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Kojin Karatani, Sabu Kohso-Transcritique - On Kant and Marx-The MIT Press (2005) PDF
Kojin Karatani, Sabu Kohso-Transcritique - On Kant and Marx-The MIT Press (2005) PDF
Transcritique
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Transcritique
Kojin Karatani
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
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storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book was set in New Baskerville by UG / GGS Information Services, Inc. and
printed and bound in the United States of America
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction: What Is Transcritique? 1
I Kant 27
1 The Kantian Turn 29
1.1 The Copernican Turn 29
1.2 Literary Criticism and the Transcendental Critique 35
1.3 Parallax and the Thing-in-Itself 44
2 The Problematic of Synthetic Judgment 55
2.1 Mathematical Foundations 55
2.2 The Linguistic Turn 65
2.3 Transcendental Apperception 76
3 Transcritique 81
3.1 Subject and Its Topos 81
3.2 Transcendental and Transversal 92
3.3 Singularity and Sociality 100
3.4 Nature and Freedom 112
II Marx 131
4 Transposition and Critique 133
4.1 Transposition 133
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not offer an easy exit from capitalism; rather only by its very exitlessness
does it suggest a possibility of practical intervention.
Along the way, I became increasingly aware of Kant as a thinker who
also sought to suggest the possibility of practiceless by a criticism of
metaphysics (as is usually thought) than by bravely shedding light
on the limit of human reason. Capital is commonly read in relation
with Hegelian philosophy. In my case, I came to hold that it is only
the Critique of Pure Reason that should be read while cross-referencing
Capital. Thus the Marx/Kant intersection.
Marx spoke very little of communism, except for the rare occa-
sions on which he criticized others discourses on the subject. He
even said somewhere that speaking of the future was itself reac-
tionary. Up until the climate change of 1989, I also despised all ideas
of possible futures. I believed that the struggle against capitalism
and the state would be possible without ideas of a future, and that
we should only sustain the struggle endlessly in response to each
contradiction arising from a real situation. The collapse of the
socialist bloc in 1989 compelled me to change my stance. Until then,
I, as many others, had been rebuking Marxist states and communist
parties; that criticism had unwittingly taken for granted their solid
existence and the appearance that they would endure forever. As
long as they survived, we could feel we had done something just by
negating them. When they collapsed, I realized that my critical
stance had been paradoxically relying on their being. I came to feel
that I had to state something positive. It was at this conjuncture that
I began to confront Kant.
Kant is commonlyand not wronglyknown as a critic of meta-
physics. For the development of this line, the influence of Humes
skeptical empiricism was large; Kant confessed that it was the idea
that first interrupted his dogmatic slumber.2 But what is overlooked
is that at the time he wrote Critique of Pure Reason, metaphysics was
unpopular and even disdained. In the preface, he expressed his re-
grets: There was a time when metaphysics was called the queen of
all sciences, and if the will be taken for the deed, it deserved this
title of honor, on account of the preeminent importance of its ob-
ject. Now, in accordance with the fashion of the age, the queen
proves despised on all sides.3 It follows that for Kant, the primary
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Rather, it was his stance that made him a kind of exile, a man inde-
pendent from the state: Kant rejected a promotion to a post in
Berlin, the center of state academia, instead insisting on cosmopoli-
tanism. Kant is generally understood to have executed the transcen-
dental critique from a place that lies between rationalism and
empiricism. However, upon reading his strangely self-deprecating
Dreams of a Visionary Explained by Dreams of Metaphysics, one finds it
impossible to say that he was simply thinking from a place between
these two poles. Instead, it is the parallax between positions that
acts. Kant, too, performed a critical oscillation: He continuously
confronted the dominant rationalism with empiricism, and the
dominant empiricism with rationalism. The Kantian critique exists
within this movement itself. The transcendental critique is not some
kind of stable third position. It cannot exist without a transversal
and transpositional movement. It is for this reason that I have
chosen to name the dynamic critiques of Kant and Marxwhich
are both transcendental and transversaltranscritique.
According to Louis Althusser, Marx made an epistemological
break in The German Ideology. But in my transcritical understanding,
the break did not occur once, but many times, and this one in par-
ticular was not the most significant. It is generally thought that
Marxs break in The German Ideology was the establishment of histori-
cal materialism. But in fact that was pioneered by Engels, who wrote
the main body of the book. One must therefore look at Marx as a
latecomer to the idea; he came to it because of his obsession with a
seemingly outmoded problem (to Engels)the critique of religion.
Thus Marx says: For Germany the criticism of religion is in the main
complete, and criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism.1
He conducted a critique of state and capital as an extension of the
critique of religion. In other words, he persistently continued the
critique of religion under the names of state and capital. (And this
was not merely an application of the Feuerbachian theory of
self-alienation that he later abandoned.)
The development of industrial capitalism made it possible to see
previous history from the vantage point of production. So it is that
Adam Smith could already pose a stance akin to historical material-
ism by the mid-eighteenth century. But historical materialism does
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not have the potency to elucidate the capitalist economy that cre-
ated it. Capitalism, I believe, is nothing like the economic infrastruc-
ture. It is a certain force that regulates humanity beyond its
intentionality, a force that divides and recombines human beings. It
is a religio-generic entity. This is what Marx sought to decode for the
whole of his life. A commodity appears at first sight an extremely
obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very
strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological
niceties.2 Here Marx is no longer questioning and problematizing
metaphysics or theology in the narrow sense. Instead, he grasps
the knotty problematic as an extremely obvious, trivial thing.
Thinking this way about Marx, one realizes that an equivalent of
historical materialismor even what is known as Marxism for that
mattercould have existed without Marx, while the text Capital
could not have existed if not for him.
The Marxian turnthe kind that is truly significant and that
one cannot overlookoccurred in his middle career, in the shift
from Grundrisse or A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy to
Capital: it was the introduction of the theory of value form. What
provoked Marxs radical turn, which came after he finished writing
Grundrisse, was his initiation to skepticism: It was Baileys critique of
Ricardos labor theory of value. According to David Ricardo, ex-
change value is inherent in a commodity, which is expressed by
money. In other words, money is just an illusion (Schein in Kant).
Based upon this recognition, both Ricardian Leftists and Proudhon
insisted on abolishing currency and on replacing it with the labor
money or the exchange bank. Criticizing them as he did, however,
Marx was still relying on the labor theory of value (akin to Ricardo).
On the other hand, Bailey criticized the Ricardian position by claim-
ing that the value of a commodity exists only in its relationship with
other commodities, and therefore the labor value that Ricardo in-
sists is inherent in a commodity is an illusion.
Samuel Baileys skepticism is similar to Humes criticism that
there is nothing like a Cartesian ego cogito; there are just many
egos. To this position, Kant responded that yes, an ego is just an illu-
sion, but functioning there is the transcendental apperception X.
But what one knows as metaphysics is that which considers the X as
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In other words, what Marx focused on was not the objects them-
selves but the relational system in which the objects are placed.
According to Marx, if gold becomes money, that is not because of
its immanent material characteristics, but because it is placed in the
value form. The value formconsisting of relative value form and
equivalent formmakes an object that is placed in it money.
Anythinganythingthat is exclusively placed in the general equiva-
lent form becomes money; that is, it achieves the right to attain any-
thing in exchange (i.e., its owner can attain anything in exchange).
People consider a certain thing (i.e., gold) as sublime, only because
it fills the spot of general equivalent. Crucially, Marx begins his re-
flections on capital with the miser, the one who hoards the right to
exchangein the strict sense, the right to stand in the position of
equivalent format the expense of use. The desire for money or the
right to exchange is different from the desire for commodities them-
selves. I would call this drive [Trieb] in the Freudian sense, to distin-
guish it from desire. To put it another way, the drive of a miser is
not to own an object, but to stand in the position of equivalent form,
even at the expense of the object. The drive is metaphysical in
nature; the misers goal is to accumulate riches in heaven, as it were.
One tends to scorn the drive of the miser. But capitals drive to ac-
cumulate is essentially the same. Capitalists are nothing but rational
misers to use Marxs term. Buying a commodity from someone
somewhere and selling it to anyone anywhere, capitalists seek to re-
produce and expand their position to exchange, and the purpose is
not to attain many uses. That is to say that the motive drive of
capitalism is not in peoples desire. Rather, it is the reverse; for the
purpose of attaining the right to exchange, capital has to create peo-
ples desire. This drive of hoarding the right to exchange originates
in the precariousness inherent in exchange among others.
Historical materialists aim to describe how the relationships be-
tween nature and humans as well as among humans themselves
transformed/developed throughout history. What is lacking in this
endeavor is any reflection upon the capitalist economy that orga-
nizes the transformation/development. And to this end, one must
take into consideration the dimension of exchange, and why the ex-
change inexorably takes the form of value. Physiocrats and classical
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economists had the conviction that they could see all aspects of so-
cial relations transparently from the vantage point of production.
The social exchange, however, is consistently opaque and thus ap-
pears as an autonomous force which we can hardly abolish. Engelss
conviction that we should control the anarchic drive of capitalist
production and transform it into a planned economy was little more
than an extension of classical economists thought. And Engelss
stance was, of course, the source of centralist communism.
One of the most crucial transpositions/breaks in Marxs theory of
value form lies in its attention to use value or the process of circula-
tion. Say a certain thing becomes valuable only when it has use value
to other people; a certain thingno matter how much labor time is
required to make ithas no value if not sold. Marx technically abol-
ished the conventional division between exchange value and use
value. No commodity contains exchange value as such. If it fails to
relate to others, it will be a victim of sickness unto death in the
sense of Kierkegaard. Classical economists believe that a commodity
is a synthesis between use value and exchange value. But this is only
an ex post facto recognition. Lurking behind this synthesis as event
is a fatal leap [salto mortale]. Kierkegaard saw the human being as a
synthesis between finity and infinity, reminding us that what is at
stake in this synthesis is inevitably faith. In commodity exchange,
the equivalent religious moment appears as credit. Credit, the treaty
of presuming that a commodity can be sold in advance, is an institu-
tionalization of postponing the critical moment of selling a com-
modity. And the commodity economy, constructed as it is upon
credit, inevitably nurtures crisis.
Classical economics saw all economic phenomena from the van-
tage point of production, and insisted that it had managed to demys-
tify everything (other than production) by reasoning that it was all
secondary and illusory. As a result, it is mastered by the circulation
and credit that it believes itself to have demystified, and thus it can
never elucidate why crisis occurs. Crisis is the appearance of the crit-
ical moment inherent in the commodity economy, and as such it
functions as the most radical critique of the political economy. In
this light, it may be said that pronounced parallax brought by
crisis led Marx to Capital.
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says, on the one hand, that surplus value (for industrial capital) can-
not be attained in the process of production in itself, and, on the
other hand, that it cannot be attained in the process of circulation
in itself. Hence, Hic Rhodus, hic salta! Nevertheless, this antinomy
can be undone, that is, only by proposing that the surplus value (for
industrial capital) comes from the difference of value systems in the
circulation process (like in merchant capital), and yet that the differ-
ence is created by technological innovation in the production process.
Capital has to discover and create the difference incessantly. This is
the driving force for the endless technological innovation in indus-
trial capitalism; it is not that the productionism comes from peoples
hope for the progress of civilization as such. It is widely believed that
the development of the capitalist economy is caused by our material
desires and faith in progress; so it is that it would always seem possi-
ble to change our mentality and begin to control the reckless devel-
opment rationally; and further, it would seem possible to abolish
capitalism itself, when we wish. The drive of capitalism, however,
is deeply inscribed in our society and culture; or more to the
point, our society and culture are created by it; it will never stop by
itself. Neither will it be stopped by any rational control or by state
intervention.
Marxs Capital does not reveal the necessity of revolution. As the
Japanese Marxian political economist, Kozo Uno (18971977)
pointed out, it only presents the necessity of crisis.4 And crisis, even
though it is the peculiar illness of the capitalist economy, is the cata-
lyst for its incessant development; it is part of the whole mechanism.
The capitalist economy cannot eradicate the plague, yet neither will
it perish because of it. Environmentalists warn that the capitalist
economy will cause unprecedented disasters in the future, yet it is
not that these disasters will terminate the capitalist economy. Also, it
is impossible that capitalism will collapse by the reverse dynamic,
when, in the future, commodification is pushed to its limitit is
impossible that it would die a natural death.
Finally, the only solution most of us can imagine today is state reg-
ulation of capitals reckless movement. But we should take notice
of the fact that the state, like capital, is driven by its own certain
autonomous powerwhich wont be dissolved by the globalization of
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imposes the communitys codeif one does not return, one will be
ostracizedand exclusivity. Second, the original exchange between
communities is plunder. And rather it is this plunder that is the basis
for other exchanges: For instance, commodity exchange begins only
at the point where mutual plunder is given up. In this sense, plun-
der is deemed a type of exchange. For instance, in order to plunder
continuously, it is necessary to protect the plundered from other
plunderers, and even nurture economico-industrial growth. This is
the prototype of the state. In order to keep on robbing, and robbing
more and more, the state guarantees the protection of land and the
reproduction of labor power by redistribution. It also promotes agri-
cultural production by public undertakings such as regulating water
distribution through public water works. It follows that the state
does not appear to be abetting a system of robbery: Farmers think of
paying tax as a return (duty) for the protection of the lord; mer-
chants pay tax as a return for the protection of their exchange and
commerce. Finally, the state is represented as a supra-class entity of
reason.
Plunder and redistribution are thus forms of exchange. Inasmuch
as human social relations entail the potential of violence, these
forms are inevitably present. And the third form is what Marx calls
the commodity exchange between communities. As I analyze in de-
tail in the book, this exchange engenders surplus value or capital,
though with mutual consent; and it is definitively different from the
exchange of plunder/redistribution. Furthermore, and this is the
final question of this book, a fourth kind of exchange exists: associa-
tion. This is a form of mutual aid, yet neither exclusive nor coercive
like community. Associationism can be considered as an ethico-
economic form of human relation that can appear only after a soci-
ety once passes through the capitalist market economy. It is thought
that Proudhon was the first to have theorized it; according to my
reading, however, Kants ethics already contained it.
In his famous book, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson said
that the nation-state is a marriage between nation and state that
were originally different in kind. This was certainly an important
suggestion. Yet it should not be forgotten that there was another
marriage between two entities that were totally heterogeneousthe
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marriage between state and capital. In the feudal ages, state, capital,
and nation were clearly separated. They existed distinctively as feu-
dal states (lords, kings, and emperors), cities, and agrarian commu-
nities, all based upon different principles of exchange. States were
based upon the principle of plunder and redistribution. The agrar-
ian communities that were mutually disconnected and isolated were
dominated by states; but, within themselves, they were autonomous,
based upon the principle of mutual aid and reciprocal exchange.
Between these communities, markets or cities grew; these were
based upon monetary exchange relying on mutual consent. What
crumbled the feudal system was the total osmosis of the capitalist
market economy. But the economic process was realized only in the
political form, of the absolutist monarchy. The absolutist monarchi-
cal states conspired with the merchant class, monopolized the
means of violence by toppling feudal lords (aristocracy), and finally
abolished feudal domination (extra-economic domination) entirely.
This was the very story of the wedding between state and capital.
Protected by the absolutist state, merchant capital (bourgeoisie)
grew up and nurtured the identity of the nation for the sake of cre-
ating a unified market. Yet this was not all in terms of the formation
of the nation. The agrarian communities, that were decomposed
along with the permeation of the market economy and by the ur-
banized culture of enlightenment, had always existed on the founda-
tion of the nation. While individual agrarian communities that had
been autarkic and autonomous were decomposed by the osmosis of
money, their communalitiesmutual aid and reciprocitythemselves
were recovered imaginarily within the nation. In contradistinction
from what Hegel called the state of understanding (lacking spirit),
or the Hobbesian state, the nation is grounded upon the empathy of
mutual aid descending from agrarian communities. And this emo-
tion consists of a feeling of indebtedness toward the gift, indicating
that it comes out of the relation of exchange.
It was amid the bourgeois revolution that these three were legally
married. As in the trinity intoned in the French Revolutionliberty,
equality, and fraternitycapital, state, and nation copulated and
amalgamated themselves into a force forever after inseparable.
Hence to be strict the modern state must be called the capitalist
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are concerned, they are of value only insofar as they are the indepen-
dent creations of the workers and not protgs either of the govern-
ment or of the bourgeois.11 In other words, Marx is stressing that
the association of cooperatives itself must take over the leadership
from the state, in the place of state-led cooperative movements,
whereby capital and state will wither away. And this kind of proposi-
tion of principle aside, Marx never said anything in particular about
future prospects.
All in all, communism for Marx was nothing but associationism, but
inasmuch as it was so, he had to forge it by critiquing. Marxs thinking
fell between that of Lassalle and Bakunin. This oscillation allowed
later generations to draw either stance from Marxs thought. But what
we should see here is less contradiction or ambiguity than Marxs
transcritique. What was clear to Marx was that it is impossible to
counter the autonomous powers of the trinity by simply denouncing
them. Based as they are upon certain necessities, they have au-
tonomous powers. In other words, functioning as they are as transcen-
dental apperception, not only are they irresolvable but also even
revive stronger. To finally abolish the trinity, a deep scrutiny into (and
critique of) them is required. Where can we find the clue to form the
countermovement? This, I believe, is in the theory of value form in
Capital. In the preface, Marx clarified his stance as follows:
To prevent possible misunderstandings, let me say this. I do not by any
means depict the capitalist and landowner in rosy colors. But individuals
are dealt with here only in so far as they are the personifications of
economic categories, the bearers [Trger] of particular class-relations and
interests. My standpoint, from which the development of the economic for-
mation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any
other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he re-
mains, socially speaking, however much he may subjectively raise himself
above them.12
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23
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which thus cannot replace money. Labor money would tacitly rely
on the existing monetary economy; even if it tried to challenge the
existing system, it would just be exchanged with the existing money
for the difference in price with the market value. What it could do at
best would be to neutralize money.
Having this antinomy in mind, the most exciting example to me is
LETS (Local Exchange Trading System), devised and practiced by
Michael Linton since 1982. It is a multifaceted system of settlement
where participants have their own accounts, register the wealth and
service that they can offer in the inventory, conduct exchanges
freely, and then the results are recorded in their accounts. In con-
trast to the currency of the state central bank, the currency of LETS
is issued each time by those who receive the wealth or service from
other participants. And it is so organized that the sum total of the
gains and losses of everyone is zero. In this simple system exists a
clue to solving the antinomy of money.
When compared to the exchange of mutual aid in traditional com-
munities and that of the capitalist commodity economy, the nature of
LETS becomes clear. It is, on the one hand, similar to the system of
mutual aid in the aspect that it does not impose high prices with high
interest, but, on the other hand, closer to the market in that the ex-
change can occur between those who are mutually far apart and
strangers. In contrast to the capitalist market economy, in LETS,
money does not transform into capital, not simply because there is no
interest, but because it is based upon the zero sum principle. It is orga-
nized so that, although exchanges occur actively, money does not
exist as a result. Therefore, the antinomymoney should exist and
money should not existis solved. Speaking in the context of Marxs
theory of value form, the currency of LETS is a general equivalent,
which however just connects all the wealth and services and does not
become an autonomous entity. The fetish of money does not occur. In
LETS, there is no need to accumulate money as the potency of ex-
changes, nor is there worry about an increase of losses. The system of
value-relation among wealth and services is generated via the curren-
cies of LETS, but the wealth and services are not unconditionally com-
mensurable, as in state currencies. Finally, among them, labor value as
the common essence would not be established ex post facto.
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to say that in these moments workers can counter capital. The first
moment is expressed by Antonio Negri as Dont Work! This really
signifies, in our context, Dont Sell Your Labor-Power Commodity!
or Dont Work as a Wage Laborer! The second moment says, like
Mahatma Gandhi, Dont Buy Capitalist Products! Both of them
can occur in the position in which workers can be the subject. But in
order for workers/consumers to be able not to work and not to
buy, there must be a safety net whereupon they can still work and
buy to live. This is the very struggle without the capitalist mode of pro-
duction: the association consisting of the producers/consumers co-
operatives and LETS. The struggle within inexorably requires these
cooperatives and LETS as an extra-capitalist mode of production/
consumption; and furthermore, this can accelerate the reorganiza-
tion of capitalist corporation into cooperative entity. The struggle
immanent in and the one ex-scendent to the capitalist mode of pro-
duction/consumption are combined only in the circulation process,
the topos of consumers workers. For it is only there that the mo-
ment for individuals to become subject exists. Association cannot
exist without the subjective interventions of individuals, and such is
possible only having the circulation process as an axis.
Karl Polanyi likened capitalism (the market economy) to cancer.15
Coming into existence in the interstice between agrarian communi-
ties and feudal states, capitalism invaded the internal cells and trans-
formed their predispositions according to its own physiology. If so,
the transnational network of workers qua consumers and consumers
qua workers is a culture of anticancer cells, as it were. In order to
eliminate capital, it is imperative to eliminate the conditions by
which it was produced in the first place. The counteractions against
capitalism within and without, having their base in the circulation
front, are totally legal and nonviolent; none of the three can inter-
rupt them. According to my reading, Marxs Capital offers a logical
ground for the creation of this culture/movement. That is, the
asymmetric relationship inherent in the value form (between com-
modity and money) produces capital, and it is also here where the
transpositional moments that terminate capital can be grasped. And
it is the task of transcriticism to make full use of these moments.
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I
Kant
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The Kantian Turn
When Kant called his new project in Critique of Pure Reason the
Copernican turn, he was alluding to his own inversion of the
subject/object hierarchy: while pre-Kantian metaphysics had main-
tained that the subject copies the external object, Kant proposed
that objects are constituted by the form that the subject projects into the
external world. In this sense, the Kantian turn is obviously a shift to-
ward subject-centrism (or anthropocentrism), while the turn known
by the name of Copernicus tends toward the opposite: the shift from
geocentrism to heliocentrisma negation of the stance that is earth-
centered (identifiable as ego-centered). Did Kant ignore the turn in
the latter sense? No, I think not. It is my contention that in his con-
stellation of thought surrounding the thing-in-itself and/or tran-
scendental object, he was echoing this very essence of the
Copernican turn, especially in stressing the passivity of subject in
relation with the external, objective world.
Kant wrote in Critique of Pure Reason:
The sensible faculty of intuition is really only a receptivity for being affected
in a certain way with representations, whose relation to one another is a
pure intuition of space and time (pure forms of our sensibility), which, in-
sofar as they are connected and determinable in these relations (in space
and time) according to laws of the unity of experience, are called object.
The non-sensible cause of these representations is entirely unknown to us,
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Kant
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The Kantian Turn
see the globe as revolving around the sun. This hypothesis does not
offer positive proof of heliocentrism itself, however, and it took as long
as a century for it to be fully accepted as a cosmological principle.
Nonetheless, even those who still believed in geocentricism had to rely
on the Copernican system of calculation. Although they believed that
the truth was that the sun revolves around the earth, for the sake of cal-
culation they still could think as if the opposite were the case. After
all, the true significance of the Copernican turn lay in the hypothetical
stance itself. In other words, the significance lay not in forcing any
choice between geocentricism or heliocentrism, but rather in grasping
the solar system as a relational structure using terms such as earth
and sunthat is totally independent of empirically observed objects
or events. And only this stance could render the turn toward helio-
centrism. Thus the significance of the Copernican turn was twofold.
In the same manner Kant managed to get around the basic con-
tradiction in the philosophy of his time, whether it was founded in
the empirical senses (as was empiricism) or in rational thinking (as
was rationalism). Instead, Kant introduced those structuresthat is,
forms of sensibility or categories of understandingof which one is
unaware, calling them transcendental structures. Words such as
sensibility [Sinnlichkeit] and understanding [Verstand] had long
existed as conceptualizations of life experience: to sense and to
understand. But Kant completely altered their meanings in a way
similar to what Copernicus had done when he rediscovered sun
and earth as terms within the solar system qua reciprocal structure.
But here it is not necessary to reiterate Kants terminology. What is
crucial is this architectonic that is called transcendental. And even if
these particular words or concepts are not always used in various
post-Kantian contexts, the same architectonic can be found there.
One notable example is psychoanalysis, in which Thomas Kuhn saw
a direct correspondence with the Copernican turn.
Because the Copernican theory is in many respects a typical scientific
theory, its history can illustrate some of the processes by which scientific
concepts evolve and replace their predecessors. In its extrascientific conse-
quences, however, the Copernican theory is not typical: few scientific theories
have played so large a role in nonscientific thought. But neither is it unique.
In the nineteenth century, Darwins theory of evolution raised similar
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really awakened Kant was the book by the Scottish critic, Henry
Home (17661782), titled Element of Criticism (17631766). Accord-
ing to Vaihinger, the following remark by Kant indicates why he
read Homes book with such excitement: Home has more correctly
called Aesthetics Criticism, because it does not, like Logic, furnish a
priori rules.6 This suggests that Kants use of the term critique may
indeed have derived from Home. Kant first used the term critique
of reason in An Announcement for the Arrangement of the Lec-
tures in the Winter Semester 1765/1766. 7 In the text, the critique of
reason [die Kritik der Vernunft] is considered logic in the wide sense,
in juxtaposition to the critique of taste [die Kritik des Geschmacks]
namely, aestheticsas that which has a very close affinity of material
cause. From this, too, one can presume a nexus shared by Kants cri-
tique and Homes book with its eponymous criticism.
With Home, Kant seized the moment to reconsider the possibility
of an aesthetic judgment of taste and to investigate its basis. Home
had sought a universality of the judgment of tastea measure of
beauty and uglinessin principles immanent in human essence. He
insisted on the a priori nature of human sensibility with respect to
beauty and ugliness. At the same time, however, Home employed
empirical and inductive methods of observing the general rules of
taste, collecting and categorizing materials from all the domains re-
lated to art and literature from antiquity to the present. Confronting
the necessity of critical judgment, he refused to take any particular
principle for granted and charged himself with the task of question-
ing the foundational principles or infallible measures of criticism.
By taking up Homes term criticism, Kant further developed the
concept into his own critiquea signifier of the fundamental
scrutiny of rational human faculties.8
Home had to confront the element of criticism particularly in
England, because that is where two principles were clashing: on the
one hand, there was classicism positing a certain empirical norm in
art and literature; and on the other, there was the Romanticist ideal
cherishing an individuals uninhibited expression of emotion. Basi-
cally taking the latter standpoint, Home still dared to seek a ground
where critical judgment could be universal, and Kant was especially
struck by this endeavor. In Critique of Judgment, he dealt tacitly with
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Kant
the same thesis and antithesis. Like Home, Kant acknowledged that
the judgment of taste had to be subjective (or individual), while be-
lieving at the same time that it should also somehow be universal. In
Kants case, however, he distinguished universality from generality:
Thus we will say that someone has taste if he knows how to entertain his
guests [at a party] with agreeable things (that they can enjoy by all the
senses) in such a way that everyone likes [the party]. But here it is under-
stood that the universality is only comparative, so that the rules are only
general (as all empirical rules are), not universal, as are the rules that a
judgment about the beautiful takes upon itself [sich unternimmt] or lays
claim to.9
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the Kantian introspection, one ought not ignore his rather strange
text Dreams of a Visionary Explained by Dreams of Metaphysics.
Kant wrote this essay in 1766 for a journal in the playful style of
eighteenth-century essayists. It was inspired by the famous earth-
quake that struck Lisbon on November 1, 1755, All Saints Daythe
very moment the faithful were at prayer in church. No wonder the
event raised such skepticism about the Grace of God. The Lisbon
earthquake shook all Europe at its rootthe general populace and in-
tellectuals alike. It rent a deep crack between sensibility and under-
standing, as it were, which, right up to Leibniz, had maintained a
relationship of remarkably seamless continuity. The Kantian critique
cannot be separated from this profound and multilayered crisis.
Several years later, Voltaire wrote Candide, deriding Leibnizian
predestined harmony, and Rousseau insisted that the earthquake
was punishment for human societys having lost touch with nature.22
By distinct contrast, Kant (who wrote as many as three analyses of
the problem) stressed that the earthquake of 1755 had no religious
meaning whatsoever, attributable as it was to natural causes alone.
