Kojin Karatani

Speaking & Events

Fri, 11 May 2012 23:40:31 +0900

		Public Talks in 2012		"History and Repetiton Today" 5th April 6 pm Fowler Museum, University of California, Los Angeles
		Publication:		Interview by Joel Weinright "Dialogues in Human Geography" (Volume 2 Number 1 March 2012) http://geography.osu.edu/faculty/jwainwright/publications/ History and Repetition Columbia University Press (Nov. 2011) "La fin de la litterature moderne" (French) http://www.fabula.org/lht/6/ "Revolution and Repetition" UMBR(a) UTOPIA A Journal of the Unconscious 2008 "Beyond Capital-Nation-State" Rethinking Marxism, 20th Anniversary, Volume 20, Routledge 2008 "World Intercourse: A Transcritical Reading of Kant and Freud" UMBR(a) A Journal of the Unconscious 2007
		Public Talks in 2011		6th, 7th, 8th April: University of California, Irvine
		Public Talks in 2010		December: Leipzig, Germany November: Seoul, Korea November: Dublin, Ireland
		Public Talks in 2009		May 28th: Erciyes University, Kayseri, Turkey June 3rd: Biligi University, Istanbul Turkey September 11th: National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico
		Public Talks in 2008		April 24th: Loyola University, New Orleans, USA October 20th: University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada October 22th: State University of New York at Buffalo, New York, USA
		Public Talks in 2007		October 8th & 10th: Stanford University, Palo Alto, USA " Beyond the Trinity of Capital, Nation & State" (youtube) May 24th: Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
		Public Talks in 2006		April 6th: Zagreb, Croatia October26-28th: Rethinking Marxism Conference, The University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA October 31st: The Contemporary Continental Philosophy Workshop, The University of Chicago, USA
		Teaching Schedule in 2005		May-June/ October-December,2005 Kinki University, Osaka Jan-May,2005 Columbia University, New York Colloquium: Reading Marx May-June/ October-December,2004 Kinki University, Osaka Colloquium: Rethinking the Debate on Japanese Capitalism (in Japanese)
		Public Talks		24 May 2005, Korea University, Seoul " The Ideal of the East" 13 April 2005, Columbia University " Revolution and Repetition" 14 March 2005 at UCLA " Rethinking Soseki's Theory of Literature"

Thing as Other (2000)

Mon, 30 May 2011 10:27:59 +0900

Thing as Other

At this conference, “thing” is being discussed in terms of six themes: thing as abstraction, thing as object, thing as material, thing as feeling, thing as idea, and thing as obsession. But among these six constructs, one thing is missing: thing as other. I have been assigned to thing as idea-something about which I have no idea what to say. But since I can talk here about anything, I would like to talk instead about thing as other.

What do I mean by thing as other? In many ways, it relate4s to what Kant called the “thing-in-itself”. In the Kantian view, what we call an object is actually a phenomenon rather than a thing. Because the object is already constituted by subjective forms and categories, we cannot know it in itself. However, the thing-in-itself is not mystical (in this sense, it is not like what Jacque Lacan called the real). Rather, it is a plain and secular matter. When Kant developed this concept, he in effect was saying that things exist regardless of our subjectivity, yet we cannot fully grasp them. But in discussing this concept, he specifically addresses a particular thing: others. We recognize the other person through the body, gestures, and language. These, though, are nothing more than phenomena, not the thing in-itself, which is the subjectivity or freedom of others. (Incidentally, freedom in this case does not mean a free society, but rather the autonomy of the will; being free from causality.) Others remain opaque to us. This is the otherness of others. What Kant calls thing-in-itself then is precisely such a free subject. He regards it, therefore, not as a theoretical construct but as a practical and moral issue.

These ideas can be related to Bertrand Russell’s question of how we know the pain of others. Russell imagined that we perceive other people’s pain through external appearance, gesture, and language. As a result, he fell into a kind of skepticism. Wittgenstein subsequently criticized this view with the observation that when someone gets burned, we rush to treat that person. In other words, the pain of others is first and foremost a moral and practical question. The theoretical question of whether or not we can actually know the pain of others is then irrelevant. Wittgenstein, in this way, implicitly inherited a Kantian problematic. Just like Kant, he was talking about the other as thing-in-itself.

