Jason Read’s “The Difference of Spinoza” opens describing the primary concern of On the Nature of Marx’s Things: “The transformation and displacement of translation. A displacement that is not unrelated to the displacements and transformations that make up capital.” I’m struck at the formula: “not unrelated.” Here Read compactly touches on one of the book’s points of stress. We handle concepts of “relation” and call this management “thinking”—concepts of the relation between individuals (forming or discerning classes of individuals based in likenesses, unlikenesses: we think “abstractly”); concepts of the relation between one group of relations, like “transformations and displacements” of one sort of material (call it linguistic material: translation, then) and another group of relations, like the “transformations and displacements” of materials that enter into the circuit of commodities. It’s strange to call thinking “handling concepts of relation,” but the figure helps underscore simultaneously that “thinking” has a relation to embodiment; that concepts are the sorts of objects (or are like them; or related to them) that can be handled; that concepts are not just used to given or derived ends (I can handle a hammer and not be using it; I can handle the shard of a cup and not drink from the fragment, or even remember the cup it was part of); even that my relation to concepts is unthought and unthinking (my handling may be habitual, as when I flick on the light-switch when entering a room). To think of thinking as “handling concepts of relation” allows me to imagine a state of affairs in which concepts of relation, like things handled and like individuals subject to relation, can be broken, scuffed, forgotten, dropped and destroyed, as well as made, valued, exchanged, admired, consumed . . .

To affirm that two individuals are “not unrelated” is not the same as to affirm that they are related: this seems intuitively correct, though it’s hard to spell out the difference in practice. The difficulty may flow from the difference between the rhetorical and logical forces of the expression. “I’m happy with the reception of my book” does not mean the same, we know, as “I’m not unhappy with the reception of my book.” Two quite different professional identities are on display, though logically the two phrases should mean the same. Recall the double negatives of “Bartleby, the Scrivener’s” orbicular narrator, whose mode is partly the subject of the third chapter of On the Nature of Marx’s Things: “I was not unemployed in my profession. . . . I was not insensible to the late John Jacob Astor’s good opinion.” Prudence keeps this most prudent man from the vanity of affirming that he was employed, and that he was sensible to that opinion; no such prudence inhibits Melville’s reader, who infers what was guarded and thereby learns to doubt the moral value, we might say, of that sort of prudence. The “transformation and displacement of translation” “is not unrelated to the displacements and transformations,” but what relation can be inferred from Read’s prudent formula, and from On the Nature of Marx’s Things? On what sorts of grounds will we draw this inference, and what value will it have? Is the not-unrelatedness of translation’s transformations to capital’s a concept (classically defined: coherent or tending to coherence and identity; boundable; useful), or is it the sort of thing I handle instead?

The royal way into my handling of “not unrelatedness”—the “not-unrelatedness” of translation’s displacements and the displacements of capital—is to be found, for Read, in the account of Marx’s encounter with Spinoza that On the Nature of Marx’s Things offers. Read very helpfully unpacks the different levels on which this encounter takes place, and rightly points out the importance of a Spinozan principle of causation to Marx—a sort of retroactive causation bound to conflict with the different figures of determination at work in Capital especially. (And even more strikingly at work in the roughly-called Hegelian reception of Marx; as well as in circumstances in which it may be strategically useful to offer as seeming certainties the outcomes of specific political interventions at concrete moments.) This conflict, Read suggests, lines up with a conflict of a different sort whose dynamic traces run through Capital. On one side of Marx’s work we find a “shallow” “logic that is at once anthropological, needs are its basis prior to and outside the economy, and anthropomorphic, the entire economy acts toward an end, towards consumption, that serves as its end” and “effaces the history of consumption, the history of needs, desires, and their transformation, a history of subjectivity, as well as the history of production, a history of the different ways in which things are produced, in terms of technology and social relation, a history of the mode of production. In opposition to it,” Read suggests, “Marx constructs a series of statements that begin to examine the way in which what is posited as outside of the economy as its natural ground must also be seen as an effect.” The “Spinozan difference” consists in this reinscription of the “outside,” “natural ground” of economy and society as instead or in addition as the effect of these.

Marx’s logic is “not unrelated” to Spinoza’s, but how does Marx handle Spinoza? On this question there is, and should be, controversy. Despite the deep structural affinities that Read and others, not least of them Althusser and Balibar, note between the two, On the Nature of Marx’s Things chooses to hang its argument on a very slender peg. The tactic is not unrelated to Althusser’s own symptomale readings of Marx, though just how the notion of “symptom” is to be handled has changed substantially in the past half-century (along with the notions of “body,” “effect, “cause,” “pathology,” and so on). I think Read is right in insisting that the symptom-tactic as deployed in On the Nature of Marx’s Things is post- rather than strictly Althusserian. The surplus-and-deficit machines tipping the argument away from the figure of the symptom are the couplet of over- and under-determination, and the handling of concepts—defective, explicitly subject to scuffing and nonidentities, embodied, materialized; liable to dropping, destruction, forgetting, and so on. Here’s an example. Read reminds us of Chantal Jacquet’s observation: “Spinoza sometimes uses bodies to explain the relations between ideas; for example, universal notions such as ‘man’ arise when ‘so many images are formed at one time in the human body that they surpass the power of imagining’ (EIIP40Schol). The limits of the bodies’ capacity to be affected,” Read continues, “underly the limitation of the mind’s capacity to think. In a similar manner some of the most intimate expressions of affective life, jealousy, anger, and fear, can be understood not by examining the body but the association of ideas.” The problem is Soritical: one fact or individual will yield an adequate image; two will permit a judgment of similarity between two adequate images, and the imagination will produce an image of what-is-similar among the two individuals and can be predicated of both; so too with three; and so on until a threshold is crossed, and the universal notion, by defect, is produced from the exhaustion of vis imaginativa. But what is this threshold? The question beats at the heart of what Read rightly identifies as the “identity and difference of idea and body [that] is the challenge of materialism.” He continues, summarizing a turn in the argument of On the Nature of Marx’s Things: “Materialism cannot be a materialism of the thing, of the object, but nor can it be a materialism of the idea, of theoretical practice. Instead materialism is both a materialism of things and ideas, tracing their overdetermined connections and their disparate effects.” When we ask about this “threshold,” we are also asking about the not unrelatedness of “things” and “ideas,” both of which are “objects” for Marx—though they operate at different levels in Capital (and in capital). What status does the threshold have? With this question, a materialism of relation comes on scene. (Thresholds are such things as can be handled; they offer a materialism of the not-unrelated.) Is the threshold between body and idea (the idea of the body; the embodiment of the idea) an aspect of the concept of the imagination? Is it an attribute of all bodies? For instance, of the embodied ideas “Spinoza” and “Marx” or for a certain Karl Marx and Bento Spinoza, the bodies that bear those names. But the expression “all bodies” is also a universal, and also an axiom of exhaustion. So—are we predicating this “threshold” of “all bodies” out of exhaustion—this time, out of the double exhaustion of our capacity to imagine the limits of the power of the imagination, and of the exhaustion of our capacity to imagine “all bodies”?

