Not by Bread Alone

This chapter shows that the rhetorical trope of chiasmus, particularly the presumable binary of use value and exchange value, is not binary at all, but, following the grammar of Marx's rhetoric discovered in Chapter 2, one of chiasmus. This discovery deconstructs the conventional binary between use and exchange and shows that Marx's oppositions are in point of fact productive differences that require one another to signify, each one a function of its relation to the other. The result is the collapse of a litany of conventional Marxian distinctions in favor of a notion of Marx's rhetoric as differential and productive of its categories rather than expressive of a conflict between them. Here Saussure's theory of the sign clarifies how Marx invents a notion of signification based on the rhetorical figure of chiasmus that is explicit in Saussure's later elaboration of the kind of signification that Marx himself invents well before the fact of Saussure's structural linguistics. This is Marx's search for expressive form, and what leads Marx to write against himself. This is the central tension in Capital and what produces Capital 's counterplot—two languages or trends of a different metaphorical order less in conflict than they are in a productive, chiasmatic dynamic. This in turn foreshadows the emergence later in Capital of Marx's key notion of surplus value. Marx's two languages or counterplots are what this study calls Marx's “double style.”