social and political understanding, in any language, including Japanese. There is no similar precedent to this period, spanning roughly 1947 through the late 1980s, in any of the other advanced capitalist countries. The peculiarity goes further. Of course, we are speaking about the University of Tokyo, which, together with Kyoto University, form the two most prestigious sites of higher education in Japan, ever since their prewar status as two of the main ‘Imperial’ universities. But, in the case of the University of Tokyo economics department, we are also speaking about the essential site of training for generations of state economic planners who staffed the bureaus of the Ministry of Trade and Information (MITI), and who were, more or less, responsible for managing Japanese capitalism and its relation to the state in pursuit of the eventual and fully-achieved goal: to turn Japan into the second largest capitalist economy on earth throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. In this sense, we can even perhaps only half-jokingly assert that an education founded on the clearest and most rigorous description of a capitalist commodity economy, that of Marx, provided the essential ground for the Japanese state’s runaway success as an economic force in the postwar period.
I do not mention this peculiar set of facts solely for their novelty (although it is certainly a topic that would itself benefit from extensive analysis), but to furnish an essential background to Karatani’s work, his emergence as a thinker, and the theoretical landscape in which he was writing. It would be difficult to think of another country with as large a population of readers well-versed in Marx, a massive and still-successful publishing industry, and a critical space of discourse overlapping with the university, but in which it was possible to make a living by writing theoretically oriented works of literary and social criticism for a mass public audience. It is in the midst of this situation – buttressed by two other historical factors, the crisis of the New Left and the advent of a new theoretical culture in the university – that Karatani’s Marx was first published.
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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