Marx, I suggest, handles this sort of Soritical question, indeed this very question, first as a problem of translation or translatability. Translation is the door into the question of the normative ground of the threshold between bodies and ideas, that is, into Marx’s underlying handling of materialism. It’s here that his residual Lucretianism is at work, since the threshold is crossed per saltum. The expression is Hegel’s; he is seeking to translate into a conceptual frame tolerable to the Logic a distressingly aleatory movement per casus or per lapsus, the accidental falling-together movement or declinatio of Lucretian ontology, cosmology, logic, and historiography. Capital, and capital, not unrelatedly, translate among orders of thought and across material thresholds, the thresholds that constitute materialism, per saltum but also per casus. Translation in capital (and in Capital) happens incerto tempore ferme / incertisque locis spatio (DRN 2:219–20): at uncertain times and in undetermined places. It could have happened otherwise: the lemma of the underground materialism of the encounter, as the late Althusser has it. On the Nature of Marx’s Things takes up an alternative I explore in Wild Materialism (2010): it is, it happens, otherwise.

How does it help us today, when the world is so direly in need of transformation, to interpret things, bodies, ideas, and the not-unrelated translations among them as On the Nature of Marx’s Things does? Let’s say we could indeed—by means, say, of such an interpretation—install the material operator “not unrelated” where the assertive, imprudent ontologization of relation now rules. (I want to distinguish between the “ontologization of relation,” stress on the verb, which I take to be the sovereign act of granting a “relation” existential primacy over relata; and the “ontology of relation,” a paradoxical and deeply helpful sort-of-concept handled with the greatest lucidity by Simondon, Balibar, and Read himself, which instead—here the Spinozist strain of the argument is clear—dissolves any claim to existential primacy in the solvent of a general monism.) Install that form: this would mean reinscribing the “outside,” the “natural ground” of economy and society: the “natural ground,” body, ecology, material circumstance, are now effects, and as such not prior to but correlative with economy and society. Tendentious separations, built to serve historical interests, become untenable; the role of extractive logic in the production of the environment becomes unassailable; that bodies are and bear the effects of logics of production and consumption, too.

But this isn’t enough. On the Nature of Marx’s Things tries, with what success of course is to be seen, to offer the bases and means by which interpretation can lead to specific, concrete political-administrative change, by claiming that the not-unrelatedness of Marx’s things, as I’ve been calling it here (with my great thanks to Jason Read), can serve as the structure of institutions. (Administrative, social, political, juridical . . .) I mean this quite specifically, though my argument here operates where the question of the decline into universals occurs. On the Nature of Marx’s Things offers, not-quite-explicitly, a theory of institution and of state- and self-governance based in defective associations and in bodies’ and ideas’ not-unrelatedness. To make these explicit is the task of the book I’m working on now.

There being in perfectly similar and equal but incongruous solids, such as the right and the left hand, conceived of solely as to extent, or spherical triangles in opposite hemispheres, a difference rendering impossible the coincidence of their limits of extension, although for all that can be stated in marks intelligible to the mind by speech they are interchangeable, it is patent that only by pure intuition can the difference, namely, incongruity, be noticed.

—Immanuel Kant, “Dissertation on the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World”

. . . and he sighed with many sighs

That moved me, and his cheeks were wan and white

Like pallid lilies, and his lips were red

Like poppies, and his hands he clenched tight,

And yet again unclenched, and his head

Was wreathed with moon-flowers pale as lips of death.

—Lord Alfred Douglas, “Two Loves​”

I am grateful to Peter Gratton for his attention to On the Nature of Marx’s Things: Translation as Necrophilology. I hasten to add the subtitle, since Gratton’s response takes the book to task for sneaking a “humanism that dare not speak its name” back into the critique of humanism just where the colon falls—in the hiatus between “things” and “translation.” “Which is it?” he asks—things or translation? “Hence,” Gratton writes, “we might think we have a divided book: we talk either about the things themselves or are endlessly doing ‘readings’ that get us nowhere, a critical reader might aver, since we are still caught within textual practices, albeit necrophilological ones.” Gratton’s point is that whatever it is that links an ostensibly realist project—concerned with the “nature of things”—to a linguistic project—translation among natural languages, of course, but more problematically still the organization and characterization of conceptualization and thought according to linguistic schemes—reintroduces the very correlationist topology the book criticizes in Meillassoux and others. He sees my project as trying to come up with a way of thinking across and with the hiatus; he is left suspecting that I sneak in the shameful figure of the human to carry out that task. There’s some reason to worry that this happens, I agree: the terms we criticize have a way of finding back doors through which to re-enter the most guarded of arguments. And who would not cringe at the prospect of being “caught within textual practices”?