He also advanced scientific hypotheses about the cause of the
quake, as well as possible countermeasures to avert future occur-
rences. It is noteworthy that while even empiricists could not help
searching for meanings to attribute to the event, Kant did no such
thing. But his radical materialism coexisted with the opposite and
opposing radicalism that he simultaneously embracedthat is, his
concern with metaphysics. That is to say that he was fascinated by
the intellect of the visionary Swedenborg, who was said to have pre-
dicted the earthquake. Kant not only conducted an inquiry into
Swedenborgs purportedly miraculous power, but also wrote a letter
in the hope of meeting him.23
Even with his interest in visionary phenomena, however, Kant per-
sisted in his belief in natural causes. The former he considered to be
daydreams, or a sort of brain disorder. He maintained that although
a vision is in actuality just a thought in the mind, it appears to have
come from the outside, by way of the senses.24 At the same time, how-
ever, he could not deny Swedenborgs intellect. While, in many
cases, the claim to perceive the supra-sensible through the senses is
delusional, there are a very few whose claims of possessing such
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them. But in philosophical reflection, this is not the case. The phi-
losophy that begins with introspection-mirror remains snared within
the specular abyss of introspection. No matter how it seeks to intro-
duce the others stance, this situation never alters. It is said that phi-
losophy began with Socrates dialogues. But the dialogue itself is
trapped within the mirror. Many have criticized Kant for having re-
mained in a subjectivist self-scrutiny, and suggest that he sought an
escape in Critique of Judgment when he introduced plural subjects.
But the truly revolutionary event in philosophy had already oc-
curred in Critique of Pure Reason, where Kant attempted to implode
the complicity inherent in introspection precisely by confining him-
self to the introspective framework. Here one can observe the at-
tempt to introduce an objectivity (qua otherness) that is totally alien
to the conventional space of introspection-mirror.
Most straightforwardly said, what is at stake in Dreams of a Vi-
sionary is the critical position that Kant himself was in at that time:
pursuing rationalist philosophy on the line of Leibniz/Wolff, there
was no other choice but to accept Humes empiricist skepticism, yet
he was not at all satisfied by either. For about ten years after that, up
until Critique of Pure Reason, he confined himself in silence. The
stance that he called transcendental came into existence sometime
during this period. Kants approach in Critique of Pure Reason is dif-
ferent not only from subjective introspection, but also from objec-
tive scrutiny. Though it is a self-scrutiny through and through, the
transcendental reflection inscribes others viewpoint. Said inversely,
though it is impersonal through and through, the transcendental
reflection is still self-scrutiny.
One tends to speak of the transcendental stance as a mere
method, and worse still, one speaks of the structure of faculties Kant
discovered as a given. The transcendental stance, however, could
not have appeared if not for the pronounced parallax. Critique of
Pure Reason is not written in the mode of self-criticism as is Dreams
of a Visionary, but the pronounced parallax is present, functioning
therein. It came to take the form of antinomy, the device to reveal
both thesis and antithesis as optical illusions.
After the publication of Critique of Pure Reason (A), Kant expressed
his realization that the order of his reasoning would have been
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because it would not even exist were it not for the regulative idea,
the assumption that nature be elucidated. Kant himself addressed the
issue of the doctrinal faith (or beliefs) [der doktrinale Glaube] that
accompanies theoretical judgments [theoretische Urteile] as follows:
[T]hus there is in merely theoretical judgements an analogous of practical
judgements, where taking them to be true is aptly described by the word
belief, and which we can all doctrinal beliefs [der doktrinale Glaube]. If it were
possible to settle by any sort of experience whether they are inhabitants of
at least some of the planets that we see, I might well bet everything that
I have on it. Hence I say that it is not merely an opinion but a strong belief
(on the correctness of which I would wager many advantages in life) that
there are also inhabitants of other worlds.34
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The Problematic of Synthetic Judgment
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Kant
In this respect, it must be said that Humes skepticism was indeed in-
consistent; he did not move beyond the convention that solely ana-
lytical thinking is solid while the synthetic is questionable. By
contrast, Kants epoch-making contribution lay in his skepticism
concerning the analytic nature of mathematicsthe very ground of
metaphysics since at least Plato. But even those who agreed with
Kants critique of metaphysics did not understand his insight into
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cognizable ones are limited, and this limitation overlaps finite consti-
tutability. All in all, it was for this reason that Kant set up the distinc-
tions between thing-in-itself and phenomena, thinking and cognition.
Therefore, we must acknowledge that Kants theory is not in the
least obsolete; indeed it assumes a strong position in contemporary
theories of mathematical foundations.
Kant was aware that by taking up any axiom, an alternative geome-
try could be produced without contradiction; yet, at the same time,
he did consider space and timethe basic forms of sensuous intuition
to be Euclidean. For this reason, he is thought to have grounded Eu-
clidean geometry and Newtonian physics philosophically. Moreover,
his thinking has even been used as a basis to counter non-Euclidean
geometry. But, as I have been arguing, just the opposite is closer to
the truth. His starting point was that, in order for non-Euclidean
geometry to be constituted, Euclidean geometry was a sine qua non.
One of the methods to prove the consistency of an axiomatic system
is to appeal to an intuitive model. For example, in Riemannian
geometry, the axiomatic system takes the sphere of Euclidean geom-
etry as its model; it then assumes a plane to be a sphere in the Eu-
clidean system, a point to be a point on the sphere, and a straight
line to be the greater circle. By so doing, the individual axioms of
Riemannian geometry can be transferred into the theorems of Eu-
clidean geometry. Which is to say that, inasmuch as Euclidean geom-
etry is consistent, so too is non-Euclidean geometry. However, since
the consistency of Euclidean geometry cannot be proven in and of
itself, one has to appeal to intuition, after all. Thus the problematic
of non-Euclidean geometry eventually circles back to Euclidean
geometry.
One should note in passing, however, that the crux of the formal-
ism of David Hilbert (18621943) lies in jettisoning this problematic and
its procedures. In his Foundations of Geometry [Grundlagen der Geometrie,
1899], he insisted that not only Euclids fifth postulate but also
other definitions and postulates are by no means self-evident truths,
in part because concepts such as point and straight line have no
meaning in and of themselves. So Hilbert formalized mathematics
into symbolic logic. This is not to say, however, that just any geome-
tries can be constituted. He set up a precise standard of judgment as
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into the manyOne part of the system will process the properties of
trigonometry, another those of algebra, and so on. Thus one can say that
different techniques are used in these parts.10
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Kant
Likewise, what are grouped together under the umbrella term math-
ematics are polysystems that cannot be centralized. Wittgenstein
stressed this heterogeneity not only because mathematics deals with
heterogeneous Nature in a practical mannerno less than do the
various sciencesbut also, and more important, because hetero-
geneity comes from an acknowledgment of the other who cannot be
interiorized. And this is the second contingency, the first being the
practical and historical nature of mathematics.
Wittgensteins critique of formalism was thus focused on its ten-
dency to exclude the otherness of the other, the contingency of the
relation to the other. Generally speaking, mathematical proofs ap-
pear to be done automatically and peremptorily. But Wittgenstein
stressed that, as to subjects following rules, they are less automatic
than compulsory. This position is reminiscent of the Platothough
unlike Gdels Platowho associated geometric proof with dia-
logue. Or more precisely, if Plato made mathematics infallible, it was
by way of introducing the proof as a dialogue in the sense of collabo-
rative inquiry.
In the Meno, Platos Socrates induces a boy who is not well-
educated in geometry to prove a theorem. In this demonstration,
Socrates proves that there is neither teaching nor learning, but
only recollection [anmnesis]. This is known as Menos paradox
or the paradox of pedagogy. The proof is executed in the form of a
dialogue, but a peculiar one in which the only thing Socrates need
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The Problematic of Synthetic Judgment
say is, You see Meno, that I am not teaching . . . only asking.20 The
prerequisite to the dialogue is a rule that stipulates: Upon the ac-
ceptance of a basic premise (axiom), one must do nothing to con-
tradict it. Proof becomes unattainable at any moment if the boy
utters anything contradictory to what he has said previously. In
other words, the boy has always already been taught to follow the
rules, which he then recollects. Prior to the dialogue, he already
shares the a priori rules. Who taught them to him?
There is nothing extraordinary about Socrates method. It is
based on specific Athenian legal institutions. Nicholas Rescher has
reconsidered dialectics in terms of those forms of disputation and
courtroom procedure in which an interlocutor (prosecutor) pre-
sents his opinion, and an opponent (defendant) counters his point,
followed by the interlocutors response.21 In this way, the first inter-
locutors point does not have to constitute an absolutely infallible,
indisputable thesis. As long as no effective counterproposal is raised
against the initial assertion, it is understood to be valid and conse-
quential. In such argumentation, the interlocutor bears the onus
probandi, the burden of proof; and the defendant is not required to
give testimony. Socrates method clearly follows this course. It is sig-
nificant that Plato began the Meno by describing the case of Socrates
himself, who believed so strongly in the dialogic justice that he ac-
cepted his own death as a result of a verdict. For the Socratic
method, even if the verdict were found to be unjust, it is the process
of justice itself that is of primary importanceand Socrates acknowl-
edged as true only what passed through this process.
In many courts of law, both opponents must obey a common rule
that technically allows the prosecutor and the defense attorney to
exchange roles at any time. Those who do not acknowledge and ad-
here to the legal language game are either ordered out of court or
ruled incompetent by the court. In this sort of game, no matter how
forcefully or enthusiastically they might oppose one another, nei-
ther opponent occupies the position of the other. As Rescher
notes, this dialogue always has the potential to become a mono-
logue. Indeed, in the works of Aristotle and Hegel, dialectics did be-
come a monologue. And though Platos dialogues were written in
the form of conversation, finally they, too, must be considered
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such a whole is only presumed after the fact, from his own language
experience. In the Saussurean system, and its legacy, a word is the
synthesis of the signifiant (the sensible) and the signifi (the supra-
sensible). But the crucial point here is that such a synthesis is estab-
lished only ex post factothat it makes sense to me. In the end, when
Saussure suggested that form (le signifiant) constitutes a differential,
relational system, the architectonic of the system tacitly took as a
premise what Kant had already called transcendental apperception.
It is Roman Jakobson who began to clarify this point. He opposed
Saussures notion that in language there are only differences, and
without positive terms.27 He thought it would be possible to order the
phonetic organization Saussure had left in a jumble by reconstruct-
ing it as a bundle of binary oppositions.
Modern specialists in the field of acoustics wonder with bewilderment how
it is possible that the human ear has no difficulty in recognizing the great
variety of sounds in a language given that they are so numerous and their
variations so imperceptible. Can it really be that it is a purely auditory fac-
ulty that is involved here. No, not at all! What we recognize in spoken lan-
guage is not sound differences in themselves but the different uses to which
they are put by the language, i.e., differences which, though without mean-
ing in themselves, are used in discriminating one from another entities of a
higher level (morphemes, words).28
Phonemes are not the same as voice/sounds; they are form that
comes into existence as differentiality only after entities of a higher
level are presupposed. The same can be said of morphemes, words,
and even sentences; they, too, are all extracted as differentiality (or
form) only when entities of respectively higher levels are presupposed.
This means that structures always and tacitly are premised on
the transcendental subjectivity that synthesizes them. Nevertheless,
structuralists thought it possible to do away with, and even deny,
transcendental subjectivity, because they presumed the existence of
a function that, though nonexistent substantially, makes a system
a system: Thus the zero sign. Jakobson introduced the zero
phoneme in order to complete the phonemic system. A zero-
phoneme, he wrote, is opposed to all other French phonemes by
the absence both of distinctive features and of a consistent sound
characteristic. On the other hand, the zero-phoneme is opposed to
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Transcritique
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Kant
are not a proof that be worth anything for truths even a little difficult to
discover, because it is much more likely that one man alone had found
them than that a whole people had: having learned, having recognized and
having considered all this, I say, I was unable to choose anyone whose opin-
ions might have seemed to me to have to be preferred to those of the oth-
ers, and I found myself constrained, as it were, to undertake to guide myself
by myself.1
It is commonly said that Descartes was a solipsist who closed off dia-
logue and sought to secure truth by way of his concept of ego. As is
evident in the passage just cited, however, Cartesian doubt begins
from his realization that the truths people believe in are simply de-
termined by the example and custom of the community to which
they belong, namely, by shared rules and paradigms. That is to say
that Descartes had already been observing the world in the manner
of a cultural anthropologist. As I pointed out earlier, many postlin-
guistic-turn philosophers reject methods such as his, motivated as
they appear to be in introspection. But the reason Descartes himself
tended toward introspection in the first place was because his prede-
cessors of the philosophia scholasticawhether nominalist or realist
had all thought within the frame of the grammar of the
Indo-European language group. In this respect, the Cartesian cogito
is nothing if not the awareness that our thought is always already
bound by language. In Kants terminology, this is the transcenden-
tal standpoint toward language. The transcendental position is
equivalent to bracketing the imagined self-evidence of the empirical
consciousness in order to reveal the (unconscious) conditions that
constitute it. What is crucial here is that the transcendental stand-
point inexorably accompanies a certain kind of subjectivity.
According to Wittgenstein, as we have also seen, skepticism is
made possible by a language game; it is a part of the game. Cer-
tainly, today, beginning from Cartesian doubt is already a language
game. But what Descartes doubted originally was the specific game
of skepticism that had been dominant since antiquity. As he framed
the problem of doubt in Discourse on Method, Not that I were, in
order to do this, to imitate the skeptics, who doubt only in order to
doubt, and who affect being always undecided: for, on the contrary,
my whole plan tended only toward assuring me, and toward casting
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aside the shifting earth and the sand in order to find the rock or the
clay.2 Certainly, today, this doubt is incorporated into modern phi-
losophy, supporting as it does the philosophy of subjectivity. And,
isnt precisely such an institutionalized doubt what Wittgenstein
sought to undermine? In fact, Wittgenstein, too, called the proper
stance from which to inquire about philosophical issues, from the
vantage point of language, transcendental.3 Here it is possible to
find Wittgensteins otherwise concealed change of attitude,
though he never spoke of it himself. Meanwhile, many of those who
advocate the linguistic turn in the philosophical context, though
often invoking Wittgenstein, forget the problematic of a certain
cogito that is already inexorably involved in the change of attitude.
Let us take up the example of another one of Descartes major
critics, Lvi-Strauss. Speaking of a traditional ethnographer, he criti-
cizes the cogito as follows:
Here they are, he says of his contemporaries, unknown strangers, non-
beings to me since they so wished it! But I detached from them and from
everything, what am I? This is what remains for me to seek (First Walk).
Paraphrasing Rousseau, the ethnographer could exclaim as he first sets eyes
on his chosen savages, Here they are, then, unknown strangers, non-beings
to me, since I wished it so! And I, detached from them and from everything,
what am I? This is what I must find out first.
To attain acceptance of oneself in others (the goal assigned to human
knowledge by the ethnologist), one must first deny the self in oneself.
To Rousseau we owe the discovery of this principle, the only one on
which to base the science of man. Yet it was to remain inaccessible and in-
comprehensible as long as there reigned a philosophy which, taking the
Cogito as its point of departure, was imprisoned by the hypothetical evi-
dences of the self; and which could aspire to founding a physics only at the
expense of founding sociology and even a biology. Descartes believes that
he proceeds directly from a mans interiority to the exteriority of the world,
without seeing that societies, civilizationsin other words, worlds of men
place themselves between these two extremes.4
I return momentarily to Descartes, after noting that while Lvi-
Strauss does pass Descartes off as a villain here, this move is strategic.
His real targets are certain successors of Cartesianism in France
Sartre in particular. On the other hand, Discourse on Method had al-
ready been written from the standpoint of an anthropologist. The
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were not fascinating, interesting strangers, but the other who rejects
empathy la Rousseau.
Lvi-Strauss adds a further claim in Tristes tropiques: The fact that
so much effort and expenditure has to be wasted on reaching the
object of our studies bestows no value on that aspect of our profes-
sion, and should be seen rather as its negative side. The truths that
we seek so far afield only become valid when they have been sepa-
rated from this dross.6 The truths Lvi-Strauss seeks so far afield
precisely as had Descartes before himexist only when they have
been separated out from the pluralism encountered by traveling
and expedition. The ultimate weapon Lvi-Strauss uses against this
process is precisely what Descartes weapon had been: mathematics
(structuralism). Lvi-Strauss acknowledges the existence of universal
reason against/within the various myths and marriage systems he
eventually encounters. If so, the Lvi-Strauss who considered
Rousseau to be founder of anthropology, seeing in him the princi-
ple, the only one on which to base the science of man, should have
quoted Descartes rather than Rousseau, or anybody else.
What is more, Lvi-Strauss encountered the same difficulties as had
Descartes. The unconscious structure he grasps is a deductive en-
tity; and, for this reason, it has been subjected to innumerable criti-
cisms by positivist anthropologists. For him, contrary to his critics,
the last standard upon which to judge the adequacy of hypothetical
models lies in whether or not they have a higher explanatory value
that is itself consistent. And it is the role of experimentation to
examine this value and internal consistency. This is definitely a dif-
ferent method from any that seeks an inductive theorization ad-
duced from the collection of empirical data. To the precise contrary,
this is the Cartesian method par excellencewhich is hardly limited
to or by the natural sciences in the narrow sense.
Lvi-Strausss method contributed mightily to an intellectual revo-
lution, the advent of structuralism, very much because he chose to
start from the axiomatic (or formal) operation by transcendentally
reducing the empirical consciousness of both the observed and the
observer. Michel Serres has maintained that structure should be de-
fined as a sheerly imported concept, namely, from contemporary
formal mathematics. Structure as such is achieved only when the
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they were indubitable, as has been said above; but, because I then desired to
devote myself solely to the search for the truth, I thought that it was neces-
sary that I were to do completely the contrary, and that I were to reject, as
absolutely false, all that in which I could imagine the least doubt, in order to
see whether there would remain, after that, something in my beliefs that
were entirely indubitable. [. . .] I resolved to feign that all the things that
had ever entered my mind were no more true than the illusions of my
dreams. But, immediately afterward, I took note that, while I wanted thus to
think that everything was false, it necessarily had to be that I, who was think-
ing this, were something. And noticing that this truthI think, therefore
I amwas so firm and so assured that all the most extravagant suppositions
of the skeptics were not capable of shaking it, I judged that I could accept
it, without scruple, as the first principle of the philosophy that I was seeking.9
Note the sudden jump that occurs between I doubt and I think.
In Descartes, I doubt is a personal determination of will. And this
I is a singular existenceDescartes himself (1). In a sense, (1) is
an empirical self, and is simultaneously the doubting subject (2),
who doubts the empirical subject (1)by way of which the transcen-
dental ego (3) is discovered. In Descartes discourse, however, the
relationship between these three phases of the ego is blurred.
When Descartes says, I am [sum], if he means that his transcen-
dental ego exists, it is a fallacy, as Kant said. For the transcendental
ego is something that can only be thought, but cannot be or exist,
that is, it cannot be intuited. On the other hand, Spinoza interpreted
I think, therefore I am as neither a syllogism nor a reasoning but
as meaning simply, I am as I think or I am thinking [ego sum cogi-
tans]; or, even more simply and definitively, man thinks [homo cogi-
tant].10 But, speaking more realistically, the Cartesian, I think,
therefore I am, means I am as I doubt [ego sum dubitans]. The de-
termination to doubt the self-evidence of the psychological ego
cannot simply originate from a psychological ego, but neither can it
from the transcendental ego that is discovered by doubt. If this is so,
however, what exists? Actually, as I will show later, the correct way of
formulating the question is not, what exists? but who is it? But
this move requires a detour through Husserl.
The questionWhat exists?was hardly irrelevant to Kant. For
in the transcendental critique, the determination to bracket em-
pirical self-evidence, or I criticize [reprehendo], is omnipresent,
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Kant
notwithstanding the fact that Kant did not mention it. The ultimate
importance of the Discourse on Method lies in the fact that it revealed
another problem in the sum: how does the I who brackets all self-evi-
dence exist?though Descartes never touched upon it again after
this particular text. (To Kant, too, the problematic of sum was finally
imperative. As I touch upon later, the Kantian transcendental critique
was not simply abstract and theoretical, but a matter of his own
existence.) On the other hand, Husserl criticized Kant, to develop
transcendental phenomenology, by returning to Descartes. Accord-
ingly, Husserl wrote, one might almost call transcendental phenom-
enology a neo-Cartesianism, even though it is obligedand precisely
by its radical development of Cartesian motifsto reject nearly all the
well-known doctrinal content of the Cartesian philosophy.11 In the
place of considering the transcendental ego as apperception, as had
Kant, Husserl considered it, as had Descartes, to be a ground from
which solid science can be deduced, and thought it imperative to de-
velop this line more persistently and rigorously than had his predeces-
sor. In this context, Husserl made a noteworthy point:
We can describe the situation also on the following manner. If the Ego, as
naturally immersed in the world, experiencingly and otherwise, is called
interested in the world, then the phenomenologically alteredand, as so
altered, continually maintainedattitude consists in a splitting of the Ego:
in that the phenomenological Ego established himself as disinterested on-
looker, above the naively interested Ego. That this takes place is then itself
accessible by means of a new reflection, which, as transcendental, likewise
demands the very same attitude of looking on disinterestedlythe Egos
sole remaining interest being to see and to describe adequately what he
sees, purely as seen, as what is seen and seen in such and such manner.12
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and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours amuse-
ment, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained,
and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any further.20
Even after this correction, however, Hume continues to spell out his
contradictory feelings about skepticism: It is just empty and frivo-
lous, it results in self-destruction, and so on. These depictions tell us
that, for Hume as for Descartes, to doubt was never merely some
sort of intellectual puzzle. It induced in him an almost morbid state
of mind. But then, after dining with friends and having other diver-
sions, he managessomehowto regain the world of self-evidence.
From the Kantian standpoint, what this transformative event points
to, if negatively, is that the transcendental Ego (or apperception) ex-
ists. The nature of Kantian apperception is that it is revealed as the
lack of itself. In the reading of Heidegger, it is nothing as a being but
exists as an ontological function.
To Hume, practicing transcendental reduction by bracketing the
world of self-evidenceand then coming back to the same world by
unbracketingcould never be voluntary. If it is true that the only
distinction between philosophers and psychotics is that the former
can bracket and unbracket freely and the latter cannot, then David
Hume definitely belongs to the latter group. If, however, Hume is
not a psychotic, it would be wrong to define philosophersnot
scholars of philosophy, of courseas free agents of bracketing. In a cer-
tain sense, they, too, are compelled to doubt the world of self-evidence. It
seems that philosophers intentionally deplete the self-evidence of
the world, but perhaps they do so because they have already lost
self-evidence from the beginning. I am not trying to say that phi-
losophers are close to or candidates for schizophrenia, but I am sug-
gesting that the transcendental reduction in philosophy cannot
merely be a methodology.
Socrates attributed the commencement of his skepticism to the
oracle of Apollo, while Descartes attributed his to a dream. But these
two cases nevertheless indicate the same thing: their doubts are not
motivated simply by their spontaneous wills. Doubting is not a game
we opt to play, but a produced, constructed experience. Doubting,
in tandem with the subject that exists as doubting, ensues from
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never know who Socrates really was, but at least we know what Plato
accomplished in Socrates name: the way of excluding external
thought by internalizing and detoxifying its radicality. In Platos
philosophy, just as in Hegels, all anterior thoughts are superseded
[aufheben] or elevated stored abolished. Platos dialectics (dialo-
gos), established by the exclusion of otherness, were another mono-
logue (monologos).
So when Heidegger praises Parmenides and Heraclitus while at-
tacking Plato, I cannot help but be skeptical about his intentions, as
when he writes: Parmenides stood on the same ground as Heracli-
tus. Where indeed would we expect these two Greek thinkers, the
inaugurators of all philosophy, to stand if not in the being of the es-
sent?27 What does the expression in the being [Sein] of the essent
[Seiendes] mean? Heideggers sophistic rhetoric and forced ety-
mology blind us to a much more crucial matterthe fact that these
philosophers stood in between communities. According to Heidegger,
Heraclitus saw Being as the gathering together of the conflicting,
and Parmenides saw identity as the belonging-together of antago-
nisms.28 In the final analysis, all that this really should mean, how-
ever, is that they thought in the world as a heterogeneous space of
intermundial intercourse, rather than thinking in the space of a com-
munity gathered around a univocal set of rules.
From the beginning, it is impossible for those within a community
to be inaugurators of all philosophy. It was only by standing in be-
tween communities that Heraclitus was able to see Being as the
gathering together of the conflicting, and Parmenides to see iden-
tity as the belonging-together of antagonisms. It is clear that this
radical positionality was lost in the Platonic Socrates, who was firmly
rooted in the community of Athens. Problematizing the loss of
Being, Heidegger may have attacked Plato as the instigator of this
line of thinking, yet his own positionality was isomorphic to Platos
excluding the heterogeneity of the thought that comes from the
topos of trade, and internalizing the denuded skeleton of that
thought. For Heidegger, in the end, the loss of Being was equal to
the loss of the German agrarian community. In our own context,
if the term loss of Being retains any significance at all, it should
be as the loss of the topos as difference, the loss of the space of
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But it was not Hegel who had first proposed this recognition of
particularity. It had been well nurtured by the Romantics. Already
Johann Gottfried Herders concept of language had entailed the
particularity that synthesizes sensibility and understanding, individu-
ality and universality. From the start, however, the syllogism linking
individuality-particularity-universality (or, in the concrete, individual-
race-genus) was not necessarily developed as a property specific to
language. For one thing, nation has always been considered the
middle term (particularity) between individuality and humanity.
Furthermore, in between the natural and the spiritualnature and
freedom in Kants termswas posited organism (qua life) as partic-
ularity. In fact, for Herder, language was always inseparable from the
notion of nation qua organism. Wilhelm von Humboldts idea that
language is an organism was also derived from Herder. For the
Romantics, the idea of nation came to be privileged because of a
grounding logic according to which particularity synthesizes, even
originates, individuality and universality. Within this logic, it is only
particularity that assumes the concrete. This idea is most typically ex-
pressed in the famous words of Joseph Marie Compte de Maistre:
there is no such thing as man in the world. In the course of my life
I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians etc.; I know, too, thanks to
Montesquieu, that one can be a Persian. But as for man, I declare that
I have never met him in my life; if he exists, he is unknown to me.33
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By the same token, for Hegel, the universal is equal to the general. He
continues:
Consequently, what is called the unutterable is nothing else than the un-
true, the irrational, what is merely meant [but is not actually expressed].
If nothing more is said of something than that it is an actual thing, an
external object, its description is only the most abstract of generalities and
in fact expresses its sameness with everything rather than its distinctiveness.
When I say: a single thing, I am really saying what it is from a wholly uni-
versal point of view, for everything is a single thing; and likewise this thing
is anything you like. If we describe it more exactly as this bit of paper, then
I have only uttered the universal all the time. But if I want to help out
languagewhich has the divine nature of directly reversing the meaning of
what is said, of making it into something else, and thus not letting what is
meant get into words at allby pointing out this bit of paper, experience
teaches me what the truth of sense-certainty in fact is: I point it out as a
Here, which is Here of other Heres, or is in its own self a simple together-
ness of many Heres; i.e., it is a universal.40
What Hegel appears to be trying to say here is this: that the individu-
ality of the Here and Now, inasmuch as it is expressed in language,
already belongs to generality; that any individuality that is not gener-
ality is merely meant; and that even the ineffable is constituted
by language. In other words, singularity exists only as a divine nature
of language. The political implication of this statement is that
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worlds are total ways the world might have been, or states or histo-
ries of the entire world.43 But in our context, we have to be cautious
about two things: first, that possible worlds are thought only from
the vantage point of the existing real world or the world that has
existed; and, second, that possible worlds are not worlds very far
removed from this world. According to Russell, the proper name
Mt. Fuji can be transposed to the description the highest moun-
tain in Japan. But let us imagine a world in which Mt. Fuji is not the
highest mountain in Japan. (And, in historical fact, Mt. Fuji was not
the highest mountain in the former Japanese Empire, which had an-
nexed Taiwan.) In this case, while we could say that Mt. Fuji is not
the highest mountain in Japan, we cannot say that the highest
mountain in Japan is not the highest mountain in Japan. Thinking
of the real world through possible worlds in this manner, the differ-
ence between proper names (Kripkes) and definite descriptions
(Russells) becomes clear. Kripke calls the proper name a rigid
designator because it is adequate to and in all possible worlds. He
negates, most of all, the idea that the individual, no matter what it
might designate, is no more than a set of characteristics. This is to
say that the proper name is unrelated to the description of an indi-
viduals characteristics, but indicates instead the individuality of an
individual in a direct way.
