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Originally serialized in seven articles in the review Gunzō in 1973–74, Kōjin Karatani’s most enduring and pioneering work in critical theory was his Marx sono kanōsei no chūshin (Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility). As Karatani himself points out here in the new preface to this English edition, the first point concerning this text that must be kept in mind is its inherently interdisciplinary or even parallax character, to use a term that Karatani would later develop into a central concept of his thought. Gunzō was and is a mainstream literary periodical, not in any way a journal of the Left, nor a philosophically or theoretically specialized space of intellectual engagement. In this sense, it is all the more remarkable that a text such as the present could be published in such a venue, and bears witness to the extraordinary public nature of intellectual life in postwar Japan. Thus, the texts that make up Karatani’s Marx were read first by a general audience, transversal to the university, and located squarely within the broad field of literary criticism.
Written at a time when the political sequences of the New Left had come to a halt under the weight of the breakdown of armed struggle, as well as the political exhaustion of competing sectarian visions of Marxism, Karatani’s Marx laid the groundwork for major changes in Japanese intellectual life. A short text of approximately 150 pages in Japanese, it produced a new reading of Marx’s work, unfamiliar to the existing Marxist discourse in Japan at the time. Since the 1920s, Marxist theory had been one of the dominant currents in Japan, so much so that one could scarcely discover a single field of the humanities and social sciences in the mid-twentieth century that had not been deeply marked by Marxism as a mode of inquiry. In this sense, Karatani’s emphasis on Marx merely continued a trend that his predecessors had already inaugurated: the great postwar intellectuals, such as Uno Kōzō, Maruyama Masao, Ōtsuka Hisao, Hiromatsu Wataru and others, had all been significantly influenced by Marxism (and, in the cases of Uno and Hiromatsu, were well-known and important Marxist theorists in their own right).
However, debates within Marxism in Japan had, from the prewar period onwards, become exceedingly methodological and obscure in their fixation on textual or theoretical minutiae. The positions linked to the prewar debate on the origins of Japanese capitalism reverberated through postwar Marxism as well, constantly attempting to understand the nature of the Japanese social formation. Karatani’s Marx, then, marked a very different moment: soon to depart for Yale at the high point of deconstruction, and in dialogue with Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and more, Karatani returned to the importance of Marx in Japanese intellectual life, but with a new set of theoretical tools. Semiotics, deconstruction, the reading of Marx as a literary thinker, and the emphasis on Capital as an intervention in philosophy that could be read as itself a theory of signs, produced a massive impact on Japanese intellectual life. Above all, the book represents a break – or rather is itself situated within a break, one might say – with the prevailing reading of Marx, dominant in 1968: that of the early Marx, a Lukácsian reading of the figure of the self-alienated labouring human. Karatani’s Marx is a firm rebuttal to the simplistic ‘theory of alienation’ so beloved of the 60s generation of Marxists in Japan.
Marx sono kanōsei no chūshin began a sequence of writings of Karatani (to be followed by dozens of further works, including among others Investigations I and II, Introspection and Retrospection) that were crucial in the development of critical theory in Japan. Karatani, along with his compatriot Akira Asada, would go on to essentially produce a parallel development in Japan to what had been institutionalized in the United States as ‘French theory’, and often referred to as ‘new academism’ in Japan. But Karatani’s Marx is unique in this sense, not only because of its importance in modern Japanese intellectual history after the moment of 1968, but also because the reading of Marx that Karatani debuts in this text will go on to form the basis of his ‘transcritical’ work that would culminate decades later in texts such as Architecture as Metaphor, Transcritique and The Structure of World History. All of these texts have now made an increasing impact in the English-speaking world, seen as an important and singular intervention in critical theory and Marxist thought.
The translation of Marx sono kanōsei no chūshin in this sense fills a void: both to make clear the origins of Karatani’s own work on Marx, but also to show its groundwork, as it were. It is in this text that Karatani’s peculiar blend of influences (Marx, mathematics, formal and Saussurean linguistics, anthropology, literary analysis, geometry, and more) is concatenated together for the first time, and thus constitutes a crucial text in our understanding of Karatani’s thought: it is also his most singular and sustained engagement directly with Marx in his body of work.
In the initial lines of the present work, Karatani writes:
To deal with a thinker is to deal with his or her work. This may seem an obvious point, but in fact it is not. For example, in order to consider Marx, one should intensively read Capital. But people instead pass through certain external ideologies such as historical materialism or dialectical materialism, and merely read Capital in order to confirm these ideological presuppositions. This is not reading. What I mean by reading a work is rather: to read neither with the presupposition of philosophical concerns external to the work itself nor authorial intention.
For Karatani, the act of reading, the politics of reading, consist in reading towards the centre of possibility expressed in the given text, and it is precisely this centre of possibility that we should affirm as the analytical core of our own reading of his project, a project devoted above all to the paradoxical explication of capital’s structures and the heretical creation of concepts for its overcoming, rather than to the canonical enforcement of academic genealogies and filiations. In contrast to Hiromatsu Wataru’s imposing Shihonron no tetsugaku (The Philosophy of Capital),1 published the same year (1974) as Karatani’s Marx began serialization, Karatani writes in a style that is deceptively simple and remarkably clear. A consistent feature of his work for decades, this speaks not only to the clarity of his thought but to his consciousness as a public intellectual.
In a sense, Karatani’s text – written as a public intervention – contains little that would help the reader situate its position genealogically, with one exception. Karatani affords a crucial place to the thought of one figure in Marxist theoretical analysis from whom he absorbed a crucial and general conceptual problem. The thinker is Uno Kōzō (1897–1977), and the problem, in the broadest possible terms, is the relationship of capital to its outside, as it were. Uno, who would go on to become one of the most dominant figures in Marxist theoretical research in Japan, and indeed one of the most famous thinkers of Marx’s value theory worldwide,2 was educated at Tokyo University.3 He left Japan to study abroad in Berlin from 1922–24, where he was accompanied by his long-time friend Sakisaka Itsurō, later the editor of the Kaizōsha edition of the Marx–Engels Collected Works – the first in the world in any language – and leader of the Japan Socialist Party following the war. (Incidentally, the so-called ‘Weimar hyperinflation’ of this period meant that with the favourable exchange rate, the Japanese Ministry of Education stipends for overseas researchers and students in Germany were worth a small fortune, and, in an interesting historical irony, it was this government money that allowed Sakisaka and other Marxist students to collect the materials that would compose the Collected Works and other original Marxian sources). Uno returned to Japan in 1924 (incidentally, on the same boat as the early Japan Communist Party leader Fukumoto Kazuo),4 where he began to teach, first at Tohoku University until 1938, when he was arrested on suspicion of his political stance. From this moment until the end of the war, Uno was forced to remain outside academic life, working in the statistics bureau of the Japanese External Trade Organization,