On Kojin Karatani’s 85th birthday, publisher Maikel da Silveira reflects on his writings on and the current US imperial project.

Maikel da Silveira, Verso Books Blog, 06/08/2026

The philosopher and literary critic Kojin Karatani turns 85 today. His latest book, The End of Modern Literature: On Permanent Revolution, publishes later this month. Meanwhile, his most ambitious work, The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange – which I had the privilege of editing for Editora Machado – has been translated into Portuguese and should reach Brazilian readers in the coming months.

Both of Karatani’d books are arriving at an opportune moment. Recent actions by Donald Trump’s United States — such as the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro, the attacks on Iran, the tariff wars launched against several countries and, above all, the designation of criminal organizations from various countries as terrorist groups, as well as the application of the same label to left-wing organizations operating within the United States — have created a dangerous precedent for justifying US military interventions in sovereign states. We have seen this film before, in the Bush era and in the days of the War on Terror. But everything suggests that this new wave of interventionism will strike with far greater force and violence.

In this light, it is striking that Kojin Karatani’s work should now, in his later years, prove such a powerful tool for addressing questions that have preoccupied him since his youth. When he entered the University of Tokyo in 1960, the protests against the revision of the US–Japan Security Treaty (known as ‘Anpo’) were at their height; to this day, they are remembered as one of the largest mass mobilizations in Japanese history. The immediate provocation for the demonstrations was the treaty that formalized Japan’s strategic and military subordination to the United States within the postwar order. But Anpo also raised a broader concern: what remained of Japanese sovereignty under the tutelage of the US military? It was, after all, an asymmetric agreement, signed between formally independent states, whose economic and military resources were, at the time, vastly unequal. The protesters, many of them young left-wing students like Karatani, confronted not only the policies of the Japanese government, but also the distance between state sovereignty, national sovereignty and popular sovereignty. We might say that Japan was witnessing a political struggle among competing conceptions of sovereignty.

It would be misleading to turn this episode into an origin myth, as though Karatani’s later theory of capital, nation and state — which would only be formalized decades afterwards — was already contained in the streets of Tokyo in 1960. But it is no exaggeration to say that the movement’s defeat helped to frame a set of problems that would be integral to his subsequent work. Anpo’s failure was frequently interpreted as proof that the surrounding movement lacked a centralized political organization capable of directing it. Karatani drew a different conclusion. In 1961, he proposed a free association of activists that would not be subordinated to a centralized party. Four decades later, he would recognize something of this intuition in the New Associationist Movement (NAM).

It is regrettable that now, six decades later, the question of sovereignty should have re-emerged so forcefully from the entrails of the “end of history”. If there is a spectre haunting contemporary politics, I would argue that it is the specter of sovereignty. Or rather, of sovereignties.

In recent years, sovereignty has reappeared everywhere. Donald Trump’s return to power undoubtedly played an important role in this revival— or in intensifying the appetite for absolute sovereignty. Tariffs, as we know, were already an important element of the first Trump administration. In his second term, however, they acquired a different scale and centrality. From 2025 onward, the government presented its so-called reciprocal tariffs not merely as instruments of trade policy, but as a means of restoring US industry, employment, and national security. The language of economic sovereignty became virtually indistinguishable from the language of economic warfare.

The consequences extended far beyond China, Trump’s principal adversary in his own discourse. Countries traditionally regarded as allies were forced to respond in the same vocabulary. In …