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Transcritique
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Transcritique
On Kant and Marx
Kojin Karatani
translated by Sabu Kohso
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2002038051
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Contents
Preface
vii
Acknowledgments
xv
I Kant
27
29
29
35
44
55
55
65
76
3 Transcritique
3.1 Subject and Its Topos
3.2 Transcendental and Transversal
3.3 Singularity and Sociality
3.4 Nature and Freedom
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81
92
100
112
II Marx
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133
133
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4.2
4.3
4.4
4.5
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161
165
185
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193
200
211
217
223
223
228
234
241
251
265
265
283
Notes
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Index
349
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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 occasions on which he criticized others discourses on the subject. He
even said somewhere that speaking of the future was itself reactionary. 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 metaphysics. 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 regrets: 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 object. 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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That is to say, a new practice cannot be initiated without a thorough scrutiny of existing theories; and the theories to which I refer
are not limited to political ones. I became convinced that there is
nothing that is unaffected by or outside of Kantian and Marxian critiques. In this project, henceforth, I did not hesitate to dive into all
possible domains including the theory of mathematical foundations,
linguistics, aesthetics, and ontological philosophy (i.e., existentialism). I dealt with problems with which only specialists are customarily concerned. Furthermore, part I (on Kant) and part II (on Marx)
were written as independent reflections, so their rapport might be
ostensible. For this reason, I had to write a rather long introduction
in order to make the connection visible, if not to summarize the
whole book.
Notwithstanding the complexity and variety of the theoretical subjects, however, I believe that the book is accessible to the general
reader. The book is based upon a series of essays that were published in the Japanese literary monthly Gunzo, beginning in 1992.
They were published alongside novels, which is to say that I did not
write them in the enclosure of the academy and scholarly discourse.
I wrote them for people who are not grounded in special domains.
Thus the nature of the book is not academic. There are many academic papers on Kant and Marx that carefully research historical
data, point out their theoretical shortcomings, and propose minute
and sophisticated doctrines. I am not interested in doing that. I
would not dare to write a book to reveal shortcomings; I would
rather write one to praise, and only for praiseworthy works. So it is
that I do not quibble with Kant and Marx. I sought to read their
texts, focusing on the center of their potencies. But I think that as a
consequence no book is more critical of them than this.
The main target of the book is the trinity of Capital-Nation-State.
I have to admit, however, that my analyses of state and nation are
not fully developed; the considerations on the economy and revolution of the underdeveloped (agriculture-centered) and developing
countries are not sufficient. These are my future projects.
Finally, I include here only a small portion of my reflections on
the particular historical context of Japanthe state, its modernity,
and its Marxismin which my thinking was fostered. I plan to deal
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with these in a sequel. In fact, I owe much of my thinking to the tradition of Japanese Marxism, and Transcritique was nurtured in the
difference between Japanese and Western as well as other Asian contexts, and in my own singular experience of oscillating and tranversing between them. In this volume, however, I did not write about
these experiences, but rather expressed them only in line with the
texts of Kant and Marx.
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Acknowledgments
In writing this book, I was supported by many people. I would especially like to thank the translators, Sabu Kohso and Judy Geib. I also
would like to thank Geoff Waite, who checked the English translation and gave us invaluable suggestions; Fredric Jameson and Masao
Miyoshi have given me enduring moral support and constructive
advice. I owe Akira Asada, Paul Anderer, Mitsuo Sekii, Indra Levy,
the late Yuji Naito, and Lynne Karatani for providing practical and
patient encouragement for the realization of the book.
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Kantian philosophy is called transcendental, as distinct from transcendent. Simply stated, the transcendental approach seeks to cast
light on the unconscious structure that precedes and shapes experience. And yet, cant it be said that from its very inception, philosophy itself has always taken just such an introspective approach? If
that is the case, then what distinguishes Kantian reflection? Kants
unique way of reflection appeared in his early work, Dreams of a
Visionary. Kant wrote, Formerly, I viewed human common sense
only from the standpoint of my own; now I put myself into the position of anothers reason outside of myself, and observe my judgments, together with their most secret causes, from the point of view
of others. It is true that the comparison of both observations results
in pronounced parallax, but it is the only means of preventing the
optical delusion, and of putting the concept of the power of knowledge in human nature into its true place. What Kant is saying here
is not the platitude that one should see things not only from ones
own point of view, but also from the point of view of others. In fact,
it is the reverse. If ones subjective view is an optical delusion, then
the objective perspective or the viewpoint of others cannot but be an
optical delusion as well. And if the history of philosophy is nothing
but the history of such reflections, then the history of philosophy is
itself nothing but optical delusion. The reflection that Kant brought
about is the kind that reveals that reflections in the past were optical
delusions. This Kantian reflection as a critique of reflection is
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engendered by pronounced parallax between the subjective viewpoint and the objective viewpoint. To explain, take an example of a
technology that did not exist in Kants time.
Reflection is often spoken of by way of the metaphor of seeing
ones image in the mirror. In the mirror, one sees ones own face
from the perspective of the other. But in todays context, photography must also be taken into consideration. Compare the two. Although the mirror image can be identified with the perspective of
the other, there is still certain complicity with regard to ones own
viewpoint. After all, people can see their own image in the mirror as
they like, while the photograph looks relentlessly objective. Of
course, the photograph itself is an image (optical delusion) as well.
What counts then is the pronounced parallax between the mirror
image and photographic image. At the time photography was invented, it is said that those who saw their own faces in pictures could
not help but feel a kind of abhorrencejust like hearing a tape
recording of ones own voice for the first time. People gradually become accustomed to photographs. In other words, people eventually come to see the image in the photograph as themselves. The
crux here is the pronounced parallax that people presumably
experience when they first see their photographic image.
Philosophy begins with introspection as mirror, and that is where
it ends. No attempt to introduce the perspective of the other can
change this essential fact. In the first place, philosophy began with
Socrates dialogue. But the dialogue itself is trapped within the
mirror, so to speak. People alternately criticize Kant for having remained in a subjectivist self-scrutiny, or search for a way out of that
in the Critique of Judgments introduction of plural subjects. But the
truly revolutionary event in philosophy had already occurred in Critique of Pure Reason, where Kant attempted to obliterate the complicity inherent in introspection precisely by confining himself to the
introspective framework. Here one can observe the attempt to introduce an objectivity (qua otherness) that is totally alien to the conventional space of introspection mirror. Kant has been criticized
for his subjective method, lacking in the other. But in fact, his
thought is always haunted by the perspective of the other. Critique of
Pure Reason is not written in the self-critical manner of Dreams of a
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Rather, it was his stance that made him a kind of exile, a man independent from the state: Kant rejected a promotion to a post in
Berlin, the center of state academia, instead insisting on cosmopolitanism. Kant is generally understood to have executed the transcendental 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 particular was not the most significant. It is generally thought that
Marxs break in The German Ideology was the establishment of historical 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 materialism by the mid-eighteenth century. But historical materialism does
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not have the potency to elucidate the capitalist economy that created it. Capitalism, I believe, is nothing like the economic infrastructure. 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, exchange 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 claiming that the value of a commodity exists only in its relationship with
other commodities, and therefore the labor value that Ricardo insists 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 illusion, 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 themselves 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 equivalent form becomes money; that is, it achieves the right to attain anything 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 reflections 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 themselves. I would call this drive [Trieb] in the Freudian sense, to distinguish 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 accumulate 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 reproduce 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 peoples 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 between 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 organizes the transformation/development. And to this end, one must
take into consideration the dimension of exchange, and why the exchange inexorably takes the form of value. Physiocrats and classical
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economists had the conviction that they could see all aspects of social relations transparently from the vantage point of production.
The social exchange, however, is consistently opaque and thus appears 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 circulation. 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 abolished 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 institutionalization of postponing the critical moment of selling a commodity. And the commodity economy, constructed as it is upon
credit, inevitably nurtures crisis.
Classical economics saw all economic phenomena from the vantage point of production, and insisted that it had managed to demystify 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 critical 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) cannot 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 difference 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 industrial 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 possible to change our mentality and begin to control the reckless development 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 catalyst 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 regulation 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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capitalism. This autonomy should nevertheless be understood in distinction from the sense of historical materialisms doctrine that state
and nation assume superstructure in relationship with economic
base; they are relatively autonomous to, though determined by, it.
First of all, as I have suggested, the very notion that the capitalist
economy is base or infrastructure is itself questionable. As I have
tried to elucidate in the book, the world organized by money and
credit is rather one of illusion, with a peculiarly religious nature.
Saying this from the opposite view, even though state and nation are
composed by communal illusion, precisely like capitalism, they inevitably exist thanks to their necessary grounds. Simply put, they are
founded on exchanges that are different from the commodity exchange. So it is that no matter how many times one stresses their nature of being imagined communities,5 it is impossible to dissolve
them. As young Marx pointed out vis--vis another bind: To abolish
religion as the illusory happiness of the people is to demand the real
happiness. The demand to give up illusions about the existing state
of affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions.
The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale
of tears, the halo of which is religion.6 The same can be said of state
and nation.
After reflecting upon value form, the Marx of Capital seems
to explicate the historical genesis of commodity exchange in the
chapter Process of Exchange. There he stresses that it began
in between communities: The exchange of commodities begins
where communities have their boundaries, at their points of contact
with other communities, or with members of the latter. However, as
soon as products have become commodities in the external relations
of a community, they also, by reaction, become commodities in the
internal life of the community.7 Despite its appearance, this depiction is not strictly of a historical situation, but the form of exchange
that is discovered and stipulated only by a transcendental retrospection. Furthermore, Marxs statement, which I quoted earlier, is in
fact based upon the premise that there are other forms of exchange.
Commodity exchange is a peculiar form of exchange among other
exchanges. First, there is exchange within a communitya reciprocity of gift and return. Though based upon mutual aid, it also
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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, plunder 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 agricultural 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; merchants 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 detail 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: association. This is a form of mutual aid, yet neither exclusive nor coercive
like community. Associationism can be considered as an ethicoeconomic form of human relation that can appear only after a society 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 feudal states (lords, kings, and emperors), cities, and agrarian communities, all based upon different principles of exchange. States were
based upon the principle of plunder and redistribution. The agrarian 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 monarchical 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 creating 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 urbanized culture of enlightenment, had always existed on the foundation 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 emotion 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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nation-state. 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 emotion of
national unity (mutual aid) fills up the cracks. When facing this fearless trinity, undermining one or the other does not work. If one attempts to overthrow capitalism alone, one has to adapt statism, or
one is engulfed by nationalist empathy. It goes without saying that
the former appeared as Stalinism and the latter as fascism. Seeing
capitalist commodity exchange, nation, and state as forms of
exchange is possible only from an economic stance. If the concept of
economic infrastructure has significance, it is only in this sense.
In the modern period, among the three principles of exchange, it
was the commodity exchange that expanded and overpowered the
others. Inasmuch as it operated within the trinity, however, it is impossible that the capitalist commodity exchange could monopolize
the whole of human relationality. With respect to the reproduction
of humans and nature, capital has no choice but to rely on the family and agrarian community; in this sense capital is essentially dependent upon the precapitalist mode of production. Herein exists the
ground of the nation. On the other hand, while absolutist monarchs
disappeared by bourgeois revolutions, the state itself has remained.
The state can never be dissolved and subsumed into the representatives of national sovereignty (i.e., government). For the state, no
matter what kind, always exists as the bare sovereign vis--vis other
states (if not always to its nation); in crises (wars), a powerful leader
(the subject of determination) is always called for, as evidenced in
Bonapartism and fascism.
One frequently hears today that the nation-state will be gradually
decomposed by the globalization of capitalism (neo-liberalism).
This is impossible. When individual national economies are threatened by the global market, they demand the protection (redistribution) of the state and/or bloc economy, at the same time as
appealing to national cultural identity. So it is that any counteraction to capital must also be one targeted against the state and nation
(community). The capitalist nation-state is fearless because of its
makeup. The denial of one ends up being reabsorbed into the ring
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are concerned, they are of value only insofar as they are the independent creations of the workers and not protgs either of the government 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 proposition 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 autonomous powers. In other words, functioning as they are as transcendental 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 formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any
other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he remains, socially speaking, however much he may subjectively raise himself
above them.12
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acts as a consumers movement. For, in fact, the process of consumption as a reproduction of labor-power commodity covers a
whole range of fronts of our life-world, including child care, education, leisure, and community activities. But what is at stake here is
obviously related to, yet clearly different from, the process of reproduction in the sense of Gramsci: the cultural ideological apparati
such as family, school, church, and so forth. In this context, it is first
and foremost the process of the reproduction of labor-power as a
topos of ordeal for capitals self-realization, and hence the position
in which workers can finally be the subject.
Marxists failed to grasp the transcritical moment where workers
and consumers intersect. And in this sense, the anarcho-sandicalists,
who opposed them, were the same. They both saw the specific class
relation in the capitalist economy (capitalist and wage workers) as a
version of that of feudal lord and serfs. They both believed that what
had been evident in the feudal system came to be veiled under the
capitalist commodity economy; therefore, the workers are supposed
to stand up and overthrow the capitalist system according to the dialectic of master and slave. But in reality, workers do not stand up at
all, because, they believe, the workers consciousness is reified by the
commodity economy, and their task as the vanguard is to awaken
workers from the daydream. They believe that the reification is caused
by the seduction of consumerist society and/or manipulation by cultural hegemony. Thus, to begin with, what they should and can do is
to critically elucidate the mechanism. Or to say it outright, that is
the only business left for them today. What Fredric Jameson calls the
cultural turn is a form of despair inherent in the Marxist practice.
There are various forms of the despair, but they are, more or less, all
the result of production-process centrism.
What about civil acts that overlap the consumption front? In keeping a distance from labor movements, they lack a penetrating stance
toward the capitalist relation of production. They tend to be absorbed into the social democracy that, approving the market economy, seeks to correct its shortcomings through state regulations as
well as redistribution of wealth.
I said that Marx of Capital did not present an easy way out of capitalism. But, from the beginning, there is no way for Capital, the
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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 contrast 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 communities 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 exchange 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 organized 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 exchanges, nor is there worry about an increase of losses. The system of
value-relation among wealth and services is generated via the currencies of LETS, but the wealth and services are not unconditionally commensurable, 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 production: the association consisting of the producers/consumers cooperatives 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 reorganization of capitalist corporation into cooperative entity. The struggle
immanent in and the one ex-scendent to the capitalist mode of production/consumption are combined only in the circulation process,
the topos of consumers workers. For it is only there that the moment 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 communities and feudal states, capitalism invaded the internal cells and transformed 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 interrupt 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 commodity 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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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 calculation 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 heliocentrism. Thus the significance of the Copernican turn was twofold.
In the same manner Kant managed to get around the basic contradiction 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 consequences, 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). According 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 Lectures 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 critique 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 related 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 questioning 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. Basically 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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the same thesis and antithesis. Like Home, Kant acknowledged that
the judgment of taste had to be subjective (or individual), while believing 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 understood 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 idea that everything is determined by natural cause is made possible by the position that brackets freedom. Conversely, only when
the determination by natural cause is bracketed, can the idea of
freedom intervene. Which idea is correct does not matter, for the
very question never arises. One attains the cognitive domain by
bracketing moral and aesthetic dimensions, but they must always be
unbracketed whenever necessary. The same can be said of moral
and aesthetic domains. When one seeks to explain everything from
one and the same positionality, one is inexorably confronted by antinomy. I deal with the ethical question of freedom in section 3.4.
Here I would stress one tangled problematic: cognitive, moral, and
aesthetic domains are all constituted by a change of attitude (i.e.,
transcendental reduction); and in the beginning these domains do
not exist in and of themselves. It follows that in every domain the
same problem recurs. For instance, in Critique of Practical Reason, the
problem of the other is explicit. But it is implied in Critique of Pure
Reason as well. And the very problem of the other is what Kant originally encountered with respect to aesthetic judgment. As I argue
later, the thing-in-itself is ultimately equal to the other. But, in
order to reach that point, it is a sine qua non to begin with the problematic of aesthetic judgment.
What distinguishes the third Critique from the first two is the appearance of plural subjectivities. To tackle this Kant did not resort
to, say, general consciousness or general subjectivity; rather, he scrutinized what kind of agreement could be made among a multitude
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a proposition is posed in a falsifiable way. Although Popper appreciated the fact that this idea was latent in Kants own work, he also accused him of remaining in the subjectivist framework.18 If a certain
proposition can be deemed universal at all, it is only insofar as one
presumes the existence of the other who may falsify it at present as
well as in the future. To Popper, however, Kant appears to have presented a rather different, arguably even opposite, approachas if
universality could be guaranteed by a priori rule! But, one has to be
extremely cautious with respect to Kants positionality here, for, as
we have seen, it was only after having confronted the problematic
of the judgment of taste (i.e., the universality in plural language
games) that Kant wrote Critique of Pure Reason.
Critique of Pure Reason begins by describing a single subjectivity, to
be sure. This does not mean, however, that Kant neglected the existence of the multitude of other subjects. Rather, he did not even
dream that universality could be attained by an agreement among
plural subjectivities, that is, by intersubjectivity. For Kant, who was
also a scientist, it was self-evident that an a priori synthetic judgment is not easily attainedand a fortiori not during his lifetime,
when heterogeneous hypotheses were very much in conflict in
the natural sciences and not merely on der Kampfplatz der Metaphysik. An agreement with othersno matter how many, and including a falsification that is based upon prior agreementhardly
guarantees universality. An agreement is customarily made within
the realm of common sense, just to reinforce it. If universality at all
exists, therefore, it must be something that goes beyond plural common senses.
It is small surprise, then, that Poppers position came to be criticized within the philosophy of science. As Thomas Kuhn argued,
there is a possibility that even a proposition posed in a falsifiable way
is not always falsified; instead, the institution of proof itself is determined by the paradigm.19 Furthermore, as with Paul Feyerabend,
the truth-value of scientific cognition tout court is determined by discursive hegemony.20 And so Popper eventually shifted his position to
think of the development of science more in the manner of evolutionary theory, that is, that stronger theories survive.21 Was the Kantian critique buried by these later deployments? I think not. First,
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Kuhns paradigm closely corresponds to Kants common sense. Second, what Kuhn spoke of in reference to his paradigm shift were
only those geniusesCopernicus, Newton, and Einsteinnot unlike the geniuses who appear already in Kants third Critique. Perhaps Kuhn never dreamt of such a coincidence because of the
complications: After all, Kant had limited his application of the concepts genius and common sense to the domain of fine art; and
the sharp distinction between natural and cultural sciences made by
the neo-Kantians (Heinrich Rickert, among others) became very influential. Meanwhile, the concept paradigm is widely accepted
against Kuhns own design precisely because it addressed a problematic wider than that of natural science, which is to say that it has the
impetus of criticism or even literary criticism.
Seen from this standpoint, it might be that contemporary philosophers of science have drawn close to the ground Kant cultivated in
Critique of Judgment. But again it must be noted that Kant had already
been aware of the problematic inherent in the arena of journalistic
criticism when he began writing Critique of Pure Reason. In this first
Critique, the other (or the other subject) is ostensibly absent. The
book persists in pursuing the introspective mode of inquiry. Those
who criticize Kant unexceptionably question if introspective inquiry
(i.e., the monologue) is by itself sufficient to scrutinize the foundation of science. It is true that Kant did not seek to introduce the
agreement of others, because the agreement itself would not guarantee a universal proposition. Instead, in the concept of the thingin-itself, he implied the future others who could falsify. But this is
not to say that our thought could never be universal because of future others. On the contrary, the question of universality could not
be posed without taking the others into consideration. In the history
of philosophy, Kant was the first to have introduced the problematic
of the other in this succinct manner.
1.3 Parallax and the Thing-in-Itself
Philosophy begins with introspection. Nonetheless, the kind of introspection that Kant performed in Critique of Pure Reason is quite
unique. It is a criticism of introspection. Thinking of this aspect of
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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 earthquake 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 intellectuals alike. It rent a deep crack between sensibility and understanding, 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 occurrences. 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 predicted 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 persisted 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, however, 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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power might in some sense be verifiable. Swedenborg was this exception: a first-class scientist, he was by no means demented; and,
here there was credible evidence of his psychic power. Kant had to
acknowledge this, but at the same time he had also to negate it.
Though he called it a psychosis, he could not help taking the
dreams of a visionary seriously. And yet he problematized his own
seriousness: Therefore, by no means do I blame my readers, if they,
instead of acknowledging the visionary as a half citizen of the other
world, are quick to write him off as a hospital candidate and thereby
shirk from all further inquiry.25 But this caveat would be less interesting, were it restricted merely to the visionarys dreams. Kant
stresses that the same is true of metaphysicists and metaphysics,
since they treat thought not deriving from experience as substantial.
In this sense, his essay could be read as Dreams of Metaphysics Explained by Dreams of a Visionary. He asks, What kind of folly exists
which cannot be brought to the mood of the bottomless world wisdom [philosophy]? Whereupon he continues: Therefore, by no
means do I blame my readers . . . . In other words, the dreams of
metaphysicists are also first class folly and evidence of a psychosis. There is no major difference between being obsessed with
dreams of metaphysics and with the dreams of a visionary. At this
moment of his life, Kant admitted that being obsessed with metaphysics was sheer madness, and yet philosophers could not help but
be mad in this sense. Thus his essay is really speaking of a metaphysician in the guise of speaking of a visionary, and the metaphysician in
this case was Kant himselfbefore he encountered Hume, that is.
A decade and a half later, Kant opened the 1781 preface to Critique
of Pure Reason, with the assertion that [n]ow, in accordance with the
fashion of the age, the queen [read metaphysics] proves despised on
all sides, 26 nonetheless, he added, it is pointless to affect indifference with respect to such inquiries, to whose object human nature
cannot be indifferent. Moreover, however much they may think to
make themselves unrecognizable by exchanging the language of the
schools for a popular style, these so-called indifferentists, to the extent that they think anything at all, always unavoidably fall back into
metaphysical assertions, which they yet professed so much to despise. 27 But this is precisely Kants own split, or rather the one he
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them. But in philosophical reflection, this is not the case. The philosophy that begins with introspection-mirror remains snared within
the specular abyss of introspection. No matter how it seeks to introduce the others stance, this situation never alters. It is said that philosophy began with Socrates dialogues. But the dialogue itself is
trapped within the mirror. Many have criticized Kant for having remained 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 occurred in Critique of Pure Reason, where Kant attempted to implode
the complicity inherent in introspection precisely by confining himself to the introspective framework. Here one can observe the attempt 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 Visionary 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 different not only from subjective introspection, but also from objective 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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In this respect, it must be said that Humes skepticism was indeed inconsistent; he did not move beyond the convention that solely analytical 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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synthetic judgment requires something other than the law of contradiction. Which is to say that Kants consideration of mathematics as
being an a priori synthetic judgment derives rigorously from his consideration of the status of axioms. Thus Kant opposed the reduction
of mathematics to logic. Kant notwithstanding, however, the concept
that mathematics is an analytic judgment proved itself not to be easily
shaken. A notable example is the later nineteenth-century logicism
of Frege/Russell, which expressed the clearest conviction that mathematics be logical. Russell, in particular, was this delusions prime proponent. On the one hand, he was an empiricist like Hume; on the
other, he insisted that mathematics was analytical. As he put it:
The proof that all pure mathematics, including Geometry, is nothing but
formal logic, is a fatal blow to the Kantian philosophy. Kant, rightly perceiving that Euclids propositions could not be deduced from Euclids axioms
without the help of figures, invented a theory of knowledge to account for
this fact; and it accounted so successfully that, when the fact is shown to be
a mere defect in Euclid, and not a result of the nature of geometric reasoning, Kants theory also has to be abandoned. The whole doctrine of a priori
intuitions, by which Kant explained the possibility of pure mathematics, is
wholly inapplicable to mathematics in its present form.5
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introduces the problematic of the other. The domain of mathematics is not exempted from this, though those who considered
mathematics as a type of analytic judgment sought to do away with it.
Famously, the paradox of contemporary mathematics derived
from Cantors theory of sets that sought to grasp infinity itself as a
number. And this must have some link to Kants theory of antinomy,
though Cantor did not think that way. According to Martin, the closest approximation to Kants approach among all contemporary theories of mathematical foundations is intuitionism. Intuitionism
acknowledges only finite objects, namely, those that can be constituted. In Martins words:
If we are trying, from todays point of view, to understand Kants explanations about the constructive character of mathematics, then we [have to be]
aware that we are using facts which Kant hadnt yet known in this precise
way. Such an explanation of Kant based on our contemporary insights nevertheless seems to be possible because the Intuitionists themselves accept
this relationship with the Kantian premises. Given this, the Kantian thesis of
the intuitive character of mathematics means the limiting of mathematics
to those objects that are constitutable [konstruierbar].
From here, Kants position towards Euclidean geometry can be made
clear. We have already said that even many Kantians passionately contested
the possibility of non-Euclidean geometry. Certainly this protest had a
certain justification in Kants positions, but things are much more difficult here than one first assumed. They became even more burdened because of the fact that Kantjust like Gauss laterneglected to speak of
non-Euclidean geometries. And when we view the battles provoked by the
introduction of non-Euclidean geometries, we must indeed say that Kant
was right to be cautious. There can be no doubt, however, that Kant himself
was quite clear about the fact that, in geometry, what is logically possible
goes far beyond the realm of Euclidean geometry. But Kant held fast, even
if presumably erroneously, to one thesis. What goes beyond Euclidean
geometry is logically possible, it is true, but it is not constitutable. This
means that it is not intuitively constitutable. And this means, in turn, that
for Kant it does not exist mathematically. Only Euclidean geometry exists in
the mathematical sense, whereas all non-Euclidean geometries are mere
thought-objects.6
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cognizable ones are limited, and this limitation overlaps finite constitutability. All in all, it was for this reason that Kant set up the distinctions 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 geometry 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 Euclidean 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 geometry as its model; it then assumes a plane to be a sphere in the Euclidean 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 Euclidean geometry. Which is to say that, inasmuch as Euclidean geometry 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 formalism 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 geometries 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
From time to time in mathematics it happens that identical theorems arise from different fields and contexts. Rather than considering them as one and the same, however, Wittgenstein, who
understood mathematics as consisting of multiple systems, considered that they belong to different systems of rules. It was in this context that he wrote, as we have seen, I should like to say:
mathematics is a MOTLEY of techniques and proofAnd upon this
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Likewise, what are grouped together under the umbrella term mathematics 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 heterogeneity 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 tendency to exclude the otherness of the other, the contingency of the
relation to the other. Generally speaking, mathematical proofs appear 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 dialogue. Or more precisely, if Plato made mathematics infallible, it was
by way of introducing the proof as a dialogue in the sense of collaborative inquiry.
In the Meno, Platos Socrates induces a boy who is not welleducated 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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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 acceptance of a basic premise (axiom), one must do nothing to contradict 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) presents his opinion, and an opponent (defendant) counters his point,
followed by the interlocutors response.21 In this way, the first interlocutors 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 consequential. 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 significant that Plato began the Meno by describing the case of Socrates
himself, who believed so strongly in the dialogic justice that he accepted 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 acknowledged 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 adhere 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, neither opponent occupies the position of the other. As Rescher
notes, this dialogue always has the potential to become a monologue. Indeed, in the works of Aristotle and Hegel, dialectics did become a monologue. And though Platos dialogues were written in
the form of conversation, finally they, too, must be considered
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must, in reality, become mutual teaching. If there is a system of common rules, it is achieved only after the event of the teaching/learning relationship. In the beginning, this mutual relationship is
asymmetrical. And this is the most fundamental aspect of communication. Again, this is not an anomalyit is our daily state of affairs.
Rather, the anomalies are commonly considered to be the normal
cases, namely, in the dialogue that takes for granted a common set of
rules, as one big merry party or symposium. Therefore, Wittgensteins introduction of the other into his reflection on communication is equal to having reintroduced the initial asymmetric
relationshipthe one so charged with impossible crossings.
In this context, teaching has nothing to do with authoritarian
hierarchy, because the teaching (or psychoanalytic) position is the
lesser one, subordinate to the others (or analysands) demand for
understanding. In the context of the political economy, teaching is
selling ones knowledge to the other. Marx made this fundamental
point very clear in his theory of exchange: The individual commodity never contains the substantial value that classical economists
claimed was immanent in it. It cannot have a value (or even use
value) if it is not sold (exchanged). And, if not sold, it is a thing to
be simply discarded. The selling position is subordinated to the
choice of the buyer (the possessor of money), and their mutual relationship is the epitome of asymmetricity.
To Wittgenstein, the someone who [does] not understand our
language, a foreigner, is not simply one among just any example he
might have taken. It is the very other, the sine qua non, in relation
to his methodical doubt. To borrow an example, when I shout,
Bring me a slab!, I may believe in the existence of a meaning internal to my utterance, but if it means building-stone to the other,
the internal signification is proven to be null and void. Wittgensteins
other is he or she who precisely nullifies this entire internal
processthe one who appears as a bizarre skeptic, to adopt Saul
Kripkes expression.23
In his early career, Wittgenstein had famously concluded,
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.24 In that
case, whereof one cannot speak meant art and religion, but not yet
science and math. In this issue of categorical distinction, it is fairly
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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 suprasensible). But the crucial point here is that such a synthesis is established 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 reconstructing 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 faculty that is involved here. No, not at all! What we recognize in spoken language is not sound differences in themselves but the different uses to which
they are put by the language, i.e., differences which, though without meaning 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 zerophoneme, 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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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 opinions might have seemed to me to have to be preferred to those of the others, 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 dialogue 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 determined 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 postlinguistic-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 predecessors 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 transcendental 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 standpoint 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. Certainly, 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 philosophy, 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 criticizes the cogito as follows:
Here they are, he says of his contemporaries, unknown strangers, nonbeings 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 incomprehensible as long as there reigned a philosophy which, taking the
Cogito as its point of departure, was imprisoned by the hypothetical evidences 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 LviStrauss 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 already been written from the standpoint of an anthropologist. The
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Cartesian cogito was originally what James Clifford called an anthropological Cogito. Writing as an anthropologist, Descartes
continues the passage as follows:
It is true that, so long as I did nothing but consider the customs of other
men, I found there hardly anything of which to assure myself, and that I noticed there almost as much diversity as I had previously done among the
opinions of philosophers. So the greatest profit that I derived therefrom
was that, seeing many things that, although they seem to us very extravagant
and ridiculous, do not cease to be commonly accepted and approved among
other great peoples, I learned not to believe too firmly anything of which I
had been persuaded only by example and custom; and thus I delivered myself, little by little, from many errors that can obfuscate our natural light
and render us less capable of listening to reason. But, after I had spent
some years thus studying in the book of the world and trying to acquire
some experience, I one day made the resolution to study within myself, too,
and to employ all the powers of my mind in choosing the paths that
I should follow. In this I succeeded much better, it would seem to me, than
if I had never been away, either from my country or from my book.5
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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 profession, and should be seen rather as its negative side. The truths that
we seek so far afield only become valid when they have been separated 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 principle, 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 entity; and, for this reason, it has been subjected to innumerable criticisms 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 different method from any that seeks an inductive theorization adduced 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 revolution, 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 defined 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 necessary 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 thinking 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 transcendental 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 transcendental 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 cogitans]; or, even more simply and definitively, man thinks [homo cogitant].10 But, speaking more realistically, the Cartesian, I think,
therefore I am, means I am as I doubt [ego sum dubitans]. The determination 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 empirical self-evidence, or I criticize [reprehendo], is omnipresent,
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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-evidence 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. Accordingly, Husserl wrote, one might almost call transcendental phenomenology 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 develop this line more persistently and rigorously than had his predecessor. 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 onlooker, 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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Descartes scrutinized this problem further in the third of his Meditations on the First Philosophy (1641), in what might well be called a
proof after the effect. This proof for the existence of God by no
means belongs on the same level as the previous ones. Descartes had
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and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours amusement, 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 frivolous, 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 diversions, 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) exists. 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 certain 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 philosophers are close to or candidates for schizophrenia, but I am suggesting 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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realistically existing difference or otherness. Yet this subject is definitely different from the transcendental subject. In contrast to
Descartes, Kant spoke little of it, save with respect to the criticizing
self. Now, this is the paththe only one that remainedwhich
I have pursued, and I flatter myself to have found on it the elimination of all the errors that had thus far set reason, as used independently of experience, at variance with itself.21 The I spoken here is
this I, namely, Immanuel Kant himself. This is neither a transcendental ego, nor an empirical ego; for this I is the one that doubts the
empirical I, and, we shall see in a moment, it is the most crucial to
the transcritical context. Unlike Descartes, however, Kant did not
confuse the doubting I with the thinking I.
A critique that assesses what our cognitive powers can accomplish a priori
does not actually have a domain as regards objects. For it is not a doctrine:
its only task is to investigate whether and how our powers allow us (when
given their situation) to produce a doctrine. The realm of this critique extends to all the claims that these powers make, in order to place these powers within the boundaries of their rightful [use].22
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the intersticethe very thing Heidegger himself ended up concealing by his political ontology. And so it is also that Heidegger interpreted the Kantian transcendental critique exclusively along its
vertical vector, to its depth. For me, by contrast, transcendental critique should be considered and practicedat the same timealong
its transversal vector. And I call this multidimensional oscillating engagement transcritique.
Now, in criticizing Descartes, Heidegger returned to the preSocratics. To be kept always in mind here, however, is the fact that
these thinkers were foreigners to Athens. Being in the Mediterranean
space of intercourse, they thought in the interstices, or intermundia
to use Marxs favorite term from Epicurus.24 They did not depart
from any polis as the self-evident premise of their thinking. Parmenides, for example, defied the Gods, and Heraclitus rebuked
community rituals. As Ortega y Gasset said, It was in them [other
cities] and not in Athens that this new type of individual was
formed.25 Although it was the center of politics and information,
Athens was initially less developed with respect to thinking than
were the margins of the Greek world. The people of the Athenian
community, who were enjoying their politico-economic hegemony,
suddenly experienced an inundation of the paradoxa of previously
unknown thinkers. For a people [Athenians] as profoundly reactionary and intensely adherent to traditional beliefs, it was an extremely unsettling experience.26
In this climate, Socrates occupied quite an ambiguous positionality. Executed by Athenians as a dangerous thinker whose faith was
informed by foreign elements, to his mind he was a genuine Athenian, faithful to the polis. Unlike foreigners, he did not charge for his
teaching. Instead of purging foreign thought, by means of his dialogue, Socrates scrutinized and internalized it. In actuality, the dialogue itself is the very form that excludes the other heterogeneous
as well as the thinker merchant. The fact that Socrates himself was excluded came to conceal his oppression of the other-heterogeneous.
In Plato, Socrates execution assumes the same significance as that
of Jesus death for the Apostle Paul. Which is to say that Plato dramatized Socrates death, one of many contingent executions of the
time, as a sacrifice for the whole community of the polis. We can
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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 (dialogos), established by the exclusion of otherness, were another monologue (monologos).