Seen from our point of view, Kripke criticizes Russell for reducing
the world with proper names to the circuit of generality-individuality.
To Kripke, even names of species, which are deemed general nouns,
are ultimately proper names. In this one can see his design to recon-
sider natural science as natural historycontrary to Russell, who
sought to reduce natural science to logic. In a different sense from
Russell, Hegel, too, had reduced the history of philosophy into a
logic without proper names. Proper names presuppose a singularity
that cannot dissolve into generality. History itself is no longer history
if not for proper names. But, at just this point, we have to approach
the problematic with another of our concernssociety-community.
Kripke stresses that rigid designation by proper name cannot be a
private matter; naming is done by the community and by a chain of
historical transmission. When Kripke uses the term community,
however, the transmission must be, in a strict sense, the one that
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I have waited to deal with Kantian ethics until now, the last chapter
of the section. But I have been tacitly talking about itespecially
via the problematic of the other. The transcendental position that
began with the pronounced parallax between my stance and the
others stance persistently entails the problematic of alterity. In this
sense, the transcendental attitude is thoroughly ethical. Speaking of
ethics as a specific genre often blinds us to that aspect. For instance,
art is customarily defined as a mediator between nature and freedom,
namely, between scientific knowledge and morality. Yet scientific
recognition involves as its premise both the activity of understanding
(or imagination-power) that sets up hypotheses of the natural world
and the existence of the others that would make the universality of
the hypotheses possible. That is, it contains elements common to
both art and morality. If so, what Kant thought with the terms free-
dom, nature, and the mediator do not aptly correspond to the offi-
cially existing objective domains of morality, scientific recognition,
and art. His concepts were not confined to them. And such open-
ness must also be true in such domains as history and economy that
he did not write about as critique. In his book on Nietzsche, Deleuze
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said that what Nietzsche had sought to do was write the fourth cri-
tique that Kant had not completed.44 For that matter, what Marx
sought to do in his critique of political economy would be another
critique in the series.
Now let me begin with Kants theory of art (or aesthetics). Pre-
Kantian classicists thought that the essence of the aesthetic experi-
ence existed in the objective form, while post-Kantian romanticists
maintained that it existed in subjective emotion. Though Kant is
often deemed a predecessor of romanticism, his thinking in fact
operated in critical oscillation between romanticism and classicism,
assuming the same transcritical stance that he took, in a different di-
mension, between empiricists and rationalists. He certainly did not
compromise between the dichotomies or contexts. Instead, he ques-
tioned the ground that makes art art, in the same way that he ques-
tioned the ground that makes cognition cognition.
A certain object is received as artwork only thanks to the opera-
tion of bracketing other interests projected onto the object. Be it a
natural object, a mechanical reproduction, or a daily utensil, the na-
ture of the object in and of itself does not matter directly. Seeing
an object by bracketing daily interests, or the change in attitude it-
self, makes the object an artwork. The common saying that Kants
aesthetics is subjective is correct to a certain extent, with the proviso
that the Kantian subjectivity is totally different from the romanticist
one. Kants subjectivity is the will to execute transcendental brack-
eting. It is for this reason that the Kantian critique is still sug-
gestive while classicist and romanticist aesthetics became obsolete
long ago.45
When Marcel Duchamp submitted the urinal on a pedestal,
signed R Mutt and titled Fountain, to the exhibition of The Soci-
ety of Independent Artists in New York in 1917, he questioned what
makes art art as a conceptual and institutional analysis. What he
shed light on in this peculiar manner was very much one of the
Kantian problematics, namely, to see things by bracketing daily in-
terests.46 And another crucial point Kant proposed is of course that
there is no universality in aesthetic judgment, though it is required;
that is, when one considers a certain thing to be universal, it is
always merely based upon historically engendered common sense.
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This antithesis should be read not from the standpoint of the causal-
ity of modern science, but of Spinozian determinism. According to
Spinoza, everything in the world is determined necessarily, but the
causality is so complicated that there is no other choice for us but to
assume freedom and contingency. Kant approves this antithesis,
namely, the fact that what we consider as a determination of free will
is always already that by the complex of causalities.
I am never free at the point of time in which I act. Indeed, even if I assume
that my whole existence is independent from any alien cause (such as
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ignored its result.53 One must not forget, however, that he sustained,
at the same time, the antithesis: I am never free at the point of time
in which I act. To repeat, he certainly said: act as if the maxim of
your action were to become by your will a universal law of nature. But the
fact of the matter is that the intention and the result of action are
different things, as Wittgenstein said: And to think one is obeying
the rule is not to obey a rule.54 We do things differently from our
intentions, and it is extremely rare that what we intend is actually re-
alized. The most crucial point here is that of responsibility, the re-
sponsibility for the result. Only when we are considered free agents,
though we are not at all in reality, do we become responsible. Kants
phrase, this deed could be regarded as entirely conditioned in re-
gard to the previous state, as though with that act the agent has
started a series of consequences entirely from himself, means just
that. When we have done something wrong without knowing that it
would be harmful (or sinful), are we still responsible even if we did
not know it? Those who have the potency to know that it was harm-
ful are said to be responsible.
While in the first conflict of transcendental ideas, the thesisthe
world has a beginning in time and in space it is also enclosed in
boundariesand antithesisthe world has no beginning and no bounds in
space, but is infinite with regard to both time and space 55are both
proven to be false by antinomy, in the third conflict of transcenden-
tal ideas, both thesis and antithesis can be established. Why? Because
the thesis signifies the stance of seeing human action by bracketing
natural causality, while the antithesis signifies the stance of seeing
the causality of human action by bracketing peoples assumption of
freedom. As long as they are bracketing different domains, they can
stand together. Let me call the former a practical stance, and the lat-
ter a theoretical stance. And, as evident now, the theoretical and
practical domains do not exist in and of themselves; they exist only
when one subjectively takes theoretical and practical stances.
Critique of Pure Reason is aimed at refuting the metaphysical argu-
mentations that seek to prove self, subject, and freedom as sub-
stance. On the other hand, Critique of Practical Reason queries the
ways by which self, subject, and freedom can exist in the phase
where the necessity of nature [Naturnotwendigkeit] is bracketed. In
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the general of morals. For him, the moral domain exists only in the
imperative (or duty): be free! What the moral law is telling us is
nothing other than to be free and to treat others as free agents. As
I have mentioned before, that Kant saw freedom in obeying duty
caused many misunderstandings. It is easily mistaken for obeying
the duties imposed by community and nation-state. Nonetheless
Kants point was to grasp morality not in good and evil but in free-
dom. In the (theoretical) dimension where we are mainly tossed
about by natural/social causalities, there is no good and evil. In ac-
tuality, there is nothing like freedom (causa sui) sensu stricto; all
acts are determined by causes. Yet if freedom as such (as a regulative
idea of reason) intervenes at all, it is only at the moment when we
consider ourselves as the cause of all of our acts. The imperative
be free is equal to the imperative of bracketing natural causes.
Nietzsche, who accused Kant of dividing the world between phe-
nomenon (read nature) and thing-in-itself (read freedom), stated as
follows:
My new path to a YesPhilosophy, as I have hitherto understood and lived
it, is a voluntary quest for even the most detested and notorious sides of
existence. From the long experience I gained from such a wandering
through ice and wilderness, I learned to view differently all that had hith-
erto philosophized: the hidden history of philosophy, the psychology of its
great names, came to light for me. How much truth can a spirit endure,
how much truth does a spirit dare?this became for me the real standard
of value. Error is cowardiceevery achievement of knowledge is a conse-
quence of courage, of severity toward oneself, of cleanliness toward one-
selfSuch an experimental philosophy as I live anticipates experimentally
even the possibilities of the most fundamental nihilism; but this does not
mean that it must halt at a negation, a No, a will to negation. It wants rather
to cross over to the opposite of thisto a Dionysian affirmation of the
world as it is, without subtraction, exception, or selectionit wants the eter-
nal circulation:the same things, the same logic and illogic of entangle-
ments. The highest state a philosopher can attain: to stand in a Dionysian
relationship to existencemy formula for this is amor fati.62
In On the Genealogy of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche re-
buked morals as the resentment of the weak. We must be careful to
interpret the word weak, however. In the most straightforward inter-
pretation, Nietzsche himself, who failed as a scholar and suffered
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from syphilis, was nothing but the weak. But the case is not so sim-
ple. To him, the strong or the berman is the one who accepts
such a miserable life as ones own creation in the place of attribut-
ing it to someone else or to given conditions. That is his formula of
amor fati. The berman is not an exceptional human. And amor fati
is the stance to accept ones destiny determined by external causes
(nature) as if it were derivative of ones free will (consistent with the
principle of causa sui), in Kantian terms. This is a practical stance
par excellence. Nietzsche scrutinized the way of being a free subject
in the practical sense. His thoughts have nothing to do with affirma-
tion of the status quo. And his will to power is attained by bracket-
ing the determination of causality; nevertheless what he forgot was
the need to see the world by unbracketing it now and then. That is,
while attacking the resentment of the weak, Nietzsche did not dare
to see the real relations that necessarily produce it. He ignored the
view that individuals are finally the products of social relations, no
matter how much they think they are beyond them.
Theodor Adorno read Kants moral imperative as a social norm
and criticized this point in reference to Freud. According to
Adorno, Kant excluded the genetic moment from moral philoso-
phy, and in recompense, attributed to it a noumenal characteristic.
No Kant interpretation that would object to his formalism and undertake to
have the substance demonstrate the empirical moral relativity which Kant
eliminated with the help of that formalismno such interpretation would
reach for enough. The law, even in its most abstract form, has come to be;
its painful abstractness is sedimented substance, dominion reduced to its
normal form of identity. Psychology has now concretely caught up with
something which in Kants day was not known as yet, and to which he there-
fore did not need to pay specific attention; with the empirical genesis of
what, unanalyzed, was glorified by him as timelessly intelligible. The
Freudian school in its heroic period, agreeing on this point with the other
Kant, the Kant of the Enlightenment, used to call for ruthless criticism of
the super-ego as something truly heterogeneous and alien to the ego. The
super-ego was recognized, then, as blindly, unconsciously internalized
social coercion.63
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Kant
One cannot project ones empathy onto the dead. Neither can one
represent their will. They never talk; they never show their interest.
Those who speak for the sake of the dead are just speaking for them-
selves. Those who mourn for the dead do it in order to forget them.
By mourning, the dead wont change; it is we who change. By not
changing at all, they reveal our changes. Thus they are cunning.
They are the others in this very sense. Seeing the others as the thing-
in-itself, as Kant did, is equal to seeing the others as someone from
whom one can never evoke mutual consent, onto whom one can
never project a representation, and of whom one can never speak
as a representative. They are, however, different from Levinass
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absolute Other. They are the relative others who are around one
everyday. What is absolute is not the others themselves but our rela-
tionship with the relative others.
I have pointed out that the inclination toward universality in
Kants epistemology and aesthetics premises the future other. In the
same way, in order for moral law to be universal, not only does it
have to be formal, but it also has to presume the future other. And
in the final analysis, the future other implies the past otherthe
deadbecause for the future other, one is dead. One must not
forget ones destined position in history.
In this precise sense, the Kantian critique essentially involves the
problematic of history. At the end of his career, Kant began to tackle
the problems of history head-on. Yet this was not a change of atti-
tude, because his stance, both theoretical and practical, persisted. The-
oretically speaking, history has no end; it has only a complex of
causality. (Those who pursue the causality of history must persist in
it without the assumption of any finality.) But, from the beginning,
the meaning and end of history do not exist in the same dimension
as theoretical scrutiny; they are practical problems par excellence.
Kant approached history with the same stance as the one he took
in Critique of Judgment: Although there is no end in natural history, a
certain finality may be presumed. Although there is no end in
human history, it can be seen as if it had a finality. According to
him, We should be content with providence and with the course of
human affairs as a whole, which does not begin with good and then
proceed to evil, but develops gradually from the worse to the better;
and each individual is for his own part called upon by nature itself to
contribute towards this progress to the best of his ability.69 It is easy
to refute this teleological position theoretically. Being theoretical is
equal to seeing things by bracketing ends.70 In the first place, Kant
himself considered such an idea of history as transcendental illu-
sion. What is more important, however, is that Kant located a puz-
zle in the relationship between generationsthat which appears to
assume an end in human history.
Yet nature does not seem to have been concerned with seeing that man
should live agreeably, but with seeing that he should work his way onwards
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to make himself by his own conduct worthy of life and well-being. What re-
mains disconcerting about all this is firstly, that the earlier generations
seem to perform their laborious tasks only for the sake of the later ones, so
as to prepare for them a further stage from which they can raise still higher
the structure intended by nature; and secondly, that only the later genera-
tions will in fact have the good fortune to inhabit the building on which a
whole series of their forefathers (admittedly, without any conscious inten-
tion) had worked without themselves being able to share in the happiness
they were preparing. But no matter how puzzling this may be, it will appear
as necessary as it is puzzling if we simply assume that one animal species was
intended to have reason, and that, as a class of rational beings who are mor-
tal as individuals but immortal as a species, it was still meant to develop its
capacities completely.71
That one cannot share in the happiness [one was] preparing im-
plies that even though an individual intends to struggle and die for
future generations, future generations will neither acknowledge nor
thank that individual for such sacrifice. One does the same vis--vis
ones ancestors. Of course, within communities and nation-states,
certain people are thanked and praised emblematically after their
deaths. But community worship is another story entirely. As Walter
Benjamin claimed, history belongs to the victors. But most of ones
efforts will be ignored by the future others. What Kant stressed was
precisely that we have to endure this disconcerting absurdity. For
whatever we do for the future others, our acts are motivated by our
own problems. For freedom has nothing to do with happiness. Free-
dom is not the same as the negation of happiness, yet the imperative
be free! is often cruel.
Kants theory of morals is historical in essence because, as I have
tried to show, it implicates the requirement that the moral law be re-
alized historically: So act that you use humanity, whether in your
own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as
an end, never merely as a means. At the same time, however, he never
ignored the natural historical process. As Hermann Cohen once re-
minded us, it is important that Kant stressed here never merely
as.72 With this, Kant also took as a premise the production and the
relation of productionthe domain that Marx scrutinized in Capi-
tal. To Kant, the use of others humanity as a means was already an
inevitability in the production and the relation of production in
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II
Marx
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4
Transposition and Critique
4.1 Transposition
134
Marx
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Kant, for his part, rarely left Knigsberg during his lifetime.
Among philosophers, Kant was perhaps the least inclined to travel.
But Knigsberg, though geographically remote, was not in the least
a rustic, provincial town. It was one of the commercial centers of the
Baltic Sea, then the site of the most active Northern European trade.
It was a city where various kinds of information intersected. Kant
wrote about it:
A city like Knigsberg on the river Pregel, the capital of a state, where the
representative National Assembly of the government resides, a city with a
university (for the cultivation of the sciences), a city also favored by its loca-
tion for maritime commerce, and which, by way of rivers, has the advan-
tages of commerce both with the interior of the country as well as with
neighboring countries of different languages and customs, can well be
taken as an appropriate place for enlarging ones knowledge of people as
well as of the world at large, where such knowledge can be acquired even
without travel.2
Because of the sea traffic, it was in a sense closer to London, the cap-
ital of the British Empire, than Berlin was. Knigsberg, having once
belonged to East Prussia, was later occupied by Russia and has been
a part of it ever since. Kants cosmopolitanism is inseparable from
the atmosphere of the citywhich, one can say, he chose. Like Hegel
and Fichte, Kant was invited to teach at the state academy in Berlin;
unlike the others, he rejected the invitation. Had he accepted, he
would have been compelled to think from the standpoint of the
state. Hence, Kants refusal was in a sense a transposition, and an
exile lacking physical movement.
And Marx. When considering him, too, one is drawn into think-
ing about transposition and its significance in the formation of
thought. But one cannot simplemindedly emphasize Marx the
refugee. For the fact is that Marx was deported and exiled to Britain,
but he was later pardoned and returned home for a brief period in
the 1850s. He then chose to return to England and London, be-
cause this nationthe most advanced in capitalist developmentand
its capital were ideal for his analysis of capitalism. Therefore, he can-
not plainly be considered a political refugee. He chose to live in Lon-
don. The point to be stressed is that Marx also thought in the
intersticethe transcritical spacewhere one has to confront
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Marx
abstractly, since, of course, idealism does not know real, sensuous ac-
tivity as such.7
Marxs Copernican turn, too, occurred more than once; and the
discursive transpositions were always accompanied by travel between
real existing places. The German Ideology was written from such an
interstice:
If we wish to rate at its true value this philosophic charlatanry, which awak-
ens even in the breast of the righteous German citizen a glow of patriotic
feeling, if we wish to bring out clearly the pettiness, the parochial narrow-
ness of this whole Young-Hegelian movement and in particular the tragi-
comic contrast between the illusions of these heroes about their
achievements and the actual achievements themselves, we must look at the
whole spectacle from a standpoint beyond the frontiers of Germany.8
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world becomes a mere idea, for him mere ideas are transformed into sensu-
ously perceptible beings. The figments of his brain assume corporeal form.
A world of tangible, palpable ghosts is begotten within his mind. That is
the secret of all pious visions and at the same time it is the general form of
insanity.13
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It was the ghosts and ideas from the past that were ruling the parties
of the time: they could understand what they were doing only in
terms of the past; that is, they were dominated by the historical
words and phraseslanguage. If so, it was isomorphic to what Marx
pointed out with respect to the German philosophers: that they were
too eager to fiddle with Hegelian problems and criticize Hegel by
expanding this or that detail of the Hegelian system, but that they
were finally little more than an undersized representation, a farce,
of Hegel himself. While Hegel at least posed a system of thought
outright, the Young Hegelians, merely as his chorus, were obsessed
with arguments, ostensibly grandiose, but in actuality empty and
fruitless. For the German philosophers, the Hegelian system as the
tradition of all the dead generations weigh[ed] like a nightmare on
the[ir living] brain. The Eighteenth Brumaire thus performed a dex-
terous satire of Hegels Philosophy of History. In the process of the
political drama of 1848 to 1851, Louis, the nephew of Napoleon
Bonaparte (who was, for Hegel, the very epitome of a world histori-
cal individual [weltgeschichtliches Individuum]) came to hold the seat
of power by resorting to that very same illusion of the world histori-
cal individual; and this notwithstanding that he had no ideal nor
assignment to be realized other than his given roleto repress, as
long as possible, the contradictions inherent in the capitalist econ-
omy by way of state intervention. In this manner, Louis Bonaparte
became the enduring prototype for all counterrevolutionaries,
including twentieth-century fascists.
What Marx paid attention to most in this text was the aspect that
this particular process of events came into existence within the par-
liamentary system (the system of representatives) as a given. The rev-
olution of February 1848 delivered universal suffrage for the first
time, and this was accomplished under the republicanism that had
abolished the monarchy. The process that was brought to a close by
the installment of petit Louis the Emperor could have occurred only
under the bourgeois parliamentary system. Marx pointed out the
existence of the real social classes behind the representation. Later
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press, in short, the ideologists of the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie itself,
the representatives and the represented, were alienated from one another
and no longer understood each another.19
146
Marx
should have been Engelss before Marxs.22 The crucial point here is
that social classes can appear as they are only by way of the dis-
courses (of their representatives), and not in the least according to
the great law of motion of history. But Marx also points to the exis-
tence of a class which, without representatives, without discourses
that speak for their class interest, has to be represented by someone
totally unrelated to them.
In so far as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence
that separate their mode of life, their interests and their culture from those
of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they
form a class. In so far as there is merely a local interconnection among
these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests begets no
community, no national bond and no political organization among them,
they do not form a class. They are consequently incapable of enforcing
their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or
through a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be rep-
resented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their mas-
ter, as an authority over them, as an unlimited governmental power that
protects them against the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine
from above. The political influence of the small-holding peasants, there-
fore, finds its final expression in the executive power subordinating society
to itself.23
The fact was that the small-holding peasants who first appeared on
the political stage supported Bonaparte. But they welcomed him not
as their representative but as their Emperor. We have seen that, es-
pecially from the twentieth century onward, this class has welcomed
and supported Fascism most fervently. But more crucially, it was the
system of representative democracy that gave them this role in the
political theatre.24 For instance, Hitlers regime came into existence
from within the ideal representative system of the Weimar Republic.
A fact unknown to the West and often ignored is that the Emperor
[Tenno] Fascism of Japan appeared only after the realization of uni-
versal suffrage in 1928. In the 1930s in Europe, Marxists considered
Hitler simply as an agent for the bourgeois economyseeking to
save it from crisisand thought it would be enough to reveal that
infra-structural fact. Like the Nazis, Marxists also found the
Weimar congress deceitful. But the masses gradually chose to be
represented by Nazism, as opposed to Marxists expectations. This
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division, but the principles of the capitalist economy that are over-
looked under the complex formation of the real social hierarchy.
This division, therefore, should not be mechanically employed as a
scheme for actual historical development.
By scrutinizing the French experience in The Eighteenth Brumaire,
Marx grasps class and class struggle as difference forming a polymor-
phous complex, and politics as a matter of discursive and represen-
tative apparati. He also, however, offers a principal reflection upon
the relationship between state and capital, taking France as a model.
In his Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Engels stated that Marxs
thought consisted of German philosophy, French socialism, and
English political economy. I would rather say that it really exists in
his transcritique between them. Written in a journalistic style, The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte yet offers a principal reflection,
different from yet certainly as important as the one in Capitalthe
critique of nation-state (polis) economics [Zur Kritik der Politischen
konomie]. It should be read as the critique of national politics, as it were.
To conclude this chapter on political representation, I would like
to touch upon what dictatorship of the bourgeoisie meant to Marx,
because it is certainly not irrelevant to his dictatorship of the prole-
tariat. It is crucial to note that Marx saw a dictatorship of the bour-
geoisie in universal suffrage, the backdrop of the coup of the
Eighteenth Brumaire, rather than a direct violent means of rule. It is
a system wherein people of all classes participate in the elections.
But that is not allat the same time, and inversely, in this system, all
individuals are, for the first time, separated in principle from all class
relations and relations of production. The representative assembly
had already existed in the feudal system as well as in the absolutist
monarchy; but it was at the point when universal suffrage and then
secret balloting were introduced that the representative assembly
turned into the unequivocal bourgeois parliament. Hiding who votes
who for whom, secret voting liberates people from their relations;
at the same time, however, it erases the traces of their relations.
Thus the relationship between representative and represented is
radically severed once, and becomes arbitrary. So it is that the repre-
sentative chosen by secret balloting is no longer controlled by the
represented. In other words, the representative can behave as if he
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represented everyone, even though that is not the case. That is the
nature of dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. It is not quite the same as
the bourgeois class running society by occupying the parliament.
Rather it is a mechanism that erases class relations or the relations of
domination by temporarily reducing people into free and equal
individualsand this mechanism itself functions as the dictatorship
of the bourgeoisie. In elections, the freedom of individuals is guar-
anteed, but this exists only at the moment that the hierarchical rela-
tions in the real relations of production are suspended. So it is that
there is no democracy sensu stricto in capitalist enterprises, outside
elections. That is to say, managers are not elected by employees, and
furthermore not by their secret voting. And it is impossible that state
bureaucrats are elected by peoples direct voting. Peoples freedom
exists only to the extent that they can choose their representatives
in political elections. And, in reality, universal suffrage is just an
elaborate ritual to give a public consensus to what has already been
determined by the state apparati (military and bureaucracy).
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154
Marx
1817. The crisis hit precisely as the most radical critique of his eco-
nomic theory. Although money had been at work in reality in the
capitalist economy, it was theoretically cremated. In his critique of
classical economics, Marx thus reintroduced the money they had
eliminated in their enlightenment.
Money was thoroughly absent from the perspective of classical
economics. Adam Smith was well aware that the developments of
commodity exchange and division of labor transform society, but he
overlooked the fact that both are rendered only by money, and
furthermore, only as a movement of capital. Smith wrongly believed
that the worldwide division of laborconstantly being organized
and reorganized by merchant capitalhad existed since the very
onset of economic history, and it followed that money was deemed
by him a mere barometer or medium. The classical economists
labor theory of value negated the dimension proper to commod-
ity exchange and conceptually reduced the source of value to
production in general. It cast a perspective by which to see precapi-
talist societies from the vantage point of production and relation
of production, namely, from the viewpoint of historical materi-
alism, thereby overlooking the dimension proper to the capitalist
economy.
Capital is a kind of self-increasing, self-reproductive money.
Marxs first formulation of this is M-C-M. It represents the activity of
merchant capital, with which usurers capital, M-M is made possi-
ble. According to Marx, merchants capital and usurers capital are
antediluvian forms of capital. The formulation of merchants capi-
tal is nevertheless also consistent with industrial capital; the main
point of difference is that in industrial capital the content of C is a
complex entity, that is, C mp (means of production) L (labor-
power); thus, in Marxs equation, the movement of industrial capital
is M-{mp L}-M. At the stage at which industrial capital became
dominant, a divergence occurred: merchants capital came to be
merely commercial capital, while usurers capital became bank or
financial capital. But, in order to consider capital in the full sense,
one should always start from the consideration of the process M-C-M,
for capital is equal to the whole process of the transubstantiation or
metamorphosis.
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Seen from a different angle, this process is also the process of cir-
culation: C-M and M-C, the domain where it appears that only com-
modity exchange via money is taking place. So much so that money
is merely a measure of value albeit a means of purchase and pay-
ment. What Adam Smith and David Ricardo both sought to eluci-
date was a mechanism that equilibrates and adjusts the division of
labor and exchange. This theoretical inclination was shared by both
classical and neoclassical economists. What they omitted was the fact
that expansions of division of labor and exchange happen only as
the self-reproductive movement of capital/money. Whether classical
or neoclassical, economists tend to give primary importance to the
production of wealth by division of labor and the exchange of
wealththings which are merely the tail end of capitals movement.
To Adam Smith, that people pursue their own profits is conse-
quently beneficial to the whole; he attributed it to the auto-adjustment
mechanismthe invisible hands (of God)in the marketplace.
On the other hand, Marx located a salto mortale in M-C-M, at the
moment C-M is realized or not, that is, the moment when it is deter-
mined whether or not the commodity is sold. In order to escape the
critical moment and continue its self-reproductive movement, capi-
tal has to create an artificial pact of presuming that the commodity
has already been sold. This is so-called credit. Crisis is not caused
merely by an accumulation of the discouraging outcome of com-
modities not being sold, but very much by a forced revelationat
the moment of final liquidationthat commodities that are sup-
posed to have been sold have not been sold in reality. Crisis is
caused by the overheating of credit. And this phenomenon has
existed since before the advent of industrial capitalism.34
In England, German Idealism was mainly despised. Before he came
to England, Marx himself had been scorning the speculative philoso-
phy that began with Fichtethat considered Ego and Spirit as auto-
poetically creating the worldas a case of insanity isolated from the
outer world. But, ironically, in England there was an uncanny coinci-
dence between the real and the ideatic. There money-dealing capital
was autonomousprecisely like the Ego and Spiritas a self-increasing
entity (M-M). The investors thought it a matter of course that they
got interest from their savings as well as dividends from their stock
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For that matter, even Marx himself was, up until the mid-1850s,
not much better than these others. He had believed that crisis would
utimately collapse the capitalist society. But it was after this hoping-
for-the-day theory failed that his understanding of capitalism deep-
ened. Up until then, Marx had thought that crises would occur due
to the anarchic impetus of capitalist production: that the crises
would break down the capitalist economy and then a revolution
would take place to finally expunge the crises as illness. From this
derived Engels and Lenins idea to solve the crises by way of a
planned economy. As we all know now, even though the planned
economy might succeed in avoiding crisis, it would inevitably cause
another illness.
