THE PARALLAX VIEW: TOWARDS A NEW READING OF KANT

Cogito is thus not a substantial entity, but a pure structural function, an empty place—as such, it can only emerge in the interstices of substantial communal systems

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(Painting: The Mute Orpheus, Giorgio de Chirico, 1971)

When Jean Laplanche elaborates the impasses of the Freudian topic of seduction, he effectively reproduces the precise structure of a Kantian antinomy. On one hand, there is the brutal empirical realism of parental seduction: the ultimate cause of later traumas and pathologies is that children were effectively seduced and molested by adults. On the other hand, there is the (in)famous reduction of the seduction scene to the patient’s fantasy. As Laplanche points out, the ultimate irony is that the dismissal of seduction as fantasy passes today for the “realistic” stance, while those who insist on the reality of seduction end up advocating all kinds of molestations, up to satanic rites and extraterrestrial harassments. Laplanche’s solution is precisely the transcendental one: while “seduction” cannot be reduced merely to the subject’s fantasy, and does refer to a traumatic encounter with the Other’s “enigmatic message,” bearing witness to the Other’s unconscious, it also cannot be reduced to an event in the reality of the actual interaction between child and their adults. Seduction is, rather, a kind of transcendental structure—the minimal a priori formal constellation of the child confronted with the impenetrable acts of the Other, who bears witness to the Other’s unconscious. We are never dealing here with simple “facts,” but always with facts located in the space of indeterminacy between “too soon” and “too late”: the child is originally helpless, thrown into the world unable to take care of itself—i.e., their survival skills develop too late; at the same time, the encounter with the sexualized Other always, by structural necessity, comes “too soon,” as an unexpected shock that cannot ever be properly symbolized or translated into the universe of meaning.¹ The fact of seduction is thus again that of the Kantian transcendental X—a structurally necessary transcendental illusion.image.jpg

In his formidable Transcritique: On Kant and Marx,² Kojin Karatani endeavors to assert the critical potential of such an in-between stance, which he calls the “parallax view”: when faced with an antinomic position in the precise Kantian sense, one should renounce all attempts to reduce one aspect to the other (or even more, to enact a kind of “dialectical synthesis” of the opposites). On the contrary, one should assert antinomy as irreducible, and conceive the point of radical critique not as a certain determinate position opposed to another position, but the irreducible gap between the positions themselves—the purely structural interstice between them. This is the way one should read the Kantian notion of the Ding an sich (the Thing-in-itself, beyond phenomena): this Thing is not simply a transcendental entity beyond our grasp, but something discernible only via the irreducibly antinomic character of our experience of reality. (And, as René Girard pointed out, is the first full assertion of the ethical parallax not the Book of Job, in which two perspectives are confronted—the divine order of the world and Job’s complaint—and neither is the “truthful” one? The truth resides in their very gap, in the shift of perspective.)

Consider Kant’s confrontation with the epistemological antinomy that characterized his epoch: empiricism versus rationalism. Kant’s solution is neither to choose one of the terms nor to enact a higher “synthesis” that would “sublate” the two as partial moments of a global truth (and, of course, nor does he withdraw to pure skepticism). The stake of his “transcendental turn” is precisely to avoid the need to formulate one’s own “positive” solution. What Kant does is change the very terms of the debate; his solution—the transcendental turn—is unique in that it, first, rejects any ontological closure: it recognizes a fundamental and irreducible limitation (”finitude”) of the human condition, which is why the two poles—rational and sensual, active and passive—cannot ever be fully mediated or reconciled. The “synthesis” of these two dimensions (i.e., the fact that our Reason seems to fit the structure of external reality that affects us) always relies on a certain salto mortale or “leap of faith.” Far from designating a “synthesis” of the two dimensions, the Kantian “transcendental” stands for their irreducible gap as such: the “transcendental” points to something in this gap—a new dimension that cannot be reduced to any of the two positive terms between which the gap is gaping.

