Karatani (Kojin) Archives - Public Seminar

Uncategorized

Africa contra Hegel

September 24, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

There was once a fantasy, shared by left and right alike, that the states of the under-developed world could come, whether by leaps or by steps, to approximate those of the so-called developed world, as if they represented some kind of historical destiny. This idea belongs to what one might ...

Uncategorized

Otaku Philosophy

On Hiroki Azuma

September 23, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

Tokyo was a real metropolis centuries before any European city got much beyond the small town stage. By the 80s it had a heavy overlay of pervasive media culture, of a kind that would not happen anywhere else for decades. The contemporary media-urban landscape was born here. Not speaking the ...

History

Marx and Nature

January 21, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

"What Engels called “the monopolization of the earth by a few” has reached absurdist proportions as I was writing this. (60) It would appear that the 1% now own more than half the wealth of the planet. It is the greatest concentration of wealth ever, and yet it corresponds to ...

Uncategorized

All Power to the {Historical} Imagination!

January 4, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

Kojin Karatani’s The Structure of World History (Duke University Press, 2014) is an astonishing work of synthetic historical theory. Karatani views world history as a history of modes of exchange. He rejects the classical Marxist view of history though as modes of production, to which political, religious and cultural levels ...

All Power to the {Historical} Imagination!

Theory & Practice

Four Cheers for Vulgar Marxism!!!!

April 25, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

If you want to show that your version of Marxism is better than somebody else’s, the quickest way to do so is to call the other version vulgar. One’s own version is nuanced, sophisticated, subtle, erudite, philosophically rich – all the things the vulgar is not. Or so it has ...

Karatani (Kojin)

Africa contra Hegel

Otaku Philosophy

On Hiroki Azuma

Marx and Nature

All Power to the {Historical} Imagination!

Four Cheers for Vulgar Marxism!!!!

Newsletter

Connect With Us