What I refuse is the historicist fiction of Marx’s conceptual development, from the dissertation to Capital. If Capital didn’t exist, who would even bother reading back to Marx’s dissertation? The early Marx is not the origin of Capital, but its result. Even the originality of this dissertation first becomes clear, not in relation to its meaning within the temporal context of its writing, but rather within the reading of Capital.
We, too, might refuse the ‘historicist fiction’ that would see the present text as a secret ‘origin’ for Karatani’s work. In some sense, it is rather the reverse: Karatani’s later work has now given us a new vantage point from which to read and re-read the present work.
In returning to a textually centred reading of Marx, Karatani burrows into the inner contradictions and the inner structure of Capital as a text, but also of capital as a concept. Here, in the aftermath of the fantasies of the full plenitude of the subjective political intervention that characterized the end of ’68, Karatani places the emphasis squarely on the side of capital, following Marx in his point that ‘the very necessity of general political action affords the proof that in its merely economic action capital is the stronger side.’12 In recent years, Karatani has come to address principally what he calls the Borromean knot of ‘capital-nation-state’, and particularly the supplementary relationship that capital requires to sustain its pretence of operating as a purely self-contained cycle, reminding us of the essential madness of capital and its corresponding system of thought. It is precisely in this sense of capital’s demented undercurrent, covered over or erased by its two impossibilities in the so-called primitive accumulation and the commodification of labour power, that the two polarities are in a constant inversion or reversal into each, whereby the logical topology of the irrational commodification of labour power in the circulation process (annulled by being covered over in the form of money) reappears in the production process as the absurdity, madness, violence, and exteriority of the historical cartography of the process of primitive accumulation. This entire cycle furnishes us with the basic problem of the supplement, in the form of the origin that erases itself as an origin, a problem that is not overcome, but merely passed through or traversed through the gift, whereby what cannot ever be said to be purely given must be there at the commencement for the entire cycle to operate. In turn, it is Karatani’s emphasis on the question of modes of exchange – his recent development, but one that can surely be connected with the present text – within the logico-historical dynamics of capital that might lead us directly to a new direction of analysis capable of understanding how the dynamics of commodification of that which cannot strictly be commodified – labour power and land – can pass through our social life as if they could be smoothly assumed, so that this impossible or excessive ‘gift’ of capital is refigured in the final form of reification, a reification in which capital in the end reifies itself.
Karatani’s triangular structure of capital-nation-state is also an emphasis on how each of these instances of the trinity serve temporarily as forces of mediation for each other: the nation mediating capital’s schema of buyer and seller of labour power, presupposed in the sphere of circulation, the state mediating the nation’s drive for communal integration through citizenship systems and policy initiatives in the gap between prosperity and recession. By focusing on the centrality of capital’s supplementarity – its originary supplemental role – Karatani also opens up for us another possible thinking of the subject in capitalist society, the political subject, after and in the wake of 1968. In precisely the place where the hole or wound of commodity-economic rationality lies, the structure of sentiment, but also the openness of practice remains. This is the domain of the political, of class struggle as such, a point where the Borromean knot of these three figures Capital-Nation-State are knotted together. Rather than reveal our stasis, our enclosure into permanent capture, Karatani’s emphasis on the sphere of circulation instead shows us the place of the primacy of politics, the possibilities of a genuinely political response to the subsumptive force of capitalist society. Karatani’s Marx is itself a text whose lessons, arranged after the end of the last great global revolutionary surge of the late 60s, remain full of possibilities, possibilities that lead us into the centre of our political condition today.
Preface to the English Edition
This book is a piece of literary criticism that I originally wrote in 1973 and serialized in a monthly literary periodical. However, the fact that I undertook the present work within the field of criticism was by no means normal or expected within the Japanese situation. Rather, it was probably the first time that such critical work could be published in a literary magazine alongside short stories and serialized novels. Yet, at the same time, it might also be said that this type of work was impossible to publish somewhere else – for example, in specialist journals of philosophy or the social sciences. In that sense, the present work is without question a work of literary criticism.
In Japan, the New Left movement emerged in the second half of the 1950s. We can say that it was influenced by the critique of Stalinism that accompanied the Hungarian revolt, but we can also relate its emergence to the beginnings of the rapid economic growth that was occurring at the same time in Japan. Suddenly a set of circumstances that could not be explained by the theoretical framework of the existing Left had emerged, for example, the phenomena of mass society and consumer society. The New Left movement which prospered alongside this development brought about a loss of authority for the Japan Communist Party (which had been strong until that point), through the nationwide political struggles that accompanied the 1960 revisions to the US–Japan Joint Security Treaty (often abbreviated Anpō). In a sense, what occurred in 1968 in Europe and North America occurred already in Japan at this moment. I entered Tokyo University in the year 1960 and participated in what we called the ‘Anpō Struggle’. However, what made me reflect on the theoretical questions of the Left came later – it came, in fact, after this struggle ended in failure.
The theoretical work of the New Left which emerged in the late 1950s can be divided into three general trends, all derived from the work of Marx. The first turned towards the early Marx and the theory of alienation, represented most clearly by the literary critic and poet Yoshimoto Taka’aki (1924–2012). The second, what we might call the reconstruction of historical materialism through a re-reading that attempted to overcome the early Marx, was best represented in the figure of the philosopher Hiromatsu Wataru (1933–1994). The third, which sought to rediscover Marx’s specificity in the text of Capital, can be represented by the political economist Uno Kōzō (1897–1977).
I was influenced by all three of these figures. For example, what drew me to literary criticism in the first place was the influence of Yoshimoto Taka’aki. On the one hand, what led me to reject the theoretical work of the early Marx on which Yoshimoto had relied so much, was precisely the influence of Hiromatsu Wataru. He provided textual proof that Engels had pre-empted the process that Althusser, for instance, referred to as Marx’s ‘epistemological break’. Yet, on the other hand, the greatest influence on me by far came from Uno Kōzō’s theoretical work in political economy.
In Uno’s conception, while Capital constituted the ‘guiding thread’ of historical materialism, it was written with a differing perspective and methodological orientation. Historical materialism views the history of social formations from the economic base of modes of production (forces of production and relations of production). In contrast, Capital explicates the capitalist economic system by beginning from commodity exchange and disclosing the process by which it comes to compose and regulate the relations of production as capital. Although these two modes of thinking are heterogeneous to each other, the majority of Marxist theorists ignored the clear differential between them