A Passage from Capital

This brief chapter is a close reading of a select instance of Marx's prose that shows in microscopic detail how the rhetoric of Capital undoes what it proposes to accomplish diegetically. This passage serves as a grammar for how Marx writes against himself—what this study calls Marx's counterplot. Marx's counterplot destabilizes the differences that structure Capital throughout: The difference between a feudal economy based on the real value of gold and silver coins and the artificial economy of modern paper money based on the symbolic, artificial representation of wealth; the sensuous, direct life of feudalism and the alienated suffering of life under industrial capitalism; the unmediated value of goods in both the economic sphere and the sphere of human worth; and the difference between direct use and artificial exchange that subtends them all. These are the putative differences upon which Marx's arguments are propped, and which its chiasmatic rhetoric ironically undoes in the way it performs or expresses them.