Kojin Karatani is the first Asian laureate of the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy & Culture, a rare thinker whose ideas move across philosophy, literary theory, aesthetics, linguistics, economics, and politics—East and West; past and present. The Berggruen Prize Jury has selected Karatani for his “radically original contributions to modern philosophy, the history of philosophy, and political thinking—making Karatani’s work particularly valuable in the current era of troubled global capitalism, crisis in democratic states, and resurgent but seldom self-critical nationalism."