Kojin Karatani

Karatani Kōjin (柄谷 行人, born 1941 in Amagasaki) is a Japanese philosopher and literary critic.

Biography

Karatani was educated at Tokyo University where he took a BA degree in Economics and an MA in English literature. The Gunzō Literary Prize, which he received at the age of 27 for an essay on Natsume Sōseki, was the first critical acclaim of the early stages of his career as a literary critic. While teaching at Hōsei University, Tokyo, he wrote extensively about modernity, and postmodernity, with a particular focus on the problems of "language, number, money", a trinity of concepts which form the subtitle of one of his central books: "Architecture as Metaphor".

In 1975, he was invited to Yale University to teach Japanese literature as a Visiting Professor, where he met Paul de Man and Fredric Jameson and began to work on formalism. Starting from a study of Natsume Sōseki, the variety of the subjects examined by Karatani became so wide that he earned the nickname "The Thinking Machine".

The critic entertained a collaborative relationship with novelist Nakagami Kenji to whom he introduced the works of Faulkner. With Nakagami, he published "Kobayashi Hideo o koete" ("Overcoming Kobayashi Hideo"). The title is an ironic reference to “Kindai o koete” ("Overcoming Modernity"), a famous symposium held in the summer of 1942 at the prestigious Kyoto Imperial University (now Kyoto University) at which Kobayashi Hideo (whom Karatani and Nakagami did not hold in great esteem) was a prominent participant.He was also a regular member of ANY, the international architects' conference which was held annually for the last decade of the 20th century and which also published a famous architectural/philosophical series with Rizzoli under the general heading of "Anyone".

In 1990, he started teaching regularly at Columbia University as a Visiting Professor.Karatani founded the New Associationist Movement (NAM) in Japan in summer 2000 [http://web.archive.org/web/20030217163733/http://nam21.org] [http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id=2187&editorial_id=9899] . NAM was conceived as a counter–capitalist/nation-state association, inspired by the experiment of LETS (Local Exchange Trading System, based on non-marketed currency).He was also the coeditor, with Akira Asada, of the Japanese quarterly journal, Hihyōkūkan ["Critical Space"] , until its withdrawal from publication in 2002.In 2006, the philosopher retired from the chair of the International Center for Human Sciences at Kinki University, Osaka, where he had been teaching.

Philosophy

Philosophically, Karatani has produced a number of concepts such as "the will to architecture", but the best-known of them is probably that of "Transcritique", which he proposed in the eponymous book, a reading of Kant through Marx and vice-versa. Writing about "Transcritique" in the New Left Review of Jan-Feb. 2004, Slavoj Žižek brought Karatani's work to greater critical attention. The Slovenian philosopher borrowed the concept of "parallax view" (which is also the title of his review) for the title of his own book.

Karatani has interrogated the possibility of a (de Manian) deconstruction and engaged in a dialogue with Jacques Derrida on the occasion of the Second International Conference on Humanistic Discourse, organized by the Université de Montréal. Derrida commented on Karatani's paper, 'Nationalism and Ecriture' with an emphasis on the interpretation of his own concept of écriture. [http://www.pum.umontreal.ca/revues/surfaces/vol5/derrida.html Jacques Derrida, Introduction to Kōjin Karatani's "Nationalism and Ecriture"]

Bibliography

In English
* "Origins of Modern Japanese Literature", Duke University Press, 1993. Translated by Brett de Bary
* "Architecture as Metaphor; Language, Number, Money" MIT Press, 1995. Translated by Sabu Kohso
* "Transcritique: On Kant and Marx", MIT Press, 2003. Translated by Sabu Kohso

In Japanese
* 畏怖する人間 ["Human in Awe"] , Tōjūsha, 1972
* 意味という病 ["Meaning as Illness"] , Kawadeshobō, 1975
* マルクスその可能性の中心 ["Marx: The Center of Possibilities"] , Kōdansha, 1978
* 日本近代文学の起源 ["Origins of Modern Japanese literature"] , Kōdansha, 1980
* 隠喩としての建築 ["Architecture as Metaphor"] , Kōdansha, 1983
* 内省と遡行 ["Introspection and Retrospection"] , Kōdansha,1984
* "Postmodernism and Criticism", Fukutake, 1985
* 探究 1 ["Philosophical Inquiry 1"] , Kōdansha, 1986
* "Language and Tragedy", Daisanbunmeisha, 1989
* 探究 2 ["Philosophical Inquiry 2"] , Kōdansha,1989
* "On the 'End' ", Fukutake, 1990
* "Collected Essays on Sōseki", Daisanbunmeisha, 1992
* ヒューモアとしての唯物論 ["Materialism as Humor"] , Chikumashobō, 1993
* “戦前”の思考 ["Thoughts before the war"] , Bungeishunjusha, 1994
* "Sakaguchi Ango and Nakagami Kenji", Ohta Press, 1996
* "Ethics 21", Heibonsha, 2000
* "Transcritique: On Kant and Marx", Hihyōkūkansha, 2001
* ネーションと美学 ["Nation and Aesthetics"] , Iwanami Shoten, 2004

Notes

External links

* [http://www.kojinkaratani.com/english/profiles.html|Official website]
* [http://www.eaps.uiuc.edu/readings/japan_as_museum.pdf "Japan as Museum"] by Karatani about Okakura Kakuzo.

ee also

*Fredric Jameson
*Architecture
*Arata Isozaki
*list of deconstructionists