{"id":5822,"date":"2010-10-12T13:10:48","date_gmt":"2010-10-12T17:10:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=5822"},"modified":"2010-10-12T14:11:22","modified_gmt":"2010-10-12T18:11:22","slug":"5822","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2010\/10\/12\/5822\/","title":{"rendered":"kojin karatani"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is Kojin Karatani. He wrote an important book on Kant and Marx called Transcritique<\/em>. \u00a0I have included parts of an essay by \u017di\u017eek<\/a> below on this book. \u00a0I’ve also taken some of \u017di\u017eek’s terms and used them above.<\/p>\n

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Economy and politics<\/strong>
\nIs, however, the ultimate Marxian parallax not that between economy and politics\u2014between the \u2018critique of political economy\u2019 with its logic of commodities, and the political struggle with its logic of class antagonisms? Both logics are \u2018transcendental\u2019, not merely ontico-empirical; and each is irreducible to the other. Of course they point towards each other \u2014\u00a0class struggle is inscribed into the very heart of economy, yet it has to remain absent, non-thematized <\/strong>(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.<\/p>\n

Any direct translation of political struggle into a mere mirroring of economic \u2018interests\u2019 is doomed to fail, just as is any reduction of the economic sphere into a secondary \u2018reified\u2019 sedimentation of an underlying founding political process.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In this sense, the \u2018pure politics\u2019 of Badiou, Ranci\u00e8re 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 Ranci\u00e8re and Badiou to Laclau and Mouffe, aim at is\u2014to put it in the traditional philosophical terms\u2014 the reduction of the sphere of economy (of material production) to an \u2018ontic\u2019 sphere deprived of \u2018ontological\u2019 dignity. Within this horizon, there is simply no place for the Marxian \u2018critique of political economy\u2019: the structure of the universe of commodities and capital in Marx\u2019s 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The relationship between economy and politics <\/strong>is ultimately that of the well-known visual paradox of the \u2018two faces or a vase\u2019: one either sees the two faces or a vase, never both of them\u2014one 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 \u2018servicing of goods\u2019, 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 \u2018administration of people\u2019 gives way to the \u2018administration of things\u2019.<\/p>\n

The \u2018political\u2019 critique of Marxism\u2014the claim that, when one reduces politics to a \u2018formal\u2019 expression of some underlying \u2018objective\u2019 socio-economic process, one loses the openness and contingency constitutive of the political field proper\u2014should 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 \u2018political post-Marxists\u2019 miss when they reduce the economy to one of the positive social spheres.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The basic idea of the parallax view is thus that bracketing itself produces its object. \u2018Democracy\u2019 as a form emerges only when one brackets the texture of economic relations as well as the inherent logic of the political state apparatus\u2014both 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 \u2018logic of domination\u2019, 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 \u2018Seminar xviii\u2019), 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 \u2018critique of political economy\u2019 lacks a theory of power and the state. The trap to be avoided here, of course, is the na\u00efve 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\u2014their contours disappear. This bracketing is not a mere epistemological procedure, it answers to what Marx called \u2018real abstraction\u2019\u2014an abstraction from power and economic relations that is inscribed into the very actuality of the democratic process, and so on.<\/p>\n

The cogito is not a substantial entity, but a pure structural function, an empty place (Lacan: $)\u2014which as such can only emerge in the interstices of substantial communal systems.<\/strong> 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 \u2018position of the enunciated\u2019, of a radical self-doubt, since even more than Descartes, Spinoza spoke from an interstitial social space, as neither a Jew nor a Christian.<\/p>\n

It would be easy to reply that this Cartesian multiculturalist opening and relativizing of one\u2019s own position is just a first step, the abandoning of inherited opinions, on the road to arrival at absolutely certain philosophic knowledge\u2014the abandoning of the false shaky home in order to reach our true home. Did not Hegel himself compare Descartes\u2019s 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\u2014a precursive \u2018negation of negation\u2019, 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\u2019s 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\u2014we remain forever split, condemned to a fragile position between the two dimensions and to a \u2018leap of faith\u2019 without any guarantee. Even with Hegel, are matters really so clear? Is it not that, for Hegel, this new \u2018home\u2019 is in a way homelessness itself, the very open movement of negativity?<\/p>\n

Along these lines of the constitutive \u2018homelessness\u2019 of philosophy, Karatani asserts\u2014against Hegel\u2014Kant\u2019s idea of a cosmopolitan \u2018world-civil-society\u2019 [Weltburgergesellschaft], which would not be a simple expansion of citizenship within a nation-state to citizenship of a global transnational state.<\/p>\n

For Karatani it involves a shift from identification with one\u2019s \u2018organic\u2019 ethnic substance, actualized in a particular cultural tradition, to a radically different principle of identification\u2014he refers to Deleuze\u2019s notion of a \u2018universal singularity\u2019 as opposed to the triad of individuality\u2013particularity\u2013generality. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This opposition is the contrast between Kant and Hegel. For Hegel, \u2018world-civil-society\u2019 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\u2014I am \u2018human\u2019 only as a German, an Englishman, a Frenchman, and so on.<\/p>\n

For Kant, on the contrary, \u2018world-civil-society\u2019 designates the paradox of a universal singularity<\/strong>\u2014that 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 (\u2018humanity\u2019), but with a universal ethico-political principle <\/strong>\u2014 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 \u2018What is Enlightenment?\u2019, by \u2018public\u2019 as opposed to \u2018private\u2019. For him what was \u2018private\u2019 was not the individual as opposed to the community, but the very communal\u2013institutional order of one\u2019s particular identification, while what was \u2018public\u2019 was the transnational universality of the exercise of one\u2019s reason.<\/p>\n

The paradox is thus that one participates in the universal dimension of the \u2018public\u2019 sphere precisely as a singular individual, extracted from or even opposed to one\u2019s substantive communal identification\u2014one is truly universal only as radically singular, in the interstices of communal identities.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is Kojin Karatani. He wrote an important book on Kant and Marx called Transcritique. \u00a0I have included parts of an essay by \u017di\u017eek below on this book. \u00a0I’ve also taken some of \u017di\u017eek’s terms and used them above. Economy and politics Is, however, the ultimate Marxian parallax not that between economy and politics\u2014between the … Continue reading “kojin karatani”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[103,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-universal","category-zizek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5822"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5822\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5836,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5822\/revisions\/5836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}