In his first Critique, Kant regards the thing-in-itself as a thing or natural object, whereas in the second, it appears as freedom or personhood. Scholars of Kant have long tried in vain to unify this apparent discrepancy. Yet there is really no enigma here. Karl Popper criticized Kant’s subjectivity as monological and lacking other subjects, claiming that the scientific proposition should be rendered in the refutable form and that it is provisionally true so long as it is not refuted by others. Kant would not have objected to this argument. In fact, Kant does not preclude others from scientific judgment. He argues that universal natural law is not obtained from exhaustive examinations but by induction from limited cases or singular propositions-so a hypothesis can only be true when it is refutable rather than refuted. Things as objects never refute; it is others who refute with their data about things. This is to suggest that for a natural law to be true, it requires not only the agreement of others but also the agreement of the unpredictable others of the future. Thus when Kant wrote about thing-in-itself, he was, in fact, implying others. In other words, others are a thing-in-itself, so there is no contradiction, then, between the first and second Critiques.

My own criteria for otherness would be with those who do not share our language. We might, in this way, take foreigners and psychotics as examples of others. A more extreme example of others would be the dead and the unborn. While it is not entirely impossible to come to some kind of understanding with others who are alive, no matter how different their culture or how insane they may be, it is, however, impossible to do so with the dead and the unborn.

Let us apply this to environmental problems. If the capitalist market economy continues as it is, we will no doubt face an environmental crisis on a global scale. In such a situation, it will not be easy for advanced countries to reach an agreement on how to handle the situation. However, it will be even more difficult for advanced countries to forge an agreement with their world countries. Why should the people of the third world sacrifice themselves and cooperate with the people of advanced countries, whose quality of life caused the crisis, and moreover, forced them to pay for it? In spite of this difficulty, it is still not impossible to negotiate with such “others”. Yet we cannot negotiate with the unborn, who will surely be the ultimate victims of environmental contamination. According to Kant’s moral principle, the ultimate message of moral law lies in the imperative: “So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.” If we sacrifice the others of the future in order to maintain our living standards, they we are treating them merely as means to our own ends. In Kantian thought, such an attitude is in no way ethical. In contrast, what Jurgen Habermas called communicative reason or public consensus is confined to the West, or at best to more advanced countries. There is no place here for thing-in-itself as the other.

Thus, as a theoretical object, the thing-in-itself is unknowable. Yet certain philosophers argue that we can reach this thing-in-itself through aesthetics. For instance, Henri Bergson believed that one could transcend linguistic articulation and intuit the thing-in-itself as duration. For him, things are images. Heidegger offers another example, distinguishing between thing and object, in effect as another version of the Kantian distinction between thing-in-itself and phenomenon. But for Heidegger, there was no ethical moment in the thing-in-itself—rather, it disclosed itself in poetry or art. Arguing this point, he offers the example of a painting of a shoe, stating that the painting enables us to see the shoe in itself by bracketing our interest in its practical usage. But does this really take us to the thing-in-itself? There is really nothing new about this idea of bracketing-it was already presented by Kant in his third Critique, seeing art as a way of looking at things by bracketing our interests. But does the thing-in-itself emerge through the bracketing of such divergent interests as use and exchange value? In never does. Instead, what we find are phenomena, for example, the discovery of beauty or the sublime is a result of subjective imaginative activity. Therefore, it would be wrong to claim that art reveals the thing-in-itself.

What Bergson and Heidegger demand is for us to take an aesthetic stance toward the actual world. Ceding to this demand, over the last ten years there has been a tendency to go back from Jacque Derrida to Heidegger, and from Gilles Deleuze to Bergson. I have witnessed this over the course of the Any conference. Perhaps one reason for it is that Derrida and Deleuze took a more clearly Marxist position after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Those who instead regress to Bergson or Heidegger are doomed from the outset. (It should be noted that when these ideas were realized in politics, the inevitable result was fascism—that is, the aesthetic sublimation of actual class conflicts.)

