Since its publication in Japan ten years ago, the Origins of Modern Japanese Literature has become a landmark book, playing a pivotal role in defining discussions of modernity in that country. Against a history of relative inattention on the part of Western translators to modern Asian critical theory, this first English publication is sure to have a profound effect on current cultural criticism in the West. It is both the boldest critique of modern Japanese literary history to appear in the post-war era and a major theoretical intervention, which calls into question the idea of modernity that informs Western consciousness.In a sweeping reinterpretation of nineteenth-and twentieth-century Japanese literature, Karatani Kojin forces a reconsideration of the very assumptions underlying our concepts of modernity. In his analysis, such familiar terms as origin, modern, literature, and the state reveal themselves to be ideological constructs. Karatani weaves many separate strands into an argument that exposes what has been hidden in both Japanese and Western accounts of the development of modern culture. Among these strands are: the "discovery" of landscape in painting and literature and its relation to the inwardness of individual consciousness; the similar "discovery" in Japanese drama of the naked face as another kind of landscape produced by interiority; the challenge to the dominance of Chinese characters in writing; the emergence of confessional literature as an outgrowth of the repression of sexuality and the body; the conversion of the samurai class to Christianity; the mythologizing of tuberculosis, cancer, and illness in general as a producer of meaning; and the "discovery" of "the child" as an independent category of human being.A work that will be important beyond the confines of literary studies, Karatani's analysis challenges basic Western presumptions of theoretical centrality and originality and disturbs the binary opposition of the "West" to its so-called "other." Origins of Modern Japanese Literature should be read by all those with an interest in the development of cultural concepts and in the interrelating factors that have determined modernity.

Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (Post-Contemporary Interventions)

Literature & Fiction

Kōjin Karatani

History & Criticism

Duke Univ Pr

In this major, paradigm-shifting work, Kojin Karatani systematically re-reads Marx's version of world history, shifting the focus of critique from modes of production to modes of exchange. Karatani seeks to understand both Capital-Nation-State, the interlocking system that is the dominant form of modern global society, and the possibilities for superseding it. In The Structure of World History, he traces different modes of exchange, including the pooling of resources that characterizes nomadic tribes, the gift exchange systems developed after the adoption of fixed-settlement agriculture, the exchange of obedience for protection that arises with the emergence of the state, the commodity exchanges that characterize capitalism, and, finally, a future mode of exchange based on the return of gift exchange, albeit modified for the contemporary moment. He argues that this final stage—marking the overcoming of capital, nation, and state—is best understood in light of Kant's writings on eternal peace. The Structure of World History is in many ways the capstone of Karatani's brilliant career, yet it also signals new directions in his thought.

The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange

Duke University Press Books

From the editors' introduction: Refusing to oppose truth to semblance, psychoanalysis models its utterances on their alliance. If Freud creates a number of 'scientific' myths that continue to elicit derisive laughter from modern psychologists - Oedipus, the primal father - it is for no other reason than that psychoanalysis emerges at the point where this repressed myth must return in the guise of rationalism itself in order to combat the fierce dialectic of obscurantism and rational atheism... Rather than unmasking the deception of the signifier, psychoanalysis produces this deception in its emptiness, indirectly revealing its semblance and separating off its illusory mystifications without sacrificing the singular jouissance it marks... Far from distancing itself from semblance, by making it into an everyday object against which one can do battle, psychoanalysis should maintain the possibility that this semblance of being might be our only chance to decide, to intervene politically.

Umbr(a): Semblance

Catherine Malabou

Henry Corbin

Russell Grigg

Joan Copjec

Jelica Sumic

Gerard Wacjman

Bernard Baas

Oliver Feltham

The Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture

We maintain that the invention of psychoanalysis discovers its true specificity at the precise point when Freud, having listened well to the appeals of his analysand, refuses to concern himself with making her 'happy again,' with recalibrating her relation to reality so as to help her finally achieve her 'full potential.' We can read this specificity at the outset, in Freud s early Studies on Hysteria, which concludes with these words of 'encouragement' to the analysand: 'Much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.' One might say - and this would be to say nearly the same thing - that psychoanalysis arrives at the domain proper to it (and only it) when Freud, rather than respond to his patient's demand to simply get rid of her suffering - to excise, annihilate, or at least cauterize the symptom that stands between her and the world in which she recalls she once took so much satisfaction - instead allies himself to her symptom, positions himself as its oblique addressee. In so doing, Freud absents psychoanalysis once and for all from the normalizing schema of 'therapy,' a schema oriented toward the elimination of what is beyond the pleasure principle - today we call this orientation 'biopower' - and makes of it a practice oriented toward the subject's construction of a knowledge about the jouissance which alone marks her singularity. The promise of psychoanalysis, then, is neither personal happiness nor a happy return to the shared norms of the social field, but the articulation of a singular truth that opens up for the subject a horizon for creative action.

Umbr(a): Utopia

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK

Etienne Balibar

Joseph Jenkins

Juliet Flower MacCannell

Danielle Bergeron

Adrian Johnston

Felix Ensslin

izonomi ve Felsefenin Kokenleri

Metis Yayıncılık

Transkritik

Erkal Ünal

Metis Yayınları

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Books by Kōjin Karatani