Ancient Society And The New Politics: From Kant To Modes Of Production

At a time when the so-called "death of theory" has alternately been celebrated or lamented (and compensated by the revival of academic philosophy and its barren subfields such as ethics and aesthetics), we may well be grateful that the most original and exciting Japanese theorist of our time, Kojin Karatani, is finally becoming more widely known in what we used to call the West. With the ambitiously named Structure of World History, indeed, Karatani's new work arrives in English at virtually the same time as its publication in Japanese. Not only is it a new turn in his own work and preoccupations, it opens some welcome new paths for our own theoretical and political discussions, reviving a number of crucial but virtually abandoned debates and (hopefully) starting some new ones. Structure of World History critically rereads a number of classic texts in new perspectives, combines new uses of current theory, and reopens the traditional debates on modes of production in new and more productive directions, taking controversial political positions, as well as philosophical ones, particularly on the relationship of Immanuel Kant to Marxism; in short, not only does it revive a much-maligned approach to history (world history, the philosophy of history, etc.), it also intervenes in economics, Marxology, theory, and philosophy itself.

Karatani's preceding book Transcritique: On Kant and Marx (1995) had already proposed a new approach to Kant, one unusual and unexpected even in the midst of what looks like a generalized Kant revival. We are far from the days in which Jean-Paul Sartre remarked that any return to Kant always marked a regression to pre-Marxist and anti-Marxist positions (a proposition that surely retains much of its relevance). It is at least not true of Karatani, whose strategic move lies not in using Kant against Hegel and the dialectic, but rather (at least on my reading) one who invents the dialectic in the first place by way of the antinomies, thereby confirming the more traditional dialectic's impatience with the pettiness of the law of noncontradiction and abandoning the attribution to Kant of the 1763 refutation of the existence of negativity in nature as such.

Two more interesting features of Kant emerge in the earlier book: the ideal of the world republic, which becomes central in Structure of World History; and the overcoming of the impasse of the Ding-an-sich (thing-in-itself) and the unknowability of the real by way of the figure of the parallax, an attractive astronomical conception that seems to be making its way in contemporary philosophy (for example, in Slavoj Žižek's work) as a result of Karatani's speculation.

For the more standard "enlightenment" view, Kant subscribed to a view of so-called transcendental realities as being fundamentally unknowable (however much we may still require them ethically). The figure of the parallax, however, suggests that we can nonetheless deduce the position and the volume of such realities, as it were, blindly and by indirect computation, even where we can never confront them directly or in some unmediated way. The shift at issue here is one from metaphysics to representationality, and it has indeed seemed to me a useful index to the difference between modernity and postmodernity: for modernity, this failure of knowledge or representation was an agonizing experience, which in literature and philosophy alike led to grandiose schemes and forms for its evasion—forms that constituted a kind of triumph over it. For postmodernity, this particular "death of god" is no longer so fraught with anguish, and the anti-representationality of the parallax has seemed to offer a new form of representation as such at the very moment of its impossibility.

But the other (non-Kantian) originality of Transcritique—and the one that led most directly to the present work—was a revision of Karl Marx that seemed...