Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility

Kojin Karatani, Gavin Walker

Description

Classic study of Marx by Japan's leading critical theorist
Originally published in 1974, Kojin Karatani's Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility has been among his most enduring and pioneering works in critical theory. Written at a time when the political sequences of the New Left had collapsed into crisis and violence, with widespread political exhaustion for the competing sectarian visions of Marxism from 1968, Karatani's Marx laid the groundwork for a new reading, unfamiliar to the existing Marxist discourse in Japan at the time.

Karatani's Marx takes on insights from semiotics, deconstruction, and the reading of Marx as a literary thinker, treating Capital as an intervention in philosophy that could be read as itself a theory of signs. Marx is unique in this sense, not only because of its importance in post-'68 Japanese thought, but also because the heterodox reading of Marx that Karatani debuts in this text, centred on his theory of the value-form, will go on to form the basis of his globally influential work.

Edited, translated, and with an introduction by Gavin Walker.

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie politique
• Critical Theory
• Movements
• Political
• Essays
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• History of ideas
• Kojin Karatani
• History of philosophy
• Marxist philosophy
• Structuralism
• Post-structuralism
• Politics
• Deconstruction
• Marx
• Capital

Informations

• Publié par: Verso
• Date de parution: 10 mars 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781788730594
• Langue: English

