Return the Gift

Return the Gift: Strategies and Gestures in Bataille,

Baudrillard, and Derrida Against Political Economy

An Essay Presented by Peter Rojas

1 September 1998

Summary

This dissertation is a theoretical investigation into equivalence and value in political economy. Drawing on the work of writers Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Georges Bataille, Marcel Mauss, and Jean-Francois Lyotard, this essay stems from the failure of Marx’s critique of political economy to escape the metaphysics of capitalism. Through a rediscovery of the morality of primitive gift exchange, Mauss, Bataille, and Baudrillard attempt to rupture the system of general equivalence that is at the heart of political economy, while Lyotard and Derrida challenge such an approach. This essay attempts to synthesize these critiques.

Contents

Preface – The First Exchangep. 4

Chapter One – The Object in Itselfp. 6

Chapter Two – The Hot and the Coldp. 22

Chapter Three – The Soul of Things: Primitive Exchange and the Economic p. 31

Chapter Four – The End of Equivalence? p. 43

Conclusion – The Lukewarmp. 51

Bibiliography p. 55

Preface – “The First Exchange”

We examine in this essay attempts to rupture economic logic, to do away with the law of equivalence and value, to demolish the idea that there is a best, most efficient, most utilitarian way to distribute and arrange wealth. Can the spell of political economy be broken? Can the abstracted, reified social relations of the commodity be penetrated to reveal the truth of the object? Are relations between humans doomed to the rationalism and cold calculations of production and economic exchange, or can the hot, emotionally charged relationships of primitive societies be rediscovered? Our search must begin with Marx, for it is in Marx that we see the first sustained attempt to demystify the workings of political economy, and in one way or another, it is this critique which has informed all the others that have come afterwards. Marxism is an attempt to find heat in the midst of the cold, to escape the logic of political economy. But in this search Marx never discovers what he is looking for; that is, he never finds a warm place outside the bounds of political economy, he never escapes political economy altogether.

It is this dilemma that all of the theorists discussed in this essay have to some degree addressed. We see the anthropologist Marcel Mauss, who looks to the primitive morality of the gift to find that which can escape the economic; Georges Bataille, a renegade Surrealist, who radicalizes Mauss and, recognizing the degree to which Marx is hopelessly mired in notions of productivism and utility, strives to overturn the restricted economics of bourgeois capitalism and rediscover an archaic ethic of noble expenditure; Jean Baudrillard, who draws on Mauss and Bataille to develop a radical critique of Marx as a means of combating the sign-logic of equivalence which he sees enveloping society, proposing symbolic exchange as a

practice which ruptures equivalence in the singularity of the sacrificial or given-object; Jean-Francois Lyotard, who attacks Baudrillard for fetishizing the primitive as outside of the economic and challenges any theory that posits an organic existence; and Jacques Derrida, the theorist of différance, who shows how the gift, which is assumed to disrupt the economic, actually destabilizes the notions of equivalence and non-equivalence while setting them in motion.

Through each of these theorists we will trace a trajectory of equivalence, focusing on the object of exchange and our relationship to it. We will discover that there is perhaps nothing to discover, that just as we can discover no first word, no originary moment of language, we can find no first exchange, no originary moment of the economic.

I would like to acknowledge the assistance of my supervisor, Professor Geoff Bennington, for offering crucial direction to this project, lecturer Mike Gane of the University of Loughborough for responding to my numerous questions regarding several of the theoretical aspects of this essay, and Megan McCarthy for proofreading, editing, and generally helping me move this essay forward.

Chapter One – “The Object in Itself”

Marx’s critique of political economy focuses on production as the primary aspect of human existence; he conceives of the body as being invested with labor power. Labor is humankind’s fundamental activity, it is what sets them apart from the animals. This labor becomes alienated under political economy, the wealth that the worker produces from his labor is wrested from him, according to Marx, “political economy conceals the estrangement inherent in the nature of labour by not considering the direct relationship between the worker and production.”1 Marx seeks to rediscover this relationship between humans and the output of their labor, before alienation and estrangement. His analysis begins by examining production, critiquing at the level of the relations of production which he asserts underlie and determine reality. This is Marx’s dramatic reversal: to look at how the economic creates consciousness, that our lived reality is directly engendered by the relations of production. He writes that,

The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence which determines their consciousness.2

Marx’s project is to break through the superstructure and arrive at the foundational social relations of production and thus be able to understand and critique a true social reality. However, this endeavor 1 Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978) p. 73.

2 Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, ed. Maurice Dobb, trans. S.W. Ryazanskaya (New York: International Publishers, 1970), p. 20-21.

assumes that critique can cut through the superstructural layers of the social and the cultural in order to come to this supreme reality, that these relations of production can be apprehended naked and unadorned. Whether his or any critique can achieve these goals is, as we shall see, quite a problematic contention. Marxism, by placing production above all else, has imbued itself in a metaphysics; its critique purports to reveal the truth of political economy, when in fact it uses the same metaphysics as its subject in order to critique it.

It is this metaphysics which Jean Baudrillard challenges in The Mirror of Production. Baudrillard’s study of Marxism seeks to wring out the metaphysical assumptions of political economy to which Marxism remains beholden, namely the conceptualization of labor as humanity’s fundamental activity and the fetishization of utility and value. He writes that Marxism “sustains an unbridled romanticism of production,” and that by placing labour at the center of human existence Marx naturalizes and prioritizes production as logos.3 He contends that because of its failure “to conceive of a mode of social wealth other than that founded on labour and production, Marxism no longer furnishes in the long run a real alternative to capitalism.” Baudrillard argues that Marxism’s identification of political economy as a motif of critique that is trans-historical “generalizes the economic mode of rationality over the entire expanse of human history, as the generic mode of human becoming.”4 In its claim that labour and production are what make humans human, Marxism unwittingly “exalts labor as value, as end in itself,” as “labor alone founds the world as objective and man as historical.”5 Marxism examines the world through the lens of dialectics, of passing through a subject-3 Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, trans. Mark Poster (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1975) p. 1.

4 Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, p. 33.

5 Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pp. 34-5.

object process of gaining self-realization. Nature is viewed as something to be dominated by humans, as something from which to extract value. Baudrillard writes that,

Historical materialism, dialectics, modes of production, labor power – through these concepts Marxist theory has sought to shatter the abstract universality of the concepts of bourgeois thought (Nature and Progress, Man and Reason, formal Logic, Work Exchange, etc.). Yet Marxism in turn universalizes them with a ‘critical’ imperialism as ferocious as the other’s. The proposition that a concept is not merely an interpretive hypothesis but a translation of universal movement depends upon pure metaphysics. Marxist concepts do not escape this lapse.6

Marxism, which sees itself as dissipating the ghosts of Enlightenment ideology actually fails to challenge the truly essential aspects of that ideology. Marxism liberates the laborer from his alienation but not from his labor; utility, progress, and science become even more entrenched. The themes of domination over nature and labor as humanity’s highest end prevail.

The concept of use value in Marx is the scene of this enshrinement, for it is in the notion of utility that we see a grand gesture of naturalization. Marx seeks to locate the object in its natural state, where it is engaged in a dialectical relationship with humans, before its abstraction as the commodity. What is the relation between exchange value and use value? Can an object have a pure use value? Is there such a thing as natural utility? Yet Marx’s critique does not so much escape the logic of its object as it duplicates it. Marxism maintains a strict distinction between use and exchange values, contending that every commodity, “has a twofold aspect—use-value and exchange-value.”7 Use value is part of the palpable and material 6 Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, p. 47.

7 Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, p. 27.

nature of the commodity, and has, “value only in use, and is realized only in the process of consumption.”8 Wealth is derived from use value, Marx says, and use values serve “social needs…they do not express the social relations of production.”9 According to Marx, use value is an inherent characteristic of the commodity, for it represents the natural utilization of the object, one that precedes any role the commodity may have in the economic sphere.10

Marx identifies a natural role for the object in its utility, the object has a functionality that is intrinsic and unalterable. The object is itself in its use value. But can the object in itself be found as itself? Rather than oppose the natural to the socio-cultural, Jacques Derrida, in Specters of Marx, destabilizes the Marxian distinction between use and exchange value. Describing Marx as something akin to a teller of ghost stories, Derrida examines in the final chapter of his book how commodities come to haunt things. The commodity form has never been transparent, it has always contained within it a hidden element. According to Derrida this is why Marx must appeal to a theological discourse in order to unravel the commodity; use values were a much more straightforward matter for Marx, it is exchange value that conjures up ghosts.11 But this, Derrida maintains, is to obscure utility: “The commodity thus haunts the thing, its specter is at work in use value.”12 The commodity, which Marx asserts masks a social relationship among humans, is the result of a ghosting (by exchange value, not use value) which is social, which in this instance constitutes the social; that is, that the commodity does not mask a social




11 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International , trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994) p. 150.

12 Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 151.

relationship, it is one.13

Marx writes that at first exchange value appears to have a natural role as a measure of equivalence between commodities of varying use values. All value, Marx contends, is derived from labor, leading him to conclude that exchange value is a relation which homogenizes the labor which stands behind each use value: “Labour which creates exchange value is thus abstract general labour.”14 This leads to what Marx terms, “social labour.”15 Derrida, following from this, writes that,

if the ‘mystical character’ of the commodity, if the ‘enigmatic character’ of the product of labor as commodity is born of ‘the social form’ of labor, one must still analyze what is mysterious or secret about this process, and what the secret of the commodity form is…There is a mirror, and the commodity form is also this mirror, but since all of a sudden it no longer plays its role, since it does not reflect back the expected image, those who are looking for themselves can no longer find themselves in it. Men no longer recognize in it the social character of their own labor. It is as if they were becoming ghosts in their turn.16

Exchange value, as the ghost of the commodity, transforms the relations of those people who are obscured by it; the body of those who transformed the object from a use value to an exchange value vanishes, leaving behind only a frozen, abstract equivalence. The living body of the laborer symbolically dies: it is this warmth of the body that Marx sees living in the cold abstraction of the commodity.

For Marx’s critique to be valid, there must be a moment before haunting, a moment of a pure utility of the object, before exchange





value. Yet we find that this defining moment for use value comes not before exchange, but after it, that in fact exchange value renders altogether meaningless the notion of a before for the object. Baudrillard points out that in Marx,

The presupposition of use value—the hypothesis of a concrete value beyond the abstraction of exchange value, a human purpose of the commodity in the moment of its direct of utility for a subject—is only the effect of the system of exchange value, a concept produced and developed by it. Far from designating a realm beyond political economy, use value is only the horizon of exchange value.17

Derrida, in a similar logic, points out that Marx makes an untenable distinction between the object and its status as a commodity:

To say that the same thing, the wooden table for example, comes on stage as commodity after having been but an ordinary thing in its use value is to grant an origin to the ghostly moment. Its use value, Marx seems to imply, was intact. It was what it was, use value, identical to itself. The phantasmagoria, like capital, would begin with exchange value and the commodity-form. It is only then that the ghost ‘comes on stage.’ Before this, according to Marx, it was not there. Not even in order to haunt use value.18

We have the case of the ghost producing the effect of the body, or of it once having had a body. The commodity has committed a crime against the object by obscuring its utility. The question of whether the object is complicit in this crime is never posed by Marx. Indeed the innocence of the object is upheld in Marx, for it allows him to maintain that the object undergoes some transformation after the introduction of exchange. Where does the certainty about a pure use value of this previous phase come from? Derrida writes that, “If this purity is not guaranteed, then one would have to say that the phantasmagoria began before the said exchange value, at the 17 Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, p. 22-23.


threshold of the value of value in general, or that the commodity-form began before the commodity-form, itself before itself.”19 Marx’s argument relies upon the existence of a moment before exchange, when the object has an immediate, rational use, and that after the introduction of exchange, the commodity has an aspect to it that is not immediately in view, that is the social relations of its production. This relationship—which Derrida likens to a haunting, for it is unseen—must for Marx have a moment of origination.

