44

ECONOMY OF VIOLENCE,
VIOLENCE OF ECONOMY
(DERRIDA AND MARX)
Catherine Malabou
Source: Originally published in Revue philosophique de fa France et de f 'hranger 2, 1990: 303-24.
This article translated by 1. Lampert and O. Serafinowicz.
Reste a penser l'economie bien sur.
J, Derrida, "Survivre", note au traducteur,
in Parages, Ed. Galilee, p. 213
Je travaille comme un fou des nuits entieres a condenser mes etudes
economiques, de faeon a en avoir mis au net au moins les lineameant
essentiels avant Ie deluge [in French in the original text].
K. Marx, Letter to Engels, December 8, 1857,
Correspondance, t. V
People often reproach Derrida for not having any "political thought". Aware
of this reproach, he recalls in The Post Card, with sadness and weariness, all
those "who do not know how to decipher, and who would happily believe
that (he) leads a very sheltered life, without exposing himself, without obses-
sion, without trembling in the political world, without taking any militant
risk".! It is indeed strange that one should not be able to "decipher" the
thought of Derrida as a permanent appeal to war: to this war which he never
stops leading, leading against war itself, as when he seizes upon the terrorist
face of imperialism, of repression, of torture, of the domination of one race
over another, of one language over another, of one sex or gender over another,
and even of a certain manner of philosophizing over another.
If one does not see the "political" dimension of this war, it is perhaps
because, first of alI, Derrida does not wage this war without perpetually
questioning any promise of peace and reconciliation, any idea of emancipa-
tion, and above all, any axiomatic claim to self-evidence in the practical
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ECONOMY OF VIOLENCE, VIOLENCE OF ECONOMY
domain, the self-evidence ofa "common world", of "freedom", of the "rights
and duties of men", of the very concept of humanity, and, finally, the self-
evidence of the existence of politics itself (or of "the" political).
War or stasis do not, for Derrida, have a political origin. Indeed, if there is
war, it is precisely because there is no origin at alI, and that this lack of origin
is the first violence, this "transcendental violence [which] does not procede
from ethical resolution or freedom";2 it is a first violence without any priority,
because it is always already differentiated, always already effaced as the trace
that it is not.
Political violence, which Derrida also calls "political differance": "hier-
archisation [ ... ], the distinction between groups, classes, and levels of
power [ ... ], delegation of authority, deferred power, given over to an organ
of capitalization",3 can only pull itself together and emerge on the basis of
something that is already violence, this bottomless "already" of violence.
This explains why it is pointless in political struggle to oppose justice to
injustice, or peace to war; again, originary violence (as the trace of non-
originarity) is irreducible. One can only fight violence with violence, and
thus aim in the direction of the "least possible violence". "Violence against
violence", Derrida says. "Economy ofviolence".4
The second reason that one might not see how the "economy of violence"
could have to do with politics, may be that it is, precisely, an economy. Indeed,
what one reproaches Derrida for could simply be that he has "subordinated"
-a term whose logic he has nevertheless never stopped deconstructing-
politics to economy. And what if Derrida has been the object of the same sus-
picion as Marx, as when Hannah Arendt, to cite only her example, says that
Marx has contributed to accelerating the lifting of the border that separates
or used to separate the sphere of the "public domain" from that of the eco-
nomy, and thus to making war penetrate the heart of "the world of action"
(politics), a world which, in its origin, "does not participate in violence"?5
We have decided here to take this hypothesis very seriously.
For one thing, we take it seriously because it is clear, for Derrida as for
Marx, that the thought of economy, or rather of a certain relation between
economy and violence, actually proceeds by way of a critique of politics
envisaged as the origin or the horizon both of violence and of the reduction of
violence. The economy of violence, in one of the two thinkers, and what can be
called the theory of economic violence, in the other, both present themselves
as non-metaphysical political thoughts, and in a certain sense, non-political
too, assuming that it is true that we owe to metaphysics the division of
"genres" within thought. Further, Marx and Derrida are the only philo-
sophers, among those who think something like "the end of philosophy", to
envisage this end precisely on the basis of a question of economy.
For another thing, we take it seriously because this common point only
makes us highlight all the better the radical difference which exists between
the Marxist and the Derridian understandings of both economy and violence;
181
POLITICS AND LITERATURE
and because the critical space opened by the play of this commonality and
this difference seems to us to open up, contrary to all expectations, a possible
future for political debate, such that the latter can still take place from the
very perspective of its closure.
What we will try to show here is that there can be such a debate between
a thought of writing and a thought of Capital, between their economies-
not to convince those who do not "know how to decipher", but so that we
ourselves may learn how to decipher something, once again, like a future, by
starting with the very troubled events of our present times.
To engage this debate, we begin with a certain hesitation of Derrida
concerning Marx's philosophy, a hesitation no doubt due to the commonality
and difference mentioned above, a hesitation which is translated into a kind
of silence (there is no "major" commentary by Derrida on Marx in the way
that there is one on Hegel, HusserI, and Heidegger, for example), and which
is marked by a double attitude.
For one thing, if Derrida often recognizes that there is actually in Marx
a gesture towards a reduction of metaphysics, he still never stops asking if
this reduction is not performed in the name of the most metaphysical deter.
mination possible both of economy and of violence. Indeed, for Derrida,
economy plays the role of a privileged metaphor in the traditional conception
of metaphor and meaning, in that it designates first and very generally the
movement of a circulation which, in the home ("oikos, house, room, crypt"6),
produces the effects of property by means of usage (par usure) and which
preserves and saves up propriety [Ie propre] in the course of its becoming
de figurative. Now, it is not certain, according to Derrida, that economy as
Marx thinks it, even though he thinks it in reaction to classical economy,
escapes from this metaphysics of the proper; it seems rather to confirm it.
This is revealed, for example, by the problematic of fetishism, a problematic
which Derrida criticizes in one of his great texts devoted to metaphor, "White
Mythology". The examination of this critique and the critique of this ex
amination will be the object of the first part of the Derrida-Marx debate
developed here.