So when Heidegger praises Parmenides and Heraclitus while attacking Plato, I cannot help but be skeptical about his intentions, as
when he writes: Parmenides stood on the same ground as Heraclitus. Where indeed would we expect these two Greek thinkers, the
inaugurators of all philosophy, to stand if not in the being of the essent?27 What does the expression in the being [Sein] of the essent
[Seiendes] mean? Heideggers sophistic rhetoric and forced etymology 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 antagonisms.28 In the final analysis, all that this really should mean, however, is that they thought in the world as a heterogeneous space of
intermundial intercourse, rather than thinking in the space of a community 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 between communities that Heraclitus was able to see Being as the
gathering together of the conflicting, and Parmenides to see identity 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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him, went beyond Kants distinction, Lukcs accounts for particularity in the following way:
Because in theoretical recognition the movement in both directions oscillates from one extreme to the other, and the middle, the particular, plays a
mediating role in either case, in the case of artistic reflection, the middle
becomes literally the center, the focal point, where the movements center
themselves. Therefore, herein exist both a movement from particularity to
universality (and back) as well as a movement from particularity toward singularity (and back), whereas in both cases the movement towards particularity is the determinant one. Particularity now achieves a non-resolvable
fixation [unaufhebbare Fixierung]: and upon this, the world of forms of artworks constructs itself. The mutual overturn [Umschlagen] and fusion [Ineinanderbergehen] of categories are changing: singularity as well as
universality appear always resolved [aufgehoben] in particularity.32
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, individuality and universality. From the start, however, the syllogism linking
individuality-particularity-universality (or, in the concrete, individualrace-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 particularity. 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 expressed 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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For classical economics, exchange value is internalized within individual commodities. But for Marx, as I have already begun to note,
particularly the Marx of Capital, commodities do not have exchange
value or even use value if they are not sold (exchanged); if not, they
are simply discarded. Marx called the jump of commodity into
money the fatal leap [salto mortale] of the commodity. When he
speaks, then, of the sociality of the commodity or of the labor that
produces it, he unequivocally refers to the fatal leap and the inevitable blindness of ours that accompanies it. The synthesis of the
two aspects of commodityuse value and exchange valueis akin
to Kierkegaards synthesis of finite and infinite. Losing the relationship with the other, the unsold commodity is like the self desperately wanting to be himself.37 In this sense, Marxs dialectics is
not a simple overturning of Hegel but is instead closer to the
Kierkegaardian qualitative dialectics. What is crucial to consider at
this point is the fact that, radically inscribed in Marxs sociality, is
the moment of singularitynotwithstanding the fact that he rejected Stirners single ego and his own [der Einzige und sein Eigentum] as quintessential bourgeois individualism.
In his Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Richard Rorty categorizes
thinkers from the past as two basic types: those who deal with individuality and those who deal with sociality. He puts Marx squarely in
the latter group.38 However, as I have pointed out, things are not
nearly so simple, not after having learned that for Marx sociality is
inseparable from singularity. Rorty fails to distinguish community
a communication network (or exchange) among those who share
the same set of rulesand societycommunication between different systems. Singularity, as exemplified by the Cartesian cogito, is
the way of existing in social space; hence it is far from being private
or introverted, as has been long claimed. With the term social,
Marx pointed to the way in which individuals belonging to different
systems/communities are connected by exchange without their
being aware of it. This is same critical space Kant identified with his
term world-civil-society. And it is the space of transcritique.
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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 untrue, 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 universal 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 togetherness of many Heres; i.e., it is a universal.40
What Hegel appears to be trying to say here is this: that the individuality of the Here and Now, inasmuch as it is expressed in language,
already belongs to generality; that any individuality that is not generality 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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cosmopolites as well as world-civil-society are only imagined constructs from the point of view of nation-states; and the individuality
that is contradictory to the public is merely meant as a phantasm.
And in this precise manner, Hegel himself ended up caging the circuit of singularity-universalityprecisely the circuit Kant had once
opened upwithin the circuit of individuality-generality.
In the introduction to the Japanese translation of Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy? Ian Hacking argues that it was Hegel who
considered language to be public propertyas opposed to the Kant
who, in Hackings view, was trapped in the philosophy of subjectivity. This Hegel is said to have initiated an important shift of emphasis
when he stated that language is a self-consciousness as being-for-theother, and that language is an externalized substance. When one
recognizes that language is external, public, and social, one at the
same time experiences a radical shift also concerning ego and identity.41 Hacking also points out that it was J. G. Hamann, the friend
and critic of Kant (who also influenced Herder), who first conceived
this idea. There is, however, a distinct vagueness both in Hackings
use of the term public and in his distinction between community
and society. For this reason, Hacking cannot distinguish between
Herders and Hegels accounts of language as being public and
Wittgensteins critique of private language.42 The Kantian transcendental critique, as I have already said, was in actuality dealing
with the matter of language. So it is wrong to assume that a new
linguistic turn would clear away the problematic of ego, especially
when the ego equals the doubting existence.
In the problematic of language, there is a knotty obstacle that cannot be subsumed into the circuit of individuality-generality: proper
names. Since ancient times, philosophers have been struggling over
individuality and generality. Realists maintain that substance exists
as a general concept, whereas individuality is only its contingent
appearance. For instance, a dog is a contingent appearance of the
concept canis. Taking the opposite tack, nominalists hold that only
the individual exists as substance, whereas generality is merely a concept attained from the former. On this view, the concept canis is an
empirical abstraction from a multitude of dogs.
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worlds are total ways the world might have been, or states or histories 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 mountain 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 annexed 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 difference 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 individuals 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 reconsider 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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In the context of textual theory, it is argued that a text is appropriated by an author with a proper name, or is authorized by the name
of the author. To take a seminal example, Roland Barthes insisted
on denying authorship and on giving the text back to its imagined
intertextual heterogeneity. But this move cannot be achieved by reducing a text to the world where there are no proper names, or a
general structure. Rather, this entire argument should remind one
of the fact that, when a text cannot be reduced to the being of an
author due to the excess of signification, one has no option but to
call the singularity of the excess by a certain proper name.
Throughout this text, I have been using the name Kantwhich
however is not the author; neither is it the philosopher who has
been appropriated by Germany or the West. The text of Kant is public to the world-civil-society. And it is this possibility that transcritique
calls Kant.
3.4 Nature and Freedom
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 freedom, nature, and the mediator do not aptly correspond to the officially existing objective domains of morality, scientific recognition,
and art. His concepts were not confined to them. And such openness 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 critique 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). PreKantian classicists thought that the essence of the aesthetic experience 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 dimension, between empiricists and rationalists. He certainly did not
compromise between the dichotomies or contexts. Instead, he questioned the ground that makes art art, in the same way that he questioned the ground that makes cognition cognition.
A certain object is received as artwork only thanks to the operation of bracketing other interests projected onto the object. Be it a
natural object, a mechanical reproduction, or a daily utensil, the nature of the object in and of itself does not matter directly. Seeing
an object by bracketing daily interests, or the change in attitude itself, 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 bracketing. It is for this reason that the Kantian critique is still suggestive 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 Society 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 interests.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 causality 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 realized. The most crucial point here is that of responsibility, the responsibility 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 regard 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 harmful 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 transcendental 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 latter 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 argumentations that seek to prove self, subject, and freedom as substance. 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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determinism is attained. Conversely, only when structural determination is bracketed can the dimension of subject and responsibility
return. Later, when poststructuralism sought to reintroduce morality
it was simply as a matter of course.60 So in this sense, none of them
was necessarily new. Being swayed by a spectacular succession of
new trends, one tends to overlook the aspect that they were alterations of theoretical and practical stances. Meanwhile, the lesson of
the Kantian transcendental critique is to keep both stances at the
same time. One has to know how to bracket and unbracket at the
same time.
In Critique of Practical Reason, Kants harshest target was eudemonism (or utilitarianism). He rejected it because happiness is governed by physical causes, namely, because it is heteronomous.
Freedom, on the other hand, is metaphysical. Kants reconstruction
of metaphysics is nothing if not involving this. But eudemonism was
not the only thing Kant considered heteronomous. So was the
morality that belongs to the community.
In Encyclopedia Logic, Hegel first praised Kant for having criticized
eudemonism, but then quickly criticized him for remaining in individualism. What was dominant at that time was the conventional
moralism imposed by family, community, and church; and eudemonism (or individualism) of English origin was rather accused of
endangering this kind of moralism. Along this line, Hegel acknowledged Kants critique of eudemonism, but attacked him by advocating the primacy of objective ethics [Sittlichkeit]. The intention was to
recover the authority of family, community, and nation-state. Against
such a position, Kant would rather support eudemonism. From eudemonism, however, one can never induce universal moral law.
The principle of happiness can indeed furnish maxims, but never such as
would be fit for laws of the will, even if universal happiness were made the
object. For, because cognition of this rests on sheer data of experience,
each judgment about it depending very much upon the opinion of each
which is itself very changeable, it can indeed give general rules but never
universal rules.61
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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 freedom. In the (theoretical) dimension where we are mainly tossed
about by natural/social causalities, there is no good and evil. In actuality, 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 phenomenon (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 hitherto 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 consequence of courage, of severity toward oneself, of cleanliness toward oneselfSuch 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 eternal circulation:the same things, the same logic and illogic of entanglements. 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 rebuked morals as the resentment of the weak. We must be careful to
interpret the word weak, however. In the most straightforward interpretation, 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 simple. To him, the strong or the berman is the one who accepts
such a miserable life as ones own creation in the place of attributing 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 affirmation of the status quo. And his will to power is attained by bracketing 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 philosophy, 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 therefore 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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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 themselves. 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 thingin-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 relationship 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 attitude, because his stance, both theoretical and practical, persisted. Theoretically 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 illusion. What is more important, however, is that Kant located a puzzle 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 remains 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 generations will in fact have the good fortune to inhabit the building on which a
whole series of their forefathers (admittedly, without any conscious intention) 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 mortal 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 implies 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. Freedom 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 realized 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 reminded 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 Capital. 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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the commodity economy. Any account of human relations that overlooks this concern is merely a monastery or dormitory daydream,
from the hotbeds of those who use the humanity of the faithful
and parents merely as a means. Kantian ethics tends to be degraded only because it is read as if speaking to an end but not
means in the place of an end, never merely as a means. The kingdom of the end exists upon a material and economic basis, and the
personalism, when the base matters are not taken into consideration, cannot help but becoming a priestly sermon. Taking this aspect of Kant into consideration, Cohen called him the true
originator of German socialism.73 Communist society, for that matter, must be a society where others are treated as an end at the same
time as a means; and communism is possible only by reorganizing the
social system where people are treated merely as a means. In other
words, here apodictically arrives the regulative idea of superseding
capitalism.
The dominant trend in contemporary ethics is the utilitarianism
rebuked by Kant. This considers good as if it were calculable like interest. Along this line, ethics is reduced to economics, not to mention
that it was coined from the standpoint of capitalist development. As
opposed to this tendency, John Rawls (b. 1921) insisted on social
justice by invoking Kant. His idea was to dissolve social inequality by
redistributing wealth relying on cumulative taxation. This was the
same as the idea of a welfare society or social democracy. It lacked
motivation toward a society where others are treated as an end at the
same time as a means. But something happened in the 1980s when he
began to pose Kantian constructivism. He began to advocate the
democratic system of possessions as an alternative to capitalism. His
idea of liberal socialism is no longer identical to the social democracy based upon the redistribution of wealth within the confinement
of capitalism. His idea of the 1980s is very close to communism qua
associationism in the sense of Proudhon and Marx. Though his idea
still lacks practical orientation, the fact that he came to pose this idea
is an encouraging example: inasmuch as one thinks about ethics not
from the vantage point of good/bad and happiness/interest but
Kantian freedom, it is apodictic to induce communism qua associationism. If so, how could the communists of the mid-nineteenth
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century be unconcerned with Kantian ethics? From its fountainhead, communism was an ethico-economic problematic.
Marxs communism cannot be considered merely as a necessity of
natural history, but also as an ethical intervention. Young Marx
wrote about the categorical imperative of communism: The criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest being for
man, hence with the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in
which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being.74
This drew a response from Ernst Bloch, who had criticized the
Marburg School as a Kantian revisionism of Marxian doctrine and
still stressed as follows: This material categorical imperative is by
no means, as alleged by the bisectors of Marx, confined to the young
Marx. No part of it was suppressed when Marx transferred what he
had formerly termed real humanism into the materialist philosophy of history.75 It must be said that lurking behind this categorical
imperative is a thread of Kantian thinking. Communism as practice
is neither merely economic nor merely moral. To adapt Kants
rhetoric, communism without economic basis is empty, while communism without moral basis is blind.
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4.1 Transposition
Marx left a massive amount of work. But fragmentary as it is, it is impossible to induce Marxs philosophy or political economy or communism out of the corpus. It was Engels who, after Marxs death,
first sought to make it into a system. He constructed an edifice of
Marxism in conformity with the Hegelian system: dialectic materialism (vis--vis logic), natural dialectics (vis--vis the philosophy of nature), historical materialism (vis--vis the philosophy of history),
political economy and state theory (vis--vis the philosophy of right),
and so on. Since then, Marxism has striven to perfect this system,
including theories of literature and art (qua aesthetics). Yet these
projects have become increasingly far-fetched.
It appears to me that Marx never intended to systematize his
thought, not because he could not, but because he chose not to. To
understand Marxs intervention, one has to bracket the conventional categories of political economy, philosophy, and political philosophy. It is necessary to observe Marxs footwork, regardless of the
targeted object. And in so doing, there is one clear thing that stands
outMarxs thought existed as nothing other than a critique of previous thought. Capital, the book written systematicallythough left
incompleteis subtitled Kritik der politischen konomie [Critique of
National Economy]: a book of critique. But this critique is far from a
condemnation. Marx never intended to construct a certain positive
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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 location for maritime commerce, and which, by way of rivers, has the advantages 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 capital 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 thinking 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, because this nationthe most advanced in capitalist developmentand
its capital were ideal for his analysis of capitalism. Therefore, he cannot plainly be considered a political refugee. He chose to live in London. The point to be stressed is that Marx also thought in the
intersticethe transcritical spacewhere one has to confront
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abstractly, since, of course, idealism does not know real, sensuous activity 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 awakens 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 narrowness of this whole Young-Hegelian movement and in particular the tragicomic 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 sensuously 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 dexterous 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 historical individual [weltgeschichtliches Individuum]) came to hold the seat
of power by resorting to that very same illusion of the world historical 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 economy 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 parliamentary system (the system of representatives) as a given. The revolution 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
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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 discourses (of their representatives), and not in the least according to
the great law of motion of history. But Marx also points to the existence 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 represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, 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, therefore, 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, especially 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 universal 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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cannot be explained merely by the effects of Nazis shrewd manipulation of passion and violence combined. From the beginning, the
communist party was also one of the representatives which could not
claim any apodictic connection with the represented, the proletariat.
With the experiences of the failure of the revolution after World
War I and the resulting fascism, the relative autonomy of superstructure became one of the Marxists key concepts. In criticizing
the Marxists of the time, Wilhelm Reich used psychoanalytic theory
to find the cause of Germans being drawn to Nazism. It was there he
discovered the authoritarian family ideology and its sexual repression.25 Later, the Frankfurt School introduced psychoanalysis into
the analysis of the mechanism of Fascism, too. In this context, psychoanalysis definitely became a new tool for analyzing superstructure. In
order to tackle Fascism, however, one should rather return first to
The Eighteenth Brumaire. In this text, Marx almost preempted the
Freudian stance of The Interpretation of Dreams. He analyzes the series
of dreamlike events that occurred during the period of time, emphasizing not the dream thoughts, that is, expressions of real class
relations, but the dream work [Traumarbeit]: how class unconscious is condensed and transferred. For that matterto the favor of
our transcritical viewFreud himself used the metaphor of the representative system in his New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis:
The dream is seen to be an abbreviated selection from the associations, a selection made, it is true, according to rules that we have not yet understood:
the elements of the dream are like representatives chosen by election from
a mass of people. There can be no doubt that by our technique we have got
hold of something for which the dream is a substitute and in which lies the
dreams psychical value, but which no longer exhibits its puzzling peculiarities, its strangeness and its confusion.26
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from Lacanian theory, as opposed to the conventional economic determinism. In my opinion, this is a general theoretical reinterpretation of historical materialism, and thereby lacks the moment to
analyze concrete facts and situations. In contrast, Marxs analytical
device in The Eighteenth Brumaire is much more specific and intricate.
What he is pointing to is the duplicity of the representational system
itself: on the one hand there is congress qua legislative power, and
on the other there is presidency qua administrative power. The latter
is chosen by the direct vote of the people. (In fact, Louis Bonaparte
advocated universal suffrage in opposition to the Republican Party,
which sought to limit voters. As a result, he became popular as the
representative of the nation. Thereafter he appealed repeatedly to
national referendums, precisely as Hitler did.) But the difference
between a congress and presidency lies not merely in the way they
are elected. As Carl Schmitt explained, the parliamentary system is
liberalistic in the sense that it governs through discussion, while the
presidency is democratic in the sense that it represents the general
will (i.e., in the sense of Diderot and Rousseau). Schmitt further
states that dictatorship contradicts liberalism but not necessarily
democracy. Bolshevism and Fascism by contrast are, like all dictatorships, certainly antiliberal but not necessarily antidemocratic. . . .
The will of the people can be expressed just as well and perhaps better through acclamation, through something taken for granted, an
obvious and unchallenged presence, than through the statistical apparatus that has been constructed with such meticulousness in the
last fifty years.27
This problematic consciousness had already been explicit in
Rousseau, who had derisively criticized the British Parliament, a representative system as follows: My argument, then, is that sovereignty, being nothing other than the exercise of the general will,
can never be alienated; and that the sovereign, which is simply a collective being, cannot be represented by anyone but itselfpower
may be delegated, but the will cannot be. . . . If a people promises
simply and solely to obey, it dissolves itself by that very pledge; it
ceases to be a people; for once there is a master, there is no longer a
sovereign, and the body politics is therefore annihilated.28 Following the example of Greek direct democracy, Rousseau disparaged
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Then, what does an emperor who is neither parliament nor president embody? Nothing other than the state. The bourgeois state is
constituted by overthrowing the absolutist monarchy. Its nature is
that by exhibiting constitutionalism and the representative system, it
conceals the substantive ingredients of the stateincluding its bureaucratic and military organizations. The executive power with its
enormous bureaucratic and military organization, with its extensive
and artificial state machinery, with a host of officials numbering half
a million, besides an army of another half million, this appalling
parasitic body, which enmeshes the body of French society like a net
and chokes all its pores, sprang up in the days of the absolute
monarchy, with the decay of feudal system, which it helped to hasten.30 Precisely as money is deemed the means to represent commoditys value, in the bourgeois state, bureaucracy and the army
appear to belong to the organ that represents the will of the nation.
At moments of crises, however, the state-in-itself appears, precisely
as, in economic crises, money-in-itself appears. Marx continues:
Only under the second Bonaparte does the state seem to have
made itself completely independent. As against civil society, the state
machine has consolidated its position so thoroughly . . .31 That is to
say that when the bourgeois economy reaches a deadlock, the state
organ intervenes under the name of the emperor.
