wish. Indeed, it is precisely this empirical warrant for hope that compels Hell
so vehemently to demand that hope be abandoned. Hell cannot be filled with
hopeful souls and remain Hell. If hope is reasonable – and the slimmest odds
are reasonable over eternity – then Hell mustscare that hope out of its denizens.
Hell can be Hell only by successfully interpellating its denizens as hopeless.
If Hell were reallyhopeless, it would not need to say so. It could welcome
entrants mutely to their doom.
Hell’s gate lies, therefore, but it is a performative lie. The inscription seeks
to construct an existence that is not real, and cannot be real, but can asymp-
totically approximate reality only through the lie that it is already real. Virgil
seeks to disrupt this performance with his demand that Dante abandon his
suspicions and put his cowardice to death. Virgil’s response does not take
Dante through the inscription, but bypasses it without probing its meaning.
Virgil is aware of Hell’s limit from the very first, for it is only in view of such
a limit that his demand that Dante abandon his cowardice and suspicion is
at all reasonable.
It is the same with Marx. Political economy performs the same interpella-
tion as does Hell.^10 Bourgeois economics depicts itself as opening up the realm
imposed on us by necessity and scarcity. It claims to establish justice in this
world of necessity by showing how the market provides the most fitting dis-
tribution of goods. Above all, it claims its truths are timeless. Thus, Ricardo
expects that ancient hunters and fishers calculated labor times, and Smith
imagines that the impulse to “truck and barter” holds sway everywhere and
at all times. The laws of the bourgeois world are the laws of all history; this
is just how things are. According to what economics claims for itself, then,
the notion of passing through its world to some other, post-economic world
is as fantastical as the idea that one could travel through Hell and come out
the other side. “Abandon every hope, you who enter.”
Mirroring Hell’s braggadocio, however, political economy is actually try-
ing to produce the situation it claims to describe as already the case. Marx
asks us to ignore this façade. He doesn’t immediately counter it, or parse its
intricacies; he simply begins his descent into political economy by putting
the proclamations of eternity off to one side. In both the Contributionand
Capital, the first sentences after the Dante citations direct our attention very
specifically to “bourgeois wealth” and “the wealth of societies in which the
42 • William Clare Roberts
(^10) I am indebted to Hasana Sharp for first drawing my attention to this parallel.