Perhaps the best way to describe the Kantian break toward this new dimension is by means of the changed status of the notion of the “inhuman.” Kant introduced a key distinction between negative and indefinite judgment: the positive judgment “the soul is mortal” can be negated in two ways, when a predicate is denied to the subject (”the soul is not mortal”), and when a non-predicate is affirmed (”the soul is non-mortal”)—the difference is exactly the same as the one known to every reader of Stephen King between “he is not dead” and “he is undead.” The indefinite judgment opens up a third domain that undermines the underlying distinction: the “undead” are neither alive nor dead, they are precisely the monstrous “living dead.”³ The same goes for “inhuman”: “he is not human” is not the same as “he is inhuman”—”he is not human” simply means he is external to humanity, animal or divine, while “he is inhuman” means something thoroughly different, namely the fact that he is neither strictly human nor strictly inhuman, but marked by a terrifying excess which, although it negates what we understand as “humanity,” is inherent to being human. Perhaps one should risk the hypothesis that this is what changes with the Kantian revolution: in the pre-Kantian universe, humans were simply humans—beings of reason, fighting the excesses of animal lusts and divine madness—while only with Kant and German Idealism does the excess to be fought become absolutely immanent, the very core of subjectivity itself (which is why, in German Idealism, the metaphor for the core of subjectivity is Night, “Night of the World,” in contrast to the Enlightenment notion of the Light of Reason fighting the darkness around). So when, in the pre-Kantian universe, a hero goes mad, it means he is deprived of his humanity, i.e., animal passions or divine madness have taken over, while with Kant, madness signals the unconstrained explosion of the very core of a human being.

Which, then, is this new dimension that emerges in the gap itself? It is that of the transcendental “I” itself, of its “spontaneity”: the ultimate parallax, the third space between phenomena and noumenon itself, is the subject’s freedom/spontaneity, which—although, of course, it is not the property of a phenomenal entity, so it cannot be dismissed as a false appearance concealing the noumenal fact that we are totally caught in an inaccessible necessity—is also not simply noumenal. In a mysterious subchapter of his Critique of Practical Reason entitled “Of the Wise Adaptation of Man’s Cognitive Faculties to His Practical Vocation,” Kant endeavors to answer the question of what would happen if we were to gain access to the noumenal domain, to the Ding an sich:

“... instead of the conflict which now the moral disposition has to wage with inclinations and in which, after some defeats, moral strength of mind may be gradually won, God and eternity in their awful majesty would stand unceasingly before our eyes. [...] Thus most actions conforming to the law would be done from fear, few would be done from hope, none from duty. The moral worth of actions, on which alone the worth of the person and even of the world depends in the eyes of supreme wisdom, would not exist at all. The conduct of man, so long as his nature remained as it is now, would be changed into mere mechanism, where, as in a puppet show, everything would gesticulate well but no life would be found in the figures.”⁴

In short, direct access to the noumenal domain would deprive us of the very “spontaneity” which forms the kernel of transcendental freedom; it would turn us into lifeless automata, or, to put it in today’s terms, into “thinking machines.” The implication of this passage is much more radical and paradoxical than it may appear. If we discard its inconsistency (how could fear and lifeless gesticulation coexist?), the conclusion it imposes is that, at the level of phenomena as well as at the noumenal level, we—humans—are a “mere mechanism” with no autonomy and freedom; as phenomena, we are not free—we are part of nature, a “mere mechanism,” totally subject to causal links, part of the nexus of causes and effects—and as noumena, we again are not free, but reduced to a “mere mechanism.” (Is what Kant describes as a person who directly knows the noumenal domain not strictly homologous to the utilitarian subject whose acts are fully determined by the calculus of pleasures and pains?) Our freedom persists only in the space IN BETWEEN the phenomenal and the noumenal. It is not that Kant merely limited causality to the phenomenal domain to be able to assert that, at the noumenal level, we are free autonomous agents; we are only free insofar as our horizon is that of the phenomenal, insofar as the noumenal domain remains inaccessible to us. Is the way out of this predicament to assert that we are free insofar as we ARE noumenally autonomous, BUT our cognitive perspective remains constrained to the phenomenal level? In this case, we are “really free” at the noumenal level, but our freedom would be meaningless if we were also to have cognitive insight into the noumenal domain, since that insight would always determine our choices—who WOULD choose evil, when confronted with the fact that the price of doing evil will be divine punishment? However, does this imagined case not provide us with the only consequent answer to the question “what would a truly free act be,” a free act for a noumenal entity, an act of true noumenal freedom? It would be to KNOW all the inexorable, horrible consequences of choosing evil, and nonetheless to choose it. This would be a truly “non-pathological” act—an act in which one acts with no regard for one’s pathological interests. Kant’s own formulations are misleading here, since he often identifies the transcendental subject with the noumenal “I,” whose phenomenal appearance is the empirical “person,” thus shirking his radical insight into how the transcendental subject is a pure formal-structural function beyond the opposition of noumenal and phenomenal.

