I only managed a few hours continuing to work through Karatani’s Transcritique this week, but they were an important few hours. I’m 200 pages in (out of some 320), but something is really starting to churn. I am purposefully moving slowly in order to more surely cover the important details in my notes (which I hand-write on a second reMarkable), as I suspect that Karatani’s argument about the isomorphic relation between Kant and Marx will be what shores up some of the conceptual turns in the last section of my dissertation’s first chapter, which is an exposition of Marx’s theory of the commodity in relation to Kant and the philosophy of cause.
I don’t yet know a lot about Karatani’s reception in Anglophone Marx studies1, but at first glance it seems to me that Transcritique illuminates a wealth of possible developments in discussions being had currently around capitalism and its discontents. My aim for the next week is to work through the last 100 pages.
I also gave an internal presentation (on Zoom) about my dissertation in the Machine Visual Culture group based at the Bibliotheca Hertziana Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome. I’ll be starting a predoctoral fellowship with this group in September 2026, and so this was a nice opportunity to communicate to others who are active in the group what I’m working on while there. I am now happily using the Rheo slides package to annotate my dissertation repo directly with slides as ‘inserts’ in the prose. This means that I can annotate excerpts from the introduction with visuals in talks such as this one, and then more easily fold edits and augmentations back into the body of my dissertation. The preparation for this talk meant that I built out slides that run parallel to the entire first section of my introduction.