Sign and Economy

Cross currents, 2002

The Text, 2023

This article presents an interpretive reading of Jacques Derrida's essay-Economimesis.‖-Economimesis‖ constitutes a complex interweaving of production and mimesis within the domain of aesthetics, demonstrating intricate connections to politics and political economy. The study examines the alliance between production and mimesis in Derrida's engagement with Kant's third Critique. It contends that Derrida's exploration of-economimesis‖ provides a novel hermeneutical framework for understanding the complexities of aesthetic production, reception, and consumption. Moreover, it argues that this conceptual apparatus provides a glimpse into the broader power dynamics and economic imperatives underpinning the creation and circulation of art as well.

This article considers the legacies of Jacques Derrida in and for Anglo-American sociocultural anthropology. It begins with a survey of Derrida's own engagement with themes that have historically been foundational to the field: (a) the critique of sign theory and, with it, the questions of language and law in Lévi-Straussian structuralism; (b) the question of the unconscious; (c) the critique of the performative and its consequences for the idea of ritual; (d ) the rereading of Marcel Mauss's concept of the gift, and of economy more generally; and (e) the analysis of the metaphysical basis of law, in both religious and ostensibly secular formations. It then considers the state of the field at the time when it was being infused with different forms of poststructuralism and explores the competing claims made by these discourses in relation to deconstruction. Finally, after tracing the convergences and divergences between Derridean deconstruction and theory in sociocultural anthropology, it treats two main examples of works produced against and under the influence of Derrida's thought, respectively.

1980

It may seem strange to be analyzing the ideological process somewhere other than in the traditional, political or cultural sanctuaries. But the point is precisely that the market for paintings and the auction sale of the work of art permit us to decipher the articulation, and thus the process, of ideological labor because they are situated in the contexts of economic power and the cultural field. The auction, this crucible of the interchange of values, where economic value, sign value and symbolic value transfuse according to the rules of the game, can be considered as an ideological matrix-one of the shrines of the political economy of the sign. It is a question of decoding the birth of the sign form in the same way that Marx was able to uncover the birth of the commodity form in the Critique of Political Economy. In consumption generally, economic exchange value (money) is converted into sign exchange value (prestige, etc.); but this operation is still sustained by the alibi of use value. By contrast, the auction of the work of art has this notable characteristic: that economic exchange value, in the pure form of its general equivalent, money, is exchanged there for a pure sign, the painting. So it is an experimental terrain, simultaneously collective and institutional, for separating out the operation of this sign value. 1 The decisive action is one of a simultaneous double reduction-that of exchange value (money) and of symbolic value (the painting as an oeuvre)-and of their transmutation into sign value (the signed, appraised painting as a luxury value and rare object) by expenditure and agonistic competition.

2010

Essays in Philosophy, 2004

Published in Golfo Maggini et al. (eds), Philosophy and Crisis: Responding to Challenges to Ways of Life in the Contemporary World, vol. 2, The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy and University of Ioannina, Washington, 2017, pp. 201-213.

In the first section, I will focus on the ordinary construal of ‘crisis’ with the aim of unpacking some of its undeclared presuppositions. Conventionally, a ‘crisis’ is a danger menacing the security of a given state of affairs. This definition is upheld in Edmund Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. I will briefly refer to that work in order to argue that Husserl’s insightful and rational discourse may be interpreted as subject to non-philosophical contingent factors related to the author’s particular circumstances. If even a sober philosophical work is infiltrated by a certain interestedness, this process of infiltration is bound to be more readily at work in political and economic approaches which anyway depend on interestedness and strategic calculation. Hence Derrida’s references to a ‘theater’ and a ‘rhetoric of crisis’. In order to expose this theatricality, Derrida outlines a set of presuppositions underlying most discursive representations of a crisis. By the very act of identifying a crisis: 1) one inevitably engages in a process of unifying the body undergoing the crisis; 2) one occupies a public stage, thereby enjoying a certain mastery or sovereignty, at least in comparison with others largely excluded from any public debate; 3) one proclaims one’s ability assuredly to decide on a teleological course of action with a view to overcoming a merely provisional and temporary crisis. In light of the lack of consensus about the status of any crisis, how is one to avoid the more biased representations? How is one to judge which of the available discourses is the most equitable and the least politically or financially interested? While acknowledging the potential benefits of the dominant understanding of ‘crisis’, a radical and critical reflection on the presuppositions of any discourse on crisis may actually be helpful toward that direction. According to Derrida, the ordinary construal of ‘crisis’ involves a certain forgetting of ‘crisis’ in the sense of a ‘caesura’ or a ‘division’ pre-dating any confident determination and decision. If ‘krisis’, etymologically related to ‘keirō’ (‘to cut’, ‘to divide’, ‘to separate’), points to an originary moment of separation or an opening up of a chasm, that moment allows for a difference and an uncertainty excluded by the subsequent moment of identification and definitive choice. There are two points to be made with respect to that alternative sense of ‘crisis’. First, to avoid reducing alterity to a simply provisional structure, ‘crisis’ qua caesura retains an element of radical incalculability. The latter entails an alterity resisting all forms of identity, certainty and judgement. This is not to say that decision and judgement are impossible. It is to say that incalculability will always be necessarily possible. It will always be necessarily possible to question the validity and sincerity of any discursive judgement about a crisis. The possibility of such questioning is something one can empirically observe in public debates. However, there is also an urgent necessity that one should question and complicate in order to resist the perhaps intentional reduction of alterity to a contingent difference. Second, Derrida’s insistence on an incalculable division results from his intention to speak in the name of those others who remain unrepresented in public debates, to stress that there are concrete differences between those suffering from the crisis and those theorizing about it. The ordinary philosophical discourse and a fortiori political and economic discourses, insofar as their principal aim is to reach a conclusive verdict, do not take seriously enough this ethical imperative to respect alterity. Without wishing to undermine all sensible endeavours to overcome current difficulties by calculation and judgement, one has cautiously to analyse all discursive representations of the crisis with a view to unveiling their inherent divisions for the sake of those who are its real victims. The second sense of ‘crisis’ reveals and also respects a radical alterity that is instrumental in exposing the interested calculations of those who exploit ‘crisis’ in the first sense by hastily unifying identities, aims and causes. Hence the demand for an economy of ‘crises’.

Cultural Logic, 1999

Essays in Philosophy, 2008