Transcritique On Kant and Marx

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.

Endorsements
"An immensely ambitious theoretical edifice in which new relations between Kant and Marx are established, as well as a new kind of synthesis between Marxism and anarchism. The book is timely from both practical and theoretical perspectives, and stands up well against a tradition of Marx exegesis that runs from Rosdolsky and Korsch to Althusser and Tony Smith."
--Fredric Jameson, William A. Lane Professor of Comparative Literature, Duke University, author of Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
I Kant 27

1 The Kantian Turn 29

1.1 The Copernican Turn 29

1.2 Literary Criticism and the Transcendental Critique 35

1.3 Parallax and the Thing-in-Itself 44

2 The Problematic of Synthetic Judgment 55

2.1 Mathematical Foundations 55

2.2 The Linguistic Turn 65

2.3 Transcendental Apperception 76

3 Transcritique 81

3.1 Subject and Its Topos 81

3.2 Transcendental and Transversal 92

3.3 Singularity and Sociality 100

3.4 Nature and Freedom 112

II Marx 131

4 Transposition and Critique 133

4.1 Transposition 133

4.2 The System of Representation: Darstellung and Vertretung 142

4.3 The Economic Crisis as a Parallax 152

4.3 The Micro Difference 161

4.5 Marx and Anarchists 165

5 The Crisis of Synthesis 185

5.1 The Form of Value qua Synthetic Judgment: Ex Ante Facto and Ex Post Facto 185

5.2 The Form of Value 193

5.3 Capital's Drive 200

5.4 Money and Its Theology, Its Metaphysics 211

5.5 Credit and Crisis 217

6 Value Form and Surplus Value 223

6.1 Value and Surplus Value 223

6.2 The Linguistic Approach 228

6.3 Merchant Capital and Industrial Capital 234

6.4 Surplus Value and the Profit 241

6.5 The Global Nature of Capitalism 251

7 Toward Transcritical Counteractions 265

7.1 The State, Capital, and Nation 265

7.2 A Possible Communism 283

Notes 307

Index