In art, to be sure, we view things by bracketing our interests. However, bracketing is not confined only to art. When we confront the world, we have at least three kinds of simultaneous judgment: cognitive judgment of truth or falsity; moral judgment of good or bad; and aesthetic judgment of pleasure or displeasure. In actuality, these judgments are interwoven and difficult to distinguish; aesthetic judgments, for example, bracket questions of both true and false and good and bad. In the same way, scientists observe things by bracketing moral and aesthetic judgments; only by this act can the objects of cognition come into existence. This, however, is not limited to the natural sciences. For example, political science since Machiavelli has focused on the effect of political action by bracketing it with moral aspects. Moreover, we can also say that works of find art become economic objects when they are considered only in terms of price. The scientific, aesthetic, political, and economic stances all come about through bracketing. As a result, a thing appears in various aspects. Nonetheless, it is not a thing-in-itself but a phenomenon. This being the case, where does the thing-in-itself emerge? It emerges only in the ethical stance of bracketing all other dimensions because this is to see the other as a free subject.

It does not necessarily follow, however, that an ethical stance assumes priority over all other criteria. What counts here is not simply bracketing but also un-bracketing. For instance, through a scientific lens, others are so-called objects. In fact, during surgery physicians bracket their patient’s personhood, as well as their own aesthetic or sexual interests. To do this requires professional training. Needless to say, after surgery they should remove the brackets. As another example, when we see films whose heroes are Mafia or Yakuza gangsters, it is ridiculous to criticize them for their immorality, just as it is absurd to object to science-fiction films on the basis that they are not scientific enough. Rather, we bracket other interests at the movie theater. Once you leave the theater, you have to un-bracket. The same is also true of the moral stance. If you adhere to moral principles in assessing the cinematic work at eh movie theater, it does not make you ethical, just foolish. Therefore, we need to learn both bracketing and un-bracketing at the same time.

The same is true of architecture. Architecture, like film, exists on a number of different levels. From a historical viewpoint, architecture first and foremost aims to supply habitable places to shelter human beings from the natural environment. Second, architecture builds monuments to display religious and political power. Since the ancients, architecture has existed between these two extreme poles. With modernity, however, came the vision of architecture as art. This view could only become possible by bracketing other interests—namely, the practical and the political. This is not to criticize the discipline but to recognize that architecture has its original dimension and its own language. However, we should be able to undo this bracketing at any time. The history of architecture has essentially centered itself around religious and political monuments, but these aspects are bracketed in its articulation as the history of pure form. In this context, architecture can be the quotation of the past texts or be deconstructive or virtual. However, this perspective overlooks two points. One is that architecture should supply habitable places to shelter human beings from the natural environment. The second is that in reality most architecture is dominated by practical, economic, and political interests. Plainly speaking, architecture is part of the capitalist construction industry. Architects cannot transcend this basic condition, no matter how artistic they may be.

In regard to these two points, I remember two incidents that took place at previous Any conferences. First was the Anywise conference held in Seoul after the major earthquake in Kobe, Japan. Aside from Arata Isozaki and myself, none of the participants mentioned this earthquake. I thought that the destruction that it caused raised issues far more fundamental to architecture than simply ideas of deconstruction; namely, that architecture as construction exists first and foremost as protection from the natural environment. Could we then say that the earthquake disclosed a thing-in-itself? Did the earthquake disclose the power of nature, or what Akira Asada called the Mononoke, or the Lacanian real? In this instance, the answer is an unequivocal no. In this instance, the thing-in-itself meant the death of 6,000 people. The dead never speak. Of course, most of the architects at the conference were not directly involved in the urban development of Kobe, and they do not bear any personal responsibility for the disaster. But for me, architects who fail to take this problem to heart will never have any relevance.

