Kojin Karatani's Transcritique introduces a startlingly new dimension to
Immanuel Kant's transcendental critique by using Kant to read Karl Marx and Marx to
read Kant. In a direct challenge to standard academic approaches to both
thinkers, Karatani's transcritical readings discover the ethical roots of socialism in
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and a Kantian critique of money in Marx's Capital.
Karatani reads Kant as a philosopher who sought to wrest metaphysics from the discredited
realm of theoretical dogma in order to restore it to its proper place in the sphere of
ethics and praxis. With this as his own critical model, he then presents a reading of Marx
that attempts to liberate Marxism from longstanding Marxist and socialist presuppositions
in order to locate a solid theoretical basis for a positive activism capable of gradually
superseding the trinity of Capital-Nation-State.
Kojin Karatani is a Japanese philosopher who teaches at Kinki
University, Osaka, and Columbia University. He is the author of Architecture as Metaphor
(MIT Press, 1995) and Origins of Modern Japanese Literature. He founded the New
Associationist Movement (NAM) in Japan in 2000.
Table of contents:
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: What is Transcritique?
I. Kant
The Kantian Turn
The Copernican Turn
Literary Criticism and the Transcendental Critique
Parallax and the Thing-in-Itself
The Problematic of Synthetic Judgment
Mathematical Foundations
The Linguistic Turn
Transcendental Apperception
Transcritique
Subjects and Its Topos
Transcendental and Transversal
Singularity and Sociality
Nature and Freedom
II. Marx
Transposition and Critique
Transposition
The System of Representation: Darstellung und Vertretung
The Economic Crisis as a Parallax
The Micro Difference
Marx and Anarchists
The Crisis of Synthesis
The Form of Value qua Synthetic Judgment: Ex Ante Facto and Ex Post Facto
The Form of Value
Capital's Drive
Money and Its Theology, Its Metaphysics
Credit and Crisis
Value Form and Surplus Value
The Linguistic Approach
Merchant Capital and Industrial Capital
Surplus Value and Profit
The Global Nature of Capitalism
Toward Transcritical Counteractions
The State, Capital, and Nation
A Possible Communism
Notes
Index
366 pages, softcover
