This is Kojin Karatani. He wrote an important book on Kant and Marx called Transcritique. I have included parts of an essay by Žižek below on this book. I’ve also taken some of Žižek’s terms and used them above.
Economy and politics
Is, however, the ultimate Marxian parallax not that between economy and politics—between the ‘critique of political economy’ with its logic of commodities, and the political struggle with its logic of class antagonisms? Both logics are ‘transcendental’, not merely ontico-empirical; and each is irreducible to the other. Of course they point towards each other — class struggle is inscribed into the very heart of economy, yet it has to remain absent, non-thematized (recall how the manuscript of Capital iii abruptly breaks off with classes). But this very mutual implication is twisted so that it prevents any direct contact between them.
Any direct translation of political struggle into a mere mirroring of economic ‘interests’ is doomed to fail, just as is any reduction of the economic sphere into a secondary ‘reified’ sedimentation of an underlying founding political process.
In this sense, the ‘pure politics’ of Badiou, Rancière or Balibar, more Jacobin than Marxist, shares with its great opponent, Anglo-Saxon Cultural Studies, a degradation of the sphere of economy. That is to say, what all the new French (or French-oriented) theories of the Political, from Balibar through Rancière and Badiou to Laclau and Mouffe, aim at is—to put it in the traditional philosophical terms— the reduction of the sphere of economy (of material production) to an ‘ontic’ sphere deprived of ‘ontological’ dignity. Within this horizon, there is simply no place for the Marxian ‘critique of political economy’: the structure of the universe of commodities and capital in Marx’s Capital is not just that of a limited empirical sphere, but a kind of socio-transcendental a priori, the matrix which generates the totality of social and political relations.
The relationship between economy and politics is ultimately that of the well-known visual paradox of the ‘two faces or a vase’: one either sees the two faces or a vase, never both of them—one has to make a choice. In the same way, we can either focus on the political, reducing the domain of the economy to the empirical ‘servicing of goods’, or on the economic, reducing politics to a theatre of appearances, a passing phenomenon that will vanish with the arrival of a developed communist (or technocratic) society, in which, as Saint-Simon and Engels put it, the ‘administration of people’ gives way to the ‘administration of things’.
The ‘political’ critique of Marxism—the claim that, when one reduces politics to a ‘formal’ expression of some underlying ‘objective’ socio-economic process, one loses the openness and contingency constitutive of the political field proper—should thus be supplemented by its obverse: the field of economy is in its very form irreducible to politics. It is this reality, of the economic as the determining form of the social, that French ‘political post-Marxists’ miss when they reduce the economy to one of the positive social spheres.
The basic idea of the parallax view is thus that bracketing itself produces its object. ‘Democracy’ as a form emerges only when one brackets the texture of economic relations as well as the inherent logic of the political state apparatus—both have to be abstracted, for people who are effectively embedded in economic processes and subjected to state apparatuses to be reduced to individual electoral agents. The same goes also for the ‘logic of domination’, of the way people are controlled or manipulated by the apparatuses of subjection: in order to discern these mechanisms of power, one has to abstract not only from the democratic imaginary (as Foucault does in his analyses of the micro-physics of power, and Lacan in his analysis of power in ‘Seminar xviii’), but also from the process of economic (re)production. Finally, the sphere of economic (re)production, too, only emerges if one methodologically brackets the concrete existence of state and political ideology; it is no surprise that so many critics of Marx have complained that his ‘critique of political economy’ lacks a theory of power and the state. The trap to be avoided here, of course, is the naïve idea that one should keep in view the social totality, of which democratic ideology, the exercise of power and the process of economic (re)production are merely parts. If one tries to keep all these in view simultaneously, one ends up seeing nothing—their contours disappear. This bracketing is not a mere epistemological procedure, it answers to what Marx called ‘real abstraction’—an abstraction from power and economic relations that is inscribed into the very actuality of the democratic process, and so on.
The cogito is not a substantial entity, but a pure structural function, an empty place (Lacan: $)—which as such can only emerge in the interstices of substantial communal systems. There is thus an intrinsic link between the emergence of the cogito and the disintegration and loss of substantive communal identities, which holds even more for Spinoza than for Descartes. Although Spinoza criticized the Cartesian cogito as a positive ontological entity, he implicitly endorsed it as the ‘position of the enunciated’, of a radical self-doubt, since even more than Descartes, Spinoza spoke from an interstitial social space, as neither a Jew nor a Christian.
It would be easy to reply that this Cartesian multiculturalist opening and relativizing of one’s own position is just a first step, the abandoning of inherited opinions, on the road to arrival at absolutely certain philosophic knowledge—the abandoning of the false shaky home in order to reach our true home. Did not Hegel himself compare Descartes’s discovery of the cogito to a sailor who, after long drifting on the sea, finally catches sight of firm ground? Is Cartesian homelessness thus not just a deceptive tactical move—a precursive ‘negation of negation’, the Aufhebung of the false traditional home in the finally discovered conceptual true home? Was in this sense Heidegger not justified in his approving quotation of Novalis’s definition of philosophy as a longing for the true lost home? We may be allowed to doubt it. After all, Kant himself stands as contrary witness: in his transcendental philosophy, homelessness remains irreducible—we remain forever split, condemned to a fragile position between the two dimensions and to a ‘leap of faith’ without any guarantee. Even with Hegel, are matters really so clear? Is it not that, for Hegel, this new ‘home’ is in a way homelessness itself, the very open movement of negativity?
Along these lines of the constitutive ‘homelessness’ of philosophy, Karatani asserts—against Hegel—Kant’s idea of a cosmopolitan ‘world-civil-society’ [Weltburgergesellschaft], which would not be a simple expansion of citizenship within a nation-state to citizenship of a global transnational state.
For Karatani it involves a shift from identification with one’s ‘organic’ ethnic substance, actualized in a particular cultural tradition, to a radically different principle of identification—he refers to Deleuze’s notion of a ‘universal singularity’ as opposed to the triad of individuality–particularity–generality.
This opposition is the contrast between Kant and Hegel. For Hegel, ‘world-civil-society’ is an abstract notion without substantial content, lacking the mediation of the particular and thus the force of full actuality. For the only way an individual can participate effectively in universal humanity is via full identification with a particular nation-state—I am ‘human’ only as a German, an Englishman, a Frenchman, and so on.
For Kant, on the contrary, ‘world-civil-society’ designates the paradox of a universal singularity—that is, of a singular subject who, in a kind of short-circuit, bypasses the mediation of the particular to participate directly in the universal. This identification with the universal is not an identification with an encompassing global substance (‘humanity’), but with a universal ethico-political principle — a universal religious collective, a scientific collective, a global revolutionary organization, all of which are in principle accessible to everyone. Just this, as Karatani points out, is what Kant meant, in a famous passage of ‘What is Enlightenment?’, by ‘public’ as opposed to ‘private’. For him what was ‘private’ was not the individual as opposed to the community, but the very communal–institutional order of one’s particular identification, while what was ‘public’ was the transnational universality of the exercise of one’s reason.
The paradox is thus that one participates in the universal dimension of the ‘public’ sphere precisely as a singular individual, extracted from or even opposed to one’s substantive communal identification—one is truly universal only as radically singular, in the interstices of communal identities.