If economy, in Marx, still remains in every sense of the term a theory
of property, then in the final analysis it must be at the same time a theory of
the overcoming of violence, this violence that threatens the eschatology of
the proper; Marx could only conceive economic violence, in capitalism, no
matter what he says on the subject, on the basis of the possibility and the
necessity of its disappearance, hence in light of an absolute non-violence.
This explains, as Derrida in Of Grammatology shows but always with extreme
care, how Levi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques could refer to Marx in order to
contrast the servitude or "the exploitation of man by man" with a state of
primary innocence, and to present violence as an accident which came from
the outside to affect the "deep insouciance" of origins. The presentation of
another reading than Levi-Strauss's of the Marxist analysis of violence, and
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ECONOMY OF VIOLENCE, VIOLENCE OF ECONOMY
the confrontation between this other reading and the Derridian conception of
"arche-violence", will be the object of the second part of the debate.
We propose here, very modestly, starting with Derrida's text itself, to see
how one might extract "an original rigour of the Marxist critique, which dis-
tinguishes it from every other critique of misery, of violence" / and to envisage
in reverse how this critique in its "rigour" can also be a critique of Derrida
himself.
Violence against violence: the hommage that we render here could only
respect this economy.
In "White Mythology", fetishism is presented as that which fulfills the
traditional philosophical thinking about sense and metaphor, about sense
as metaphor, a thinking that organizes itself according to a double contra-
dictory movement which we must recall here. First of all, because it charac-
terizes the process of metaphor in general as the phenomenon of usage/wear
[usure] at work in language, "the uninterrupted exhaustion of the primitive
meaning, the regular semantic loss", it follows that this thinking itself
obeys the law that it claims to describe, since in order to carry out this de-
scription it necessarily has recourse to a metaphor of linguistics, a metaphor
that it finds readymade, as the term "usage [usure]" indicates, in economics.
Indeed it is "the paradigms of money, metal, silver and gold" that make the
analogy, as it seems they always have, between linguistics and economics:
meaning shares with money this property of not being itself, that is of only
existing,jinally and in its proper sense, in order to circulate, to devalue itself,
to de-figure itself. Yet, is it precisely on the scene of this exchange between
economy and language that, "as much for Nietzsche as for Marx" says
Derrida, the problematic of fetishism is articulated. Fetishism is the result
of the continual movement at the heart of which the "two types of signifiers",
linguistic and economic, "supplement one another", each one of them,
according to the discourse, serving as the reference of the other. Thus, "for
Marx the reference seems mostly to be economic and the metaphor seems
to be linguistic", whereas Nietzsche "at least in appearance ... reverses the
direction of the analogy".8 For Marx, fetishism takes hold when gold and
silver acquire, in the mode of mercantile representation, the power of speech;
whereas for Nietzsche, as the passage that Derrida extracts from Das Philo-
sophenbuch: Theoretische Studien
9
expresses, it is language itself and its force
of truth which, suffering the results of usage/wear [usure], would become as
heavy and insignificant as metal.
On the one hand, then, traditional thinking about meaning and metaphor
can only become metaphorical itself, and it ends by designating the infinite
movement of this metaphorization as fetishism, or the irreduceability of the
trope which perpetually converts the currency sign into a linguistic sign and
the linguistic sign into a currency sign.
But on the other hand, and this is its second movement, the metaphysical
determination of the process of meaning tries ceaselessly to conjure away its
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POLITICS AND LITERATURE
own metaphoricity, that is, to reduce the fetishism that nevertheless constitutes
it. This is how, for Derrida, the Marxist critique of fetishism (let us leave
aside here the Nietzschean critique), would ultimately depend upon an absolute
prohibition against any pure and simple assimilation of "economic science to
the play of language".10 Since the two types of signifiers are interchangeable,
and precisely because of that, it is a question for Marx of putting economy
itself outside of the game, outside of the tropological play, and to posit it as
the referential reality of any possible game. Derrida finds proof of this in
Marx's acerbic criticism in The German Ideology ofStirner's lucidity when the
latter claims, for exemple, to trace back, by means of etymology, the inver-
sion of usage (usure), and retrace the path to the proper meaning of property
itself, and thus to explain an economic phenomenon by means of a philolo-
gical procedure. Marx says: "All this theoretical nonsense which seeks refuge
in etymology would be impossible if the real private property which the com- .
munists want to abolish had not been transformed into this abstract concept:
'property"'.il Derrida interprets this critique of etymology in the following.
way: for Marx, the reality of the proper would be grounded beyond its
meaning, including its own proper meaning; this implies, if one develops this
interpretation, that one could say from a Marxist point of view that economy.
is structured like a language only on the condition that one upheld as a cer-
tainty the non-linguistic essence of the economic structure. As for linguistic
structure, it could only be said to be economic upon reflection, that is as a
reflection, as a metaphor, or if one prefers, super-structurally. There would thus
be in Marx a whole metaphysics, or a whole fetishism, of economic reality.
But if one holds onto this Derridian reading, how does one explain the fact .
that the Marxist critique of fetishism never stops denouncing every form
of fetishisation of reality? Indeed, for Marx, what is capitalism, the most
elaborate form of fetishism, if not precisely this enterprise, at once economic
and ideological, of the transformation of one of the terms of an analogy or .
comparison into the referential reality of the analogy or the comparison as such?
It is striking indeed to note, when one reads for example Book I of Capital;
that Marx devotes all of his effort to analyzing what he calls "the enigmatic .
aspect of equivalence",!2 or, in other words, precisely that from which every
form of analogy, comparison, proportion, exchange, and thus also of meta-
phor and resemblance proceeds. The enigma of equivalence in capitalism
from which there arises every fetishistic delirium.