Crisis is a chronic disease inherent in the capitalist economy, yet
also a solution to its internal defects. In other words, capitalism
makes temporary repairs to its innate problem by crises, thus it will
never collapse because of it. It can be compared with hysteria, the
springboard of Freudian psychoanalysis. For an ill patient, hysteria is
itself a solution, thanks to which the patients stability is secured for
the time being. But, for Freud, what was more crucial than hysteria
was the mechanism of unconscious that would cause itwhich exists
in a person whether or not he or she is ill. In the same way, for
Marx, crisis was no longer the terminator of capitalist economy. It
became important only because it would reveal the truth of the capi-
talist economy that is invisible in the everyday economy. Thus Marxs
stance on seeing the capitalist economy by way of the pronounced
parallax provoked by the crisis.
Marx wrote Capital in conformity with Hegelian Logic, wherein
the status of capital is very similar to that of Spirit (Geist). Capital is
nevertheless nothing like a materialistic inversion of the Hegelian
system. In his attempt to grasp crisis as an innate element in capital-
ism, it required Marx take a completely non-Hegelian viewpoint.
This was, I insist, the transcendental standpoint. In Kantian philoso-
phy, crisis would function like a critique of capital Geist that seeks
to self-expand over its boundaries. Thus for Marx to elucidate
the drive of capitalism what was required was a kind of transcenden-
tal retrospection. In this aspect, Marxian critique comes close to
psychoanalysis.
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There have been many disputes over assessments of early and late
Marx. One was a tendency to appreciate the alienation theory of
early Marx as opposed to the economic determinism of later Marx.
Counter to this, Althusser stressed the epistemological break that oc-
curred in the period of The German Ideology. There is an important
aspect of Marx that both of the tendencies overlooked, that is, the
critique of Marx, or Marx as a critic. As I have been pointing out,
Marxs thought could not have been formed if not for the incessant
transpositions and turns. And it is wrong to induce some essential
philosophy out of it.
In his doctoral dissertation, Difference between the Democritean
and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature in General, written before his
Economic and Philosophical Manuscript, Marx had already pre-
sented his critical (and more crucially, transcritical) stance. In this,
Marx sees the difference between Democritus and Epicurus in terms
of their philosophies of nature. It is commonsense that there are
large differences in their philosophies; yet in their philosophies of
nature they were very similar. Epicurus modified Democritus me-
chanical determinism by introducing the concept of the swerve of
the atom away from the straight line. This had been considered as a
diversion, rather than a serious development. Marx, on the other
hand, sought to prove that the difference between their philosophi-
cal systems derived precisely from this micro difference. The
uniqueness of Marxs method in his dissertation lies in that it speaks
of the difference between Democritus and Epicurus in their almost
identical philosophies of nature rather than the whole of their
philosophies.
Indeed, on the one hand it is an old and entrenched prejudice to identify
Democritean and Epicurean physics, so that Epicurus modifications are
seen as only arbitrary vagaries. On the other hand I am forced to go into
what seem to be microscopic examinations as far as details are concerned.
But precisely because this prejudice is as old as the history of philosophy,
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and practice lie in his transcritique. Finally, Marx was less a scholar
of philosophy and political economy than a journalistic critic.
166
Marx
167
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168
Marx
who drew the idea of surplus value from Ricardos labor value
theory long before Proudhon drew the idea of profit-theft from
Smith: exemplary works include Thomas Hodgskins Political
Economy (1827), and William Thompsons An Inquiry into the Principles
of the Distribution of Wealth (1824). These led to the Chartist movement.
Another reason Proudhon believed it possible to dissolve capital and
the state through workers association without workers political strug-
gle was that, in 1830s France, industrial capitalism was underdeveloped
and there were very few industrial workers. Saint-Simonism, which was
then predominant, advocated development of industry and redistribu-
tion of wealth to the workers: It was the precursor of corporatism. In
fact, the large industrial revolution in France took place at the time
of Louis Bonaparte, a Saint-Simonist, by whom the socialists were
coopted. In contrast, Proudhon was unswervingly opposed to such
state-socialism. It was just like the way Marx had objected to Lasserls
state socialism, which conformed to Bismarcks state capitalism.
Meanwhile, there was neither industrial capitalism nor socialist
movement in the Germany of the 1830s. They existed only as ideas, to
the extent that an introductory book by Lorenz von Stein, Socialism
and Communism in France Today,49 had a large influence. Left Hegelians
were, in a word, little more than a movement of those philosophers
who were impacted by French socialism and communism. The
movement appeared most importantly and crucially as a critique of
Hegel. Hegelian philosophy was a dominant state ideology, and
furthermore, Hegel himself was well informed about classical eco-
nomics and even criticized it philosophically in his system, with the
stance that the state qua reason would transcend the contradiction
and disruption caused by the civil society as the system of wants.
All Left Hegelians, headed by Feuerbach, assumed the critical
stance against Hegel. Feuerbach called himself a communist, seek-
ing to practice the German philosophical interpretation of French
communism. However, other young philosophers, motivated by
him, began to extend the Feuerbachian critique to the sociopolitical
sphere. For instance, Marx criticized Hegels Philosophy of Right by
applying the Feuerbachian critique of Christianity. Feuerbach
asserted that man, a sensual being, had alienated its own species
being (communal essence) in the phantasm of God and should
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retrieve it. Likewise, Marx considered that human beings are species-
essential beings only in the political state (parliamentary democracy)
qua communal fantasy, while in civil society (the social state), they ac-
tually pursue their own interests, resulting in inequality and repres-
sion. He considered this gap as self-alienation. But, to abandon such
a fantasy and realize the communal being in reality, we would have
to change the civil society and abandon the capitalist economy.
What should be stressed here is the fact that Marx did not agree with
the idea of abolishing the capitalist economy by way of the state. It
derived from Hegels position which then, in later times, grounded
state capitalism as well as state socialism. Meanwhile, Marxs goal was
to abolish the political state itself, and for this purpose precisely, it
was necessary to recompose the civil society taken over by the capi-
talist economy into a social state. This was basically the same as the
anarchist idea, which Marx never left behind. Around this time,
however, Marx did not have any concrete or practical scope toward
the realization; his thinking was still revolving around the concept of
species being, and did not necessarily exceed Feuerbach philosoph-
ically. It is not surprising that, for Max Stirner, Marx up to this point
appeared to be a follower of Feuerbach. Furthermore, Marx was at
the time an admirer of Proudhon.
Without considering this context, we would not understand why
Stirner (in The Ego and Its Own) criticized not only Feuerbach but
also Proudhon. Stirner claimed that what Feuerbach called Man was
a version in disguise of God or Spirit, where this myself (deicitic) was
fatally missing. He made a similar remark on Proudhon.
So Feuerbach instructs us that, if one only inverts speculative philosophy,
always makes the predicate the subject, and so makes the subject the object,
and principle, one has the undraped truth, pure and clean. With this, to be
sure, we lost the narrow religious standpoint, lost the God, who from this
standpoint is subject; but we take in exchange for it the other side of reli-
gious standpoint, the moral standpoint. Thus we no longer say God is
love, but love is divine.50
Furthermore,
Piety has for a century received so many blows, and had to hear its superhu-
man essence reviled as an inhuman one so often, that one cannot feel
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tempted to draw the sword against it again. And yet it has almost always been
only moral opponents that have appeared in the arena, to assail the
supreme essence in favor ofanother supreme essence. So Proudhon, un-
abashed, says: Man is destined to live without religion, but the moral law (la
loi moral ) is eternal and absolute. Who would dare today to attack morality?51
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Stirner came up with the kind of ethics that treats other individuals
who are actually in front of us as free humans, without the media-
tion by any higher being such as family, community, ethnicity, state,
or society.55 This ethics leads to the egoists associationhis socialism.
Otherwise, socialism would result in the predominance of the soci-
ety over individuals. Thus Stirner criticized Proudhons association
as the community that subordinates individuals. Nevertheless,
Proudhon was different from the kind of communism that Stirner
criticized. He denied the association in this sense. It should be said
that his socialism was rather an egoists association, as is clear in his
later work, The Principle of Federation. The social contract par excel-
lence is a federal contract, which define as follows: a bilateral and
commutative contract concerning one or more specific objects, hav-
ing as its necessary condition that the contracting parties retain more
sovereignty and a greater scope of action than they give up.56 Yet, at
that point of time in the 1840s, it had not yet been clear to him.
Meanwhile, the significance that Stirners critique of Feuerbach
had in Germany was more philosophical. Indeed, young Hegelians
reversed Hegels idealism, but they never doubted Hegelian think-
ing that saw the individual as a member of a category of higher
being. Rejecting the substantiation of the general notion (qua
Geist), they yet posited it as being internalized within the individual.
In this manner, the higher being (qua the general) remained. In
contrast, Stirner regarded the individual as real, and the general no-
tion as a specter. This sounds pretty much like the nominalist asser-
tion that only the individual is the substance, while the general is a
mere notion. But it is different. In fact, he refuted not only realism
but also nominalism. How, then, is his stance different from that of
nominalism? In this respect, Stirners my own (property) is sugges-
tive. For instance, nominalists saw the individuality of the individual
in the proper name, namely, property. Nonetheless, the proper
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and by explaining in this way all phenomena, even those like rent, accumu-
lation of capital and the relation of wages to profits, which at first sight
seem to contradict it.63
In this there is a recognition that Bakunin could not have had. Yet it
is rather odd that, after Marxs intricate analysis of the social rela-
tions and the parliamentary system in The Eighteenth Brumaire, Prou-
dhon ascribed the whole issue to the nature of people. He is
explaining the reason why Bonaparte became the Emperor merely
by the inclination of people to love authority. When Proudhon pub-
lished this, Marx was writing the corpus that was later edited and
published as the third volume of Capital, striving to understand why
the capital and state endure so tenaciously. Nevertheless, this does
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Marxists who have believed that the first step toward communism is
the planned, state-owned economy have neglected both producers
cooperatives (or cooperative production) and consumers coopera-
tives (or cooperative stores). Originally conceptualized by Utopians
since Robert Owen, cooperative movements gained popularity in
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the 1860s in England after innumerable setbacks. Not only did Marx
never deny them, but he saw possible communism in the association
of free and equal producers. At the same time, Marx pointed out the
limit of the cooperative movements; they are constantly placed in se-
vere competition with capital. Their options would be either to re-
main partially in the area of production where capitalist mode is
hardly developed, to become a stock company itself, or to be de-
feated in the competition and go bankrupt. Therefore, to convert
social production into one large and harmonious system of free and
cooperative labor, general social changes are wanted, changes of the
general conditions of society, never to be realized save by the transfer of
the organized forces of society, namely, the state power, from capi-
talists and landlords to the producers themselves.
Needless to say, as is clear in his critique of Lassalle, it is not to fos-
ter cooperative societies with state aid. To transfer state power to the
producers does not mean that they seize it, but that they abolish it.
Association of associations should take the place of the state.
As I mentioned before, Bakunin thought that Lassalles idea de-
rived from Marx. But nothing is so alien to Marx than resorting to
state power, as Lassalle did. Nonetheless, Marx was also different
from Bakunin in the very aspect that Marx assumed a center for inte-
grating the multiple associations, while refusing the center of the
state power. Is it his authoritarianism? According to Proudhon, anar-
chism is not anarchic (chaotic), but orderly: it is still a sort of govern-
ment. While acknowledging that the phrase anarchic government
involves a kind of contradiction and sounds absurd, Proudhon in-
sists that anarchy is a form of government, that is, self-government
or autonomy. Also he defined anarchism as the idea of reducing po-
litical functions to industrial functions; and that a social order arises
that forms nothing but transactions and exchanges.66 In this light,
Marxs idea of converting social production into one large and har-
monious system of free and cooperative labor is not contradictory to
Proudhons idea; it has nothing to do with state control.
It is worth noting that Proudhon regarded authority and liberty as
not merely contradictory but as antinomy. Which means that
the two opposite propositions are valid; the thesis is: there ought to be
the center. The antithesis is: there ought not to be a center. For instance,
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anarchists defy any authority, but if this stance only brings about
chaos, it would end up helping authority to reassert itself. Proudhon
believed he found the principle to overcome this antinomy in the as-
sociation (he called it federation in his late years). It [the idea of
federation] resolves all the problems posed by the need to reconcile
liberty and authority. Thanks to this idea we need no longer fear
being overwhelmed by the antinomies of rule.67 It would be a new
system that solves the antinomy of freedom and authority.
Earlier in the same book he said:
To balance two forces (authority and liberty) is to submit them to a law
which, obliging each to respect the other brings them into agreement.
What will supply us with this new element, superior to both authority and
liberty, and acquiring pre-eminence with the consent of both?the con-
tract, whose terms establish right, and bear equally upon two contending
forces.68
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a blind law, and they do not bring the productive process under their
common control as their associated understanding [assozierter Verstand].
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with each other as values and realizes them as values. Hence commodities
must be realized as values before they can be realized as use-values.
On the other hand, they must stand the test as use-values before they can
be realized as values. For the labor expended on them only counts in so far
as it is expended in a form which is useful for others. However, only the act
of exchange can prove whether that labor is useful for others, and its prod-
uct consequently capable of satisfying the needs of others.6
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Marx
Marx made the point that the social relations of individuals appear in
a perverted form of a social relation between thingsthis is known as
alienation theory. Lukcs later attached primary importance to this
and raised it to the thesis of reification. But, in fact it is based upon
the same concept as Marxs earlier alienation theory. They both take
the form of projecting what is discovered ex post facto as ex ante
facto. From an ex post facto stance, the social division of labor formed
by the commodity economy looks precisely the same as the division of
labor formed in an enclosed space of community or factory. While the
division of labor in the latter (community) is consciously organized
and transparently apprehensible, the way humans and their labors are
interconnected in the former (society) is unknowable.
Suppose I buy a melon with the royalties I earn from writing this
book. The melon is perhaps grown by a farmer in Florida. He can
never know that his labor is placed in equivalency with my labor.
Furthermore, between the farmer and me lies capital. If we can de-
tect a division of labor between us, it would be only from an ex post
facto position, from which everything becomes transparent.
Certainly Capital, too, contains this ex post facto view. Yet Marx
opposes the idea that different commodities become equivalent be-
cause they contain the same amount of labor.
Men do not therefore bring the products of their labor into relation with
each other as values because they see these objects merely as the material
integuments of homogeneous human labor. The reverse is true: by equat-
ing their different products to each other in exchange as values, they
equate their different kinds of labor as human labor. They do this without
being aware of it. Value, therefore, does not have its description branded
on its forehead; it rather transforms every product of labor into a social hi-
eroglyphic. Later on, men try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind
the secret of their own social product: for the characteristic which objects of
utility have of being values is as much mens social product as is their lan-
guage. The belated scientific discovery that the products of labor, in so far
as they are values, are merely the material expressions of the human labor
expended to produce them, marks an epoch in the history of mankinds de-
velopment, but by no means banishes the semblance of objectivity pos-
sessed by the social characteristics of labor.10
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Marx
just an illusion. Based upon this idea, both Ricardian leftists and
Proudhon proposed the labor money and exchange bank as alterna-
tives. Criticizing this position, however, Marx was still within the con-
finement of the labor theory of value. Then suddenly he was
confronted by Baileys critique that claimed that the value of a com-
modity exists nowhere but in its relationship with other commodi-
ties. Therefore the labor-value claimed to be internalized in
commodities is just an illusion and thereafter, Marxs theory of value
was forged to be transcendental.
It was only after the relational system of commodities was synthe-
sized by money and each commodity was given value that classical
economics was able to consider each commodity as internalizing
labor-value. For his part, Bailey insisted that there existed only val-
ues qua commodity relations; however, his thought neglected to
question what is money that prices them. This was the same as hav-
ing overlooked the agent that composes the system of commodities,
namely, money as the general equivalent form in Marxs term.
Money in this sense is precisely like a transcendental apperception
X, in contrast to the substantial aspect of money such as gold or sil-
ver. To take it substantially is, to Marx, fetishism. Money as fetish is
an illusion. But, in the sense that it is the kind of illusion that is hard
to eliminate, it is a transcendental illusion.
For the mercantilists and monetary system that preceded classical
economics, money was a special thing. Marx called it the fetish of
money. Classical economics scorned it and posed labor as an alter-
native value substance, yet they left the fetishism of money intact.
The auto-reproductive movement of capital (M-C-M) itself is the
product of the fetish of money. Both Ricardo, the pioneer of labor
theory of value, and his critic, Bailey (the unacknowledged founder
of the neoclassical school), just covered up money on the surface. At
times of crises, as Marx said, people rush to money, turning back to
the monetary system. Thus, the Marx of Capital traced a trajectory
back to mercantilism passing Ricardo and Bailey. And by criticizing
both of his predecessors, Marx revealed the formthe transcenden-
tal formthat constitutes the commodity economy.
For Marx, what makes a certain thingnamely, goldmoney is
not precisely its material nature. Gold becomes money only because
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bowels of the earth, the direct incarnation of all human labor. Hence the
magic of money.22
Marxs theory of value form does not deal with the historical origin
of money. It is a transcendental (and retrospective) reflection upon
exchange mediated by money. Adam Smith famously posited the
origin of money in the barter system. In exchange via money, one
can certainly locate the exchanges of things at one end. This does
not mean however that the exchange of things develops into the
monetary economy. The exchange of things is made possible by
something totally different: the reciprocity of gift and return.
Adam Smith wrote as follows:
This division of labor, from which so many advantages are derived, is not
originally the effect of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends that
general opulence to which it gives occasion. It is the necessary, though very
slow and gradual, consequence of a certain propensity in human nature
which has in view no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck, barter,
and exchange one thing for another.
Whether this propensity be one of those original principles in human na-
ture of which no further account can be given; or whether, as seems more
probable, it be the necessary consequences of the faculties of reason and
speech, it belongs not to our present subject to inquire. It is common to
all men, and to be found in no other race of animals, which seem to know
neither this nor another species of contracts.23
Marx cast doubt upon the premises assumed by the theories of origin.
(In Smiths time, there were many reflections on originand of
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Marx
use Marxs term, because this is not something that came into exis-
tence at a certain time in a remote age, but something that is always
already and presently going on, and furthermore, because the impli-
cation of Marxs communities is manifold, including many levels,
from the family, tribe, nation-state, and so on.
What is the implication of the statement that commodity ex-
change begins in between communities? First, this exchange is dif-
ferent from that which takes place within communities in the
common sense, which is mainly motivated by the principle of reci-
procity in gift and return. For instance, even in those nation-states
where the commodity economy is most advanced, within families
there isif a division of laborno commodity exchange. Within
families the functional exchange is the reciprocity of a gift called
love. Second, there is looting in disguise within a community, also
known as taxation and redistribution, which is yet different from the
violent form that occurs in contact between communities. Thus, in
precommodity economic situations, dominant within communities
were the relationships based on gifting and/or looting, while the
commodity economy took place only marginally.
Karl Polanyi made such a claimthat the reciprocity of gifting
and redistribution was dominant before the market economy took
holdin his book The Great Transformation.25 Here the point I would
like to stress is that redistribution is, from the beginning, a form of
plunder, or more to the point, an institution in order to plunder
continuously. Feudal lords ruled agrarian communities as they pil-
laged their products. They restricted the amount of robbing to a
level where peasants could survive; they also had to protect them
from external forces, and conduct public undertakings such as irri-
gation works. For this reason, the peasants obligation to pay the
land tax was represented as a return or duty. That is to say that plun-
der takes the guise of reciprocity. This form of redistribution was es-
sentially consistent with that in absolutist monarchies as well as
nation-states. By redistributing the tax it levies, the state apparatus
seeks to resolve class conflicts and solve unemployment problems.
And again all of these are represented as the states gift.
Plunder is compulsive, while the reciprocity of gifting assumes a
different kind of compelling power. That is, a gift compels the gifted
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who are in the position of seller. Here there is a dialectic that is differ-
ent from the Hegelian dialectic based upon the relationship between
master and slaves, based upon plunder. The neoclassical economists
overlooked this dynamic relation between categories that entails an
overturn. They assume only consumerists and corporations as the sub-
jects of economic activity and speak of the issues of the market econ-
omy as if the crux were just how corporations could respond to the
demands of the consumers. This position forms a stagnant parallelism
with the majority of Marxists who are only concerned with the class
domination that exists in the production process.
For both classical and neoclassical economists, the task is to eluci-
date how the social equilibrium can be achieved when individuals are
acting for their maximal interest (i.e., either profit or utility). This
thematic belongs to the matter of the market economy and its mech-
anism; it has nothing to do with the foundational question, What is
capitalism? These economists start from the individuals and compa-
nies who pursue their maximal interests. Yet these individuals them-
selves are the products of the commodity economy, and thus
historical. Their desire itself is already mediated. In order to shed light
on this, we have to return to the form of pre-industrial capital, rather
than focusing on the characteristics of advanced industrial capital.
Classical economics dropped money because its predecessor, the
ideology of mercantilism, had supported the accumulation of
money by trade. Money gives anyone the right to exchange directly
with anything, anytime, and therefore, everyone seeks to have it.
This is the fetish of money. Nonetheless, Marxs objective was no
longer simply to criticize the illusion of bullionism. Classical econo-
mists had already attacked the money-fetishist thinking of mercantil-
ism, and Marx acknowledged this as their great contribution; that
they opposed the money-centered stance of mercantilism and
sought to reconsider the value of commodity from the vantage point
of the process of production. Meanwhile, he himself was consistently
concerned with money qua metaphysical conundrum. He wrote
about it in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:
Only the conventions of everyday life make it appear commonplace and or-
dinary that social relations of production should assume the shape of
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things, so that the relations into which people enter in the course of their
work appear as the relations of things to one another and of things to peo-
ple. This mystification is still a very simple one in the case of a commodity.
Everybody understands more or less clearly that the relations of commodi-
ties as exchange values are really the relations of people to the productive
activities of one another. The semblance of simplicity disappears in more
advanced relations of production. All the illusions of the monetary system
arise from the failure to perceive that money, though a physical object with
distinct properties, represents a social relation of production. As soon as
the modern economists, who sneer at the illusions of the monetary system,
deal with the more complex economic categories, such as capital, they dis-
play the same illusions. This emerges clearly in their confession of naive as-
tonishment when the phenomenon that they have just ponderously
described as a thing reappears as a social relation and, a moment later,
having been defined as a social relation, teases them once more as a thing.30
The magic of money was no longer the concern for classical econo-
mists. Money, for them, was just a barometer of value (labor time)
immanent in commodity, or a means of circulation. It follows that
they gave importance to the production of goods and services and
the adjustment of exchange by market. This emphasis made them
overlook the mystery of capital as self-reproducing money, or the
fundamental motive drive of capitalism. Furthermore, it made them
lose sight of the asymmetric, hierarchical relation between capital as
the buyer and wage workers as those who have to sell their labor-
power commodity; it made them fail to grasp the critical moment of
capitalthat it has to, at least once, stand in the selling position due
to its self-reproductive nature.
What Marx said with respect to circulation can be summarized
as follows: in the process of circulation C-M-C, C-M (selling) and
M-C (buying) are separate, and precisely for this reason, the sphere of
exchange is infinitely expandable in both space and time. Neverthe-
less, in this process, because of the fatal leap implicit in C-M or C-M
(selling), the possibility of crises exists. If circulation is expressed
in the circuit C-M-C, this process simultaneously contains a reverse
process: M-C and C-M. That is to say, the movement of money is the
circulation of commodities, but not vice versa. Hence although the
movement of money is merely the expression of the circulation of
commodities, the situation appears to be the reverse of this, namely
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today. This is equal to the drive to attain the right to consume any-
where and anytime, instead of consumption at this moment. It is this
drive that makes goldout of all other commoditiessublime.
What I would like to focus on here is not how capitals self-repro-
duction is possible but why capitals movement has to continue end-
lessly. Indeed this is interminable and without telos. If merchant capital
(or mercantilism) that runs after money (gold) is a perversion, then
industrial capital, that appears to be more productive, has been be-
queathed the perversion. In fact, before the advent of industrial cap-
ital, the whole apparatus of capitalism, including the credit system,
had already been complete; industrial capital began within the appa-
ratus and altered it according to its disposition. Then what is the
perversion that motivates the economic activity of capitalism? It is
the fetishism of money (commodity).
At the fountainhead of capitalism, Marx discovered the miser
(money hoarder), who lives the fetishism of money in reality. Owning
money amounts to owning social prerogative, by means of which
one can exchange anything, anytime, anywhere. A money hoarder is a
person who gives up the actual use-value in exchange for this right.
Treating money not as a medium but as an end in itself, plutolatory, or
the drive to accumulate wealth, is not motivated by material need.
Ironically, the miser is materially disinterested, just like the devotee
who is indifferent to this world in order to accumulate riches in
heaven. In a miser there is a quality akin to religious perversion. In
fact, both money saving (hoarding) and world religion appeared at
the same time, that is, when circulationwhich was first formed in
between communities and gradually interiorized within them
achieved a certain global nature. Therefore, if one sees the sublime in
religious perversion, one should see the same in a misers perversion;
or if one sees a certain vulgar sentiment in the miser, one should see
the same in the religious perversion. It is the same sublime perversion.
The hoarder therefore sacrifices the lusts of his flesh to the fetish of gold.
He takes the gospel of abstinence very seriously. On the other hand, he can-
not withdraw any more from circulation, in the shape of money, than he
has thrown into it, in the shape of commodities. The more he produces, the
more he can sell. Work, thrift, and greed are therefore his three cardinal
virtues, and to sell much and buy little is the sum of his political economy.32
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The motive for hoarding money does not come from the desire
whether or not mediated by the desire of othersfor material (use
value). It must be said that all psychological or physiological ap-
proaches to analyzing this motive are altogether more vulgar than
the miser himself, because lurking behind the motive of the miser is
a religious problem, as it were.
Because material can be purchased anytime if money is saved,
there is no need to stockpile. So it is that saving or accumulation it-
self begins in the saving of money. Saving money instead of material
is not caused by any technical limitation of saving material. Outside
the sphere of the monetary economy there is no autotelic impulse to
save in any community. As George Bataille said, in such communi-
ties, excessive products are just expended. Far from being motivated
by need or desire, saving is rooted in perversion (the opposite of
need or desire); and, in reverse, it is the saving that creates in indi-
viduals the more-than-necessary need and multifarious desire. To be
sure, the savings of the miser and the capitalist are not the same;
while the miser attempts to be left out of the circulation process by
selling much and buying little, the capitalist has to voluntarily leap
into the auto-movement M-C-M (M M).
Use-value must therefore never be treated as the immediate aim of the capi-
talist; nor must the profit on any single transaction. His aim is rather the
unceasing movement of profit-making. The boundless drive for enrich-
ment, this passionate chase after value, is common to the capitalist and the
miser; but while the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is
a rational miser. The ceaseless augmentation of value, which the miser
seeks to attain by saving his money from circulation, is achieved by the
more acute capitalist by means of throwing his money again and again into
circulation.33
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214
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215
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Marx
this way only (so it seems to me) could a certain merchandise have become
a lawful means of exchange of the industry of subjects with one another,
and thereby also become the wealth of the nation, that is, money.41
217
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kingdom of ends look subjectivist; but this could not be the case, for
it was based upon realistic, economic ground. That Kant saw the king-
dom of ends as a regulative idea contains a critique of the capitalist
economy precisely because the capitalist economy makes it fatally im-
possible to treat humanity in the person of any other as an end.
Contrary to what people usually imagine, Marx rarely spoke of the
future. In The German Ideology, which was mostly written by Engels,
Marx made the following addendum: Communism is . . . not a state
of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will]
have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which
abolishes [aufhebt] the present state of things, the conditions of this
movement result from the premises now in existence.42 And the po-
tency to constitute this reality comes from capitalism itself. In this
sense, communism would exist as a companion to the movement of
capitalism, yet as an oppositional movement created by capitalism it-
self. This should not be, in Kantian terms, a constitutive idea,
namely, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself, but a
regulative ide, namely, an ideal which constantly offers the ground
to criticize reality. An elucidation of capitalism is thereby an ethical
task par excellence. Here is the transcritical juncture between politi-
cal economy and morality, between Marxian critique and Kantian
critique.