Crucial is thus the shift of the place of freedom from the noumenal beyond to the gap between phenomenal and noumenal; and this brings us to the complex relationship between Kant and Hegel. Is this shift not precisely the shift from Kant to Hegel, from the tension between immanence and transcendence to the minimal difference/gap in immanence itself? Hegel is thus not external to Kant: the problem with Kant was that he produced the shift but was not able, for structural reasons, to formulate it explicitly—he “knew” that the place of freedom is effectively not noumenal, but the gap between phenomenal and noumenal, but could not put it so explicitly, since, if he were to do so, his transcendental edifice would have collapsed. However, WITHOUT this implicit “knowledge,” there would also have been no transcendental dimension, so one is forced to conclude that, far from being a stable consistent position, the dimension of the Kantian “transcendental” can only sustain itself in a fragile balance between the said and the unsaid, through producing something the full consequences of which we refuse to articulate or “posit as such.” (The same goes, say, for the fact that, in the Kantian dialectic of the Sublime, there is no positive Beyond whose phenomenal representation fails: there is nothing “beyond”—the “Beyond” is only the void of the impossibility/failure of its own representation; or, as Hegel put it at the end of the chapter on consciousness in his Phenomenology of Spirit, beyond the veil of the phenomena, consciousness only finds what it itself has put there. Again, Kant “knew it” without being able to consistently formulate it.)

According to Karatani, Marx, in his “critique of political economy,” when faced with the opposition of “classical” political economy (Ricardo and his labor-theory of value—the counterpart to philosophical rationalism) and the neo-classic reduction of value to a purely relational entity without substance (Bailey—the counterpart to philosophical empiricism), accomplished exactly the same breakthrough toward the “parallax” view: he treated this opposition as a Kantian antinomy, i.e., value has to originate both outside circulation, in production, AND in circulation. Post-Marx “Marxism”—in both its versions, Social Democratic and Communist—lost this “parallax” perspective and regressed into the unilateral elevation of production as the site of truth against the “illusory” sphere of exchange and consumption. As he emphasizes, even the most sophisticated theories of reification and commodity fetishism—from the young Lukács through Adorno up to Fredric Jameson—fall into this trap: the way they account for the lack of revolutionary movement is that the consciousness of workers is obfuscated by the seductions of consumerist society and/or the manipulation of the ideological forces of cultural hegemony, which is why the focus of the critical work should shift to “cultural criticism” (the so-called “cultural turn”)—the disclosure of ideological (or libidinal—it is here that originates the key role of psychoanalysis in Western Marxism) mechanisms that keep workers under the spell of bourgeois ideology. In a close reading of Marx’s analysis of the commodity form, Karatani grounds the insurmountable persistence of the parallax gap in the “salto mortale” that a product must accomplish to assert itself as a commodity:

“The price [of iron expressed in gold], while on the one hand indicating the amount of labour-time contained in the iron, namely its value, at the same time signifies the pious wish to convert the iron into gold—that is, to give the labour-time contained in the iron the form of universal social labour-time. If this transformation fails to take place, then the ton of iron ceases to be not only a commodity but also a product; since it is a commodity only because it is not a use-value for its owner—that is to say, his labour is only really labour if it is useful labour for others, and it is useful for him only if it is abstract general labour. It is therefore the task of the iron or its owner to find that location in the world of commodities where iron attracts gold. But if the sale actually takes place, as we assume in this analysis of simple circulation, then this difficulty, the salto mortale of the commodity, is surmounted. As a result of this alienation—that is, its transfer from the person for whom it is a non-use-value to the person for whom it is a use-value—the ton of iron proves to be in fact a use-value and its price is simultaneously realized, and merely imaginary gold is converted into real gold.”⁵

This jump, by means of which a commodity is sold and thus effectively constituted as a commodity, is not the result of an immanent self-development of (the concept of) Value but a “salto mortale” comparable to a Kierkegaardian leap of faith—a temporary, fragile “synthesis” between use-value and exchange-value, comparable to the Kantian synthesis between sensitivity and understanding: in both cases, the two irreducibly external levels are brought together. For this precise reason, Marx abandoned his original project (discernible in the Grundrisse manuscripts) of “deducing,” in a Hegelian way, the split between exchange-value and use-value from the very concept of Value: in Capital, the split between these two dimensions, the “dual character of a merchandise,” is the starting point. The synthesis has to rely on an irreducibly external element, as in Kant, where being is not a predicate (i.e., cannot be reduced to a conceptual predicate of an entity), or as in Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity, where the reference of a name to an object cannot be grounded in the content of that name, in the properties it designates.

