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History and Repetition
Kojin Karatani wrote the essays in "History and Repetition" during a time of radical historical change, triggered by the collapse of the Cold War and the death of the Showa emperor in 1989. Reading Karl Marx in an original way, Karatani developed a theory of history based on the repetitive cycle of crises attending the expansion and transformation of capital. His work led to a rigorous analysis of political, economic, and literary forms of representation that recast historical events as a series of repeated forms forged in the transitional moments of global capitalism.
"History and Repetition" cemented Karatani's reputation as one of Japan's premier thinkers, capable of traversing the fields of philosophy, political economy, history, and literature in his work. The first complete translation of "History and Repetition" into English, undertaken with the cooperation of Karatani himself, this volume opens with his innovative reading of "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," tracing Marx's early theoretical formulation of the state. Karatani follows with a study of violent crises as they recur after major transitions of power, developing his theory of historical repetition and introducing a groundbreaking interpretation of fascism (in both Europe and Japan) as the spectral return of the absolutist monarch in the midst of a crisis of representative democracy.
For Karatani, fascism represents the most violent materialization of the repetitive mechanism of history. Yet he also seeks out singularities that operate outside the brutal inevitability of historical repetition, whether represented in literature or, more precisely, in the process of literature's demise. Closely reading the works of Oe Kenzaburo, Mishima Yukio, Nakagami Kenji, and Murakami Haruki, Karatani compares the recurrent and universal with the singular and unrepeatable, while advancing a compelling theory of the decline of modern literature. Merging theoretical arguments with a concrete analysis of cultural and intellectual history, Karatani's essays encapsulate a brilliant, multidisciplinary perspective on world history.
272 pages, Paperback
First published November 29, 2011
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About the author
Kōjin Karatani
87 books91 followersKōjin Karatani (柄谷 行人 Karatani Kōjin, born August 6, 1941, Amagasaki) is a Japanese philosopher and literary critic.
Karatani was educated at University of Tokyo, where he received a BA 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 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. 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.
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.
(from Wikipedia)
Karatani was educated at University of Tokyo, where he received a BA 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 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. 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.
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.
(from Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
November 27, 2012
What can I add? Karatani-esque?!? Really liked the essay on Takeda Taijun and Sakaguchi Ango. Say what he will about the death of the author as transcendental locus of meaning--Karatani has a gift for distilling relevant bio-detail and context when he introduces dense texts and potentially turgid ideas. Ex: Takeda's particular interpretation of Buddhism, his disposition to slant given his family background, education, in context of his choice of preferred texts. Since this chapter came on the heels of a discussion that rather levelled Zen buddhism and explored the common intellectual potentials of (monotheisms both) Christianity and True Land Buddhism in Tokugawa, it was well sequenced. Also, though sometimes it seems Karatani has not actually read the books he is talking about, his close readings of both Murakami-H and Oe were intricate, and I could see how they connected lit analysis to KK's mania for singularity and history as multiple asymmetries. Essays are more polished and less jumpy-around than _Origins_, but I suppose one has thirty years of refining and experience to thank for that, as well.
December 16, 2022
Çok çok başarılı. Yazarın ilk okuduğum kitabı olsa idi ikinci kitabını okumak istemeyebilirdim Japon kültürüne yabancı olduğum için. İkinci kitabı olduğu için diğer kitapları da ilgimi çekebilir. Kütüphaneden okuduğum kitap idi.
May 3, 2020
Tarihin olay olarak değik olgu olarak belirli bir döngüyle tekrar ettiği fikrini Japonya tarihi üzerinden anlatılıyor. Bu fikri ve Japonya tarihi üzerine merakı olanlara tavsiye ederim.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews