Hell has the power to turn the soul toward it; if it succeeds, that soul does
not notice the passage of time, even unto eternity. This is the danger Dante
confronts at the gates of Dis, the inner citadel of Hell. The gates are closed
and barred by devils, and, while they wait, Virgil and Dante are accosted by
the Furies, who threaten that Medusa is coming. Virgil responds dramati-
cally; he orders Dante to turn and close his eyes, “for if the Gorgon appears
and you should see her, there would never be any going back up.” Not wait-
ing for Dante to act, Virgil grabs him, turns him around, and covers his eyes
with both of their pairs of hands. Medusa never appears, however; instead,
Dante opens his eyes to see an angel arriving to open the gates, and the duo
proceeds downward (Inf. 9.34–63).
Freccero (1986:126) believes this threat of petrification is central to the whole
Inferno. Hell threatens the interloper with petrifying appearances that, if seen,
prevent all escape. Medusa, if she were to appear, would be the condensed
manifestation of Hell’s paralyzing frightfulness; she is Hell’s attempt to make
good on the gate’s threat of eternity. But this attempt necessarily remains
only an attempt. The Gorgon – like the gate’s inscription – is a damnation
that is never actually present. The petrifying face never shows itself, but
always only threatens from the immanent future. The Gorgon may represent
the threat of corporeality, but it is Dante’s very corporeality – the fact that he
is a living body, whose sight can be blocked by his motion and by the opaque
materiality of his hands – that preserves him from that threat.
But isn’t the threat of the Gorgon precisely the threat we sense in Marx’s
presentation of the phenomenology of capital? And isn’t it this threat that
keeps the rediscoverers of Marx from breaking the seal on Capital? Don’t we
fear that, after all, the logic of capital is an iron cage? The greatest danger of
paralysis seems to confront us at the very place I cast above as Marx’s own
entry into Dis, the transition from the market to the abode of production. It
is here where those Marx characterized as the vulgar economists were frozen,
unable to see in labor-power anything but one more commodity. Here, too,
most of Twentieth Century economics has languished, fixated on the equi-
librium of the market. The phenomenology of capitalism is extremely per-
suasive, but if we are persuaded by it, then we must also conclude that
capitalism will never end. Indeed, we would not even notice that it is ending
all around us as we stand paralyzed.
In Marx, as in Dante, it is materiality itself that will preserve us against
this paralysis threatened by the appearance of reified relations of production.
56 • William Clare Roberts