concern. Claiming that Marx’s critique of political economy is ironic amounts
to claiming that his text’s effectiveness, the way it works, is not to be found
in his explicit discussions, but lies in silence elsewhere, though this elsewhere
is the elsewhere of the words themselves, their own silence. We must now
turn explicitly, first, to those words, and then, finally, to their silence.
Political economy is an excellent phenomenology of the modern world; as
such, it is only the systematic re-presentation of the forms and language in
which that world presents itself.^22 The categories of political economy “are
forms of thought which are socially valid,” as Marx puts it (1976:169). That
the world of political economy is, for Marx, one of phenomena is quite explicit
from the very first lines of both the Contributionand Capital; the monstrous
collection of commodities is how the wealth of bourgeois society appears
(erscheint). Moreover, this mode of appearing of modern relations of pro-
duction is also the logosof its appearance. Thus, “the manner of speaking of
the English economists” amounts to “commodities speak[ing] through the
mouth of the economist” (1976:177). Marx remains insistent, right up to the
end of the book, that the political economists are the mouths through which
capitalism speaks (e.g., 1976:932). Capitalism is a mode of life that, like reli-
gion, gives rise to Vorstellungen(presentations, imaginings, ideas) that are
themselves actual (wirklich), that do work (wirken). Political economy is the
systematization of these presentations.
But this social validity of political economy’s phenomenology is the dan-
ger that Marx seeks to overcome in Capital. As in the Inferno, the danger of
Hell lies precisely in its spectacular character. As Dante writes inPurgatorio,
the sensuous soul can become fixated:
[.. .] when we hear or see something
that holds the soul strongly turned to it,
time passes, and we do not notice its passage. (Pur. 4.7–9)The Origin of Political Economy and the Descent of Marx • 55(^22) Terrell Carver is right, I think, when he claims that, in Capital, Marx “was primar-
ily interested in the language employed ordinarily within capitalist and commodity-
producing societies.” I begin to diverge from him when he continues; “Capitalis an
analytic work, proceeding from that ordinary language, through a critique of the
‘science’ of political economy which purported to explain it, ascending ultimately to
a realm in which conceptual relationships, deemed ‘logical’ or ‘conceptual’, can be
traced out” (1998:27). Obviously, I think the directionality of Marx’s movement is
slightly different than does Carver, and I am trying to show that the ordinary lan-
guage of capitalism, the science of political economy, and the realm of conceptual
relations are all one.