The very tension between production and circulation is thus again that of parallax: yes, value is created in the production process; however, it is created there only potentially, since it is only actualized as value when the produced commodity is sold and the circle M-C-M’ is completed. Crucial is this temporal GAP between the production of value and its actualization: even if value is produced in production, without the successful completion of the process of circulation, there literally is no value—the temporality here is that of the futur antérieur, i.e., value “is” not immediately, it only “will have been”; it is retroactively actualized, performatively enacted. In production, value is generated “in itself,” while only through the completed circulation process does it become “for itself.” This is how Karatani resolves the Kantian antinomy of value, which is AND is not generated in the process of production: it is generated there only “in itself.” And it is because of this gap between in-itself and for-itself that capitalism needs formal democracy and equality:

“What precisely distinguishes capital from the master-slave relation is that the worker confronts him as consumer and possessor of exchange values, and that in the form of the possessor of money, in the form of money, he becomes a simple center of circulation—one of its infinitely many centers, in which his specificity as worker is extinguished.”⁶

What this means is that, in order to complete the circle of its reproduction, capital has to pass through this critical point at which the roles are inverted: surplus value is realized only by workers in totality buying back what they produce. This feature provides the key leverage from which to oppose the rule of capital today: is it not natural that the proletarians should focus their attack on that unique point at which they approach capital from the position of buyer and, consequently, at which it is capital which is forced to court them? “/…/ if workers can become subjects at all, it is only as consumers.”⁷ It is perhaps the ultimate case of the parallax situation: the positions of worker-producer and consumer should be sustained as irreducible in their divergence, without privileging one as the “deeper truth” of the other. (Incidentally, did not the planned economy of State Socialism pay a terrible price for privileging production at the expense of consumption precisely by failing to provide consumers with needed goods, by producing products which nobody needed or wanted?) One should therefore thoroughly reject the (proto-Fascist, if anything) opposition of the financial-speculative profiteering capital to the “substantial” economy of capitalists engaged in productive activity: in capitalism, the production process is only a detour in the speculative process of money engendering more money—i.e., the profiteering logic is ultimately also what sustains the incessant drive to revolutionize and expand production:

“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.”⁸

Consequently, there are four basic positions apropos money: (1) the mercantilist one—a direct naïve fetishist belief in money as a “special thing”; (2) the “classical bourgeois political economy,” embodied in Ricardo, which dismissed money-fetishism as mere illusion and conceived money as a mere sign of the quantity of socially useful labor—value here was inherent to a commodity; (3) the “neoclassical” school, which rejected the labor theory of value and also any “substantial” notion of value: for it, the price of a commodity is simply the result of the interplay of supply and demand, i.e., of the commodity’s usefulness with regard to other commodities. Karatani is right to emphasize how, paradoxically, Marx broke out of the confines of the “classical” Ricardo labor-theory of value through his reading of Bailey, the first “vulgar” economist to emphasize the purely relational status of value: value is not inherent to a commodity; it expresses the way this commodity relates to all other commodities. Bailey thus paved the way toward Marx’s structural-formal approach, which insists on the gap between an object and the structural place it occupies: in the same way that a king is a king not because of inherent properties, but because people treat him as one (Marx’s own example), a commodity is money because it occupies the formal place of the general equivalent of all commodities—not because, say, gold is “naturally” money. It is crucial to note how both mercantilists and their Ricardian critics remain “substantialist”: Ricardo was, of course, aware the object which serves as money is not “naturally” money—he laughed at the naïve superstition of money and dismissed mercantilists as primitive believers in magic properties; but in reducing money to a secondary external sign of the value inherent to a commodity, he nonetheless again naturalized value, conceiving it as a direct “substantial” property of a commodity. It is this illusion that opened the way to the naïve early socialist and Proudhonian practical proposal to overcome the money fetishism by introducing direct “labor money,” which would merely designate the amount each individual contributed to social labor.

However, is the ultimate Marxian parallax not the one between economy and politics, between the “critique of political economy” with its logic of commodities and the political struggle with its logic of antagonism? Both logics are “transcendental,” not merely ontico-empirical, and both are irreducible to each other. Of course, they both point toward each other (class struggle is inscribed into the very heart of economy, yet it has to remain absent, non-thematized—recall how the manuscript of Capital III abruptly ends with it; and class struggle is ultimately “about” economic power relations), but this very mutual implication is twisted so that it prevents any direct contact (any direct translation of political struggle into a mere mirroring of economic “interests” is doomed to fail, as is any reduction of the sphere of economic production to a secondary “reified” sedimentation of an underlying founding political process).