218
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220
Marx
their value vanishes in the face of their own form of value. The bourgeois,
drunk with prosperity and arrogantly certain of himself, has just declared
that money is a purely imaginary creation. Commodities alone are money,
he said. But now the opposite cry resounds over the markets of the world:
only money is a commodity. As the heart pants after fresh water, so pants
his soul after money, the only wealth. In a crisis, the antithesis between
commodities and their value-form, money, is raised to the level of an ab-
solute contradiction. Hence moneys form of appearance is here also a mat-
ter of indifference. The monetary famine remains whether payments have
to be made in gold or in credit-money, such as bank-notes.44
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6
Value Form and Surplus Value
I have dealt with the nature of the drive [Trieb] of capitals self-
reproduction. Now its time to question how the self-reproduction is
made possible in the process M-C-M. Said in the most common par-
lance, it is by buying low and selling high. Classical economists ac-
cused this act as exemplifying the cunning nature of merchants, and
stressed that the profit of industrial capital, in contrast, comes from
the process of production. Their insistence on the labor theory of
value understandably comes from this viewpoint. They considered
the process of circulation to be secondary, and sought to derive in-
terest and ground rent from the profit earned in the process of pro-
duction. When capitalist production began in England, however,
the credit system had already been in place, and even stock com-
panies had already been active. It was merchant capital that had
created them. Early industrial capitalists were no other than the
merchants who began the putting-out system [Verlagssystem]. Indus-
trial capitalism and its theorists forgot their origin. The system of illu-
sion produced by the capitalist economy can never be explained
from the viewpoint of the production process alone. Marx began his
scrutiny from the process of circulation because the kernel of capital
exists in the formulation of the archi-capital M-C-M, and because
capitalist production cannot exist if not for the world market engen-
dered by this formulation.
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His emergence as a butterfly must, and yet must not, take place in the sphere
of circulation. These are the conditions of the problem. Hic Rhodus, hic salta!3
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227
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228
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229
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Herein exists the crucial point: what produces capital also makes the
possibility and inevitability of crisis. This is the destiny of capitalism.
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As Marx says, via money, selling and buying are split both spatially
and temporarily. The owner of money can buy anything, anywhere,
anytime. Seeing this again in analogy with language, money is like
writing [criture] in contrast to speech [parole]. Written texts may be
read by anyone, anywhere, anytime, and its circulation is invisible.
What is univocally understandable to the present other in speech has
to be read differently in different languages (Langues) in writing.
The hatred of money of Ricardo or Prouhdon corresponds to the
hatred of writing. Both are hatreds of mediated communication,
going hand in hand with the fantasy of direct and transparent ex-
change. As Jacques Derrida problematized in Of Grammatology, phi-
losophy since Plato has entailed a hostility to letters, while admiring
the direct and transparent exchange-communication.15 And the same
has been going on in the political economy as hostility toward
money. As Platos criticism of writing already took for granted the
irresolvable being of writing, the idea of barter, the starting point
of classical economistssuch as seen in the narrative of Robinson
Crusoetacitly took as a premise the irreducible being of money
(qua the general equivalent).
It must be said that those political economists or socialists who
idealistically deny the apodeicity that exchange has to be mediated
by money are falling into metaphysics. Capital reads: Value, there-
fore, does not have its description branded on its forehead; it rather
transforms every product of labor into a social hieroglyphic. Later
on, men try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of
their own social product: for the characteristic which objects of util-
ity have of being value is as much mens social product as is their
language.16 Marx saw the commodity form as social hieroglyphic,
which is in Derridas term archi-criture. This is to say that money is
not just a secondary thing; and it is already inscribed in and as the
core of commodity form.
To conclude this section, I examine a critic who approached the
problematic of artistic value from the vantage point of the opacity of
social exchange, Paul Valry.
After all, a work of art is an object, a human product, made with a view to
affecting certain individuals in a certain way. Works of art are either objects
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Thus Valry points to the ultimate ground upon which the value of
artwork arises in the separation of two processes (production and
consumption), and the impenetrability of the gap. The direct target
of his critique here is evidently Hegelian aesthetics, which stands in
the position to subsume both processes, and claims that history has
no opacity. (For that matter, so-called Marxist aesthetics is the
same.) Valry undoubtedly came to achieve this stance through his
reading of Capital.18
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How then does industrial capital earn surplus value? Classical econo-
mists, who ideologically support industrial capital, emphasize the
importance of profit earned in the process of production rather
than in the process of circulation. Unlike Ricardian leftists, Ricardo
himself never thought so simply that this was an exploitation of sur-
plus labor, yet his idea contained the seeds from which this position
derived. Ricardo considered that the natural price (as distinguished
from the market price) of a commodity already contained profit
that which is then distributed to ground rent (overhead) and inter-
est.19 As I mentioned previously, it is thought that Marxs theory of
surplus value is a successor to this, and as a result, Marxs theory has
been accused by many while defended by neo-Ricardians since Piero
Sraffa. For instance, Nobuo Okishio and Michio Morishima mathe-
matically proved the proposition: if the rate of profit is plus (positive),
the rate of surplus value is plus (positive), that is, surplus labor exists.20 But
the problem of their predecessor, Ricardo, who began from labor
value and omitted money, still haunts. That is to say, this line of
thinking is strictly modeled within a homogenous system. What is of
fatal importance to us, however, is the fact that there are plural
value systems, and surplus value is engendered in the exchange
between them.
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239
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241
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all over the world. When wages get high domestically, companies
transport their factories abroad to find cheaper labor. Capital does
not choose where and how it gets surplus value. Even in economies
based upon industrial capital, the activities of merchant capital co-
exist omnipresently, including stock exchange and exchange rate. It
is this omnipresence of the activities of merchant capital that con-
stantly brings the fluctuating prices closer to equilibrium. The ma-
jority of economists warn today that the speculation of global
financial capital is detached from the substantial economy. What
they overlook, however, is that the substantial economy as such is
also driven by illusion, and that such is the nature of the capitalist
economy.
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Marx
Furthermore, from profit interest and ground rent are paid, and
self-consumption expenditure is excluded, then the rest is rein-
vested. For them, there is no such distinction, that is, of Marx, be-
tween variable capital (labor-power commodity) that accrues surplus
value and constant capital (means of production and raw material).
There is only the distinction between fixed capital (stock) and circu-
lation capital (flow). Wages are part of the cost price; they are not
distinguished from the costs of means of production and raw mater-
ial. Profit is considered to be made by the total capital input. Every
capital attempts to earn profit by reducing the cost price.
Capitals are divided into various industrial branches, that is, from
heavy industry to agriculture. The rate of profit of each branch ap-
proaches the average rate of profit. In the branches of higher rate of
profit, investments of capital become active, while in those with
lower rates, investments are withdrawn or productions are withheld.
The world of industries appears to be formed as if by natural selec-
tion or the law of the jungle. In the state of equilibrium in which an
average rate of profit is established, the price of production in vari-
ous branches assumes the kind of price with which to achieve aver-
age profit. To be certain, within the same branch fierce struggles
among capitals in search of extra profit constantly take place. This im-
proves the productivitynamely, the organic composition of capital
of each branch.
For the empirical consciousness of capitalist society, the whole
thing about economic activity appears merely in the above manner.
Required is no more than achieving the equilibrium price (price of
production) that is distinguished from market price fluctuating by
the dynamic of supply and demand. Thus the insistence of neoclassi-
cal economists that the concepts of value and surplus value are false
is in total accord with the everyday consciousness of the agents. How-
ever, it is only by the reflection of such everyday consciousness that the
conundrum of surplus value can be shed light on. Our task is to con-
duct a retrospective query from this everyday consciousness in the
third volume to the general reflection in the first volume, reversing,
as it were, the order of Marxs descriptive deployment. In actual
fact, the rate of profit is the historical starting point. Surplus value
and the rate of surplus value are, relative to this, the invisible
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diverge from the original value. Confronting it, Smith had to aban-
don his labor theory of value, and switch to a position that speaks to
labor as a relatively dominant factor. The problem here is that the
price that constitutes the equal rate of profit between industries
does not parallel the amount of input labor. If, in every branch of
industry, the rate of profit comes to be equal, the price of produc-
tion of a certain product must be either higher or lower than its
original value. For this reason, Ricardo, too, partially revised his
labor theory of value and concluded that value cannot be deter-
mined only by labor input, except for those branches that have a
standard composition of capital and a standard turnover term of
capital. So it is that the transformation problem was not Marxs
invention, but an aporia that had long existed.
It is the common understanding that Marx sought to solve this
aporia at the same time as sustaining the labor theory of value. Neo-
classical economists since Bawerk claimed to have pointed out
Marxs contradiction, and sought to banish the notions of value or
surplus value altogether. Ironically, however, in the line of neo-
Ricardians since Sraffa, the correspondence between the rate of sur-
plus value and the rate of interest has been mathematically proven,
as has been touched upon earlier. But I do not think that this ex-
plains what Marx sought to do. First, Marxs labor theory of value
and that of Ricardo are fundamentally different. As I have
already explained, Marxs belief was: It is not that input labor time
determines the value, but conversely that the value form (system)
determines the social labor time. In other words, Marx sought to
transcendentally elucidate the formal system that valorizes the input-
labor. The term surplus value is of concern here. In distinction
from profit, it is a transcendental concept; it is not something that
is visible right here, empirically. Ricardo lacked this dimension, had
to resort to the labor theory of value to make up for it, and then
pulled it back when inconvenient.
In the third volume, Marx distinguishes rate of profit and rate of
surplus value in the following manner: While rate of profit is c_____
s
v,
the ratio of surplus value to the total social capital seen as the sum
total of variable capital (qua labor power) and constant capital (qua
raw material, means of production, etc.), the rate of surplus value is _vs ,
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the ratio of surplus value to the total social capital seen as variable
capital (labor power). Now if we suppose that the rate of surplus
value to the total social capital is fixed, in capitals in which the ratio
of constant capital to the total social capital is large, the rate of inter-
est must be lower. Then, how, in capitals of every branch, can an
average rate of profit be guaranteed? To repeat, the aporia Ricardo
encountered was this: If in industrial branches with different ratios
of variable capital and constant capitalor different organic compo-
sition of capital in Marxs termthe same rate of profit has to be
achieved, price of production is diverged from the value qua input
labor. Ricardo thus came to posit that price of production accords
value only in capitals with standard organic composition. On the
other hand, Marxs solution to this aporia is that the total surplus
value of total capital is distributed to the price of production of the
capitals of different industrial branches so that the average rate of
profit can be established in each branch.
To this rather strange idea, it is easy to pose alternatives. For in-
stance, as Engels critically mentioned in his preface to the third vol-
ume of Capital, George C. Stiebeling posed a solution: The rise of
the organic composition of capital increases the productivity of
labor and raises the rate of surplus value; therefore, the rate of
profit of the branch, even if it has a smaller ratio of variable capital,
goes up and approaches the average rate of profit. On the other
hand, Marx, though he admits that the transformation of organic
composition of capital affects the productivity of labor, assumes that
the productivity of labor is constant, that is, the rate of surplus value
is constant. Here Marx undoubtedly premised a certain synchronic
system wherein the rate of surplus value of total social capital is con-
stant. According to our primary definition, the surplus value of in-
dustrial capital is attained by the temporal differentiation of systems,
but then, what happens if it is seen synchronically? This is what Marx
did: What we previously viewed as changes that the same capital un-
derwent in succession, we now consider as simultaneous distinctions
between capital investments that exist alongside one another in
different spheres of production.29 This method is also used else-
where: We can now move on to apply the above equation for the
profit rate, p sv/c, to the various possible cases. We shall let the
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essentially the same as the shorter cycle. It, too, should be seen as a
part of the process to drastically improve the organic composition of
capital. Certainly, the advent of the longer cycle might be said to indi-
cate that the capitalist economy had begun a new stage. Nevertheless,
this new stage is nothing that goes beyond the recognition of capital-
ism presented in Capital, namely, the limit of the capitalist economy.
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though their lives were not always carried on within the commodity
economy, their products came to be virtually and forcibly posited in the
chain of the global commodity economy. For world money, there was
no longer any exteriority that went beyond it. It is at this moment that
capitalism was established as world capitalism.41
What Immanuel Wallerstein calls the modern world system
began, in reality, within the international credit system of merchant
capital. Even absolutist monarchical states had no choice but to op-
erate in and with it; it was rather engendered by its compelling pres-
ence. So-called primitive accumulationwhich separated labor
power from means of production and commodified landwas ren-
dered by the absolutist monarchical state; but this whole thing oc-
curred within and was provoked by the competition for international
trade. The capitalist mode of commodity production in England was
commenced by merchant capital fighting the international trade
war in order to compete with foreign noncapitalist commodity pro-
ductions. But this particular mode of production has not decom-
posed all conventional forms of production and will not. It simply
provides a fictitious institution to noncapitalist modes of production
as if they were fully capitalist enterprisesand marginalizes them. In
consequence, capitalist modes of production, though partial, seem
to be omnipotent.
Seeing capitalism from the specificity of industrial capitalism
alone often results in repressing the premises of capitals historicity,
and equally crucially, the total picture of how the capitalist mode of
production coexists with the noncapitalist mode of production in
mutual reciprocity. As I said in chapter 5, Marx reflected upon the
establishment of the average rate of profit from the vantage point of
how total surplus value is distributed to unequally developing indus-
trial branches. But, to be more precise and thorough, the branches
of noncapitalist production must be included in this scheme. First,
thinking about the situation within a nation-state, the businesses of
many branches of self-employed farmers and independent small
producers do not achieve an average rate of profit; they have little
consciousness of the rate of profit as such. They sustain their sim-
ple reproduction by introducing their own and their family mem-
bers labor power. They own their means of production and are not
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capital invested in colonies, etc. is concerned, however, the reason why this
can yield higher rates of profit is that the profit rate is generally higher
there on account of the lower degree of development, and so too is the
exploitation of labor, through the use of slaves and coolies, etc. . . .
But this same foreign trade develops the capitalist mode of production at
home, and hence promotes a decline in variable capital as against constant,
though it also produces overproduction in relation to the foreign country,
so that it again has the opposite effect in the further course of development.
We have shown in general, therefore, how the same causes that bring
about a fall in general rate of profit provoke counter-effects that inhibit this
fall, delay it and in part even paralyze it. These do not annul the law, but
they weaken its effect. If this were not the case, it would not be the fall in
the general rate of profit that was incomprehensible, but rather the relative
slowness of this fall.50
Here Marx shows us that the tendential fall in the rate of profit is
inevitable within a system (a nation-state). The tendential fall in the
rate of profit is not a problem that arose anew in the stage of imperi-
alism that developed heavy industry. From the beginning, [c]apital-
ist production never exists without foreign trade. Marx thought,
from early on, that industrial capitalism did not exist without the
world market. Why then did he take the trouble of such a detour
enfolding the world economy into the English economyinstead of
directly tackling the world economy? To this day this remains one of
the most troubling enigmas of Capital. I believe it was because he
had to negate the stereotypical view that grasps world capitalism just
as an aggregate of individual national economies. The point is that
no single national economy could be autonomous; no matter how
hard it resists, it is inexorably combined into the system of world
specialization.
Now seen from the paradoxical view of nation-world, wherein the
products of various countries are internalized, the issue of unequal
exchange by foreign trade can be transposed back to the branches
within a national economy that have different organic compositions.
As I have already mentioned, total surplus value is distributed to
the capitals with the higher organic compositionas the average
rate of profit or the price of production. Only in this manner is it
possible to see that under the free trade that Ricardo advocated
namely, specialization by comparative advantage and international
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In this sense, capital does not care whether it gets surplus value from
solid object or fluid information. So it is that the nature of capital is
consistent even before and after its dominant production branch
shifted from heavy industry to the information industry. It lives on
by the difference. And as the father of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener,
suggested, information is originally nothing but difference.3
The most crucial point of distinction for Marx is the one between
production in general and value production; value productivity is
not determined by what it produces, but by whether or not it pro-
duces difference. Accordingly, it is incorrect to say that the shift of the
main labor types is parallel to the shift of the forms of capitalist pro-
duction. Mark Poster posed the concept of the mode of informa-
tion as opposed to Marxs mode of production in his Foucault,
Marxism, and History.4 This is another attempt to revise historical mate-
rialism that persistently sees history from the vantage point of produc-
tion; it cannot be a critical comment on Capital, which is originally an
inquiry into the forces with which capitalist production qua the pro-
duction of information (difference) organizes society. Another
group of Marxists has paid utmost attention to the diversification of
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and this has not changed since. Nation-states, no matter how democratic
and industrial-capitalist-like to insiders, are absolutist-mercantilist
par excellence to outsiders. What is called liberalism is also a form of
the absolutist-mercantilist agenda, an economic policy that hege-
monic states always adopt.
In Capital, Marx bracketed the matter of state, which however
does not mean that he overlooked the existence of the state. The
primary task of Capital was to grasp the principles of capitals move-
ment, counter to and as a critique of German mercantilist state
economists (those whom Marx called the vulgar economists).
Thereby Marx bracketed the existence of the state methodologi-
cally, because state interventionespecially since the absolutist
stateis bound by the principles of the capitalist economy; because
extra-economic compulsion does not work in this context. In this re-
spect, the absolutist state diverged from the feudal state, where the
economic and the political had not been separated. Nonetheless,
saying this does not deny the fact that the state is based on a different
principle of exchange (plunder/redistribution) from that of the cap-
italist market economy; therefore, one has to acknowledge its auton-
omy to a large extentand this in a different sense from the relative
autonomy of superstructure that derived from historical materialism.
The fact that Capital lacks a theory of state has made Marxists ei-
ther gloss over it or return to pre-Capital accounts of it. It is generally
understood that early Marx grasped the state as an imagined com-
munity, while middle Marx considered it as a device for class domi-
nation. But in his The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, there is a
deeper understanding vis--vis the state than in either of these exam-
ples. Then, how did the Marx of Capital think of the state? The an-
swer to this question is not found by collecting bits and pieces of his
account of state in Capital, nor in his theories of state in his earlier
work. That is, we have to construct a new theory of state by applying
Marxs method in Capital. In order to tackle the capitalist economy,
Marx returned from liberalism to mercantilism, from industrial capi-
tal to merchant capital. In order for us to tackle the state, we have to
return to the previous stage of the bourgeois constitution.
In this retrospective approach, however, we must be wary of not
returning to a past too distant, namely, feudal states and Asiatic
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for these abilities to develop, and offers them a platform on which they may
attain high honours, so also does it constitute a remedy for the self-conceit
of individuals and of the mass, and a meansindeed one of the most im-
portant meansof educating them.13
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external sovereignty, but internally, neither the monarch himself nor the
state was sovereign. On the one hand . . . the particular functions and pow-
ers of the state and civil society were vested in independent corporations
and communities, so that the whole was more of an aggregate than an or-
ganism; and on the other hand, they [i.e. these functions and powers] were
the private property of individuals, so that what the latter had to do in rela-
tion to the whole was left to their own opinion and discretion. . . .14
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Marx
domain) and points out that they are two different types of
exchange (see section 5.3). According to my scheme, there are in
the strict sense four relations of exchange in the world. First, there is
reciprocity of gift and return (within agrarian communities). Sec-
ond, there are robbery and redistribution (between state and agrar-
ian communities). Third is commodity exchange. And the fourth is
association. Association is based on mutual aid like that found in tra-
ditional communities, yet it is not as closed. It is a network of volun-
tary exchange organized by those who have once left traditional
communities via the commodity economy. The four types of ex-
change can be illustrated as follows:
a state b nation
c capital (market economy) d association
a equality b fraternity
c liberty d association
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domination) entirely. This was the story of the wedding of state and
capital.
Feudal ground rent became national tax, while bureaucracy and
standing army became state apparatuses. Those who had belonged
to certain tribes, in certain clans, now became subjects under the ab-
solutist monarchy, grounding what would later be national identity.
Protected by the absolutist state, merchant capital (bourgeoisie)
grew up and nurtured the identity of the nation for the sake of cre-
ating a unified market. Yet this was not all in terms of the formation
of the nation. Agrarian communities that were decomposed along
with the permeation of market economy and by the urbanized cul-
ture of enlightenment always existed on the foundation of the na-
tion. While individual agrarian communities that had been autarkic
and autonomous were decomposed by the osmosis of money, their
communalitiesmutual aid and reciprocitythemselves were re-
covered imaginarily within the nation.
Anderson points out that, after the decline of religion that used to
make sense of individuals death, the nation plays the proxy for it. In
this situation, what is important is the fact that religion had existed
as and in the agrarian community. The decline of religion is equal to
the decline of community. In contrast to what Hegel called the state
of understanding (lacking spirit), or the Hobbesian state, the nation
is grounded upon the empathy of mutual aid descending from
agrarian communities. And this emotion is awakened by national-
ism: belonging to the same nation and helping each otherthe
emotion of mutual aid. And this nation is exclusive to other nations.
(My intention is not to understand nationalism from an emotional
viewpoint, though. For emotion is finally produced by the relation
of exchange. According to Nietzsche, the consciousness of Schuld
[guilt] derived from an economic principalSchuld [debt]. The in-
debtedness is the kind that one feels toward gifts. Beneath emotion
lies the relation of exchange.) This is the so-called marriage of state
and nation.
It was amid the bourgeois revolution that these three were offi-
cially married. As in the trinity intoned in the French Revolution
liberty, equality, and fraternitycapital, state, and nation copulated
and amalgamated themselves into a force that was inseparable ever
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after. Hence the modern state must be called, sensu stricto, the capi-
talist nation-state.16 They were made to be mutually complementary,
reinforcing each other. When economic liberty becomes excessive
and class conflict is sharpened, the state intervenes to redistribute
wealth and regulate the economy, and at the same time, the emo-
tion of national unity (mutual aid) fills up the cracks. When facing
this fearless trinity, undermining one or the other does not work.
The French Revolution extolled liberty, equality, and fraternity.
The equality here was not limited to the equal right to liberty, but
practically meant the equality of wealth. In 1791, the Convention
Nationale interpreted equality as equality of wealth, and sought to
bring it about. This policy was terminated by Thermidor in 1793.
But the idea of the redistribution of wealth by the state remained.
This took hold as Saint-Simonism. Meanwhile, the fraternity signi-
fied the solidarity of citizens beyond nation and language. But then,
at the time of Napoleon, it came to mean the French nation. In this
manner, the ideal of liberty, equality, and fraternity turned into
the capitalist nation-state.
It was Hegel who grasped this collapse theoretically as the triad
system of philosophy [Dreieinigkeit]. On the one hand, he affirmed
the liberty of civil society as the system of desire, while, on the other
hand, he posited the state-bureaucratic system as reason that recti-
fies the inequality of the distribution of wealth. Furthermore, frater-
nity, to him, was equal to a nation that overcomes the contradiction
between liberty and equality. Finally, the state for Hegel was the po-
litical expression of the nation. Thus Hegels Philosophy of Right was
the most complete expression of the trinity of capitalist nation-state.
From this, one can draw everything else: liberalism, nationalism, the
accounts on the welfare state, Schmitts theory of sovereignty, and even
criticisms against them. Hence it is necessary to retackle the book in
order to grasp the crux to supersede the capitalist nation-state.17
Marxs critical work began with his accounts of Hegels Philosophy
of Right. Instead of being prematurely dropped, this concern was re-
ally raised to its completion in Capital. Employing the dialectic
method of description that he had once denied, Marx sought to illu-
minate the whole of the capitalist economy. Although in Capital one
finds no accounts of nation and state, there is a framework to grasp
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everything (not only capital but also nation and state) as an eco-
nomic structure, namely, a form of exchange. Therefore, it is imper-
ative to reconsider Hegels Philosophy of Right from the vantage point
of Capital. It must be there that the escape from the trinity is found.
In Philosophy of Right, Hegel dialectically grasps the reciprocity of
capitalist nation-state that was already in place. Though he did not
describe the historical formation of the trinity, his model was evi-
dently taken from the actually existing example: Great Britain. In
this sense, the book could function as a critique of the state in
Germany. That is to say, what is described in the book is a model to
be realized in the future in all places other than the pioneers of the
trinity: Great Britain, France, and The Netherlands. In fact, even
today, the formation of the trinity is the main objective in many
countries of the world. The formation of the capitalist nation-state is
never an easy task.
Gramsci spoke of revolutionary movements using figures of mili-
tary tactics: the war of maneuver (frontal attack) and the war of posi-
tion. The war of maneuver signifies a confrontational and direct
fight with the state government, while the war of position indicates a
struggle within and against the hegemonic apparatuses of civil soci-
ety, residing behind the state governmental apparatus. In this con-
text, he clearly stated that what had worked in the Russian
Revolution would not work for Western civil societies. In Russia, the
State was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in
the West, there was a proper relation between the State and civil so-
ciety, and when the state trembled a sturdy structure of civil society
was at once revealed. The State was only an outer ditch, behind
which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks.18
A mature civil society is established only where the wedding of Capital-
Nation-State is well established. In Italy, fascists smashed the Leninist
struggle that was led by Gramsci and centered on the occupation of
factories. Its weakness was due to its reliance on nationalism. Mean-
while, in Russia, where the wedding of Capital-State-Nation had not
been completed, wars were fought on behalf of the tsar himself and
not for the nation; therefore, the socialist revolution had been able
to, or had to, resort to nationalism. Since then, many socialist revo-
lutions have borne national independence movements; in those
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the state and capital were already weakened by external causes such
as defeat.
Another reason for the failure to revolutionize the labor move-
ment was that the real capitalism itself surpassed the visions of classi-
cal and neoclassical economics. In such a climate, Keynes came to
believe that chronic depression (or the crisis of capitalism) could be
overcome by producing effective demand. This not only implied the
mercantilist intervention of state, but more important that the total
social capital would come into existence in the form of the state. As
Marx explained, capitalists are willing to pay as little as possible to
their own workers (the production cost), while they hope other cap-
italists pay as much as possible to their own workers (the potential
consumers). But, if all capitalists followed this drive, depression
would endure, unemployment would be rampant, and the capitalist
system itself would be in a state of serious malfunction. Thus total so-
cial capital appeared to regulate the selfishness of individual capi-
tals. And then Fordism intervened with mass production, high
wages, and mass consumption, and produced a so-called consumer
society. Herein the labor movement became totally subsumed in the
capitalist system, encouraged rather than oppressed. Now the work-
ers economic struggle has come to support the up cycles of the cap-
italist economy in, for example, an increase of consumption (and
capitals accumulation). Accordingly, it seems harder and harder to
find a moment in the production process to overthrow capitalism.
But it was always impossible.
In his later years, Engels, too, came to think that parliamentalist
revolution was possible. Though Karl Kautsky (18541938) attacked
Bernstein as a revisionist, if one considers the fact that he was the
legal heir of Engelss copyright, it must be that Engels shared a simi-
lar position. And Kautsky, too, succeeded the policy of later Engels.
The idea of social democracy based upon redistribution of wealth by
the state unwittingly reinforces the nationalist impetus. As has been
stated, surplus value is finally realized in transnational intercourse;
in the redistribution, both capital and wage workers share the inter-
est in one nation-state. After the outbreak of World War I, both social
democrats and workers in the nations involved turned to support the
war, and the Second International collapsed as a consequence. Thus
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to say that workers as the otherthe one who capital can never
subsumeappear as consumers. It follows that the class struggle
against capitalism must be a transnational movement of workers qua
consumers or consumers qua workers. Consumers civil acts, includ-
ing the problematization of environmental and minority issues, are
moral, but the reason they have achieved a certain success is that
a consumers boycott is the most dreadful thing capital can imagine.
In other words, the success of the moralist intervention is guaran-
teed not only by the power of morality in itself, but more crucially,
because it is the embodiment of the asymmetric relation between
commodity and money. Therefore, in order to begin an opposi-
tional movement against capital, it is imperative to discover a new
context where labor movements and consumers movements meet,
and this not as a political coalition between existing movements but
as a totally new movement itself.