In Capital, Marx registered only three classes: capitalists, landowners, and wage workers. These are sheer aliases of the economic categories: capital, ground rent, and labor power commodity; and the
real formations of the social hierarchy are much more complex than
this triad. Even in Britain, which Marx selected for his model, there
was no such tripartite division; rather various classes, including all
the dead generations, existed in reality. In France, worse still, there
were few industrial laborers in 1848. And those whom Marx called
proletariat in The Eighteenth Brumaire were very much those craftsmen who turned radical, having been deprived of their jobs by the
osmosis of British industrial capital. This is why they too ended up
supporting Louis Bonaparte, the Saint-Simonist on horseback, whose
slogans were state-led economic development and social welfare.
What Marx sought to present in Capital was not the prospect that the
development of industrial capital would lead to the tripartite class
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division, but the principles of the capitalist economy that are overlooked 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 polymorphous complex, and politics as a matter of discursive and representative 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 proletariat. It is crucial to note that Marx saw a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie 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 representative 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 guaranteed, but this exists only at the moment that the hierarchical relations 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).
4.3 The Economic Crisis as a Parallax
Now living in exile in England and dealing with British discourse,
Marx could no longer rely on his previous approaches. He had to
shift his stance once more. In confronting German and French ideologues, it was significant and even imperative to invoke the economic
class structure that was repressed in their discourses, whereas in
British discourse, the very empiricist stance that he had posed against
German philosophers and the very economic problematic that he
had introduced against French ideologues were dominant. There is
no doubt that the economic problematic was the veiled infrastructure in the idealist tradition. But it was not veiled in the English context; class struggles over economic interests were especially manifest
in the climate of the mid to late nineteenth century. Both classical
economists and Ricardian socialists had been approaching the problematics of society and history via the explicitly economic standpoint.
In fact the issue concerning the exploitation of surplus-value (qua
surplus-labor)the very notion that is believed have been coined by
Marxhad already been posed by the Ricardian socialists.
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1817. The crisis hit precisely as the most radical critique of his economic 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 commodity exchange and conceptually reduced the source of value to
production in general. It cast a perspective by which to see precapitalist societies from the vantage point of production and relation
of production, namely, from the viewpoint of historical materialism, 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 possible. According to Marx, merchants capital and usurers capital are
antediluvian forms of capital. The formulation of merchants capital 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 (laborpower); 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 circulation: C-M and M-C, the domain where it appears that only commodity exchange via money is taking place. So much so that money
is merely a measure of value albeit a means of purchase and payment. What Adam Smith and David Ricardo both sought to elucidate 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 consequently 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 determined whether or not the commodity is sold. In order to escape the
critical moment and continue its self-reproductive movement, capital 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 commodities not being sold, but very much by a forced revelationat
the moment of final liquidationthat commodities that are supposed 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 philosophy that began with Fichtethat considered Ego and Spirit as autopoetically creating the worldas a case of insanity isolated from the
outer world. But, ironically, in England there was an uncanny coincidence 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 hopingfor-the-day theory failed that his understanding of capitalism deepened. 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 capitalist 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 capitalism, it required Marx take a completely non-Hegelian viewpoint.
This was, I insist, the transcendental standpoint. In Kantian philosophy, 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 transcendental retrospection. In this aspect, Marxian critique comes close to
psychoanalysis.
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been entitled Capital: The Critique of Hegelian Philosophy of Right. People refer back to Hegelian philosophy in order to approach Capital,
because it is written in the framework of Hegelian Logic. But
Hegels Elements of the Philosophy of Right, for instance, has its own historical limit: it was an attempt to ground, from the vantage point of
exchange and contract, the trinity of Capital-Nation-State when the
capitalist economy came to organize the greater part of modern
Western society, namely, the trinity was completed ( the end of
history in a sense) therein. Within such a historicity, Hegel saw the
market economy (civil society) as a system of wants. That is to say, he
could not see the market economy as formed by a perverted drive of
capitalism. In this sense, he was within the same confinement as the
classical economists. Meanwhile, Marxs insight was that the capitalist economy is a system of illusion, that it is driven by the movement
M-C-M, and that at its fountainhead is the drive to accumulate
money (qua the right to exchange-ability)in distinction from the
wants and desire to achieve wealth. To achieve this objective, he returned to value form. Therefore, Capitals similarity to the Hegelian
system should not confuse us.
After writing Grundrisse, Marx commented in retrospect on his
own doctoral dissertation in a letter to Ferdinand Lassalle:
During this time of tribulation I carefully perused your Heraclitus. Your reconstruction of the system from the scattered fragments I regard as brilliant, nor was I any less impressed by the perspicacity of your polemic. . . . I
am all the more aware of the difficulties you had to surmount in this work
in that about 18 years ago I myself attempted a similar work on a far easier
philosopher, Epicurusnamely the portrayal of a complete system from fragments, a system which I am convinced, by the by, wasas with Heraclitus
only implicitly present in his work, not consciously as a system. Even in the
case of philosophers who give systematic form to their work, Spinoza for instance, the true inner structure of the system is quite unlike the form in
which it was conciously presented by him.38
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What distinguishes Capital from previous work lies in the introduction of the microscopic view vis--vis the theory of value-form. This
had not existed in Grundrisse of the 1850s or in A Contribution to the
Critique of Political Economy of the early 1860s. One should read the
micro difference between Capital and these previous works, because
[w]hat can be demonstrated in the small can even more easily be
shown where the relations are considered in larger dimensions.
The conviction that Marxs important break occurred only once has
made us overlook how crucial this shift was.
Here is another example concerning the movement of Marxs thinking, written in 1843, before Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts:
In investigating a situation concerning the state one is all too easily tempted
to overlook the objective nature of the circumstances and to explain everything
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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.
4.5 Marx and Anarchists
Another aspect of Marxs ambiguity is his relation with the three
anarchists: Bakunin, Proudhon, and Stirner. Bakunin incisively
branded Marx as an authoritarian and dictatorial thinker, which became an established reputation among later anarchists. By contrast,
Marxists formulated Marx as a thinker who entirely negated anarchism. But both overlooked the subtle difference in the Marxian
critique of anarchism. For instance, Bakunin attacked Marx along
with Lassallians. That was Lassalles program, and it is also the program of the Social-Democratic Party. Strictly speaking, it belongs not
to Lassalle but to Marx, who expressed it fully in the famous Manifesto
of the Communist Party, which he and Engels published in 1848 . . . Is it
not clear that Lassalles program is in no way different from that of
Marx, whom he acknowledged as his teacher?44 It must have been a
big misunderstanding, if not outright slander; Bakunin ignores the
deployment of Marxs thought during the 1860s and 1870s.
Marx was critical of the idea (i.e., of Lassalles Gotha Programme)
to have the state protect and foster cooperative production. Marx was
clear: That the workers desire to establish the conditions for cooperative production on a social scale, and first of all on a national
scale, in their own country, only means that they are working to
transform the present conditions of production, and it has nothing
in common with the foundation of co-operative societies with state
aid. But as far as the present co-operative societies are concerned,
they are of value only insofar as they are the independent creations of
the workers and not protgs either of the government or of the
bourgeois.45 In other words, Marx is stressing that the association of
cooperatives itself must take place of the state, instead of state-led cooperative movements, whereby capital and state are to wither away.
And this kind of proposition of principle aside, Marx never said
anything in particular about future prospects. Marx extolled
the Paris Commune mainly achieved by Proudhonists, and found in
it possible communism: If united co-operative societies are to
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What does this distinction between private property and individual property mean? Precisely because modern private ownership
was that which was awarded by the absolutist state in exchange for
paying taxes, private ownership is equal to state ownership. So it is a
total fallacy to abolish private property by means of state ownership.
The abolition of private property must be an abolition of the state
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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 struggle 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 redistribution 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 economics 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, seeking 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 speciesessential beings only in the political state (parliamentary democracy)
qua communal fantasy, while in civil society (the social state), they actually pursue their own interests, resulting in inequality and repression. 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 capitalist 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 philosophically. 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 religious 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 superhuman 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, unabashed, 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 mediation 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 society 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 excellence is a federal contract, which define as follows: a bilateral and
commutative contract concerning one or more specific objects, having 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 thinking 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 notion as a specter. This sounds pretty much like the nominalist assertion 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 suggestive. 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, accumulation 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 relations and the parliamentary system in The Eighteenth Brumaire, Proudhon 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 published 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 cooperatives (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 severe competition with capital. Their options would be either to remain partially in the area of production where capitalist mode is
hardly developed, to become a stock company itself, or to be defeated 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 capitalists and landlords to the producers themselves.
Needless to say, as is clear in his critique of Lassalle, it is not to foster 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 derived 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 integrating the multiple associations, while refusing the center of the
state power. Is it his authoritarianism? According to Proudhon, anarchism is not anarchic (chaotic), but orderly: it is still a sort of government. While acknowledging that the phrase anarchic government
involves a kind of contradiction and sounds absurd, Proudhon insists that anarchy is a form of government, that is, self-government
or autonomy. Also he defined anarchism as the idea of reducing political 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 harmonious 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 association (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 contract, whose terms establish right, and bear equally upon two contending
forces.68
Therefore, when Marx criticized Bakunin, he did it not as an authoritarian. Rather he took the antinomy that Proudhon pointed out
much more seriously than Bakunin did. What is more, Marx praised
the Paris Commune, carried out mainly by Proudhonists, in which
he found the vision of possible communism. Marx was seeking a
method of achieving the liberty that neither falls into chaos nor into
state authority.
Marxs manuscript for the third volume of Capital reads as follows:
Wird gesagt, da nicht allgemeine Ueberproduction, sondern Disproportion innerhalb der verschiednen Produktionszweige stattfinde, so heit das
weiter nichts als da innerhalb der kapitalistischen Productionszweige die
Proportionalitt darstelt, indem hier der Zusammenhang der Produktion
als blindes Gasetz auf die Productionsagenten wirkt, sie nicht als assozierter
Verstand ihn ihrer gemeinsamen Controlle unterworfen haben.69
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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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The Crisis of Synthesis
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Classical economists had sought to approach the issue of commoditys value from the vantage point of labor; they had seen money
merely as the index of labor-value. To them there was no enigma of
money. Based upon the experience of observing the newly appeared
industrial capitalism, they had been inclined to defy the previous
forms of capital: merchant capital and interest-bearing capital.
Then, Marx intervened; he sought to reconsider capital from the
vantage point of merchant capital and interest-bearing capital. He
presented the accumulation of capital using the formula M-C-M.
Marx especially paid attention to interest-bearing capital, that is, the
antideluvian form of capital.
We have seen how merchants capital and interest-bearing capital are the
oldest forms of capital. But it lies in the very nature of the matter that interest-bearing capital should appear to the popular mind as the form of capital
par excellence. In merchants capital we have a mediating activity, whether
this is considered as fraud, labor or whatever. In interest-bearing capital, on
the other hand, the self-reproducing character of capital, self-valorizing
value, the production of surplus-value, appears as a purely occult quality.1
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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 product consequently capable of satisfying the needs of others.6
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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 detect 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 because 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 equating 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 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
utility have of being values is as much mens social product as is their language. 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 development, but by no means banishes the semblance of objectivity possessed by the social characteristics of labor.10
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just an illusion. Based upon this idea, both Ricardian leftists and
Proudhon proposed the labor money and exchange bank as alternatives. Criticizing this position, however, Marx was still within the confinement of the labor theory of value. Then suddenly he was
confronted by Baileys critique that claimed that the value of a commodity exists nowhere but in its relationship with other commodities. 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 synthesized 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 values qua commodity relations; however, his thought neglected to
question what is money that prices them. This was the same as having 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 silver. 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 alternative 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 transcendental 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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coat seem as if it had exchange-value (direct exchangeability) in itself. The equivalent form of a commodity, accordingly, is the form
in which it is directly exchangeable with other commodities.19 The
enigma of money is lurking behind the equivalent form. Marx called
it fetishism of the commodity.
But, this simple equation does not mean that the one coat is the
only, unequivocal, equivalent form. It is possible for twenty yards of
linen to be in the equivalent form as well.
Of course, the expression 20 yards of linen 1 coat, or 20 yards of linen is
worth 1 coat, also includes its converse: 1 coat 20 yards of linen, or 1 coat
is worth 20 yards of linen. But in this case I must reverse the equation, in
order to express the value of the coat relatively; and, if I do that, the linen
becomes the equivalent instead of the coat. The same commodity cannot,
therefore, simultaneously appear in both forms in the same expression of
value. These forms rather exclude each other as polar opposites.
Whether a commodity is in the relative form or in its opposite, the equivalent form, entirely depends on its actual position in the expression of
value. That is, it depends on whether it is the commodity whose value is
being expressed, or the commodity in which value is expressed.20
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bowels of the earth, the direct incarnation of all human labor. Hence the
magic of money.22
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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use Marxs term, because this is not something that came into existence at a certain time in a remote age, but something that is always
already and presently going on, and furthermore, because the implication 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 exchange begins in between communities? First, this exchange is different from that which takes place within communities in the
common sense, which is mainly motivated by the principle of reciprocity 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 pillaged 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 irrigation works. For this reason, the peasants obligation to pay the
land tax was represented as a return or duty. That is to say that plunder takes the guise of reciprocity. This form of redistribution was essentially 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 different 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 subjects of economic activity and speak of the issues of the market economy 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 elucidate 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 mechanism; it has nothing to do with the foundational question, What is
capitalism? These economists start from the individuals and companies who pursue their maximal interests. Yet these individuals themselves 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 economists had already attacked the money-fetishist thinking of mercantilism, 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 ordinary 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 people. This mystification is still a very simple one in the case of a commodity.
Everybody understands more or less clearly that the relations of commodities 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 display the same illusions. This emerges clearly in their confession of naive astonishment 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 economists. 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 laborpower 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. Nevertheless, 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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the circulation of commodities seems to be the result of the movement of money.31 Therefore, C-M-C and M-C-M seem like the
front and back of the same cycle, but are completely different because the initiative of the circulation is seized and controlled by the
possessor of money.
The movement of capital is, simply expressed, M-C-M (M M).
In vulgar economics, capital simply means funds, while to Marx capital means the whole process of metamorphosisfrom money to production equipment/raw material, to products, and to money again.
If the metamorphosis is not complete, namely, if capital cannot
complete its self-reproduction, it is no longer capital. But, because
the metamorphosis appears as the circulation of commodity, the
movement of capital is concealed within. For this reason precisely,
in the imagination of classical and neoclassical economists the selfreproductive movement of capital is dissolved within the circulation
of commodities, or in the process of the production and consumption of goods. The ideologues of industrial capital avoid the word
capitalism, preferring market economy, which conveniently represents capitals movement as peoples free exchange of things via
money in the marketplace. This veils the fact that market exchange
is at the same time the place for capitals accumulation. When the
market economy is in turmoil, these ideologues like to criticize speculative financial capital as being responsible for the disorder, as if
the market economy itself were innocent of capitals business.
The economic phenomenon that appears as the production and
consumption of goods contains a veiled, perverted drive which is totally different from the ostensible activity. This is the will to M (M
M), the fetishism of money. But Marx saw it as the fetish of commodity; this was because he took as a given that classical economists
had already criticized the fetishism of money. At the same time, he
realized that the fetishism of money was still surviving, inscribed
within the stance of classical economics itself (especially the claim
that each commodity internalizes value). So it is that the fetishism of
commodity here should not be confused with the commodity fetish
in the field of consumption, namely, that which fixes consumers
eyes on advertisements in mass image or show windowsthe focus
of innumerable Marxian historians and cultural commentators
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today. This is equal to the drive to attain the right to consume anywhere 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-reproduction is possible but why capitals movement has to continue endlessly. 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 bequeathed the perversion. In fact, before the advent of industrial capital, the whole apparatus of capitalism, including the credit system,
had already been complete; industrial capital began within the apparatus 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 cannot 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 approaches 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 itself 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 communities, 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 individuals 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 capitalist; nor must the profit on any single transaction. His aim is rather the
unceasing movement of profit-making. The boundless drive for enrichment, 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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saw an asceticism to use-value in the motivation of industrial capitalism. Puritans were rational misers, as it were; however, what drives
capitalism is not their rationality but their perversion. The drive of
capitalism exists in this paradoxical nature: the rejection of goods
ends up accruing more goods, contributing to the accumulation of
property. For this reason, negation of the desire toward consumption, the materialism, cannot amount to the criticism of capitalism.
As I quoted earlier, Marx posited merchant capital and interestbearing capital as the oldest forms of capital. But at their root are
money-hoarders. In reality, both usurer and interest can exist only
thanks to money hoarding, that which causes the shortage of money
in the circulation process. Therefore, the movement of capital, the
hoarding drive, that unwittingly has been forming the globalization
of humanity in the world, does not have a rational motivation. In
Freudian terms it is a sort of compulsion to repeat [Wiederholungszwang]. This nature comes to manifest itself in totality in the
stage of capitalist productionwherein the commodity economy
subsumes the labor-power commodity and makes merchant capital
commercial capital, merely, a division of the whole system. This
compulsion to repeat can be elucidated only by a retrospective
query to the miser.
5.4 Money and Its Theology, Its Metaphysics
Being nurtured in between communities, merchant capital or the
commodity economy has, in principle, a global nature. Capitalist
production, though only partial, can affect and transform the whole
world because this power comes from the sociality (global nature) of
the commodity economy. As money develops into world money, so
the commodity owner becomes a cosmopolitan. The cosmopolitan
relations of men to one another originally comprise only their relations as commodity owners. Commodities as such are indifferent to
all religious, political, national, and linguistic barriers. Their universal
language is price and their common bond is money.34 For instance,
the realistic ground for Kants cosmopolitan society [Weltbrgergesellshaft] lies in the commodity economy. In fact, Kant, too, saw the
ground for perpetual peace in the development of commerce.
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religion is an alienated way of grasping the species-being; and humans must recapture the common essence. This criticism of religion
was a regression from Kant. First, Kant had already negated religions
except for their moral aspect; second, the feeling of the sublime
arose only after the religious awe to coercive nature had disappeared. It follows that the logic achieved in the experience of the
sublime cannot be applied to the criticism of religion. The sublime
itself already assumes the negation of religion. The Kantian sublime
must be found strictly in natural objects, because this particular feeling is established only when humans are fully enlightened and
become secular beings. Therefore, even if it is true that Marx appropriated Feuerbachian criticism of religion to the criticism of the secular capitalist economy, his theory of money would be better
understood if it were approached via Kants theory of sublime. Furthermore, unlike the Feuerbachian theory of self-alienation, Kants
theory of the sublime already contains a recognition of capitalism.