Let us recall that it is by following the convolutions of the process of
value at the heart of the reign of commodities and their exchange that Marx .
is going to stage this enigma. The whole problem of exchange is tied, as
we know, to this difficulty from the beginning: to find the measure, or the
commonality, of the dissimilar. "Commodities", Marx says, "must be related
back to something which is common to them, and with respect to which they
represent an addition or a subtraction". Every equation of value, of the type
"x quarters of wheat = y kilograms of iron", presupposes in fact three termsl
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ECONOMY OF VIOLENCE, VIOLENCE OF ECONOMY
"The two objects are thus equal to a third which in itself is neither one nor the
other. Each of the two, as an exchange-value, must be reduceable to a third,
independently of the other."!3 It is useless to delay here with familiar points.
We know well that the third term of the equation, the source of value, is
labour time, that is, the measure of an expenditure of force. The problem is
that in capitalism, "the determination of the quantity of value by labour time
is ... a secret hidden under the apparent flux of the values of commodities."!4
What in reality is dissimulated when the true source of the "determination
of the quantity of value" is concealed? What is the big "secret"? It is the
genius of Marx to have shown that the secret is that every measure is always
in itself measurable, that the equivalent is necessarily itself a value, that what
makes commodities commensurable is not incommensurable to them. An
equivalent, indeed, can only fulfill its function by not remaining outside the
system of which it is nevertheless "the regulatory law"; this is what gives it its
"enigmatic" character. And if this enigma must be reinforced, if this secret
must remain hidden in the mode of capitalist production, it is because the
latter has every interest in positing ideologically that on the contrary, the
equivalent is a referent, that is, a transcendent reality exterior to the process of
exchange and value.
This explains why, in this mode of production, it is not labour time which
plays the role of the "form of equivalence", to the extent that it is precisely
impossible to fetishize labour, the latter being too obviously measurable.
Labour, which is measured by, and only by, time, cannot play the role of a
referent. Similarly, the "money man" takes good care to conceal from the
labourers (and to conceal from himself) the fact that the expenditure of
their labour power is a commodity like any other, and that it is, within the
logic of profit, not only the creator of value but that it also has, or is itself, an
exchange-value. For what would happen if people became conscious of the
relative character, i.e. "the social and non-sacred" character, as Marx says,
character of the measure? To avoid this type of question, it is better to present
labour power as a simple use-value which can be exchanged, under the form
of some sort of contract, for a salary, namely for money.
Money: here we have, in contrast, the ideal form of equivalence. Indeed,
if money is itself also a commodity, it at least has grounds to claim not to
be one, because it seems to draw its dignity as an equivalent from its own
nature alone, that is, from its precious character. Of all commodities, it is the
one best suited to become a fetish, since "the movement which acted as an
intermediary" (namely, which has permitted the commodity that consists of
money to be transformed into the universal equivalent of commodities),
"vanishes in its own result and leaves no trace"Y The shining splendour of
money frees it from the vulgar game of reciprocity in exchange; thus, "a
commodity does not appear to become money because of other commodities
expressing reciprocally their values in it; but on the contrary, these other
commodities seem to express their value in it just because it is money" .16
185
POLITICS AND LITERATURE
The fetish is the crystallized equivalent, reified in a referent, that is, in a
non-value, or again, in an self-referential value, which is absurd (since noth-
ing really has value in-itself); an absurdity which, indeed, can only give rise
to forms of idolatry, superstition, and delirium. The capitalistic specificity of
money depends precisely on the impossibility of its devaluation in usage [usure].
In the most banal coins of money, it is ultimately the metal which in the
imaginary, always has value or counts, or rather over-counts, since seems
to possess, in the name of its own glitter, like God, the eternal secret of the
value of all things.
Now, against this illusion, Marx shows, and this is perhaps what he would
have said to Derrida, that money, just like any other form of equivalence,
is always already used or worn down, because the proper nature [le pro pre] of
:alue. in.general is to have a sensible, .figurative sense, except, precisely,
m fet1sh1st representatiOn. Materialism never stops affirming the immaterial-
ity, in the sense of non-substantiality, of the equivalent: "not one atom of
matter enters into the value", says Marx.
17
Thus gold, for example, as soon as
it becomes a commodity, circulates and thus really loses its face, figure, and
bu_t since it is not altogether gold either, in that it is not a commodity,
It never m fact really has a figure, and owes its auriferous existence or its
aura, as it were, only to its originary defiguration. And one can say the same
of all commodities; it is this "unfigurability" which for the capitalist constitutes
their "ungraspable character", their "caprice", their "chimerical being" .
18
The
capitalist necessarily attributes a fantastic character to these things which are
at once use-value and exchange-value, that is to say, which manifest a total
absence of support, which are unbearable and unjustifiable [insupportables] in
that they have no intrinsic value, in that they exist only as a network of traces
(traces o_f utility, traces of expended energy, traces of qualities) immediately
efface? m .the process of their quantification in the light of exchange, a
quantificatiOn that depends on a standard which is itself, once again, nothing
but commodity; is, a network of traces, a "hieroglyph", Marx says.
One IS then left wantmg to be able to orient oneself, to find a reference, a
sense or a reality, for this chimera.
Yet, it is precisely this chimera and its irreality that give reality to the
science of economics. Reality, for Marx, is that there is no referent. And the
science of economics spends its time, first and foremost, demonstrating
that capitalism, on the contrary, is the realm of referentiality, determined
as meaning, law, or philosophy, so many terms that das Kapital,
by Itself, could translate. And so it is not surprising that in this realm,
commodities speak, that they make signs, that their "sensible" expressions
(that one could call signifiers) seem to relate back to an abstraction (or a
signified), and this abstraction to a nature (or a referent). How could it be
otherwise, since it would appear, as we said above, not so much that economy
is structured like a language, but that capitalist economy is structured like (a)
linguistics?