Calling “humanism” whatever-it-is that enters through the back, ashamed or unable to call itself by name, seems to me off. And yet getting the name of this whatever-it-is right is a matter of high conceptual as well as political and economic stakes, as Gratton notes. Also of high disciplinary stakes. “Humanism’s” sad history of collusion with bad and worse need hardly be recalled, but it is a historical term whose uses vary and values wane and wax. Tarring a thinker with “humanism,” shameful or heroic (as I do, I admit, with New Materialism), is an old and happy way for the bien-pensant disciplinarian to put that thinker in his (in this case) place.

I’m not unhappy that the book’s queerness should be identified, its name spoken at last—though I suspect that the name the book has deliberate trouble speaking is not the names “human” or “humanism,” but rather “politics” as expressed in the formula “something like.” Indeed you might say that the book intends to make the political formula “something like,” or in its complete form “something like the relation between the mental object and the material,” hard to speak, hard to think, and difficult to name. Why would I want to make things harder for us? Why make a name harder, rather than easier, to think and speak? Pace Wittgenstein, language doesn’t just go on holiday when things are made hard in this way: it’s made to stop doing its job, it’s furloughed, locked out. Why (to take the chapter at hand) take my readers “deep into the woods of Freud’s 1927 account of fetishism by way of Lacan, an approach that has never made any point less obscure,” as Gratton puts it? Am I (who would?) denying nonhuman agency? How does something like “politics” get to stand on the formula “something like”?

Let me out myself. First off, I do not have Gratton’s faith in the idea that we can, after all and at last, approach either “things” or “translation,” or “something like” their relation, if not immediately, then at least without tangling ourselves irremediably in mediations. Some of these make our paths obscure; some shed light for indeterminate reasons; some set us off on different paths altogether; some end up being the paths we take. Only very impoverished notions of mediation, of historicity, of thought, things, and the dynamic and historically contingent movements among these will offer up “things,” “translation,” and “something like” their relation outside the thicket. Just such notions are one of the book’s targets—from the first. The book makes its way to the last chapter, on which Gratton focuses, with some deliberation. It’s possible—it’s likely—that the position the last chapter opens on, of dissatisfaction and irritation with the uses of “materiality and objecthood,” has its foundation in these chapters. To lay this foundation—and to map out the Lucretian turn in Marx—the first chapters directly address the standing of “relation”—the relation between material things that I can point to, demonstrate, hand over to the “this” and the “meaning” of what comes to hand really; and the concepts associated with them. The tack is not just (post-) Hegelian and (post-) Althusserian; a wholesale engagement with Husserl is entailed (though it’s implicit—time and the economies of writing prevailed); Simondon and Balibar on the ontology of relation are the book’s interlocutors here. Second—still preliminary. The distinction between “things” and “translation” (of the sorts of apparently immaterial things we can translate: “pain,” “bread,” etc.) is, as Gratton knows, an especially shaky one in Lucretian atomology. Marx’s materialism takes that shakiness seriously, as do I.

“Something like the relation . . .” Gratton is right to pick up the phrase-formula. It makes the book’s argument in the compactest possible way. The domain of what is “like” (which is to say—according to one definition—of what can be assigned a common predicate with something else) is a “thing,” a “something.” A thing, this thing (for now, a material object as well as an object of thought) is related to that inasmuch as they bear a common predicate. (“. . . is cold,” said of a beer—to take Gratton’s example—relates that beer to whatever I predicate “. . . is cold” of; and “beer” is “something like” “male hair loss” because both “. . . are examples” in Gratton’s argument). “Relation” is a “thing,” “something;” and it is also like a thing. This is odd and distinctly worth exploring. On the Nature of Marx’s Things outlines, through Marx’s lasting engagement with Lucretian atomology, the notion that relations have material, objectual standing, and obey many of the same rules of movement, extensibility, production, composition and decomposition as both real, material, indicable objects and concepts. My suggestion is that this strange notion of materialized, objectual relation opens up a distinctly political lexicon.

When I say that “something like a relation” between “things” and “language” obtains, or can be established, or can be fashioned, or produced, or assigned value, or marketed, I mean in the first place something like this. When I mark off a class of actors who have some standing and some commonality—let’s call them an economic class, or a social class, or an interest group: the basic unit of political association—I may then say that the members of that group resemble one another, that they are alike, in this: that they belong to that class. Whatever differences I may want to note among them, this at least will be true: that they share a spectral resemblance to one another inasmuch as belonging-to-the-class qualifies them in the same way, and that they are alike in that respect. “Likeness” is, on this description, a logical operator rather than a concept, strictly speaking—but a powerful one, whose abstractness can get us into trouble rather quickly. My “like” actors—things and language, say—may not recognize their likeness, but if they do they have at their disposal the lexicon of solidarity, even of fraternity, in which to express this recognition of their likeness.

When I say that “something like a relation” obtains or can be established between “things” and “language,” I may have in mind, in the second place, a stronger view regarding this “likeness.” Let’s say we agree that “this group of people has a common interest, let’s say they are all interested in gaining access to land that will allow them to grow food, or to employment that will allow them to feed their families,” and that I am a member of that group. We are “alike,” in my first, abstract sense, merely in having in common the belonging-to-this-class. But I may want to assert something stronger: I may want to say that we share a “likeness” that is the condition upon which we enter into the class or the group. We are all, we might say, hungry people, or people desirous of employment—and this quality that we share is the condition on which we can be understood to be a class. It is the condition on which we can be grouped and our interests assessed, compared, and measured in a general economic frame: like with like. “Like with like”: I am now founding the first, abstract sense in which I say that this or that person is like another, upon a prior, qualitative likeness we share: we resemble one another in being hungry, or desirous of employment. We are first alike in this definitive and immanent sense, and then we discover or disclose to one another the abstract relation we also share: being possessed of that quality is also an abstract relation; here too we will have at our disposal the lexicon of solidarity, even of fraternity, in which to express this recognition of our likeness.

When I say that “something like a relation” obtains or can be established between “things” and “language,” I may be using the term to distinguish it from a stronger form of identification: this is like that, but it is not identical in substance with it. I am like you in this respect, say inasmuch as we are both hungry and that we demand, together, that our needs be met, but we are not the same. We may even be alike in “liking” Fred, or in “liking” green beans. A simile will hold two terms in tremulous proximity, but the assertion of a metaphoric identity is never consummated: “his cheeks were wan and white / Like pallid lilies, and his lips were red / Like poppies”—but they were not. (Even the line breaks serve to mark the difference.) “Achilles is like a lion,” in having a great mane of hair, in his valor, in his nobility: but the word “like” calls up immediately an aspectual distinction between Achilles and the lion. Achilles is like a lion in this respect and that, but not, for instance, in marching on four paws, or in allowing the female of the species to hunt for him, or in having a tail. The aspectual distinction that “like” holds forth, and which the identity proposition of a metaphor or of a name hides, need not be quite so trivial as this aesthetic, Homeric example might imply. Indeed one can organize an entire cosmology around this distinction between the assertion of identity and the assertion of likeness, as Aquinas does in Summa Theologica 1.13, “On the Names of God.” These are Aquinas’s famous words, which establish that “being,” existence, is the univocal, “universal ground” of “likeness” that permits other substantial, but equivocal, likenesses to be established among or discerned in actually existing beings. This univocal, universal ground produces its own likeness, the fact that existent beings exist, because it is univocal: and in this sense it is a likeness that precedes being-like-another-substance. It is, in short, the condition of transcendence; the ground of theology. This is the passage from Summa Theologica:

Although equivocal predications must be reduced to univocal, still in actions, the non-univocal agent must precede the univocal agent. For the non-univocal agent is the universal cause of the whole species, as for instance the sun is the cause of the generation of all men; whereas the univocal agent is not the universal efficient cause of the whole species (otherwise it would be the cause of itself, since it is contained in the species), but is a particular cause of this individual which it places under the species by way of participation. Therefore the universal cause of the whole species is not an univocal agent; and the universal cause comes before the particular cause. But this universal agent, whilst it is not univocal, nevertheless is not altogether equivocal, otherwise it could not produce its own likeness, but rather it is to be called an analogical agent, as all univocal predications are reduced to one first non-univocal analogical predication, which is being.

Political theology stands on the reticent relation of likeness that the sovereign bears to God: he is like God, but not in ways that humans can know fully, because God’s qualities are beyond us, and our terms for them are merely like the names Gods qualities would properly have. “So the name of ‘lion’ applied to God,” Aquinas says, “means only that God manifests strength in His works, as a lion in his. Thus it is clear that applied to God the signification of names can be defined only from what is said of creatures.” When God becomes a lion, or when Achilles becomes a lion, when we say “Achilles is a lion” or “God is a lion,” or when we say “MAN is born free; and everywhere he is in chains,” we lose our guide along with the lost, aspectual “like” that provides us with what Aquinas calls “proportionate likeness.” Now, when we must supply “likeness” where there is no “like” to indicate that we may do so, to indicate that we are licensed to do so; now, under the weight of identity we are invited or required to provide, not just the aspects under which the similarity of the terms “Achilles” and “lion” or “chain” and “fetter more broadly construed” might fall, but also the figure of an identity without aspectual qualification: Achilles truly is a lion, when he is also manifestly not; man everywhere truly is in chains, when there are also and evidently men walking the streets, freely, whose mind-forged manacles we only imagine. But how? In what respect can something both be and not be something else? A different concept of identity is entailed than classically obtains in the logic of propositions, including propositions concerned with such ontico-political matters as citizenship, or representativity, or sovereignty. If Achilles can both be a lion and not be a lion, if Man can both be in chains and not be in chains, then a citizen may also be a slave, and someone who hungers, whose political identity is that he belongs to the class of people whose hunger is definitive of their political standing, this person may also not hunger; a sovereign may be other than a sovereign at once; a king may have two bodies. When identity propositions are haunted by the difference of mere “likeness,” “like” is not only a political concept—it gives us the privileged figure of theologico-political subordination to a single, ghostly, univocal predication that stands, in sovereign silence, over all else. The specter of “likeness” provides the privileged figure of modern political language: the simile, the figure of aspectual relation, which is to say of limited identification, of a contracted and limited identification with another, or with a group. I am like you, inasmuch as we hunger for the same things or desire in common this or that thing. But I differ from you as well, and when our goals are achieved or when they are shown to be unachievable my elective association with you reaches its term, and we part ways, and I find myself allied with another, for now, in this or that context and to one or another end.

I have been referring throughout to the “ghostly” effects of “like,” whose systematic unsystematicity I have been outlining. I’m doing this for rhetorical purposes, of course, but also in order to emphasize the connection that “something likeness,” the major operator of On the Nature of Marx’s Things, has to a specific biopolitical, bio-theological register, in which sovereign power is invested in political subjects, and transferred across generations, according to a principle tied classically to likeness to the father. The systematic unsystematicity of “like” reflects in part, and in part generates, crises in the application and in the understanding of that principle, crises that take institutional form in, and at the advent of, European modernity: of Marxian modernity.

Here is an example. We are on the battlements in Elsinore, where Horatio and the watch greet Hamlet and open the play on the question of the likeness between their recollection of the dead monarch, and the appearance of his ghost. Look, Marcellus says, “There it comes again!” “In the same figure, like the king that’s dead,” Bernardo exclaims. “Looks it not like the king? mark it, Horatio.” And Horatio: “Most like: it harrows me with fear and wonder.” Here it is the similarity of appearance between the ghost and the living king that Shakespeare’s characters intend to stress. If “like” is a figure, it is a figure tending not toward substitution but toward identity: “In the same figure, like the king that’s dead”: the “same figure,” the figure of sameness, is the figure of “like.” On the battlements, before the hour when the cock crows, likeness strikes the eye; from this “like” flow the claims that the specter makes upon the living. To the extent that one generation truly resembles, is like, another, the state’s coherence is secured. Like passes to like, the ghost of sovereign authority carried upon genetic likeness. The play Hamlet is Shakespeare’s most searching consideration of the politics of likeness.