That is, Kants beauty that is discovered by dis-interestedness is already a byproduct of the commodity economy, the movement that is
disinterested in the qualitative differences of use value. Nonetheless,
in the case of beauty it is still inseparable from the use value pleasure principle, while the sublime appears as totally contradictory to
the principle.
By the same token, a liking for the sublime in nature is only negative
(whereas a liking for the beautiful is positive): it is a feeling that the imagination by its own action is depriving itself of its freedom, in being determined
purposively according to a law different from that of its empirical use. The
imagination thereby acquires an expansion and a might that surpasses
the one it sacrifices; but the basis of this might is concealed from it; instead
the imagination feels the sacrifice or deprivation and at the same time the
cause to which it is being subjugated.39
In the sublime, a certain pleasure is attained by displeasure. Kant defines it as acquir[ing] an expansion and a might that surpasses the
one it sacrifices. Isnt this the problematic of surplus-value par excellence? This is evident in the following phrase from Kants Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View.
Young man! Deny yourself satisfaction (of amusement, of debauchery, of
love, etc.), not with the Stoical intention of complete abstinence, but with
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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
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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 kingdom of ends as a regulative idea contains a critique of the capitalist
economy precisely because the capitalist economy makes it fatally impossible 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 potency 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 itself. 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 political economy and morality, between Marxian critique and Kantian
critique.
5.5 Credit and Crisis
Kant rejected the metaphysics that projects what is achieved ex post
facto onto ex ante facto thinking. Yet at the same time, he acknowledged as sine qua non any teleological projection into the future
calling it the transcendental illusion [transszendentalen schein],
whose function we cannot dispense with, albeit only an illusion. He
maintained that even theory requires faith. It is my contention that
what supports the capitalist economy is credit qua transcendental illusion. A commodity cannot express its valueno matter how much
labor time is expended to produce itif it is not sold. Seen ex post
facto, the value of a commodity could be considered as existing in
social labor time, while in ex ante facto, there is no such guarantee.
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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 absolute contradiction. Hence moneys form of appearance is here also a matter 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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parts of the violent (or liberalistic) reformation of capitalist production. The same periodical crises of Marxs age are no longer existent, precisely like the victims of hysteria caused by sexual repression
that Freud encountered. Yet, so long as capitalism is a world constituted by the credit system, crises will continue to dog it.
The economic process is a religio-genic-process that continues to create and expand the phantasmic domain of value. And the temporality of capitalism is similar to that of Judeo-Christianity in the sense
that the end is indefinitely deferred. This analogy, however, does
not intend to point out a parallelism or reciprocity between economic and religious phenomena.46 If religion is economic, it is so in
the sense that it is rooted in the burden of debt that the living feel
toward the dead, or namely, the exchange between this world and
that world. One should not disdain the economic. Rather all the serious institutions of humanity: capital, state, nation, and religion
should be scrutinized from the economic standpoint. Whether or
not we believe in religion in the narrow sense, real capitalism places
us in a structure similar to that of the religious world. What drives us
in capitalism is neither the ideal nor the real (i.e., needs and desires), but the metaphysics and theology originated in exchange and
commodity form. Marx conceptualized communism out of the logic
of capitalism itselfthat which severs people from the local communities to which they are subordinated, and then recombines them socially. To use the rhetoric of Matthew in The New Testament, money
as capital would say: Do not think that I have come to bring peace
to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have
come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her
mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and ones
foe will be members of ones own household. Whoever loves father
or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son
or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.47
In the stage that industrial capital was established, namely, when
the commodity economy began to control the whole of production by
the commodification of labor power, the view to see the previous society from the vantage point of productionhistorical materialism
finally came into existence. An elucidation of industrial capitalism is
useful in an elucidation of previous society, but not vice versa. The
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The justification of classical economics was that the profit of industrial capital is produced by equivalent exchange; it is achieved by
the enforcement of the power of production by the division of labor
and cooperative workthe healthy, favorable acts. Marx, too,
claimed that surplus value cannot be achieved in the process of circulation. The capitalist class of a given country, taken as a whole,
cannot defraud itself. However much we twist and turn, the final
conclusions remain the same. If equivalents are exchanged, we still
have no surplus value. Circulation, or the exchange of commodities,
creates no value.1 Yet at the same time, he insisted that surplus
value cannot be realized in the process of production alone.
The total mass of commodities, the total product, must be sold, both that
portion which replaces constant and variable capital and that which represents surplus value. If this does not happen, or happens only partly, or only
at prices that are less than the price of production, then although the
worker is certainly exploited, his exploitation is not realized as such for the
capitalist and may even not involve any realization of the surplus-value extracted, or only a partial realization; indeed, it may even mean a partial or
complete loss of his capital. The conditions for immediate exploitation and
for the realization of that exploitation are not identical. Not only are they
separate in time and space, they are also separate in theory. The former is
restricted only by the societys productive forces, the latter by the proportionality between the different branches of production and by the societys
power of consumption.2
Marx is saying that, regardless of what happens in the process of production, surplus value is finally realized in the process of circulation.
That makes it contradictory to the previous statementthat surplus
value cannot be achieved in the process of circulation.
Capital cannot therefore arise from circulation, and it is equally impossible
for it to arise apart from circulation. It must have its origin both in circulation and not in circulation.
We therefore have a double result.
The transformation of money into capital has to be developed on the
basis of the immanent laws of the exchange of commodities, in such a way
that the starting-point is the exchange of equivalents. The money-owner,
who is as yet only a capitalist in larval form, must buy his commodities at
their value, sell them at their value, and yet at the end of the process withdraw more value from circulation than he threw into it at the beginning.
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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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production. It has always remained partial, yet, by pursuing difference, produced the social and global nexus between peoples that
individual communities had never been able to organize.
The situation has not changed even since modern nation-states
have come into existence as an expansion or unification of the communities. Marxs social [sozial] is pointedly distinct from not only
Gemeinschaft, but also from Gesellschaft, because even the latter is another kind of community that appeared after the establishment of
the commodity economy. For the consciousness within community,
for the thinking entrapped within, it is possible to say that money is
just an index of value or the medium of exchange. In contrast,
Marxs term social should be exclusively used to describe the
exchange between different systems, and furthermore, exchange in
which one cannot know with whom the product is being exchanged.
Therefore, the social characteristics of the exchange that occurs in
between communities is more evident in foreign trade, wherein
money appears as world money [Weltgeld] qua universal commodity
in the social space.
But as coin, money loses its universal character, taking on a national, local
one. It is divided up into coinage of different sorts, according to the material of which it consists, gold, copper, silver, etc. It acquires a political title,
and speaks, as it were, a different language in different countries. . . . Gold
and silver, like exchange itself, as already mentioned, do not initially appear within the sphere of a social community but at the point at which it
ends, at its boundaries; at its not very numerous points of contact with foreign communities. Gold and silver now appear posited as the commodity as
such, the universal commodity which preserves its character as a commodity
at all places.6
Mercantilists clung to gold, not simply because of their mammonism, but rather because gold is the ultimate means of settlement
in international trade. And, with respect to this, Marx says, However much the modern economists consider themselves to have advanced beyond the mercantile system, in periods of general crises
gold and silver figure in precisely this determination, in the year
1857 as much as in 1600. In this character, gold and silver [play] an
important role in the creation of world market.7 Mercantilists derived
gold from the balance of trade. Meanwhile, modern economists,
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teaching at the University of Laussane. But Saussure further developed this framework; he did not remain in Paretos model,
like many of Jakobsons examples, which were just rewordings of
neoclassical economics.
Saussure differentiated himself from neoclassical theory. His conviction was that in language there are only differences; it is a system
of pure value11these statements could not have been said had he
thought within a unitary system (i.e., of a Langue). He introduced
the concept of value only when he took into consideration another
system of Langue. Saussures point is that when a word is translated
into another language, it achieves the same meaning, yet at the
same time, the value of the word is altered in the new/different
system in correspondence to its different relationship with other
words. From this focal point, he explains that there is no meaning
(the signified) that is apodictically tied to the signifier, in other
words, no immanent meaning. As Hjelmslev pointed out, the signifier and the signified cannot be conceptually separated as long as
one synchronic system is concerned. The concept of value as distinct
from meaningor price, in economicsbecomes necessary only
when manifold/different systems are at stake.
What about Marx? In general terms, he negated the idea of seeing
money and language analogically. To compare money with language is no less incorrect. Ideas are not transformed into language
in such a way that their particular attributes are dissolved and their
social character exists alongside them in language as do prices
alongside commodities. Ideas do not exist apart from language.
Ideas which must first be translated from their mother tongue into a
foreign language in order to circulate and to become exchangeable
would provide a better analogy; but then the analogy is not with the
language but with its foreignness.12 That is to say that, if an analogy
between language and money becomes crucial at all, it is only where
their foreignness [Fremdheit] is at stake.
Saussure employed economic figures only when he spoke of the
value of language that is distinguished from meaning. He explained
it by using examples of different currencies.13 If one follows this
analogy, meaning is identified with price, while value corresponds to
the difference between the relational systems that determine price.
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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 exchange. As Jacques Derrida problematized in Of Grammatology, philosophy 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, therefore, 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 utility 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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Marxs unique contribution is that he sought to understand industrial capital, too, within the general formula M-C-M. In other words,
Marx sought to reconsider surplus value from the vantage point of
circulation. To Marx, what distinguished industrial capital from
merchant capital was, first and foremost, that the former discovered
a special commodity that the latter had not knownthe commodity of labor power. Industrial capital purchases this most special
commodity in human historylabor powerin order to produce
products, and then sells those products to the commodity itself
laborersin order to earn surplus value. For neoclassical economists, consumers and companies are the only economic subjects. To
them, laborers are deemed just wages as part of the cost of production. Meanwhile, the surplus value of industrial capital is attained
only in a sort of circulation process: capital purchases labor power
from living laborers, who, in consequence, buy back what they produce from capital (and at this very moment, laborers are totally equal to
consumers). It is not that individual workers buy the very same things
they produce, but that in totalityand herein the concept totality
intervenes as a sine qua nonlaborers qua consumers buy what they
produce. This further signifies that surplus value cannot be considered on the level of individual capital but strictly as total social capital.
Each capitalist knows that he does not confront his own worker as a producer confronts a consumer, and so he wants to restrict his consumption,
i.e., his ability to exchange, his wages, as much as possible. But of course, he
wants the workers of other capitalists to be the greatest possible consumers
of his commodity. Yet the relationship of each capitalist to his workers is the
general relationship of capital and labor, the essential relation. It is precisely
this which gives rise to the illusiontrue for each individual capitalist as
distinct from all the othersthat apart from his own workers, the rest of the
working class confronts him not as workers, but as consumers and
exchangersas moneyspenders. . . .
It is precisely this which distinguishes capital from the [feudal] relationship
of dominationthat the worker confronts the capitalist as consumer and one
who posits exchange value, in the form of a possessor of money, of a simple center of circulationthat he becomes one of the innumerable centers of circulation, in which his specific character as worker is extinguished.21
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general. As a result, neoclassical economists and the like identify consumers as the subject, and companies as suppliers to their demands
thus the illusion of the consumer subject that plays a major role in
consumer society. But this is not all. The acts of consumers against
companies such as protest and boycott are, in substance, laborers
movement, yet they are considered as distinct and even made to
oppose it.
One of the most crucial lessons of Marxs reflection is that surplus
value cannot be assessed from the process of individual capitals
movements. In this fact there exist the complexity and invisibility of
capitalist system as a totality. Capital cannot realize surplus value unless it succeeds in selling its products, namely, unless its products
achieve value as commodity. But the problem is that the potential
buyers of the commodity are in reality either other capitals and/or
their laborers. This is the dilemma of individual capitalists. Going
after profit, capital tries to reduce wages and elongate labor-time of
its own workers to their limits. But if all capitals follow these tenets
unconditionally, surplus value wont be realized because the potential buyers of the commodities, namely, the laborers, will be worn
out and beaten. Thus the more the individual capitals seek to attain
profit, the worse the recession gets in toto. But in the Great Depression of the 1930s, the total capital managed to reverse the impetus.
This was so-called Fordism. In consequence, what we know as the
consumerist society came into existence. These incidents were however not beyond Marxs theoretical reach. Fordism or Keynesianism
signifies the intervention of the total social capital to restrain the
egoism of individual capitals in order to avoid total collapse, and in
turn, secure profit for the individual capitals. It appears to be contrary to the conviction of Adam Smith that everyones egoistic strive
for profit is in the end beneficial to everyone. Also it appears to be a
denial of the Weberian spirit of capitalism-Protestantism that encourages diligence and saving. But they are nothing unimaginable within Marxian theory. It was shocking only for the view that
detects the realization of surplus value in individual capitals alone or
in the process of production alone.
Marx made a keen distinction between absolute surplus value and
relative surplus value: The former is attained by the lengthening of the
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The previous phrases appear to be similar to those of classical economics and Ricardian leftists, except that Marx introduces the temporality of ex ante facto and ex post facto. Surplus value, unlike
profit, cannot be posited within the context of individual companies. Surplus value that makes possible the accumulation of capital is
engendered only in totality by workers selling their labor power and
with the money buying back the commodities they produced. And
only where there is a difference in price between value systems: A
(when they sell their labor power) and B (when they buy the commodities), is surplus value realized. This is so-called relative surplus
value. And this is attained only by incessant technological innovation. Hence one finds that industrial capital too earns surplus value
from the interstice between two different systems. As Marx says, individual workers cannot lay claim to what they produce as the result of
their combination prior to their production. Here is the inexorable
opacity engendered by the temporal sequence. Therefore, the surplus value of industrial capital is not fraudulent, either; but this is
simply in the same sense that the surplus value of merchant capital is
not. If we accuse merchant capital of being an unequal exchange,
industrial capital has to be accused, too.
The need to produce different value systems temporally makes
the technological development of industrial capital inevitable. If,
like Joseph Alois Schumpeter, one praises the extra surplus value
earned by technological innovation as entrepreneurship, one
could consider the surplus value that merchant capital gains as a fair
share for its acumen in discovering the regional differences of values and its adventurous spirit of going to ever more remote places.
Schumpeter thought that the decline of entrepreneurship would
terminate capitalism. This only indicates that capital would end
when it can no longer exploit difference. It is only inevitable that the
entrepreneurship declines when difference is no longer produced.
But capital cannot help discovering and/or creating difference, no
matter what is at stake.
Thus, while merchant capital is engendered spatially by the difference between two value systems (that is invisible to those who exclusively belong to either of the systems), industrial capital sustains
itself by continuing to produce different value systems temporally.
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The improvement of the productivity of labor enables industrial capital to produce different systems within a system. Therefore, the look
of equivalent exchange notwithstanding, it can achieve difference.
Then immediately thereafter, the difference is dissolved and a new
value system at the new level is required and produced. Capital has
to produce this difference incessantly and endlessly. It is this requirement or burden that has motivated and conditioned the unprecedentedly high speed of technological innovation in the age of
industrial capitalism. Despite both the praise and accusations surrounding this phenomenon by ideologues of opposing sides, this
technological innovation is not motivated in and of itself; it is driven
by capitalism. As we have long been observing, for the expansion of
capital, a next to meaningless differentiation of technology is constantly required. Capital is destined to motivate and continue technological innovation not for the sake of civilizing the world, but for
the sake of its own survival.26
In order to avoid confusion I should clarify that the expression
the value of labor is lowered has nothing to do with lowered wages
or impoverishment. It means that the value of labor is lowered relative to the standard within the given value system. In the newly
formed value system, the lowered value of labor contemporaneously
confronts the lowered value of products. Therefore, as a result, the
living conditions of workers could be improved and even the workday could be shortened. This improvement does not in the least
contradict that capital nevertheless earns relative surplus value.
For the sake of definition, I have stressed the different ways by
which merchant capital and industrial capital earn surplus value
the former from spatial difference and the latter by temporal differentiation. But in reality, capital does not choose either/or; it
employs both. For instance, in the nineteenth century, English industrial capitalism bought cotton from India, manufactured it into
fabric, and exported it back to India. It earned tremendous profit
from this cycle, involving the difference of the Indian value system.
In consequence, it ruined the Indian manual labor industry, while
contributing to an increase in the production of raw cotton therein.
Today the situation has not changed: Industrial capitalism looks not
only for cheap raw materials but also for cheap labor power, roving
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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 coexist omnipresently, including stock exchange and exchange rate. It
is this omnipresence of the activities of merchant capital that constantly brings the fluctuating prices closer to equilibrium. The majority 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.
6.4 Surplus Value and Profit
In the first volume of Capital, Marx considers capital in general, and
in the third volume, he deals, for the first time, with individual capitals, namely, capitals in various branches of production. In other
words, the first volume deals with value and surplus value, while
the third deals with the price of production and profit. In the
beginning of the third volume, he explains the design:
It cannot be the purpose of the present, third volume simply to make general reflections on this unity [of the production and circulation processes].
Our concern is rather to discover and present the concrete forms which
grow out of the process of capitals movement considered as a whole. In their actual movement, capitals confront one another in certain concrete forms,
and, in relation to these, both the shape capital assumes in the immediate
production process and its shape in the process of circulation appear
merely as particular moments. The configurations of capital, as developed
in this volume, thus approach step by step the form in which they appear
on the surface of society, in the action of different capitals on one another,
i.e., in competition, and in the everyday consciousness of the agents of
production themselves.27
In the everyday consciousness of the agents, namely, of industrial capitalists and their economists, how does the capitals movement appear? For them, there is no such thing as surplus value. Profit is
everything. Price of production minus cost price leaves profit.