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ECONOMY OF VIOLENCE, VIOLENCE OF ECONOMY
It thus becomes impossible, reading the phraseology of commodities, to
determine which of the two terms of the analogy, terms we must now call
linguistics as such and economics, serves as reference for the other-very
simply because, like commodities, they are mirror images of one another: like
fabric and outfit, in that irresistible page of Book 1, they nudge and wink at
each other, and like two conspiring producers, they each in turn cash in on
the benefits of surplus-value. What would Marx have thought of this sentence
of Saussure, which Derrida cites as confirmation of the alleged Marxist meta-
physics of the economy of meaning: "There [i.e. in lin.guistics], as
economy, one is face to face with the notion of value; m the two 1t 1s
a matter of a system of equivalence between things of different orders: m one,
between labour and salary, in the other, between a signified and a signifier"?
19
What would he have thought, if not that this analogy, present once more, is
the very form of capitalist reasoning?
It is not that the economy or even labour, as Marx thinks of them, are
incomparable, incomparably more real than the play of language (even if
Marx certainly recognized that the play of language, which he never
taking seriously for a single minute, was incomparably more real than 1ts
determinate linguistic expressions, or than its determinate etymological facts
as Stirner so miserably thought). For Marx, precisely, as we have seen,
everything is comparable, nothing escapes the game of not even
comparison itself, and it is perhaps in order to say th1s that 1t IS worth the
trouble for him, to do philosophy one last time.
In The German Ideology, he says to Saint-Sancho, who advocates "the
incomparability of the individual": "Comparison is in no way an arbitrary
product of reflection .... itself the o!
parison ... , it presupposes that the actlVlty of the mcompara?le
distinguishes itself from the activity of his equals in a domam.
La Persiani is an incomparable singer because she is a singer and IS compared
to other singers by people whose ears, which do the comparing by virtue of
a normal anatomical construction and a musical culture, are in a position to
recognize her incomparable character. The song of la Persiani cannot be
compared to the croaking of a frog-even here a is possible, ?ut
it would be a comparison between the human species and the frog species,
and not between la Persiani and this particular frog."
20
We could not resist
the pleasure of this long citation, which, like the whole passage from which it
is extracted, shows that for Marx, thinking always comes down to compar-
ing, relating, and constructing analogies, finding a measure for the dissimilar,
or in other words, economizing the difference. But it is precisely because
everything is comparable that the economy of comparison cannot simply
belong to an economy of the sign, since the latter (as Derrida has well shown)
always presupposes a reality which is not itself a sign, an autonomous
entity, Marx says, which necessarily lies "outside" the oikos (at the same
time as it turns the oikos into an inside). In this sense, Marx and Derrida have
187
POLITICS AND LITERATURE
the same problem: getting to the point of thinking a diacriticity (and hence also
a metaphoricity) that are unassignable; a diacriticity that would govern the
elements of a given system as well as the relation between different systems,
for example the systems of language and economy.
There remains, for Marx, the economic reality of this diacriticity, the
irreduceably economic determination of the economy of difference. And
there remains, for us, to assess this "reality", since it would appear that one
cannot think it, in a facile manner, as simply a foundation or a guarantee.
Indeed, it seems difficult now, taking the previous analysis into account, to
say that the primacy of economy for Marx is purely and simply of a refer-
ential order. It would perhaps be necessary to understand this "economic
reality" on the basis of the absolute prohibition that exists, for Marx, against
thinking the economy of a functioning (the play of the equivalent in general)
in any other way than by scientifically studying an economic functioning
(the material organization of such and such a mode of production). This pro-
hibition would reveal the impossibility of distinguishing, as Derrida does in
the sphere of writing, between an "arche-economy" and the economy as one
usually conceives it, economy in the "usual sense". In other words, for Marx,
one could not think a division, even on the condition of erasing it immediately,
between the arche-economy and the "empirical" economy, since each one
gives itself immediately and factually (in an irreduceable facticity) along with
the other. The examination of this hypothesis will guide us in the second part
of this work, in opening up the question of violence and the question of the
difference between "economy of violence" and "economic violence".
We have invoked the absolute prohibition, for Marx, against thinking of
the economy of a functioning outside the scientific study of an economic
functioning. However, it is undeniable that the Marxist analyses of the play
of the equivalent and of absolute comparability bring to light what one can
call a "general economy" which, as such, cannot be the object of a positive
science, nor delimit the economy as a "domain" of knowledge.
To confirm this, one need only read the Introduction to the Critique of
Political Economy of 1857, in which Marx presents the logical assemblage
in which the very structure of this play is distributed. This assemblage is
"a complex articulated set"
21
holding between elementary forms, namely
production, distribution, exchange, consumption, and finally circulation.
These elements, in their relations, constitute "the traits common ... to all
epochs of production".
22
As Marx says, these traits do not constitute a
"universal" which would always be at work in such and such a particular
mode of production, but again a diacritical structure, whose study would
exceed the traditional framework of the episteme, and which actually could
be thought, effectively, as an "arche-economy"; which could be thought, in
other words, as the movement of a trace which would defer its own efface-
ment, whatever the economic system in which it was operating, thus allowing
this system to distribute itself in time and space.
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ECONOMY OF VIOLENCE, VIOLENCE OF ECONOMY
Marx carries out his analysis as a critique of classical economics which
thinks of the articulation of these common traits as "a normal syllogism
according to the rules" within which "production constitutes universality,
distribution and exchange constitute particularity, and consumption con-
stitutes singularity, in which the whole is concluded".
23
According to this
syllogistic logic, is general natural laws;
tion is determined by social contmgency, which could subsequently exercise
a more or less stimulating action upon production; exchange is situated
between the two as a formally social movement; and the final act of consump-
tion, conceived not only as the last stage but as the final end, is strictly
speaking outside the economy, except to the extent to which it reacts in turn
on the point of departure, and opens up once again the whole process". 24
Marx summarizes the classical conception in this way: in it, the part that
belongs to economy proper would be the conflictual play between distribu-
tion and exchange, that is, the social violence and arbitrariness tied to the
problem of division (we will return to this), which would lead their war on the
battlefield delimited by the two fixed poles of a "pre-economic fact", 25 namely
production, and a post-economic fact, namely consumption.