This “pure politics” of Badiou, Rancière, and Balibar, more Jacobin than Marxist, shares with its great opponent—the Anglo-Saxon Cultural Studies and their focus on struggles for recognition—the degradation of the sphere of economy. That is, all the new French (or French-oriented) theories of the Political, from Balibar through Rancière and Badiou to Laclau and Mouffe, aim at—put in traditional philosophical terms—the reduction of the sphere of economy (of material production) to an “ontic” sphere deprived of “ontological” dignity. Within this horizon, there is simply no place for the Marxian “critique of political economy”: the structure of the universe of commodities and capital in Marx’s Capital is NOT just that of a limited empirical sphere, but a kind of socio-transcendental a priori, the matrix which generates the totality of social and political relations. The relationship between economy and politics is ultimately that of the well-known visual paradox of the “two faces or a vase”: one either sees the two faces or a vase, never both—one has to make a choice. Similarly, one either focuses on the political, and the domain of economy is reduced to the empirical “servicing of goods,” or one focuses on economy, and politics is reduced to a theater of appearances, a passing phenomenon which will disappear with the advent of the developed Communist (or technocratic) society, in which, as Engels already put it, the “administration of people” will vanish in the “administration of things.”

The “political” critique of Marxism (the claim that, when one reduces politics to a “formal” expression of an underlying “objective” socio-economic process, one loses the openness and contingency constitutive of the political field proper) should be supplemented by its obverse: the field of economy is IN ITS VERY FORM irreducible to politics—this level of the FORM of economy (of economy as the determining FORM of the social) is what French “political post-Marxists” miss when they reduce economy to one of the positive social spheres.

The basic idea of the parallax view is that bracketing itself produces its object—”democracy” as a form emerges only when one brackets the texture of economic relations as well as the inherent logic of the political state apparatus: both must be abstracted from, and people who are effectively embedded in economic processes and subjected to state apparatuses must be reduced to abstract units. The same goes for the “logic of domination,” of the way people are controlled/manipulated by apparatuses of subjection: to clearly discern these mechanisms of power, one must abstract not only from the democratic imaginary (as Foucault does in his analyses of the micro-physics of power, and as Lacan does in his analysis of power in Seminar XVIII), but also from the process of economic (re)production. Finally, the specific sphere of economic (re)production only emerges if one methodologically brackets the concrete existence of state and political ideology—no wonder critics of Marx complained that Marx’s “critique of political economy” lacks a theory of power and state. Of course, the trap to be avoided here is precisely the naïve idea that one should keep in view the social totality, the parts of which are democratic ideology, the exercise of power, and the process of economic (re)production: if one tries to keep in view all, one ends up seeing nothing—the contours disappear. This bracketing is not only epistemological; it concerns what Marx called “real abstraction”: the abstraction from power and economic relations is inscribed into the very actuality of the democratic process, etc.

More radically, one should assert the parallax status of philosophy itself. From its very beginnings (with the Ionian pre-Socratics), philosophy emerged in the interstices of substantial social communities, as the thought of those caught in a “parallax” position, unable fully to identify with any of the positive social identities. This is what is missing in Heidegger’s account—how, from his beloved pre-Socratics onward, philosophizing involved an “impossible” position displaced with regard to any communal identity, be it “economy” as household organization or polis. Like exchange according to Marx, philosophy emerges in the interstices BETWEEN different communities, in the fragile space of exchange and circulation between them—a space lacking any positive identity. Is this not especially clear in the case of Descartes? The grounding experience of his position of universal doubt is precisely a “multicultural” experience of how one’s own tradition is no better than what appear to us as the “eccentric” traditions of others:

“[...] I had been taught, even in my College days, that there is nothing imaginable so strange or so little credible that it has not been maintained by one philosopher or another, and I further recognized in the course of my travels that all those whose sentiments are very contrary to ours are yet not necessarily barbarians or savages, but may be possessed of reason in as great or even a greater degree than ourselves. I also considered how very different the self-same man, identical in mind and spirit, may become, according as he is brought up from childhood amongst the French or Germans, or has passed his whole life amongst Chinese or cannibals. I likewise noticed how even in the fashions of one’s clothing the same thing that pleased us ten years ago, and which will perhaps please us once again before ten years are passed, seems at the present time extravagant and ridiculous. I thus concluded that it is much more custom and example that persuade us than any certain knowledge, and yet in spite of this the voice of the majority does not afford a proof of any value in truths a little difficult to discover, because such truths are much more likely to have been discovered by one man than by a nation. I could not, however, put my finger on a single person whose opinions seemed preferable to those of others, and I found that I was, so to speak, constrained myself to undertake the direction of my procedure.”⁹