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Furthermore, from profit interest and ground rent are paid, and
self-consumption expenditure is excluded, then the rest is reinvested. For them, there is no such distinction, that is, of Marx, between 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 circulation capital (flow). Wages are part of the cost price; they are not
distinguished from the costs of means of production and raw material. 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 approaches 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 selection 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 various branches assumes the kind of price with which to achieve average profit. To be certain, within the same branch fierce struggles
among capitals in search of extra profit constantly take place. This improves 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 neoclassical economists that the concepts of value and surplus value are false
is in total accord with the everyday consciousness of the agents. However, 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 conduct 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 abandon 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 production 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 determined 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. Neoclassical 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 neoRicardians since Sraffa, the correspondence between the rate of surplus value and the rate of interest has been mathematically proven,
as has been touched upon earlier. But I do not think that this explains 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 inputlabor. 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
s
surplus value in the following manner: While rate of profit is c_____
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 interest 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 composition 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 instance, as Engels critically mentioned in his preface to the third volume 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 constant. According to our primary definition, the surplus value of industrial 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 underwent 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 elsewhere: 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 indicate that the capitalist economy had begun a new stage. Nevertheless,
this new stage is nothing that goes beyond the recognition of capitalism presented in Capital, namely, the limit of the capitalist economy.
6.5 The Global Nature of Capitalism
Industrial capital, as Marx says, subordinates other kinds of capital,
and reorganizes them as parts of itself. The varieties of capital
which appeared previously, within past or declining conditions of
social production, are not only subordinated to [industrial capital]
and correspondingly altered in the mechanism of their functioning,
but they now move only on its basis, thus live and die, stand and fall
together with this basis. Money capital and commodity capital, in so
far as they appear and function as bearers of their own peculiar
branches of business alongside industrial capital, are now only
modes of existence of the various functional forms that industrial
capital constantly assumes and discards within the circulation sphere,
forms which have been rendered independent and one-sidedly extended through social division of labor.37 In consequence, merchant capital becomes commercial capital that takes partial charge
of industrial capitals activities. It was this phenomenon that made
classical economists belittle merchant capital.
Industrial capital supersedes other capitals, because [i]ndustrial
capital is the only mode of existence of capital in which not only the
appropriation of surplus-value or surplus-product, but also its creation, is a function of capital. It thus requires production to be capitalist in character . . .38 The movement of industrial capital drives
capitalist society to incessant technological innovation. Yet this does
not prevent industrial capital from striving for earning surplus value
from spatial difference as well. In fact industrial capital has always
been doing this; and without it, cannot survive. Industrial capital is a
variant of merchant capital that earns surplus value from the difference of the spatial systems it creates. For instance, capitals today
travel around the world looking for cheaper labor power.
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I insist on seeing industrial capital as a variant of merchant capital, rather than elaborating its distinction from merchant capital.
Capitalno matter what kindgains surplus value from the difference of value systems, yet this essential nature is theoretically
repressed. Industrial capital as well as the theorists who support it repressed their essential sameness by marginalizing merchant capital
and mercantilism.39 Industrial capital or the capitalist mode of production was begun by those merchant capitalists who were competing in the mercantilist international trade; by that time, commercial
credit, bank credit, and stock companies had already been established.
Industrial capitals reformation of the world notwithstanding,
however, the capitalist mode of commodity productionin distinction from commodity production in generalwas and is only partial, and its percentage within the whole of production is small. The
majority of production, be it commodity production or noncommodity production, is still noncapitalist. In the future, too, it is
impossible that all production becomes capitalist through and
through. Why then could this partial capitalist mode of production
overpower the globe? Only thanks to the global nature of the commodity economy that interconnects the whole of products and
production, namely, the global nature of money.
Marx saw the historical premise for modern capitalism in the advent of the world market. The circulation of commodities is the starting point of capital. The production of commodities and their
circulation in its developed form, namely trade, form the historic presuppositions under which capital arises. World trade and the world
market date from the sixteenth century, and from then on the modern history of capital starts to unfold.40 The formation of the world
market really means that the spheres of the commodity economy that
had existed as fragments in different parts of the world came to be
connected. In the concrete, this means that the world currency system
was established by gold and silver; thereupon grounded was the mercantilism that accumulated gold and silver as the means of international liquidation. World money [Weltgelt] encompassed communities,
which had been isolated in autarky. Since then, no matter what people of communities the world over wanted, or, in other words, even
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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 operate in and with it; it was rather engendered by its compelling presence. So-called primitive accumulationwhich separated labor
power from means of production and commodified landwas rendered by the absolutist monarchical state; but this whole thing occurred 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 productions. But this particular mode of production has not decomposed 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 industrial 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 simple reproduction by introducing their own and their family members labor power. They own their means of production and are not
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proletariat; thus they even have pride of a petit-bourgeois kind. Nevertheless they are the kind of people who are, though indirectly, exploited even more than the proletariat. Also these branches play the
role of storing the relative surplus population (qua the industrial reserve army) that increases in number as the organic composition of
capital rises. During times of prosperity, the necessary labor power is
mobilized from them.
Notwithstanding the persisting signs that the capitalist mode of
production is about to decompose all other modes of production, it
is not and never will be the case. Rather the capitalist mode of production seeks to conserve and make use of them, and the proletariat
is no exception. Wallerstein says: I do not tell you anything novel to
say that, in historical capitalism, there has been increasing proletarianization of the workforce. The statement is not only not novel; it is
in the least surprising. The advantages to producers of the process
of proletarianization have been amply documented. What is surprising is not that there has been so much proletarianization, but that
there has been so little. Four hundred years at least into the existence of a historical social system, the amount of fully proletarianized labor in the capitalist world-economy today cannot be said to
total even fifty per cent.42 The majority of wage workers are not
those fully defined proletariats who are, as Marx claims, [f]ree
workers in the double sense,43 (the double sense means that they
do not own any means of production, and they are free from various
traditional binds derived from the precapitalist means of production,
as would be the case with slaves, serfs, etc.) but semi-proletariats who
belong to households whose members share incomes from the various jobs they get whenever possible. In the households of the semiproletariat, everyone shares everybody elses income. This kind of
mutual aid is not exchange, but based upon the same compelled
reciprocity of gift and return that I observed before. Which also
means that they are bound by the traditions and orders of community (more than an urban population). And if I think about it, an
element of noncapitalist reciprocity remains even in the most advanced sectors of capitalist development. Even after the traditional
communities have for the most part decomposed, remnants of them
still exist in family relationships.
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Why on earth are premodern production and relations of production preserved in advanced capitalist countries? This is an intractable problem the world over (outside the most advanced sectors
of England and North America). In prewar Japan, there was a famous uproar called the Japan Capitalism Debate or the Feudal
System Debate, which involved quite a few scholars of the time. The
title specifying Japan notwithstanding, this problem is not peculiar
to Japan, it is universal. (The same type of problematicas to
whether or not the societies in Latin America are feudalreappeared in the argument between Ernst Laclau and Immanuel
Wallerstein in the 1970s.) In the Japan Capitalism Debate, one
school Koza-ha maintained that in Japanese society, where (extraeconomic) feudal domination presided over by the emperor
[Tenno] system remained deeply embedded, the primary task was a
bourgeois revolution against feudalism. The opposition school Ronoha insisted that Japanese society was already amidst a fully developed
capitalist economy; what appeared to be feudal dominion in agricultural districts was in fact already a form of modern landholding
wherein the farm rent overheated because of competition between
the overpopulation of tenant farmers coming from cities as relative
surplus population. In such a situation, the hierarchy in rural areas
appeared to be even more feudal, which however was really a product of the capitalist economy; and even that phenomenon would
eventually disappear.44
At a glance, the latter position seems to be more realistic. This,
however, contained the problematic determinism that all underdeveloped capitalist nation-states would repeat the same developmental pattern as Britain, the model of Capitaland overlooked the
crucial fact that both developed and underdeveloped nation-states
coexisted in the synchronic relation of world capitalism. Meanwhile,
stressing the feudal remnants, the former school at least conceived
of a theoretical stance that could question the simplistic economic determinism and objectify the formation of political and mythological
powerthe so-called superstructure. The problematic of analyzing
the Japanese specificity was then succeeded in the postwar climate by
some leftist critics (such as Masao Maruyama and Takaaki Yoshimoto) as, most eminently, the enigma of Emperor fascism: Why
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primeval, mythological elements function in highly advanced industrial capitalist societies. For this endeavor, they introduced methods
of political science and anthropology, and so forth, domains outside
conventional Marxist doctrines. This somewhat corresponded to
the agendas of the Western Marxists who struggled under Fascism
during the 1930s; Gramsci, for instance, who came to pay utmost attention to cultural hegemony, and the Frankfurt School, which introduced psychoanalysis into its analysis of power. As a general
tendency, Marxists paid attention to the relative autonomy of superstructure because of their belief that this intervention would finally
compensate Marxs theoretical shortcomings. As I mentioned earlier, however, Marxs Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte had already revealed the mechanism of Bonapartism (qua the prototype
of fascism)how it came into existence out of the complex of coexisting advanced industrial capitalism and conventional relations of
production and class structureby way of analyzing the every mechanism of the representation [Darstellung] and representative system
[Vertretung]. Thus the idea that the advent of Fascism in the 1930s
brought something novelagainst which Marxs analysis was
obsoletewas finally wrong. The idea only proved that Marx had
not been read closely enough.
It is now necessary to shift our problematic: the issue of why
primeval, mythological elements function in highly advanced industrial capitalist societies should be graspednot as the relative autonomy of superstructurebut in the framework of why high industrial
capitalization does not entirely decompose the conventional relations of production, and rather conserves them for its own use;
namely, it should be grasped as an immanent problem of capitalism.
For instance, in 1935 Kozo Uno made an important observation
when criticizing both sides of the Japan Capitalism Debate. The
following is a rough summary of his point. The process of capitalist
development in underdeveloped countries that had begun capitalization in the stage of imperialism was inexorably different from the
process of British development. Forced to undertake a quick capitalist development by the pressure of advanced strong states, they had
to proceed with the concentration of capital by adopting state protectionist policies and the stock system. They sought to shape up the
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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 imperialism that developed heavy industry. From the beginning, [c]apitalist 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 produces 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 production. Mark Poster posed the concept of the mode of information as opposed to Marxs mode of production in his Foucault,
Marxism, and History.4 This is another attempt to revise historical materialism that persistently sees history from the vantage point of production; it cannot be a critical comment on Capital, which is originally an
inquiry into the forces with which capitalist production qua the production of information (difference) organizes society. Another
group of Marxists has paid utmost attention to the diversification of
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commodity production in consumer society and especially its fascinating effects, as if they were the cornerstones to revising the worldview of Capital. In reference to Walter Benjamins phrase [n]ovelty
is a quality independent of the intrinsic value of the commodity,5
for instance, they seek to discover an autonomous domain in cultural production. From my stance, however, novelty is little more
than a synonym for information qua difference. What capital has to
produce from the beginning are not products in and of themselves,
but, more crucially, value (and surplus value). From the vantage
point that surplus value is attained by the production of difference,
the drive for novelty does not offer any new recognition. To tackle
capital, hence, one always has to think from the formula of merchant capital: M-C-M. This approach would reveal that the so-called
development of industrial capitalism in stages is nothing but the return of the repressed of the archi-form of capitalism.
Wallersteins theory of the modern world system is important
insofar as it posed an alternative to the view that sees the world economy simply as the relationality and aggregate of national economies.
Yet at the same time, it appears epoch-making only because mainstream Marxism has interpreted Marxs thought as if it were an extension of national economics (the economics of polis) and not as
its critic that he was. Classical economists (liberalists) have been disavowing their own originthe amalgamation of mercantilists and
absolutist monarchyand insisting on the separation of economy
from state power. This is a repression of the historical origin in a
double sense. As I have already mentioned, the capitalist mode of
production commenced within the mercantilist state thanks to its investment and protection. In the latecomer capitalist states (such as
Germany, France, and Japan) in the nineteenth century, there was
state intervention in the economy; however, even in England, the industrial revolution took place thanks to the backup of the state as it
sought to grasp world hegemony. The liberalists forgot this fact and
described the world as if the capitalist economy had come into existence sui generis, independent from the state, and continued to
exist as such. Wallersteins concept of the modern world system thus
indicates, in our context, that at the fountainhead of modernity
there existed the absolutist-mercantilist state qua economic system,
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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 hegemonic 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 movement, 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 methodologically, 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 respect, 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 capitalist market economy; therefore, one has to acknowledge its autonomy 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 either gloss over it or return to pre-Capital accounts of it. It is generally
understood that early Marx grasped the state as an imagined community, while middle Marx considered it as a device for class domination. But in his The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, there is a
deeper understanding vis--vis the state than in either of these examples. Then, how did the Marx of Capital think of the state? The answer 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 capital 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 important 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 powers of the state and civil society were vested in independent corporations
and communities, so that the whole was more of an aggregate than an organism; 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 relation to the whole was left to their own opinion and discretion. . . .14
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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). Second, there are robbery and redistribution (between state and agrarian communities). Third is commodity exchange. And the fourth is
association. Association is based on mutual aid like that found in traditional communities, yet it is not as closed. It is a network of voluntary exchange organized by those who have once left traditional
communities via the commodity economy. The four types of exchange can be illustrated as follows:
c exchange by money
d association
a feudal state
b agrarian community
c city
d association
a state
b nation
d association
a equality
b fraternity
c liberty
d association
Lenin thought that nations were formed by unified markets in consequence of the development of the capitalist economy. This observation is as confused as the prospect that the globalization of
capitalism will eventually terminate nations. Yet this confusion is not
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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 absolutist 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 creating 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 culture of enlightenment always existed on the foundation 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.
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 nationalism: 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 indebtedness 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 officially 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 capitalist 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 emotion 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 signified 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 rectifies the inequality of the distribution of wealth. Furthermore, fraternity, to him, was equal to a nation that overcomes the contradiction
between liberty and equality. Finally, the state for Hegel was the political 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 really raised to its completion in Capital. Employing the dialectic
method of description that he had once denied, Marx sought to illuminate 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 economic structure, namely, a form of exchange. Therefore, it is imperative 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 evidently 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 military tactics: the war of maneuver (frontal attack) and the war of position. 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 society, residing behind the state governmental apparatus. In this context, 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 society, 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 CapitalNation-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. Meanwhile, 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 revolutions have borne national independence movements; in those
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regions where state apparatuses and capitals conspired with colonialist powers, it was the socialists who informed and realized nationalism. The success of the revolutions unfortunately does not teach
us anything further concerning the struggle where the CapitalNation-State trinity is well established.
One often hears the prediction that, thanks to the globalization of
capital, the nation-state will disappear. It is certain that economic
policies within nation-states do not work as effectively as before, because of the growing network of international economic reliance on
foreign trade. But, no matter how international relations are reorganized and intensified, the state and nation wont disappear. When
individual national economies are threatened by the global market
(neoliberalism), they demand the protection (redistribution) of the
state and/or bloc economy, at the same time as appealing to national cultural identity. So it is that any counteraction to capital must
also be one targeted against the state and nation (community). The
capitalist nation-state is fearless because of its trinity. The denial of
one ends up being reabsorbed in the ring of the trinity by the power
of the other two. This is because each of them, though appearing to
be illusory, is based upon different principles of exchange. Therefore, when we take capitalism into consideration, we always have to
include nation and state. And the counteraction against capitalism
also has to be against nation-state. In this light, social democracy
does nothing to overcome the capitalist economy but is the last resort for the capitalist nation-states survival.
The capitalist economy has an autonomous power. But it also has
its own limits. No matter how much the capitalist commodity economy affects the whole production, it is partial and parasitic. Furthermore, it has an exteriority that it cannot treat at its disposalland
(the natural environment in the broad sense) and humans as agents
of labor-power commodity.19 For the capitalist market economy to
reproduce humans and nature, the intervention of the nation-state
is imperative. Kozo Uno saw the ultimate bounds of capitalism in the
fact that capital by itself cannot produce labor-power commodity.
Labor-power commodity is certainly not a simple commodity, since
it cannot be reproduced because of a shortage, nor discarded because of an excess. A shortage of labor power lowers the profit rate
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Notwithstanding this insight, what is crucial in Capital is less the distinction between industry and agriculture than that between the
capitalist mode of production and production in general, or between the world organized by value form and not. Commodification
and industrialization are related, yet different matters altogether.
Vis--vis the environmental problem, increasing numbers of people
advocate symbiosis with nature rather than dominance, after the
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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 movement was that the real capitalism itself surpassed the visions of classical 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 capitalists 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 social capital appeared to regulate the selfishness of individual capitals. 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 workers economic struggle has come to support the up cycles of the capitalist 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 similar 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 interest 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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Lenin rightfully accused Kautsky as an apostate. But his Third International (or Comintern) also came to be subordinated to the national
interest of the Soviet Union. These failures were not necessarily due
to Marxists indifference to the problematics of nation, as might be
considered widely, but, to their ignorance of the problematics of
state. Inasmuch as one sees only the production process as the problematic place of exploitation and resort to state power to resolve it,
the rise of nationalism that unequivocally pursues profit of its own is
inevitable.
At the end of the twentieth century, the victory of Bernsteinism
became evident. Edouard Bernstein constructed his position from
his experience of British society and socialist movements in the late
nineteenth century. In Britain, after the 1850s, the working class
began to enjoy a certain richness and consumerist lifestyle. So it was
that a social democrat like John Stuart Mill became prominent.
It was in such a situation that Marx wrote Capital. Today, some
Marxists advocate a return to Mill. They do not think about the fact
that Marx wrote Capital in an age when Mill was in fashion. Beginning from such a paradigm, it is clear that one can no longer think
in terms of the dialectic of master and slave: The dialectic that identifies wage-labor as a version of slave or serf and concludes with the
victory of the laborers is obsolete. And Marx sought to think of the
capitalist economy and its sublation [Aufheben] totally differently.
In Capital, as Marx clearly stated in his preface, both capitalists
and workers are deemed only agents of economic categories: capital
(money) and labor power (commodity). Although Marxists refer to
Capital often, generally speaking, Marxists are somehow unsatisfied
and perplexed by it. This is because it is difficult to find a moment
for the subjective practice therein. But this is not a shortcoming of
the book. Capital looks at the capitalist economy from the vantage
point of natural history, namely, a theoretical stance; it is only
natural that the dimension of subjective intervention is absent.
