Karatani was educated at University of Tokyo, where he received a BA in economics and an MA in English literature. 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 metPaul 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. The title is an ironic reference to “Kindai no chokoku”, a symposium held in the summer of 1942 at Kyoto Imperial University at which Hideo Kobayashi 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 :ja:New Associationist Movement|New Associationist Movement in Japan in the summer of 2000. NAM was conceived as a counter–capitalist/nation-state association, inspired by the experiment of LETS. He was also the co-editor, with Akira Asada, of the Japanese quarterly journal Hihyōkūkan, 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.
Philosophy
Karatani has produced philosophical concepts, such as "the will to architecture", which he calls the foundation of all Western thinking, but the best-known of them is probably that of "Transcritique", which he proposed in his book Transcritique, where he reads Kant through Marx and vice versa. Writing about Transcritique in the New Left Review of January–February 2004, Slavoj Žižek brought Karatani's work to greater critical attention. Žižek borrowed the concept of "parallax view" for the title of his own book. Karatani has interrogated the possibility of a deconstruction and engaged in a dialogue with Jacques Derrida at the Second InternationalConference on Humanistic Discourse, organized by the Université de Montréal. Derrida commented on Karatani's paper "Nationalism and Ecriture" with an emphasis on the interpretation of his own concept of écriture.
