I worked more through Karatani’s Transcritique this week and am a few hours away from having detailed notes across all of its chapters. I’ll preview my organised thoughts about it here, as next week I’ll flesh them out some more, perhaps in a blog post on my main blog.
As far as I can tell, Karatani is a critic on pretty low volume in the English-speaking world, given that he is a figure apparently as great in stature in Japan as Fredric Jameson is in America. Architecture as Metaphor and Transcritique were translated by Sabu Koshu and published with MIT Press in 1995 and 2005 respectively. Columbia University Press published History and Repetition in 2011 ; but it was not until the publication of The Structure of World History with Duke University Press in 2014 that the Anglophone Marx studies world seems to start really discussing his work.1 Duke then published Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy in 2017, Oxford University Press Nation and Aesthetics also in 2017, and two more translations of Karatani’s work have been published by Verso in 2020 and 2026.
There may be other translations into English that I’ve missed, as Karatani has written and published more than 20 books in Japanese over the course of a career that runs from 1980 to present. But despite this good number of translations, I am now surprised that I have heard so little of his work having read Transcritique. The book argues that transcritique is the common methodological thread that ties Marx to Kant, and in turn re-reads Marx’s Capital as a transcritical reading of political economy. For the uninitiated, this is heterodox essentially because it has been much more common to tie Marx tightly to Hegel, rather than Kant, both because Marx explicitly positioned Capital as a counterpoint to Hegel’s dialectical method, and because his intellectual biography has much more obvious ties to him. Whether it matters or not for our reading of Capital and Marx is the table stakes of the debate. (Whether reading Capital and Marx in the 21st century matters is the topic of my dissertation. Spoiler: I argue that it does, and that we have few better philosophical resources for thinking about the social architecture and politics of computer science.)
I’m hung up on Karatani at the moment because he argues in Transcritique that Capital is “a Kantian critique of the ill-contained drive of capital to self-realize beyond its limit” [4, p.9]. Karatani divulges to the reader a wealth of good thinking about these terms—critique, drive, self-realization, limit—in a number of respects; but the fundamental aspect of Marx’s work that his argument’s vocabulary opens up for me is its mathematical nature. If Marx is a student of Kant, then he is a student of formalization and the ways in which we can (and can’t, or shouldn’t) claim its intricacies bear a relation to reality. As noted, I intend to digest Karatani’s Transcritique more directly somewhere soon, so that’s all I’ll say for now. What reading Transcritique has confirmed for me is that I need to read Karatani’s other work, especially his writing on Marx (Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility and The Structure of World History), and learn more about 20th century Japanese Marxist thinkers such as Uno Kōzō.