and letter, God is the ultimate signified, the spirit that animates every letter.
Hell, being the furthest removed from God of any part of creation, is a place
of hopelessness precisely because the signifiers there have been cut off from
their signified, they no longer communicate with the God that is the sole
source of their meaning. If the cosmos, according to Thomistic neo-Aristotelian-
ism, is a set of love letters God has written to himself, then Hell is the dead
letter office, the elaborate storage center for missives that can be neither deliv-
ered to their addressee nor returned to their sender (which are the same in
this case). Depicting such a realm in words that operate according to the nor-
mal rules of signification seems to contradict precisely the hellishness of Hell.
Thus, Dante’s dilemma: how can his poem possibly convey Hell, when the
very conveyance of meaning is antithetical to Hell?
Dante’s solution, according to Freccero, is to mimic in his poetry the very
coagulation of meaning that is Hell. He does this by means of ironic literal-
ization, the substitution of something bodily for anything spiritual. Such lit-
eralization is ironic in Schlegel’s sense of parekbasis; it steps aside from the
signified in order to signify the signifier itself. It “turns words into icons,
souls into bodies [,] the spirit into the letter, [and] rhetorical figures into
things” (Freccero 1986:106). We’ve already seen this conflation of signifier
and signified in Dante’s plea that the sense of the gate’s inscription is as hard
(duro) as the stone in which the letters are inscribed, but the prime example
of this ironic materialization is the fact that sinners spend eternity engaged
in precisely what they chose and pursued on earth. As Freccero writes, “If
the bodies in hell are really souls, then it follows that their physical attitudes,
contortions and punishments are really spiritualattitudes and states of mind,
sins made manifest in the form of physical punishment. It is therefore cor-
rect to say the punishments arethe sins; sin bears the same relationship to
punishment as the souls in hell bear to their fictive bodies” (1986:106f ).^20 The
Infernois the Hell of language, where what is meant is always meant at a
remove, where every sign is a sign of a sign, where the channels by which a
signifier normally signifies are multiplied into a labyrinth.
Given the double character of Marx’s critique, it seems that Capital, too,
steps aside from the signified (capitalism) to address, instead, its signifier
The Origin of Political Economy and the Descent of Marx • 53(^20) Thus, the philosophers in limbo are condemned to philosophize forever, to love
wisdom from afar without ever becoming sophoi; the lustful are buffeted about in Hell
by the same love they chose to be buffeted by in life; the gluttonous, who lived like
pigs, eternally rut about in the mud; etc.