Kojin Karatani wrote the essays in "History and Repetition"
during a time of radical historical change, triggered by the
collapse of the Cold War and the death of the Showa emperor in
1989. Reading Karl Marx in an original way, Karatani developed a
theory of history based on the repetitive cycle of crises attending
the expansion and transformation of capital. His work led to a
rigorous analysis of political, economic, and literary forms of
representation that recast historical events as a series of
repeated forms forged in the transitional moments of global
capitalism.
"History and Repetition" cemented Karatani's reputation as one
of Japan's premier thinkers, capable of traversing the fields of
philosophy, political economy, history, and literature in his work.
The first complete translation of "History and Repetition" into
English, undertaken with the cooperation of Karatani himself, this
volume opens with his innovative reading of "The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," tracing Marx's early theoretical
formulation of the state. Karatani follows with a study of violent
crises as they recur after major transitions of power, developing
his theory of historical repetition and introducing a
groundbreaking interpretation of fascism (in both Europe and Japan)
as the spectral return of the absolutist monarch in the midst of a
crisis of representative democracy.
For Karatani, fascism represents the most violent
materialization of the repetitive mechanism of history. Yet he also
seeks out singularities that operate outside the brutal
inevitability of historical repetition, whether represented in
literature or, more precisely, in the process of literature's
demise. Closely reading the works of Oe Kenzaburo, Mishima Yukio,
Nakagami Kenji, and Murakami Haruki, Karatani compares the
recurrent and universal with the singular and unrepeatable, while
advancing a compelling theory of the decline of modern literature.
Merging theoretical arguments with a concrete analysis of cultural
and intellectual history, Karatani's essays encapsulate a
brilliant, multidisciplinary perspective on world history.
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