Cogito is thus not a substantial entity, but a pure structural function—an empty place. As such, it can only emerge in the interstices of substantial communal systems. The link between the emergence of cogito and the disintegration and loss of substantial communal identities is thus inherent, and this holds even more for Spinoza than for Descartes: although Spinoza criticized the Cartesian cogito, he criticized it as a positive ontological entity—but he implicitly fully endorsed it as the “position of enunciation,” the one which speaks from radical self-doubt, since, even more than Descartes, Spinoza spoke from the interstice of social spaces, neither as a Jew nor as a Christian.

It would be easy to counter here that this Cartesian multiculturalist opening and relativizing one’s own position is just a first step, the abandoning of inherited opinions, which should lead us to acquire absolutely certain philosophical knowledge—the abandoning of the false, shaky home in order to reach our true home. Did not Hegel himself compare Descartes’ discovery of the cogito to a sailor who, after long drifting around the sea, finally catches sight of firm ground? Is Cartesian homelessness, then, just a deceitful strategic move? Are we not dealing here with a Hegelian “negation of negation,” the Aufhebung of the false traditional home in the finally discovered conceptual true home? Was Heidegger, then, not justified in approvingly quoting Novalis’ description of philosophy as longing for the true lost home? Two things should be added here. First, Kant himself is truly unique in this topic: in his transcendental philosophy, homelessness remains irreducible; we remain forever split, condemned to a fragile position between two dimensions and to a “leap of faith” without guarantee. Secondly, are things really so clear with Hegel? Is it not that, for Hegel, this new “home” is in a way homelessness itself—the very open movement of negativity?

Along these lines of the constitutive “homelessness” of philosophy, one should actualize Kant’s idea of the cosmopolitan “world-civil-society /Weltbürgergesellschaft/,” which is not simply an expansion of the citizenship of a nation-state to the citizenship of a global trans-national State; it involves a shift from the principle of identification with one’s “organic” ethnic substance actualized in a particular tradition, to a radically different principle of identification. Karatani refers here to Deleuze’s notion of universal singularity as opposed to the triad of individuality-particularity-generality; this opposition is the opposition between Kant and Hegel. For Hegel, “world-civil-society” is an abstract notion without substantial content, lacking the mediation of the particular and thus the force of full actuality—i.e., it involves an abstract identification which does not grasp the subject substantially; the only way for an individual to effectively participate in universal humanity is therefore via full identification with a particular nation-state—I am “human” only as a German, Englishman, etc. For Kant, on the contrary, “world-civil-society” designates the paradox of universal singularity: a singular subject who, in a kind of short-circuit, bypassing the mediation of the particular, directly participates in the Universal. This identification with the Universal is not the identification with an encompassing global Substance (”humanity”), but with a universal ethico-political principle—a universal religious collective, a scientific collective, a global revolutionary organization—all of which are in principle accessible to everyone. As Karatani points out, this is what Kant means, in the famous passage of his “What is Enlightenment?”, by “public” as opposed to “private”: “private” is not the individual as opposed to one’s communal ties, but the very communal-institutional order of one’s particular identification, while “public” is the trans-national universality of the exercise of one’s Reason. The paradox is that one participates in the universal dimension of the “public” sphere precisely as a singular individual extracted from or even opposed to one’s substantial communal identification—one is truly universal only as radically singular, in the interstices of communal identities.

1. See Jean Laplanche, New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1989.

2. See Kojin Karatani, Transcritique. On Kant and Marx, Cambridge (Ma): MIT Press 2003.

3. For a closer elaboration of this distinction, see Chapter 3 of Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying With the Negative, Durham: Duke University Press 1993.

4. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, New York: Macmillan 1956, p. 152-153.

5. Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,” in Collected Works, vol. 29, New York: International Publishers 1976, p. 390.

6. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1993, p. 420-421.

7. Karatani, op.cit., p. 290.

8. Karatani, op.cit., p. 241.

9. Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method, South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press 1994, p. 33.