Second, I remember that at the Anyplace conference in Montreal there was a discussion on “architecture and politics”. I left with the impression that what was being termed “politics” was too abstract, tending toward the linguistic games that architecture plays. The conference also took place immediately after the arrest of an executive at the Shimizu-Kensetsu Construction Company, the principal sponsor of the Anyone Corporation. However, I was the only one to touch upon this issue. In Japan, the construction industry is the very foundation of conservative politics, and it continues to maintain close, and somewhat byzantine, connections to the Yakuza. Even if they are only indirectly tied to this web of associations, Japanese architects, including Isozaki, cannot claim to be innocent bystanders. Japan, of course, is not the lone exception. As David Harvey remains us in his recent book, Spaces of Hope, in the midst of so-called globalization, we must lok at how the construction industries of advanced countries behave in the third world, and how their presence there is supporting and influencing the relations of production and power structures. The Any conferences, circling the world, have been too indifferent to these issues.

These conferences have long been considered a place of interaction between architects and philosophers. However, I do not really see myself as a philosopher, and I have no interest in discussing architecture theoretically. With a couple of exceptions, I have attended all the Any meeting over the past ten years, but who then have I been at these conferences? In effect, I have been a thing-in-itself as other. That is to say, I have not shared the same language with most of the other participants, nor did I try to do so. I refused. As a consequence, I was rejected. At Any, I have been a thing-in-itself but not a phenomenon. Indeed, many people were even unaware of my presence. Perhaps the organizers hoped that I would fulfill just such a function. But for me, this is not a pleasant position to be in. And so, in many ways, it comes as a relief to me that this role is finally over.

Anyone, the first Any conference, was held in 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Also crumbling at this time were the formerly radical resonances contained in postmodernism. There was no longer any validity in the postmodernist stance of ironically praised the deconstructive force of capitalism. This has become increasingly clear over the past ten years. During this time, or more precisely, in the last few years, my own position has fundamentally changed. I have come to hold the view that we should take a positive stance, that we should positively counteract the movement of capital and states. Thanks to Any, I was able to publish Architecture as Metaphor. However, this book was the work of the 1970s and ‘80s, and does not reflect my thinking today. These more recent thoughts will manifest themselves in English with the publication of a new book, Transcritique-Kant and Marx. From its title, it is clearly not a book about architecture, but in a broad sense I believe that it suggests the future course that architecture should take. This book is also the product of my interactions with Any participants over the last decade, and for that I am thankful. (June, 2000)

Earthquake and Japan

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 00:27:20 +0900

I was on the streets of Tokyo when the earthquake struck. The ground shook violently, while buildings swayed around me for a long time. It was beyond anything I had experienced before, and I sensed that something terrible had happened. My first thought was of the Kobe earthquake that killed more than 6,000 people in 1995. Although I did not experience the Kobe earthquake first hand, it hit the region of my hometown where many close relatives lived, and so I headed immediately to the scene of the disaster. I walked the streets where building after building had collapsed into rubble.

Clearly, the scale of the current disaster far surpasses that of the Kobe earthquake. For it also includes the damage caused by the tsunami to coastal regions across hundreds of kilometers as well as the danger of nuclear catastrophe. Yet these are not the only differences. The Kobe earthquake was completely unexpected. Aside from a small number of experts, no one had imagined the possibility of an earthquake there. The recent earthquake, on the other hand, had been anticipated. Earthquakes and tsunamis have struck the Northeastern region of Japan throughout its history, and frequent warnings had been sounded in recent years. Meanwhile, nuclear power had always given rise to strong opposition, criticism, and warnings. Yet the scale of the earthquake went far beyond any prior anticipation. It was not that anticipating the scale of such a disaster was impossible, just that people had purposely avoided doing so.

There is another difference. Although the Kobe earthquake occurred after the end of the bubble economy of the 1980s, when economic recession had already taken hold, people at the time had yet to fully recognize the demise of Japan's high-growth economy. For this reason, the Kobe earthquake initially appeared as a symbol of Japan's economic downfall. Yet this was quickly forgotten as the nation tried to recapture an age when people spoke of "Japan as No. 1." It was after the Kobe earthquake that Japan wholeheartedly adopted neoliberal economic policies with the pretext of reviving the economy.