Hamlet himself is less sure that “likeness” of this sort secures the claims of the sovereign and the father—“The spirit that I have seen,” he says, “May be the devil: and the devil hath power / To assume a pleasing shape.” He famously dithers; he offers a conception of man that takes up the matter of likeness, and finds it unsatisfactory, and lacking in delight. “What a piece of work is a man!” Hamlet will exclaim. “How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!” How like an angel; how like a god. That Hamlet then goes on to stress man’s disanalogy to both gods and angels and his dislike for man in general—and woman too—tells us how far he has moved from the battlements at the play’s opening, but also from the Thomist stress on the univocity of Being, the universal ground on which substantial, equivocal analogies stand. Finally, the grounds the play provides for his decision to seek revenge are not clear: the “likeness” of the ghost to his father alone is shown to be insufficient.

But this is already true on the battlements, where Shakespeare ties the incoherence of the concept of likeness both to doubts concerning the transmission of legitimate sovereign power and to the overdetermination of his medium. These are the lines I am remembering. Horatio is addressing Hamlet, explaining what he and the watch have seen in past nights:

HORATIO

Two nights together had these gentlemen,

Marcellus and Bernardo, on their watch,

In the dead vast and middle of the night,

Been thus encounter’d. A figure like your father,

Armed at point exactly, cap-a-pe,

Appears before them, and with solemn march

Goes slow and stately by them: thrice he walk’d

By their oppress’d and fear-surprised eyes,

Within his truncheon’s length; whilst they, distilled

Almost to jelly with the act of fear,

Stand dumb and speak not to him. This to me

In dreadful secrecy impart they did;

And I with them the third night kept the watch;

Where, as they had deliver’d, both in time,

Form of the thing, each word made true and good,

The apparition comes: I knew your father;

These hands are not more like.

“I knew your father; / These hands are not more like.” We know what Horatio must mean: this hand, my left for instance, is like this other hand, my right, say, in the way that the dead king is, or was, like the ghost. Proportional analogy stands on and in the actor’s hand, which gathers together the ways in which the play can resemble, be like, things living and absent, dead or unrepresentable things like sovereignty itself, the actor gathers them into a gesture, and presents them so as to catch the conscience of the Prince, and of the pay’s audience. But what does Horatio mean? Is the subject’s hand “like” the living prince’s hand in the way that the remembered King is like the ghost? Does proportional analogy still and always secure the bio-theo-political domain? Horatio’s gesture catches the theater’s dilemma: what is the actor’s body designating? What is the gesture like, what does it mime, of what is it a mimesis? My assertion was hedged in with qualifications: I said, Horatio must mean that this hand, my left, his left for instance, is like this other hand, my right, his right, say, in the way that the dead king is, or was, like the ghost. But can we be so sure what is like what on stage, and what the time of “likeness” is? Is Horatio holding up his own hand? And what is his hand—is the actor holding up the hand of the character, or the hand of the actor? Doesn’t everything depend in the first instance on their being no “likeness” at all, but sameness between one and the other hand, the hand of the actor and the hand of the character, the sameness of convention and agreement that yes, this hand I see on stage is indeed Horatio’s hand, and not the hand of the actor I also see, whose hand I am truly seeing, as the watch and the Prince, and the Prince’s friend, “truly see” the ghost of Hamlet’s father? “I knew your father; / These hands are not more like.” But what are Horatio’s words indicating, what is he pointing at verbally? Whose hands are these? What are they like? Is Horatio catching Hamlet by the hand and saying, “Your hand and mine, the Prince’s hand and his good subject’s hand, these are as alike as the living and the dead are?” And how alike is that? Is Horatio holding up both his own hands, or both Hamlet’s? Is one hand, say the left hand, like the right hand, or is it its inverse? Is Horatio holding up two notes, each written in a different hand, comparing them, saying, “Look, this handwriting and that, they look alike”? The demonstrative pronoun, what the hand and the tongue indicate, pitches the matter into the director’s lap: here, you do something with “these hands.” Neither the author’s hand, nor the hand of the player who copied these lines in the author’s hand for his use, will illuminate us; nothing beyond the demonstrative gesture is indicated; we do not know what it is like, this gesture; in it, we fear or we feel, the likeness of the father’s ghost is not affirmed, but put into question; what it means to know the Prince’s father, to the extent that such knowledge is expressed as the knowledge of his likeness, of his figure, is also placed into question. It helps not one bit that we know or think we know the work’s author, that we see or do not see here the hand of the writer or of the director: these hands that Horatio indicates, just here, are not like them in any way that can be read upon them. If I do not know whether this hand that I hold out, which holds together the system of proportional analogy that holds my theologico-political life in hand, if I do not know that this is my hand, then I also do not know your father, or my own, or myself: Marcellus says, about the Ghost: “Is it not like the king?” And Horatio answers: “As thou art to thyself.” Shakespeare’s, or Horatio’s, “like” places before us the spectacle of the disarticulating of the unitary conception of “like”-ness on which sovereignty classically stands; on which the concept of the concept stands classically; on which the relation between demonstrable, indicable, material “things” and translation sits. On the Nature of Marx’s Things argues that this structural disarticulating, and the aleatory rearticulating of the field of the political about the systematic unsystematicity, temporal, representational, logical, political, of “something like [. . .] relation,” are the two hands that the material concept of relation called “something likeness” hold out today.