Yet, for Marx to identify such a moment is impossible, for it requires him to designate a moment before culture. Baudrillard, in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign¸ argues against a natural state for the object, and for the social nature of use value, and asserts that it is a “fetishized social relation, just like the abstract equivalence of commodities.”20 Use value and exchange value are two systems united in equivalence; it is this principle of equivalence which, “establishes the object in a functional equivalence to itself in the single framework of this determined valence: utility. This absolute signification, this rationalization by identity (its equivalence to itself) permits the object to enter the field of political economy as a positive value.”21 Under the notion of utility, the object is itself, and it corresponds to its natural usage. Baudrillard points out that this correspondence is derived from a structural system of value similar to language in which signs are assumed to have a natural connection to their referents.

The base assumption of utility is that the object has a natural, common-sense use to it. But like the object, the sign, cannot have its


20 Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981) p. 131.

21 Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique, p. 134.

meaning pinned down and fixed. No matter what the determination, there can always be a usage of the object that is not prescribed in advance. Derrida writes that,

Just as there is no pure use, there is no use value which the possibility of exchange and commerce (by whatever name one calls it, meaning itself, value, culture, spirit [!], signification, the world, the relation to the other, and first of all the simple form and trace of the other) has not in advance inscribed an out-of-use—an excessive signification that cannot be reduced to the useless. A culture began before culture—and humanity. Capitalization also. Which is as much as to say that, for this very reason, it is destined to survive them.22

Objects cannot have their use pinned down, nor can they have their significance as objects of exchange strictly delimited. This congruence between Derrida’s deconstruction of language and his critique of Marx and political economy plays upon the metaphysics of presence which permeate Marx’s writings.23 This metaphysics finds perhaps its clearest expression in Marx’s notion of use value, of the proposition that an object’s direct and unmediated nature is revealed in its utility. Use value can never be what Marx needs it to be; it is a state which can never be viewed in isolation. Derrida says of it that, “Without disappearing, use value becomes, then, a sort of limit, the correlative of a limit-concept, of a pure beginning to which no object can or should correspond, and which therefore must be complicated in a general (in any case more general) theory of capital.”24 The commodity, “affects in advance the use value of the wooden table. It affects it in advance, like the ghost it will become, but this is precisely where haunting begins.”25 Whatever use values the object has are


23 See Derrida’s Of Grammatology for an introduction to his critique of the metaphysics of presence in linguistics.



instituted and forever multiplied by the commodity.

This connection between the sign and the commodity is elucidated in Baudrillard’s For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. In Sassurean linguistics the sign has two aspects, a signifier, which is a sound or written word, and a signified, the idea-image that the signifier relates to; the things that signs refer to are known as referents.26 Baudrillard points out the parallel between the sign and the commodity, for the commodity itself has a twofold aspect to it in exchange value and use value. He writes that, “the logic of the commodity and of political economy is at the very heart of the sign…signs can function as exchange value (the discourse of communication) and as use value (rational decoding and distinctive social use).”27 But, he continues, this logic can be reversed, the logic of the sign can be found in the commodity as well: “[i]t is because the structure of the sign is at the very heart of the commodity form that the commodity can take on, immediately, the effect of signification…its very form establishes it as a total medium, as a system of communication administering all social exchange.”28 Leading from this, we will see that both Baudrillard and Derrida draw on the logic of the sign in order to further understand Marx’s critique of the commodity.

Both Baudrillard and Derrida recognize use value and the signified are the inaccessible truths of the commodity and the sign, for just as it is impossible to access the idea-image outside of the signifier, it is equally impossible to identify a use value that precedes a social relation for the object. Baudrillard writes that,

26 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Roy Harris (Chicago and La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1986) p. 99.

27 Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, p. 146.


Use value and needs are only an effect of exchange value. Signified (and referent) are only an effect of the signifier….Neither is an autonomous reality that either exchange value or the signifier would express or translate into code. At bottom they are only simulation models, produced by the play of exchange value and signifiers….Use value and the signified do not constitute an elsewhere with respect to the systems of the other two; they are only its alibis.29

Derrida proposes that use value, rather than preceding the commodity, is a determination made after the fact, that can only be made after the de facto haunting of the commodity. Marx seeks to determine the precise moment at which the ghost appears on stage, but even before the haunting by the commodity,

the ghost had made its apparition, without appearing in person, of course, and by definition, but having already hollowed out in use value, in the hardheaded wood of the headstrong table, the repetition…without which a use could never even be determined….This haunting is not an empirical hypothesis. Without it, one could not even form the concept of use value, or of value in general, or inform any matter whatsoever, or determine any table, whether a wooden table—useful or saleable—or a table of categories.30

The moment of haunting has already arrived, no matter at what point you investigate the status of the object. The object in its utility is not a state which precedes its commodification, it is a retrospective determination.

Derrida states that use value implies that the object is “being used by the other or being used another time,” and that “this alterity or iterability projects it a priori onto the market of equivalences (which are always equivalences between non-equivalents, of course)...In its original iterability, a use value is in advance promised, promised to exchange and beyond exchange. It is in advance thrown 29 Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, p. 137.


onto the market of equivalences.”31 The commodity, as a marker of equivalence, does not destroy the original purity of that which becomes haunted; rather Derrida asserts, the notion of the original uncorrupted condition itself comes out of the commodity: “But one must say that if the commodity corrupts (art, philosophy, religion, mortality, law, when their works become market values), it is because the becoming-commodity already attested to the value it puts in danger. For example: if a work of art can become a commodity, and if this process seems fated to occur, it is also because the commodity began by putting to work, in one way or another, the principle of an art.”32 The commodity is for the object the possibility of an-other usage, an out-of-use; for the commodity to seduce these values, it must have already in some way distinguished them as purities capable of seduction.

In this way the Marxist critique fundamentally relies on the conception that capitalism is an unnatural system, a perversion of the natural course of the object and humankind’s relation to it. The naturalized body – the body of rational, objective use – becomes the victim of a ghosting, terrorized by a spirit which separates and deceives. Derrida’s spectral investigations uncover the extent to which Marx purports to see the ghost of exchange, when in actuality he has conjured up ghosts himself: “These ghosts that are commodities transform human producers into ghosts.”33 Use value, itself becomes the ghost, the never fully present apparition which lies forever outside our grasp, implying that everything is a haunting: exchange, use, ourselves.

Derrida reveals Marx’s critique to be fixated with discovering this natural body; yet there is never a body, Derrida concludes, only 31 Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 162.



ghosts, the body itself turns out to be a ghost. There is never a true economy, there can only be an artificial economy. The ploy of the Marxist critique is to set up a natural economy that is in opposition to the artificial one of political economy, to link exchange to labor, and thus to find in the relations of production the truth of the commodity. Lyotard, citing the work of Piero Sraffa, brings up a question which has largely gone unasked, namely, is it necessary to refer to production to understand exchange? Sraffa describes a self-replicating capitalism without contradiction: “Sraffa’s fact is the system of capital as the producer and consumer of commodities: a positivist fact, to be constructed… Value is simply the set of rules of transformation for all commodity-products into commodity-goods of production.”34 Contrary to Marx’s dictum that “labour-time is the substance and the inherent measure of value,”35 in Sraffa’s system,

in order to determine the value of a commodity, one does not analytically take into consideration a quantity of substance included in it (labour-force, for example), but its exchangeability as an amount (that is, the relation of its quantity with that of its means of production)…It is only within the entire set of circuits (at least of basic products) that value can be read…The meta-economic opposition of use value and exchange value, or rather of use value and value as such, completely disappears here: there are only use-exchange values, prices in mutual interdependence, or the quantitative relations of commodities.36

Labour, viewed in Marxism as the natural relation of humans to the world which becomes alienated under capitalism, is sheared of its purity, and its primacy. Lyotard draws on Sraffa to demolish this aspect of Marxist critique, this recourse to a harmonious, unalienated labor. The result is a conceptualization of capitalism that is without

34 Jean-Francois Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant, (Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1993) p. 151.


36 Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, p. 151.

internal contradiction, that can be expanded with an influx of energy and material without an inevitable collapse; its commodity relations cannot be demystified as abstract labor, for there is no concrete labor.37

Lyotard takes Sraffa’s analysis a step further, concluding that capitalism need have none of the dialectical movement that Marx accords to it. Without contradiction, Marxism’s prophecy of inevitable proletarian revolution collapses. The commodity in Sraffa is a part of synchronic system of equivalence which does not have to be analyzed in terms of utility or labor-input to be understood:

What, when all’s said and done, are we dealing with in Sraffa’s approach? [It is] a theoretical discourse, expelling from itself every recourse to an exteriority and to a dialectic of the reversal of economic reality, putting only disparities regulated by the laws of transformation into play between terms none of which has referential privilege, on the contrary, any commodity at all from the system may be taken as the standard, and the composite commodity just described being, in the theoretical model, only the most saturated equivalence of what effectively regulates exchanges in the domain of reference or the empirical system.38

Derrida and Baudrillard each utilize this congruence between the sign and the commodity in their critiques; Lyotard seizes on the congruence between Sraffa’s conceptualization of a capitalism with an internally consistent logic and a Sassurean conceptualization of a language that precedes subjects. Capitalism is a self-sufficient system that allows for no exteriority. In this respect, Lyotard states, capitalism is like Sassurean linguistics, whose system of the arbitrariness and differential meaning of the sign is not dependent upon external reference to function. He writes that Sraffa’s work,

is a type of discourse analogous in every way to the one



which Saussure elaborated for language, the same epistemological bias (in linguistics, langue rather than parole, in economics, the system of commodities rather than of subjects of goods), and has therefore the same concept of value as regulated referral, replacing that of signification-designation. A fully syntactical perspective.39

What we have then is a capitalism that like language, cannot be reduced to a first moment, a first production, or a first exchange. A Marxist critique – and indeed most critiques of political economy in general – is above all a historical one; it attempts to investigate conditions before political economy in order to analyze conditions in political economy. What Lyotard, drawing on Sraffa, makes clear is that like the structuralist analysis of language, any inquiry into capital must confront the problem of not being able to find external referents from which to ground critique. Capital is its own ghost.