To criticize this logic, Marx begins by saying that none of the moments
of this articulation is primary relative to another: "Each one of them is not
only immediately the other, not only mediator of the other, but each one of
them, by fulfilling itself[we underline this], creates the other, and is created in
the form of the other".
26
It is appropriate to insist on this accomplishment,
which Marx characterizes very specifically not as a dialectical result, but as
the movement of a finishing stroke [English in the original], an expression
which Badia translates into French, in a footnote, as "la derniere touche et le
coup de grike".
27
This finishing touch is a movement of using-up or wearing
out [usure] which cuts into no plenitude; each of the elements of production,
distribution, etc., informs itself only of the using-up of the other, and thus
appears, when it does get information, as already used the point
where it is impossible to take one of these elements as the point of departure
of the process, since, Marx says, they are all always given in the "finish" of an
originary after-effect.
Thus, if one takes for example the point of view "of the singular indi-
vidual" (other points of view of course being possible), it is distribution that
is "appears naturally as a social law that constitutes the position
within which he produces and which thus precedes production". 28 But this
restriction to the law of distribution, to moira, reveals, by being used-up [par
usure], by the repetition oflabour, that distribution is in reality determined by
production, by the existence of capital (of capital in general), and so produc-
tion in turn appears as the first moment of the process. Yet, as the individual
"who develops his faculties in the course of production, expends them as well,
and consumes them in the act of production",
29
it follows that production,
as a result of being-spent [usure] (of expenditure), now cedes its place to
189
POLITICS AND LITERATURE
And. Marx adds: 'The product meets its ultimate 'finish' only
consumptIOn. A raIlway upon which nothing rides, that is not used, is not
sumed, is only a railway in dunamis and not in reality. Without
there is no consumption; but without consumption, there is no
either. ... It is only when it makes the product vanish that consumption
it the 'finishing stroke"'.30 As for exchange, it is as much that which is
(up) [qui s'use] in production, in that it is "entirely determined by it", by
law, as it is that which makes use of and uses-up production, since it is .
activity, "a means of manufacturing the product". Finally,
just as much a movement that takes place in exchange
It charactenzes the general dynamic of interchangeability of the five elelmeln1
of the articulation. It is thus easy now to see why it is impossible to
priority, logically or chronologically, to one or another of these five
In light of this analysis, the "finishing stroke" appears as the trajectory
spending preceding the reserve, which would, in other words, produce
the fact [apres-coup] that which it spends, in a movement that one
without hesitation call that of an economic differance. For Marx, there is
original reserve. Because it is impossible to rigorously distinguish IJUJU'Cl", V.I
from distribution, since they are differentiated by their relation, it follows,
example, that the earth, which is a privileged resource in all economic
courses, cannot purely and simply be considered as an agent of
In the same way, against what is affirmed by classical economics, land ...... ,val",
salary, interest, profit cannot simply belong to the sphere of
tIon .. Nothing exists which is not already distributed, divided up, u,'o ""0'"
or dIsmembered. Capital itself is always at once "agent of production"
"source of revenue", that is, "a determinate form of distrubution that is .
determining";3l as for the accumulation of capital, it is constituted as a
reserve only as a function of the inflation of its distributed dissemination: i.e. ;
when is a disappearance of a manufacturing or of a family businesses,
a prolIferation and spatial dispersion of multinationals, a division of prop-
erty, a planetary anonymity of subcontracting, and the subcontracting of the
subcontracting, etc.
Nothing in the regulated play of the five powers, the five differential
inscriptions, stands outside of the playas an inexhaustible and endless source
of wealth; this explains why the measure, or the equivalent, which, in such
a of production, allows for establishing relations of propor-
tIOnalIty and pomts of reference at the heart of this economics of the "finishing
stroke", cannot itself be extra-economic. Nothing, once again, is held in
reserve, nothing, and certainly not, as it is claimed too often, the labour force,
which, precisely as force, is perpetually traversed and itself laboured upon by
the game of difference, expending itself without saving itself up in the exhaus-
tion that reconstitutes it, yet without being returned to itself, since it is
consumed right where it consumes, it is distributed right where it assembles
190
ECONOMY OF VIOLENCE, VIOLENCE OF ECONOMY
. f 't is exchanged right where it reproduces itself, and it circulates right
ItSel , I
,
W We see how the "finishing stroke", the deferred
of the using-up [usure], can be a "wntmg m tfhe selnse
T
, h
to
d
ree to which its economy IS an economy 0 ongma elau 1. e
the eg . , . I' f .. h' h
, h' g stroke" is pure repetition a repetItIve clrcu atlOn 0 lorces w IC
"finIS III ' 32 '
" tually overflow (their) proper frame", as Marx says, WhICh overflow
perpe , 'h' h t'
by in-propriety in the play of nty; m t IS It e 1-
tion of and in the dIfference IS really also a VIO ent 0 VIO ence. f
I d
eed for Marx there does not exist a first state of mnocence (that state 0
n , f" E I
, ocence which "it was still worth the trouble to get out 0 , as nge s says
irony), How else would we understand critique of all those
theories that explain the emergence of some phen?menon, such, as
slavery, by appealing to political violence, IS, by appealtng to
ariness of men and to social contingency which, by means of conventlOnaltty,
perpetually cause the de-generation of the peaceful and po:v
er
of nature (cf. the role given to distribution and m the ,claSSIcal
syllogism cited above)? Engels, in Anti-Duhring, raIses a acerbiC attack
against that theorist for whom "it is clear that these economic phenomena are
explained by political causes, namely by understood
here of course in the very limited sense of the exercise of power, or what
calls "the malevolence of governments" ,35 i.e. a derivative violence relatIve
to an original non-violence. Note also in passing that is exactly
evolence that Levi-Strauss takes up, indeed from a MarXist perspectIve ... m
order to explain the enslavement of men by contrast: it is clear in
Marxist theory that enslavement does not have a polttIcal cause, If
by politics, as Engels says, "that which injects nature with sm
ofinjustice".37 The subjection of men, what one calls the ,of man
by man, is not the fruit of a decision, conscious or unconscIOUS. MarXIsm
shown that a true theory of oppression, alienation, and misery must depnve
itself of recourse to a demonic aetiology of power. In fact, as Engels so
admirably says, "if, in order to believe in overturning current of the
distribution of the products of labour, with its glanng contradictIOns of
misery and opulence, of famine and feast, we had no better than
the feeling of the injustice of this mode of distribution and the convictIon of
a final victory of righteousness, we would be in a sorry state indeed and we
would have to wait a long time",38
Political violence for Marx is always derivative in relation to the originary
violence of the "finishing stroke". We now have to understand how Marx can
tie together this originary violence with some particular given type .of exercise
of political and economic violence in a given mode of productIOn, as for
example the unpaid appropriation of another's labour which in capitalism
engenders alienation and pauperization.
