Tuesday, May 5, 2015

Money Wisdom #355

"Rephrasing this ontology [of money] in terms of everyday experience, we can speculate that the fantasies about the things we can do with money are related more to the reality of money than to the actual things we can do with money (which is another way of explaining how money is worth more than anything money can buy). But maybe we can notice this peculiarity also in a plea that Marx sends to Friedrich Engels during his exile in London: 'Never has anyone written about money in general amidst such total lack of money in particular.' In ontological terms, these inversions call for conceiving of the reality of money as intertwining presence and absence. The money that is absent [...] is somehow much more vivid and visible, much more present, than is the dull money that actually exists..."

Noam Yuran What Money Wants (2014) p.74-75