DIGESTION AND THE INFINITY OF LABOR

Abstract

This essay returns to Jacques Derrida’s 1975 essay, “Economimesis,” to account for its unacknowledged Marxist language. Focusing on Derrida’s analysis of the mouth in the Critique of Judgment, this essay traces a genealogy of oral logic between Kant and Marx that unveils both Marx’s Kantian inheritances and Kant’s proto-Marxist tendencies. In identifying this genealogy, the essay argues that “Economimesis” should be treated as an important reading of Marx, a reading that also demonstrates the critical passages between deconstruction and Marxism. In doing so, it responds to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s critique that “Economimesis” only demonstrates Derrida’s tendency toward “Marxist metaphorics.”

Keywords:

• deconstruction
• Marxism
• digestion
• humanism
• Kant
• ontology

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

I would like to acknowledge the assistance of the anonymous reviewers, whose thoughtful remarks improved this essay immeasurably. My thanks also to Cesare Casarino for his careful reading of the essay in its early stages.

1 See also Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Speculations on Reading Marx.”

2 Unless otherwise noted, all italics and German additions are Derrida’s. Unless otherwise noted, all French brackets are additions of the original translator.

3 See Capital Vol. 1, “Chapter 7: The Labor Process and Valorization Process,” p. 290. See also Capital Vol. 2, “Part Three: The Reproduction and Circulation of the Total Social Capital: Chapter 18: Introduction and Chapter 20: Simple Reproduction.”

4 The original text in German poses some problems for translation. The relevant sentence to my analysis of digestion is “seine geistige unorganische Natur, geistige Lebensmittel, die er erst zubereiten muß zum Genuß und zur Verdauung [ … ]” It uses three words – Lebensmittel, Genuß and Verdauung – which the translator translates respectively as “nourishment,” “palatable” and “digestible.” Lebensmittel could probably be more plainly translated as “food.” Verdauung (meaning “to digest”) is generally straightforward but Genuß represents more difficulty for translation. Technically one can simply translate this as “enjoyment” or “pleasure” but the word has a long history in German philosophy. Genuß, for example, is the word used by Kant (and referenced by Derrida) in his discussion of the distinction between pleasure and enjoyment. Genuß refers to sensuous or immediate enjoyment (i.e., food) while Lust is the word used by Kant in relation to aesthetic pleasure. Likewise, Hans Ulrich Seeber also notes in his essay, “Fascination and Pleasure: Aesthetic Culture, Darwinism, and Eating in English Literature at the Turn of the Century (Wells, Housman, Brooke),” that:

The German word Genuß refers to both to the consumption of food, and to pleasure, and it is traditionally used in the language of art criticism. The same word connotes the pleasure of eating and the pleasure of contemplating art. In fact, since antiquity, the production and consumption of art has been metaphorically spoken of cooking and eating. (287)

In other words, while the rendering of Genuß as palatable is not necessarily consistent with a standard translation as “enjoyment,” its association with the pleasures of food is extensive. My thanks to Krisztina Vasarhelyi for clarification of the German text.

5 I owe discovery of this quotation to Maggie Kilgour’s From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990).

6 In Chapter 6 of Capital Vol. 1 “The Sale and Purchase of Labor Power,” Marx also uses digestion in order to explain the difference between the capacity to labor and labor itself:

When we speak of labor, or capacity for labor, we do not speak of labor, any more than we speak of digestion when we speak of capacity for digestion. As is well known, the latter process requires something more than a good stomach. When we speak of capacity for labor, we do not abstract from the necessary means of subsistence. On the contrary, their value is expressed in its value. If his capacity for labor remains unsold, this is of no advantage to the worker [ … ] (277)

7 Marx replaces this analysis with a metabolic metaphor in Capital Vol. 1. See Chapter 7: “The Labor Process and the Valorization Process”:

The labor process, as we have just presented it in its simple and abstract elements, is purposeful activity aimed at the production of use-values. It is an appropriation of what exists in nature for the requirements of man. It is the universal condition for the metabolic interaction between man and nature, the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence, and it is therefore independent of every form of that existence, or rather it is common to all forms of society in which human beings live. (290)

8 For an excellent account of bees in political philosophy, see Craig McFarlane’s “Apum Ordines: Of Bees and Government.” See also Hobbes’ Leviathan, “Part II: ‘Of Commonwealth,’ Chapter XVII ‘Of the Causes, Generation, and Definition of a Commonwealth,’ ‘Why Certain Creatures Without Reason, or Speech, Do Nevertheless Live in Society Without Any Coercive Power.’”

9 See also Barbara Noske’s comments on the 1844 manuscripts in her chapter, “Domestication Under Capitalism” in Beyond Boundaries: Humans and Animals (New York: Black Rose, 1997). Both Benton and Noske acknowledge that Marx’s anthropocentrism is often in tension with his naturalist or immanent account of human and nature relations, which leaves critiques of his humanism open to revision. See p. 13 in Noske and p. 25 in Benton.

10 For a discussion of the importance of “Economimesis” to understanding the legacy of humanism in German thought after the nineteenth century, most notably in Freudian psychoanalysis, see pp. 14–18 of my essay, “Between the Toy and the Theatre: Reading Aesthetics in Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (Free Associations 20.1 (2019): 9–26). In that section, I argue that Derrida’s diagnosis of Kant’s onto-theological humanism (and its echo in the 1844 manuscripts) helps reveal the philosophical background of Freud’s reading of the fort-da game.

11 The title of this section, “Two Versions of the Mouth” is a play on Maurice Blanchot’s “Two Versions of the Imaginary.”

12 In French, Derrida uses “plus-value” instead of the possible “survaleur.” There is some debate over these terms but since most French translations of Marx render it as “plus-value,” it is unlikely that “plus-value” would not immediately echo Marx to French readers.

13 See, for example, Eugenie Brinkema’s essay, “Laura Dern’s Vomit, or Kant and Derrida in Oz” (Film-Philosophy 15.2 (2011): 51–69) and Alison Ross’s “Historical Undecidability: The Kantian Background to Derrida’s Politics” (International Journal of Philosophical Studies 12.4 (2004): 375–93).