Dear Tracy:

Thank you for your generous and far-reaching response to On the Nature of Marx’s Things. Your comments center on the book’s returns to the matter of the fetish. (A return: the fetish, because of lexical coincidence, a common genealogy in both lines of thinking, and a similar topology, is the peg on which Freudo-Marxism was most commonly hung, at the time when that juncture promised something like a unified theory of psycho-cultural production and consumption.) You show how the term “fetish,” taken in a number of ways, runs through the argument of On the Nature of Marx’s Things. Here is in brief the arc that “fetish” traces: The opening chapters focus directly on commodity-fetishism and the inscription of aleatory, discontinuous, necrophilological moments—incoherent mediations—in Marx’s ontology and in Capital’s theory of value. This focus shifts with the argument, and the fetish becomes, via Freud and Adorno, the field on which On the Nature of Marx’s Thing ends up grappling with Meillassoux’s account of correlation and with Lacan’s restaging of Freud. Badiou draws the strings subtly when Meillassoux breaks lances on the field, but isn’t directly addressed; Freud himself, you are right to note, emerges as something like the hero in this andromachy; what was an analysis of Marx’s ontology and theory of value undertaken from the Lucretian moment in his writings becomes an account of mediation undertaken from the fetishization of form in Meillassoux (and, behind him, larval, Badiou). You don’t note this, but it’s I think implicit in your remarks about the “plasticity” of figura: as “fetish” changes in value, so does “matter” in the book. “As . . . so” is a little off. There’s something not quite systematic and not quite explicit in my treatment of fetishism throughout the book—and in my treatment of its relation to matter. I’m very glad that your response will give me the opportunity to address it.

From your reading of fetishism’s declensions in On the Nature of Marx’s Things you pose four questions—clusters of questions, really—in closing: Badiou? Is Freud really the hero of the andromachy, or does he not rather retreat into the language of lack and compensation that’s the signature of the tropology of the fetish? Poetry? And what do figure and figurality contribute to a reflection on matter? They’re crucial and they’re related. Let me approach them through the moment of greatest stress in your response, which falls, I think, about at the point of greatest stress in On the Nature of Marx’s Things: where you make the transition from an account of fetishism understood as substitution—of whatever-is-to-hand or of what-is-like the Vorbild of the phallus: trope—to an account of fetishism as installing or forcing, into the real and as real, the “bony” (Donne’s term, also Hegel’s, borrowed and repurposed in On the Nature of Marx’s Things) idea of the integrity of the maternal phallus: figure. Whatever may distinguish the different accounts of fetishism in On the Nature of Marx’s Things, you argue, they have this in common: they are of the order of translation, that is, of substitution, of trope. Since this is so, they are figures of intralinguistic displacement occurring as it were on the same level, within or between natural languages and within and between orders of the symbolic. The figure-forcing-fetish that you invite us to consider operates from a symbolic domain, to install a singular new thing in the real: the truth of the idea of the phallic mother. This thing is no longer lost (in substitution); it can be enjoyed fully; it sutures the field of fantasies precisely inasmuch as it is singularly installed; its truth is the singular forcing that’s signed onto it; and the singular event of its forcing has the status of a real historical event, or better, of the event of the real in history; or better still, of the installing (in human history) of history-as-the-advent-of-the-event. And because the event installing the figure-forcing-fetish has this standing, it pre-figures (you lean on Auerbach wonderfully to introduce prospective temporality into the account of the fetish) the real eventual standing of the fantasy of the maternal phallus. (And hence the organization of the fields of fantasy and desire not about a lack but about a real.) You write: it—the figure-forcing-fetish, nomination, figura—“like Badiou’s Number is something that is paralinguistic but also not foreign to language. It is resistant to linguistic formalization, but does not simply fall outside of language.” The transition from trope to figure, or from counting to Number, reminds you not just of Badiou, but also of Lyotard’s account of figure. It brings to mind, for me, the always-unthinkable difference between stative or thetic moments—Fichtean setzen—and the predication of such moments, that is, the system of qualities of, and thus substitutes, tropes, for, whatever-substance those thetic moments then, in that same predication, are granted (as in de Man’s late essay on irony).

This is, I said, the point of principal stress both in your response and in the book. One way to explain why this is and must be so is to ask where the term “matter” fits into the scheme of figura: “something that is paralinguistic but also not foreign to language . . . [that is] resistant to linguistic formalization, but does not simply fall outside of language.” “Matter,” I’d like to say, with you, is the name we give (or the name historically assigned) to figura in this sense. But it’s hard to affirm this. We follow out the chain: figura is the singular name for what is “resistant to linguistic formalization, but does not simply fall outside of language.” This seems intuitively off, since to nominate matter as matter is to ascribe to it differential qualities (we distinguish it from form, from spirit, from substance, from body, and so on). Evental nomination is the condition on which that ascription occurs; it is ascribing, predicating—gerundives that mark an occurring. Here the Lucretian strain of Marx’s thinking is at work: the gerundive eventing that is nominating has the shape of declinatio or clinamen.

What does it mean to install declinatio in the structure of fetish-formation, and also in the event of nomination that the figure-forcing-fetish installs, as the singular idea of the unity of the phallic mother, in the real? Here your mention of Badiou’s Number and Numbers will be of use. For another way to construe the point of stress in your response and in On the Nature of Marx’s Things is to gloss the installed idea of the one of the phallic mother as the installing of the One as idea, as the counts-for-one of the null. Number is built on the axiom of the counts-for-one; that it is axiomatic tells us that whatever relation there is between the null set and the One is different from the relation that obtains between the One and any other number; and that that relation is not thinkable in the same way. So just how is it to be thought? On the Nature of Marx’s Things offers three related answers. It is to be thought precisely as clinamen; as mediation; and as poeticity. These three terms aren’t synonyms; they operate on different levels of the argument; they pertain to different sorts of objects. Together, though, they signify that the real of the idea of the singular phallic mother, by virtue of being installed according to an eventual nomination that bears their triple signature, does not and cannot have the function of suturing ideally the field of fantasy and desire. Rather, it installs the real of the not-one as the condition of what we can no longer call a field, not even the field we would want, fantastically, to call matter.

Where would this then leave us? It seems to me that installing the real of the not-one as declinatio (which is, I think, what the book means by necrophilology) has striking consequences for politics; for understanding the value-form of capital; for understanding how the concepts produced under its regime become objects-for-thought; and when we seek to establish what the ontology of these sorts of objects might be. (Are such defective concepts objects? If they are not-one, in what sense are they objects for thought? Would the discipline of the philosopher consists not only in recognizing, in the middle, deponent sense of “reconnaitre,” the “nomination-effects,” “nominalization,” or “translation-effects” in the “mathematical condition for philosophizing,” but also in producing them? And would this then correspond to a strictly political dimension of thought?) Finally, it seems to me to yield a rather different understanding of historicity than the Augustinian one that rides on the singular event of forcing.

