theoretical edifice that Karatani has constructed and presented to the larger public.
Never before in the annals of Marxian study had the theoretical notion of ‘modes of exchange’ – derived from Marx’s own term, ‘intercourse’ – been put forward or discussed. It is a leading conceptual category with which to correct any reading of Marx that is not centred on Capital. Karatani’s intellectual enterprise is at the core of an ambitious project that endeavours to tackle the enormous complexity of historical ‘social formations’ that he has systematically theorized in The Structure of World History. It would not be presumptuous to suggest that future reprints of Marx’s Capital, Volume I might include Karatani’s The Structure of World History as its supplement. Karatani has proved that Marx is not ‘anachronistic’, as the late nineteenth-century reformist Eduard Bernstein misguidedly claimed, a criticism that has since been repeated over and over by reformists, Marxists, and non-Marxists alike, during the last century and into the present.
Karatani’s intellectual project is constructed at the intersection of philosophical and psychoanalytical theories. On the psychoanalytical account, taking Freud’s theory of the unconscious, Karatani brings out Kant’s transcendental philosophy as an ‘unconscious structure’, grounded in a transcendental unity of apperception – the ‘I think’ which accompanies all representations – that ‘precedes and shapes experience’. Moreover, his theory takes up Hegel’s Geist under the term ‘unconscious Spirit’ extracted from Philosophy of Spirit. The outcome is Karatani’s illumination of the unconscious structure in Marx that leads to his thesis of the ‘unconscious of communism’. In the Introduction to the present study, I examine the ‘unconscious of communism’ under the Freudian term ‘The Return of the Repressed’ that Karatani repeatedly invokes across his entire work. In this respect, I want to pause here and reflect on the notion of the so-called ‘turn’ which is implied in the notion of the ‘Karatani turn’. Affirming that that there is ‘one Karatani’, an ‘indivisible’ one,5 I nevertheless want to say that there is a turn in Karatani from the very beginning which would endow his work with a unity. I call it ‘the unconscious turn’. In this sense, the ‘Karatani turn’ may be conceived in a continuum of what he referred to as ‘the Kantian turn’ as explicated in his Transcritique: On Kant and Marx.6 In essence, Karatani’s turn is a turn to the Kantian ‘transcendental critique’. At the centre of this critique, we must recognise the unconscious. As Karatani summarises in Transcritique: ‘Simply stated, the transcendental approach seeks to cast light on the unconscious structure that precedes and shapes experience’7 [my emphasis]. The essence of this turn is in fact philosophy’s turn to psychoanalysis, which is the hallmark of contemporary philosophical speculations in our time, the origin of which goes back to Kant. Now on the question of the relation of Karatani to philosophy, we must recognize what he once said: ‘[W]hen I came to Kant, I had the feeling I was walking down the so-called royal path of philosophy, the orthodox course of philosophy … [W]hen I was called a philosopher abroad at first it made me extremely uncomfortable, I even argued against it for a while, but from that point I began to think, well, if people call me it, maybe it is alright’.8
Standing on philosophical ground, Karatani’s interpretation of the post-Kantian German Idealism insists on Marx as its continuation. This is an important point in Karatani’s Kantian Marxism. The spirits of Marx, referred to as his many ghosts, were first brought up by Derrida. In Specters of Marx, Derrida invoked the great Paul Valéry, who in the landmark Crisis of the Spirit (1919) wrote about the spectres of Hamlet:
But he is an intellectual Hamlet. He mediates on the life and death of truths. His ghosts are all the objects of our controversies, his remorse is all the titles of our glory … If he seizes a skull, it is an illustrious skull – ‘Whose was it?’ – This one was Lionardo … And this other skull is that of Leibniz who dreamed of universal peace. And this one was Kant qui genuit Hegel, qui genuit Marx, qui genuit … Hamlet does not know what to do with all these skulls. But if he abandons them! … Will he cease to be himself?9
It is in the spirit of Valéry’s statement above that we must consider Karatani’s declaration in The Structure of World History, a statement that is determined historically:
We have seen how the historical situation that has emerged since 1990 has involved a repetition of the classical philosophy of Kant, Hegel, and Marx. Accordingly, to rethink these figures is to touch on problems integral to the reality of today’s world. But we have to reject the common view that believes that Kant was superseded by Hegel, and Hegel in turn by Marx.10
These remarks pose a philosophical challenge to any serious study of Marx that neglects to think of Marx as a continuation of the tradition of German Idealism, albeit with a specific understanding of the latter.