The natural body, or the ghost? The natural system of capitalism, or the haunted house of exchange? The laboring body of the proletariat is nowhere to be found, all that is left is the cycle of exchange and the ghost of the object. We are confronted with a capitalism that is like language, without beginning or end, and that is irreducible to production. What remains is exchange, and the system of value and equivalence; this is the terrain of the critiques we turn to, for the dilemma remains of how to build a critique of political economy that is not trapped in the economic metaphysics of equivalence, utility, value, etc. While the Marxist critique of capitalism attacks general equivalence in the form of exchange value, the fundamental economic logic of value is never challenged. Because Marx only addresses that which is reducible to production, he is never able to account for excess, waste, idleness, antiproductiveness, abundance, or any challenge to political economy that does not


emanate from a proletariat engaged in a revolutionary dialectical process. It is this unspoken excess in Marx that Baudrillard believes holds the key to escaping this dilemma. He writes that,

In order to question the process which submits us to the destiny of political economy and the terrorism of value, and to rethink discharge and symbolic exchange, the concepts of production and labor developed by Marx (not to mention political economy) must be resolved and analyzed as ideological concepts interconnected with the general system of value. And in order to find a realm beyond economic value (which is in fact the only revolutionary perspective), then the mirror of production in which all Western metaphysics is reflected, must be broken.40

Marx fails to usurp value in his formulations, he “made a radical critique of political economy, but still in the form of political economy. These are the ruses of the dialectic, undoubtedly the limit of all ‘critique’.”41 Baudrillard believes that dialectics are meaningless in a world without recourse to the real – capitalism viciously deceived Marx. Even as Marx appears to cut through the ideological fog of the commodity to discover its truth, in actuality the categories of production and utility in which he grounds his analysis of the commodity were themselves the hidden ideology of this system. But is there a critique of political economy possible that is not itself within political economy?

We will examine the terrain that Baudrillard proposes we move to, that of symbolic exchange. It is in the archaic/primitive logic of the gift and counter-gift that Mauss, Bataille, and Baudrillard seek to find a threat to political economy. Baudrillard proposes that for political economy to have its “definitive resolution,” its critique must move to a



different level – to that of symbolic exchange.42 It is in the excess and waste, in the avowedly anti-economic that these theorists search for a critique which escapes the logic and metaphysics of political economy. In a world dominated by equivalence, Baudrillard wishes to rediscover the gift and its symbolic power of non-equivalence. In Baudrillard’s view it is no coincidence that the commodity and the sign share an internal structure. Baudrillard sees the society as being subject to what he terms the structural law of value, of the logic of the sign unfolding itself across society. Baudrillard’s argument is a complex one, for it meshes elements of post-structuralism, psychoanalysis and Marxism in order to examine how political economy – now intimately bound up with the sign (in what he terms “the commodity-sign”) – has become a semiotic system. He writes that,

just as Marx thought it necessary to clear the path to the critique of political economy with a critique of the philosophy of law, the preliminary to this radical change of terrain is the critique of the metaphysic of the signifier and the code, in all its current ideological extent. For lack of a better term, we call this the critique of the political economy of the sign.43

Deeply influenced by the work of Situationist leader Guy Debord on the transformation of modern life into spectacle, Baudrillard contends that simulation is the mode of this newly emerged post-industrial capitalism such that it is decreasingly possible to isolate an empirical, objective reality. The signifier reigns as political economy, having entered a new mode that de-emphasizes industrial production while emphasizing leisure and consumption. It finds its perfect expression in this cultural logic of equivalence, perfect circulation, and the apparent disappearance external reality. This semio-political economy is not so much challenged by Marxism as it is inadvertently



strengthened by it as Marxism continues to plot strategies against the capitalism of a bygone era. What does Baudrillard believe can effectively contest this capitalism? He turns towards the primitive morality of symbolic exchange, which he sees as the only course of action that can rupture this dominating mode of equivalence and structural value.

In political economy (and Western thought in general) the primitive has been fetishized as living harmoniously with the world in a natural mode. What is the lure of the primitive? From Rousseau onwards the primitive exists for us not just as radical alterity, as the is-not of our society, but as our originary moment, as the “before” of our own time. Primitive society is viewed not only as not-us, but as what we once were. Primitive society functions as an uncorrupted version of society by which to measure our own decay and degradation, to somehow strip away the layers of civilization and view what lies at society’s core. It is this positioning of primitive society as antecedent that, as we shall see, both furthers and hinders the critique of political economy.

In Marx’s investigations to discover roots of the capitalist mode of production, he wonders, How is it that capitalism arose? This query places Marx in a vicious circle, given that “the accumulation of capital presupposes surplus-value; surplus-value presupposes capitalist production; capitalist production presupposes the availability of considerable masses of capital and labor-power in the hands of commodity producers.”44 Primitive accumulation solves this problem, as it is an accumulation which “is not the result of the capitalist mode of production but its point of departure.”45 Marx tackles this originary

44 Marx, Capital, p. 873.


moment when he identifies primitive accumulation as an originary moment in political economy: “Primitive accumulation plays approximately the same role in political economy as original sin does in theology.”46 Political economy explains the current disparity in the distribution of wealth, in which a tiny minority are affluent while the vast majority possess little more than their own labor power, by harkening back to pre-history. Supposedly those who were more industrious, intelligent, able, and efficient naturally accumulated the most wealth, while the mass of others, by dint of their inferiority, were unable to compete.47 Marx rejects this theory out of hand, arguing that it is a myth used to justify the status quo of capitalism, and that in actual fact, primitive accumulation, rather than being a peaceful and just process in which all fairly competed, was ridden through with “conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force play[ed] the greatest part.”48 Marx seeks to replace political economy’s “idyllic” view of primitive accumulation with one which is more realistic and historically accurate. Political economy views the primitive as the first stage of its development, it posits a natural phase of accumulation leading up to production and capital. Marx’s gesture is to attack this naturalization of primitive accumulation, to show how that it is “nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production. It appears as ‘primitive’ because it forms the pre-history of capital, and of the mode of production corresponding to capital.”49 But in doing so, Marx rejects the notion of an idyllic primitive accumulation only to defer the idyllic to the time before primitive accumulation, in which the primitive exists in a state

46 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage Books, 1977) p. 873.




of organic, unalienated labor. Marx can still only conceive of the primitive in terms of production, as a point along the historical time-line of production. The theorists that we examine below recognize this, and it impels them towards the principles of symbolic exchange.

Is it possible to overcome the metaphysics of production and value? In order to break free of these metaphysics Baudrillard works to rediscover the marginalized elements of political economy, elements that Marx fails to find in his critique. Baudrillard identifies two types of wealth, each hopelessly irreconcilable: material social wealth and symbolic wealth.50 Marx is able only to recognize social wealth (that which develops out of production and the transformation of the world), and thus is only able to conceive of the primitive in these terms. Symbolic wealth, on the other hand, is that which, “mocking natural necessity, comes conversely from destruction, the deconstruction of value, transgression, or discharge.”51 Symbolic exchange, which Baudrillard proffers as an alternative to economic exchange, draws upon this power of destruction and excess in order to counter what he sees as the symbolic deficit of life under the regime of economic value and structural equivalence.

The space of the primitive is the place from which Baudrillard generates his critique of capitalism. Baudrillard uses symbolic exchange like a lense through which to view capitalism, to see the elements of life that it marginalizes and cannot capture. He considers his lense to be far more accurate than Marx’s because it can see beyond production, which Marx seemingly cannot. Baudrillard condemns Marx for identifying a mode of unalienated labor prior to primitive accumulation, yet Baudrillard’s problem seems to be less

50 Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, p. 42-3.


with Marx’s positing of such an organic society and more with Marx’s conception of such a society only in terms of its mode of production. Baudrillard himself posits primitive society as a state before political economy; he too sees an organicity in primitive life, but through symbolic exchange, not production. Baudrillard argues that Marx, by positing a transhistorical narrative of accumulation, has imposed notions of political economy on societies to which these notions do not apply: “There is neither a mode of production nor production in primitive societies. There is no dialectic and no unconscious in primitive societies. These concepts analyze only our own societies, which are ruled by political economy.”52 As there is no economic reality in these societies, no sense of value, Baudrillard refuses to grant primitive societies a place in historical-time.53 They cannot be retrofit into the timeline of production, because primitive societies, Baudrillard believes, have an entirely different mode of existence. Baudrillard refers to this mode as symbolic exchange, whose position outside of production stands in opposition to political economy. It is this use of primitive exchange to ground a critique of capitalism that we explore next.



Chapter Two – “The Hot and the Cold”

The hot and the cold: the critique of political economy that attempts to escape its metaphysics has taken the form of contrast between the cold rationality of political economy and the hot, affective, emotionally-charged relations of primitive symbolic exchange. Production versus consumption, thrift versus luxury, conservation versus expenditure: political economy has marginalized the excessive and enshrined utility. What is the strategy against this economy, this productivist mentality? Political economy is seen as the freezing of the connections between humans, cooling them down to mere commodity relations at the expense of symbolic relationships which are generous, warm, exciting, emotionally-charged. Modern humanity has forgotten primitive exchange, it has suppressed the morality of the gift. Accordingly, primitive exchange is unspoken in a modern society which would place the primitive under the sign of nature. The regime of political economy cannot acknowledge the cultural sophistication of primitive exchange, a sophistication which could challenge it.

Marcel Mauss in his work tries to show that rituals of exchange in primitive societies possess an intricacy of relations and motivations that inform their understanding of themselves and their society, countering the Marxian assertion of that social consciousness is always reducible to relations of production. Writing in the context of the modernized, Western culture of the early twentieth-century that had become convinced that it lacked the fire of the primitive, Mauss sets forth an anthropology of prestation in primitive exchange exhibited in The Gift. The Gift was one of the first attempts to systematize the social relations of the gift; Mauss tries to trace the trajectory of the object-as-gift, and thus what compels the returning of

the gift in primitive societies, what power the gift possesses.54 Rather than viewing the gift as some sort of form of rational acquisitive economic exchange, such as a form of barter in which roughly equivalent goods are traded, Mauss believes that the gift is an entirely distinct form of exchange and circulation. Mauss deviates from a common anthropological view that primitive societies exist without markets or exchange in a “natural economy,” believing that, “[i]n the economic and legal systems that have preceded our own, one hardly ever finds a simple exchange of goods, wealth, and products in transactions concluded by individuals.”55 Primitive societies have complex systems of exchange, embodied primarily by the gift, which as a “total social phenomena” incorporates all of the social, religious, juridical, and economic aspects of these societies.56 The gift is the object of a both disinterested and obligatory symbolic exchange, in which the donor places the donee into debt, with an obligation to repay the gift with a counter-gift, a counter-gift which is often expected to exceed the initial gift.57

The cycle of gift exchange is not simply a form of trade or barter; rather it is a total social phenomenon with each turn of the cycle involving, determining and risking each participant’s honor, prestige, and social standing. Using the Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest and their practice of the potlatch as an example, Mauss describes how this orgiastic ritual of gift-giving, sacrifice, and destruction functions as the system of exchange in these societies.58

Contrary to coldly logical and self-interested capitalistic exchange in

54 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W.D. Halls (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990) p. 3.