Let me try to be clearer. In your response you refer to a passage from Badiou’s Number and Numbers that defines a nomination as a “‘poetic’ invention, a new signifier, which affixes to language that for which nothing can prepare it.” Badiou is referring—by way of an example, but it is not an example like any other, any more than the Normalvorbild Freud refers to is indeed only normal, just one of a set of possibly-exchangeable cases, tropes for each other, so to speak—to “the appellation ‘irrational numbers.’” Here, he says, “for example,” “the problems of terminology bring the weight of the event to bear.”

His example:

Take for example the appellation “irrational numbers.” It is truly astonishing to find such a designation at the heart of mathematical rationality. . . . “Irrational,” in [Dedekind and Euclid’s] mathematical texts whose rationality is transparent, paradigmatic even, no longer has any signification. We might say that what makes itself known here is a symptom of the radical difference between nomination and signification. A signification is always distributed through the language of a situation, the language of established and transmitted knowledges. A nomination, on the other hand, emerges from the very inability of signification to fix an event, to decide upon its occurrence, at the moment when this event—which supplements the situation with an incalculable hazard—is on the edge of its disappearance. A nomination is a “poetic” invention, a new signifier, which affixes to language that for which nothing can prepare it. A nomination, once the event that sustains it is gone forever, remains, in the void of significations. Now, at the moment of the great Greek crisis of number, when the arrival of that at once inevitable and enigmatic event made it known that certain relationships (those, for example, of the diagonal of a square and its side) cannot be “numbered” within the code of existing numbers, the word i arrived, saturating and exceeding the mathematical situation. This word designates that which, having no logos, nonetheless must be decided as number. It inscribes in a new situation of thought a nomination without signification: that of a number which is not a number. Since that time, the word has lodged itself, without alteration, in mathematical language. It traverses translations, negligible but subsistent. Our word “irrational” is unmindful of the import of the nomination i to the same extent that the word “rational” retains little of the Greek logos. And, above all, this nomination has ended up taking on a univocal signification. But the contrast remains, and one can reactivate it—as I do—in between signification and that which, in the word that imparts it, contradicts it explicitly. For this contrast is the trace within language of a foundational truth-event.

The story that Badiou recalls (“when the arrival of that at once inevitable and enigmatic event made it known that certain relationships [those, for example, of the diagonal of a square and its side] cannot be ‘numbered’ within the code of existing numbers”) haunts the history of Western philosophy—understandably: it tells of what befell the first man who made public the limits of reason. It reaches us indirectly, translated, mediated. We find it in Greek, related by the neo-Platonist philosopher and scholiast Proclus, who is probably working from a slightly different form of the story found in Iamblichus’s De vita pythagorica. We also find it in an Arabic translation, by the great tenth-century translator Abu Uthman al-Dimishqi, of a lost Greek work by Pappus of Alexandria.1 The tale concerns the school of Pythagoras. Here are two versions:

It is well known that the man who first made public the theory of the irrational (alogon, ana logon) perished in a shipwreck in order that the inexpressible and unimaginable should ever remain veiled. And so the guilty man, who fortuitously touched on and revealed this aspect of living things, was taken to the place where he began and there is forever beaten by the waves.2

And:

Since [book X of Euclid’s Elements] has the aforesaid aim and object [the attainment of irrefragable principles, which he established for commensurability and incommensurability in general], it will not be unprofitable for us to ascertain the benefit it provides. Indeed the sect [or school] of Pythagoras was so affected by its reverence for these things that a saying became current in it, namely, that he who first disclosed [lit.: brought out—akhraja] the knowledge of that which does not hear and does not speak, and spread it abroad among the common herd, perished by drowning: It is fitting that they meant by this, in the way of a riddle [lughz], that everything within totality that is deaf or does not speak or cannot be visually imagined ought to be veiled [sitr]; and that every soul which by error or heedlessness discovers [takshaf] or reveals [tazhar] something of this kind that is in it [in the soul] or in this world, will wander [thereafter] hither and thither on the sea of non-identity [lit.: a sea of non-similarity; a sea lacking all similarity of quality or accident], immersed in the stream of coming-to-be that has no order.3

The discovery of additional manuscripts and corresponding changes in editorial conventions pertaining to, as well as the established readings and translations of, earlier sources have shifted the outlines of the story considerably over the centuries; its sense and pathos, what the story is understood to tell and to what effect, have also changed, in and out of time with these editorial changes. The bibliography on this fable focuses for the most part on the different historical knots it ties—as Badiou indicates, the question whether what the unfortunate Pythagorean disclosed was the construction of the dodecahedron, the irrationality of the square root of 2 (the diagonal of the square), or rather a larger principle of mathematical irrationality that would put paid to the Pythagorean world order broadly speaking; whether the Pythagorean school would indeed have sacrificed one of its members, even if he betrayed a secret; whether the school treasured such secrets in the first place; whether the story is to be read as allegory or parable rather than as history.

The mystery that the treacherous Pythagorean reveals hangs on an accident. What is this bit of information, this deadly secret? The editorial tradition has handed down two answers: the event of nomination is not one; it is not One. The preferred reading of Proclus’s story—preferred since the first quarter of the nineteenth century, though noted earlier—concerns not what is inexpressible or irrational in general, but much more specifically the incommensurability of the measurements of the diagonal and the side of the square—that is, the irrationality of the square root of two, √2, revealed by the proportional construction [ana-logon] of the geometric figure. On this account—which is bolstered by the observation that the form alogon would be out of place, grammatically, in Proclus’s text, what founders on the story will be a particular sub-branch of early mathematics, and not the “rational vision of the world.”