Mainstream Marxists, who inherited classical economics, have
been prioritizing labor movements on the production front, while
considering anything else as secondary and subordinate. One has to
keep in mind another implication of thisthat production process
centrism entails male centrism. As a point of fact, until the recent
past, labor movements have been conducted mainly by men, while
consumer movements have been led mainly by women. This has
been based on the division of labor between men and women, com-
pelled by industrial capitalism and the modern state. The produc-
tion process centrism of classical economics is a view that stresses
value-productive labor and thus considers household work to be
unproductive. The discrimination between value-productive and
non-value-productive labors began with industrial capitalism and
quickly became gendered. It is now clear that the male-centrist rev-
olutionary movement, which lacks a countermeasure to this gen-
dered division of labor, cannot be a real oppositional movement
against the state-capital amalgamation.27
Meanwhile, in advanced capitalist nation-states, civil acts have
been central as a repulsion against the male centrism of the labor
movement. They involve issues of discrimination against women and
other minorities as well as the environment. Unfortunately, civil
acts here, in reverse, tend to abstract the matters of process of
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As I pointed out in the part on Kant, the Copernican turn was a new
stance to see the earth and sun as terms in a relational structure, ir-
respective of those empirically observed objects. The introduction of
this stance was more revolutionary than the overturn of the helio-
centric view. I would say that the same is true with the movement of
workers qua consumers. The movements of consumers boycotts
have long existed empirically, but they attain a radical implication
comparable to the Copernican turn only when they are posited in
the context of the theory of value form and seen as a transposition
from relative value form to equivalent value form (from seller of
labor-power commodity to buyer of commodities); and further
in the context of the capitals metamorphosis: M-C-M. If not for the
theoretical position, consumers acts or civil acts would be subsumed
into social democracy.
The movement of consumers qua workers is crucial, however, not
because workers movements are in decline. The exploitation of sur-
plus value takes place in an invisible whole. If so, the resistancethe
countermovement against the exploitationmust also take place
within the black box, namely, in the domain of the circulation
process in which neither capital nor state can ever take control. The
concept workers qua consumers becomes crucial in this struggle in
the dark. This principle could be applied to past history as well.
Imagine! Should this have intervened in the conflict between parlia-
mentarianism versus Leninism in the late nineteenth century, things
would have been different. Against the parliamentarianism posed by
Bernstein and Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin famously in-
sisted upon a strategy centered on workers general strikes.
And anarcho-syndicalists were the same in this aspect. And neither
side could stop the imperialist wars. But, if I allow a subjunctive
mood here: suppose that, in the place of political general strike ex-
ecuted at the risk of workers lives, internationally united workers
conducted a general boycott, a campaign of refusing to buy major
capitalist products (whatever the national origin) under the leader-
ship of the Second International while working normally, states and
capitals would have been powerless, because all of these acts are
legal and nonviolent, at the same time as being most damaging to
capital.
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Notes
Preface
1. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. and ed. Mary Gre-
gor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 38, 4:429.
2. See Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics [1783], trans. and ed.
Gary Hatfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 10. Kant says: The
remembrance of David Hume was the very thing that many years ago first inter-
rupted [the] dogmatic slumber.
3. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason [1781/1787], trans. and ed. Paul Guyer
and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 99, Aix.
5. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, in Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels, Collected Works, vol. 5 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), p. 49.
Introduction
2. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (Har-
mondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 163.
308
Notes
4. See Kozo Uno, Principles of Political Economy, trans. Thomas T. Sekine (Atlantic
Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1980).
8. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and
Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), p. 283.
9. Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected
Works, vol. 22 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), p. 335.
11. Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, in Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels, Collected Works, vol. 24 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), pp. 9394.
13. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Notebook IV, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondworth:
Penguin Books, 1993), pp. 420421.
14. Ex-scendent is a compound deriving from the translation of the Japanese term
cho-shutsu, which means exiting and transcending.
15. See Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944).
1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason [1781/1787], trans. and ed. Paul Guyer
and Allen W. Wood, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 512513,
A494/B523.
2. Thomas Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1957), p. 4.
4. See The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore 19721973 [1975], ed. Jacques-
Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998), pp. 123136.
5. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics [1783], trans. and ed. Gary
Hatfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 10.
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309
Notes
8. I learned much from Yoshifumi Hamadas close readings on Kant. For further
reference concerning Homes role in Kants critique, see Hamada Yoshifumi, Kant
Rinrigaku no Seiritsu [The Establishment of Kants Ethics] (Tokyo: Keiso Shobo,
1981).
12. The New Science of Giambattista Vico [1725], trans. and ed. Thomas Goddard
Bergin and Max Harold Fisch, bk. I, XII (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976),
p. 63.
16. See Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kants Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1982).
18. See Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Hutchinson & Co.,
1959; first published in German in 1934).
19. See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [1962], 2d enlarged
ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), esp. chap 5: The Priority of
Paradigms.
20. For Paul Feyerabends first argument to this effect, see Against Method: Outline of
an Anarchist Theory of Knowledge [1975] (London: Verso, 1978); for compressed sum-
maries of his critique of Kuhn, see Killing Time: The Autobiography of Paul Feyerabend
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), esp. pp. 67, 128129, 142, 154.
21. For part of Poppers critique of Kuhn in this regard, see Objective Knowledge: An
Evolutionary Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), esp. pp. 182, 216.
22. Other important, related literary responses to the Lisbon Earthquake include
Goethes depiction of it in the first book of Dichtung und Wahrheit [Poetry and Truth,
6715 NOTES UG 1/29/03 8:03 PM Page 310
310
Notes
18111835], which chronicles his life up to precisely 1755, and Heinrich von Kleists
transnational restaging of the significance of the event in South America, in his
short story Das Erdbeben in Chili [The Earthquake in Chile, 1806].
23. See his letter, An Frulein Charlotte von Knobloch. 10 August 1763?, in Im-
manuel Kants Werke, vol. 9 (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1922), pp. 3439.
24. Not incidentally, Kants thesis about vision is close to one of Lacans basic defini-
tions of psychotic paranoia. Lacan also noted that the history of paranoia . . . made its
first appearance with a psychiatrist disciple of Kant at the beginning of the nine-
teenth century, specifically that R. A. Vogel is generally credited with having intro-
duced the term into modern usage in 1764 (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III:
The Psychoses 19551956 [1981], ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg [New
York: Norton, 1993], p. 4).
25. Immanuel Kant, Trume eines Geistersehers, erlutert durch Trume der
Metaphysik, in Immanuel Kants Werke, vol. 2 (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1992),
pp. 363364: Daher verdenke ich es dem Leser keinesweges, wenn er, anstatt die Geis-
terseher vor Halbbrger der andern Welt anzusehen, sie kurz und gut als Kandidaten
des Hospitals abfertigt und sich dadurch alles weiteren Nachforschens berhebt. For a
partial translation, see Dreams of a Visionary Explained by Dreams of Metaphysics,
trans. Carl J. Friedrich, in The Philosophy of Kant (New York: Modern Library, 1993).
29. A book by the Japanese philosopher, Megumi Sakabe, Risei no Fuan [Anxiety of
Reason] (Tokyo: Keiso Shobo, 1982) informed me of the approach to reading Cri-
tique of Pure Reason via Dreams of Visionary. In his book, Sakabe holds that the dy-
namism of self-critique (of undecidability) in Dreams is lost in Critique, while I
believe that it is made full use of in the transcendental method developed therein.
31. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena [1967], trans. David B. Allison (Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 79.
32. See Immanuel Kant, Philosophical Correspondence 17591799, ed. and trans. Arnulf
Zweig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 96. In the letter written to
Mercus Hertz (about May 11, 1781), right before the publication of the first edition
of Critique of Judgment, Kant confessed that he had an alternative plan in mind. That
is, he should have started with The Antinomy of Pure Reason, which could have
been done in colorful essays and would have given the reader a desire to get at the
sources of the thing-in-itself. In Kants published version, the thing-in-itself is expli-
cated as if it were ontologically premised, whereas in fact it would more properly in-
tervene skeptically by way of the antinomy or dialectic in the Kantian sense. The same
is true of transcendental subjectivity.
33. Kant himself warned against finding mystical implications in the thing-in-itself:
Idealism consists in the claim that there are none other than thinking beings; the
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311
Notes
1. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics [1783], trans. and ed. Gary
Hatfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 20, 4:2724:273.
3. In this regard, see Kants remark in his Critique of Pure Reason [1781/1787]: But
where the public holds that subtle sophists are after nothing less than to shake the
foundation of the public welfare, then it seems not only prudent but also permissible
and even credible to come to the aid of the good cause with spurious grounds rather
than to give its putative enemies even the advantage of lowering our voice to the
modesty of a merely practical conviction and necessitating us to admit the lack of
speculative and apodictic certainty. I should think, however, that there is nothing in
the world less compatible with the aim of maintaining a good cause than duplicity,
misrepresentation, and treachery (trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood
[Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], pp. 648649, A749750 B777778).
4. Diesen zufolge halte ich davor, da die Substanzen in der existierenden Welt,
woven wir ein Teil sind, wesentliche Krfte von der Art haben, da sie in Vereini-
gung miteinander nach der doppelten umgekehrten Verhltnis der Weiten ihre
Wirkungen von sich ausbreiten; zweitens, da das Ganze, was daher dreifachen Di-
mension habe; drittens, da dieses Gesetze willkrlich sei, und da Gott davor ein
anderes, zum Exempel der umgekehrten dreifachen Verhltnis, htte whlen kn-
nen; da endlich viertens aus einem andern Gesetze auch eine Ausdehnung von an-
dern Eigenschaften und Abmessungen geflossen wre. Eine Wissenschaft von allen
diesen mglichen Raumesarten wre ohnfehlbar die hchste Geometrie, die ein
eindlicher Verstand unternehmen knnte. Die Unmglichkeit, die wir bei uns be-
merken, einen Raum von mehr als drei Abmessungen uns vorzustellen, scheinet mir
daher zu rhren, weil unsere Seele ebenfalls nach dem Gesetze der umgekehrten
doppelten Verhltnis der Weiten die Eindrcke von drauen empfngt, und weil
ihre Natur selber dazu gemacht ist, nicht allein so zu leiden, sondern auch auf diese
Weise auer sich zu wirken (Immanuel Kant, Gedanken von der wahren
Schtzung der lebendigen Krfte und Beurteilung der Beweise, in Immanuel Kants
Werke, vol. 1 [Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1922], p. 23).
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312
Notes
5. Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor,
1957), p. 91.
6. Wenn wir von hier aus Kants Erklrungen ber den konstruktiven Charakter der
Mathematik zu verstehen versuchen, dann sind wir uns darber klar, da wir
Sachverhalte benutzen, die Kant in dieser przisen Weise noch nicht gekannt hat.
Eine solche Erklrung Kants von unseren heutigen Einsichten heraus scheint uns
aber mglich zu sein, weil die Intuitionisten selbst diesen Zusammenhang mit den
kantischen Anstgen bejahen. Dann bedeutet also die kantische These vom an-
schaulichen Charakter der Mathematik die Einschrnkung der Mathematik auf
solche Gegenstnde, die konstruierbar sind.
Von hier aus lt sich auch die Stellung Kants zur euklidischen Geometrie deut-
lich machen. Wir sagten schon, da auch viele Kantianer die Mglichkeit der nicht-
euklidischen Geometrie lebhaft bestritten haben. Sicherlich hat dieser Protest eine
gewisse Begrndung in den Aufstellungen Kants gehabt, aber die Dinge liegen weit
schwieriger, als man zunchst angenommen hat. Sie werden noch dadurch erschw-
ert, da Kantebenso wie spter Gausses vermieden hat, von nichteuklidischen
Geometrien zu reden, und wenn wir die Kmpfe betrachten, die Einfhrung der
nichteuklidischen Geometrien entfacht hat, dann mssen wir wohl sagen, da Kant
mit gutem Recht vorsichtig gewesen ist. Es kann aber kein Zweifel sein, da Kant
sich darber klar gewewen ist, da auch in der Geometrie das logisch Mgliche ber
den Bereich der euklidischen Geometrie weit hinausgeht. Aber Kant hieltwenn
auch vermutlich irrtmlicherweisean einer These fest. Was ber die euklidische
Geometrie hinausgeht, ist zwar logisch mglich, es ist aber nicht konstruierbar, das
heit, es ist nicht anschaulich konstruierbar, und dies heit nun wiederum fr Kant,
es existiert mathematisch nicht, es ist ein bloes Gedankending. Nur die euklidische
Geometrie existiert in Mathematischen Sinne, whrend alle nicht-euklidischen
Geometrien bloe Gedankendinge sind (Martin, Immanuel KantOntologie und
Wissenschaftstheorie, p. 32).
7. Gdels incompleteness theorems are well known, and I have dealt with them ex-
tensively in Architecture as Metaphor: Language, Number, Money, trans. Sabu Kohso
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995).
313
Notes
20. Plato, Meno, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Including the Letters, ed. Edith
Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Bollingen Series LXXI (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1961), p. 366.
23. Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language: An Elementary Exposition
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 21. See my Architecture as Metaphor
for a more detailed discussion.
25. Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgensteins Vienna (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1973), p. 169.
27. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), p. 120.
28. Roman Jakobson, Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning, trans. John Mepham
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1978), p. 74.
29. R. Jakobson and J. Lotz, Notes on the French Phonemic Pattern, in Roman
Jakobson, Selected Writings, vol. 1: Phonological Studies, 2d ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1951),
p. 872.
30. Claude Lvi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, vol. 1, trans. Claire Jacobson and
Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), p. 33.
31. Translated into Arabic, sunya became sifr, meaning at once zero and sign or
symbol, similar to the English cipher. And one possible contributing origin of the
mathematical symbol o is that it is the first letter of the Greek word ouden, meaning
nothing.
314
Notes
3 Transcritique
1. Ren Descartes, Discourse on Method [1637], ed. and trans. George Heffernan
(South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), p. 33; pt. 2, sec. 4.
3. Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote: Logic is not a theory but a reflexion of the world.
Logic is transcendental (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, with an introduction by
Bertrand Russell, [London: Routledge, 1981], p. 163, 6:13.) This transcendental is
commonly deemed synonymous to a priori. But, according to my reading, what
Wittgenstein calls logic is our act of transcendentally scrutinizing the form of
language that grasps the world in which we are.
6. Claude Lvi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New
York, Modern Library, 1955), p. 3.
11. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations [1931], trans. Dorion Cairns (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), p. 43.
14. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology
[1936], trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970),
pp. 179180.
315
Notes
19. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Ernest C. Mossner (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1969), p. 315.
21. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason [1781/1787], trans. and ed. Paul Guyer
and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 8, Axii.
22. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment [1790], trans. Werner S. Pluhar, (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1987), p.15.
23. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time [1927], trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 254.
24. Marx often cited Epicurus term intermundia. For example: Trading nations,
properly so called, exist only in the interstices of the ancient world, like the gods of
Epicurus in the intermundia (Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy
[1867], vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes [Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976], p. 172).
25. Jos Ortega y Gasset, The Origin of Philosophy [1957], trans. Toby Talbot (New
York: Norton, 1967), p. 112.
29. Immanuel Kant, What Is Enlightenment?, in Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss,
trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 5556.
30. See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition [1968], trans. Paul Patton (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 1.
32. Gyrgy Lukcs, Uber die Besonderheit als Kategorie der sthetik (Neuwied: Luchter-
hand, 1967), pp. 209210: Whrend nmlich beim theoretischen Erkennen diese
Bewegung in beiden Richtungen wirklich von einem Extrem zum anderen geht und
die Mitte, die Besonderheit, in beiden Fllen eine Vermittlungsrolle spielt, wird
in der knstlerischen Widerspiegelung die Mitte wrtlich zur Mitte, zum
Sammelpunkt, wo die Bewegungen sich zentrieren. Es gibt dabei also sowohl eine
Bewegung von der Besonderheit zur Allgemeinheit (und zurck), wie von der
Besonderheit zur Einzelheit (und ebenfalls zurck), wobei in beiden Fllen die
Bewegung zur Besonderheit die abschlieende ist. . . . Die Besonderheit erhlt eine
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Notes
nunmehr unaufhebbare Fixierung: auf ihr baut sich die Formenwelt der Kunstwerke
auf. Das gegenseitige Umschlagen und Ineinanderbergehen der Kategorien ndert
sich: sowohl Einzelheit als auch Allgemeinheit erscheinen stets als in der Besonder-
heit aufgehoben.
34. Kant said the following about Herders book: This attempt is a bold one, yet it
is natural that the inquiring spirit of human reason should make it, and it is not dis-
creditable for it to do so, even if it does not entirely succeed in practice. But it is all
the more essential that, in the next installment of his work, in which he will have
firm ground beneath his feet, our resourceful author should curb his lively genius
somewhat, and that philosophy, which is more concerned with pruning luxuriant
growths than with propagating them, should guide him towards the completion of
his enterprise. It should do so not through his hints but through precise concepts,
not through laws based on conjecture but through laws derived from observation,
and not by means of an imagination inspired by metaphysics or emotions, but by
means of a reason which, while committed to broad objectivities, exercises caution
in pursuing them (Immanuel Kant, Reviews of Herders Ideas on the Philosophy of
the History of Mankind, in Kant: Political Writings, trans. H. B. Nisbet [Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1970], p. 211). In this reserved criticism, it is
evident that Kant detected in Herder a pretension of reason or metaphysics.
Kant wrote about Fichte as follows: What do you think of Mr. Fichtes Wis-
senschaftstlehre? He sent it to me long ago, but I put it aside, finding the book too
long winded and not wanting to interrupt my own work with it. All I know of it is
what the review in the Allgemeine Literaturzeitung said. At present I have no inclination
to take it up, but the review (which shows the reviewers great partiality for Fichte)
makes it look to me like a sort of ghost that, when you think youve grasped it, you
find that you havent got hold of any object at all but have only caught yourself and
in fact only grasped the hand that tried to grasp the ghost. The mere self-conscious-
ness, indeed, the mere form of thinking, void of content, therefore, of such a na-
ture that reflection upon it has nothing to reflect about, nothing to which it could
be applied, and this is even supposed to transcend logicwhat a marvelous impres-
sion this idea makes on the reader! The title itself arouses little expectation of any-
thing valuableTheory of Sciencesince every systematic inquiry is science, and
theory of science suggests a science of science, which leads to an infinite regress (Im-
manuel Kant to J. H. Tieftrunk, April 5, 1798, in Immanuel KantPhilosophical Corre-
spondence, 175999, ed. and trans. Arnulf Zweig [Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1967], p. 250). It was thus Kant who first called Fichtes selfthat which was
reiterated as spirit and man in German Idealismghost.
35. In a letter to Karl Marx, criticizing the idealist tendency of Stirner, Engels wrote:
This egoism is taken to such a pitch, it is so absurd and at the same time so self-
aware, that it cannot maintain itself even for an instant in its one-sidedness, but must
immediately change into communism. Engels continued: But we must also adopt
such truth as there is in the principle. And it is certainly true that we must first make
a cause our own, egoistic cause, before we can do anything to further itand hence
that in this sense, irrespective of any eventual material aspirations, we are commu-
nists out of egoism also, and it is out of egoism that we wish to be human beings, not
mere individuals. Or to put it another way, Stirner is right in rejecting Feuerbachs
man, or at least man of Das Wesen des Christentums (The Essence of Christianity).
Feuerbach deduces his man from God, it is from God that he arrives at man, and
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Notes
hence man is crowded with a theological halo of abstraction. The true way to arrive
at man is the other way about. We must take our departure from the Ego, the em-
pirical, flesh-and-blood individual, if we are not, like Stirner, to remain stuck at this
point but rather proceed to raise ourselves to man. Man will always remain a
wraith so long as his basis is not empirical man. In short we must take our departure
from empiricism and materialism if our concepts, and notably our man, are to be
something real: we must deduce the general from the particular, not from itself or, a
la Hegel, from thin air (A Letter from Engels to Marx, 19 November 1844, in Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, various translators [New York: Interna-
tional Publishers, 1982], p. 38:1112). But it is hard to think that Engelss letter
properly grasped the issue raised by Stirner. Concerning this, see section 4.5.
36. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 166.
37. See Sren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death [1849], trans. Alastair Hannay
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1989).
38. See Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1989).
42. Hannah Arendt sought to posit the political process of public consensus in
Kants Critique of Judgment. Meanwhile, Kant was not in the least satisfied with the no-
tion of common sense that works within only regional and historical confinements.
For him, judgment of taste calls or a universality far beyond them. Insofar as public
consensus (common sense) omits the call of universality, it retreats into a private
matter. On the other hand, Habermas sought to reconceptualize Kants reason as a
dialogic reason (i.e., intersubjectivity), overlooking the significance of Kants thing-
in-itself. Intersubjectivity is just anotherif largersubjectivity, and does not surpass
it. Such a notion tends to ignore the otherness of others. And such shortcomings of
theory reveal themselves more dreadfully in the actual events of the world.
What is called public consensus among people like Arendt and Habermas tends to
be the consensus within communities, among specific groups of people who share
common sense. For instance, Habermas dares to say that his consensus would not be
pertinent to non-Western worlds. He supported the German participation in the air
raids on Kosovo, claiming that it was based upon public consensus. It was not even
the consensus of the United Nations, but just within the European nations. In this
sense, the European Community, though beyond the scale of conventional nation-
states, is just another superstate that is deemed public when convenient.
43. Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1972), p. 18.
44. See Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy [1962], trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1983), esp. the section Critique.
6715 NOTES UG 1/29/03 8:03 PM Page 318
318
Notes
45. In defining modernism, Clement Greenberg resorted to Kant, calling him the first
modernist critic. See Modernist Painting [1960], in Clement Greenberg, Collected Essays
and Criticism, vol. 4, ed. John OBrien (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
46. For a detailed account on the Kant/Duchamp effect on contemporary art and
aesthetics, see Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,
1996).
48. What Russian formalists called ostranenie or defamilialization was nothing but a
bracketing of the familiar objects. This kind of operation is not, however, limited to
the arts.
49. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W.
Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 484485, A444/B472
A445/B473.
50. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. and ed. Mary Gregor, with an
introduction by Andrews Reath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997),
p. 80, 5:94.
52. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. and ed. Mary
Gregor, with an introduction by Christine M. Korsgaard (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), p. 31, 4:421.
53. The critique of Kantian ethics as subjectivist has been widespread ever since
Hegel. And Max Weber was one of those critics. In his Politik als Beruf (1919), he dis-
tinguished ethics of responsibility [Verantwortungsethik] from ethics of mind
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319
Notes
[Gesinnungsethik]. Ethics of mind implies an attitude that considers the selfs convic-
tion of justice as essential, and the failure of ones action as attributable to others or
to situations beyond ones control. Ethics of responsibility signifies an attitude that
takes responsibility for the results of ones action. Weber understood Kants ethics as
ethics of mind, based on a misunderstanding. The seminal point of Kant was that
thinking of oneself as moralistically sound and acting upon the conviction does not
mean one is so in reality, precisely like the $100 in the imagination is not the same as
the real $100 bill. Kants morality exists in the attitude to ascribe all the results of
ones deeds to oneself, instead of others.
59. It seems that from Capital the subjectivity to change the economic social struc-
ture of capitalism hardly appears. But, as I detail in the conclusion to part II, Marx
discovered the moment to overturn the hierarchical structure within itself.
62. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power [1888], trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J.
Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books), 1968, p. 536, #1041.
63. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum,
1973), p. 272.
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Notes
64. Freud confronted a case where a child who was brought up indulgently came to
develop a very intense superego or a strict conscientiousness; he sought to solve this
riddle by assuming the death drive as a primary factor. In other words, he posited
that what generates conscientiousness is not a stern superior other (or external
world) but a giving up of ones own aggression drive (i.e., the psychic energy is trans-
ferred to the superego and then directed to the ego). But Freud insisted that this
new idea was not contradictory to his previous one.
Which of these two views is correct? The earlier one, which genetically seemed
so unassailable, or the newer one, which rounds off the theory in such a welcome
fashion? Clearly, and by the evidence, too, of direct observations, both are justified.
They do not contradict each other, and they even coincide at one point, for the
childs revengeful aggressiveness will in part be determined by the amount of puni-
tive aggression that he expects from his father. Experience shows, however, that the
severity of the superego that a child develops in no way corresponds to the severity of
treatment with which he himself has met. The severity of the former seems to be in-
dependent of that of the latter. A child who has been brought up very leniently can
acquire a strict conscience. But it would also be wrong to exaggerate this indepen-
dence; it is not difficult to convince oneself that severity of upbringing does
also exert a strong influence on the formation of the childs superego. (Sigmund
Freud, Civilization and Its Discontent, trans. and ed. James Strachey [New York:
Norton], p. 92).
So it is that in Freud the superego is ambiguous. And the novelty of Freud after
Beyond the Pleasure Principle exists in his attempt to elucidate the riddle of superego
without resorting to communitys norms. What began to happen with Beyond the Plea-
sure Principle was the transformation not only of the framework of psychoanalysis but
also of his cultural theorythey are indeed inseparable. This was an overturning of
the romanticist convention that culture is an external, social fetter; and this over-
turning would not have been possible if not for an assumption of the death drive. I
have scrutinized this subject in my essay Death and NationalismKant and Freud
(Hihyo Kukan [Critical Space], no. 1516 [Tokyo: Ohta Press, 19971998]).
66. In a lecture soon after World War II, Karl Jaspers divided German guilt into four
categories: criminal, political, moral, and metaphysical. (The Question of German
Guilt, trans. by F. B. Ashton [New York: The Dial Press, 1947]). The first indicates
crimes of warthe violations of international law that were being tried in Nurem-
berg. The second, political guilt, is a concern of the entire nationno German is in-
nocent. Politically everyone acts in the modern state, at least by voting, or failing
to vote, in elections. The sense of political liability lets no man dodge . . . If things go
wrong the politically active tend to justify themselves; but such defences carry no
weight in politics (p. 62). According to Jaspers, the responsibility for this guilt
affects every citizen of the state, not only those who supported fascism but also even
those who did not. The third category, moral guilt, is applied to moral responsibility
and not legal responsibility: namely, where one did not help someone even if one
could have or one did not object to an evil though one should have. In this case, one
is not legally but morally guilty because one did not act for Sollen [oughtness]. The
last is metaphysical guilt, which is very close to Adornos problematic. For instance,
those who survived the concentration camps have had a feeling of guilt toward those
who died, almost as if they themselves had killed them. Because this sentiment is
almost unfounded both legally and politically, it is deemed metaphysical. Jaspers
little-known lecture defined the way Germans should act toward the responsibilities
of war. Now the distinction is a sine qua non for all ethical thinking.
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However, there are a few problems. Jaspers gives us the impression that Nazism
was mainly due to a fault of the mind, such that philosophical self-examination
could solve it. He neglects to question social, economic, and political causes of
Nazism. That is to say that Jaspers considers Kantian morality on the level of moral
guilt, while treating metaphysical guilt as lofty. But Kants morality is essentially
metaphysical, yet consistent with the stance to examine the natural causes by swerv-
ing away from individual responsibility.
67. Derridas account was forwarded to those who question Paul de Mans responsibil-
ity as a Nazi collaborator. See Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de
Mans War, in Responses: On Paul de Mans Wartime Journalism, ed. Werner Hamacher,
Neil Hertz, and Thomas Keenan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989).
68. Sren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, trans. Howard and Edna Hong (New York:
Harper & Row, 1962), p. 328.
70. Kants critical oscillation took place not only between Hume and Leibnitz but
also between Epicurean contingency and Aristotelian teleology: Whether we should
firstly expect that the states, by an Epicurean concourse of efficient causes, should
enter by random collisions (like those of small material particles) into all kinds of for-
mations which are again destroyed by new collisions, until they arrive by chance at a
formation that can survive in its existing form (a lucky accident which is hardly likely
ever to occur); or whether we should assume as a second possibility that nature in this
case follows a regular course in leading our species gradually upwards from the lower
level of animality to the highest level of humanity through forcing man to employ an
art which is nonetheless his own, and hence that nature develops mans original ca-
pacities by a perfectly regular process within this apparently disorderly arrangement
(Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History, in Kant, Political Writings, ed. Hans
Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970] p. 48).
Standing in an Epicurean position, Kant avoided seeing history teleologically, yet at
the same time he posed the idea that the teleology of history is permitted as a biologi-
cal (organic) one and as a regulative idea (qua transcendental semblance).