55 Mauss, The Gift, p. 5.




which parties exchange equivalents and create no other relationship between them, under the potlatch, the gifts and counter-gifts exchanged are of increasing value in each cycle of gift and counter-gift. Meanwhile the individuals involved are bound together in a symbolic relationship that has no end, for the obligation to return a gift of higher value never disappears.59 These participants find themselves in an emotionally charged, dynamic relationship of mutual obligation, with the objects of exchange serving to fuel an ever more intimate connection. Mauss writes that in the potlatch, “consumption and destruction of goods really go beyond all bounds. In certain kinds of potlatch one must expend all that one has, keeping nothing back. It is a competition to see who is the richest and also the most madly extravagant.”60 In the potlatch, the point is to try to humiliate one's rival by expending the most one can, to show that one has the most wealth to lose, and thus gain prestige. Attempting to achieve this, individuals not only give gifts of escalating value, but also spectacularly destroy their wealth in order to attest to their status.61

The potlatch is radically different from the logic of political economy. Bataille notes that the potlatch is, “the opposite of a principle of conservation;” it is has no conception of wealth as something to saved.62 Rather wealth is viewed as something to be expended in these elaborate rituals, as something to generate prestige, not more material possessions. Mauss writes that that potlatch is,

a system of law and economics in which considerable wealth is constantly being expended and transferred. If




62 Georges Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure” from Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985) p. 122.

one so wishes, one may term these transfers acts of exchange or even of trade and sale. Yet such trade is noble, replete with etiquette and generosity. At least, when it is carried on in another spirit, with a view to immediate gain, it becomes the object of very marked scorn.63

According to Mauss, primitive gift exchange exists outside of utility and what is conceived of as the natural use of the object, for the object of exchange is imbued with a symbolic power that is continually invested into it.

This symbolic power of the object of gift-exchange drives these exchange; Mauss writes that in these societies, while there is a notion of value, the “very large surpluses” amassed are, “expended to no avail, with comparatively enormous luxury, which is in no way commercial.”64 How is it qualitatively different? Mauss continues that, “the whole of this very rich economy is still filled with religious elements. Money still possesses its magical power and is still linked to the clan or to the individual. The various economic activities, for example, the market, are suffused with rituals and myths.”65 The participants in exchange are in, “a perpetual state of economic ferment and this state of excitement is very far from being materialistic.”66 Mauss argues that a subsumed morality of this effervescent state of affairs lurks underneath the surface of Western society, diminished and cooled by the dominance of economic exchange.67 Whether this morality of the gift and noble expenditure can be recovered or whether it even existed at all is at issue.



65 Mauss, The Gift, p. 72.66

Mauss, The Gift, p. 72.

67 Mauss, The Gift, pp. 65, 72.

Is the gift the heat that will melt the frozen, reified relations of political economy? Mauss believes that it is. He sees primitive gift exchange as the antecedent to rational economic exchange, that it is “our Western societies who have recently made man an ‘economic animal.’”68 For Mauss, gift exchange is the originary moment of economics, the balanced practice which becomes corrupted and occluded by acquisitive exchange. How or why this transition occurred is never properly elucidated in Mauss’ text, though he does it make it clear that it was the Romans and the Greeks who,

separated sale from gift and exchange, isolated the moral obligation and contract, and in particular conceived the difference between rites, laws, and interests…[this economy of the gift] was too dependent on chance, was overexpensive and too sumptuous, burdened with consideration for people, incompatible with the development of the market, commerce, and production, and all in all, at that time was anti-economic.69

The economic acts as a force to reduce the uncertainty of exchange, to remove the unpredictability from its mechanisms. Bataille observes that in societies with a strong morality of the gift, material wealth is only valuable to the extent that it can sacrificed.70 The connection that Western society draws between material wealth and security from need is not made in these cultures, because the nature of cyclical gift exchange is such that any fortune must be able to be offered up in the ritual of prestation and counter-prestation. One must be willing to go all the way, to give totally, for to let a rival present one with a greater gift would be to lose face. 71 No aspect of one’s wealth can be reserved or held back, everything must be on the table, ready to be sacrificed. The presumed need for economic growth and the expansion of 68 Mauss, The Gift, p. 76.


70 Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure”, p.123.

71 Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure,” p. 123.

production ends the domination of the morality of the gift, for rational economism cannot tolerate such instability. For Mauss the implication is that the morality of the gift must have come before political economy and been supplanted by it. He creates a historical time-line, placing primitive symbolic exchange at the beginning, as the starting point of the market and its development. The primitive here functions as moment before the economic, before notions of utility and production, and it is here that we turn to the work of Bataille, who actively sought to recapture expenditure and overturn this restricted economy.

* * *

The sweltering fervor of excess, of energy that cannot be capitalized upon, of expenditure without reserve permeates the thought of Bataille, who believes that throughout human history there has always been an element outside of utility and production. Unlike Marx who places production at the heart of human existence, Bataille reverses this and has at the center a need to destroy. In Bataille it is the failure of Western society to recognize this primality of destruction that has lead to the suppression of expenditure; he posits that production is subordinate to destruction, that humans produce in order to destroy. Baudrillard writes that Bataille goes “beyond proper political economy (which in essence is regulated through exchange value), straight to the metaphysical principle of economy. Bataille’s target is utility, in its root.”72 Unlike Marxists who seek a “good use of economy,” Bataille overturns this principle of order, conservation, and utility and “sweeps away all this slave dialectic from an aristocratic point of view, that of the master struggling with death.”73 Capitalism

72 Baudrillard, “When Bataille Attacked the Metaphysical Principle of Economy,” p. 59.


and its ideology of production have brought about the forgetting of how to destroy, of how to lose; this need expresses itself vestigially in the forms of value placed on jewels, the Christian fixation on Christ’s self-sacrifice, gambling, and certain art forms.74

Bataille theorizes this need for destruction as emanating from the problem of a surefeit of energy that any system produces which is far in excess of what is necessary for the maintenance of the system, and if not used for growth, must be spent without profit, “gloriously or catastrophically.”75 Believing that all problems of political economy, geophysics, history, biology, philosophy, literature and art are either underpinned by or related to this movement of energy on the earth’s surface, Bataille undertakes a dramatic reversal by elaborating a concept of general economy “in which ‘expenditure’ (the ‘consumption’) of wealth, rather than the production, was the primary object.”76 This reversal entails looking at luxury and not necessity as humankind’s “fundamental problem;” Bataille argues that need has never been the central motivation in consumption. He contends that in primitive societies the secondary nature of production and acquisition in relation to expenditure is clear, and that exchange in these societies is “a sumptuary loss of ceded objects.”77 The principle of destruction is acknowledged and abided by in these societies; they knew how to expend.

Bataille examines the merging post-industrial economy of the West after the Second World War, whose ever expanding capacity for production also creates vast surpluses, surpluses that must be

74 Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure,” p. 119.75

Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Volume One, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1995) p. 21.76

Bataille, The Accursed Share, p. 9-10.


expended in some form: “We must divert the surplus production, either into the rational extension of difficult industrial growth, or into unproductive works that will dissipate an energy that cannot be accumulated in any case.”78 Humanity today, Bataille believes, has lost its ability to expend grandly, as “the great and free forms of unproductive social expenditure have disappeared. One must not conclude from this, however, that the very principle of expenditure is no longer the end of economic activity…Everything that was generous, orgiastic, and excessive has disappeared.”79 Political economy is unable to acknowledge this excess of energy, for waste is so contrary to its central precepts, but Bataille locates these gestures of expenditure, claiming that these motions of expenditure lie hidden beneath the surface, unaccounted for in the theory of restricted, political economy. The bourgeoisie with their rationalist economism know nothing of noble expenditure; yet, Bataille writes, “human life cannot be in any way limited to the closed systems assigned to it by reasonable conceptions…In fact, in the most universal way, isolated or in groups, men find themselves constantly engaged in processes of expenditure.”80 It is only in a rediscovery of the principle of destruction that life can become whole again; expenditure is the missing part of the equation.

The abundance waiting to burst forth that is continually contained is a strong motif in Bataille; this drive towards expulsion underpins his notions of both eroticism and death.81 Bataille says that the taboo placing limits on eroticism and death initially separates humans from animals in order to escape “from the excessive domination of death and reproductive activity (violence that is) under 78 Bataille, The Accursed Share, p. 25.



81 Bataille, Eroticism, trans. Mary Dalwood (London: John Calder Ltd., 1962), p. 93.

whose sway animals are helpless.”82 Bataille’s writing augurs a return to the sacrificial, to a human practice of expenditure in which the drive towards expulsion would be freed. Transgression of taboos is a letting loose of this violence of expenditure, Bataille argues that we must rediscover death and the erotic, that we must not suppress these excesses. He writes that we must turn away from civilization, from everything we know, “The world to which we have belonged offers nothing to love outside of each individual insufficiency: its existence is limited to utility.”83 The principles of conservation mute the transgressive power of death and the erotic, it is only through the risk that these expenditures entail that one can truly live, according to Bataille. He states that, “A world that cannot be loved to the point of death—in the same way a man loves a woman—represents only a self-interest and the obligation to work…In past worlds, it was possible to lose oneself in ecstasy, which is impossible in our world of educated vulgarity.”84 Only in the excess can one find pleasure, for the pulsional drives can find fulfillment only in this movement towards nothingness that is destruction.

The excess escapes us, it is heat without light, and ostensibly without positive value. It is this heat Bataille sees as charging a system which would deny its existence. But such expenditure is crucial to the system, it is an integral aspect of existence according to Bataille. No system can continue without expending this excess; somehow it will be lost. As a result Bataille calls for a societal recognition of the value of expenditures, that we might use to free ourselves from the shackles of economy, for “the extension of economic growth itself requires the overturning of economic 82 Bataille, Eroticism¸ p. 83.

83 Bataille, “The Sacred Conspiracy,” p. 179.


principles – the overturning of the ethics that grounds them….If a part of wealth is doomed to unproductive use without possible profit, it is logical, even inescapable, to surrender commodities without return.”85

But doesn’t this logic contain within itself the economism that Bataille purports to reject? Hasn’t Bataille, in trying to find value in expenditure, succumbed to the very logic of utility he seeks to escape? Bataille argues that because an excess cannot be capitalized upon, it should be expended not with an idea of self-interest, but purely in accordance with desire, that this is “only a matter of an acceptable loss, preferable to another that is regarded as unacceptable: a question of acceptability, not utility.”86 But is it possible to make a choice about how to expend that does not in some way involve an economic principle, i.e. that there is a best expenditure, or an expenditure that maximizes pleasure or brings about organicity?

Bataille looks to the original source of all heat and light, the sun, which constantly gives without receiving, as the model for expenditure. This solar morality of expenditure represents for Bataille a systemic truth, that of life which must constantly deal with an excess it must expel. Bataille bases his theory in his observations of nature and the movement of energy on the earth’s surface. In his theory, the sun is the ultimate source of all energy on the earth. It is this gesture of naturalization that leads Baudrillard to accuse Bataille of having misunderstood Mauss: “Bataille founds his general economy on a ‘solar economy’ without reciprocal exchange, on the unilateral gift that the sun makes of its energy: a cosmogony of expenditure which he deploys in a religious and political anthropology. But Bataille has misread Mauss: the unilateral gift does not exist”87 Rather than

85 Bataille, The Accursed Share, p. 25.

86 Bataille, The Accursed Share, p. 31.

87 Jean Baudrillard, “When Bataille Attacked the Metaphysical Principle of Economy,” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, 1987, Vol. 11(3), p. 61.

underpinning expenditure and consumption in a conception of natural processes as Bataille does, Baudrillard accounts for the excess of energy in the system arising from,

a continual higher bidding in exchange – the symbolic process that can be found in the work of Mauss, not that of the gift…but that of the counter-gift. This is the single truly symbolic process, which in fact implies death as a kind of maximal excess – but not as individual ecstasy, always as the maximal principle of social exchange.88

There is no need to appeal to fundamental processes or forces. Instead Baudrillard looks to the cycles of symbolic exchange in which the stakes, affective and material, grow higher and higher, spiraling out of control. It is in this cycle in which the sacrificial object accrues more and more symbolic meaning that Baudrillard sees the generation of abundance.