Thus, Uno Kozo is correct when he said that Capital only presents
the necessity of crisis and not of revolution, and that revolution is a
practical problem. And this practical, I insist, must be interpreted
in the Kantian sense: that the movement against capitalism is an ethical and moral one. All the counteractionsagainst exploitation,
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separated from the relationalitycapital vs. wage laborthe subjectivity of consumers can only be an abstract category. It is for this reason that for Marxists, the place of consumption has appeared to be
false and deceitful (at least, before the advent of the postmodern
scene). A multitude of negative accounts of consumer society have
tacitly conceived this position (and the positive accounts as well).
With respect to our position, however, the consumer position is
something that should be rediscovered and redefined. All in all, surplus value that sustains industrial capital can exist, in principle, only
thanks to this mechanism that workers in totality buy back what they
produce. Surplus value is finally realized on the consumption point,
the place where capital is confronted by alterity and compelled into
a salto mortale as a seller of commodities.
In the monetary economy, buying and selling as well as production
and consumption are separated. This splits workers subject into
halflabor-power = seller subject and consumer subjectand marginalizes the former, making it seem as if corporations and consumers
were the only subjects of economic activities. In consequence, it also
segregates the labor and consumers movements. In recent history,
while labor movements have been brought down to skeletons, consumers movements have flourished, often incorporating issues of environmental protection, feminism, and minorities. Generally, they
take the form of civil action and are not connected to, or are sometimes even antagonistic to, the labor movement. After all, though,
consumers movements are virtually laborers movements transposed,
and are important only inasmuch as they are so. Conversely, the labor
movement could go beyond the bounds of its specificity inasmuch
as it self-consciously adopts the potency of consumers positionality.
For, in fact, the process of consumption as a reproduction of laborpower commodity covers a whole range of fronts of our life-world, including child care, education, leisure, and community activities.
Here let us reconsider the meaning of the fact that industrial capital is based upon labor-power commodity. This implies not only that
industrial capital hires workers to make them work, but also, and
more important, that surplus value is attained only by workers, who
in totality buy back what they produce. (Although what workers buy
are consumer goods, if they were not sold, neither could producers
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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, including 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 guaranteed 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 oppositional 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, compelled by industrial capitalism and the modern state. The production 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 revolutionary movement, which lacks a countermeasure to this gendered 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, irrespective of those empirically observed objects. The introduction of
this stance was more revolutionary than the overturn of the heliocentric 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 surplus 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 parliamentarianism 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 insisted 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 executed 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 leadership 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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cooperatives would not be a retrogression to self-sufficient, selfenclosed communities, but an open market economy; and it would
not be like the market economy as we know it.
The counteraction to the capitalist nation-state should be nonviolent
through and through. But here a redefinition of nonviolent is necessary; the parliamentary systemas opposed to a military uprisingis
always defined as the nonviolent way of changing the political
state. But it is not the case that it is veritably nonviolent. I argue that
parliamentarianism, too, wills to state power. According to Max
Weber, the state is equal to a human community that demands an
actual monopolization of the means of executing physical violence
within a limited domain. Whether by compulsion or by agreement,
the execution of might is violent through and through. Therefore,
all those who are involved in politics are flirting with the demonic
power lurking in violence, it might be said.31 In this sense of Weber,
social democracy is in the least nonviolent, albeit less violent. Social
democracy seizes state power by resorting to the majority vote in the
parliamentary system and seeks to redistribute the wealth extorted
from capital (as tax) to workers. If so (as seen from the stance of the
radical libertarian Hayek), the difference between Bernstein and
Lenin is not as large as it seems. Both resort to state power, that is,
violence. One is a soft statism, while the other a hard statism. From
our vantage point, neither seeks the abolition of the labor-power
commodity, namely, wage labor. And the social democracy is the last
resort for the capitalist nation-state to survive.
What we call nonviolence is exemplified by the strategy of
Mahatma Gandhi. But it cannot be reduced to so-called civil disobedience. Mahatma Gandhis principle of nonviolent resistance is well
known, but less known are his resistances of boycotting English
products and nurturing consumers/producers cooperatives.32 If
not for this nurturing, the boycott could not be what Gramsci called
the war of position. If not for the will to noncapitalist cooperatives,
the boycott would be a nationalist movement that cared only for the
well-being of national capitals.
Karl Polanyi likened capitalism (the market economy) to cancer.
Coming into existence in the interstice between agrarian communities and feudal states, capitalism invaded the internal cells and
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In contrast to Lukcs theory of totality, this is a transcritical recognition. And the tendency Jameson commented on here is no longer
limited to the United States of America. In the climate following the
1990s, it has become the same world over. Antisystemic movements
are flourishing in the advanced capitalist states. But, being too
afraid of totalization and the representative system, these movements are isolated from each other. The reason is clear: They are
gathered under single thematic frames, respectivelyfeminism, homosexuality, ethnicity, environmental concerns, and so on. The importance of these movements lies in the fact that they take up the
existential dimension that cannot be reduced to the previous movements centered on the relation of production and/or class relation.
But my point is that individuals are living in plural dimensions of social relations. Hence, the movements that are grounded upon a onedimensional identity come to face internal conflicts by way of the
return of the differences in the bracketed dimensions.34 For instance, as I have mentioned, consumers movements are opposing
labor movements in many regions. But then, again, it is likely that
social democracy would subsume the mutually isolated, molecular
movements. Thus, the movements that refuse centralization and
representation have only two choices: being represented by a party
that participates in the state power or remaining local. The choice is
whether to be subsumed into the capitalist nation-state or left untouched and fragmented.
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Preface
1. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. and ed. Mary Gregor (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 interrupted [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.
4. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 117, Bxxx.
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.
6. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Law: Introduction [1844], in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 3 (New York:
International Publishers, 1976), p. 182.
Introduction
1. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Law: Introduction [1844], in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 3 (New York:
International Publishers, 1976), p. 175.
2. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 163.
3. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, pp. 102103.
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4. See Kozo Uno, Principles of Political Economy, trans. Thomas T. Sekine (Atlantic
Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1980).
5. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983).
6. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 176.
7. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 182.
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.
10. See Marx, Capital, vol. 3, p. 567.
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.
12. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 92.
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).
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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 Immanuel Kants Werke, vol. 9 (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1922), pp. 3439.
24. Not incidentally, Kants thesis about vision is close to one of Lacans basic definitions 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 nineteenth century, specifically that R. A. Vogel is generally credited with having introduced 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 Geisterseher 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).
26. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 99, Aviii, Aix.
27. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 100, Ax, Axi.
28. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 99, Avii.
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 Critique of Pure Reason via Dreams of Visionary. In his book, Sakabe holds that the dynamism 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.
30. Immanuel Kant, Dreams of a Visionary, in The Philosophy of Kant, p. 15.
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 explicated as if it were ontologically premised, whereas in fact it would more properly intervene 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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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 anschaulichen 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 deutlich machen. Wir sagten schon, da auch viele Kantianer die Mglichkeit der nichteuklidischen 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 erschwert, 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 extensively in Architecture as Metaphor: Language, Number, Money, trans. Sabu Kohso
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995).
8. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, rev. ed., ed. G. H.
von Wright, R. Rhees, G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Cambridge,
MA: The MIT Press, 1991), p. 383.
9. In Architecture as Metaphor, I pointed out that Gdels method prefigured so-called
deconstruction, and that Wittgenstein exemplified a related, yet also fundamentally
different orientation.
10. Karatani, Architecture as Metaphor, 176177; pt. 3, 49.
11. Karatani, Architecture as Metaphor, p. 143; pt. 3, 1.
12. Karatani, Architecture as Metaphor, p. 143; pt. 3, 2.
13. Karatani, Architecture as Metaphor, p. 173; pt. 3, 42.
14. Karatani, Architecture as Metaphor, p. 176; pt. 3, 46.
15. Karatani, Architecture as Metaphor, p. 99; pt. 1, 166.
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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.
2. Descartes, Discourse on Method, p. 47; pt. 3, sec. 6.
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.
4. Claude Lvi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, vol. 2, trans. Monique Layton
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 36.
5. Descartes, Discourse on Method, pp. 2325; pt. 1, sec. 15.
6. Claude Lvi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New
York, Modern Library, 1955), p. 3.
7. Michel Serrs, Hermes 1, La communication (Paris: dition de Minuit, 1968), p. 38:
Ds lors, sur un contenu culturel donn, quil soit Dieu, table ou cuvette, une
analyse est structurale (et nest structurele que) lorsquelle fait apparaitre ce contenu comme un modle au sens prcis plus haut, cest--dire lorsquelle sait isoler
un ensemble formel dlments et des relations, sur lequel il est possible de raisonner sans faire appel la signification du contenu donn.
8. Ren Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy [1641], in Discourse on Method
and The Meditations, trans. F. E. Sutcliffe (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968),
pp. 106107; second meditation.
9. Descartes, Discourse on Method, p. 51; pt. 4, sec. 1.
10. See Benedict de Spinoza, Parts I and II of Descartes Principles of Philosophy
[1663], in The Collected Works of Spinoza, vol. 1, trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 234; and Ethics [1675], in The Collected Works of
Spinoza, vol. 1, trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985),
p. 448 (2EA2).
11. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations [1931], trans. Dorion Cairns (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), p. 43.
12. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, p. 35.
13. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, p. 37.
14. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology
[1936], trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970),
pp. 179180.
15. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, p. 202.
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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 Besonderheit aufgehoben.
33. As cited from uvres compltes de Joseph de Maistre, in A Dictionary of Philosophical
Quotations, ed. A. J. Ayer and Jane OGrady (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992), p. 280.
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 discreditable 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 Wissenschaftstlehre? 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-consciousness, indeed, the mere form of thinking, void of content, therefore, of such a nature 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 impression this idea makes on the reader! The title itself arouses little expectation of anything valuableTheory of Sciencesince every systematic inquiry is science, and
theory of science suggests a science of science, which leads to an infinite regress (Immanuel Kant to J. H. Tieftrunk, April 5, 1798, in Immanuel KantPhilosophical Correspondence, 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 selfaware, 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 communists 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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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 empirical, 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: International 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 University Press, 1989).
39. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit [1807], trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 62.
40. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 66.
41. Ian Hacking, Gengo wa Naze Tetsugaku-no-Mondai Ni Narunoka? (Tokyo: Keiso
Shobo, 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 notion 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 thingin-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 nationstates, 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.
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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).
47. In Uses of AestheticsAfter Orientalism (Boundary 2, Edward W. Said, vol. 25,
no. 2, summer 1998), I argued that the position of interests cannot be ignored in consideration of our responses to various matters. Albert O. Hirschman points out that
the position of interests came to exceed that of passions in the eighteenth century;
see his The Passions and the Interests (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). It
was thanks to this shift that the theses on passion, which had been flourishing up
until the seventeenth century, disappeared in the succeeding era. This was of course
the deed of the commercialism of civil society. The commodity economy brackets all
the differences of use value and thus reduces everything to exchange value. Disinterestedness as a key function of an aesthetic context certainly signifies an act of
bracketing economic as well as utilitarian interests. However, aesthetic function does
not prevent aesthetic value from transferring itself to commodity value. In this case,
the value perversely goes up to the extent that it reaches a heavenly perch from
which to look down on other commodities. In fact, art worship by the masses is often
addressed to the heavenly (or perversely) expensive commodity itself. In his critique
of utilitarianism, Kant regarded happiness as a matter of affection, which was in reality a matter of interest. For instance, eudemonism (or utilitarianism) is very much
that which reduces morality to interest. Henceforth, contemporary ethics, based as it
is upon utilitarianism, is essentially economy centered (in the sense of neoclassical
economics), because its goal is how to realize, as Jeremy Bentham said, the greatest
happiness of the greatest number of people. It follows that the function of Kants
critique of eudemonism lies in making us confront morality directly, once more, by
bracketing interest.
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.
51. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 544, A554/B582A555/B583.
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 distinguished ethics of responsibility [Verantwortungsethik] from ethics of mind
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[Gesinnungsethik]. Ethics of mind implies an attitude that considers the selfs conviction 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.
54. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations [1945], trans. by G. E. M.
Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953), sec. 81e.
55. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 470471, A426/B454A427/B455.
56. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, pp. 2728, 5:30.
57. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, p. 38, 4:429.
58. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 92.
59. It seems that from Capital the subjectivity to change the economic social structure 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.
60. Notwithstanding its remarkable intellectual revolution, structuralism was also
celebrated by those who sought to escape from the questions of subjectivity and responsibility. One should pay attention to the fact that most of these followers used
this occasion to attack Sartre. But, in fact, Sartres early stance was shared by the
structuralists. Sartre never simplemindedly and unconditionally claimed the importance of subject. He stressed human freedom, that is, being-for-itself, as a negation
of a hypostatized, bourgeois subject. He posited a structural determination, as it
were, in the place where people believed they were free, on the condition that he insisted on determination by way of an original choosing (of prereflective cogito).
In Being and Nothingness, Sartre maintained that all human doings were destined
to fail, and then, after World War II, he began to advocate humanism and attempted
to write ethics, because of his experience under the Nazi occupation. Sartre acknowledged that there was no resistance except for the communist party and that he
was not worthy of being called a member of the Resistance. Furthermore, he tackled
head-on the issues of the French colonialist past before and after World War II,
which other intellectuals, including communists, ignored. In this sense, antiSartrean structuralism functioned to dissolve responsibility for the past, bringing
about the advent of Nouveau Philosophes, the self-deceiving and mediocre group
proud of the French tradition of freedom and human rights.
61. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, p. 33, 5:36.
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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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 transferred 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 punitive 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 independent 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 independence; 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 Pleasure 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 overturning 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]).
65. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, pp. 362363.
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 Nuremberg. The second, political guilt, is a concern of the entire nationno German is innocent. 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 swerving away from individual responsibility.
67. Derridas account was forwarded to those who question Paul de Mans responsibility 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.
69. Immanuel Kant, Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History, in Kant,
Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 234.
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 formations 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 capacities 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 biological (organic) one and as a regulative idea (qua transcendental semblance).
71. Kant, Idea for a Universal History, p. 44.
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: Introduction [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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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 supported by all classes: from workers, peasants in the South, and even minorities, to capitalists, 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 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), pp. 7071.
29. See Heideggers lecture Declaration of Support for Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist State (November 11, 1933): German Volksgenossen and Volksgenossinnen! 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 possibility 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).
30. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire, p. 185.
31. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire, p. 186.
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 Holland and England, including the famous Tulip Crisis, that stormed across Holland
between 1634 and 1637. They were most certainly financial crises provoked by speculation; one cannot determine, however, whether they were superficial and incidental. 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 capital, 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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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 capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an immense collection of commodities. 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 chapter 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 development 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 Nature, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), p. 36.
40. See Marx, Difference between Democritean, pt. 2, chap. 1.
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 particles) 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 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 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 devastation, 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 possibilities 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.
42. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, pp. 8990.
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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.
47. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, p. 567.
48. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 929.
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.
51. Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, p. 46.
52. Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, p. 148.
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.
54. Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, p. 42.
55. The socialism of Proudhon was ethico-economic. He said: Instead of a million
laws, a single law will suffice. What shall this law be? Do not to others what you would
not they should do to you: do to others as you would they should do to you. That is
the law and the prophets. . . . But it is evident that this is not a law; it is the elementary formula of justice, the rule of all transactions (P.-J. Proudhon, General Idea of the
Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, trans. John Beverley Robinson [New York: Haskell
House, 1969], p. 215).
Yet this rule is no other than Kants law of morals. Proudhon did not speak of
it as an abstract category as it may seem; he envisioned an association wherein exchange itself was the ethics. And Kant, too, was interested in the economic system
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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: University of Toronto Press, 1979), p. 43.
57. What Stirner called Eigentrichkeit is the same as what Kierkegaard called Einzelheit. They both point to singularity. Stirner maintained that only egoists could form
unions (associations); this perfectly corresponds to Kierkegaards claim that only singular 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 Fragments). 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 circuit: individual-genus at the same time as persisting in materialism.
58. Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, p. 277.
59. Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, in Collected Works, vol. 5, p. 4.
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.
63. Proudhon, The Principle of Federation, pp. 1617.
64. Proudhon, The Principle of Federation, pp. 1617.
65. Instructions for Delegates to the Geneva Congress, Karl Marx: The First International and After. Political Writings, vol. 3, ed. David Fernbach (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1992), p. 90.
66. Proudhon, The Principle of Federation, p. 11.
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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 arrived, 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 basically 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 Publishers, 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 guaranteed 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 Comments 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 California Press, 1984), Benjamin Barber proposed a system that enables the participatory democracy (including lottery). Nevertheless, his strong democracy idea does
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not consider the aspect of Proudhons industrial democracynamely, the participatory democracy within corporations or workplace in general. If not for this aspect,
the result would inevitably be a weak democracy.
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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 Programme, 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, although 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 production and object production as one and the same thing. This stance also solidified the
identification of the capitalist economy with industrial civilization. Therefrom derived 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 conspicuously in the agricultural sectorwhich is half based upon the production by nature. 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 tendency of mainstream Marxism since Engelsto rule the natural and anarchic elements 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 derivative 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 socialism, 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 economy 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.
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14. The Quantitative Determinancy of the Relative Form of Value, in Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 146.
15. Bailey, A Critical Dissertation, p. 72.
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 commodities 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, subspecies, 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 Leinwand 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 Incarnation 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 distinguishing 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 economics, however, money sustains itself. But more contemporary economists who criticize 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.
17. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 126.
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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 capital. This only goes to show how the valorization of capital founded on the antithetical 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 outbreaks 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 politischen konomie, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 28 (New
York: International Publishers, 1976), p. 42. Marx developed his notion of the precapitalist forms of production based on his reflections on the capitalist economy in Grundrisse. 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 necessity, starting from the primitive communityand this was never Marxs intention.
The multifariousness of the production systems should be understood as variations 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 precapitalist system is based on the reciprocity between robbery (qua redistribution) and
gift. And even in capitalist society, these have not been abolished but rather transformed into the form of the modern nation-state. Considerations of the precapitalist 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 possible to grasp the whole relation of production. It follows that, counter to its intention, the theory would result in centralist power control.
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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 determination (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 always 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 exchanged 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.
14. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 209.
15. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chacravorty Spivak (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
16. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 167.
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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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 alternation, affecting the various industrial countries at different times, between a relative
short and weak improvement in trade and a relatively long and indecisive depression. 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.