191
POLITICS AND LITERA TURE
Must we, in order to explain this connection, return to what Derrida
Of Grammatology calls a circulation of the strata of violence, a circulation
which the "arche-violence", as "loss of the proper, of the absolute proximity
of presence-to-self", finds its articulation with "empirical violence", "war in
the usual sense", "what one commonly calls evil, war, indiscretion, rape"?39 .
so, we would then have to say that for Marx, who admits that the big diffi_
culty is "to know how general historical relations intervene in production"40>
(that is, in the "finishing stroke"), primary violence or originary using-up
[usure] are given in the form of historical versions of themselves, in the factual'
and empirical configurations that consist of the different economic systems,
We would further have to say thereby that originary distribution is itself
distributed, according to a stratified structure, a genealogy of levels, which
opens the possibility of making a division between the economy of violence
an.d violence, between a symbolic violence (the economy of the
pnva.tlOn of the proper), and a violence that one could call material (economy:
of pnvate property). The whole question is to know whether Marx would have
accepted this division.
Let us suspend the answer for a moment, and make a detour by way of
th,e analysis of violence that is based on the events reported by .
LeVI-Strauss m the chapter "In the Family" in Tristes Tropiques. These now
famous e.vents, whi.ch we will very quickly recall here, are the following: the
ethnologist plays With a group of children. A little girl strikes a playmate. The
latter seeks his protection, and tells him the name of her enemy, a supreme
vengeance, since proper names must remain secret; the other little girl, in
turn, "gives over" her companion, and Levi-Strauss comes bit by bit to know
all the names in the group. This scene allows Derrida to analyze the stratified
structure of violence: we see indeed how physical violence (the slap) cedes its
place, one might say by "genealogical variation", to symbolic violence (the
transgression of the prohibition whose object is the proper name). Derrida's
commentary: "A silent foreigner is present, immobile, at a game oflittle girls.
That one of them had 'hit' a 'playmate' is not yet a case of true violence. No
integrity has been breached. Violence appears only at the moment when one
can start to break into the intimacy of the proper names". 41
Ma.rx certainly have agreed with Derrida as to the analysis of
breakmg mto the proper, and of what this breaking-in signifies; we have tried
to show why. But he would surely not have accepted that this analysis
procedes by way of reducing the role of the slap. Physical violence for Marx is
the irreduceable, that which it is impossible to economize on, even in the
name, indeed even less in the name, of an economy of violence. He would not
have admitted that a slap does not breach any integrity. For him, every blow
counts; all the blows against the body: the slaps, as well as forced labour,
fatigue, famine, unhealthy conditions, fingers cut off by the machines. There
is no moment at which violence "is not yet a true case of violence"; a slap
already contains in itself all violence. How could one fail to recognize, indeed,
192
ECONOMY OF VIOLENCE, VIOLENCE OF ECONOMY
that the possibility of striking, .infinitely. itself in
Jizations, is as originary as the possibility of obliteratmg the proper, m It
. t bottom the same possibility? Therefore, one can always say that phYSical
IS. alence is "empirical"; but since it is established that this very empiricity is
physical violence, just as much as that which justifies (or fails
Ir f h T'}z . "
to justify) its reduction, thus has the value 0 an arc e. 1, ere IS no common
sense" of violence.
And Derrida knows it well, he who speaks of "arche" only on the basis
of the "arche-impossibility", always reaffirmed in his text, of making the
division between the transcendental and the empirical; he says: "The value
of the transcendental arche must make its necessity felt before letting itself
be erased".42 And there remains that phrase concerning the "true violence",
which testifies to the fact that this arche-impossibility is also the arche-
impossibility of conjuring away this difference altogether; that phrase
cerning the "true violence", which manifests the fact that the erasure of thiS
division itself remains, necessarily and always, something archaic.
The layers of violence are steady, equal, without above or below, I say
your name if you strike me, I strike yo.u if say my. nam.e;. it is t.o
be called like that. There is no appealing thiS appelatlOn, It IS a stnke. It IS
beyond appeal, and one is struck because of it. All one can do is to look for
the precise point of impact, the point of collision where one finds, coming up
against one another and mixing inextricably, the punch of the origins, the
originary violence of usage (usure), and the force of the strike which here and
now ties us to the political and social war. This point of impact is precisely for
Marx the economic organization which as we know is always for him defined
as a field of struggle. Struggle is the irreduceable factum within which are
articulated, in their undivided difference, on the one hand the originary con-
flict of the elements in the complex of production/distribution/consumption/
exchange/circulation, and on the other hand the combat which organises
itself, within a mode of production, into a system of relations among forces,
a combat which every child's game anticipates. The struggle is the very tight
point of the fabric of life, so tight that one cannot unknot it, or separate out
of it the threads of what we will once again call the transcendental and the
empirical, which are, just like everything else, absolutely comparable.
We do not at all think that Marx criticizes capitalist violence and its
alienating power within the horizon of a communist promise of non-violence.
