Kōjin Karatani (柄谷 行人 Karatani Kōjin, born August 6, 1941, Amagasaki) is a Japanese philosopher and literary critic.
Karatani was educated at University of Tokyo, where he received a BA in economics and an MA in English literature. The Gunzō Literary Prize, which he received at the age of 27 for an essay on Natsume Sōseki, was his first critical acclaim as a literary critic. While teaching at Hosei University, Tokyo, he wrote extensively about modernity and postmodernity with a particular focus on language, number, and money, concepts that form the subtitle of one of his central books: Architecture as Metaphor.
In 1975, he was invited to Yale University to teach Japanese literature as a visiting professor, where he met Paul de Man and Fredric Jameson and began to work on formalism. Starting from a study of Natsume Sōseki, the variety of the subjects examined by Karatani became so wide that he earned the nickname The Thinking Machine.
Karatani collaborated with novelist Kenji Nakagami, to whom he introduced the works of Faulkner. With Nakagami, he published Kobayashi Hideo o koete (Overcoming Kobayashi Hideo). The title is an ironic reference to “Kindai no chokoku” (Overcoming Modernity), a symposium held in the summer of 1942 at Kyoto Imperial University (now Kyoto University) at which Hideo Kobayashi (whom Karatani and Nakagami did not hold in great esteem) was a participant.
He was also a regular member of ANY, the international architects' conference that was held annually for the last decade of the 20th century and that also published an architectural/philosophical series with Rizzoli under the general heading of Anyone.
Since 1990, Karatani has been regularly teaching at Columbia University as a visiting professor.
Karatani founded the New Associationist Movement (NAM) in Japan in the summer of 2000. NAM was conceived as a counter–capitalist/nation-state association, inspired by the experiment of LETS (Local Exchange Trading Systems, based on non-marketed currency). He was also the co-editor, with Akira Asada, of the Japanese quarterly journal, Hihyōkūkan (Critical Space), until it ended in 2002.
In 2006, Karatani retired from the chair of the International Center for Human Sciences at Kinki University, Osaka, where he had been teaching.
What can I add? Karatani-esque?!? Really liked the essay on Takeda Taijun and Sakaguchi Ango. Say what he will about the death of the author as transcendental locus of meaning--Karatani has a gift for distilling relevant bio-detail and context when he introduces dense texts and potentially turgid ideas. Ex: Takeda's particular interpretation of Buddhism, his disposition to slant given his family background, education, in context of his choice of preferred texts. Since this chapter came on the heels of a discussion that rather levelled Zen buddhism and explored the common intellectual potentials of (monotheisms both) Christianity and True Land Buddhism in Tokugawa, it was well sequenced. Also, though sometimes it seems Karatani has not actually read the books he is talking about, his close readings of both Murakami-H and Oe were intricate, and I could see how they connected lit analysis to KK's mania for singularity and history as multiple asymmetries. Essays are more polished and less jumpy-around than _Origins_, but I suppose one has thirty years of refining and experience to thank for that, as well.
Çok çok başarılı. Yazarın ilk okuduğum kitabı olsa idi ikinci kitabını okumak istemeyebilirdim Japon kültürüne yabancı olduğum için. İkinci kitabı olduğu için diğer kitapları da ilgimi çekebilir. Kütüphaneden okuduğum kitap idi.
Tarihin olay olarak değik olgu olarak belirli bir döngüyle tekrar ettiği fikrini Japonya tarihi üzerinden anlatılıyor. Bu fikri ve Japonya tarihi üzerine merakı olanlara tavsiye ederim.