The Undecidability of Capital

Shannee Marks
The Undecidability of Capital
1. Prolegomenon
2. Derrida on his Knees
3. The Secret
4. Spirit:Time
5. What is Capital besides Capital? (or Postone ‘de-forms’ Marx)
6. The Subject as Double Substance
1. Prolegomenon
Why is it that capitalism does not have to work – in the sense that
communism does? Whether it works or it is perceived to be broken, almost
irreparably – nothing can affect its survival – its perpetuation. This seems to
be anti-Darwinist or anti-evolutionary. An organism which survives merely
because it is – not because it is the best or fittest. Broken eternal capitalism is
a prime example of ‘inoperative power’. Its indifference to perfection or even
desirability is already rooted in the indifference of money to ‘whatever
commodity’ as long as such a commodity can ceaselessly perform the miracle
of turning money into more money. As Marx writes: “The capitalist knows,
that all commodities, no matter how shoddy they look or how bad they smell,
in faith and in truth are money, (…) and besides that, miraculous means to
make out of money more money.” [“Der Kapitalist weiß, daß alle Waren, wie
lumpig sie immer aussehen oder wie schlecht sie immer riechen, im Glauben
und in der Wahrheit Geld, (…) sind und zudem wundertätige Mittel, um aus
Geld mehr Geld zu machen.” (Karl Marx, Das Kapital Erster Band, Marx
Engels Werke abbreviated MEW Band 23, Berlin, 1975, p. 169)] In a similar
vein, Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts notes that the capitalist can make a
greater profit from derelict ‘cellar-dwellings’ rented to the proletariat than
from the rent from palaces – as capital although a science of wealth, is also a
science of perishing (darben) – both in the commodities it can convert to ever
greater value and the molding (including deforming) of desire necessary for
their willing consumption. “Das rohe Bedürfnis des Arbeiters ist eine viel
größere Quelle des Gewinns als das feine des Reichen. Die Kellerwohnungen
in London bringen ihren Vermietern mehr ein als die Paläste (…)” [“The raw
desire of the worker is a much greater source of profit than the fine one of the
rich. The cellar flats in London yield more for their landlords than the palaces
(…)”, Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte (1844) in Marx Engels Werke
abbreviated MEW Band 40, Berlin, 1990, pp. 551-552)]
Marx speaks of the ‘rawness’ of capital towards the underclass

complementary to the ‘fineness’ towards the monied class corresponding to
Wesen (essence) and Schein (appearance). Capital or what Marx calls in his
1844 manuscripts – the national economy – acts upon the whole of what is
human through its regime of desire and desirelessness. It imposes on both the
capitalist and the worker an unnatural asceticism. They assume the ‘life mask’
of the “usurious miser and the ascetic productive slave” (Marx, op. cit., p. 549)
– under the premise that what I expend I have taken away from the
accumulation of capital. Here capital is indistinguishable from the ‘science of
morality’. The uneasy duality of luxury and frugality (excess and dearth)
flowing through capital and its national economy is split between the human
agents of capital and itself. Human renunciation nurtures the luxury of
capital. As Marx writes: money can travel, go to the theatre, to balls, eat, be a
patron of the arts, knowledge, move in society…The less you are, the less of
yourself you expend, the more you have deposited in your second alienated
imperishable life, your capital. On the other hand desire in the sense of a
feeling of lack, a need aroused in me by the other in order to lure me into
spending money on whatever commodity is supposed to fill that lack is an
absolute condition of any accumulation of capital. Long before the capitalist
market, Socrates, standing in the agora, observed – “how many things there
are which I don’t want.” Epicurus following in that tradition of resistance to
desire advised a correspondent who asked him how to increase his wealth -
decrease your desires.
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Desire (Drang), which Schelling saw as “the pre-form of spirit”, is immanently

corrupted and in a permanent state of mauvaise foi as a hostage of capital.
(see Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, Frankfurt, 1982,
p. 202) The ‘inoperative’ – saves himself up from labour – in the way the
worker used to save his money instead of wasting it on “fleeting desires”. The
inoperative’s asceticism is the abstinence from activity, from action. One
renounces action. Could this antinomy of luxury (debauchery) and asceticism
in capitalism underlie the movement in Schopenhauer’s thought-construct
from affirmation to negation of the will to live?
Capital does not necessarily imply an ever evolving higher level of civilisation
– but can do just as well or better with a worse one, as long as the basic
conditions of capital or M-C-M’ (money-commodity-more money) themselves
are given. Self-preservation is not an absolute value – it should hover at the
point of neediness. Neediness is the appropriate mode for the self-
preservation of the worker (includes all non-capitalists in capitalism); it is also
“the principle of national economy”. In this way morality protrudes into the
“essence” of the national economy.
Capital or money have desires (Bedürfnisse) which must be satisfied, the
worker must practice being without desire, being wasted.
The Roman Empire was built on Roman Army bread made of spelt flour, the
Egyptian pyramids on pharaonic bread made of kamut flour – the British
Empire (Bath), says an Englishman – an old Bluecoat boy – was built on
‘Mother’s Pride’. One of those white nothing loaves. Less than air. The
British are the Luftmenschen in the succession of imperialists. The Scots at
least have their oat biscuits – they eat them like the Indios in the Andes chew
on their coca leaves – to stave off exhaustion while mounting the heights in
thin air.
Just as in the figure of just going on there is an implicit ‘belief’ in the unending
repetitive character of a series or rule, we carry around an apriori syllogistic
rhetorical structure in thinking which presupposes that one thought must
follow from another thought and so on. But must it – does it? In the same
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way actions, occurrences follow from other actions or occurrences in the

empirical or historical world – otherwise they are merely ‘contingent’. But can
they both follow and not follow – be related and unrelated. In an absolutely
contingent world this would probably be possible. The assumption that things
or thought must follow from one another imposes a (science-esque) mimetic
flux on the form of phenomena – their way of changing or passing by staying
the same – a kind of flux of identity. This is also a flux of logos – logos implies
that everything must be connected with everything else. Logos can appear in
the form of a hierarchy of principles exerting force through various stages of
methodical generalisation until it reaches bottom at the empirical data. Both
the flux and the scale are ancient models – although the hierarchical logos as
Adorno and Horkheimer develop in Dialectics of Enlightenment was at the
threshold of Enlightenment – in Bacon’s treatises on science. (see Max
Horkheimer und Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung,
Philosophische Fragmente, Amsterdam, 1968, p. 17)
Each moment of the flux is a repetition of the one before so that in going on
there is only before never after. Badiou is quite taken by Beckett’s ‘bad verse’
(vers de mirliton) about such a flux of the same – what are numbers other
than this. In the counting of numbers there is the utter assumption that more
will always be the same as less – the unit of one added to a transfinite number
is no different than the unit of one added to one. Is this truth? Is the
following of the same by the same a kind of verification of the same? Would
then conversely a following of the same by the other be a falsification of the
same? Or of the other? In the following of the same by the same there is only
a change by substitution – that which was in the place of now moves out of
this place – or as Badiou would say is then non-being. But it is replaced by a
replica of itself – so the following of the same by the same is an unending
substitution of being by non-being. This is the thing’s undecidability.
Beckett’s verse is a kind of faux-Heraclitean homily:
“Flux causes (one notes already that flux itself is seen as a ‘cause’ sm)
That every thing
Even in being,
Every thing,
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Thus this one here,

Even this one here,
Even in being
Is not.
Let’s speak about it.”
(quoted in Alain Badiou, “The Writing of the Generic: Samuel Beckett” in
Condtions, London, 2008, p. 251)
This just going on expressed in Beckett’s verse has nothing to do with

Hegelian being-becoming says Badiou, - it is a site of the generic human in a
work of fiction – yet it is situated within the historical epoch of the ‘Hegelian’
becoming of capital. How is that possible? The generic human as a fiction of
just going on of the same subsists within or parallel to the transformation of
the same in non-human capital. Are they then simultaneous to one another?
Badiou is “happy” to call the economy of Beckett’s texts “ancient”. More
precisely, Beckett’s fiction is composed according to the “five ‘supreme kinds’
of Plato’s Sophist” (Badiou, , op. cit., p. 254) . “We could say that these
supreme kinds, Movement, Rest, the Same, the Other, the Logos (…)
constitute the reference points, or primitive terms, for an axiomatic of
humanity as such.” (ibid.)
The truth of generic humanity in a work of fiction in the ongoing epoch of

capital is ancient. Although the generic in Badiou’s sense is a reduction of all
quality to quantity, an unbinding of all that is bound, which can only occur in
capitalism. Between one nostril and the other lies the Sahara, says
Giacometti. Beckett’s art is a work of fiction – a “fiction of generic writing”
(Badiou) – but in every fiction there must be something which is not fiction
otherwise how would one recognize it as fiction? In Beckett’s case it is the
generic (“oriented towards essence, or Idea”, Badiou, ibid.) which is the non-
fiction of his fiction.
“That the thing can simultaneously be held in the place where it is and in the
place where it is not is given in the image of the flux; this flux, however, is
never the synthesis of being and non-being, and is not to be confused with
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Hegelian becoming.” (Badiou, op. cit., p. 252) This balancing of the thing
between being and not-being in the flux of the same (mimetic flux) is what
Badiou calls its undecidability. But Beckett’s flux of the same seems to elude
simultaneity – for if something is to come, something else has to go. What
kind of myth is that? The myth of the number?
2. Derrida on his Knees
I saw an odd clip of Derrida on You Tube – speaking about Heidegger in some
dreary shabby classroom (Jacques Derrida on Martin Heidegger 2000). One
sees a few smirking auditors behind him. He is dressed in a pristine black
jacket and grey trousers, as if one could take his sartorial elegance for granted
although somehow out of place, he holds a microphone, he is in front of a
table on a dais painted black or dark blue. The table is covered with a blue
cloth. The most incongruous element in the scene is that he is ‘standing’ on
his knees. No explanation. A sheer fact. Hard to interpret. Is that a partial
definition of a fact? It resists (desists?) any ultimate interpretation – but
allows for an indefinite amount of speculation. This could be an axiom of
‘speculative realism’. The clip itself was not very revealing either. Derrida
disagrees with some things Heidegger says about “animality” (“that animals
don’t speak, don’t die, are poor in world” – he is suspicious of this, - “it has
heavy consequences”). He also “parts company” with Heidegger about other
things such as technology, epochality. His tone of voice and facial expressions
are emphatic, demanding. Derrida’s tie hangs suggestively below his belt –
the angle of his tilting – like a plumb line – showing how much he deviates
from the shortest distance to the floor. The impression is one of self-dwarfing.
Is Derrida assuming the position of the ‘penitent god’? God who asks
forgiveness from humanity? Benjamin suggests this aspect of God-ness in his
fragment on “Capitalism as Religion” – God is implicated in the debt/guilt of
capitalism and must seek atonement. Sacrifices are made to atone the guilt of
God. The crucifixion was another act of God asking forgiveness from his
creatures for their creaturely-ness. Or is Derrida rather enacting a kind of
Dostoyevskian gesture of humility – such as those required or carried out by
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the various capricious holy men or holy fools who populate his novels. In The
Possessed penitents visiting a famous holy man must approach him on their
knees. When he elects to accept their penance they are made to drink a
horribly over sweetened tea (according to their degree of sinfulness) all the
while still on their knees. The enigmatic holy man in The Brothers
Karamazov, the ailing Starez, goes down on his knees in front of Dmitri, one
of the brothers, during a tumultuous family audience of the Karamazovs in his
hermitage cell. No one knows why. It is just the mystery of the divine holy
impulse. Although a sceptical monk who witnesses this genuflection –
attributes it to the showmanship of the dying Starez. The holy man senses a
crime will take place. Later one will say he foresaw everything.
Dmitri had just ridiculed his father for wooing a woman desired and courted
by both father and son.
Is Derrida the penitent at the feet of Heidegger, the holy man – or the self-
effacing holy man bending his knee to the ‘sinner’ Heidegger in absentia?
The Starez, a figure much admired by Wittgenstein, is a monk whose historical

religious function (not just his but the institution of Starez-hood) is to accept
the soul and will of those coming to him and to rule it as his own. This is the
spiritual way – through slavery to freedom. Something similar happens in de
Sade’s societies (communities) – except it is solely of the body. “Abolishing
the property of one’s own body as of the other bodies is a phantasy inherent in
the operation of the perverse; the pervert inhabits the body of the other as his
own and thus infuses the other body with his own.” (Pierre Klossowski, “Sade
und Fourier” in Lektüre zu de Sade, Frankfurt, 1981, p. 224) The Starez rules
the body through the soul, de Sade’s figures rule the body through the body.
Starez’ rule is theocracy – de Sade’s is biopolitics.
Derrida was trapped/caught on a video by a random contingent

spectator/camera who extracted this moment out of a continuum of an
unknown duration. Although some element of choice or decision can be read
into Derrida’s kneeling position – at least it is physically difficult to
spontaneously kneel while giving a lecture (like opera singers acting a role
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while singing) and equally difficult to abruptly end such kneeling. This extract
of less than a minute, the epitome of insignificance, could have remained a
recorded fact among the millions circulating seen and unremembered on the
internet (just like thought itself – you have to have thought much to forget
much as Robert Walser said), if it had not been ‘seized’ by a second act – that
of my protocol and futile (useless) interpretation.
Perhaps this fact is not just on video but also in writing somewhere already, a
‘curated’ video - although unknown to me. My act of impaling by writing is
my own first appropriation of this visual fact – the ‘trace’ of an inexplicable
gesture. Is my writing a third degree of reality? First the act of kneeling – the
capture of that specific moment as in a witnessing by the camera operator is
the second. The use of knee bending in literature has less power than the fact
of Derrida’s filmed kneeling, although it may have been itself an ‘onto-
theatrical’ gesture. In literature such an act would seem ‘excessive’. In ‘life’ or
the filmed version Derrida’s kneeling radiates the “brutality of the fact”
(Francis Bacon) – no amount of interpretation can change or erase it. One
can only shake one’s head like the woodcutter sitting in the ruin of Rashomon
Gate staring into the rain in the beginning of Kurosawa’s film Rashomon and
repeat “I don’t understand.”
The imperviousness of the fact (factum brutum) is the ‘secret’ – Derrida’s

secret is his own gesture of powerlessness. The kneeling position mimics an
amputee – one does not see his feet anymore. That of course is the front view
– the fortuitous angle. Those behind Derrida were not privy to this illusion of
a footless lecturer – as in any magic trick - it all has to do with the position of
the spectator.
The room itself seems to be miniaturized. The scale of the room where the
audience is sitting is greater than the site (spot) where Derrida is kneeling on
the dais. The room seems to shrink down on him like an inverted pyramid.
As a dramatic character he is reminiscent of Mnouchkine’s interpretation of
the tragic king Richard the Second in her staging of Shakespeare’s eponymous
play. Richard is obdurate and arrogant – unaware until too late of the
conspiracy against him by his rebellious vassals. The actor portraying the king
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was made up to an extreme pallor – looking almost Japanese – and confined

to a wheeled vehicle – a hybrid of a wheelchair and a chariot – as if he had
wheels instead of legs, already lowered in stature, before being toppled or
floored by his adversaries. Derrida is the king and at the same time one of the
conspirators against the king - “Je suis la plaie et le couteau!” (I am the
wound and the knife!, Baudelaire, “L’Héautontimorouménos”).
Is Derrida’s kneeling a symptom of his circumcision neurosis?
3. The Secret
The secret is like a fact, because it is of language but not only of language – it
is also the withholding of language. Otherwise it would not be a secret. It can
potentially be the infinite withholding of language, if the secret is ‘kept’
absolutely – it ceases to be just a secret, it ceases to be in total. The absolute
secret tends to nil, to void, to absence. So it is a fact of absence. The
attributes of language cease to inform it – no rhetoric, no sophistry can take
hold of a secret. The secret can be of a fact – besides being a fact – for
instance the secret identity of someone, the secret hiding place of something
valuable, stolen – but all secrets must be susceptible to being known or
unknown. The ‘secrets of the universe’ are not really secrets – because no one
‘has’ them either to divulge or conceal. Hence truth is not a secret as the
concept of aletheia might imply – something which comes out of its hiding.
Wherever it is hidden or revealed – whether it is seen or unseen (told or
untold?), the truth is indifferent to this hiding or disclosure. Does
Wittgenstein have anything to say about the secret – except that he is silent
about what cannot be said? But is that a secret? A secret must be sayable –
even if not said. A secret is not the ineffable. Truth is indifferent (adiaphoric)
to its being true or being known. So a secret could not necessarily be truth.
But could a fairy tale or a fiction be a secret? A secret ‘must’ be true or its
withholding would be of no consequence, but truth is not a secret. As a secret
withers away in its untelling – to this degree it exposes itself to the danger of
the ‘unthought’.
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But what if anything does the secret have to do with semblance (appearance)
or ‘Schein’ – with the veil of the aesthetic?
Benjamin discovers a philosophy of semblance in Goethe’s “Elective Affinities”
– and of what seems so nearly the same – of the secret, veiled being. But he is
rather confusing in his manner of determining the occult transitions from
semblance to secret and the eventual revelation of the secret – and if this is
the same as the unveiling of semblance. Can semblance ever be unveiled?
One could assume that in the logic of Goethe’s aesthetic there is either
semblance or no semblance (the unveiling of the secret) – nor can there be a
slow crumbling away of semblance, just as fictions neither age nor become
more true. Ottilie is the character in whom Goethe lays the signature of
beautiful tragic semblance. She is semblance whose tragedy is to have been
chosen as the semblance of tragedy. She is both figure and transfiguration –
the static center of what Hebbel likened to an “automaton in an anatomical
theatre” (quoted in Walter Benjamin, Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften, in
Illuminationen, Frankfurt, 1961, p. 135) – her semblance is not compelled by
external suffering or violence to its demise. The semblance, which represents
itself in her beauty, is one of imminent departure – a figurine meant to be
broken, a soft light soon to be extinguished. She is Goethe’s idol of tragedy
itself – an embodied fetish of the transition in the novel from the cathartic
affect to the sublime.
“Eben dieser Übergang ist es, der im Untergang des Scheines sich vollzieht.
Jener Schein, der in Ottiliens Schönheit sich darstellt, ist der untergehende.
Denn ist es nicht so zu verstehen, als führe äußere Not und Gewalt den
Untergang der Ottilie herauf, sondern in der Art ihres Scheins selbst liegt es
begründet, daß er verlöschen muß, daß er es bald muß.” (ibid., p. 139)
[“Particularly this transition is the one which occurs in the demise
(Untergang) of semblance. That semblance, which represents itself in
Ottilie’s beauty, is a sinking one. It is not to be understood, that distress and
violence lead to Ottilie’s perdition, rather it is grounded (begründet) in the
type of her semblance (Schein), that it must go out, that it must go soon.”]
When Ottilie fades away as it is inscribed in her semblance to do – she is not

unveiled in her demise – she confirms rather Goethe’s belief in the Platonic
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doctrine that beauty is inseparable from semblance – the further removed

from beauty and semblance, the closer to life – but not truth. Beauty or the
illusory beautiful in a work of art is closest in vicinity not to truth but to the
expressionless (das Ausdruckslose), which seems to vaguely correspond to the
secret.
Plato’s theory of beauty does not refer first to beautiful semblance in art (as
the work of art) but to beautiful life. But this is because Plato is caught
between despising and shunning art as unacceptable mimesis and his ideal of
philosophy as anti-mimetic discourse. Yet beauty as Schein is not merely an
imitation of life – if it were it would be reduced to economy – the
reproduction of life in its manifest sense where bodies represent other bodies
– or so it would seem. This mimetic nature of the ‘general economy’ (Bataille)
can be traced back to its “abysmally mimetic” original event – the work of
death or the sacrifice. The body of the sacrifice represents or imitates the
body of the community or its economy – which is the same thing. The ‘work of
death’ is substituted for and anticipates the ‘work of life’. This is almost the
opposite movement to that of a Heideggerian ‘unconcealing’ qua aletheia – as
the sacrifice or work of death ‘reveals’ in advance what is normally concealed
by the ‘work of life’. First comes the unconcealing – then the concealing. (see
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography, Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics,
Stanford, 1998, p. 124, note 124)
Benjamin’s aesthetic of beautiful semblance as necessarily ‘irrevocably’ veiled

has little to do with any kind of ‘unconcealing’. On the contrary – beauty’s
“law of essence” (Wesensgesetz) is such that it only appears (erscheint) veiled.
Without the veil, beauty would cease to be beauty. The veil is also its
constitutive secret – Adorno speaks of the necessary “enigma character” (der
Rätselcharakter) of art. That is why art cannot be appropriated through
understanding – the more one ‘understands’ the further away the art, it veils
itself in the misdirected understanding of the spectator. The only art, which
can be understood totally without a remainder, is not art at all. “Als
konstitutiv aber ist der Rätselcharakter dort zu erkennen, wo er fehlt:
Kunstwerke, die der Betrachtung und dem Gedanken ohne Rest aufgehen,
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sind keine.” [The enigma character however is recognizable as constitutive,

there where it is missing: works of art, that are exhausted in consideration and
thought without a remainder, are not any.]
(Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, Frankfurt, 1970, p. 184)
A standard move of deconstructionist philosophy – in the literary sphere,

obviously most amenable to such procedures of extraction and subtraction, is
to carve out a figure from a text (for instance Bartleby) which functions then
as a type or model. Rather than seeing this as the collapse of the aesthetic, the
fabrication of such a type is the way of ‘mastery’ or conquest of the text. The
seemingly trivial question appearing as the title of Heidegger’s essay on
Zarathustra reveals the predatory intention – “Who is Nietzsche’s
Zarathustra?”. One knows that whatever the answer - it will have only one
timbre – the destruction of the enigma. Out of such a destruction of the
source, power is set free for the reconstruction of an anti-aesthetic ontological
monument – in this case of Nietzsche himself. The monumentalizing drive
articulates itself in Lacoue-Labarthe’s etymological frenzy (fever) surrounding
the word Ge-stell (Heidegger) which he traces to its provisional ‘Greek’ origin
in “stele”– meaning statue or monument as that which is present and erected.
“What predominates and what joins poiesis (or even techne) and technology—
in a common, though unequally, unthought [impensée] of aletheia—is
precisely the static determination of Being.
Ge-stell is primarily and fundamentally the stele. (…) this amounts to saying
that Ge-stell is a word for presence—with presence here interpreted as stele,
or, since it is always necessary to conjugate everything with (the forgetting of)
aletheia, unconcealment interpreted as erection.” (Lacoue-Labarthe,
Typography, op. cit., p. 69)
(Heidegger and Badiou, two points on the curve of ontology, stand for non-
metamorphosing or barren philosophy – never anywhere else than with itself
alias Being – unable to subtract from itself (not even as sacrifice). Although
errors are fertile – the fertility of errors is a substitute or disguise for the
sterility of philosophical monuments like Being. Heidegger himself laments
the impossibility of Dasein having or perceiving itself from a distance. The
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asphyxiating closeness of Dasein and its shadow Angst or Sorge (Care) is

reminiscent of baroque aesthetics – the nearest possible conjunction of vision
and the visible, automatic sight. [See “Baroque Quantities”, Faust Series Opus
9, 13th November 2009 for a reference to the baroque and the monadic
enclosure] Heidegger in his regretting the loss of distance, longs for the
romantic ‘mood’ – gone for ever. Being is not romantic. Philosophy as
ontology is the economy of stagnant value – value from which all movement,
speed of circulation has been extracted. Although Badiou contends that
philosophy circulates between ontology and truth procedures. But why should
the inverted world suddenly transport or convey truth?)
What would be the purpose of such a bizarre collection of figures cut out of
their original textual ambient and turned into statues – the purpose for
philosophy (of the Heideggerian-deconstructionist provenance)? It seems
that for Heidegger it is the only way philosophy can engorge itself with poetry
not for the sake of the aesthetic enigma – but to furnish itself with the means
of representing itself in figures or types (Gestalt). Thus one will find figures
from Nazi propaganda such as Ernst Jünger’s Der Arbeiter Herrschaft und
Gestalt (The Worker - Rule and Type) next to scavengings from poetic sources
such as Rilke’s Angel and of course Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. Once they have
undergone philosophical branding – the ensuing types become
indistinguishable convicts in philosophical detention, ‘bad’ and ‘good’
company herded together in one confinement. The intention, desire,
relentless strategy is that such figured types displayed behind philosophical
bars, painfully unconcealed in a metaphysical freak show, can never become
enigmas again. Aesthetic loss is philosophical (ontological) gain. Poetry (art)
becomes directly metaphysical (truth bearing) but only when imagination
(fiction) is seized upon by philosophy. This approximates what Badiou (also
in the wake of Heidegger) would call the state of being a “condition” of
philosophy; he admits that all these conditions are necessarily external to it.
Art or especially poetry is one of those conditions. Lacoue-Labarthe makes
this ‘dependency’ of Heideggerian philosophy upon that which it would also
subordinate most explicit: “For if Zarathustra is a figure, in the strongest
sense (and we will see in a moment that for Heidegger it is a historical
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necessity that commits metaphysics, in the process of completing itself, since

Hegel, to (re)presenting itself (sich darstellen) in figures, as well as to
representing (vorstellen) transcendence, from the perspective of the
“subjective” determination of Being, as the form, figure, imprint, type of a
humanity. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Jünger’s Worker, even Rilke’s Angel –
(…)” (Lacoue-Labarthe, op. cit., p. 52). More tentatively, Lacoue-Labarthe
asks in a footnote if one shouldn’t add “Freud’s Oedipus and Marx’s
Proletarian” to the row of “subjective” determinations of Being. “Marx’s
Proletarian” though would utterly resist being trimmed to a ‘type of a
humanity’ – if any type at all, then a type of Capital. If though Lacoue-
Labarthe’s perspective is of a ““subjective” determination of Being”, then one
could more plausibly conceive of ‘Marx’s Capital’ as fitting into this series of
types. Marx identified Capital as the ‘automatic subject’ of its own production
process in the first volume of Capital – Capital in Marx’s dialectical
presentation is already metaphysical and would not to have to undergo any
forced conversions to achieve such transcendence. The capitalist, another
possible ‘type’, may seem to be pursuing ‘subjective purposes’, but only insofar
as he is the ‘conscious porter’ (“bewußter Träger”) of “the objective content of
circulation – the valorisation of value (…)” (Karl Marx, Das Kapital Erster
Band, Marx Engels Werke abbreviated MEW Band 23, Berlin, 1975, p. 167).
The capitalist is a conscious subject only to the degree that he ‘loses’ his
subjectivity in his imitation of the restless movement of unceasing profit – the
self-processing process of capital. Capital, on the other hand, is the
“automatic subject” of its own self-valorisation, because, despite its constant
alternating metamorphoses into money and commodity, it never loses itself in
this movement. “It (value) moves constantly out of one form into the other,
without losing itself in this movement, and transforms itself in this way into
an automatic subject.” [“Er geht beständig aus der einen Form in die andre
über, ohne sich in dieser Bewegung zu verlieren, und verwandelt sich so in ein
automatisches Subjekt.” (Karl Marx, Das Kapital, MEW 23, op. cit., p. 169)]
The capitalist, as the subject who loses his subjectivity in the subjectivity of
Capital, is only such when he functions as ‘personified capital’, or when his
subjective purposes are those of capital endowed or gifted with his own “will
14
and consciousness” (for what is subjectivity other than will and

consciousness?) – those purposes being the “growing appropriation of
abstract wealth”. (ibid., pp. 167-168)
Could one speak of an ‘original’ or a ‘derived’ type – the archetype and its
ectype? Would Capital be the original (metaphysical) type, the capitalist the
derived one – in the sense of the creator and the created? The purposes of the
capitalist, says Marx, are never use-value (Gebrauchswert), only profit – value
for capital. The authenticity of the derived capitalist type or subject – as type
is a subjective determination of being according to Lacoue-Labarthe - is
greater, the more the ectype capitalist personifies the (original) archetype
capital. The more the capitalist is conscious of his will the more he (his will)
personifies or transports the will of capital. The more his will is the will of
capital, the more authentic and free it feels, the more lost it is in capital.
The identity of the capitalist’s will and the will of capital is what constitutes
the moral certainty of the type. In an almost Schopenhauerian sense, the
capitalist is an “appearance of the will” (Erscheinung des Willen) of capital,
the same will which is objectified in any other thing alias commodity or
money. Musil writes in the second volume of “Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften”
– in a conversation between Ulrich and Director F. “Das Geld ist ein
Vernunftwesen.” (Money is a being of reason.) because money decides where
it wants to be spent – he should have said – money is a being of will. Ulrich,
the logical mathematical hero of the novel seems to imply that the ‘ecstatic
society’ Kakanien – Austro-Hungary in the last year of its belle époque 1913 -
is at the most intermittently rational, whereas money is the guarantee of a
continuous flow of ratio. Money is always rational. Money means
“Großkapital”. The ‘reason’ of money is also the model for the logic infusing
Musil’s caricature of a scientific action-culture – quantitative, exact, barbaric–
the “logical structure of the world” (Carnap). Besides “Großkapital” – the
types, which inhabit this world, are merchants, warriors, hunters and
scientists.
The other half of the story – “world history” - is ‘love’ or passion. “Denn die
Weltgeschichte ist mindestens zur Hälfte eine Liebesgeschichte.” (motto of
Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, Hamburg, 1987, Band II)
15
Musil’s source for his observation “Money is a being of reason.” may have
been Heraclitus – a fusion of two of his axioms: “Fire is gifted with reason.”
[“Das Feuer ist vernunftbegabt.” In Heraklit Fragmente, München, 1986,
B64a, p. 23] and “For fire exchange is everything and fire is for everything like
money for gold and gold for money.” [“Für Feuer ist Gegentausch alles und
Feuer für alles wie Geld für Gold und Gold für Geld.” op. cit., B90, p. 29] By a
simple substitution – fire is like money, money is thus gifted with reason.
This money though is not the money of the Schatzbildner (hoarder of

treasure), who wishes to ‘rescue’ or extract it from the circulation sphere, it is
money which follows money (which is to say capital, the ‘man of the crowd’),
best rescued in exposing itself over and over to circulation. Money follows
money also means money imitates money in the pursuit of ever greater
surpluses – even to its own perdition as in the case of a general crisis of
finance, ‘credit crunch’ or more specific fraudulent schemes - the Ponzi
scheme etc. ‘Money makes the world go round’ deteriorates (disappears) into
money chasing its own tail.
This moral certainty of the capitalist ectype translates into the cult of
authenticity of the bourgeois subject – his supposed absolute identity with
himself or ‘facticity’. This authenticity, says Adorno, is a lie, a fiction of
identity – or rather the true identity of the circulation sphere with itself. As a
type – the authenticity of the bourgeois subject – merely certifies (determines)
its absolute replaceability or the ultimate fungibility of things, their
quantifiability as epiphenomena of capital (fetish).
The ‘authenticity’ which Adorno rejects is an attribute of something which is

in itself false – the bourgeois subject – the substrata of any ‘authenticity’, it is
more than false, it is a ghost, says Adorno, following Schopenhauer. For
Adorno ‘inauthenticity’ is a way of rescuing the ‘human’ never in itself
‘original’ – always an imitation of other humans. The ‘authentic’ is a cipher
for the spectrality of the subject – or the “trotzige und verstockte Beharren
auf der monadologischen Gestalt” [“defiant and stubborn insistence upon the
16
monadological type (Gestalt)”, Theodor W. Adorno, “Goldprobe” in Minima

Moralia, Frankfurt, 1980, p. 204]
Theatricality overturns the false life of Echtheit – authenticity. Inauthenticity
is a mimetic form – as in playing oneself (recalling Nietzsche) – the
inauthenticity of the subject becomes true to the degree that his authenticity is
revealed as a lie: “Die Gleichsetzung von Echtheit und Wahrheit ist nicht zu
halten.”[“The equation of authenticity and truth is not sustainable.” Adorno,
op. cit., p. 202].
The inversion of Echte (authentic) and Unechte (inauthentic) leads Adorno to

the conclusion – “Was nicht verdorren will, nimmt lieber das Stigma des
Unechten auf sich. Es zehrt von dem mimetischen Erbe.” [Whatever does not
want to wither, accepts rather the stigma of the inauthentic. It draws on the
mimetic legacy.” Adorno, op. cit., p. 204]
But one cannot be sure if this is not a piece of counterfeit (spurious) advice –
as Adorno calls this mimetic behavior the “Urform von Liebe” (Ur-form of
love) in which the “priests of authenticity” scent “Spuren jener Utopie, welche
das Gefüge der Herrschaft zu erschüttern vermöchte.” [“traces of that utopia,
which could shake the structure of domination”, ibid.]. One can almost hear
Adorno mocking Bloch as one of those ‘priests of authenticity’. But is
Nietzsche really one of them?
Heidegger’s answer to the self-posed question, “Who is Nietzsche’s

Zarathustra?” - is that he is the teacher who has come to teach the overcoming
of the spirit of revenge. Revenge casts all objects as degraded objects. This
spirit of revenge (“persecution”) is supposed to have pervaded all thinking
until this day – “(…) all representation to this day of beings with regard to
their Being (…)” (Martin Heidegger, Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?, Review
of Metaphysics, March 1967, p. 421) Yet what is Heidegger’s or the onto-
metaphysical appropriation of an aesthetic enigma in the vulgar attempt to
demystify it – anything other than a revenge – Heidegger’s revenge on
Nietzsche? Considering Nietzsche’s self-stylizing of his philosophy as theatre
(Schein) or the theatre of self-semblance, the antidote to Being – Heidegger’s
17
requisitioning of Zarathustra for the moral improvement of ‘humanity’ is

tantamount to the closing down of Nietzsche’s theatre. “Meine Philosophie
umgedrehter Platonismus: je weiter ab vom wahrhaft Seienden, um so
reiner schöner besser ist es. Das Leben im Schein als Ziel.” [“My philosophy
(is) an inverted Platonism: the further away from true being, the more pure
beautiful better it is. Life in semblance is the goal.” Friedrich Nietzsche,
Kritische Studienausgabe 7, Herausgegeben von Giorgio Colli und Mazzimo
Montinari, München, 1988, Nachgelassene Fragmente Ende 1870 - April 1871,
7 [156], p. 199]
Still, Heidegger must admit at the end of his essay in the “Note on the Eternal
Recurrence of the Same”, that he remains confounded by Nietzsche:
“Nietzsche himself knew that his “most abysmal thought” remains an enigma.”
(op. cit., p. 431)
There is no theatre without a revenge tragedy. In this sense Tadeusz Kantor’s

theatre of degraded objects, realities (such as the funfair) and actors is an
exemplary theatre of revenge.
4. Spirit:Time
If the capitalist is the subject whose subjectivity is lost in capital – does that
mean that the proletariat is the subject whose subjectivity can be found in
capital? Does Marx imply this symmetry – or are they both lost?
It would seem there is rather an asymmetry or even rupture in Marx’s theatre

of capital. The capitalist is the “character mask” of capital – but what mask
does the proletariat represent? Or – what does the proletariat personify in the
sense that the capitalist personifies capital? The proletariat qua proletariat
seems to be so reduced, so much an appendage of the production process that
he does not even have (need) a mask. He does not personify labour – he is
labour. Or rather abstract labour. Abstract labour is quantified labour –
having no particular qualities besides being average social labour. The
measure of abstract labour is the time of its working. Does the proletariat
18
personify time – the particular time of the production process? Does it

acquire its potential universality – meaning beyond the regime of capital –
from its intimate relation to time? A time beyond capital?
Although the capitalist is a personification of capital – in a sense possessed by

capital, having ‘sacrificed’ his will and consciousness to its ‘eternal return’ –
he is not conscious of such a sacrifice. As the personification of capital he is
not aware of himself as “pain and contradiction” (Nietzsche) – he regards
himself in the glow of capital as ‘free and authentic’. The eternity of capital
imbues the capitalist ‘subject’ with a share of its own immortality. As the
character mask of capital the capitalist is pure pleasure (Lust) – and pleasure
as Nietzsche writes in “Also sprach Zarathustra” seeks eternity. But pleasure
like will is semblance (Schein) and appearance. Being, says Nietzsche, is only
pain and contradiction – but we live in that other illusion or semblance – that
of becoming – in every moment of which the “secret of pain” must lie
dormant. Semblance determines “empirical being” – although that is not
“true being”- but there is no ‘way’ to this true being.
As the character mask of capital, the capitalist has no immanent relation to

time, he is not constituted qua character mask by time in the way the
proletariat is determined by time – the unitary socially average time of
abstract labour. The capitalist is ‘above’ time in the way capital is timeless,
eternally metamorphosing in its repetitive fashion of self-valorisation and self-
devalorisation (‘crisis’). The proletariat is the embodiment of quantified
unspecific labour time. His ‘role’ in Capital is not ‘above’ time but ‘in’ time –
he is of the order of finitude, hence ‘closer’ to being than the semblance of
infinitude embodied in capital and its personified agent – the capitalist. This
being in time of the proletariat is another way of saying that the physical life
and life in capital of the proletariat tend to ever closer identity. The time for
his physical reproduction is a quantifiable but varying fraction of the time he
serves capital – the ‘remainder’ is gratis time in which value arises. His life-
time is a function of his formal quantified time for capital. Hence, the
capitalist feels ‘free’ and ‘authentic’ in his personification of the immortality of
capital, its absolute semblance of eternal return or will (in Nietzsche’s sense).
19
The proletariat on the other hand feels inauthentic (closer to ‘true being’) and
unfree as the ‘personification’ of abstract labour or his absolute identity (in
terms of the absolute negativity of capital) with formal ‘empty’ time. The
proletariat is conscious of himself as finitude, as time, in his state of being the
measure of the time of abstract labour. “We are not measuring time, we are
ourselves a measure of time.” (Shannee Marks, “Body of Grammar: Body of
Pain” (Exhibition Writings from The Accident Colony Triptych, Austrian
Cultural Forum London 2008) in Night Work Philosophy Interrupted,
forthcoming)
For Marx abstract labour and the time of abstract labour as its measure fuse to
near identity. Time is also the mark of quantification – or ‘wound’, a kind of
ignominy imprinted (branded) on the proletarian organism. He is nothing but
time, nothing more or less than what he quantifies in his abstract labour.
Quoting a factory inspection report of 30th April 1860 in which the ‘open
secret’ is acknowledged – “Moments are the elements of profit.” – Marx
expressly describes the worker as “personifizierte Arbeitszeit” [“personified
labour time”, Das Kapital, MEW 23, op. cit., pp. 257-258] He refers not to
Hegelian concepts but to the factory jargon of the time – the usual appellation
for workers who worked full time was simply “full times”, children under 13
who were only allowed to work six hours were called “half times”: “Der
Arbeiter ist hier nichts mehr als personifizierte Arbeitszeit.” [“The worker is
nothing more here than personified labour-time.”, ibid.]
The truism “time is money” refers to this obliquely in terms of circulation - the
price paid by the capitalist in the circulation sphere for the purchase of time
(the commodity labour-power) - the only commodity which yields more time
than needed for its reproduction alias surplus value or money. “When time
money ist, so ist es vom Standpunkt des Kapitals aus nur die fremde
Arbeitszeit, die allerdings im eigenlichsten Worte das money des Kapitals
ist.” [“When time is money, then it is from the point of view of capital, only the
strange (fremde) labour-time, which is in a literal sense the money of capital.”
Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, Europäische
Verlagsanstalt Frankfurt, reprint of the Moscow edition of 1939 and 1941,
20
p. 528]
Average social labour-time and abstract labour collapse into one. Here Marx
follows Hegel’s determination of time as presented in the second volume of his
Enzyklopädie:
“Weil die Dinge endlich sind, darum sind sie in der Zeit; nicht weil sie in der
Zeit sind, darum gehen sie unter, sondern die Dinge selbst sind das zeitliche;
so zu sein ist ihre objektive Bestimmung.” [“Because things are finite,
therefore they are in time; not because they are in time, do they decline, rather
things are themselves the temporal, to be like that is their objective
determination.” G.W.F. Hegel, Werke in zwanzig Bänden 9, Enzyklopädie der
philosophischen Wissenschaften II, “Die Naturphilosophie” Frankfurt, 1978,
p. 50]
Hegel refers to time as “die totale Negativität” [“total negativity” (op. cit.,
p. 55)]. Time passes into space and space into time as “the point”. The
concrete point is “the place” – unity of here and now (space and time). Spirit
is also a category of negativity – Hegel attributes to it the title of “absolute
negativity”. One can see a kinship between two ‘competing’ categories of
negativity – time as total negativity ‘haunts’ spirit as absolute negativity.
Transposed to a Hegelian Marx perspective – one could regard these
contradictory negativities as the site of an incongruous rupture between
capital as spirit and the proletariat as abstract labour/average time. Is that
perhaps the contradiction intended by Nietzsche when he writes: “Wahrhaft
seiend ist nur der Schmerz und der Widerspruch.” [“Truly existent is only
pain and contradiction.” op. cit., p. 204] There is perhaps no way to this “true
being” – but the site of rupture indicates such an ‘abyss’ where the
transfigured ‘pain’ of average time embodied in the proletariat (“the broken
Ur-pain” – Nietzsche, ibid. p. 205) contradicts absolute semblance or
“pleasure” (“the complete Ur-pleasure”, ibid.) embodied in what Nietzsche
calls will, Hegel – spirit, Marx - capital. Although for Hegel spirit (Geist)
incorporates (is) both contradiction and pain even evil – its dividedness
(Entzweiung) belongs to the nature of spirit. Geist is constituted as a
contradictory unity or identity of itself and not itself - necessarily exiting from
21
itself into its negative, its other, implying pain and contradiction to return to
itself as the idea – to become upon its return the idea returning to itself.
(see G.W.F. Hegel Werke in zwanzig Bänden 10, Enzyklopädie der
philosophischen Wissenschaften, III, “Die Philosophie des Geistes”,
Frankfurt, 1976, pp. 25-27) Since Marx and to a certain extent Nietzsche are
materialist thinkers – contradictory entities although mutually determinant
remain painfully separate.
Following Nietzsche, the absolute negativity of spirit itself can also be

translated into notions of time – it is the timelessness of total pleasure in
eternal contradiction with the finite time of broken pain. The rupture between
infinite capital and finite proletariat rives Marx’s oeuvre itself. The early Marx
saw the world primarily through the living being of the worker, the sensuous
qualities of labour attesting to the specifically human in its species-being
(Gattungswesen) and its capacity for suffering, hence under capital in a state
of abject harm and alienation – the later Marx was obsessed by the demonic
so-called esoteric abstraction capital, the baroque apotheosis of political
economy. This baroque tyrant endlessly contemplating itself – showing itself
to itself in a broken mirror, its quasi-spirit, casting all its ‘exoteric’ parts in its
own image. The proletariat became a figment of the baroque ‘allegory’ of
capital – and the bridge to the living being of labour was more or less
interrupted – or at least so it would seem to some interpreters (like Moishe
Postone) of Marx’s “mature” work. Yet at the end of the chapter on the
transformation of money into capital Marx conjures up a grotesque scene
occurring after the buyer and seller of the commodity labour power leave the
simple sphere of circulation “the veritable Eden of innate human rights” – and
the “physiognomy of our dramatis personae” goes through decisive changes.
The antinomy of pain and pleasure implicit in the opposing personifications
(‘masks’) of capital and abstract labour becomes physically visible. “Der
ehemalige Geldbesitzer schreitet voran als Kapitalist, der
Arbeitskraftbesitzer folgt ihm nach als sein Arbeiter; der eine bedeutungsvoll
schmunzelnd und geschäftseifrig, der andre scheu, widerstrebsam, wie
jemand, der seine eigne Haut zu Markt getragen und nun nichts andres zu
22
erwarten hat als die – Gerberei.” (Marx, Das Kapital, MEW 23, op. cit., p.
191)
[“He, who before was the money-owner, now strides forward as capitalist; the
possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer. The one with an air of
importance, smirking, intent on business; the other timid and holding back,
like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect
but—a hiding.”, Karl Marx, Capital Vol. I, translated from the third German
edition by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, edited by Frederick Engels,
New York, 1967, p. 176]
Average labour-time though as a quasi-epithet of the proletariat is not directly

(immediately) the biological temporality of the individual ‘Dasein’ who is a
worker.
The labour-time of the social body is infinite – it is the time of the species.
Not the individual lifetime is the measure of value (nor the reproduction of
said lifetime) – but the total average lifetime of the species insofar as it is
available as average social labour for capital. The social body now and to
come but also the past in the form of ‘dead labour’ is the infinitude of finite
beings to be set against the infinitude of the accumulation of capital. The
singular member of this infinite set of finite beings is precisely not conscious
of his own death in the mass of the species-time. There is no being-towards-
death of the species. The species does not die, cannot die – not as long as it is
needed by capital.
The temporal unit, which Marx emphasizes, is not the lifetime of (generic)
abstract labour (the worker as ‘personified time’) – it is the working day.
Each day, the worker must be able to replenish his expended energy –
muscles, brain, nerves etc – to be able to go on the following day. His time is
not the time-toward-death – he has little opportunity to be concerned with
that – it is the time towards tomorrow and all the other tomorrows. It is a
time of self-preservation but not for self – for capital. The ‘self’ of abstract
labour, or embodied abstract labour is not really self – only the armature or
phantom of a self. How can one know (recognize) one’s ‘own’ time when it is
merely devolved into the social average – in other words a statistic, a number?
23
The average social time is the ‘substance’, the essence – the lifetime of the
individual is appearance, contingency, accident.
The time of production or average social time – the socially average labour
time – implies at least two kinds of quantitative reduction of ‘human’ time.
Marx emphasizes that abstract labour is measured and has its magnitude in
the time of simple labour – devoid of any particular qualities - for instance
labour skills. This is the invention of capitalism as the social totality. In
addition, being exchange value, the commodities are made equivalent to one
another especially in their all being expressed in terms of the general
equivalent money (‘the great leveller’), hence the labour time expended in
their production must also be quantitatively equivalent.
The aim for capital – is that the time abstract labour spends in production
earning the means of subsistence should itself diminish – leading to more and
more ‘disposable’ time for capital. Disposable time (‘time regained’) is itself
reified – it becomes a commodity, in its turn raw material (use value) for
“varied new products which impose themselves on the market as uses of
socially organized time.” (Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, Detroit, 1983,
p. 151) What else are ‘social media’ than reified time, what Debord calls
“spectacular time” – “the time of consumption of images (…) and the image of
the consumption of time” (Debord, op. cit., p. 153)?
Some of this time may even appear as leisure or holiday time for the worker –
but as Guy Debord notes – in the society of the spectacle – all time in and out
of the working day is subsumed under capital, becoming “pseudo-cyclical
time”: “Pseudo-cyclical time leans on the natural remains of cyclical time and
also uses it to compose new homologous combinations: day and night, work
and weekly rest, the recurrence of vacations.” (Debord, op. cit., p. 150) But
this pseudo-cycle of the spectacular is only possible because the initial violent
wrenching of the proletariat-to-be from his pre-capitalist setting creating ‘free’
producers – was the “violent expropriation of their own time”. (Debord, op.
cit., p. 159 - italics in the original) The time of abstract labour is also a
degraded time and essentially static.
24
5. What is Capital besides Capital? (or Postone ‘de-forms’ Marx)
Capital is the present owner (whereby present=eternity) of all time – past,

present, future – but itself has no time, is not time. History begins with the
loss of innocence – but not second innocence, the timeless time of capital.
As another second innocence, the work of art has a tenuous precarious
correspondence with the semblance (Schein) capital. Loss of innocence is
always also the loss of time – that to which the work of art strives to return, to
regain it. The work of art is the imaginary place where the lost is found
(although the finding is not imaginary) – the work is always past – dead
labour (die tote Arbeit) just as capital is also ‘congealed dead labour’. (Adorno
saw Mahler’s music as one of “absolute lostness”, but in which like in Proust’s
À la Recherche du Temps Perdu lost time files past again in a ghost parade.)
The dead work mourns itself and that which has been lost, but is at the same
time necrophilia – hence the potential of baroque contagion in every work of
art. The baroque is a cult of the exquisite corpse (the crucified body for
example) – a reverse vanitas, the side of life is more horrific than the side of
death. The baroque corpse (the dead work of art) keeps its secret like nature.
But does that mean the secret is objectified in the work of art, in nature? In
capital? Or is the objectified secret already (in) second nature? But how does
one know if the secret is kept or not – if love and death have the power to strip
away the veil of semblance, as Benjamin writes in his essay on “Die
Wahlverwandschaften”, are they not nature? Nature betraying its secret to
itself? Second innocence like second nature as in the work of art (der schöne
Schein) does not aspire to the fullness of being (seinshaltig). It claims for
itself the fullness of not-being. In this sense, Nietzsche as the philosopher of
semblance and the destruction of semblance, is also a Gesamt-antidote to
Heidegger. Nietzsche’s point of departure is tragedy, theatre – the world as a
work of art.
“Unser Schmerz ist ein vorgestellter: unsre Vorstellung bleibt immer
bei der Vorstellung hängen. Unser Leben ist ein vorgestelltes Leben. Wir
kommen keinen Schritt weiter. Freiheit des Willens, jede Aktivität ist nur
Vorstellung. Also auch das Schaffen des Genius Vorstellung. Diese
Spiegelungen im Genius sind Spiegelungen der Erscheinung, nicht
25
mehr des Ureinen: als Abbilder des Abbildes sind es die reinsten
Ruhemomente des Seins. Das wahrhaft Nichtseiende – das
Kunstwerk.(…)Das Sein befriedigt sich im vollkommenen Schein.”
[“Our pain is an imagined (one): our imagination always gets caught in
the imagination. Our life is an imagined life. We are not moving a step
forward. Freedom of the will, every activity is only imagination. So also the
working of genius is imagination. These reflections in genius are
reflections of appearance, no longer the ur-one: as images (copies) of
the image (copy) they are being’s purest moments of rest. The true not-
being – the work of art (…) Being contents itself in perfect semblance.”
(Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe 7, Herausgegeben von Giorgio
Colli und Mazzimo Montinari, München, 1988, Nachgelassene Fragmente
Ende 1870 - April 1871, 7 [157], p. 200 – emphasis in the original.
Note: Besides imagination Vorstellung means idea or representation.)]
The destructive impulse of Nietzsche’s philosophy of semblance is directly

opposed to Heidegger’s ‘Destruktion’. Nietzsche dissolves being in semblance
– Sein in Schein – in the work of art. There is no ground towards which ‘life’
is moving. “We are not moving a step forward.” We only heap copies upon
copies. We are not looking for an “Ur-One”. The “copies of copies”, the forest
of simulacra, are being’s moments of rest – but being (Sein) cannot exist
without semblance (Schein).
So what is capital? Capital is pure quantity, but cannot itself be quantified.

“(Das Kapital ist nicht einfache Quantität, noch einfache Operation: sondern
beides zugleich.)” [“(Capital is not simple quantity, nor simple operation: but
both at once.)” (Karl Marx, Grundrisse, op. cit., p. 519)] Capital like
semblance (Schein) as a category of aesthetics (in the sense of transcendental
semblance) exemplified in the work of art is not opposed to an essence
(Wesen) – but it is a self-sufficient semblance for us. Like Benjamin’s
“schöner Schein”, which he found absolutely formed in Goethe’s tragic figure
of Ottilie – capital as semblance encompasses in its appearance its own decay.
Its decay is not its ‘essence’ – it is integral to its semblance. But as semblance
or semblance of decay – this decay in itself has no age, its decay is always new
26
and always old. All its self-negating properties such as the eternal return of
valorisation and decapitalisation (‘crisis’) are included within its semblance or
‘totality’. Capital thus is without history. As a value-form, capital performing
as semblance has its origins in another more elementary semblance – in
money. It cannot be deduced as an aesthetic category (as it appears for us)
from the material ‘natural’ substrata of production – but is itself an advanced
formation of the mercantile economy of money. “Welthandel und Weltmarkt
eröffnen im 16. Jahrhundert die moderne Lebensgeschichte des Kapitals.
Sehen wir ab vom stofflichen Inhalt der Warenzirkulation, vom Austausch
der verschiednen Gebrauchswerte, und betrachten wir nur die ökonomischen
Formen, die dieser Prozeß erzeugt, so finden wir als sein letztes Produkt das
Geld. Dies letzte Produkt der Warenzirkulation ist die erste
Erscheinungsform des Kapitals.(…)Jedoch bedarf es nicht des Rückblicks auf
die Entstehungsgeschichte des Kapitals, um das Geld als seine erste
Erscheinungsform zu erkennen. Dieselbe Geschichte spielt täglich vor unsren
Augen.”
[“World commerce and world market open the modern life history of capital
in the 16th century. If we disregard the material content of the commodity
circulation, the exchange of different use-values, and consider only the
economic forms, which this process produces, we find its last product to be
money. This last product of the commodity circulation is capital’s first form of
appearance.(…) However, we have no need to look back to the history of the
genesis of capital to recognize money as its first form of appearance. The
same history plays daily before our very eyes.” (Karl Marx, Das Kapital, MEW
23, op. cit., p. 161)]
Capital is ahistorical in the sense that each day it repeats its own history – its
birth out of the head of money.
Yet capital has its own ‘internal’ temporal side – mostly neglected in
discussions of its spiritual nature – this temporal side though is not value-
creating but rather the limit of value, negative and sterile. It is the time of
circulation which determines the speed of turnover and accumulation, in
other words the realisation of value. This time itself must be deducted from
27
any value realised in the actual circulation process. “Die Zirkulationszeit

kommt nur in Betracht in ihrem Verhältnis – als Schranke, Negation – der
Produktionszeit des Kapitals; diese Produktionszeit ist aber die Zeit,
während welcher es sich fremde Arbeit aneignet; die durch es gesetzte
fremde Arbeitszeit.”
[“The circulation-time is considered only in its relation – as a barrier,
negation – of the production-time of capital; this production-time is however
the time, during which capital appropriates strange (fremde) labour; the
strange (fremde) labour-time it has installed.” (Marx, Grundrisse, op. cit.,
p. 528)]
But as there would be no value if the product would remain in the warehouses,
all labour which is part of “bringing the commodity to the market” belongs to
the production process and adds value. The product is only a commodity
when it has entered circulation. These two different times – the circulation
time of capital, the periodicity of its turnover measured in a year and the
“natural work day” as the measure of labour-time – together comprise what
bourgeois political economy ambiguously calls the “labour time” of “working
capital”. The mystification, says Marx, which ensues, “liegt in der Natur des
Kapitals.” [“lies in the nature of capital” (Marx, Grundrisse, op. cit., p. 534)]
Some of this mystificatory “nature of capital” seems to swirl about Moishe

Postone’s exegesis of Marx – a certain immanent ‘undecideability’ regarding
the nature of capital permeates his text “Time, Labor and Social Domination”.
He seems to rediscover some of the illusions of the political economy which
Marx sought to dismantle – as if they were new truths – falling into the traps
of Marx’s dialectical presentation. For instance – in his zeal to unseat the
proletariat as the “subject-object of history”, a view he denounces in
“traditional Marxism”, Postone contends instead that Marx’s category of
capital has all the attributes of Hegel’s ‘spirit’. Instead of the proletariat
Capital is the epochal hero of Marx’s epochal oeuvre – and the “subject-object
of history”.
As the name of Marx’s work is Capital and not Labour, it is not surprising that
it would be seen as the overriding subject of its own production process. For
28
Marx though capital is a very strange sort of subject – as he writes in the

Grundrisse – capital is at all times in its process of valorisation the negation of
itself as the overall subject of the movement, which Marx most frequently calls
circulation. “Das Kapital aber ist als Subjekt der Zirkulation; die Zirkulation
als sein eigner Lebenslauf gesetzt. (…) Das Kapital ist daher in jeder
besondren Phase die Negation seiner als des Subjekts der verschiednen
Wandlungen.”
[“Capital is as the subject of circulation; presented in circulation with its own
life cycle. (…) Capital is thus in each special phase (of circulation sm) the
negation of itself as the subject of the various transformations.”
(Marx, Grundrisse, op. cit. p. 514)]
Oddly, the complete ‘life’ of capital, so exhaustively charted by Marx, as it

moves in and out of the circulation sphere and production process is missing
in Postone’s presentation. Despite his bias towards capital as the primum
movens of history – he concentrates like those authors he criticizes almost
exclusively on labour and the sphere of immediate production.
Postone is not content with anointing capital as subject of its so-called self-
valorisation process - he designates capital as the subject of history, as secular
‘spirit’, claiming that this is how Marx intended his critique be understood.
Implicit in Postone’s inference is the notion that the repetitive cycle of capital
valorisation and devalorisation, what Marx calls its lifeline (Lebenslauf) – its
own reproduction and self-destruction process – is identical with historical
process or historical time as such.
Postone cites a crucial well-known passage from the first volume of Capital
where Marx analyses the “general formula of capital” as proof of his
contention:
“At this point in his exposition, Marx describes his concept of capital in terms
that clearly relate it to Hegel’s concept of Geist:
It [value] is constantly changing from one form into the other without becoming lost
in this movement; it thus transforms itself into an automatic subject ….In truth,
however, value is here the subject of a process in which, while constantly assuming
29
the form in turn of money and of commmodities, it changes its own magnitude,…and
thus valorizes itelf….For the movement in the course of which it adds surplus-value is
its own movement, its valorization is therefore self-valorization….[V]alue suddenly
presents itself as a self-moving substance which passes through a process of its own,
and for which the commodity and money are both mere forms.
Marx, then, explicitly characterizes capital as the self-moving substance which
is Subject. In so doing, Marx suggests that a historical Subject in the Hegelian
sense does indeed exist in capitalism, yet he does not identify it with any social
grouping, such as the proletariat, or with humanity. Rather, Marx analyzes it
in terms of the structure of social relations constituted by forms of objectifying
practice and grasped by the category of capital (and, hence, value). (…) they
possess the attributes that Hegel accorded the Geist. It is in this sense, then,
that a historical Subject as conceived by Hegel exists in capitalism.” (Moishe
Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination, Cambridge, 2003, p. 75)
But is this the Subject as conceived by Marx? Why would Marx consider
capital the subject of history when he develops its forms so as to show that in
its operation it is ahistorical – repeating its own history over and over again
every day? Irreversible history – the Doppelgänger of the eternal present of
the life cycle of Capital – is itself a semblance (result) of a universal quantified
time of capitalist production or “circulating capital” in the wide sense. The
seeming paradox of at least two different unitary times of capital would
disappear if circulation were not the historical-ontological ground of Capital
from which it goes out and to which it returns. The two times: the cyclical
unitary time (revolutions) of Capital in its complete repetitive cycle of being
always what it is not at any particular moment - unifies within itself as its
‘necessary illusion’ – the irreversible time of universal world history.
This ‘universal history’ though is not really history at all but as noted by Guy
Debord, it is “(…) still only the refusal within history of history itself.”
“145 With the development of capitalism, irreversible time is unified on a
world scale. Universal history becomes a reality because the entire world is
gathered under the development of this time. But this history, which is
everywhere simultaneously the same, is still only the refusal within history of
30
history itself. What appears the world over as the same day is the time of
economic production cut up into equal abstract fragments. Unified
irreversible time is the time of the world market and, as a corollary, of the
world spectacle.” (Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, Black & Red, Detroit,
1983)
Irreversible history haunts the cyclical “life-act”(Lebensakt) of Capital as its
other ‘present’, its ‘spectacle’.
The theme of ‘being of haunting’ – the ‘present’ is the unchanging eternal

cycle of capital whereby present has no meaning. If there is only present then
present disappears. History is the shadow of that eternal non-present present.
History which seems to be the most concrete of all is relegated to a negligible
vaporous trail of the quasi-biological yet undying organism (organic cycle) of
capital.
(Whatever does not belong to any temporal determination – is transcendental,
because it seizes possession of all times. Such as sin (Kierkegaard), decay
(entropy), or the accident? Is it possible to raise the temporal itself to the
power of the transcendental? To transcendentalize time?)
Capital transforms itself in the circular movement of its circulating self in its
various phases of money, commodity, production process, more money, in the
market, in the circulation, as rent or interest bearing capital, as credit or
finance – at any specific moment always that which it is not as the subject of
the whole. If it were to be what it is, it would cease to be in its own endless
process of valorisation meaning it would cease to be at all. Hence it is
temporal only in a formal sense –it can never be historical.
In all the unitary time of capital there is not one atom of history. Neither can
one find, as Postone claims, an “immanent logic of history” in its “alienated
form of social relations”. (Moishe Postone, Time, Labor and Social
Domination, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 270) In another passage
Postone seems to retreat from this claim – citing “Marx’s analysis” whereby
“the capital form of social relations (…)is blind, processual, and quasi-
organic.” (ibid.) Capital then is a form of ‘second nature’ – the quasi-organic
31
– as such it cannot constitute an “immanent logic of history” – rather it is

itself posited by history, not in itself historical or susceptible to self-
transformation in reaction to ‘events’. It is a parasite of events and as such
absolute semblance. When Marx refers to history in relation to capital he
speaks of a “natural historical process” – a movement of the natural world for
which he has discovered the general forms.
But Postone will again attempt to rescue the historical dynamic of capital, its
so-called immanent historical logic – which he seems so eager to establish.
Despite its ‘blindness’ capital is at the same time, value – somehow the more
noble part of capital for Postone – and value “(…)is, as we shall see, a category
of efficiency, rationalization, and ongoing transformation. Value is a category
of a directionally dynamic totality.” (Postone, op. cit., p. 272)
Marx defines value in the first chapter of Das Kapital as having as its
‘substance’ abstract human labour, whose measure in turn is the time of
labour. Abstract human labour represents a multiple complex process of
reduction and quantification of human activity. Abstract labour is first of all
the most ‘simple’ form of labour or labour in its simple form – this is of course
an ideal of simplification. Marx suggests other ways of determining this
simplification – it is also an average – but not just any average, it is average
social labour determined by the average productivity at any given time in the
social body alias capitalist society. Marx does not describe the exact way such
a social average is constructed – not in this chapter – its operation is merely
assumed. The social average is an indefinite unknown means of quantifying
labour, which together with the apparent ‘visible’ abstraction of the measure
of time determine the value produced by abstract human labour. This labour
thus is not the least qualified nor is it the most qualified – it is an average.
(The process of proletarisation described by Marx as “original accumulation”
was in most cases a degrading of the skills of labourers – the transfer of these
skills to the more efficient machine for the purpose of cheaper production of
larger quantities of commodities – irregardless of their quality.) Average
social time, the composite of these various processes of reduction or laying
bare of labour, is not pure quantity although it is a measure of
standardisation. Value is measured by the simple duration of labour-time
32
required for its production as a function of the standard amount of time

needed for this act in a given society according to its average level of
productivity. This standard of average social labour is a hybrid of cultural,
social and technological parameters – itself a model of reified time.
Any system based on an average level of productivity, as is the case in
capitalism, can hardly be said to be a “directionally dynamic totality” – as
Postone argues. On the contrary, one of the peculiar inner contradictions of
capitalism – is its persistent aim to rest at a plateau – the average – to move
from unrest to rest – approximating more what Benjamin refers to as a
“Dialektik des Stillstands” (dialectic of stagnation) than a dynamic tendency.
Physicists studying cities and corporations have recently confirmed the same
tendency of stagnation despite ‘dynamic’ appearances– from a statistical
mathematical perspective. Corporations are feeble – this is capital – they
have a longevity of about 40-50 years. Cities are indestructible – this is
history – the terrain of the ‘multitude’. Cities are a more likely subject of
history. Citing the work of Bettencourt and West, Jonah Lehrer writes in the
New York Times of 17th December 2010: “At first glance, cities and companies
look very similar. They’re both large agglomerations of people, interacting in a
well-defined physical space. They contain infrastructure and human capital;
the mayor is like a C.E.O. But it turns out that cities and companies differ in a
very fundamental regard: cities almost never die, while companies are
extremely ephemeral. As West notes, Hurricane Katrina couldn’t wipe out
New Orleans, and a nuclear bomb did not erase Hiroshima from the map. In
contrast, where are Pan Am and Enron today? The modern corporation has an
average life span of 40 to 50 years.
This raises the obvious question: Why are corporations so fleeting? After
buying data on more than 23,000 publicly traded companies, Bettencourt and
West discovered that corporate productivity, unlike urban productivity, was
entirely sublinear. As the number of employees grows, the amount of profit
per employee shrinks. West gets giddy when he shows me the linear
regression charts. “Look at this bloody plot,” he says. “It’s ridiculous how well
the points line up.” The graph reflects the bleak reality of corporate growth, in
which efficiencies of scale are almost always outweighed by the burdens of
33
bureaucracy. “When a company starts out, it’s all about the new idea,” West
says. “And then, if the company gets lucky, the idea takes off. Everybody is
happy and rich. But then management starts worrying about the bottom line,
and so all these people are hired to keep track of the paper clips. This is the
beginning of the end.”
The danger, West says, is that the inevitable decline in profit per employee
makes large companies increasingly vulnerable to market volatility. Since the
company now has to support an expensive staff — overhead costs increase
with size — even a minor disturbance can lead to significant losses. As West
puts it, “Companies are killed by their need to keep on getting bigger.” ”
(Jonah Lehrer, A Physicist Solves the City, New York Times, December 17,
2010, online)
It seems the physicist’s findings are a mathematical echo of Marx’s discussion

in Volume 3 of Capital of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall
(“As the number of employees grows, the amount of profit per employee
shrinks.”) as always accompanied by the irresistible self-destructive need of
capital to concentrate in ever-greater conglomerations (“ “Companies are
killed by their need to keep on getting bigger.” ”) Odd that West presents his
findings as if no one had ever discovered these ‘laws’ of capital before.
These looming elements of the ineluctable and recurring crisis of capital – the
tendency of the rate of profit to fall and capital’s fatal drive towards unlimited
concentration - both utter counter-movements to any dynamic of rational
efficiency – are dismissed by Postone as “surface phenomena” of capital. (see
“Time, Labor, and Social Domination, op. cit., page 311 note 15) Postone’s
“theory of capital” ‘de-forms’ Marx’s critique of political economy in the
attempt to free capital of any blemish which could spoil his interpretation of
capital as the apex of history or perfect ‘spirit’ – akin to Hegel’s Geist.
34
6. The Subject as Double Substance
Although dismissive of the so-called “surface phenomena” of capital as

accidental or insignificant for the analysis of its nature – Postone presents
another such “surface phenomenon” – capital as an “automatic subject” (see
passage cited above) as the proof, that Marx saw capital as the subject of
history, as Geist. Recalling his presentation of the “general formula of
capital”, Marx reveals at the end of the next chapter entitled “The
Contradictions in the General Formula of Capital” that this general formula is
merely that which is visible in the sphere of circulation. Marx comes to the
temporary seemingly paradoxical conclusion that because a capitalist in the
long run exchanges equivalents – capital cannot originate in the circulation
sphere, but neither can it not not originate in circulation. “It is (…) impossible
for capital to be produced by circulation, and it is equally impossible for it to
originate apart from circulation. It must have its origin both in circulation
and yet not in circulation.” (Karl Marx, Capital Vol. I, translated from the third
German edition by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, edited by Frederick
Engels, New York, 1967, pp. 165-6)
He concludes the following chapter on the “The Buying and Selling of Labour-
Power”” almost in symmetry to the ending of the chapter on the “general
formula”, so as to warn the reader – what he has seen in the preceding
chapters is how capital appears to expand itself spontaneously – but is not
how this expansion alias surplus value really arises. The new element he has
introduced by the end of the sixth chapter – is that unique commodity which
has the power within itself to create value – the commodity of labour power.
So if at the end of the chapter 4 in which Postone’s “automatic subject” holds
sway Marx writes:
“Value therefore now becomes value in process, money in process, and, as
such, capital. It comes out of circulation, enters into it again, preserves and
multiplies itself within its circuit, comes back out of it with expanded bulk,
and begins the same round ever afresh. M-M’, money which begets money,
such is the description of Capital from the mouths of its first interpreters, the
Mercantilists.(…)M-C-M’ is therefore in reality the general formula of capital
35
as it appears prima facie within the sphere of circulation.” (Karl Marx, Capital
Vol. I, op. cit., pp. 154-155)
At the conclusion of chapter 6 Marx dispels this appearance – showing it to be

at the very least incomplete: “Accompanied by Mr. Moneybags and by the
possessor of labour-power, we therefore take leave for a time of this noisy
sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in view of all men,
and follow them both into the hidden abode of production, (…)Here we shall
see, not only how capital produces, but how capital is produced. We shall at
last force the secret of profit making.” (Karl Marx, Capital Vol. I, op. cit.,
p. 176)
Marx, the dramatist of capital, is constantly alternating in his presentation

between the action on stage and how it appears to the audience (who are also
the actors) and that other view from behind and below. On stage the capital
spectacle is an automaton – a beloved entertainment in Victorian times –
“self-processing value”, “automatic subject”, “self-moving substance”, all the
forms of the “general formula of capital M-C-M’ ”. This is a formula inherited
from older forms of capital – usurer, merchant capital – grasped as a system
in mercantilism. Appropriately, mercantilism was also a system of state
economy. The illusion that money directs itself under the tutelage of the state
lives on in all forms of monetarism. But Marx was not an early monetarist,
assuming that money and money supply exist in a solipsistic ‘other’ economic
cosmos apart from production – as Postone sometimes would like to suggest.
(An inchoate ghostly mercantilist-monetarism haunts Postone’s occasional

futurist utterances about capitalism – in such a future the market would be
abolished, not the capitalist mode of producing ‘value’. The market would be
replaced by an ‘administration’ (of what?), “another mode of coordination and
generalization” and the “law of value could also be mediated politically.”
(Postone, op. cit, p. 291). This sounds suspiciously like some sort of
corporatism operating outside of the world market, usually associated with the
fascist phase of capitalism – is this the New Chicago School?)
36
Marx, though, in demonstrating how money is transformed into capital, has

only set up the scene on stage to unravel it in the following chapters. The
capitalist does not just buy cheap and sell dear – he buys and sells at the value
of commodities. Marx exposes though the other indispensable commodity
which capital procures in the circulation sphere – the commodity of labour
power. This commodity must be consumed by capital in the production
process so that capital can re-emerge and expand itself in the circulation
sphere.
So in a Hegelian sense capital flows out of itself into its negation – labour-
power metamorphosed in the production sphere into abstract labour which
creates value – to return to the circulation sphere where this value must be
realised as M’ or capital. But Postone further twists Marx and his inheriting of
Hegelian dialectical forms. For Postone Hegel is the source for Marx’s so-
called discovery of capital as the “subject-object of history” which Postone
paraphrases quite literally: “For Hegel, then, the Geist is simultaneously
subjective and objective – it is the identical subject-object, the “substance”
that is at the same time “Subject”(…)” (Postone, op. cit., p. 72)
But Hegel’s substance is precisely itself and not itself – “Geist and not Geist”
(Adorno, Negative Dialektik, op. cit., p. 199) – and as such dialectical.
Without the “work of the negative” the substance, even if the substance were
“the life of God” would be empty, bland and lifeless writes Hegel. Adorno also
criticizes Hegel for “blowing up” Geist into the “Whole” – whereas the
“differentia specifica” of Geist is that it is a Subject, “subjectivistic”: “Geist, der
Totalität sein soll, ist ein Nonsens (…)” [“Spirit meant to be totality is
nonsense (…) ibid.] comparing this thinking to the logic of totalitarian
singular parties of the 20th century.
Postone revives a vulgar “identity-philosophy”, denuded of the negativity
inherent in both Hegel and Marx. Waxing lyrical, he turns Marx’s critique of
capital into a positive concept of pure affirmation – Capital as Geist, Subject
and “homogeneous totality” (see Postone, op. cit. pp. 78-79), whereby
especially for Hegel Geist is inherently contradictory and divided (entzweit) –
in other words negativity.
37
Marx was able to recognize the dialectic of capital and its negation abstract
labour as a double subject or a hybrid substance through the forms of Hegel’s
Logic and Phenomenology (e.g. Herr-Knecht, master-slave). This negativity
of substance with itself is reciprocal – capital being also the negation of
abstract labour.
Contrary to Postone’s claim, that the “mature Marx” of Das Kapital had
abandoned his critique of Hegel’s dialectic as an inverted mystified one which
had to be turned upside down to discover its “rational core” in the “mystical
cover” – Marx reiterates, in an approving response to a Russian reviewer of
the Russian translation of Das Kapital, precisely this view in his Afterword to
the second German edition of Das Kapital Volume I (London 1873). But in its
“rational form” Hegel’s dialectic disquiets the bourgeoisie, because its
movement leaves nothing fixed, in its positive grasp of what exists it always
includes the negation of what exists implying a “necessary demise” of
capitalist social formations – all the more realistic, according to Marx, given
the cyclical nature of capital and its always imminent “general crisis”. The
essence of Hegel’s dialectic is “critical and revolutionary” (Marx). One
wonders why Postone is at such pains to prove Marx has ‘recanted’ his
revolutionary ‘demystification’ of Hegel’s dialectic. (see Postone, op. cit., p. 75)
Yet, Postone seems to stumble himself over this ‘duplicity’ of substance in

Marx’s Capital – when he remarks in the vicinity of his claim that capital is
the identical subject-object of history, that Marx refers both to abstract labour
and capital as substance: “(…)at the beginning of Capital he (Marx) himself
makes use of the category of “substance”. He refers to value as having a
“substance”, which he identifies as abstract human labour.” (ibid.) A few
sentences later Postone switches to capital as substance – but now
immediately also Subject and Geist. He is unable to show how both capital
and abstract labour compose what Hegel designates, in the Preface to the
Phenomenology of Spirit, as “The living substance (…) which is only insofar as
it is the movement of positing itself, or the mediation of the process of
becoming different (emphasis sm) from itself with itself.” (Hegel, Preface to
the Phenomenology of Spirit quoted in Postone, op. cit., p. 72) Hegel
38
continues to emphasize that this “living substance” far from being identical
with itself – is as “Subject, pure simple negativity, precisely so the splitting of
the simple; or the opposing doubling, which is again the negation of this
indifferent diversity and is its opposite:” [“Sie (die lebendige Substanz) ist als
Subjekt die reine einfache Negativität, eben dadurch die Entzweiung des
Einfachen; oder die entgegensetzende Verdopplung, welche wieder die
Negation dieser gleichgültigen Verschiedenheit und ihres Gegensatzes ist:”,
G.W.F. Hegel, Vorrede, Phänomenologie des Geistes, Werke in zwanzig
Bänden 3, Frankfurt, 1976, p. 23)]
As Marx writes – capital is produced in circulation and not in circulation. It is

precisely due to this splitting or doubling of capital and abstract labour as the
source of value, realised in the circulation of capital, that makes it impossible
to grasp capital as an identity of any kind – neither of itself with itself
(Postone) nor of itself with itself and not-itself – abstract labour. When
wealth (stofflicher Reichtum) as in quantities of goods (use-value) does not
enter into the circulation sphere – due to forced inactivity, contraction – as in
the crisis of overproduction or in a crisis of finance (like in the present – all
those abandoned unfinished ghost estates in Ireland) – although these goods
have been produced in the capitalist production process through the agency of
abstract labour they will still have nil value – or less, as negative value, loss or
debt. The production process – so emphasized by Postone – is the site of the
potential valorisation of capital – but it is also the site of the consumption of
commodities, variable capital (labour-power) and constant capital
(machinery, raw materials, etc) Without the transfer of commodities
produced in the production process to the circulation sphere – where they are
converted into money again, they remain mere material wealth. Hence money
is not less original in the production of capital than abstract labour. Abstract
labour may be the source of value – money is the form of the realisation of
value and surplus value, in other words capital. Ricardo emphasized labour as
the source of value – but Sismondi showed how value is always in danger of
disappearing in the crisis, devalorising. If Marx would truly think as Postone
suggests – he would have fallen behind the level of insight of a Sismondi.
39
Postone most peculiarly excises the market and property relations from the
process of production of capital. He quarantines abstract labour in the
production sphere, where it supposedly creates value without the intrusion of
money in this process. In this purified world of capital – class struggle and
exploitation melt away like “les neiges d’antan”.
“Note that the market-mediated mode of circulation is not an essential
moment of this dynamic. (…) If the market mode of circulation does play a
role in this dynamic, it is as a subordinate moment (…) To focus exclusively on
the mode of circulation is to deflect attention away from important
implications of the commodity form for the trajectory of capitalist
development in Marx’s critical theory.” (Postone, op. cit., p. 291)
The commodity form only exists in circulation. What else is the commodity
form other than the receptacle of dead congealed labour, stripped of its
qualities, like Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, in which
form it circulates (as money or commodity) in the circulation sphere – just as
abstract labour is the quantitative form of living labour engaged in the
production process of said commodity form?
Circulation without the commodity is empty. The commodity without
circulation has no value. In an absurd way, Postone’s ‘theory of capital’ misses
above all capital.
© Shannee Marks, December 2010

All rights reserved
Published in Faust series Opus 9: 28th December 2010
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The Undecidability of Capital

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The Undecidability of Capital

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Shannee Marks

The Undecidability of Capital

Marx speaks of the ‘rawness’ of capital towards the underclass

Desire (Drang), which Schelling saw as “the pre-form of spirit”, is immanently

way actions, occurrences follow from other actions or occurrences in the

Thus this one here,

This just going on expressed in Beckett’s verse has nothing to do with

The truth of generic humanity in a work of fiction in the ongoing epoch of

2. Derrida on his Knees

The Starez, a figure much admired by Wittgenstein, is a monk whose historical

Derrida was trapped/caught on a video by a random contingent

The imperviousness of the fact (factum brutum) is the ‘secret’ – Derrida’s

was made up to an extreme pallor – looking almost Japanese – and confined

Is Derrida’s kneeling a symptom of his circumcision neurosis?

When Ottilie fades away as it is inscribed in her semblance to do – she is not

doctrine that beauty is inseparable from semblance – the further removed

Benjamin’s aesthetic of beautiful semblance as necessarily ‘irrevocably’ veiled

sind keine.” [The enigma character however is recognizable as constitutive,

A standard move of deconstructionist philosophy – in the literary sphere,

asphyxiating closeness of Dasein and its shadow Angst or Sorge (Care) is

necessity that commits metaphysics, in the process of completing itself, since

and consciousness” (for what is subjectivity other than will and

This money though is not the money of the Schatzbildner (hoarder of

The ‘authenticity’ which Adorno rejects is an attribute of something which is

monadological type (Gestalt)”, Theodor W. Adorno, “Goldprobe” in Minima

The inversion of Echte (authentic) and Unechte (inauthentic) leads Adorno to

Heidegger’s answer to the self-posed question, “Who is Nietzsche’s

requisitioning of Zarathustra for the moral improvement of ‘humanity’ is

There is no theatre without a revenge tragedy. In this sense Tadeusz Kantor’s

It would seem there is rather an asymmetry or even rupture in Marx’s theatre

personify time – the particular time of the production process? Does it

Although the capitalist is a personification of capital – in a sense possessed by

As the character mask of capital, the capitalist has no immanent relation to

Following Nietzsche, the absolute negativity of spirit itself can also be

Average labour-time though as a quasi-epithet of the proletariat is not directly

5. What is Capital besides Capital? (or Postone ‘de-forms’ Marx)

Capital is the present owner (whereby present=eternity) of all time – past,

The destructive impulse of Nietzsche’s philosophy of semblance is directly

So what is capital? Capital is pure quantity, but cannot itself be quantified.

any value realised in the actual circulation process. “Die Zirkulationszeit

Some of this mystificatory “nature of capital” seems to swirl about Moishe

Marx though capital is a very strange sort of subject – as he writes in the

Oddly, the complete ‘life’ of capital, so exhaustively charted by Marx, as it

The theme of ‘being of haunting’ – the ‘present’ is the unchanging eternal

– as such it cannot constitute an “immanent logic of history” – rather it is

required for its production as a function of the standard amount of time

It seems the physicist’s findings are a mathematical echo of Marx’s discussion

6. The Subject as Double Substance

Although dismissive of the so-called “surface phenomena” of capital as

At the conclusion of chapter 6 Marx dispels this appearance – showing it to be

Marx, the dramatist of capital, is constantly alternating in his presentation

(An inchoate ghostly mercantilist-monetarism haunts Postone’s occasional

Marx, though, in demonstrating how money is transformed into capital, has

Yet, Postone seems to stumble himself over this ‘duplicity’ of substance in

As Marx writes – capital is produced in circulation and not in circulation. It is

© Shannee Marks, December 2010

Published in Faust series Opus 9: 28th December 2010

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