Kojin Karatani, a Japanese thinker and literary theorist, has been chosen as 2022 winner of the $1 million Berggruen Prize for Philosophy & Culture.
Karatani was chosen on the premise of his “radically unique contributions to trendy philosophy, the historical past of philosophy, and political pondering,” in response to the prize jury, which referred to as his work “significantly helpful within the present period of troubled international capitalism, disaster in democratic states, and resurgent however seldom self-critical nationalism.”
Calling Karatani “one of the vital outstanding philosophers of our time,” Berggruen Jury Prize Chair Antonio Damasio credit him with having “produced new philosophical ideas that delve into the character of democracy, nationalism, and capitalism in a powerful ensemble the place the notions of reciprocity and equity loom massive because the unifying hyperlinks.”
A press launch from the Berggruen Institute gives some details about Karatani’s profession:
Initially famed for his research of literature and aesthetics, Karatani went on to provide strikingly unique work in political economic system and the historical past of philosophy—combining literary, philosophical, political, and financial considerations in a heterodox exploration of the connections of language and quantity to cash and aesthetics, for instance, and to the concurrently growth of imperialist, capitalist, and philosophical programs. In 2003, Karatani printed Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, which gained widespread recognition for his transcritical readings of each thinkers in a re-telling of Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx. His account of Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy, printed in 2017, was an influential decentering of Athens as the only supply of each philosophy and democracy, with an emphasis on Ionian thought and on the implications of a distinct type of society. He’s a prolific creator of works together with the not too long ago printed Powers and Modes of Alternate (2022), a sequel to The Construction of World Historical past: From Modes of Manufacturing to Modes of Alternate, in addition to Marx, In the direction of the Heart of its Prospects, Nation and Aesthetics Kant and Freud, Historical past and Repetition, Structure as Metaphor; Language, Quantity, Cash, and Origins of Trendy Japanese Literature.
Berggruen Institute Chairman Nicolas Berggruen added:
Karatani’s studying of Marx flips the concept the financial mode of manufacturing is the ‘substructure’ that determines all else and postulates as an alternative that it’s the ever-shifting ‘mode of change’ amongst capital, the state and nation which collectively shapes a society. Not an arm-chair thinker, Kojin Karatani has actively promoted a contemporary type of the form of reciprocity he noticed in historical Ionian tradition, which he calls ‘associationism.’
The previous winners of the Berggruen Prize are Peter Singer (2021), Paul Farmer (2020), Ruth Bader Ginsburg (2019), Martha Nussbaum (2018), Onora O’Neill (2017), and Charles Taylor (2016). The Berggruen Institute, based in 2010 by Nicolas Berggruen, goals to “to develop foundational concepts about how one can reshape political and social establishments” in gentle of “nice transformations” in politics, economics, and different main points of our lives.
