ABSTRACT
The invention of photography has been given far more significance than being just a technology of image production. Brought about by the technological apparatus of the camera that later became the foundation of cinematography, photography is elevated to a notion that can curiously explain the revolution in philosophy inaugurated by Kant with his ‘Copernican turn’. It is now shown that a technological invention, the camera, has retroactively aided us to understand more deeply the crux of Kantian critical philosophy, a technology not known to Kant himself. We owe this to Kojin Karatani and his seminal Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, which explores Kant’s much neglected term ‘pronounced parallax’ and explains it by an exemplification of the invention of photography. In this chapter I examine Karatani’s analysis under the term ‘Photographic Moment of the Critical Philosophy’.