Once again, struggle is the fabric of life. What Marx criticizes in capitalist
violence is the fact that it ruins, numbs, and annihilates men by denying and
obscuring itself qua violence, in the guise of the naturalistic ideology of the
peacefulness of origins and of the equality to come. It is in this sense that this
violence is unacceptable. It is in this sense that one must struggle violently
against it, always play violence against violence-there is economy here too,
but revolutionary economy. Let us read Engels again, one last time: "violence
plays another role in history (other than the role Duhring makes it play), a
193
POLITICS AND LITERATURE
revolutionary role"; it breaks into pieces "fixed and dead forms" 43 It e
. , co.
nomlzes death. Without being able to claim to develop here how we should
understand this "revolution", whose concept, in our view, has never yet been
us say only that what is revolutionary in Marx's thought is this
Id.ea that It IS by means of violence and within violence that can be attained
any preexisting ideology of justice and injustice, what is the most;
Just [Ie plus juste]. For there is, relatively, proportionally, comparat.
Ively, most/more just [un plus juste]; and an economy of violence can in no
way dIspense [faire l'economie] this question, except by being an economy
of the lesser evIl, an. economy of compromise. Yet the most/more just, for
Marx, t?e most eqUItable equivalent, namely as we have seen, the force of
la?our, IS also the most violent [Ie plus violent]. Indeed, that which allows for
a Just of at the heart of "the common product"44 is
truly thIs force whIch, as we have said, is radically subjected to its absolute
original down [usure], the always already of .
the .. The most Just IS also the most violent: this is perhaps
traIt that the of Marx's philosophy
m relatIOn to every other phIlosophy of mIsery" and oppression.
To conclude, let us add that the impossibility of distinguishing between a
sense. a?d, let us say, a "non-vulgar" sense of violence equally implies
the ImpossIbIlIty of distinguishing between a non-vulgar sense and a usual
sense .of econ.omy. The originary economy of the "finishing stroke" has no
of some particular factual economic system whose function-
mg m turn gl.ves it a without which it would be nothing.
Just as the raIlway on whIch nothmg runs, the "finishing stroke" without its
without its "finishing stroke", is merely dunamis. Necessity ofthe
double usmg-up [usure]: here is, for Marx, the sense of economic reality. One
can of a first usure. only on the basis of its redoubling in the economy as
orgallIzatlOn productIOn, and thus as determinate exercise of violence.
We would ha,:,e. to show precisely how this understanding of economy
goes beyond ItS tradItIOnal understanding: the law of the home, the spirit of
t?e !he domestic organization (Lacan would say the "hommes-
ma.mtamed by the couple formed, in its mysterious union, by the
Helmlzchkelt and the Unheimlichkeit. We have simply tried to see here how
the of the usure exceeds the law of the dwelling in that it is
actually a kmd of wntmg, a play of differences, a tracing.
it is an enigmatic writing in that it renders absolutely unread-
able the dIfference that it itself is between two senses of itself as writing the
non-vu.lgar and the usual. The "broad" and the "narrow". A writing the
great readers of Marx, would have called "automatic writing",
non-transcendental, automatically non-empirical. Automatic
wntmg, as says in La part du feu, is the experience of language
subject. This writing indeed liberates language from its instrumental
functIOn, from its traditional determination as a simple piece, or agent, of a
194
ECONOMY OF VIOLENCE, VIOLENCE OF ECONOMY
r
economy of the oikos of the rational animal, in order to affirm it as the
large , . ... .. bl b
. ary economIc potentIalIty, WIthout WhICh nothmg would be a e to e
prtm omized. The whole problem, and this is what Blanchot shows, is that the
eco
n
. .. " .." th
language is liberated from ItS restnctIOn to commullIcatlOn, e more
more '. I " t
it has value for its own sake, and the It a. concre e
ball, a mass of existence ... ; (in automatIc wntmg), all that IS phYSIcal
the primary role: rhythm, weight, mass, figure, and. then the on :-vhlc?
it is written, the trace of ink, the book. Yes, happIly language IS a thmg: It
. the written thing, a bit of bark, a shard of rock, a fragment of clay o.n
IS 45 . h f t t
h
h the reality of the earth subsists". Everythmg appens as I au oma IC
WIC . h.hh
writing revealed this extreme, extremely subtle, pomt at w t e
arche-trace, as language, as writing, confounds Itself. obscurely WIth t?e
most empirical of traces: brute, massive, irreduceable
ment of things [Ia chose dans son parti pris], matter. IS poetI.c
translation of materialism, understood as the thought of the ImpOSSIble clan-
fication of the impossible critique, of this blind spot where trace after trace
are And as if by chance-though automatic writing is the least
chancy of chances (it is "an objective chance")46-Breton .in L'amou: (au
remarks upon the frequency of economic images in this
"I was truly astonished, at the time when we were begmnmg to practIce
automatic writing, at the frequency with which the words tree of bread, .of
butter, of salt, of pepper . .. tended to recur in our texts. could one. resIst
the charm of a garden like that, where all the trees of provIdence are gIVen a
place to meet?,,47 If one lets the economy of language function for an?
violently so, as a lexical production and a syntax of t?en
ately the outlines of an economic organization will app.ear.m ,:hlch nature m
its prodigality will already have been used up by the dlstnbutIOn of pro-
ducts that it has not fabricated, where nature's innocence has been VIOlated,
and where there is an affirmation, in the form of their unthinkable difference,
of need and desire, or as Breton says, of "the pleasure principle and the reality
principle". Economy, and economy.
From economy to economy, then: an impossible in the of
which nevertheless we will have taken the risk of sketchmg out a dIalogue
Marx and Derrida. Or rather between a certain Marx and Derrida,
a Marx whom only Derrida could have made us encounter, a Marx who is a
thinker of writing. A Marx who could only encounter Derrida on the scene of
this war whose unavoidable necessity both of them will have demonstrated.
