Kojin Karatani is a Japanese philosopher who teaches at Kinki University, Osaka, and Columbia University. He is the author of Architecture as Metaphor (MIT Press, 1995) and Origins of Modern Japanese Literature. He founded the New Associationist Movement (NAM) in Japan in 2000.
An immensely ambitious theoretical edifice in which new relations between Kant and Marx are established, as well as a new kind of synthesis between Marxism and anarchism. The book is timely from both practical and theoretical perspectives, and stands up well against a tradition of Marx exegesis that runs from Rosdolsky and Korsch to Althusser and Tony Smith. - Fredric Jameson, William A. Lane Professor of Comparative Literature, Duke University, author of Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism