Kojin Karatani 
Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility 

Originally published in 1974, Kojin Karatani’s
Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility has been among his most enduring and pioneering works in critical theory. Written at a time when the political sequences of the New Left had collapsed into crisis and violence, with widespread political exhaustion for the competing sectarian visions of Marxism from 1968, Karatani’s
Marx laid the groundwork for a new reading, unfamiliar to the existing Marxist discourse in Japan at the time.



Karatani’s
Marx takes on insights from semiotics, deconstruction, and the reading of Marx as a literary thinker, treating
Capital as an intervention in philosophy that could be read as itself a theory of signs.
Marx is unique in this sense, not only because of its importance in post-’68 Japanese thought, but also because the heterodox reading of Marx that Karatani debuts in this text, centred on his theory of the value-form, will go on to form the basis of his globally influential work.



Edited, translated, and with an introduction by Gavin Walker.

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Gavin Walker is Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. Previously, he was Associate Professor of Intellectual History at Mc Gill University in Montreal, Qu�bec, where he taught for 12 years. His research and teaching focuses on contemporary theory in its intersections with global intellectual history, continental philosophy and world literature, politics and aesthetics. He is the author of The Sublime Perversion of Capital (Duke, 2016) and Marx et la politique du dehors (Lux �diteur, 2022), the editor of The End of Area: Biopolitics, Geopolitics, History (Duke, 2019, with Naoki Sakai), The Red Years: Theory, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Japanese ’68 (Verso, 2020), Foucault’s Late Politics, a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly (Duke, Fall 2022), and ‘Ronso’ no buntai (Hosei University Press, 2023, with Yutaka Nagahara) as well as editor and translator of Kojin Karatani’s Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility (Verso, 2020). His new book, The Rarity of Politics: Passages from Structure to Subject is forthcoming from Verso.