Event overview
A dialogue between Kawashima and Walker on editing, translating and creatively applying the works of Tosaka Jun, Uno Kōzō and Kōjin Karatani to our current conjuncture.
This Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought seminar will stage a dialogue between Kawashima and Walker on their work editing, translating, interpreting and creatively applying the work of Tosaka Jun, Uno Kōzō and Kōjin Karatani to our current theoretical conjuncture.
Ken Kawashima is an Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto. To date, his work has focused on how to advance Marxist critiques of the political economy after the critique of “essentialism”. Refusing to accept contemporary interpretations of Marx’s own discourse as “determinist”, Kawashima has focused on the antinomies of the logic of capital in the work of Marx to pursue a deceptively simple question: What does it mean to say, “The commodification of labor power?” He has answered this question by elaborating upon Marx’s concept of “surplus populations” and exchange, which has led him to examine the relationship between contingency and repetition in the process of commodification.
More historically, his research never ignores the many ways in which imperialism and colonialism pervert the antinomies of the logic of capital through discourses (among others) of national culture, race and multi-ethnic pluralism. His book, The Proletarian Gamble: Korean workers in interwar Japan (Duke UP, 2009) fleshes out these questions and concepts while also mining the Japanese colonial and metropolitan archives of the 1920s and 1930s. He is the co-editor of Tosaka Jun: A Critical Reader (Cornell UP, 2014) and the editor and translator of Uno Kōzō’s Theory of Crisis (Brill, 2022), for which he also contributed a co-authored essay with Gavin Walker.
Gavin Walker is an Associate Professor of History at McGill University, the author of The Sublime Perversion of Capital (Duke, 2016), Marx et la politique du dehors (Luc Éditeur, 2022), and a member of the editorial collective of positions: asia critique. He is the editor of The End of Area (Duke, 2019, with Naoki Sakai), Marx, Asia, and the History of the Present, a special issue of positions: politics (positionspolitics.org, 2020), and The Red Years: Theory, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Japanese ‘68 (Verso, 2020), as well as editor and translator of Kōjin Karatani’s Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility (Verso, 2020) and a special issue edited for South Atlantic Quarterly on Foucault’s Late Politics (2022).
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 8 Dec 2022 | 5:00pm - 6:30pm |
Accessibility
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