72. Concerning this account, I received suggestions from Tetsuo Watujis essay,
Kant ni-okeru Jinkaku to Jinruisei [Personality and Humanity in Kant], 1931.
73. See Herman Cohen (18421918), Einleitung mit Kritischen Nachtrag, zur Geschichte
des Materialismus von Lange, S. 112ff; and Ethik des reinen Willens, S. 217ff. See John
Rawlss preface to the French version of A Theory of Justice [1987]. Belknap Revised
Edition 1999.
74. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Law: Intro-
duction [1844], in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 3 (New York:
International Publishers, 1976), p. 182.
75. Ernst Bloch, On Karl Marx, trans. John Maxwell (New York: Herder and Herder,
1971).
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322
Notes
1. Ren Descartes, Discourse on Method [1637], ed. and trans. George Heffernan
(South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), p. 49; pt. 3 sec. 7.
2. Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Victor Lyle
Dowdell (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), pp. 45n.
3. See For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1990), and Reading Capital,
trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1979).
7. Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach [1845], in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,
Collected Works, vol. 5 [New York: International Publishers, 1976], 68, here p. 5;
translation slightly modified. This very ambiguity of Marx with respect to his appreci-
ation of subject and its exterior, of active and passive moments, resurfaced as the
conflict between materialists and formalists in the context of later Marxism. Con-
trary to what is commonly believed, formalists are not necessarily idealists through
and through. Far from it, many sought out the active agent that constitutes phenom-
ena and grasped linguistic form as its material. Thus this, too, is a kind of material-
ism. Indeed, if one overlooked this aspect, even Marxism would be a mere
empiricism. Meanwhile, when formalism rejects the externality that offers the con-
tent of experience, it becomes idealism. This entire problematic formation was al-
ready prefigured in the Kantian Turn. Kant not only criticized rationalism as
thought that lacks experience, but also warned that the starting point of empiricism,
sense-datum, was always already constituted by a certain form. Emphasizing the pri-
macy of the form of sensibility as well as the category of understanding, it might be
said that Kant already had spoken to the materiality of language. At the same time,
however, he insisted on the existence of the thing (in-itself) that persists no matter
how one might think of and represent the world. Thus, in his Materialism and Em-
pirio-Criticism (1909), Lenin pointed out that Marxism as well as neo-Kantianism had
lost sight of the existence of things themselves by stressing the activity of form, and
that Kant was to this extent more materialist than either of them (see V. I. Lenin,
Collected Works, vol. 14 [Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971]). Nonetheless, whereas
Marx had pointed to the materiality of the symbolic form (under the concept of
value form) that had been repressed in classical economics, Lenin ignored the for-
malist materiality entirely, thus rendering his own materialism into an unnecessarily
impoverished empiricism.
On the subject of the Kantian turn, I cannot ignore another example that has ap-
peared recentlywithout even mentioning Kantin the context of contemporary
theory: Judith Butlers Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993). In her previ-
ous work, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), Butler had emphasized the
precedence of gender as a social, cultural category over sex as a biological category.
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323
Notes
8. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, in Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels, Collected Works, vol. 5 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), p. 28.
9. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, trans. and ed. Wataru Hiro-
matsu (Tokyo: Kawade Shobo, 1974).
11. I shall in another discourse endeavor to give an account of the general princi-
ples of law and government, and of the different revolutions they have undergone in
the different ages and periods of society, not only in what concerns justice but in
what concerns police, revenue and arms, and whatever else is the object of law. I
shall not, therefore, at present enter into any further detail concerning the history
of jurisprudence (Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments [London: A. Miller, in
the Strand, 1759], p. 551).
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324
Notes
13. Karl Marx, The Holy Family, trans. Richard Dixon and Clements Dutt, in Karl
Marx and Fredrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 4 (New York: International Publish-
ers, 1976), p. 185.
15. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, trans. Clements Dutt, in
Collected Works, vol. 11 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), pp. 103104.
16. Hans Kelsen, Vom Wesen und Wert der Demokratie (Tbingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1929),
p. 30: Anderseits aber wollte man den Schein erwecken, als ob auch im Parlamen-
tarismus die Idee der demokratischen Freiheit, und nur diese Idee, ungebrochen
zum Ausdrucke kme. Diesem Zwecke dient die Fiktion der Reprsentation, der
Gedanke, da das Parlament nur Stellvertreter des Volks sei, da das Volk seinen
Willen nur im Parlament, nur durch das Parlament uern knne, obgleich das par-
lamentarische Prinzip in allen Verfassuungen ausnahmslos mit der Bestimmung ver-
bunden ist, da die Abgeordneten von ihren Whlern keine bindenden
Instruktionen anzunehmen haben, da somit das Parlament in seiner Funktion vom
Volke rechtlich unabhngig ist. Ja, mit dieser Unabhngigkeitserklrung des Parla-
mentes gegenber dem Volke entsteht berhaupt erst das moderne Parlament, lst
es sich deutlich von der alten Stndeversammlung ab, deren Mitglieder bekanntlich
durch imperative Mandate ihrer Whlergruppen gebunden und diesen verant-
wortlich waren.
20. Karl Marx, Preface to the Second Edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 21 (New York:
International Publishers, 1976), p. 56.
21. Friedrich Engels, Preface to the Third Edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International
Publishers, 1963), p. 14.
22. In texts such as The Reasoning of Marxism [Marukusu-Shugi no Riro] and On Engels
[Engels Ron], Wataru Hiromatsu stresses that he who played the first violin in con-
structing historical materialism was Engels. I agree with this opinion, except that my
standpoint comes from the opposite direction from that of Hiromatsu, who speaks to
the importance of Engels. I want to emphasize that Marxs power as well as concern
lay much less in conceptualizing historic materialism than often believed. Around the
same time as The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte was published, Engels wrote
Peasant War, in which what he called the law of history was already present. But this
book cannot rival The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, because of its lack of con-
cern for the system of representation/representatives, if not to say Marxs genius.
325
Notes
24. I propose to approach the political form that appeared out of the overall crisis of
capitalism in the 1930s from the vantage point of Bonapartism. So-called fascism or
the collapse of representation was not a phenomenon limited to Germany, Italy, and
Japan. For instance, the American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt was sup-
ported by all classes: from workers, peasants in the South, and even minorities, to cap-
italists, to the extent that the role of the party system became obsolete. Perhaps such a
phenomenon occurred only once, not before and not after. He famously conducted
the New Deal and, furthermore, shifted American foreign policy from isolationism to
active interventionism: the engagement in war and imperialist world policy.
25. Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (New York: Orgone Institute Press,
1946).
26. Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey
(New York: Norton, 1965), p. 14.
27. Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy [1923], trans. Ellen Kennedy
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1988), p. 16.
28. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston (Har-
mondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), pp. 7071.
29. See Heideggers lecture Declaration of Support for Adolf Hitler and the Na-
tional Socialist State (November 11, 1933): German Volksgenossen and Volksgenossin-
nen! The German people have been summoned by the Fhrer to vote; the Fhrer,
however, is asking nothing from the people. Rather, he is giving the people the pos-
sibility of making, directly, the highest free decision of all: whether the entire people
wants its own existence [Dasein] or whether it does not want it (Richard Wolin, ed.,
The Heidegger Controversy [Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1993], p. 49).
32. David Ricardo, On The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, 3d ed.
(London: John Murray, 1821), p. 341.
33. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), pp. 236237.
34. Crises occurred often during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Hol-
land and England, including the famous Tulip Crisis, that stormed across Holland
between 1634 and 1637. They were most certainly financial crises provoked by specu-
lation; one cannot determine, however, whether they were superficial and inciden-
tal. Even the cyclic crises in the age of industrial capitalism that began in 1819 first
appeared as financial crises and were then considered incidental. For industrial capi-
tal, credit and speculation are not merely secondary elements. Furthermore, it must
be noted that the seventeenth-century crises in Holland and England were already
world crises.
35. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 2, trans. Ben Fowkes
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 137.
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Notes
36. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in Karl Marx
and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 29 (New York: International Publishers,
1976), p. 390.
37. In the beginning of Capital, Marx wrote: The wealth of societies in which the capi-
talist mode of production prevails appears as an immense collection of commodi-
ties. Here, importantly, capital (stock) itself is included in the commodities. If so, the
original commodity must be one that includes not merely various objects and services
but capital itself. In this respect, the composition of Capital, which ends with the chap-
ter Classes, is not consistent. In Principles of Political Economics [Keizaigaku Genri]
(1962), the Japanese political economist Koichiro Suzuki problematized this point and
recomposed Capital logically, presenting the completion of capitals self-recursive de-
velopment wherein commodity finally becomes share capital (the capital commodity).
38. Karl Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle, May 31, 1858, in Collected Works, vol. 40, p. 316.
39. Karl Marx, Difference between Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Na-
ture, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 1 (New York: Interna-
tional Publishers, 1976), p. 36.
41. Kants transcritique was conducted not only in the interstice between Hume and
Leibnitz, but also between Epicurean contingency and Aristotelian teleology. He
said: Whether we should firstly expect that the states, by an Epicurean concourse of
efficient causes, should enter by random collisions (like those of small material parti-
cles) into all kinds of formations which are again destroyed by new collisions, until
they arrive by chance at a formation which can survive in its existing form (a lucky ac-
cident which is hardly likely ever to occur); or whether we should assume as a second
possibility that nature in this case follows a regular course in leading our species
gradually upwards from the lower level of animality to the highest level of humanity
through forcing man to employ an art which is nonetheless his own, and hence that
nature develops mans original capacities by a perfectly regular process within this
apparently disorderly arrangement; or whether we should rather accept the third
possibility that nothing at all, or at least nothing rational, will anywhere emerge from
all these actions and counter-actions among men as a whole, that things will remain
as they have always been, and that it would thus be impossible to predict whether the
discord which is so natural to our species is not preparing the way for a hell of evils
to overtake us, however civilized our condition, in that nature, by barbaric devasta-
tion, might perhaps again destroy this civilized state and all the cultural progress
hitherto achieved (a fate against which it would be impossible to guard under a rule
of blind chance, with which the state of lawless freedom is in fact identical, unless we
assume that the latter is secretly guided by the wisdom of nature)these three possi-
bilities boil down to the question of whether it is rational to assume that the order of
nature is purposive in its parts but purposeless as a whole (Immanuel Kant, Idea for a
Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose, in Kant, Political Writings, trans.
H. B. Nisbet [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970], p. 48). On the one
hand Kant, from the Epicurean stance, rejected the teleology of history, while on the
other hand he thought it could be accepted as a regulative idea (or transcendental
illusion)namely as the teleological hypothesis with respect to life (organism). This
acceptance of teleology is shared by Marxs view of history.
327
Notes
43. Karl Marx, Justification of the Correspondent from the Mosel, in Karl Marx
and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers,
1976), p. 335.
44. Michael Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, trans. Marshall S. Shatz (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 176.
45. Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, in Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engel, Collected Works, vol. 24 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), pp. 9394.
46. Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected
Works, vol. 22 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), p. 335.
49. Lorenz von Stein, Der socialismus und communismus des heutigen Frankreichs. Ein
beitrag zur zeitgeschichte (Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1842).
50. Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, trans. David Leopold (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995), p. 47.
53. As an example of the ego, Stirner named an artist, Raffaello Santi, instead of a
common person. That was somewhat misleading. What is noteworthy in this respect
is that in The German Ideology Marx stressed that Raffaello could not have created his
masterpieces without the preceding historical context as well as social division of
labor. In todays discourse, this corresponds to the claim that the author is dead or
that work is no less than the texta textile of quotations. Nonetheless we still
have to index a certain work by way of the authors name. Why? It is not because
it belongs to the author, but because the work as a singular eventthis (deictic) way
of weaving various textscan be pointed to only by a proper name. The Marx that I
am dealing with at this moment is also the proper name as an index. The work of
Marx could not have existed without the precedents and contemporary context.
And, with this way of assembling the external resources, the singularity of Marx
remains.
328
Notes
where the law of morals was realized. Seen from this vantage point, it is possible to
say that Stirners critique of Proudhon sought to radicalize the ethical, while Marxs
critique of Proudhon pushed the aspect of economy to the limit. All in all, however,
these two aspects cannot be considered separately. Thus it is crucial for our scrutiny
of the issues of socialism to return to Kant.
56. P.-J. Proudhon, The Principle of Federation, trans. Richard Vernon (Toronto: Uni-
versity of Toronto Press, 1979), p. 43.
57. What Stirner called Eigentrichkeit is the same as what Kierkegaard called Einzel-
heit. They both point to singularity. Stirner maintained that only egoists could form
unions (associations); this perfectly corresponds to Kierkegaards claim that only sin-
gular persons [Einzelheiten] could be Christian. Kierkegaard stressed that Christianity
did not exist in the churches; to him, Christianity existed in what he called the
ethics b, which was distinct from the ethics a of the churches (Philosophical Frag-
ments). There was a difference in their stance toward Christianity: Stirner attacked it,
while Kierkegaard protected it. But the sameness in their stance toward singularity is
what is more crucial. Kierkegaard published Either/Or in 1843, which showed his
contemporaneity with Stirner. Independently and separately, they sought to exceed
the circuit of the individual-genus of Hegelian philosophy. Meanwhile, criticizing
Hegelian idealism, the Young Hegelians nevertheless remained in the Hegelian
framework of thought. In Marx, finally, one sees a thinker who broke out of the cir-
cuit: individual-genus at the same time as persisting in materialism.
60. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, in Collected Works, vol. 5, p. 30.
61. Concluding The Ego and Its Own, Stirner wrote, Ich have meine Sache auf Nichts
gestellt [I have posited my affairs on nothing]. This was in fact a parody of Arnold
Ruges words: to posit everything over history. Stirners position is to take off
from the existence of the I qua nothingness, which is not determined by historical
relations.
62. In Communists Like Us (New York: Semiotext(e), 1990), Antonio Negri and Flix
Guattari stated that communism is a liberation of singularity. I understand that this
also presents the direction to synthesize, rather than oppose, the positions of Marx
and Stirner.
63. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected
Works, vol. 6 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), pp. 123124.
65. Instructions for Delegates to the Geneva Congress, Karl Marx: The First Interna-
tional and After. Political Writings, vol. 3, ed. David Fernbach (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1992), p. 90.
329
Notes
69. Karl Marx, konomische Manuskripte 18631867 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1992),
p. 331.
70. Karl Marx Friedrich Engels Werke, vol. 25. (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1973), p. 267.
72. These reflections owe much to Minoru Tabatas book Marx and Association
(Tokyo: Shinsen sha, 1994).
73. Karl Marx, The Draft of The Civil War in France, in Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels, Collected Works, vol. 22 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), p. 491.
74. Today the conflict between Bolshevism and anarchism is expressed less politi-
cally than philosophically. For instance, Deleuzes work can be read as an anarchism.
But Deleuze wrote closely on not only Hume and Bergson but also Spinoza and
Leibnitz. I believe that Deleuze tacitly criticized both tendencies by way of affirming
both. In this sense, what he did was a Kantian-Marxian transcritique. In Nietzsche and
Philosophy, he read Nietzsches work as the sequel to Kants third critique; in Anti-
Oedipus, he recognized the works of Marx and Freud as transcendental critique. Gen-
erally speaking, however, Deleuze became the darling of todays aestheticized
anarchists. The majority of Deleuzians ignore the fact that in his last interview, he
professed himself to be completely Marxist, and in consequence, they regress to
Bergsonism.
75. Bakunin insisted that revolution should be realized by the free association of
workers themselves. But he could not do away with the leadership of reason or intel-
lectuals. Though denying centralist power, he sought to organize a secret society
(party) formed in the strict hierarchy of a tree-structure. In this sense, he was not so
far from Branqui, according to whom revolution was of and by the masses them-
selves, but doomed to fail without the orientation of the awakening vanguards (i.e.,
party).
In his The Catechism of the Revolutionist, Bakunin wrote that each comrade should
have several second- or third-level activists, not fully engaged in the revolution,
who help them out now and then; and these comrade-revolutionaries should con-
sider the activists as part of their revolutionary capital. Nechaev acted on it. It is un-
deniable that this derived from Bakunins theory of organization. The Russian
socialist movement that began in the 1840s was influenced by Feuerbach. Young
Dostoevski committed himself to it and was deported to Siberia. It was there he
wrote The Possessed. In any event, it is noteworthy that Dostoevskis discernment
of the revolutionary politics owed to the anarchist movement rather than to the
Marxists.
Anarchists deny the domination of reason. One should not forget, however, the
paradox: Only reason can criticize reason. Even Bergsons critique of intellect is a
critique of reason by reason. Forgetting this paradox, one can easily and simple-
mindedly assert the predominance of intuition and life. That is a disguised arro-
gance of reason. For instance, Georges Sorel called state-power forceread
oppressive intellectand the general strike of workers violenceread pulse of
lifebased on Bergsonian philosophy. And it was not a coincidence that his theory
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330
Notes
came to fruition under the fascism of Mussolini. Anarchists reject the leadership of
intellectuals and deny the party system; anarcho-syndicalists in particular professed
themselves to be an autonomous movement of workers. But these workers are
nothing if not intellectuals; the group is nothing but a party. Trotsky pointed out the
deception in this idea: Above all in France, for French syndicalismwe must repeat
thiswas and is, in its organization and theory, likewise a party. This is also why it ar-
rived, during its classical period (1905-07), at the theory of the active minority, and
not at the theory of the collective proletariat. For what else is an active minority,
held together by the unity of their ideas, if not a party? And on the other hand,
would not a trade union mass organization, not containing a class-conscious active
minority, be a purely formal and meaningless organization? (Leon Trotsky, On the
Trade Unions [New York: Pathfinder Press, 1969]).
But I am not saying that the centralist party idea of Lenin and Trotsky was just.
What I doubt is the choice whether to accept or reject the centralist party. This is ba-
sically the same as the fatalistic idea about revolutionary politics: whether to accept
or reject the bureaucratic system. What is necessary is to discover a system that can
prevent the fixation of hierarchy, after once adopting the leadership of intellectuals,
the representative system, and the bureaucratic system.
76. In his introduction to the third version of Marxs The Civil War in France,
published in 1891 in Germany, Engels degraded Proudhon in various ways. (See
Friedrich Engels, Introduction to Karl Marxs The Civil War in France, in Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 27 [New York: International Publish-
ers, 1976]) As he said negatively, Proudhonists were certainly minorities in the Paris
Commune. But, calling themselves minorities affirmatively, they protested against
the centralist rule by the majorities. The majorities were Branquists and Jacobins,
while the minorities consisted of the members of the International Working
Mens Association (for whom Marx wrote the essays). The leading ideal of the
Paris Commune was evidently that of the IWAnamely, of Proudhonists. And
Marx praised them. Meanwhile, Engels intended to degrade them by calling them
minorities as if majorities were just. The Commune was shattered in two months.
If it had lasted longer, it would have been dominated by Branquists and Jacobins.
In the Russian Revolution, Lenin associated his party with the majorities [Bolshevik],
and repeated the same thing. I contest that it was due to Engelss distortion of
history.
Furthermore, Engels attacked the Commune that it left the central bank alone. In
fact, capitalism at the time would have been damaged more severely had the central
bank been dissolved. On the other hand, however, Engelss idea of state ownership
of the economy, too, would have made the state endure. According to Charles
Longuet, the husband of one of Marxs daughters, Proudhonists such as Charles
Besley intended, after the victory of the Commune, to organize la Banque nationale
that would need neither stockholders nor stocks, but still issue bank notes guaran-
teed only by securities, following the Proudhonist agenda. It requires further
scrutiny to determine whether this idea could truly be an alternative to the currency
and credit system of the capitalist state, but the point is that any association that
would abolish the capitalist economy would still involve currency and a credit system
of its own. I shall argue this point at the conclusion of the book. (See A Few Com-
ments on Engels Introduction [Engels no jobun no jakkan no ten ni tsuite], in The
Civil War in France [France no Nairan] [Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten].)
77. In Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1984), Benjamin Barber proposed a system that enables the participa-
tory democracy (including lottery). Nevertheless, his strong democracy idea does
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331
Notes
1. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 3, trans. Ben Fowkes (Har-
mondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 744.
4. In the New Testament, the monetary economy appears as despised and denied,
and yet it is used as a metaphor time and again. In Greek philosophy since Plato, this
has also been the case. Both had to confront the theologico-metaphysical nature
of money. Marc Schell offers a fascinating reflection on this topic in The Economy of
Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).
332
Notes
the gifts of nature. Classical economists basically followed this line, except that they
replaced the productive power of nature with human division of labor. Here arose
the conviction that value is formed only by human labor. In Critique of the Gotha Pro-
gramme, Marx criticized the classical economist stance of Ferdinand Lassalle
(18251864) and emphasized that not only humans but also nature produce. This
critique was not merely uttered for the sake of rebuking Lassalles tacit defense of
the landowner class, but represented his consistent position throughout Capital:
When man engages in production, he can only proceed as nature does herself, that
is, he can only change the form of the materials. Furthermore, even in this work of
modification he is constantly helped by natural forces. Labor is therefore not the
only source of material wealth, i.e., of the use-value it produces. As William Petty
says, labor is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother. (Marx, Capital,
vol. 1, pp. 133134)
In other words, labor and land are the very things that capital cannot produce, al-
though it relies on them, even lives off of them. But still the crux is that all products,
whether man-made or natural, are organized by value form, and both physiocrats
and classical economists disregarded this dimension. They considered value produc-
tion and object production as one and the same thing. This stance also solidified the
identification of the capitalist economy with industrial civilization. Therefrom de-
rived the permeating fallacy that the problems of industrial capitalism are equal to
those of modern industry and technology.
Classical economists emphasis on labor was certainly an epoch-making turn if one
thinks about it. Nonetheless, it not only resulted in the widespread neglect of the
dimension of money and creditengendered by the difficulty and crisis of
exchangebut also fostered the illusion that social exchange could be grasped
transparently. This stance came to see the social division of labor that is constantly
organized and reorganized by money, and the division of labor inside a factory, as
one and the same. From this emerged the socialism (qua statism) that plans
and controls the whole of society like a factory. History has proven that this works
only locally and temporarily. In many cases, its failure has appeared most conspicu-
ously in the agricultural sectorwhich is half based upon the production by na-
ture. From a larger perspective, however, the failure comes from a naivet vis--vis
the essential difficulty of exchange. Today it is crucial for us to note that the ten-
dency of mainstream Marxism since Engelsto rule the natural and anarchic ele-
ments and design a totally controlled societystemmed from the ideology of
classical economics.
The idea of planning an economy by means of a centralized power is not solely de-
rivative of classical economics, but of neoclassical economics that belittled the labor
theory of value. They share the same stance in regarding money just as index of
value or a means of exchange. For instance, Oskar Lange, who advocated market so-
cialism, sought to present the possibility of a rational distribution of resources by a
planned economy. Being a follower of Walrass theory of general equilibrium, he
held that it would be realized more suitably in the socialist than in the capitalist
economy. In this idea, the central bureau of economic planning would play the role
of overseeing the stock market, introducing the computerized informatic system.
The market socialists, who appeared after the collapse of the Soviet Union, more or
less think the same way. On the other hand, Marx never believed in a planned econ-
omy or the state control of economy. His point was not to neutralize money but to
sublate it. For further discussion, see section 5.2.
13. Samuel Bailey, A Critical Dissertation on the Nature, Measure, and Causes of Value:
Chiefly in Reference to the Writings of Mr. Ricardo and His Followers. By the Author of Essays
on the Formation, etc., of Opinions (London: R. Hunter, 1825), pp. 4, 5, 8.
6715 NOTES UG 1/29/03 8:03 PM Page 333
333
Notes
14. The Quantitative Determinancy of the Relative Form of Value, in Marx, Capi-
tal, vol. 1, p. 146.
16. Classical economists and their critics, neoclassical economists, overlooked the
enigma as to why exchanges could occur only by way of money. For they took money
either as a measure of value or as a means of exchange. Under such a belief in the
neutrality of money, Walrass theory of general equilibrium was established.
Neoclassical economists consider the market to be a place where prices of commodi-
ties are adjusted under the auspices of an auctioneer. But, in the real market, selling
and buying do not take place at the same time. As Marx said, selling and buying are
split by money being accumulated. The theory of general equilibrium is just an
hypothesis, established by neutralizing (nullifying) money. Only Johan Dustaf
Knut Wicksell among the neoclassical economists suspected the neutrality of money;
see Vorlesungen ber Nationalkonomie auf Grundlage des Marginalprinzipes, Bd, I, 1913,
Bd, II, 1922; English translation: Lectures on Political Economy, 2 vols., 19341935.
He said that the discrepancy between the market or money rate of interest and
the natural or real rate of interest cumulatively invites the fall of valuein other
words, that the monetary economy is originally disequilibrate. Hayek saw the market
as a disperse and competitive place where the theory of general equilibrium was
inapplicable.
Meanwhile, this problem was already touched upon by Marx. In the first edition of
Capital, Marx made an important suggestion concerning this. In the theory of value
form, he explained the advent of the general equivalent form in form III as follows:
In form III . . . linen appears as the generic form of the equivalent for all other
commodities. It is as if, along with and aside from lions, tigers, rabbits and all other
real animals that group together and make up the different genus, species, sub-
species, families etc. of the animal world, there was also the animal, the incarnation of
the entire animal world. Such a particular that comprises in itself all existing species
of the same sort is a general, as animal, God and so on. (In der Form III, welche
die rckbezogene zweite Form und also in ihr eingeschlossen ist, erscheint die Lein-
wand dagegen als die Gattungsform des Aequivalents fr alle audern Waaren. Es ist
als ob neben und ausser Lwen, Tigern, Hasen und allen andern wirklichen
Thieren, die gruppirt die verschiednen Geschlechter, Arten, Unterarten, Familien
u.s.w. des Thierreichs bilden, auch noch das Thier existirte, die individuelle Incarna-
tion des ganzen Thierreichs. Ein solches Eizelne, das in sich selbst alle wirklich
vorhandenen Arten derselben Sache einbegreift, ist ein Allgemeines, wie Thier, Gott
u.s.w.Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Oekonomie, vol. 1, Hamburg: O. Meissner;
New York: L. W. Schmidt, 18671894, p. 27). This suggests a self-referential paradox
akin to that of the theory of sets. The stance of classical and neoclassical economics
regarding money just as medium-signifies positing money on the meta-level and dis-
tinguishing it from commodities on the object-level. But such logical typing cannot
be sustained. For, as shown by the fluctuation of the rate of interest, it so happens
that money also becomes a commodity; that is to say that it so happens that what is in
the meta-level (i.e., a class) at some point falls to the object-level and becomes a
member.
Notwithstanding the neutralization of money by classcial and neoclassical eco-
nomics, however, money sustains itself. But more contemporary economists who crit-
icize them consider Marx as an epigone of the Classical school, ignoring his theory
of value form. In this aspect, Marxists think in the same way.
334
Notes
23. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations [1776], ed. Andrew Skinner (Har-
mondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1970).
25. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York: Farrar & Reinhart, 1944).
27. The capitalist economy cannot be overcome by the previously existing princi-
ples. Many antitheses that appear to counter the principles of the market economy
are just reconfirming particular phases of the capitalist economy. For instance,
Georges Bataille saw the postwar American economic policy, the Marshall Plan, as
expenditure. His general economics appears to have been conceptualized in
order to ground the Keynesian intervention of the state, rather than primitive soci-
eties. Meanwhile, the anthropologist, Marcel Mauss, who contributed revolutionary
insights into the system of gifting in primitive societies, sought to draw a principle of
cooperative society.
28. Marxs stance that saw capitalists as personifications of capital is even more
apropos when applied to this stage, when stock companies have become dominant.
In this system, a split occurs between capital and management, between capitalists
(stock holders) and executives. In consequence, executives come to consider them-
selves as workers with complicated tasks. No matter what they think subjectively, they
have to work effectively toward the self-reproduction of capital so that they are not
fired. This situation is also true for the bureaucrats of socialist states, who subjec-
tively negate profit making and exploitation.