In contrast, the awareness of economic decline was widespread in Japan prior to the recent earthquake. The shrinking birthrate and the aging of the population left no room for a rosy outlook. Although empty nationalist rhetoric calling for Japan's revival as an economic superpower continues to hold sway in the major media, a different perspective has taken root in people's hearts, one that acknowledges the reality and continuing prospect of low growth and that calls for the formation of a new economy and civil society. In this respect, the recent earthquake does not come as a surprise shock to the economy. Rather, it will only strengthen already existing tendencies, confirming, in a sense, the very issues that were overlooked following the Kobe earthquake.

In the wake of the Kobe disaster I was impressed, first of all, by the relative composure of the elderly people who had lost their homes. Their attitude was that having started out from the burnt-out ruins of World War II, they had only to start over again. Second, large numbers of young volunteers, raised in an age of affluence, gathered from all over Japan to help out, forming communities of mutual aid. Such a phenomenon was not unique to Japan. I have heard of a similar occurrence following the recent Sichuan earthquake in China. Such communities emerge where traditional communities are gone.

Examining the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and subsequent catastrophes in her book "A Paradise Built in Hell," Rebecca Solnit concludes that "extraordinary communities arise in disaster." It is commonly thought that when order dissipates, a Hobbesian natural state arises in which people behave as wolves toward one another. The reality, however, is that people who regarded one another with fear when living in the social order created by the state form communities of mutual aid amid the chaos following disaster, a spontaneous type of order that differs from that which exists under the state.

It was this type of community that was born in the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake. Yet Japan's particular historical experience also came into play. For the ruins of the earthquake strongly evoked the psychological conditions following World War II, when people came together to reflect upon the war and the history of modern Japan that led to it. The "paradise" formed in the wake of the disaster, however, was short-lived, and the memory of the war disappeared along with it.

When order was restored following the Kobe earthquake, the dominant tendency was to try to use the disaster as a business opportunity to effect economic revival. Prime Minister Koizumi encouraged neoliberalist policies all the more, and he trampled on the postwar pacifist constitution by pushing through the dispatch of Self-Defense forces to Iraq. Yet the end result was continuing economic stagnation and a widening gap between rich and poor. As a result, the Liberal Democratic Party, which had held sway for so long, yielded power to the Democratic Party of Japan. Yet the new administration was unable to embark on a new course.

This was the situation in which the recent earthquake occurred. Once more, the disaster evoked the burnt-out ruins after the war. In addition, the crisis at the Fukushima nuclear power plant cannot help but call forth memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Postwar Japanese have had a strong, even excessive, aversion to nuclear weapons and to nuclear power in general. Needless to say, there was strong opposition to the building of nuclear power plants in Japan. Nonetheless, following the oil shocks of the 1970s, the state affirmed and encouraged the development of nuclear power plants. Early campaigns proclaimed the necessity of nuclear power for economic growth, while in recent years it was claimed that nuclear power could help reduce carbon emissions and therefore benefit the environment. That such claims were a form of criminal deception on the part of industry and government has been made all too clear by recent events.

In the ruins of postwar Japan, people reflected upon the path the country had taken in modern times. Standing against the Western powers, modern Japan strived to achieve the status of a great military power. The shattering of this dream in the nation's defeat led to another goal, to become a great economic power. The ultimate collapse of this ambition has been brought into sharp relief by the recent earthquake. Even without the earthquake, it was fated for destruction. In truth, it is not the Japanese economy alone that is failing. In the early 1970s, global capitalism entered a period of serious recession, and since then it has been unable to overcome the decline in the general rate of profit. Capital has sought a way out of this decline through global financial investment and by extending industrial investment into what had formerly been "third world" regions. The collapse of the former strategy has been exposed by the so-called Lehman shock. Meanwhile, the accelerated development of countries such as China, India, and Brazil, continues. Yet such accelerated growth cannot last long. It is inevitable that wages will rise and a limit on consumption be reached.

