From: Michael Perelman (michael@ECST.CSUCHICO.EDU)
Date: Fri Oct 28 2005 - 22:48:36 EDT
Keenan, Thomas. 1993. "The Point is to (Ex)Change It: Reading .Capital. Rhetorically." in Emily Apter and William Pietz, eds. Fetishism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press): pp. 152-85. 169: C1, p. 128: Marx describes the residual after abstracting away all use value. He calls the residual a "gespenstige Gegenstandlichkeit." "There is nothing of them left over but this same ghostly objectivity, a mere jelly of undifferentiated labor." 168: LC, p. 46 "each one of them completely resembles the other. They all have the same phantomic reality. Metamorphosed into identical sublimes, samples of the same indistinct labor." 168: "Because they resemble each other, as all ghosts do, having no phenomenal or sensible features by which to distinguish "themselves," the operation of which they are the remnant can finally occur. Thanks to their resemblance, the condition of exchange are met -- the very exchange that leaves them, atomless, behind. Without ghosts, no exchange." 169: "the commodity as ghost is a figure for the most rigorous of reductions, the radical elimination of all traces of use value, with one exception: the residue of the abstraction itself." 171: C1, p. 152 "The secret of value-expression, the likeness and equivalence of labor ... could not be deciphered until the concept of human similarity or equality had already acquired the permanence of a popular prejudice." "But [it] is first possible only in a society where the commodity form is the general form of labor-product." Compare the following to Sohn-Rethel. 171: "Exchange is possible because abstraction reveals the common humanity surviving in the things exchanged." 171: In other words, human is equated with ghostly. 176: C1 143-4 "We see then, that everything our analysis of the value of commodities previously told us is repeated by the linen itself .... Only it reveals its thoughts in a language with which it alone is familiar, the language of commodities." -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
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