- Kojin Karatani’s Inquiry II, Part I: On Proper Names | Chapter 1: Singularity and Particularity1
- Kojin Karatani’s Inquiry II, Part I: On Proper Names | Chapter 2: Proper Names and History
- Kojin Karatani’s Inquiry II, Part I: On Proper Names | Chapter 3: Names and Language
- Kojin Karatani’s Inquiry II, Part I: On Proper Names | Chapter 4: Possibility and Actuality
- Kojin Karatani’s Inquiry II, Part I: On Proper Names | Chapter 5: The Contingency of Relations
In this book (Origins of Modern Japanese Literature), Karatani offers an epoch-making reconstruction of the historical and cultural picture of Japan’s modernization during the Meiji Restoration … This is the first reason for its claims on us: it is not even an “alternate history” which is offered us by this “postmodern” analysis of the institutions of the modern self, writing, literature, and scientific objectivity that were constructed and imposed by the Meiji Revolution. Rather, it is as though that great laboratory experiment which was the modernization of Japan allows us to see the features of our own development in slow motion, in a new kind of form […].
—Fredric Jameson, “In the Mirror of Alternate Modernities”2
By the late 1990s, Japanese literary criticism—the distinctive field that began with Hideo Kobayashi—had already declined and disintegrated. Today literary criticism has lost still more of the power to stir the mind, the tension, and the capacity to build knowledge and deliver intellectual shocks that it once possessed. Yet Karatani, the best-known critic since Kobayashi, still calls himself a literary critic—something one can only see as his arduous effort to resist the death of literary criticism.
… After 1984, while continuing to publish substantial theoretical works such as Inquiry I (1986) and Inquiry II (1989), Karatani began to move away from the inward orientation of his criticism, emphasizing the mobility and flexibility of “secular criticism.” As a member of the editorial groups of Kikan Shichō (1988–1990) and Hihyō Kūkan (Critical Space, 1991–), he also actively explored new directions with other intellectuals.
—Hiroki Azuma3
In today’s English, ‘pig’ refers to the animals with which farmers deal, while ‘pork’ is the meat we consume. The class dimension is clear here: ‘pig’ is the old Saxon word, since Saxons were the underprivileged farmers, while ‘pork’ comes from the French porque, used by the privileged Norman conquerors who mostly consumed the pigs raised by farmers. This duality, signalling the gap that separates production from consumption, is a case of what, in his formidable Transcritique. On Kant and Marx, Kojin Karatani refers to as the ‘parallax’ dimension. Best known as the most striking Japanese literary critic of his generation—his Origins of Japanese Literature presented to the English-speaking world by Fredric Jameson—Karatani has moved from subsequent reflections on Architecture as Metaphor to one of the most original attempts to recast the philosophical and political bases of opposition to the empire of capital of the current period. In its heterodox theoretical ambition and concern with alternative revolutionary traditions—here principally anarchist—Transcritique might be compared with Roberto Unger’s trilogy Politics, a work out of Brazil. But Karatani’s thought-world is closer to that of Marx, and behind him to the heritage of classical German philosophy.
—Slavoj Žižek4
But in fact, the world as a whole is not being “Japanized.” In Japan, the intellectual and ethical dimensions of life have disappeared completely. Those who mock such things are now wielding their power. “Subculture, manga, anime—what wonderful things!” Such praise was once ironic, and to that extent had a certain critical force. But there is no irony left in Japan now. There is only smug, provincial self-affirmation. To put it plainly, Japan has nothing left now. And there is no room left to turn things around. But I have not given up hope. From now on, I will work harder.
—Kojin Karatani3