For this reason, global capitalism will no doubt become unsustainable in 20 or 30 years. The end of capitalism, however, is not the end of human life. Even without capitalist economic development or competition, people are able to live. Or rather, it is only then that people will, for the first time, truly be able to live. Of course, the capitalist economy will not simply come to an end. Resisting such an outcome, the great powers will no doubt continue to fight over natural resources and markets. Yet I believe that the Japanese should never again choose such a path. Without the recent earthquake, Japan would no doubt have continued its hollow struggle for great power status, but such a dream is now unthinkable and should be abandoned. It is not Japan's demise that the earthquake has produced, but rather the possibility of its rebirth. It may be that only amid the ruins can people gain the courage to stride down a new path.

(March 16, 2011)

(Translated by Seiji M. Lippit)

under construction

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 19:07:50 +0900

Books

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 19:07:03 +0900

		Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (1993) Karatani's brilliant account of the birth of modern literature and nation. The issues of subjective interiority, nationalism, illness, and modernity are discussed with an insightfully wide range of knowledge and intelligence. Includes authorial comments to the Japanese version and a very informative preface by Fredric Jameson. Publisher : DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS ; (May 1993) See more details at amazon.com


		Architecture as Metaphor (1995) Based on the discussions of postmodern philosophy, Karatani discusses architectural structure of society and possibilities of organizational (r)evolution of social structures. Including an introduction by the architect Arata Isozaki inside and covered with beautiful design outside, this has been one of the recent bestsellers of the MIT Press. Publisher : The MIT Press ; (October 1995) See more details at amazon.com


		Transcritique: On Kant and Marx (2003) Fredric Jameson comments on Transcritique: "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 pratcial 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 at Duke University, author of "Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism". Publisher : The MIT Press ; (July 2003) See more details at amazon.com Review by SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK

Biography

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 19:06:26 +0900

Kojin Karatani was born in 1941 in Amagasaki city, located between Osaka and Kobe. He received his B.A. in economics and M.A. in English literature, both from Tokyo University. Awarded the Gunzo Literary Prize for an essay on Natsume Soseki in 1969, he began working actively as a literary critic, while teaching at Hosei University in Tokyo. In 1975 he was invited to Yale University to teach Japanese literature as a visiting professor, where he became acquainted with Yale critics such as Paul de Man and Fredric Jameson. After publishing "Origins of Modern Japanese Literature" in 1980, Karatani proceeded from literary criticism to more theoretical studies ranging from "Architecture as Metaphor: language, number, money" to "Transcritique: on Kant and Marx. At the same time, he made a political commitment to editing the quarterly journal 'Critical Space' with Akira Asada. "Critical Space" was the most influential intellectual media in Japan until it folded in 2002. In 2000, Karatani also organized New Associationist Movement (NAM). Since 1990 he has taught regularly at Columbia University as a visiting professor of comparative literature. He has also taught as a visiting professor at Cornell and UCLA. He was a regular member of ANY, the international architects' conference which was held annually for the last decade of the 20th century. In 2006, Karatani retired from teaching in Japan to devote himself full-time to his lifework.

Major books:
(English)		Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, Duke University Press,1993 Architecture as Metaphor; Language, Number, Money, MIT Press,1995 Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, MIT Press, 2003

(Japanese)		Man in Awe, Tojusha, 1972 Meaning as Illness, Kawadeshobo, 1975 Marx: The Center of Possibilities, Kodansha, 1978 Origins of Modern Japanese literature, Kodansha, 1980 Architecture as Metaphor, Kodansha, 1983 Introspection and Retrospection, Kodansha,1984 Postmodernism and Criticism, Fukutake, 1985 Philosophical Inquiry 1, Kodansha, 1986 Language and Tragedy, Daisanbunmeisha, 1989 Philosophical Inquiry 2, Kodansha,1989 On the 'End', Fukutake, 1990 Collected Essays on Soseki, Daisanbumeisha, 1992 Materialism as Humor, Chikumashobo, 1993 Thoughts before the war, Bungeishunjusha, 1994 Sakaguchi Ango and Nakagami Kenji, Ohta Press, 1996 Ethics 21, Heibonsha, 2000 Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, Hihyokukansha, 2001