Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility

Originally published in 1974, Kojin Karatani’s <i>Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility</i> has been among his most enduring and pioneering works in critical theory. Written at a time when the political sequences of the New Left had collapsed into crisis and violence, with widespread political exhaustion for the competing sectarian visions of Marxism from 1968, Karatani’s <i>Marx</i> laid the groundwork for a new reading, unfamiliar to the existing Marxist discourse in Japan at the time.<br><br>Karatani’s <i>Marx</i> takes on insights from semiotics, deconstruction, and the reading of Marx as a literary thinker, treating <i>Capital</i> as an intervention in philosophy that could be read as itself a theory of signs. <i>Marx</i> is unique in this sense, not only because of its importance in post-’68 Japanese thought, but also because the heterodox reading of Marx that Karatani debuts in this text, centred on his theory of the value-form, will go on to form the basis of his globally influential work.