Kojin Karatani

is a Japanese philosopher and literary critic.

Biography

Karatani entered the University of Tokyo in 1960, where he joined the radical Marxist Communist League, better known as "The Bund," and participated in the massive 1960 Anpo protests against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, which he would later come to view as a formative political experience.

Karatani graduated with a B.A. in economics in 1965, and added an M.A. in English literature in 1967. The Gunzō Literary Prize, which he received at the age of 27 for an essay on Natsume Sōseki, was his first critical acclaim as a literary critic. While teaching at Hosei University, Tokyo, he wrote extensively about modernity and postmodernity with a particular focus on language, number, and money, concepts that 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. He started from a study of Natsume Sōseki.

Karatani collaborated with novelist Kenji Nakagami, 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 no chokoku” (Overcoming Modernity), a symposium held in the summer of 1942 at Kyoto Imperial University (now Kyoto University) at which Hideo Kobayashi (whom Karatani and Nakagami did not hold in great esteem) was a participant.

He was also a regular member of ANY, the international architects' conference that was held annually for the last decade of the 20th century and that also published an architectural/philosophical series with Rizzoli under the general heading of Anyone.

Since 1990, Karatani has been regularly teaching at Columbia University as a visiting professor.

Karatani founded the New Associationist Movement (NAM) in Japan in the summer of 2000. NAM was conceived as a counter–capitalist/nation-state association, inspired by the experiment of LETS (Local Exchange Trading Systems, based on non-marketed currency). He was also the co-editor, with Akira Asada, of the Japanese quarterly journal Hihyōkūkan (Critical Space), until it ended in 2002.

In 2006, Karatani retired from the chair of the International Center for Human Sciences at Kinki University, Osaka, where he had been teaching.

In 2022, Karatani was awarded the $1 million Berggruen Prize for Culture and Philosophy.

Philosophy Karatani has produced philosophical concepts, such as "the will to architecture", which he calls the foundation of all Western thinking, but the best-known of them is probably that of "transcritique", which he proposed in his book Transcritique, where he reads Kant through Marx and vice versa. Writing about Transcritique in the New Left Review of January–February 2004, Slavoj Žižek brought Karatani's work to greater critical attention. Žižek borrowed the concept of "parallax view" (which is also the title of his review) for the title of his own 2006 book, The Parallax View.

Karatani has interrogated the possibility of a (de Manian) deconstruction and engaged in a dialogue with Jacques Derrida at 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.