On the strong, metaphysical reading that Proclus appears to endorse and which Badiou recalls for us, what is at stake in the story is the disclosure of the unthinkable, the unthought, the inexpressible or inconceivable—ton alogon. The term alogon figures elsewhere in Euclid and in Proclus (whose “Prologue” to his commentary on Euclid’s Elements says, in most editions, that Pythagoras “discovered the unthinkable or inexpressible [τῶν ἁλόγων πραγματείαν] and the construction of the cosmic figures”). On this reading, the traitor in my story (who may be Hippasus of Metapontum) threatens to bring about what one critic calls, perhaps hyperbolically, “the sudden collapse” of the “rational, ordered vision of the world set in place by Pythagoras.”4 For Pythagorean cosmology, in the definitive versions we find in Iamblichus, in Porphyry, and in Proclus, tends toward numerical “rationalism.” Here is Proclus: “Pythagoras, being asked what was the wisest of things, said it was number. . . . But by number, he obscurely signified the intelligible order, which comprehends the multitude of intellectual forms: for there that which is the first, and properly number, subsists after the superessential one.”5 The metaphysical version of the story produces a paradox. Properly irrational numbers, if that is what alogoi are in this story, and if the texts do indeed intend alogon at this juncture, both belong and do not belong to the “intelligible order,” inasmuch as they occur within it but are not part or members of it; they are and are not intelligible. If “number” “signifies the intelligible order,” however obscurely, then our unfortunate Pythagorean philosopher bears us news of something that is and is not a number, and which is unintelligible both in lying outside the order of the intelligible, and in violating the twin logical principles on which intelligibility in general stands, the principles of identity and of non-contradiction. Condemning the bearers of such news to eternal, Promethean suffering, over and over, at different historical junctures and under aspects that differ according to how “intelligibility” or rationality are marked, defined, or valued—this seems not only just, but philosophically constitutive, constitutive of the discipline of philosophy, in its long history.

The old story sticks, as Badiou remarks. It is lurid, even if it is nothing more than an allegory or a fable; over time it gathers and sheds cultural values. Its Promethean heroics must appeal: the disclosure of the mystery; the betrayer bears philosophical fire; the secret he discloses democratizes knowledge, extends philosophia, and not just geometry, into “the form of a liberal discipline, seeking its first principles in ultimate ideas, and investigating its theorems abstractly and in a purely intellectual way,” ton peri auton philosophian eis schema paideias eleutherou metestisen, as Proclus writes of Pythagoras. Its contradictions are signs, we suspect, of conceptual and historical compromises. To erect a tomb for a living man is to condemn him to social death, but also to guarantee him symbolic life (a tomb is a memorial); this is also the practice of the Pythagorean school, Iamblichus tells us, with respect to those probationary students who were not allowed to become true Esoterics, or to join the ranks of homacoi, the initiates, those who listened to Pythagoras from within the veil, face to face.6 The excluded, the socially dead, the School’s rejects, reaped this benefit: they were awarded twice the wealth they deposited in order to be considered for elevation to homacoi. To note that the gods, outraged, brought about the traitor’s death is to exonerate the School, and in the same stroke to make the School’s mysteries matters of divine concern. To draw an analogy among the various mysteries revealed—the construction of the dodecahedron, the discovery of the irrationality of the diagonal (the incommensurability of the diagonal with the sides of the square: ana-logon), the discovery of the irrational, a-logon—is to betray the historical record, which insists on the particularity of each mystery; but it is also to establish the commensurability of these singular events, to bring them under the measure of a single scheme. To read the story as an allegory, a parable or a riddle is to place a veil before it, to be removed by initiates in possession of esoteric knowledge; the allegorical mystery revealed thereby amounts to this alone: that esoteric knowledge must be kept veiled. (Hippasus revealed that there is a School, a discipline; he publicized the scheme of disciplinarity.) Whether in its hyperbolic or in its more restricted shape, the story tells also, allegorically, parabolically, the story of the disciplinary formation of philosophy, and the costs entailed in moving from an esoteric mystery-cult toward paideia. The history of lectiones of Proclus’s scholium marks another circuit: from a discipline whose extreme limit is the alogon, what is deprived of the logos, reason, enunciation, articulation; to a discipline concerned instead with the internal paradoxes of the commensurable and the proportional, analogon. Finally, this old story fits its Promethean protagonist into a particularly significant circuit—the one leading “the guilty man . . . to the place where he began and there is forever beaten by the waves” ; more explicitly still: “Every soul which by error or heedlessness reveals (takshaf) or reveals (taZhar) something of this kind that is in it [in the soul] or in this world, will wander [thereafter] hither and thither on the sea of non-identity [lit.: a sea of non-similarity; lacking all similarity of quality or accident], immersed in the stream of the coming-to-be that has no order.”

“Nomination,” Badiou holds, is “a ‘poetic’ invention, a new signifier, which affixes to language that for which nothing can prepare it.” He says: “And, above all, this nomination [i, alogon] has ended up taking on a univocal signification. But the contrast remains, and one can reactivate it—as I do—in between signification and that which, in the word that imparts it, contradicts it explicitly. For this contrast is the trace within language of a foundational truth-event.” Note here that the trace of the foundational truth-event is reactivated in the counts-for-two of a “contrast.” The One of the truth-event of nomination is traced in the Two of the difference or contrast between “signification and that which, in the word that imparts it, contradicts it explicitly.” But the circuit of mediations—through neo-Platonic sources, through Arabic scholia and translations—no longer offers, as a single or indeed intelligible story, the allegorical trace of “a foundational truth-event” that “supplements the situation with an incalculable hazard.” Rather, as I’ve tried to argue in On the Nature of Marx’s Things, this open, unsystematic operation “invents” or “produces,” by declinationes, “poetic” signifiers that install what I call necrophilology in the “field” of desires constituted in, and as, capitalist modernity—that is, “poetic” signifiers that install in that field what is neither only irrational nor only alike-to-something else (neither only alogon nor only analogon; not only figura, not just trope) as the non-self-identical trace of the not-one. The One of the Truth Event is rather the figural-forcing-fetish, the trace of the instancing of the multiple as Normalvorbild. “And so we wander hither and thither on the sea of non-identity [a sea of non-similarity; a sea lacking all similarity of quality or accident], immersed in the stream of coming-to-be that has no order.”

Thank you.