Extrait

Marx
Towards the Centre of Possibility
Marx
Towards the Centre of Possibility
Edited, translated, and with an introduction by Gavin Walker
Kōjin Karatani
With support from the Japan Foundation
This English-language edition published by Verso 2020
Originally published in Japanese as Marukusu sono kanōsei no chūshin, 1974 © Kōjin Karatani 2020
Translation and Introduction © Gavin Walker 2020
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted
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Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 versobooks.com
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-058-7
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-779-1 (LIBRARY)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-059-4 (UK EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-060-0 (US EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Karatani, Kōjin, 1941- author.
Title: Marx : towards the centre of possibility / Kojin Karatani.
Other titles: Marukusu sono kanōsei no chūshin. English
Description: London ; Brooklyn, NY : Verso, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Originally published in 1974, Kojin Karatani’s Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility has been amongst his most enduring and pioneering works in critical theory. Written at a time when the political sequences of the New Left had collapsed into crisis and violence, with widespread political exhaustion for the competing sectarian visions of Marxism from 1968, Karatani’s Marx laid the groundwork for a new reading, unfamiliar to the existing Marxist discourse in Japan at the time. Karatani’s Marx takes on insights from semiotics, deconstruction, and the reading of Marx as a literary thinker, treating Capital as an intervention in philosophy that could be read as itself a theory of signs. Marx is unique in this sense, not only because of its importance in post-68 Japanese thought, but also because the heterodox reading of Marx that Karatani debuts in this text, centered on his theory of the value-form, will go on to form the basis of his globally-influential work”– Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019044487 | ISBN 9781788730587 (paperback) | ISBN 9781788737791 (library binding) | ISBN 9781788730600 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Socialism. | Marxian economics. | Communism and literature. | Marx, Karl, 1818–1883.
Classification: LCC HX73 .K36413 2020 | DDC 335.4–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019044487
Typeset in Sabon by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
Contents
Acknowledgements
Note on the Translation
‘Karatani’s Marx’ by Gavin Walker
Preface to the English Edition
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Notes
Index
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank above all Kōjin Karatani himself, for discussions and exchanges on the present book, and for agreeing to the translation of this early work of his, which has had such an important effect on the development of critical theory in Japan.
Thanks to Michael Bourdaghs and Ken Kawashima for their support of the project, to Sebastian Budgen, Rosie Warren, Cian McCourt, and others at Verso for their editorial support, and to Rachel and Anne for their love and support.
I initially translated the text while I was a faculty fellow at the Institute for the Public Life of Art & Ideas at McGill University, and finished the final editing of the text while a visiting researcher at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at Kyoto University, a wonderful place to work. I thank Kenta Ohji for his invitation, and all the staff of the Institute for their support during my stay.
The translation and publication were made possible in part by support from the Japan Foundation UK, who provided a Translation Grant, and by support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Note on the Translation
Throughout this volume, Japanese language is transliterated according to the modified Hepburn system. Karatani’s original text, like the bulk of Marxist theoretical writing in Japanese until recently, has only a very limited reference apparatus, with no bibliography, and no specific citations. For this English-language edition, all citations in the text have been sourced to original texts, or to their major English-language translations.
All texts of Marx and Engels have been referred to the editions of record: the Marx-Engels Collected Works (Moscow, London, New York: Progress Publishers, Lawrence & Wishart, and International Publishers) in English, and the Marx-Engels Werke (Berlin: Dietz) and Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (Berlin: Dietz) in German. I have added occasional footnotes marked [Trans.] for terms and concepts that Karatani mentions but that are not developed in the text, particularly in relation to the Japanese-language theoretical situation.
In Japanese-language Marxist theoretical writing, Marx’s economic abbreviations are typically retained in the style of the German original. Hence W is used for Ware, G for Geld, Pm for Produktionsmittel, A for Arbeitskraft, etc. I have changed these to the standard English usage: C = commodity, M = money, Mp = means of production, L = labour power, c = constant capital, v = variable capital, s = surplus value.
In general, I have endeavoured to avoid a mode of translation – which is, to be formally consistent with Karatani’s argument in this text, nothing more than one particular reading protocol – that accentuates the linguistic distance of the text. By that I mean something quite simple. There is a mode of translation that seeks, at all times, to render opaque yet distant the original text in its translated form. Such a mode emphasizes ‘untranslatable’ terms, terms in the original left transliterated, forms of expression that seek to establish a stylistic difference that the reader is free (although also propelled) to regard as emblems of cultural divergence. I reject wholly this mode of translation, not because it is ‘less accurate’ – after all, ‘accuracy’ is nearly impossible to coherently assess in translation – but because it places the text within an economy of meaning that evades textuality in favour of a first-order explanatory mechanism of ‘cultural difference’. Needless to say, this apparent ‘cultural difference’ is itself never explained, but simply relied upon as a given, initial stratum of meaning that is posited at the outset, or strictly speaking, pre-posited. Karatani’s work is impossible to assess on such a basis. The context, properly speaking, of this work is the global spread of anti-humanist, anti-essentialist critical theory that entered the world conceptual scene in the late 1940s, and that has conditioned a crucial segment of intellectual history ever since. In that sense, I do not exoticize Karatani’s writing, which is clear, straightforward, and although influenced by the current of deconstruction dominant at Yale in the 1970s when he was there, never attempted to appropriate the Derridean style. The book should be read absolutely without reliance on any conception of Japanese-ness as a supposed explanatory mechanism, but instead with an understanding that the Japanese tradition of social theory was itself undergoing remarkable international transformations at the time.
Karatani’s Marx
Gavin Walker
Often, one translates a book because it is topical for our moment in an untimely fashion; what appeared at the forefront of the historical process in one part of the world may later come to dominate at another moment elsewhere. Other times, one translates a book because of its intellectual-historical value; texts frequently concretize and concentrate in their appearance a whole continent of thought surrounding their moment of emergence. At yet other points, one might translate a book whose mode of expression is unique, distinctive, or rare in our world. In all cases, the ‘value’ of the translation is linked to some aspect of the historicity of the text, be it of immediate, historical, or logical importance. Kōjin Karatani’s Marx is all of these things at once: an exceptionally important work in intellectual-historical terms, a distinctive reading of Marx whose insights remain powerful, and an early key to the later developments of his thought, already amply represented in the English language.
Today, Karatani himself needs little introduction as a thinker. Since the 1970s, he has been at the forefront of Japanese intellectual life, producing numerous influential works of social theory, literary criticism, political thought, and intellectual history, among them the 1974 Marukusu sono kanōsei no chūshin (Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility). This early book, which pioneered a new theoretical role for Marx in the Japanese situation, both drawing on and moving away from the heavily methodological analyses of the postwar Japanese tradition of Marxist theory (represented by thinkers such as Uno Kōzō and Hiromatsu Wataru), paved the way for a new opening of critical theory, in the broad sense, in Japanese intellectual life. Karatani’s influence on multiple generations of thinkers cannot be overstated, both for his own original ‘reading protocols’ and conceptual innovations, as well as his organizational and editorial role, founding and animating the widely influential journal Hihyō kūkan (Critical Space) throughout the 1990s. Edited in collaboration with the influential critic Akira Asada, Hihyō kūkan or Critical Space played an exceptional – and rare – role for the intellectual space of contemporary Japanese thought. Published for roughly fifteen years, from its founding in 1991 to its final issue in the mid 2000s, Critical Space distinguished itself above all for the remarkable curation of texts that Karatani and