For Baudrillard this is the fatal flaw in Bataille, for he has critically misunderstood primitive exchange. Bataille is unable to conceive of destruction except in terms of its relation to production. Baudrillard claims Bataille’s notions of expenditure are still too economic, acting as merely the “flip side of accumulation.”89

Baudrillard goes beyond the notion of surplus in his understanding of expenditure in symbolic exchange. Bataille talks of a surplus to be expended, while Baudrillard insists that primitive peoples have no concept of surplus, and that to theorize them in such terms is to remain within the bounds of political economy. Baudrillard thus seeks a radical defiance, which he sees lacking in Bataille: “The root of sacrifice and of general economy is never pure and simple expenditure – or whatever drive of excess that supposedly comes to us from nature – but is an incessant process of challenge.”90 Noting, as 88 Baudrillard, “When Bataille Attacked the Metaphysical Principle of Economy,” p. 61.



Mauss does, that symbolic exchange goes on with the gods as well as other people, the challenge for Baudrillard is a sacrifice that acts as a provocation to the gods to reciprocate abundantly.91 Symbolic exchange thus draws on the cycle of gift and counter-gift, the potlatch and the kula, of excess, abundance, and destruction. It is only these, Baudrillard, argues, that can issue a significant, credible threat to political economy. Baudrillard looks to the gift and its radical powers in primitive symbolic exchange, and it is this point that we must turn to an investigation of the gift itself.

91 Mauss, The Gift, p. 15-16, Baudrillard, “When Bataille Attacked the Metaphysical Principle of Economy,” p. 61. Mauss writes, “The relationships that exist between these contracts and exchanges among humans and those between men and the gods throw light on a whole aspect of the theory of sacrifice. First, they are perfectly understood, particularly in those societies in which, although contractual and economic rituals are practised between men, these men are the masked incarnations, often Shaman priest-sorcerers, possessed by the spirit whose name they bear. In reality, they merely act as representatives of the spirits, because these exchanges and contracts not only bear people and things along in their wake, but also the sacred being that, to a greater or lesser extent, are associated with them.”

Chapter Three – “The Soul of Things: Primitive Exchange and the Economic”

“Things sold still have a soul.” – Marcel Mauss, The Gift92

It is the trajectory of the object that is at stake in these critiques; the object is never itself, but is purported to be so. What role does the object play? What power does it possess, what relationship does it create in its exchange? Marx decries the cold, unfeeling relations of economic exchange, and seeks to find a good use of the object, a natural use for it. Mauss reveals the power within the object that once given compels its return, he describes these social implications of the gift-object as being the soul of the soul. He seeks an acknowledgement of this soul, a soul which has been frozen out of interested economic exchange in Western society. The soul disappears for these objects, their power to bind people together is gone. In a somewhat similar fashion, the object for Bataille is sumptuous and abundant, bursting forth with radiant energy, and in it he tries to (re)find a for the object a destiny not of use, but of expenditure and waste. Bataille through general economy pursues the object from production to consumption, and attempts to overturn the morality of political economy and its strictures for the object. Bataille’s anti-economism is not limited to the object. The motif of the sacrificial looms large in Bataille’s writings, with death as the limit of expenditure; death must be risked for all meaning, for any pleasure. This for Bataille, is the lesson of the primitive.93

Baudrillard, Bataille, and Mauss view primitive exchange as the “other” to the economic, as the impassioned, hot practice which thaws



the abstracted cold relations of political economy. The gift contains an affective energy in its symbolic practice, an energy that rational exchange marginalizes, freezes out. But can the gift be what it purports to be? Can it rupture the circuits of economy? Does the gift possess a binding energy that is absent in the economic? The gift’s power is in the symbolic; it is this power that Derrida investigates in Given Time: Is such a gift possible? The semantics of the gift become paramount in Derrida’s critique; Mauss, Bataille, and Baudrillard assume that the gift lies outside economic exchange because the gift is presupposed to be motivated by something other than the cold rational logic of economy. This warm, affective process of expenditure in which one must risk everything, when even one’s own death must be on offer, is viewed as wholly different from economic exchange because the sense of rational self-interest seems to be completely absent in these rituals of prestige. Derrida refuses to grant this assumption; for him, the gift as such is impossible. The hot practice of gift/counter-gift that Mauss, Bataille, and Baudrillard seek outside of the economic is bound inseparably to the cold ratio of the economic, but it is not merely that the gift is economic. Rather the gift destabilizes the hot and the cold, it makes a distinction between the two impossible.

For Mauss, Bataille, and Baudrillard, the gift and its symbolic power are found in the cycle of exchange. Derrida sees this circle as the economic itself. He puts forward that the economic implies return, a return to center: “the law of the economy is the – circular – return to the point of departure, to the origin, also to the home.”94 This is the basis of exchange; it implies the exchange of equivalents such that neither person in the act comes away having received more than they 94 Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993) p. 7.

have given. Lyotard notes this as well, writing that “the theory of every market…is that there is nothing to be gained, that every exchange and the balance of every account is nil.”95 The gift must defy this logic, for it requires that the donor come away from the exchange with less and that the donee come away with more than they arrived with, and that the donor does not give with the expectation of receiving something, for this would not be gift, this would just be interested exchange. The gift’s logic ruptures exchange and flouts symmetry and reciprocity, for the gift to be gift, it must demand nothing in return. In this way the gift tries to escape the circle of exchange, it must be aneconomic, it must not fall into the circular time of economic exchange in which each act of giving enjoins a reciprocation.96 The economic in this sense commands time, for it designates a time of return; the gift must destroy this time.97

These conditions of the gift also indicate its impossibility; the gift is filled with an ambiguity from which it must be divested. The ideal of the gift is that it is an offering given with no self-interest in mind, with no expectation of gain, or of a counter-gift; the gift, while often assumed to always be good, “can also be bad, poisonous, and this from the moment the gift puts the other in debt, with the result that giving amounts to hurting, doing harm.”98 Because of this Derrida contends that, “the gift…is annulled each time there is restitution or counter-gift,” for any gift which has been reciprocated is a gift given under obligation.99 If the gift generates any meaning – that is, if the gift creates obligation – then the gift cannot be gift:

Each time, according to the same circular ring that leads 95 Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, p. 159

96 Derrida, Given Time, p. 7.




to ‘giving back’, there is payment and discharge of a debt. In this logic of the debt, the circulation of a good or of goods is not only the circulation of the ‘things’ that we will have offered to each other, but even of the values or the symbols that are involved there and the intentions to give, whether they are conscious or unconscious…There is gift, if there is any, only in what interrupts the system as well as the symbol, in a partition without return and without division, without being-with-self of the gift-counter-gift.100

This leads to a paradoxical situation in which the donee must not recognize the gift as such, they must not become obligated by the gift. No symbolic relationship can arise from the exchange, the gift cannot become a marker of an interaction, the power of the gift to compel reciprocation that Mauss identifies must be hindered.

It is this disinterested yet obligatory nature of the gift, this gift which when given exercises upon the donee a compulsion to reciprocate, that intrigues Mauss, for it implies a radically different understanding of exchange. The object is not given in order to get another in return. Rather than marking the end of the relationship between the individuals, the act of exchange marks the initiation and extension of that relationship. Baudrillard argues that the object of exchange is not important per se, for anything could be the object of exchange, but at the same time, once exchanged, no other object can signify that relation; it is “arbitrary, and yet absolutely singular.”101

What Mauss identifies as the spirit or soul that inhabits the object is the symbolic aspect of exchange, Baudrillard sees as what makes the object of symbolic exchange not an object: “It is inseparable from the concrete relation in which it is exchanged, the transferential pact that it seals between two persons: it is thus not independent as such. It has properly speaking, neither use value, nor (economic) exchange value.

100 Derrida, Given Time, p. 12-13.


The object given has symbolic exchange value.”102 This animus of the object – the intangible force which Mauss believes embodies the obligation to return– is identified by Baudrillard as the unconscious symbolic relationship that the object creates/embodies between the individuals involved.

Yet for Baudrillard, the gift is what engenders meaning, it is the symbol of a relationship; to deny this aspect of the gift is to succumb to the structural logic of the sign. In the Baudrillardian idea of symbolic exchange, the materials of exchange are not autonomous or dissociable from the relationship (the gift is not iterable; there can be no repetition of the gift-object as anything except gift-object), thus it can be neither a commodity nor a sign.103 Derrida counters this; for the gift to be, it must not become the symbol of a sacrifice. The gift must be forgotten, Derrida writes, there must be a “forgetting of forgetting” such that both parties to the exchange are not cognizant of the gift, it must not signify or symbolize a gift in any way.104 This is because,

From the moment the gift would appear as gift, as such, as what it is, in its phenomenon, its sense and its essence, it would be engaged in a symbolic, sacrificial, or economic structure that would annul the gift in the ritual cycle of the debt. The simple intention to give, insofar as it carries the intentional meaning of the gift, suffices to make a return payment to oneself. The simple consciousness of the gift right away sends itself back to the gratifying image of goodness or generosity, of the giving-being who, knowing itself to be such, recognizes itself in a circular, specular fashion, in a sort of auto-recognition, self-approval, and narcissistic gratitude.105


103 Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, p. 64-5.

104 Derrida, Given Time, pp. 15, 23.


For Derrida, any intentionality on the part of the subjects of exchange renders the gift meaningless and thrusts it, at least partially, into the realm of the economic, of interested exchange.

What is this gift that cannot be? Must the gift be abandoned even if it cannot aspire to be a purely disinterested gesture? Baudrillard is not troubled by this paradox of the gift; the gift that is the object of symbolic exchange disappears in order to assume value as symbol. The gift is a Hegelian formulation in that it embodies a relationship of both distance and proximity, it binds the individuals together and indicates their existence as autonomous individuals: the gift is “always love and aggression,” it is a symbolic gesture which is hot, alive and connecting.106 The gift in Baudrillard is never unilateral, it always a part of a process of symbolic exchange and is always expected to be reciprocated. For this reason it cannot be troubled by intentionality, as this symbolic power is generated through the cycle of gift-counter-gift. Derrida would ask then: Why call this gift? Why pretend that such a level of generosity and excess is involved when, although the stakes may be high in gift exchange, they are never as high as Mauss, Bataille, and Baudrillard would have us believe. This is because there is no original gift in symbolic exchange. As Gasché notes in his essay “Heliocentric Exchange,” the donor need never risk giving a gift that won’t be returned because they know that they are already within a cycle of exchange. In turn, the value of sacrifice is diminished because there is less at stake. Mauss never wonders why the first gift is given or how this original obligation arises, Gasché further notes that: “To explain the reasons why the donor gives, to account for that act of which Mauss says that it too is obligatory, would be to show that the donor is already in the game at the start of the game. That is, his prestation is always already a counter-106 Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, p. 65.

prestation.”107 Obscuring the originary moment of exchange demolishes the Maussian framework of gift-counter-gift; the gift, which derives such symbolic power from sacrifice, both requires an original sacrifice and must deny that an original sacrifice exists.

* * *

Baudrillard believes that capitalism and its prevailing mode of productivism have been chipping away at the symbolic throughout history. He writes that, “Labor is defined (anthropologically and historically) as the force that disinvests the body and social exchange of all ambivalent and symbolic qualities, reducing them to a rational, positive, unilateral investment.”108 Semio-political economy and its law of equivalence obliterates the symbolic aspect of existence: it cannot account for anything which escapes the system of value, for expenditure without utility. Only through remembering the symbolic can a challenge to capitalism be issued.

Despite the drive of commodity to dominate everything under general equivalence, there is one thing Baudrillard believes that can never be absorbed by political economy: Death. Death, the expenditure which cannot be made profitable, is incomprehensible to political economy. Because it cannot be governed by equivalence, death cannot be given meaning in political economy, according to Baudrillard,

[f]or political economy only exists by default: death is its blind spot, the absence haunting all its calculations. And the absence of death alone permits the exchange of values and the play of equivalences. An infinitesimal injection of death would immediately create such excess and ambivalence that the play of value would completely collapse. Political economy is an economy of death, because it economises on death and buries its discourse.109

107 Rodolphe Gasché, “Heliocentric Exchange,” in The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity, ed. Alan D. Schrift (New York: Routledge, 1997) p. 111.


109 Baudrillard, Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (London,

Symbolic exchange is the process of generating meaning for death. Death is at the heart of this symbolic process, and it is death’s role as the absolute expenditure that provides it with such symbolic power. It is death, the absence of meaning, the non-presence which cannot be represented through language, that is at the heart of symbolic exchange. The function of symbolic exchange is to embody a social relationship which generates meaning for death, for death can never be fully accounted for in language or in political economy. Baudrillard argues that primitive cultures view death not as the end of motion, as a cold frozen moment, but rather as a charged, meaningful, and symbolic state. The domination of life by political economy means the obliteration of differences which were previously unified under symbolic exchange; the dead, who were inconvertible with the living but shared a relationship with them, are excluded.110 Death, which had previously been imbued with meaning in the symbolic relationship between the living and the dead, is divested of meaning and becomes thus the one state which general equivalence cannot bring under its system.

Baudrillard’s adherence to symbolic exchange is nostalgic; for him, the symbolic is the guarantor of meaning that the sign cannot be. The object of symbolic exchange is submerged and comes to embody a relationship, and only that relationship; when the object does not, at best it can only be a sign that refers to the absence of such a relationship. The sign, as opposed to the symbol, only represents an absence of meaning. Symbolic exchange has a transparency of relations that is obscured in the abstracted political economy of the commodity. This absent relationship serves for Baudrillard the

Thousand Oaks, CA, New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 1993) p. 154.

110 Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, p. 126.

function of a lost signified, of the missing relationship among individuals that the commodity erodes. He writes that, “the object-become-sign no longer gathers meaning in the concrete relationship between two people. It assumes its meaning in its differential relation to other signs.”111 The symbolic meaning of the gift arises from the sacrifice that is inherent in the act of giving and the loss without return that this sacrifice embodies. It is this element of risk that is compulsory and impossible, because for the sacrifice to assume meaning it must represent a genuine gesture of expenditure, yet this risk is virtually done away with when gift-giving is part of a process of cyclical exchange in which a counter-gift is expected and generally assured. Under capitalism, Baudrillard states, society has forgotten the symbolic, and consequently finds itself divested of the affective meaningfulness that permeates primitive culture.

Yet, this gift embodies a contradiction that Baudrillard cannot resolve. For if the gift assumes its meaning from its status as the object of a sacrifice, of an expenditure, then for it to maintain this status, Derrida points out that neither party to this event can recognize the gift for what it is. The implication is that the gift cannot take place between between subjects who are cognizant of the gift as gift, the gift must seek its place “before any relation to any subject.” It is safe to say then, that, “a consistent discourse on the gift becomes impossible.”112 The gift portrays the ambivalence of the object of exchange, of an object-of-sacrifice that must and must not symbolize, in order to be what it is and is not. Because of this Lyotard argues that gift exchange belongs properly to semiology, and as with Derrida, that we are left thus with the Lacanian problematization of the subject, of an exchange which presupposes subjects but also makes 111 Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, p. 66.


them impossible.113 Gift exchange both institutes a relationship and necessitates one, leaving us in a position of not being able to identify an originary moment for the symbolic relationship. Still in a system of general equivalence, the gift is stuck in an affective process of circulation, with each exchange imbuing it with meaning; it is a substitution, a symbol which carries meaning, but like the signifier this gift-as-symbol can only mask its lack, its very meaninglessness, and this, Lyotard says, is a problematic which, “carries with it the entire philosophy of the subject, the philosophy of a body haunted by self-appropriation and property since the theory of communication is obviously just another piece of economic theory.”114 Rather than escaping value and general equivalence, symbolic exchange, is actually at the heart of this system, despite Baudrillard’s claims that it exists outside the semiotic; it is in itself a system of substitution and exchange, it follows economy to the letter.

Baudrillard’s critique of Marx is based in part upon Marx’s misunderstanding of primitive societies. According to Baudrillard, Marx inserts primitive societies into a historical time which is transcendent and universal. Baudrillard looks toward primitive societies as a way out of their respective dilemmas in understanding and opposing political economy, and in turn ends up creating his own metaphysical structure, in which he contrasts primitive societies, with their organic wholeness, to the meaningless and alienation of semio-political economy. Lyotard comments that for both of them the primitive is viewed as the mode in which the alienated, “inorganic” body under capitalism becomes whole.115 The primitive is held out as “paradise” for this “inorganic” body, a paradise which

Baudrillard imagines as a body impassioned with intense 113 Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, p. 122. See also Lacan’s Seminar on “The Purloined Letter.”

114 Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, p. 122-23.


ambivalences, anterior to all political economy, and which Marx – although he comes round to this from the other perspective, precisely that of political economy – still suffers from because he needs it, in his critical perspective, as the quasi-exteriority on which all critique relies in order to criticize its object.116

Each theorist must posit something ‘outside’ in order to formulate his critique of political economy, and in each it is a vision of the organic body. The organic body for Marx is the producing body which is not separated from the world of his creation, and for Baudrillard it is the body invested with symbolic meanings, not the arbitrariness of equivalence.

Lyotard charges Baudrillard with being guilty of nostalgia, of fantasizing about a primitive social existence that never was. This idealization of the primitive is a long standing theme in Western thought. Where are these organic societies? Lyotard seizes upon this in Baudrillard, arguing that in fact “there are no primitive societies,” that they serve for Baudrillard as a “lost referent”:

this society of the gift and counter-gift plays, in Baudrillard’s thought, the role of a reference (lost of course), of an alibi (which cannot be found), in his critique of capital. Baudrillard does not mean to speak of nature or naturality. How is it that he does not see that the whole problematic of the gift, of symbolic exchange, such as he receives it from Mauss, with or without the diversions of Bataille, Caillois, Lacan, belongs in its entirety to Western racism and imperialism – that it is still ethnology’s good savage, slightly libidinalized, which he inherits with the concept?117

This is an understandable outcome of Baudrillard’s attempts to locate outside of political economy something with which to challenge it. Baudrillard, inspired by Mauss’ work in the anthropology of primitive 116 Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, p. 131.


exchange (which insists that this primitive exchange is not economic), must have been convinced that he had found a pre-economic logic that could strike at the heart of capitalism, which Marxism had failed to attack.

And what of exchange? Why is a variant on exchange (or the original form of it, either way) seen as the escape route from production and the economic? This preference for symbolic exchange, which Baudrillard looks to as the way out of general equivalence, is still trapped in the cycle of value, according to Lyotard:

To criticize production is necessarily also to criticize exchange, all exchange, its concept. Exchange is no less ‘humanist’ than production. If we must get away from production, and we must, let’s also give exchange the slip, the instantiation of fluxes and affects on these exchange-entities. Circulation is no less suspect than production, it is only as Marx well knew, a particular case of production taken in the broad sense.118

Rather than replace one metaphysical motif for another, as Baudrillard does, Lyotard challenges the centrality of both production and exchange, challenging the structuralist tradition of those such as Levi-Strauss who would place exchange at the very center of human existence, as human existence itself. Unlike Baudrillard, who tries to find an alternative to political economy in symbolic exchange, Lyotard displaces more than he replaces; he offers no practice in substitution.

Lyotard, by claiming that he is not interested in critique, is seemingly able to escape this need to ground himself in an external referent.119 Yet in generating his critique, Lyotard perhaps unwittingly shows libidinal economy as the truth of economy. Geoff Bennington writes that, “Lyotard needs a system which it is difficult to explain as



truer or more adequate, but which might be said to be more powerful: and he thinks that he can find one by thinking about force or power as such, in the form of energy or libido.”120 Isn’t he making a certain economic gesture in ascertaining that it is this libidinal economy which underwrites both symbolic exchange and political economy? One economy for two? The strength in Lyotard’s use of the libidinal comes from demonstrating the difficulties in drawing a boundary between capitalist society and the pre- or non-capitalist, where he asserts that, “There is as much libidinal intensity in capitalist exchange as in the alleged ‘symbolic’ exchange.”121 This line is moved to suit the particular critique, which is something that Marx and Baudrillard are both guilty of: “[R]e-placing a frontier allows changes in the designations of the countries situated on either side; hence it will no longer be: capitalist-economy versus precapitalist economy, it will be: political economy or equivalence versus symbolic exchange or ambivalence; but the system of oppositions remains the same.”122 Each theorist retains a distinction between the whole and the divided, Baudrillard does not make a break with Marx so much as redefine and resituate the referent of the primitive within Marxist theory. By reading Marx for the libidinal, Lyotard finds the weakness in Baudrillard’s critique, for both Marx and Baudrillard look for a place to attack their quarry that is libidinally whole, Marx finding it in the precapitalist, Baudrillard finding it in symbolic exchange.

Is there heat in capitalism? Does it possess, as Lyotard asserts a libidinal warmth that these critiques of political economy have contended it does not? Lyotard directly counters Baudrillard, stating

120

Geoff Bennington, Lyotard: Writing the Event (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988) p. 14-15.

121 Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, p. 109. This quotation was originally italicized.


that capitalism, rather than being barren of the symbolic, is permeated by it in the form of libidinal energies. He asks: What is the desire that underpins political economy? Is there one at all? Lyotard returns to Marx, and rather than attempt to find the truth of Marx, as he accuses Baudrillard of trying to do, Lyotard proposes to read Marx, “as a madness and not as a theory,” wishing to find “what there is of the libido in Marx.”123 Lyotard, in a move which decisively breaks with the Marxist orthodoxy of the ’68 generation, decries all those who would attack Marx for remaining hopelessly within the bounds of political economy. These attacks, he argues, act as if there was some realm outside of political economy from which to find a pure, untainted symbolic relationship. Theorists such as Baudrillard, he writes, assail Marxism for its exclusion of symbolic exchange, its vain search for,

a relation between persons which would not be subordinated to the considerations of the product, but would be entirely governed by symbolic exchange, entirely centered on the exhaustion of libidinal resources of love and death in a give-and-take heedless of the conservation of goods, heedless of power, bound up with rekindling force at all costs.124

Baudrillard supposes that this symbolic relationship is entirely outside of the economic, but Lyotard contends that the purity of symbolic exchange for which Baudrillard looks is nowhere to be found. Combating economic logic by trying to find something that precedes it, or that is more wholesome or fulfilling or less alienating or more libidinal, is a dead end.

The fault that Lyotard sees is in obscuring the reality of political economy as a libidinal economy, as an economy underwritten with desire. This is what Marxism and its legacy has suppressed. This

123 Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, pp. 95, 96.


distinction between political economy and symbolic economy cannot be drawn because:

there is no external reference, even if immanent, from which the separation of what belongs to capital (or political economy) and what belongs to subversion (or libidinal economy), can always be made, and cleanly; where desire would be clearly legible, where its proper economy would not be scrambled.125

The clean separation that Baudrillard makes, that he must make for him to be able to set something up in opposition to political economy, cannot be made. The pure libidinal economy of the primitive does not exist; rather this libidinal economy is embedded, however fragmented, in political economy as well. Lyotard summarizes this as: “Not merely: there is no other ‘regional’ reference, but: capitalism is also a primitive society, or: the primitive society is also capitalism.”126

Capitalism, far from being the symbolically bankrupt system that Baudrillard believes it to be, is actually, Lyotard argues, wrought through with libidinal energies. Baudrillard condemns Marx for seeing the primitive only in terms of ideal production, while he himself is only able to see the primitive in terms of ideal exchange; he just defers the organic from production to exchange. Lyotard contends that symbolic exchange is not outside of the logic of political economy, it reproduces the metaphysics of political economy as well. He writes that its

indisputable intensities are also read in terms of order, and even of the return to order, that the tensions which all at once inscribe themselves at the extremities or at the centre of the social surface fully participate in the sense that they do not in any way subvert it, but literally compose it, and thus circulate in it as exchangeable, intelligible, semiotic signs.127

Just as symbolic exchange actually contains within it the logic of 125 Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, p. 108.



political economy, capitalism contains within it much of the libidinal energy that Baudrillard would associate with symbolic exchange alone. Lyotard points out that, “Isn’t fetishism an opportunity for intensities?”128 And in a passage that Bennington describes as having caused Lyotard to be accused of having “moved over to the extreme Right, of writing an apologia of voluntary servitude,”129 Lyotard contends that laborers in nineteenth-century Britain left the countryside to move to cities and engage in the drudgery, misery, and peril of working in the new factories that sprung up during the industrial revolution, not because they were afraid of dying of starvation, but because the experience contained a certain jouissaince; that is, they enjoyed it.130

Refusing to identify an unalienated state from which to ground critique, Lyotard abandons critique, or at least critique as we know it. It is not that Lyotard is in favor of capitalism, as a simplistic reading of Libidinal Economy would hold, but that no critique of capitalism can ignore its libidinal aspect, one which can be quite strong at times. Lyotard calls for an abandonment of the critiques that have been made up to this point. He writes that,

we must put a stop to the critique of capital, stop accusing it of libidinal coldness or pulsional monovalence, stop accusing it of not being an organic body, of not being a natural immediate relation of the terms it brings into play…and so understand that there never has been an organic body, an immediate relation, nor a nature in the sense of an established site of affects, and that the (in)organic body is a representation on the stage of the theatre of capital itself.131

Like Derrida’s notion of the commodity generating a concept of utility,


129 Bennington, Lyotard: Writing the Event, p. 40.



of a natural object, Lyotard points out that it is capitalism which dissimulates the idea of a space outside of itself. Marxism’s fatal flaw is to never realize this. In response to this predicament, Lyotard calls for replacing “the term critique by an attitude closer to what we effectively experience in our current relations with capital…a horrified fascination for the entire range of dispositifs of jouissance.”132 Lyotard refuses to try to find a space outside of capitalism from which to ground a critique. Multiple attempts to rewrite Marx have fallen into this trap which Lyotard seeks to avoid; any critique which seeks to oppose some unseparated, unalienated form of existence to capitalism, whether it be Marx’s communist mode of production, Debord’s directly lived reality, or Baudrillard’s symbolic exchange will always be misguided, for this organic existence is impossible.


Chapter Four – “The End of Equivalence?”

Where Baudrillard insists on locating the truth of the gift (in the symbolic relation it represents), Derrida refuses to make such a demarcation. The obligation that Baudrillard sees arising from the gift, the obligation which underlies the system of primitive symbolic exchange, is also what renders the gift not gift. Derrida writes that,

Mauss reminds us that there is no gift without bond, without bind, without obligation and ligature; but on the other hand, there is no gift without that does not have to untie itself from obligation, debt, contract, exchange, and thus from the bind. But after all, what would be a gift that fulfills the condition of the gift, namely, that it not appear as gift, that it not be, exist, signify, want-to-say as gift, a gift without intention to give? Why would we still call that a gift?133

The gift must appear not to appear, its appearance must be its disappearance; it can never be fully present as itself for to do so would be to make itself not itself. The status of the gift here is akin to the rhetorical status of the sign, as neither can exist as a positivity, as a meaning-in-themselves, but only as a displacement and a continual deferral. This is precisely what Baudrillard strives so hard to conclude about the gift: he wishes it to engage in a “positive relation,” for it to institute and cement a relationship between the object and its meaning.134

Derrida cannot recognize this positive relation; rather than yearn for a gift which can generate meaning, Derrida confronts this


134 Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, p. 161. What Baudrillard upholds is that the disjunctive relation of signifier and signified does not exist in symbolic exchange; it is only when the symbol ceases to organize and hold meaning, when it ceases to be a symbol, that it becomes a sign. In this way symbolic exchange functions something like the phallus does in Lacan, as the guarantor of meaning; it is symbolic exchange which ties down the aribtrary sign to its meaning; its meaning is meaning. Derrida in his article “The Purveyor of Truth,” attacks Lacan’s use of a phallogocentrism, this positing of a transcendental signifier. Baudrillard does not state that the symbolic is transcendental, but it does seem to have a transcendental function in his theorization of symbolic exchange in that it must escape the logic of the sign. See Lacan’s “Seminar on the Purloined Letter.”

paradox of the gift head on. He writes that, “The gift itself – we dare not say the gift in itself – will never be confused with the presence of its phenomenon.”135 Yet if “the gift is another name of the impossible,” it is still with us, we still “think it, we name it, we desire it, we intend it.”136 How is it that we are posed with this paradox of the gift at all, how is it that we are able to think it, name it desire it, and intend it? Derrida writes that perhaps we have these notions of the gift, “only there where there is this movement still for thinking, desiring, naming that which gives itself neither to be known, experienced, not lived…In this sense one can think, desire, and say only the impossible, according to the measureless measure of the impossible.”137 But because the gift cannot be found in itself, Derrida examines its trajectory from the place of its disappearance, its supposed point of departure, the circle of exchange; he looks for a starting point in the place of the circle, yet as the circle has no starting point, this is to look for the impossible in the impossible. A dangerous venture.

Looking for the impossible in the impossible suggests that the “theory of the gift is powerless,” and that one must risk unmeaning, one must, “engage oneself in this thinking, commit oneself to it, give it tokens of faith, and with one’s person, risk entering into the destructive circle.”138 The risk must be run, the circle must be entered, Derrida writes, one cannot refuse the precepts of the gift: “Know still what giving wants to say, know how to give, know what you want to give, know how the gift annuls itself, commit yourself even if commitment is the destruction of the gift by the gift, give economy its





chance.”139 The economic is not so easily disrupted; the gift is not the outside of exchange, it is not the place from which to critique the economic that Baudrillard wants it to be. Rather Derrida contends that it is this notion of exteriority, this thinking of the gift, “that sets the circle going, it is this exteriority that puts the economic in motion. It is this exteriority that engages the circle and makes it turn.”140 This exteriority is inseverably linked to the circle of the economic; the gift underlies it, for despite its aspirations to escape economy, the gift’s more mundane fate is exchange. The circle is set in motion by the gift through the imposition of obligation, by the reciprocation that is compelled. However, Derrida is careful not to lead us to infer that the gift is the originary moment of exchange. Just like Gasché, Derrida is skeptical of the Original Gift:

If one must render an account (to science, to reason, to philosophy, to the economy of meaning) of the circle effects in which a gift gets annulled, this account-rendering requires that one take into account that which, while not simply belonging to the circle, engages in it and sets off its motion. What is the gift as the prime mover of the circle? And how does it contract itself into a circular contract? And from what place? Since when? From whom?141

For while the value of the gift is as that which escapes the circle, it is the annulling of the gift which makes this circle of economic possible. The original gift is impossible, for the gift can only be gift if it disrupts this circle, and at the same time this circle can only be brought about if the gift remains stuck within the circle. No originary moment can be identified.

It is to a certain extent this realization that the gift is always caught up in a constantly accelerating cycle of gift and counter-gift




that fuels Baudrillard’s critique of political economy, for it is in this logic that he seeks to confront capitalism. It is this surety of the counter-gift and its logic of reversal (i.e. that any gesture can be reversed or reciprocated) that Baudrillard contends has come to dominate society.142 The structural law of value and its mode of general equivalence reigns. Baudrillard writes, “Everywhere, in every domain, a single form predominates: reversibility, cyclical reversal and annulment put an end to the linearity of time, language, economic exchange, accumulation, and power.”143 Baudrillard critiques the circle itself, this circle which traps the gift that he wishes to destroy, the same circle as gift which he seeks to challenge.

Contending that capitalism has abolished the real and now extends it as a mode of simulation that plays into its logic, Baudrillard wonders where the terrain of contestation must lie. Dominated by the structural law of value, that is by the same sort of logic of equivalence that rules the sign, Baudrillard believes that we live under the simulation and hyperreality of its code. The logic of the code is the abolition of reality and the infinite exchangeability and convertibility of everything – commodities, politics, religion, science, labor. The power of the code is that it alone possesses the ability to give under this regime, as it gives, according to Baudrillard, “the gift of work…a gift of the media and messages, which due to the monopoly of the code, nothing is allowed to retort; the gift, everywhere and at every instant, of the social.”144 How to disrupt the code? Baudrillard sees no recourse in a dialectical strategy of proletarian revolution, as this only engages the code on the realm of the real, which is a realm of its own devisement.145 Instead, Baudrillard wants a higher-order strategy, one 142 Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, p. 2.




that wrests the gift from the code, one which turns the principle of its power against the system itself: the impossibility of responding or retorting. To defy the system with a gift to which it cannot respond save by its own collapse and death. Nothing, not even the system, can avoid the symbolic obligation, and it is in this trap that the only chance of a catastrophe for capital remains…For it is summoned to answer, if it is not to lose face, to what can only be death. The system must itself commit suicide in response to the multiplied challenge of death and suicide.146

The gift must thus risk all in order to gain all; Baudrillard here delves into the symbolic in order to issue a challenge to what he sees as the total supremacy of the sign in contemporary society. It is the sign’s logic of dissimulation which is countered by sacrifice in the symbolic, for only through a gesture which tries to beat the system of general equivalence can there be provocation: the system has forgotten the counter-gift. Baudrillard is here to return it.

But for the gift to be the provocation that Baudrillard wants it to be, it must first be gift, it must be able to present itself as such. What then of this gift which must be gift? Derrida affirms that we must “render an account” of this simulacrum of the gift, this gift which lacks an Original, this gift that is to break the cycle.147 He wonders, “Whence comes the law that obligates one to give even as one renders an account of the gift? In other words, to answer still for a gift that calls beyond all responsibility?”148 How do we account for a gift which demands the rupture of logos, when to make such a demand is




madness itself?149 Derrida asks,How, without madness, can one desire the forgetting of that which will have been, like the gift, a gift without ambivalence, a gift that would not be a pharmakon or a poisoned present but a good, a good that would not be an object (a good given as a thing) but the good of the gift, of giving or donation itself?150

Because of this the gift is “at once reason and unreason,” it contains within itself the “madness of the rational logos, that madness of the economic circle.”151 This gift, which is the supplement that must be abolished, destabilizes the circle of economy (which is the cycle of return, of balance, of settling accounts) both by being that which would disrupt this returning, and is also what, “entails the circle, makes it turn without end, gives it its movement, a movement that the circle and the ring can never comprehend or annul.”152 Which is the madness? “Is madness the economic circulation annulling the gift in equivalence? Or is it the excess, the expenditure, or the destruction?”153

To interrogate this madness Derrida returns to Mauss and his formulations on the gift, asserting that Mauss conflates the gift and exchange, arguing that, “the apparent, visible contradiction of these two values—gift and exchange—must be problematized.”154 The gift and its counter-gift, two actions seemingly linked, are also diametrically opposed, for it is the counter-gift which makes the gift not gift, it is the counter-gift that makes exchange exchange. These two are linked in and through time, by the temporality which joins







them, as the gift prescribes a period of time for its return. The gift must not be returned right away, but this reciprocation must not be put off indefinitely either. Derrida writes that,

In Mauss’s view, the term forms the original and essential feature of the gift. The interval of this delay to deadline allows Mauss to pass unnoticed over that contradiction between the gift and exchange on which I have insisted so much and which leads to madness in the case both where the gift must remain foreign to circular exchange as well as where it is pulled into that exchange, unless it is the gift itself that does the pulling.155

The term and the deferral that the gift gives is, within the logic of the gift, a force of the object which both temporalizes and temporizes.156

As the gift cannot give itself, Derrida concludes that the gift can only give “to the extent it gives time,” which is the difference between the gift and other forms of exchange.157

Derrida says that it is these temporal aspects of the gift that Mauss struggles with, for it is there that he tries to find what distinguishes the gift from credit, debt, and payment. Mauss doesn’t want to reduce the gift to the “objective values of exchange”; rather he wishes to recognize the originary nature of the gift and to show how its symbolicity “runs throughout cold economic reason.”158

Derrida argues that Mauss is unable to contain the madness of the gift in his writing, for despite his attempts to constrain it and isolate it as the originator of value, and thus as the beginning of the economic, the gift is itself a surfeit of meanings and implications. The gift cannot be everything that it must be, yet it must be. This madness, Derrida writes, “burn[s] up the very meaning of the gift; at the very least it threatens the presumed semantic unity that authorizes one to 155 Derrida, Given Time, p. 40.



158 Derrida, Given Time, p. 42

continue speaking of the gift.”159 This unity can only be maintained, Derrida writes, by the extension of credit to others in order to speak of the gift.160 So then in order for the gift to be understood, it must act as a sort of general equivalent: “There must be a general equivalent of the given if one is to understand what happens with the gift in general and how gifts and exchanges in general are ordered—and, finally, what the Thing given is.”161 This positing of a general equivalent places the gift firmly within the realm of the economic; the gift, which Baudrillard would identify for its very singularity, must already be in the system of equivalence before its disparate meanings and functions can be unified.

Such a unification of these contradictory meanings leads to Mauss’s attempt to navigate a middle course for the gift, which Derrida says roots Mauss firmly in a notion of a natural, archaic society based on a morality of the gift.162 Mauss views this morality of the gift as an inheritance from archaic society, Derrida writes; these societies understood the gift(s) of nature and the necessity of return: “From giving nature, one must learn to give, in a manner that is both generous and ordered; and by giving as nature says one must give, one will mark the right equivalence. This equivalence is nothing other than that of the giving-returning or of the giving-taking.”163 It is in this mode of equivalence that Mauss tries to rediscover the archaic morality that he believes points the way to a better society, a society founded on a more just morality of balance and generosity. This archaic morality of giving as much as one gets lies at the heart of Mauss’s work; Derrida writes that in Mauss, the “equivalence of the 159 Derrida, Given Time, p. 45.





taken and the given is posed, it is a thesis and a theme.”164 But this implies that equivalence does not yet exist and needs to be established: “There is at the outset neither real equivalence nor semantic equivalence: To give does not mean to take—on the contrary!”165 Derrida points out that for Mauss there must be equivalence, for latent in the imbalance that the gift creates is the assumption that there is a state of parity between the gift and counter-gift.166 Yet the very premise that a return to balance would be a good thing generates an abundance that makes equivalence impossible.167 It is this notion of equivalence which puts itself in equivalence with a state of non-equivalence that Derrida argues must be confronted.168 Mauss’s morality of the gift risks meaninglessness for it cannot strike a balance between these ambivalences, it is not able to distinguish between equivalence and non-equivalence. This madness of the gift that gives an equivalence between non-equivalence and equivalence signifies that all bets are off.






Conclusion – “The Lukewarm”

The hot is discovered to be lukewarm. Marxism and symbolic exchange are both unveiled to be in some form political economies, but more importantly we can see that there is no pure heat, no critical theory of the fiery hot. Every object, every exchange has an-other to it, some measure of equivalence lurking in it. Absolute heterogeneity is nowhere to be found. The critical theory of political economy has always tried to speak from this other place of heterogeneity, of fixed meaning and non-equivalence. But where is this outside of political economy? What escapes equivalence? To find this outside, the critiques of political economy have tried to isolate the before of economy, to establish the conditions that existed before commodity exchange. Marx tries to do this when he searches for the object before the commodity, in the form of natural utility. The relationship with the object is considered harmonious, and it is this relationship of production that Marx seeks to refind in the proletarian revolution in which alienation would end and humanity/subject would once again be reunited with the earth/object. But this object in itself can never be found; it is already subject to equivalence no matter at which point one begins looking. The principles of conservation, utility, and production at the heart of political economy are never challenged in Marx, nor are his provocations towards equivalence satisfactorily resolved in his positing of a natural use value for the object as the way out of the equivalence of exchange value.

Instead Mauss, Bataille, and Baudrillard turn to primitive exchange which they see escaping utility and equivalence, the two trajectories that Marx imposes on the object. The object in/of symbolic exchange is supposed to be completely heterogeneous, absolutely singular, inexchangeable, and thus without equivalent. To counter political economy then is to counter equivalence, to try to (re)discover

heterogeneity. Marxism and symbolic exchange both attempt to appeal to a logic which is wholly outside of political economy, to find something that breaks the law of equivalence. But where Marx turns to utility, Mauss, Bataille, and Baudrillard look towards the morality of primitive exchange, a morality which is seen as escaping both utility and equivalence through expenditure.

Yet this morality can barely contain within itself the madness of the gift, this problem of being of the gift that Derrida identifies. Because of this the madness of the gift is not the madness that Baudrillard or Bataille would wish it to be. It is not the irrationality, the anti-logos of the economic, the pre-economic practice that would end the economic. This is the secret dream of those who look to the gift as Mauss, Bataille, and Baudrillard do in identifying the gift as the escape hatch of economy, as the practice that disrupts the circle of economic exchange. Their belief is that the relations among humans will be warmer, more affective, more genuine under symbolic exchange and noble expenditure, which they contrast with the abstract, rational relations of commodity exchange. Equivalence, the notion of an identity or exchangeability between terms runs through the semiotic and the economic, it is their fundamental law. Remove equivalence, they say. Yet, we cannot oppose a hot, heterogeneous, mixed up non-equivalence to a cold, homogeneous, ordered equivalence for the gift renders meaningless these distinctions. The gift is both hot and cold, and neither hot nor cold. It is economic and it is non-economic, it institutes the economic and puts an end to the difference between the two. It presupposes its meaning and abolishes it all at once. And it is this paradox of the gift that destabilizes all attempts to capture in it a morality of the gift or utilize it ground a critique of political economy.

This is the dilemma we find ourselves in, in which any undertaking to break equivalence is foiled before it is even attempted, in which we cannot adequately conceive of a system of non-equivalence which does not also render meaningless this non-equivalence. Derrida views this attempt to find non-equivalence as a foray into madness, a madness that makes it impossible to even speak of the gift, for it is a madness that eats away at the semantic as well as the economic. If the possibility of critique lies only in the impossibility of the gift, then how can we begin? Perhaps we can begin rejecting, as Lyotard does, the lure of the primitive, writing that, “there are no primitive societies or savages at all, we are all savages, all savages are capitalized-capitalists.”169 The critique of political economy, if there is to be one, must abandon its pretense of grounding itself outside of its object in a space preceding the economic. There is no first exchange, no first moment of production to be found, no primitive exchange or mode of production to be isolated and examined. The economic is always with us, it always precedes and sets the stage for our examinations into it; but this is not to say that its logic must dominate. We can and must take up the challenges of confronting equivalence and non-equivalence, of expenditure and conservation, of consumption and production, the hot and the cold and push these terms to their investigatory limits. We are trapped in a circle that sets itself in motion, that has no starting point, in which equivalence is only achieved through a violent suppression of the supplement which would set up disparity, and in which any non-equivalence is fully implicated in a system of equivalences. We can only start at a similar non-starting point, working in and through the contradictions and blurring of distinctions, never pretending that we can grasp in our hands what we seek.


Bibiliography

Bataille, Georges, 1995. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Volume One, trans. Robert Hurley, New York: Zone Books.

_____, 1962. Eroticism, trans. Mary Dalwood, London: John Calder Ltd.

_____, 1985. “The Notion of Expenditure,” from Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

_____, 1985. “The Sacred Conspiracy,” from Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Baudrillard, Jean, 1981. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin, St. Louis: Telos Press.

_____, 1993. Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant, London, Thousand Oaks, CA, New Delhi: SAGE Publications.

_____, 1975. The Mirror of Production, trans. Mark Poster, St. Louis: Telos Press.

_____, 1987. “When Bataille Attacked the Metaphysical Principle of Economy,” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, 11. 3, 57-63.

Bennington, Geoff, 1988. Lyotard: Writing the Event, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

de Saussure, Ferdinand, 1986. Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Roy Harris, Chicago and La Salle, Illinois: Open Court.

Debord, Guy, 1995. The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, New York: Zone Books.

Derrida, Jacques, 1993. Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans.

Peggy Kamuf, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Derrida, Jacques, 1987. “La Facteur de la Vèritè,” in The Postcard, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

_____, 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf, New York: Routledge.

Gasché, Rodolphe, 1997. “Heliocentric Exchange,” in The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity, ed. Alan D. Schrift, New York: Routledge.

Lacan, Jacques, 1982. “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’” Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: W.W. Norton.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 1993. Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Marx, Karl, 1970. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, ed. Maurice Dobb, trans. S.W. Ryazanskaya, New York: International Publishers.

_____, 1977. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes, New York: Vintage Books.

_____, 1978. “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker, New York: W.W. Norton.

Mauss, Marcel, 1990. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W.D. Halls, New York: W.W. Norton.

Documents

Return the Gift