Karatani argues that Marx’s path is one “no one
had yet taken,” and it consists in the ability to
materially ground the most abstract of things –
the operations of value production as a process
of signification. In philosophy and in capitalism,
Matter is resource to Value (Signification and
Significance), and its existence in and of itself is
“pointless” unless assigned value. Marx’s argu-
ment is that abstractions, including social rela-
tions, in capitalism but in idealist philosophy too,
tend to constitute the mirage of a self-sufficient
universe. This illusion, Marx intimates in the third
volume of Capital, is in contradiction with the real
material conditions of human production and be-
comes ultimately unsustainable. Today the tech-
no-capitalist epistemic fallacy and displaced
metaphysics of the self-sufficient universe of
pure (financial) value is facing its final contradic-
tion: the physical or material limitations of its very
possibility.