This book is a modest attempt intended as an introduction to Karatani and his work, placing at its centre Karatani’s reconstruction of Marx. It is an expository work that tries to bring out the singularity of Karatani’s systematic philosophical-theoretical reading of Marx, centred mainly on the reconstruction of Capital, though it also contains a critique of him. I begin with Karatani’s early Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility and follow up with Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, and finally his The Structure of World History. Concerning the latter, I must state upfront that in this volume I can only do partial justice to the immense scope and breadth of the materials covered in this monumental work. More than one book is indeed needed if we are to tackle all the theoretical concepts and categories advanced in Karatani’s groundbreaking work. I am hoping that my introductory attempt here will prompt other scholars to undertake its more comprehensive treatment. Here, I will move to Karatani’s later effort entitled Isonomia: The Origins of Philosophy, published in English in 2017. This extraordinary scholarly work challenges the traditional idea of the origins of Western philosophy by bringing back the neglected notion of ‘isonomia’ which, among other things, radically alters our conception of the relationship between Socrates and Plato. As I read it, it has a larger intent, which is to foreground the political at the origins of Western philosophy and show its important implications for the contemporary and much-contested notion of ‘liberal democracy’. Karatani’s equally important volume, Nation and Aesthetics: On Kant and Freud, was also published in 2017 in English translation. Reading this volume, I devote a chapter to Karatani’s excellent analysis of aesthetics and nation and specifically discuss his transcritique on Kant and Freud.
This study is written with the aim not to contest but to clarify, not to argue but to explain. Here, I should state that I am informed by competing scholarly loyalties divided between philosophy and architecture. I allowed myself to take up this project prompted by Karatani’s own engagement with architecture and philosophy in his early intellectual enterprise. I am nevertheless neither in a position, nor would I dare, to dispute the sophisticated theoretical expositions advanced by Karatani. In this respect, the present work is written only in praise of his work. It is aimed at bringing out his praiseworthy intellectual project which stands, in my view, as a corrective to the more-than-a-century-old-Marxism and many Marxists including Marx’s own friend, Friedrich Engels – not to mention the challenge it poses to contemporary Marxists with a tendency not to read Marx philosophically. In Chapter 1, ‘Karatani and “Liberated Marx” ’, I lay the ground for the crucial distinction to be made between Marx and all other brands of Marxisms. In the course of my investigation, I mention authors and secondary sources that Karatani has cited and discussed but I do not go into any detailed discussion of them, as this would not be appropriate for the intent of this book.
This volume is a sequel to my previous study on Karatani, Kōjin Karatani’s Philosophy of Architecture (Routledge, 2024), in which I read Karatani’s earlier text, Architecture as Metaphor (1995), but it is different in its approach and objectives. Whereas in the former I inserted myself into Karatani’s discourse, in the present work I exclude my own voice in order to let Karatani speak for himself. I therefore assume the position of a conveyer of Karatani’s powerful intellectual project to the larger public. Therefore, I focus on the real importance and reputation of Karatani within the current intellectual debate. I have taken advantage of the opportunity to bring out his unique contribution to the philosophical and critical reconstruction of Marx which, as I claim, remains unparalleled.
Derrida 1994, p. 13.
Karatani 2020.
I am following Jonathan Abel’s ‘Preface’ to Karatani’s Nation and Aesthetics, ‘One Karatani, Indivisible’, in which Abel usefully enumerates different aspects of the so-called ‘turn’ in Karatani. In one passage, Abel remarks the following: ‘Turn suggests a veering from a path, indeed a single path through and around difficult terrain: and yet the thought of many of those thinkers said to have made a turn challenges us to work against such dominant linear paradigms and attempt a history or understanding of thought without turn’, in Karatani 2017, p. xix.
See Karatani 2005.
See Karatani 2005, p. 1.
Quoted in Jonathan E. Abel’s ‘Preface: One Karatani, Indivisible’, in Karatani 2017, p. xii.
Valéry wrote this passage in his ‘La Crise de l’esprit’, that Jacques Derrida quoted in his Specters of Marx, p. 5.
See Karatani 2014, pp. 301–2. In this regard, Karatani’s reconstruction of Marx complements Slavoj Žižek’s enterprise of reading Marx based on his Hegelian-Lacanian approach that will be later discussed in this work.