Parallax View
Discussion
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK:
"In today’s English, ‘pig’ refers to the animals with which farmers deal, while ‘pork’ is the meat we consume. The class dimension is clear here: ‘pig’ is the old Saxon word, since Saxons were the underprivileged farmers, while ‘pork’ comes from the French porque, used by the privileged Norman conquerors who mostly consumed the pigs raised by farmers. This duality, signalling the gap that separates production from consumption, is a case of what, in his formidable Transcritique. On Kant and Marx, Kojin Karatani refers to as the ‘parallax’ dimension. [1] Best known as the most striking Japanese literary critic of his generation—his Origins of Japanese Literature presented to the English-speaking world by Fredric Jameson—Karatani has moved from subsequent reflections on Architecture as Metaphor to one of the most original attempts to recast the philosophical and political bases of opposition to the empire of capital of the current period. [2] In its heterodox theoretical ambition and concern with alternative revolutionary traditions—here principally anarchist—Transcritique might be compared with Roberto Unger’s trilogy Politics, a work out of Brazil. But Karatani’s thought-world is closer to that of Marx, and behind him to the heritage of classical German philosophy.
Karatani starts with the question: what is the appropriate response when we are confronted with an antinomy in the precise Kantian sense of the term? His answer is that we should renounce all attempts to reduce one aspect of it to the other (or, even more, to enact a kind of ‘dialectical synthesis’ of the opposites). One should, on the contrary, assert antinomy as irreducible, and conceive the point of radical critique not as a determinate position as opposed to another position, but as the irreducible gap between the positions—the purely structural interstice between them. Kant’s stance is thus to see things ‘neither from his own viewpoint, nor from the viewpoint of others, but to face the reality that is exposed through difference (parallax)’. [3] Karatani reads the Kantian notion of the Ding an sich (the Thing-in-itself, beyond phenomena) not so much as a transcendental entity beyond our grasp, but as what is discernible only via the irreducibly antinomic character of our experience of reality." (http://libcom.org/library/the-parallax-view-karatani-s-transcritique-on-kant-and-marx-zizek)