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Note on the Translation

Throughout this volume, Japanese language is transliterated according to the modified Hepburn system. Karatani’s original text, like the bulk of Marxist theoretical writing in Japanese until recently, has only a very limited reference apparatus, with no bibliography, and no specific citations. For this English-language edition, all citations in the text have been sourced to original texts, or to their major English-language translations.

All texts of Marx and Engels have been referred to the editions of record: the Marx-Engels Collected Works (Moscow, London, New York: Progress Publishers, Lawrence & Wishart, and International Publishers) in English, and the Marx-Engels Werke (Berlin: Dietz) and Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (Berlin: Dietz) in German. I have added occasional footnotes marked [Trans.] for terms and concepts that Karatani mentions but that are not developed in the text, particularly in relation to the Japanese-language theoretical situation.

In Japanese-language Marxist theoretical writing, Marx’s economic abbreviations are typically retained in the style of the German original. Hence W is used for Ware, G for Geld, Pm for Produktionsmittel, A for Arbeitskraft, etc. I have changed these to the standard English usage: C = commodity, M = money, Mp = means of production, L = labour power, c = constant capital, v = variable capital, s = surplus value.

In general, I have endeavoured to avoid a mode of translation – which is, to be formally consistent with Karatani’s argument in this text, nothing more than one particular reading protocol – that accentuates the linguistic distance of the text. By that I mean something quite simple. There is a mode of translation that seeks, at all times, to render opaque yet distant the original text in its translated form. Such a mode emphasizes ‘untranslatable’ terms, terms in the original left transliterated, forms of expression that seek to establish a stylistic difference that the reader is free (although also propelled) to regard as emblems of cultural divergence. I reject wholly this mode of translation, not because it is ‘less accurate’ – after all, ‘accuracy’ is nearly impossible to coherently assess in translation – but because it places the text within an economy of meaning that evades textuality in favour of a first-order explanatory mechanism of ‘cultural difference’. Needless to say, this apparent ‘cultural difference’ is itself never explained, but simply relied upon as a given, initial stratum of meaning that is posited at the outset, or strictly speaking, pre-posited. Karatani’s work is impossible to assess on such a basis. The context, properly speaking, of this work is the global spread of anti-humanist, anti-essentialist critical theory that entered the world conceptual scene in the late 1940s, and that has conditioned a crucial segment of intellectual history ever since. In that sense, I do not exoticize Karatani’s writing, which is clear, straightforward, and although influenced by the current of deconstruction dominant at Yale in the 1970s when he was there, never attempted to appropriate the Derridean style. The book should be read absolutely without reliance on any conception of Japanese-ness as a supposed explanatory mechanism, but instead with an understanding that the Japanese tradition of social theory was itself undergoing remarkable international transformations at the time.