37. Marx, Capital, vol. 2, p. 136.
38. Marx, Capital, vol. 2, pp. 135136.
39. For instance, those who praise the adjustment mechanism of the market economy 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 ideology 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 ostensible 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 mediation of the production process (Capital, vol. 2, p. 137).
40. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 247.
41. In Aristotles cosmology, there is an indefinitely expanding chaos outside community. This idea was dominant throughout medieval Europe and more or less
everywhere, including non-European communities, which did not know Aristotle. It
was Giordano Bruno who overturned the idea and was burnt at the stake. Going far
beyond the Copernican heliocentric theory, he conceptualized an infinite universe
whose center was far beyond the sun. In his On the Infinite Universe and Worlds,
he distinguished the world from the universe, according to his recognition that if
the universe is one infinity, it must include worlds. To Bruno, the universe is one, an
infinite space that envelops worlds. See Giordano Bruno, On the Infinite Universe
and Worlds, in Milton K. Munitz, ed., Theories of Universe (New York: Free Press,
1957). Tzvetan Todorov pointed out that Brunos idea was inspired by the fact that
the world had been enclosed into one whole by the discovery and invasion of a new
continent, as observed and recorded by Las Casas. See his The Conquest of America:
The Question of the Other (New York: Harper & Row, 1984). That is to say that only
when the indefinite exteriority came to disappear was infinity conceptualized. In our
epistemology, world refers to community, while universe refers to society. Seen in this
context, it might be said, Brunos concept of the infinite universal space that envelops worlds came from the real advent of the world market.
42. Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism (London: Verso, 1983), pp. 2223.
43. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 874.
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
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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, derivatives of the capitalist commodity economy, and that the primary task was a social
democratic revolution backed up by universal suffrage and the constitutional monarchy 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 involve a number of scholars and intellectuals outside the parties, and raised many important 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).
45. Uno Kozo, Shihonshugi no Seiritsu to Noson-bunkai no Katei [The Establishment of
Capitalism vis--vis the process of decomposition of agricultural villages], in Uno Kozo
Chosakushu, vol. 8 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1974).
46. Marx, Capital, vol. 2, p. 546.
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 Seiritsu] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1967).
48. Marx, Capital, vol. 2, p. 546.
49. In the early 1960s, the Japanese Marxian political economist, Hiroshi Iwata, elucidated 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).
50. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, pp. 345346.
51. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class (London: Verso,
1991), pp. 123124.
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3. Norbert Weiner, Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1961).
4. Mark Poster, Foucault, Marxism, and History: Mode of Production versus Mode of Information (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1984).
5. Walter Benjamin, Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century, in Reflections, trans.
Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), p. 158.
6. The ideologues of the nation-state speak as if there were a nation and its homeland from the beginning, which then developed a feudal system and then absolutism, 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: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 57.
8. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 149 n 22.
9. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 161.
10. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), #301, p. 341.
11. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, #302, p. 342.
12. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, #314, pp. 351352.
13. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, #315, p. 352.
14. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, #278, p. 315.
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 centuries, 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 developing 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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In addition, the agents of a bourgeois revolution are not always bourgeoisie themselves. 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 sufficiently realize the conditions of capitalist economies are bourgeois revolutions, no
matter who the players.
16. The trinity of Capital-Nation-State consists of three mutually complementary
forms of exchange. Corporatism, the welfare state, and social democracy, for example, are all end forms of the trinity, and do nothing to abolish it. The globalization
of capitalism wont decompose it either. Look at the European Community. To the
nations within Europe, it might be considered an overcoming of the nation-state,
but from the outside, it exists just as a gigantic superstate.
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 nature, 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, implying 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 Quesnay. 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 antiSemitism, which denied the Nazis biological theory of race, was rooted, in essence,
in antimerchant capitalism (or anti-international financial capitalism), and a derivative 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 realize 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 fascism 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.
20. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 637.
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 oblivious 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 society, 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 morning, 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 conventional 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 inferior 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 characteristics, but the economic interest that subordinates every labor to exchange value.
23. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth, England:
Penguin Books, 1973), pp. 420421.
24. See Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, trans. Harry
Cleaver, Michael Ryan, and Maurizio Viano (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1991).
25. Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks, p. 110.
26. Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks, pp. 229230.
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, commodity exchange realized the equality between men and women, but it also concretized 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 equality. 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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33. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1981), p. 51 n 31.
34. Anarcho-syndicalists denied intellectuals representation and insisted on workers autonomous movements: Workers themselves should represent workers. The denial of representation results in the denial of political interventions other than those
of workers. But what about the anarcho-syndicalists themselves? They were a small
group of people and, after all, representing workers. Similar things can be said
about minority movements. The persistent stance that minority liberation should be
undertaken by minorities themselves is definitely correct in one aspect; but it also results in rejecting those who are not minor in the same category. So it is that the
movement tends to be closed. Individuals are living in various dimensions; if one is
minor in one category, he or she is not in another category. This further splits the
minorities movements.
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 association of producers/consumers cooperatives; the division of labor and entrenchment 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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Page 350
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Index
Associations (cont.)
labor and, 288290
LETS and, 298301
M-C-M formula and, 296297
Mill and, 287
money structure and, 297298
Negri and, 290291
nonviolence and, 302
Paris Commune, 284
revolutionizing of, 285286
Ricardo and, 285
Says Law of Market and, 290
Second International, 283, 286287, 296
subjectivism and, 288, 290291,
293294
surplus value and, 291
Third International, 287
Third World and, 295
total social capital and, 292293
Assozierter Verstand (associated
understanding), 178, 180, 183
Bacon, Francis, 42
Bahktin, 70
Bailey, Samuel, 57
surplus value and, 228
value form theory and, 193196
Bakunin, Mikhail, 1718, 329n75
anarchism and, 180181
Marx and, 178
principle of association and, 284
Barter, 200201, 232
Bataille, George, 204, 210
Beauty, 4142
Being, 97100
Benjamin, Walter, 268
Bernstein, Edouard, 16, 287, 302
Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche),
122123
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud),
123124
Blankenburg, W., 9293
Bonaparte, Louis, 145146, 150
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 143
Bourbaki, Nicolas, 78
Bourgeois, 145, 150
Boycotts, 346n32
Bracketing, 117120, 160161
Bullionists, 67
Burke, Kenneth, 144
Candide (Voltaire), 45
Cantor, Georg, 6162
Capitalism, 5, 165
anarchic crises and, 157
antideluvian form of, 186
antinomy and, 225
archi-form of, 266268
associations and, 283306
autonomous power of, 281282
barter and, 200201
boycotts and, 346n32
Capital-Nation-State and, 265283
circulation process and, 11, 207208,
224225 (see also Circulation process)
commodity and, 915, 200211 (see also
Commodity)
cosmopolitanism and, 211212
counteraction to, 298306
credit and, 156, 217222, 335n45,
346n28
crisis in, 231232
depression and, 220221
driving mechanisms of, 200211
ethics and, 216217
exchange issues and, 200211
foreign trade and, 260261
French Revolution and, 1415
globalism and, 1112, 1516, 251263
historical materialism and, 140
imagined communities and, 1214
imperialism and, 266
individual distribution and, 246247
individual subordination and, 171
industrial capital and, 234241,
251283, 289290
interest and, 156
LETS and, 2325, 298301
linguistic approach and, 228234
M-C-M formula and, 910, 20 (see also
M-C-M formula)
merchant capital and, 234241,
262, 266
metaphysics and, 211217
miser analogy and, 7
moral issues and, 1819
natural environment and, 282283
nonviolence and, 302
origin and, 223
parallax and, 152161
plunder and, 202203
Polanyi and, 302303
production control and, 166
profit and, 168, 241251
putting-out system and, 223
reciprocity and, 202203
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Page 351
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Index
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Page 352
352
Index
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Page 353
353
Index
solipsism and, 82
Spinoza and, 9596
thinking/doubting and, 8688, 9192,
9598 (see also Skepticism)
unconscious structure and, 8586
Determinism, 162
Dialectics, 133
Dictatorships, 182
Diderot, Denis, 148
Difference and Repetition (Deleuze),
101102
Difference between the Democritean
and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature
in General (Marx), 161
Discourse on Method (Descartes), 42,
8183, 8688, 96
Doctrinal faiths. See Religion
Doubting. See Skepticism
Dreams
daydreams, 4547, 129
dreamwork and, 147
Freud and, 147
Kant and, 4547
Marx and, 147
representation systems and, 147
Dreams of a Visionary Explained by Dreams
of Metaphysics (Kant), 14, 4546
Drive (Trieb), 6, 215
surplus value and, 223228, 241251
Duchamp, Marcel, 113, 119
Darstellung (ideological
representations), 142152
Darwin, Charles, 3132
Daydreams, 4547, 129
Deleuze, Gilles, 101102, 112113
Democracy, 182184
Democritus, 161162
Derrida, Jacques, 48, 91, 232
Der Verlust der natrlichen
Selbstverstndlichkeit (Blankenburg),
9293
Descartes, Rene, 42
Amsterdam and, 134
cogito and, 8388, 9192, 96, 134
ego and, 56, 8188, 9192
God and, 9192
Hume and, 93
Kant and, 8188, 9192
Lvi-Strauss and, 8385
methodology of, 42, 8188, 9192, 96
representation systems and, 149
skepticism and, 134
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Page 354
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Index
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Page 355
355
Index
Evolution, 3132
Exchange. See Commodity
Existentialism, 105
Experience
aesthetic judgment and, 3738
singularity and, 100112
Externalization, 4849
Faith. See Religion
Fascism, 146147, 255256
Fetishism, 6, 196, 271, 208209, 298
Feudalism, 222, 255, 278
Feudal System Debate, 255
Feuerbach, Ludwig, 105
alienation theory and, 213214
anarchism and, 171
Left Hegelians and, 168169
religion and, 213
Feyerabend, Paul, 43
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 155
Fordism, 236, 286, 340n35
Formalism, 6061, 68
Foucault, Marxism, and History (Poster),
267
Foundations of Geometry (Hilbert),
6364
France, 152, 280
Freedom, 112116
Adorno and, 123125
antinomy and, 177178
bracketing and, 117120
communism and, 129130
community subordination and, 171
constructivism and, 129130
cross-generational issues and, 127128
Hegel and, 121
Kierkegaard and, 126
Marx and, 119
Nietzsche and, 122123
production process and, 128129
religion and, 120
theoretical, 120121
thing-in-itself and, 122
Frege, Gottlob, 60
French Revolution, 1415, 278
representation systems and, 142146
Saint-Simonism and, 279
universal suffrage and, 143144
Freud, Sigmund, 157158
consciousness and, 33
Copernican turn and, 3235
dreams and, 147
language and, 7374
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Page 356
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Index
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Page 357
357
Index
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Page 358
358
Index
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Page 359
359
Index
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Page 360
360
Index
Mathematics (cont.)
as basis of truth, 5657
constitutability and, 6263
formalism and, 6061, 68
geometry and, 3235, 5759, 6165
Gdel and, 6467
Hilbert and, 6364
Hume and, 5657, 60
intuitionism and, 6063
judgment and, 5565
Kant and, 5565
lingustic turn and, 6576
Menos paradox and, 6869
non-Euclidean geometry and, 5759
parallel postulate and, 5960, 6364
phonemes and, 7778
proof and, 5859, 6168
reductionism and, 56
set theory and, 57, 6062, 67
spatial expansion and, 5859
undecidability and, 6467
Mazzini, Giuseppe, 292
M-C-M formula, 910, 20, 268
associations and, 296297
Capital-Nation-State and, 265
circulation process and, 207208
commodity metamorphosis and, 190
credit and, 218219
industrial capital and, 235
linguistic approach and, 231
parallax and, 154156, 159160
surplus value and, 223
value form theory and, 186, 210
Mechanical determinism, 162
Meditations on the First Philosophy
(Descartes), 9192
Menos paradox, 6869
Mercantilism, 67, 153. See also
Economic issues
Capital-Nation-State and, 265283
drive and, 206
money and, 212, 216
surplus value and, 223228, 241251
Merchant capital
e-trade and, 266
globalism and, 262 (see also Globalism)
value form theory and, 234241
Meta-mathematical critique, 6465
Metamorphosis, 142
M-C-M formula and, 910, 20, 154156
Metaphysics
acceptance of, 4647
analytic judgment and, 188189
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Page 361
361
Index
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Page 362
362
Index
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Page 363
363
Index
Qua essence, 32
aesthetics, 133
associationism, 129
Capital-Nation-State and, 265283
German Idealism and, 141142
specter and, 172173
surplus value and, 223228, 241251
value form theory and, 185211
world money and, 226
Rawls, John, 129
Realism, 108109
Reason, 316n34. See also Kant,
Immanuel
Cartesian method and, 8188, 9192
cogito, 8388, 9192, 9598,
102103, 134
ego and, 8188, 9192 (see also Ego)
Husserl and, 8891
judgment and, 4453, 5580 (see also
Judgment)
Menos paradox and, 6869
pedagogy and, 6872, 75
rationalism, 4, 7
recollection and, 6869
speculation and, 5152
thinking/doubting and, 8688, 9192
(see also Skepticism)
unconscious structure and, 86
Reciprocity, 202203
Recollection, 6869
Redistribution, 13, 202
Reductionism, 56, 9294
Reflection, 24
judgment and, 187188
Kantian turn and, 4753
origin theories and, 200201
Reich, Wilhelm, 146147
Religion, 45, 70
abolishment of Christianity and,
331n5
alienation theory and, 137, 213214
capitalism and, 266
commodity and, 212
criticism of, 212
Descartes and, 9192
divinity and, 169
economic issues and, 221
as exhange, 185
freedom and, 116, 118, 120
Hegel and, 104, 168169, 189
as illusion, 212
Kant and, 115116
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Page 364
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Index
Saint-Simonism, 279
Sartre, JeanPaul, 120
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 74
linguistic approach and, 229231
transcendentalism and, 77, 7980
unconscious structure and, 86
Says Law of Market, 290
Schizophrenia, 9293
Schmitt, Carl, 148, 271, 301
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 30
Schumpeter, Joseph Alois, 239, 248
Science
Copernican turn and, 2935
Kantian turn and, 3544
nature/freedom and, 112130
Self-alienation, 136137, 169, 213214
Set theory, 57, 6062, 67
Shakespeare, William, 212213
Skepticism. See also Judgment
Cartesian method and, 8688, 9192
cogito and, 9596
Descartes and, 9598, 134
Heidegger and, 9798
Hume and, 94
Husserl and, 95
Kant and, 94 (see also Kant, Immanuel)
Marx and, 98, 134 (see also Marx, Karl)
ontology and, 9798
reductionism and, 9394
Socrates and, 9495, 9899
Spinoza and, 9596
Wittgenstein and, 6571, 74, 8283
Smith, Adam, 4, 139, 236
capitalism and, 154, 200
colonialism and, 258259
ethics and, 216217
exchange origin and, 225226
labor theory and, 215216
lingusitic approach and, 229
M-C-M formula and, 154156
money origins and, 200201
profit-theft and, 168
surplus value and, 227228
transformation problem and,
243244
value form theory and, 193, 204
Social capital, 292293
Social democracy, 16
Socialism, 10, 16
aesthetics and, 345n22
economic issues and, 152161
Marx and, 1617
profit-theft and, 168
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Page 365
365
Index
Throwness (Geworfenheit), 30
Total social capital, 292293
Toulmin, Stephen, 73
Trade cycle, 247251
Transcendentalism, 1
apperception and, 7680
Blankenburg and, 9293
bracketing and, 117120, 160161
Cartesian method and, 8188, 9192
Copernican turn and, 2935
ego and, 8188, 9192 (see also Ego)
ex post facto observation and, 191193
freedom and, 112130
Husserl and, 8891
Kantian ethics and, 3132, 112130
language structure and, 7680
pedagogy and, 6872, 75
skepticism and, 9698 (see also
Skepticism)
thing-in-itself and, 4453
thinking/doubting and, 8688
transformation problem and, 243244
transversalism and, 92100
value form theory and, 185211
Transcritique
aesthestics and, 3738
Capital-Nation-State and, 1316,
265283
circulation and, 8 (see also Circulation
process)
communism and, 283306
economic issues and, 614, 1725
ego and, 56 (see also Ego)
exchange and, 1213 (see also
Commodity)
German Idealism and, 141142
historical materialism and, 48, 133,
139140, 163, 322n7
Kantian turn and, 3544 (see also
Kant, Immanuel)
language and, 6580
LETS and, 2325, 298301
literary criticism and, 3544
Marx and, 1517, 161165 (see also
Marx, Karl)
mathematics and, 6575
nature/freedom and, 112130
pronounced parallax and, 24
reflection and, 14, 4753, 187188,
200201
representation systems and, 142152
singularity and, 100112
sociality and, 100112
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Index
Transcritique (cont.)
subjectivism and, 8192 (see also
Subjectivism)
transversalism and, 92100
Transformation problem, 243244
Treatise of Human Nature, A (Hume), 36
Tristes tropiques (Lvi-Strauss), 8485
Truth
Cartesian method and, 8188, 9192
enlightenment and, 100103
God and, 9192
Husserl and, 8891
Lvi-Strauss and, 8485
pedagogy and, 6869
reductionism and, 56
skepticism and, 6571, 74, 8283,
8688, 9192
thinking/doubting and, 9192
Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques, 229
Undecidability, 6467
United States, 304305
Universality, 38, 4243
community and, 12, 100112
Deleuze and, 101102
freedom and, 112130
individuality and, 100112
proper names and, 109112
singularity and, 100112
suffrage and, 143144, 183
understanding and, 102103
Uno, Kozo, 11, 250, 256
Utopians, 176177
Vaihinger, Hans, 3637
Valry, Paul, 232233
Value form theory, 711
alienation theory and, 192
analytic judgment and, 188189
antinomy and, 189190
Bailey and, 193196
capitals drive and, 200211
equivalency and, 191193, 197
exchange and, 198200
expanded form and, 198
ex post facto observation and, 191193,
217218, 222
fictitious institution and, 197198
illusion and, 219220
Kant and, 187188
labor theory and, 215216
language and, 197200, 228234
LETS and, 2325, 298301