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.
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 Asada undertook, its influential transcripts of group discussions and round-tables, in some cases field-defining, and the unique mixture of theoretical work that was possible in the journal, ranging from Marxian political economy to philosophy, social theory, literature, music, architecture, art and more. In a sense, since its dissolution, other journals which overlapped in content – such as Gendai shisō: Revue de la pensée d’aujourd’hui (published since the early 70s by Seidosha, and itself an important site for the development of critical theory in Japan) – have been in a process of retreat, and, I would say, especially in a process of de-internationalization. Karatani and Asada’s unique mixture of great influence domestically along with their international links provided a complex and powerful space of critique that has yet to be replicated.
As Karatani has frequently pointed out – and as he does again in the new 2019 preface to this edition – his own texts on Marx have tended to appear at moments in which Marx was least on the theoretical agenda. In some sense, the publication of this work in 2020 is untimely in a classically doubled sense. On the one hand, it is a voice out of time, a voice from the 1970s, immersed in a theoretical situation that could not be further from that of the Anglophone world today. In another sense, it is untimely, because it is today, in the Anglophone world and more broadly in the advanced capitalist countries, that Marx is suddenly on the agenda again, almost ‘trendy’: the source of numerous positions in public discourse, no longer a ‘bad word’ associated with the ideological demonization of the USSR, and, in a sense, the main figure of theoretical resistance to the dominance of neoliberalism, a figure once again associated with the cutting edge of contemporary political thought. In such a situation, a number of key points about Karatani himself and about this work must be kept in mind.
It is probably scarcely believable to the majority of Marxists in North America and Western Europe that in the twentieth century, it could easily be argued that the most Marxist country on earth was postwar Japan. Not ‘most socialist country’ or ‘most communist country’ in the sense of forms of governance, but ‘most Marxist country’ in the sense of an intellectual culture, and certainly the most Marxist system of higher education. When Karatani entered the economics department of the University of Tokyo in the 1950s, where he studied with major figures of Marxian economics like Suzuki Kōichirō in the tradition of Uno Kōzō (about whom more shortly), the undergraduate course – ‘Foundations of Economics’ or ‘Principles of Economics’ (Keizai genron) – consisted of four years of intense reading, as if they were textbooks, of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital, the Theories of Surplus Value, and associated works. Such a comprehensive, detailed and rigorous education in Marx’s own work likely existed nowhere else at the time, and certainly not in the Soviet bloc, where the Stalin-period ‘Economic Textbooks’ tended to replace the works of Marx himself. It still does not exist in China, where today you are more likely to read various classics of liberalism and perhaps some ‘Xi Jinping Thought’ than you are to be trained up in a strict and attentive reading of Marx. In fact, throughout the twentieth century, an intensive reading of Marx tended to eventually become suspect in many of the ‘actually-existing’ socialist countries (although certainly not all), perhaps testifying to the dangerous power of this body of thought: if you read it too carefully, you might turn it back on us.
In many strange ways,
