Abstract

GERACE, Roberto. The making of abstraction. some hypotheses on money, language, and modern literature. Rev. Guillermo Ockham [online]. 2022, vol.20, n.2, pp.247-259.  Epub Aug 26, 2022. ISSN 1794-192X.  https://doi.org/10.21500/22563202.5840.

The question I have tried to answer is whether there is such a thing as linguistic alienation and what are its consequences for Marxist literary studies and the understanding of so-called “superstructure” in general. Relevant assumptions about this topic were elaborated above all in the 1960s and 1970s by Lefebvre, Rossi-Landi, Baudrillard, and Latouche, through the tabulation of parallelism between Marx’s theory of value and Saussure’s theory of the sign. In my opinion, all these hypotheses failed to highlight the specificity of Marxian interpretation of money, which is a very distinct form of semiotics, because (as Finelli and Arthur, among others, have shown) it owes a lot to Hegelian logic.

I, therefore, try to prove that, by forcing certain categories of semiotics and the philosophy of language to interpret the critique of Marx’s political economy, money turns out to be not a sign, but a code: paraphrasing Lacan, one could say that capital is configured as a language. It is not, however, a neutral language, but a linguistic praxis capable of concealing a material situation through abstractions. If this is true, we don’t really need to ask how a matter (the structure) acts on a series of semantic and ideological chains (the superstructure), but to what extent capital itself, considered as a text, works as a formal pattern (using Marx’s words: a formelle Bestimmung) for the organization of all the matter on which it extends its abstracting domain. The “structural causality” relied on by Jameson in The Political Unconscious is thus the result of the dialectical nexus between mechanical and expressive causalities.

Keywords : theory of value; Marxism; semiotics; philosophy of language; linguistics; economics; commodity fetishism; literary theory; comparative literature; political philosophy.

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