Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Money Wisdom #394

" What equivalence affirms, Marx shows, is an identical essence. The expression of value, transforming diverse products of labor into identical sublimates, is a language of alchemy, of essence and quintessence, of distillation and sublimation. This difference between use-value and exchange-value, then, exposes all the oppositions between body and soul, as Marx's frequent metaphors in this register demonstrate. Use-value is the physical, incarnated, perceptible aspect of the commodity, while the exchange-value is a supernatural abstraction, invisible and supersensible. No biologist's scalpel has ever found a person's soul or anima, just as 'hitherto, no chemist has been able to discover exchange-value in a pearl or diamond' (Marx, Capital 58) "


Jean-Joseph Goux Symbolic Economies (1990) p.19

Thursday, January 21, 2016

Money Wisdom #393

"...why and how do the fragile letters of our alphabet, forming the sign 'God', inscribing this master word of idealist thought, posit it as the place where all things are evaluated in common."

Jean-Joseph Goux Symbolic Economies (1990) p.11