Karatani’s Marxian parallax
Harry Harootunian

One of the rarely noticed historical ironies of the twentieth century was the effort of societies located on the capitalist periphery – outside of Euro-America – to resort to a philosophy which had no place for them in order to explain their entry into and experience of capitalist modernization. Japan led the way in this search for meaning, owing to its good fortune in avoiding outright colonization, but even colonized regions drawn into the capitalist desiring machine invariably turned to philosophy – usually neo-Kantianism, phenomenological existentialism and Marxism – as the privileged optic through which to refract their experience and grasp its ultimate meaning; societies which only yesterday, so to speak, obeyed the rhythms of vastly different social and cultural referents.

It is well known that Edmund Husserl, on the eve of World War II, gave explicit expression to the idea that only the West knew philosophy. This was a lasting cultural conceit inherited and willingly but paradoxically continued by ‘Western Marxism’ down to the present day. But this reminder of exclusion failed to discourage and inhibit the several attempts by Japanese and other ‘latecomers’ to utilize a philosophy that could not conceptualize its outside in order to explain to themselves the nature of both the history and society they were made to live under the new regime of capitalist modernization and colonization. With Marxism, thinkers were early induced to rethink it as philosophy. What this repressed history showed was precisely the recognition that since philosophy held no place for their societies, and no accounting of the difference they represented, in spite of its universalizing claims, it was vital to see in this absence philosophy’s vulnerable centre, the point at which its universalistic presumptions collapsed like a house of cards. Long before the poststructuralist assault on metaphysics, Japanese thinkers and others outside of Euro-America had already begun the task of identifying the scandal of its claims.

With the publication of Kojin Karatani’s Transcritique: On Kant and Marx,* we are reminded of both the neglected history of the attempt to recruit the resources of philosophy to explain the experience of modernity and philosophy’s unexpected move, embracing a deconstructive impulse before the letter, to save it from itself. Long known as one of contemporary Japan’s principal literary and cultural thinkers, Karatani, who now spends part of the year teaching in an American university, has in many ways continued this great tradition, bringing it back from its shadowed exile, to recall for us the importance of all those attempts formulated on the margin to contest the claims of the centre with its own ‘weapons’, what Chinese in the nineteenth century advised in the formula ‘using barbarian tools to manage the barbarians’. But, as Karatani shows, it’s not as simple as it sounds and his book is no derivative imitation.

Towards the end of this long, dense, complex and original book, Karatani explains that his goal ‘in writing [it] … is a return to Capital once more to read the potential that has been overlooked’ (265). With this announcement he is clearly referring to a tradition of misrecognitions bound to an ‘ideology of industrial capitalism’ sanctioning all those efforts by Marxists to ‘renovate its creativity’. The promise of extracting this overlooked potential is to be achieved by reading Kant through Marx and Marx through Kant in order to recover their shared ground of critique. Karatani warns early that his reading has nothing to do with the neo-Kantianism that dominated prewar academic philosophy in Japan, even though there were thinkers like Tosaka Jun, whose Marxism was mediated by Kant rather than Hegel and whose conception of dialectic comes close to Karatani’s choice of the notion of parallax. The strategy of pairing reveals two different but mutually complementary positions and allows Karatani to resort to Kant apparently to make up for what he sees missing in Marx’s materialism by adding a subjective/ethical dimension. Kant and Marx shared a critical perspective based on ‘the pronounced parallax’ that took the form of the antinomy. Here Karatani risks recuperating the figure of those very bourgeois antinomies that both Lukács and Sohn-Rethel, in their own ways, held up as instances of idealist contradictions. In Karatani’s reckoning there occurs a constant ‘transposition’ between the two thinkers, as they move to different discursive positions that produce the parallax. This migration between positions is what also characterizes, for Karatani, the oscillations observed when workers change their location from selling labour-power to occupying the place where they consume the goods they have produced. I will return later to this point, which is central to the articulation of a new strategy of association against capital, state and nation. But it should also be noted that the parallax resembles all of those early attempts by thinkers outside Euro-America to envisage an arrangement whereby the polarities representing decisive differences between West and East functioned as antinomies whose transposition was necessary to make each other whole.

According to Karatani, Marxists have failed to recognize this transverse moment, whether it is in Kant, Marx or the worker, where opposite truths – antinomies – intersect to provide a transcritical perspective. What Karatani is pointing to is a transcendental critique capable of leading not to a third position, as such, but to the opening of transversal and transpositional movement. In fact, this theoretical movement enables him to reread Capital in such a way as to reveal the silhouette of association which, he believes, manifests a ‘possible communism’, an ethico-economic form of exchange that owes as much to Proudhon as it does to Marx, a geological shift from the movement of labour to consumption (295). Although this movement involves seeing how Marx grasped the worker occupying both the place of abstract labour and consumption, as if temporal and spatial difference made the transfer negotiable and natural, the resulting transposition resembles more a shift from proletarianization to embourgeoisement. But before I turn to this parallax it is useful to see what transcritique yields for a rereading of Capital.

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