335
Notes
37. In The Coiners of Language (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), Jean
Joseph Goux compares the gold standard with literary realism, and suggests a rap-
port between the collapse of the former and the decline of the latter, in reference to
Andr Gides Faux-monnayeurs. But the termination of the conversion system in Eng-
land and France came as a result of World War I and the weakening of the interna-
tional hegemony of these nation-states. Thus the event was represented as the fall of
the father. The fact was that at that time, gold (as world money) again became nec-
essary for international liquidation, and the American dollar became the key cur-
rency convertible to gold. That is to say that the gold standard was not terminated at
that time, but in 1972, when the conversion system of the dollar was terminated.
Since then, international financial trading has been more volatile. According to
Goux, Gides Faux-monnayeurs pioneered the presentation of a world in which lan-
guage (qua currency) is independent from referents and ideas. But Gide and other
high modernists of that period were working in the sphere of modernism precisely
corresponding to the Keynesian currency management of that time that tacitly re-
lied on the gold standard for international settlement. If one continues the line of
economic referents, it can be said that it was when America stopped the gold stan-
dard that the state of affairs called postmodernismepitomized by the phrase the
original itself is copybegan to emerge. It is impossible, however, for this situation
to last forever.
38. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1976),
p. 325.
39. Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987),
p. 129.
40. Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Victor Lyle Dowdell
(Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), p. 54.
41. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysic of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 6970, 6:2876:288.
42. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (New York: International
Publishers, 1989), pp. 5657.
43. As I discussed in Architecture as Metaphor (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995),
Marx used the term Naturwchsigkeit [grown-by-nature-ness] often, beginning with
The German Ideology. This indicates the force that forms human history as pure
natural becoming, the force of which no planning and control are possible.
The fact that Marx retained the term was important especially in contrast to the lin-
eage of Marxism (historical materialism) that has sought to plan the whole course of
history.
45. With respect to the credit system, Marx wrote; If the credit system appears as
the principle lever of overproduction and excessive speculation in commerce, this is
simply because the reproduction process, which is elastic by nature, is now forced to
its most extreme limit; and this is because a great part of the social capital is applied
6715 NOTES UG 1/29/03 8:03 PM Page 336
336
Notes
by those who are not its owners, and who therefore proceed quite unlike owners
who, when they function themselves, anxiously weigh the limits of their private capi-
tal. This only goes to show how the valorization of capital founded on the antitheti-
cal character of capitalist production permits actual free development only up to a
certain point, which is constantly broken through by the credit system. The credit
system hence accelerates the material development of the productive forces and the
creation of the world market, which it is the historical task of the capitalist mode of
production to bring to a certain level of development, as material foundations for
the new form of production. At the same time, credit accelerates the violent out-
breaks of this contradiction, crises, and with these the elements of dissolution of the
old mode of production (Marx, Capital, vol. 3, p. 572).
46. In fact there are many biblical references in Capital. It might be possible even to
say that Marx saw industrial capital as the New Testament, and merchant capital or
usurers capital as the Old Testament. Although the New Testament needs the Old
inasmuch as it is the realization of the latter, it, as a new revision, also has to be a
negation of the latter. The stance that classical economists took toward the previous
economics was interestingly the same as this.
47. Matthew 34 in The New Oxford Annotated Bible, Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E.
Murphy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
48. Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 185758, a.k.a. Grundrisse der Kritik der poli-
tischen konomie, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 28 (New
York: International Publishers, 1976), p. 42. Marx developed his notion of the precapi-
talist forms of production based on his reflections on the capitalist economy in Grun-
drisse. But this account does nothing to explain world history. It is rather a device to
understand the historical peculiarity of capitalist production itself. So it is that there is
no possible way to lay out a certain course or order of development as historical neces-
sity, starting from the primitive communityand this was never Marxs intention.
The multifariousness of the production systems should be understood as varia-
tions of composite elements, and not as historical necessity. For this reason, Maxime
Rodinson proposed to call them pre-capitalist systems of exploitation. See his Islam
et Capitalism (Paris: Edition du Seuil, 1966); English translation, Islam and Capitalism
trans. Brian Pearce (London: Allen Lane, 1974). As I said in section 5.3, the precapi-
talist system is based on the reciprocity between robbery (qua redistribution) and
gift. And even in capitalist society, these have not been abolished but rather trans-
formed into the form of the modern nation-state. Considerations of the precapital-
ist systems of exploitation are necessary, only because this persists today in
metamorphosed form.
49. The theory of reification tacitly takes for granted a stance from which it is possi-
ble to grasp the whole relation of production. It follows that, counter to its inten-
tion, the theory would result in centralist power control.
1. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (Har-
mondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 266.
337
Notes
8. In a sense, it is correct to say that Marx sought to push the Ricardian labor theory
of value even further than Ricardo. On the other hand, facing an impasse, Ricardo
partly revised his theory and had it that value is not determined solely by invested
labor, except for within those departments that have a standard composition of capi-
tal and a standard turnover term. As I have already said in the context of Baileys
criticism of Ricardo, however, Marx was no longer of the opinion that each com-
modity internalizes its own value. The value of each commodity is given only when
the relationship between commodities forms a system; if so, even if the value sub-
stance of a commodity is the invested labor, it would be the labor value that has been
reposited and adjusted in the exchange with money. In other words, it is the social
labor-time or the abstract labor-time, as Marx put it. Marxs social labor time is
distinct from the actual labor time expended to produce individual commodities; it
is rather the labor time that is discovered belatedly within products after being socially
constituted via the exchange with money. The value vis--vis labor timeeither via
commodity exchange or capitalist productioncannot be measured quantitatively
by any means whatsoever. What we can know is only price. And what is certain is that
capital is deadly serious about the reinforcement of productivity; that this is realized
only by shortening the necessary labor time; and that the difference of productivity
determines the hierarchy of value systems of world nations.
Also in Capital, Marx says he assumes simple labor; this is for convenience sake
and the simple has nothing to do with the kind of labor. The diversity and com-
plexity of labor as use-value cannot be measured quantitatively. But it is in reality
quantifiedas the amount of wagesonly after being socialized by the commodity
exchange. Therefore, intellectual labor comes to be quantitatively compared with
simpler labors. It is not that the labor time expended for the production of commodi-
ties places them in equivalency, but that placing them in equivalency determines the
social labor time expended for the production. The quality of labor does not matter
in this. And there is no need to revise the previous analysis; even in the face of a shift
of major labor forms from, for instance, the second industry (manufacturing) to the
third industry (service).
Kozo Uno argued that Marx made a mistake in posing labor time as value-
substance in the stage of the theory of value form, and that it rather should have ap-
peared in the stage of the process of production in industrial capitalism, wherein
labor power becomes commodity, and labor time is objectified to a certain degree
because of mechanical production. This precisely points to the fact that a thing such
as labor time is very much particular to the economy of industrial capital. Which is
to say that the concept should not be applied to the noncapitalist economy, and fur-
thermore, to an economy that is beyond capitalism. In this aspect, the idea of Owen
and Proudhon, of labor money in particular, that was supposed to be beyond capital-
ism, was dependent upon and confined within the paradigm of the capitalist com-
modity economy. To sublate the capitalist economy is equal to sublating labor-value.
Communism, according to Marxs vision, is supposed to be a society where everyone
6715 NOTES UG 1/29/03 8:03 PM Page 338
338
Notes
is given according to their need, and not a society where everyone is given according
to the amount of their labor. In other words, a society must abolish the determina-
tion (law) of value according to labor itself. Marx acknowledges the labor theory of
value only for the sake of abolishing the economic system that imposes it. On the
other hand, those ideologues who tend to disavow the labor theory of value are
those who wish for the permanence of capitalism. In order to totally nullify labor
value, it is imperative to have another form of exchange and money.
9. Samuel Bailey, A Critical Dissertation on the Nature, Measure, and Causes of Value:
Chiefly in Reference to the Writings of Mr. Ricardo and His Followers. By the Author of Essays
on the Formation, etc., of Opinions (London: R. Hunter, 1825), p. 72.
10. Roman Jakobson, On Language (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 462.
11. See Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris (La
Salle, IL: Open Court, 1972).
12. Karl Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 185758, in Collected Works, vol. 28, p. 99.
13. In answering this question, it is relevant to point out that even in non-linguistic
cases values of any kind seem to be governed by a paradoxical principle. Value al-
ways involves:
(1) something dissimilar which can be exchanged for the item whose value is under
consideration, and
(2) similar things which can be compared with the item whose value is under
consideration.
These two features are necessary for the existence of any value. To determine the
value of a five-franc coin, e.g. what must be known is: (1) that the coin can be ex-
changed for a certain quantity of something different, e.g. bread, and (2) that its
value can be compared with another value in the same system, for example, that of a
one-franc coin, or a coin belonging to another system (e.g. a dollar). Similarly, a
word can be substituted for something dissimilar: an idea. At the same time, it can
be compared to something of like nature: another word. Its value is therefore not
determined merely by that concept or meaning for which it is a token (Saussure,
Course in General Linguistics, pp. 113114). Thus Saussures linguistics is not
that of a unitary system; it takes as a premise the exchange (translation) with other
languages.
17. Paul Valry, Reflections on Art, in Paul Valry, Aesthetics, trans. Ralph Manheim
(New York: Pantheon, 1964), pp. 142143.
18. Valry wrote on Capital: Hier soir relu . . . (un peu) Das Kapital. Je suis un des
rares hommes qui laient lu. Il parait que Jaurs lui-mme . . .
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339
Notes
19. The first person to draw the theory of surplus value from Ricardo was Charles
Wentworth Dilke; he wrote a pamphlet The Source and Remedy of the National Difficul-
ties (1821). Then, Thomas Hodgskin wrote Labour Defended against the Claims of Capi-
tal (1825). Ricardos The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation was published in
1817. So their responses were rather quick. Their work offered the theoretical
ground for the British labor movement beginning in the 1820s. It is evident that the
position of surplus value exploitation was not Marxs discovery. Marx himself ad-
mitted as much, and commented on Dilkes pamphlet: This scarcely known pam-
phlet (about 40 pages) . . . contains an important advance on Ricardo. It bluntly
describes surplus valueor profit, as Ricardo calls it (often also surplus produce),
or interest, as the author of the pamphlet terms itas surplus labor, the labor which
the worker performs gratis, the labor he performs over and above the quantity of
labor by which the value of his labor capacity is replaced, i.e. by which he produces
an equivalent for his wages. Important as it was to reduce value to labor, it was equally
important to present surplus value, which manifests itself in surplus produce, as surplus
labor. This was in fact already stated by Adam Smith and constitutes one of the main
elements in Ricardos argumentation. But nowhere did he clearly express it and
record it in an absolute form (Karl Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 186163Theories
of Surplus Value, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 32 [New
York: International Publishers, 1976], p. 374.).
20. Around 1960, Nobuo Okishio suggested that the proposition: if the rate of
profit is plus, surplus labor is necessarily involved can be proven either in considera-
tion of production price or more general price (Marx Keizai-gakuKachi to kakaku no
Riron [Marxian Political Economythe Theory of Value and Price] [Tokyo:
Chikuma Shobo, 1977]).
340
Notes
32. Marx said, Each individual capital forms only a fraction of the total social capi-
tal (Capital, vol. 2, p. 427). And I suggest that total social capital be divided into two
categories: national total-social-capital and global total-social-capital. Global
total-social-capital treats individual national total-social-capitals in the same way that
the national total-social-capital treats individual capitals. The advent of global total-
social-capital was exemplified by the U.S. postwar foreign aid program, the
Marshall Plan, and the establishment of the International Monetary Fund in 1944.
33. See Joseph Alois Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York:
Harper & Bros., 1942).
36. At the time Marx was writing Capital, world crises occurred in approximately ten-
year cycles. This so-called Jugler cycle was in synch with technological innovationthe
improvement of capitals organic compositionin cotton manufacturing. That is,
cotton machines lasted about ten years. As Marx said, A machine also undergoes
6715 NOTES UG 1/29/03 8:03 PM Page 341
341
Notes
what we might call a moral depreciation (Capital, vol. 1, p. 528). But, as Engels
pointed out (Marx, Capital, vol. 3, p. 620 n 8), beginning in the 1870s, turning points
came to be marked by great crises. The acute form of the periodic process with its
former ten-year cycle seems to have given way to a more chronic and drawn-out alter-
nation, affecting the various industrial countries at different times, between a relative
short and weak improvement in trade and a relatively long and indecisive depres-
sion. Nikolai D. Kondratieffs theory of the long wave was an answer to this problem.
But whether or not this accompanies a crisis is a problem of the world credit system.
39. For instance, those who praise the adjustment mechanism of the market econ-
omy tend to blame its malfunction on speculators, who are the merchant capitalists
who earn surplus value from the difference of value systemsof capital commodities
and money commodities in the stock and exchange markets. Herein persists the ide-
ology of industrial capitalism-classical economics, claiming that manufacturers are
healthy while speculators are not. This blurs capitals own merchant-capitalist
natureearning surplus value by differentiationby shifting it exclusively to the os-
tensible merchant capital. It is important to note that this ideologythe hatred of
merchantshas been influential beyond the boundaries of economy; before
World War II, it was heard as anti-Semitism. Against such a tendency, Marx says: all
nations characterized by the capitalist mode of production are periodically seized by
fits of giddiness in which they try to accomplish the money-making without the medi-
ation of the production process (Capital, vol. 2, p. 137).
42. Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism (London: Verso, 1983), pp. 2223.
44. The Japan Capitalism Debate is also called the Feudal System Debate. The
background of this debate was that the group associated with the Japan Communist
6715 NOTES UG 1/29/03 8:03 PM Page 342
342
Notes
Party (Koza-ha) determined that the overthrow of the Emperor [Tenno] system
namely, a bourgeois revolutionwas to be their primary task, for they attributed the
backwardness of Japanese society to the remaining strength of feudal landlords. This
agenda was in fact based upon the programs of Comintern. In opposition, Rono-ha
the Laborers-peasants Sectinsisted that these feudal remnants were, conversely, de-
rivatives of the capitalist commodity economy, and that the primary task was a social
democratic revolution backed up by universal suffrage and the constitutional monar-
chy that was, though weak, already established in Japan. In this manner, the harsh
conflict vis--vis the political program was deeply etched in this long-lasting debate.
Nonetheless, because this debate took place lawfully in public journals, it came to in-
volve a number of scholars and intellectuals outside the parties, and raised many im-
portant issues, that of literary criticism included, concerning Japanese modernity.
Without reflecting on this debate, one cannot speak of the intellectual problematic
of modern Japan. Concerning this, see Germaine A. Hoston, Marxism and the Crisis
of Development in Prewar Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).
47. Since the beginning of the eighteenth century, the importation of Indian cotton
fabric into Great Britain had been restricted by mercantilist protectionism. While
British products were sold to India with only a 2.5 percent duty, by 1812, Indian
products were severely taxedmuslin at 27 percent and calico at 71 percent. In
1823, duties were lowered to 10 percent, but only because, by this time, the Indian
cotton industries had collapsed and the high tariff was no longer necessary. See
Sakae Kakuyama, The Development of English Cotton Manufacture and the Advent
of World Capitalism, in The Formation of World Capitalism [Sekai-shihonshugi no Seir-
itsu] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1967).
49. In the early 1960s, the Japanese Marxian political economist, Hiroshi Iwata, elu-
cidated the fact that the object of Capital is really world capitalism, except that it is
internalized within the national economy of England. See his The Formation of World
Capitalism (1964).
51. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class (London: Verso,
1991), pp. 123124.
343
Notes
3. Norbert Weiner, Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Ma-
chine (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1961).
4. Mark Poster, Foucault, Marxism, and History: Mode of Production versus Mode of Infor-
mation (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1984).
6. The ideologues of the nation-state speak as if there were a nation and its home-
land from the beginning, which then developed a feudal system and then abso-
lutism, and finally became a modern nation-state. But, both the nation and its
homeland were articulated at the time of the absolutist monarchy as its subject and
domain. It was the absolutist monarchy that gathered people who had been divided
in tribes and fiefdoms in the feudal ages, and made them into a nation. People of
modern nations, however, imagine their one continuous historical origin from an
ancient dynasty when there was nothing like a nation. Nonetheless, the enduring
power of nationalism is not solely due to the fact of representation. Representation
persists in being strong inasmuch as it functions to fill in the gap left by the absence
of the reciprocal community; it even becomes the ground to overcome, though
temporarily and illusorily, the class conflict delivered by the industrial capitalism.
7. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 57.
15. See Benedict Anderson, Gengo to Kokka [Language and State] published in the
Japanese literary magazine, Bungaku-kai, September 2000. In this essay, Anderson
maintained that in Indonesia, the identity of the nation was provoked and organized
by the state, and that it was initiated by The Netherlands colonialist state apparatus.
This proves the point that the absolutist state apparatus preceded the nation. The
form of the absolutist states, which appeared in the West in the fifth to sixth cen-
turies, is not obsolete today. The role they played has been repeated in various
forms, in other regions, all over the world, and even today. Dictatorships in develop-
ing countries can be seen in this light. When a centralist state is being established in
regions where different tribes, nations, and religious groups form a complex, it
adopts the form of the absolutist state, be it monarchy or socialism. In this sense
what they think and say and what they actually do are two different things.
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344
Notes
In addition, the agents of a bourgeois revolution are not always bourgeoisie them-
selves. As Marx said, bourgeois thinkers and bourgeoisie are two different things.
For instance, vis--vis the Japanese modern revolution called the Meiji Restoration
(1868), many Marxist thinkers in Japan claimed that it was acted upon by lower class
Samurais and intellectuals, so it was not a bourgeois revolution. If we take a look at
modern revolutions in France and Great Britain, however, the actual bearers were
also intellectuals, landowners, and independent producers. So revolutions that suffi-
ciently realize the conditions of capitalist economies are bourgeois revolutions, no
matter who the players.
17. According to Bob Jessop, from the 1970s on, Marxists have come to realize that the
state is not just a reflection of an economic class structure, but has its own autonomy
and functions as a regulator among various interests in civil society. See his State Theory
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990). But this interpretation is
not new; it was stressed already by Hegel. One must tackle Hegels Philosophy of Right
again. If not, the previous recognition would give way to the idea of regulation in the
sense of social democracy, omitting the scheme of abolishing the capitalist nation-state.
18. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare
and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), p. 283.
19. The reproduction of people and land is made possible by the production of na-
ture, as it were, that is, the gift of nature. From this position, famously or infamously,
anticapitalist nationalists stress blood and land. Because they are gifts [Geschenk] of
nature, they are also destiny [Schicksal]. Heideggers ontology grasps Being in
terms of the German expression es gibt [there is], which literally says it gives, im-
plying that existence as destiny is equal to the gift of nature. In this manner, his
thinking has been connected to the agriculture-first principle beginning at Ques-
nay. Yet he was not simply a man of the forest. Heidegger supported the National
Socialist Labor Party a.k.a. the Nazi Party, because he believed that the party would
solve the labor problems rooted in industrial capitalism. Heideggers brand of anti-
Semitism, which denied the Nazis biological theory of race, was rooted, in essence,
in antimerchant capitalism (or anti-international financial capitalism), and a deriva-
tive of the theory of classical economics. His ideal was based upon the principles of a
production-centered rather than circulation-centered stance, and he sought to real-
ize it in harmony with nature. The crux of fascist movements, as opposed to its
stereotypical image, lies in offering alienated workers a surplus of life by recovering
the authenticity [Eigentrichkeit] of the natural environment. It is not the case that fas-
cism always takes the form of jingoism; it is not always involved in the militaristic
state. So it is that fascism is not obsolete. It is omnipresent; today its essence can also
be found in certain radical ecologists.
21. Since the Puritan Revolution, bourgeois revolutions have always involved violent
acts. Even some socialist revolutions have been violent, however, that is only because
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they occurred in countries where the bourgeois revolution (read sweeping of feudal
remnants) or the formation of nation-state had not yet been completed. Still there
are many regions on earth where violent revolution is necessary. It is unjust and
pointless for bourgeois ideologues to criticize this type of revolution. They are oblivi-
ous to their own pasts. But the point I want to make is that what abolishesnot
just regulatesthe bourgeois state (capital/state amalgamation) is no longer the
violent revolution. I would call this other movement a counteraction rather than a
revolution.
22. To be precise, socialism was rooted not only in the ethical but also the aesthetic
stance. This is exemplified by John Ruskin, who impeached the loss of the pleasure
of work in capitalist production. Approaching Marxism from the aesthetic aspect,
William Morris conceived communism as a utopia where labor is art. In this case, art
must not be taken in a narrow sense. For instance, every labor can become play and
similar to artistic activityeven if not institutionalized as artwhen the interest in
its purpose is bracketed. In The German Ideology Marx wrote, While in communist so-
ciety, where nobody has one exclusive activity but each can become accomplished in
any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it
possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morn-
ing, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I
have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic (p. 53).
But this is not totally the story of an unreal dream world. In what is called volunteer
activity, people can do anything they want, and sometimes they would rather do the
kinds of work which have been deemed inferior and dirty in terms of the conven-
tional value hierarchy, namely, in that system which holds brain work to be greater
than physical work. In their volunteer or leisure time they can do hard, dirty, and in-
ferior work with a sense of purpose, only because it is not their subsistence. This
proves that what makes labor anguishing does not come from its inherent character-
istics, but the economic interest that subordinates every labor to exchange value.
24. See Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, trans. Harry
Cleaver, Michael Ryan, and Maurizio Viano (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1991).
27. In societies that existed previous to the stage of state, there was a division of
labor between men and women, but not patriarchy. It is since the early stage of state,
namely, when the type of exchange that is based upon robbery and redistribution by
violence became dominant that patriarchy came into existence. In contrast, com-
modity exchange realized the equality between men and women, but it also con-
cretized the hierarchical division between value productive labor and nonvalue
productive labor. In the modern capitalist nation-state, while there is no longer a
conspicuous patriarchy, it is reinforced in the modern family with its masks of equal-
ity. As opposed to this, there is a movement that encourages women to launch into
value productive work. Notwithstanding the importance of this idea, I have to point
out that it simply follows the logic of capitalism. The true struggle against patriarchy
should be the struggle against capitalism as a whole. Ivan Illich famously claims that
capitalism destroyed the reciprocity and equality between mens and womens labor
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28. Concerning this kind of credit system, LETS (Local Exchange Trading System),
started in the 1980s by Michael Linton, deserves mention. Beginning with Proud-
hons mutualismfree credit and exchange banksthere have been many at-
tempts similar to this. LETS is not an anarchist project; it was formulated in order to
protect regional economies from the forces of global capital. After examining local
currencies that were tried during the Depression of the 1930sincluding the stamp
money conceptualized by Silvio Gesell (18621930)Linton solidified his idea of
exchange. This has been widely practiced in Canada, England, France, Argentina,
and Japan. In most cases, it has been practiced to protect the local economy from
global capitalism. However, LETS turned out to carry more revolutionary potential
to counteract capital and state than Linton had expected. It is far beyond the local
money, especially when it is combined with Internet.
29. In his afterword to Communists Like Us, Antonio Negri strictly distinguishes be-
tween socialism and communism. Socialism is the social system whereby individuals
are compensated according to what they work for, while communism is the social
system whereby individuals are compensated according to their needs. In Marxism
in general, socialism is deemed a transitional stage toward communism. In other
words, it is supposed that by an increase of productivity, socialist society be shifted to
a society where individuals work according to their abilities and get what they need.
Negri denies this. His point is that socialism is a form of capitalism that can never be
shifted to communism. I totally agree with this. We both hold that the objective is
communism and not socialism. However, in terms of the prospect, what Negri says is
obscure to me. My conviction is that only by having LETS (which abolishes labor
value itself) as a ground can communism be approached.
30. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 57.
31. Max Weber, Politik als Beruf (Berlin: Dunker & Humbolt, 1968), p. 8: Heute dage-
gen werden wir sagen mssen: Staat ist diejenige menschliche Gemeinschaft, welche
innerhalb eines bestimmten Gebietesdies: das Gebiet, gehrt zum Merkmaldas
Monopol legitimer physischer Gewaltsamkeit fr sich (mit Erfolg) beansprucht.
32. For individual capitals, nothing is more damaging than boycotts. The most pow-
erful campaign in the Civil Rights movement of the late 1950s was initiated by the
boycotting of the segregated bus services in Montgomery, Alabama. It is said that the
leader, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., learned the spirit of nonviolent resistance from
Gandhi. But what needs to be stressed here is that nonviolent resistance was done as
a boycott. Without referring to Gandhi, Malcolm X, later in his life, sought to do
what Gandhi did in his own context: He was trying to organize consumers/produc-
ers cooperatives by and for the African American community. It was a tacit boycott
against capitalist economy. Since his death, the social welfare system has begun to
support many more impoverished, including African Americans; but it does not help
their independence. What is imperative here is also not the social democracy that or-
ganizes the states redistribution of wealth, but the autonomous movement to create
consumers/producers cooperatives.
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33. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1981), p. 51 n 31.
35. The multitude of associations that would be organized by LETS would have the
same semi-lattice structure. About this structural characteristic, see my Architecture as
Metaphor: Language, Number, Money, trans. Sabu Kohso (Cambridge, MA: The MIT
Press, 1995).
36. It is impossible to assure that the bureaucratic system wont appear in the associ-
ation of producers/consumers cooperatives; the division of labor and entrench-
ment of representative positions will inevitably occur due to the difference of
individual potency. To avoid this, it is necessary to employ both election and lottery.
37. As one example, I would like to mention the New Associationist Movement
(NAM), which was launched in Japan in the year 2000.
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353
Index
354
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355
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356
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357
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358
Index
Karl Marx and the Close of his System surplus value and, 223251
(von BhmBawerk), 243 transformation problem and, 243244
Kautsky, Karl Johann, 286287 transposition and, 2021
Kelsen, Hans, 144 value form theory and, 185211,
Keynsianism, 236 215216
Kierkegaard, Sren, 8 wages and, 150151
freedom and, 126 Labor theory, 215216, 337n8
individuality and, 104105 Lacanian theory, 148
religion and, 331n5 Lambert, Johann Heinrich, 57
value form theory and, 189 Landowners, 164
Knowledge class struggle and, 150151
Cartesian method and, 8188, 9192 value form theory and, 197198
individuality and, 100112 Language, 335n37
judgment and, 112 (see also Judgment) apperception and, 7680
Kantian ethics and, 112130 Cartesian method and, 8283
manifold system analysis and, 237238 Freud and, 7374
nature/freedom and, 112130 games of, 71, 73, 8283
Nietzsche and, 112113 Gdel and, 6567
Kommentar zu Kants Kritik der reinen grammar and, 7475, 82
Vernunft (Vaihinger), 3637 individuality and, 108
Kondratieffs wave, 250 linguistic turn and, 6576
Knigsberg, 135 Marx and, 138
Koza-ha school of thought, 255 Menos paradox and, 6869
Kripke, Saul, 72, 109111 origin theories and, 200201
Kuhn, Thomas, 3032 parental training and, 7172
pedagogy and, 6872, 7576
Labor, 6, 17 phonemes and, 7778
alienation theory and, 192 political issues and, 143
anarchism and, 165184 (see also proper names and, 109112, 171172
Anarchism) realists and, 108109
associations and, 283306 representation systems and, 142152
capitalism and, 1920 Saussure and, 7980
Capital-Nation-State and, 265283 singularity and, 107
capitals drive and, 200211 solipsism and, 7374
consumers and commodity, 235236 structure and, 7680
(see also Commodity) undecidability and, 6567
Copernican turn and, 295296 understanding and, 103
Gandhi and, 302 Valry and, 232233
gender and, 345n27 value form theory and, 197200,
globalism and, 251263 228234
individuality and, 105106 Wittgenstein and, 6574, 8283
industrial capitalism and, 234241 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 17, 159
language and, 228234 Lectures on Kants Political Philosophy
LETS and, 2325, 298301 (Arendt), x
Marxian representation and, 142152 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 56, 188
M-C-M formula and, 910, 20, 154156 Lenin, Vladimir, 287, 302
merchant capital and, 234241 anarchism and, 181182
profit and, 168, 241251 Capital-Nation-State and, 265266,
prolonged workday and, 249 276277
representation systems and, 142152, dictatorships and, 182
347n34 Lenthousiasme: La critique kantienne de
revolutionizing of, 285286 lhistoire (Lyotard), x
state control of, 165 Leviathan (Hobbes), 272
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