The scene of their strange complicity, of their violent sympathy. Sympathy:
for the one as much as for the other, the question of this war is (and is only)
the political question. But it is precisely, for the one as much as the.a,ther, as
we have said, a question which can never be posed in terms of polItIcs, an.d
which requires, in order to be thought, that one bring to light econor;rlIc
assemblage from which it proceeds, and from which every polItIcal phIlo-
sophy proceeds as well. Violence: the one reproaches the other for what the
195
POLITICS AND LITERA TURE
other would also necessarily have reproached him for in his turn, for having
characterization of economy that is still too metaphysical, or too
At stake: the impossibility for the one, the possibility for the other, of
ing something like a radical justice (a word which Marx liked a lot, no
because "radical" does not mean "absolute") obtained in and through
To claim to close this debate is unthinkable: it was our purpose simply
show that it can be opened; and the study of this opening is the form that
homage to Derrida has taken here. Indeed, for us, one renders homage to
thought of deconstruction in saying that if it owes much to the H
and Heideggerian gestures towards the reduction of metaphysics, and
petually recognizes its debt to them, it is not at all foreign to that
attempt at a reduction of philosophy's traditional determination, namely that
of Marx. A singular attempt in that it deprives itself of any recourse to a
question of inauguration; an attempt that proceeds from an imp os sibil"
ity of "attaining-or reattaining-the Greek eidos",48 because its founding
splendour, and its sense, are forever lost. Indeed it is by taking the point of
view of the sorrow of inheritors without legatees, of sons without fathers,
of those who persevere after the founders yet without them, in the disarray of,
the second era, that Marx will have made his entry into philosophy. Indeed,
in his thesis of 1841, he affirmed that, just as Epicurus had had to carry, to
tolerate, without being able to reattain it in any way, the retreat of the era "of
the powerful premises" that Plato and Aristotle were, so the young Germans
of the 1940s, and all the others, had to carry the opaque weight of the
Hegelian glory which would henceforth be mute. A post-liminal situation
in which the seconds, in relation to the archons, always cut the figure of an
"almost incongruous appendix".49 But, says the young Marx, one must seize
here "the opportunity in the misfortune":5o in the irreduceable darkening of
the morning light, philosophy discovers its essential task, which is to formu-
late rallying ruling principles [mots d'ordreJ in a state of emergency, ruling
principles which have no foundational value (for Marx, praxis is not a
foundation), but which reveal themselves, when the knives are sharpened,
to be powerful deconstructive weapons. Ruling principles whose sense, so
simple in reality, was already prefigured by the tetrapharmakon of Epicurus,
which Marx cites in his thesis:
There is nothing to fear from the gods,
There is nothing to fear from death,
One can attain happiness,
One can tolerate sorrow.
I t does render homage to Derrida to try to speak to him from this space,
also reserved in his own pharmacy, in the service of first aid, where one
operates in the shadow, in misery, in misfortune, where there is a chance,
where there is promise.
196
VIOLENCE, VIOLENCE OF ECONOMY ECONOMY OF
Notes
1 La Carte Postafe, de Socrate a Freud et eu-defa, Paris, Aubier-Flammarion, 1980,
p. 48. h'" I'n L 'ecriture et fa difference, Paris, Seuil, 1967, p. 188.
2 'Violence et metap YSlque, . . .
3 De la grammatologie, Pans;, MmUlt, 1967, p. 192.
4 "Violence et metaphyslque ,p. 191; '1 -L 1961 1983 pp. 35 and 42.
5 Condition de l'homme moderne, Pans, Ca mann evy, , ,
6 Parages, Paris, Galilee, 1986, p. 121.
7 De la P;, 1.1
5
. r es de fa hifosophie, Paris, Minuit, 1972. .
8 "La ,1ll gt on a o:blie qu'elles Ie sont, des metaphores qUi
9 "Les ventes sont des sensible des pieces de monnaie qui ont perdu
ont ete usees et per u t t des lo;s en consideration non plus comme
leur empremte CBIld) et qUI ren
monnaie, mais comme metal.
10 Ibid., p. 237. .. f C mtribution a fa critique de f'economie politique.
11 Ibid., pp. 257, 258, CitatIOn .rom (
12 Le Capital, 1, Ed. De la PleJade, t. 1, p. 588.
13 Ibid., p. 564.
14 Ibid., p. 609.
15 Ibid., p. 629.
16 Ibid., p. 416.
17 Ibid., p. 576. . 1 throughout Book 1.
18 These from Cours de linguistique generafe.
19 "La my tho ogle anc e,. , . 6
20 L'ideofogie allemande, Paris 1976, p. 44 .
21 "Introduction ... ", in ContrzbutlOn, ES, 1977, p. 151.
22 Ibid., p. 151.
23 Ibid., p. 155.
24 Ibid., same page.
25 Ibid., p. 161.
26 Ibid., p. 159.
27 Ibid., p. 157.
28 Ibid., p. 161.
29 Ibid., p. 156.
30 Ibid., p. 157.
31 Ibid., p. 160.
32 Ibid., p. 165. . h' ". "La violence apparait avec l'articulation".
33 Cf. Derrida, "VIOlence et metap YSlque . . I 188
34 Anti-Duhring, Theorie de la VIOlence, Pans, ES, 197 , p. .
35 Introduction, p. 151. . . 192: "( ... ) La lutte contre
36 Cf. the phrase Cited m De C
fa
du controle des cit oyens
l'analphabetIsme se confond ... vec
par Ie pouvoir."
37 Anti-Duhring, p. 188.
38 Ibid., p. 186.
39 De fa grammatofogie, p. 164.
40 Introduction . .. , p. 163.
41 De la grammatoiogie, p. 163.
42 Ibid., p. 90.
43 Anti-Duhring, p. 211.
44 Capital, I, p. 613. .
45 La part du feu, Paris, Gallimard, 1949, p. 93.
197
POLITICS AND LITERATURE
46 L'amour fou, Paris, Gallimard, "Folio", p. 116, 117.
47 Ibid.
48 "Violence et metaphysique", p. 120.
49 Difference de fa philosophie de fa nature chez Democrite et Epicure, Paris,
Ducros, 1970, p. 217.
50 Ibid., p. 63 ("Travaux preparatoires").
198
MAKING
APORE
Source: Unpublished
have to acc:OrrlmC)O