Kojin Karatani

Kojin Karatani studied at Humanities and Social Sciences I, the University of Tokyo, Faculty of Economics, University of Tokyo and Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, The University of Tokyo. The recorded working language is Japanese. Employment is recorded with Yale University, Columbia University and Nippon Medical School. Distinctions recorded are Sei Itō Award, Kamei Katsuichirō Prize and Berggruen Prize.

• Name — Kojin Karatani • Born — 6 August 1941 • Birthplace — Amagasaki, Japan • Awards — Berggruen Prize (2022) • Education — University of Tokyo (BA, MA) • Institutions — * Hosei University • Kindai University • Main Interests — Comparative literature Literary criticism Kōjin Karatani is a Japanese philosopher and literary critic.

Karatani entered the University of Tokyo in 1960, where he joined the radical Marxist Communist League, better known as "The Bund," and participated in the massive 1960 Anpo protests against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, which he would later come to view as a formative political experience. Karatani graduated with a B.A. in economics in 1965, and added an M.A. in English literature in 1967. The Gunzō Literary Prize, which he received at the age of 27 for an essay on Natsume Sōseki, was his first critical acclaim as a literary critic. While teaching at Hosei University, Tokyo, he wrote extensively about modernity and postmodernity with a particular focus on language, number, and money, concepts that form the subtitle of one of his central books: Architecture as Metaphor. In 1975, he was invited to Yale University to teach Japanese literature as a visiting professor, where he met Paul de Man and Fredric Jameson and began to work on formalism. He started from a study of Natsume Sōseki. Karatani collaborated with novelist Kenji Nakagami, to whom he introduced the works of Faulkner. With Nakagami, he published Kobayashi Hideo o koete (Overcoming Kobayashi Hideo). The title is an ironic reference to “Kindai no chokoku” (Overcoming Modernity), a symposium held in the summer of 1942 at Kyoto Imperial University (now Kyoto University) at which Hideo Kobayashi (whom Karatani and Nakagami did not hold in great esteem) was a participant. He was also a regular member of ANY, the international architects' conference that was held annually for the last decade of the 20th century and that also published an architectural/philosophical series with Rizzoli under the general heading of Anyone. Since 1990, Karatani has been regularly teaching at Columbia University as a visiting professor. Karatani founded the New Associationist Movement (NAM) in Japan in the summer of 2000. NAM was conceived as a counter–capitalist/nation-state association, inspired by the experiment of LETS (Local Exchange Trading Systems, based on non-marketed currency). He was also the co-editor, with Akira Asada, of the Japanese quarterly journal Hihyōkūkan (Critical Space), until it ended in 2002. In 2006, Karatani retired from the chair of the International Center for Human Sciences at Kinki University, Osaka, where he had been teaching. In 2022, Karatani was awarded the $1 million Berggruen Prize for Culture and Philosophy.