#quote19

Akhil Gupta, “The reincarnation of souls and the rebirth of commodities: representations of time in “East” and “West””

Even in modern western culture the tropes of circular time are constantly invoked in the ‘boom and bust’ language of economics, in the routinisation of the work (the eternal recurrence of the ‘nine-to-five’ job), in the cyclic patterns of the seasons, the biological rhythms of the body, and the 24-hour clock, and so on. What is strikingly different about modern western conceptions, however, is the rigidity of the distinction that is made between beings and things, which Akhil Gupta notes, allows for a constant recycling of ideas, commodities, fashion, and even garbage, but does not allow for the possibility of the rebirth of beings. 

Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Ethics in Aristotle is a science of character: the building of character, the dynamics of habits... ‘Happiness’ is thereby expected from the humans’ best possible adjustment to these habits... From Aristotelian to the Christian ethics, the good remains predicated on the homeostatic principle of pleasure and its ‘tempering’ tendency, which allows the human being to fit itself within the mold of habits.

Kordela, Surplus

The ethics of analysis ... involves effacement, setting aside, withdrawal indeed the absence of ... the dimension of habits, good and bad habits.

Kiarina Kordela, $urplus: Spinoza, Lacan, Introduction

Like Cantor, who treated infinity as a number, Marx developed his ‘theory of sets’ by treating capital itself, and therefore money itself, as a commodity. It was thus not the generality but the infinity of money that interested Marx. Money must not be regarded as a general measure of value, but rather as a commodity that is unconditionally exchangeable.

Classical economics ignores this aspect of money by defining money as a barometer that indicates the magnitude of value. By excluding money, the classical schools of economics were able to achieve an equilibrate system. The same can be said for the neoclassical school and, for that matter, most Marxian economists. On the other hand, Marx stresses that such an equilibrium is essentially nonexistent. It is therefore absolutely impossible to control capitalism from the meta-level, because capitalism itself is deconstructive.

This does not mean that Capital can be reduced to this interpretation. What I would like to say here is that Marx was experiencing the same crisis that has accompanied formalization since the latter half of the 19th century; having written the ‘foundations’ of economics, Marx simultaneously realized - sooner than anyone else - the absence of its foundation.

Kojin Karatani, Architecture as Metaphor, “Money”

Kordela, Surplus

“Capital itself demands the abolition of national boundaries, involves a system of production in which what traditionally was considered reproduction or unproductaon is equally a part of production itself (both leisure and unemployment being necessary for the sustenance of capitalism), and is already increasingly entrusting the means of production to the multitude, since the latter is itself constituted by them, reproducing them in body and mind.