TY - JOUR AU - Gerace, Roberto PY - 2022/08/29 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - The Making of Abstraction. Some Hypotheses on Money, Language, and Modern Literature JF - Revista Guillermo de Ockham JA - Rev. Guillermo Ockham VL - 20 IS - 2 SE - Research article DO - 10.21500/22563202.5840 UR - https://revistas.usb.edu.co/index.php/GuillermoOckham/article/view/5840 SP - AB - <p>The question I have tried to answer is whether there is such a thing as linguistic alienation and what its consequences are for Marxist literary studies and for understanding the so-called "superstructure" in general. Relevant assumptions on this subject were elaborated, above all, in the sixties and seventies by Lefebvre, Rossi-Landi, Baudrillard and Latouche, through the tabulation of a parallelism between Marx's theory of value and Saussure's theory of sign. In my opinion, all these hypotheses failed to understand the specificity of the Marxist interpretation of money, which is a very different form of semiotics, because (as Finelli and Arthur, among others, have shown) it owes much to Hegelian logic.</p><p>Therefore, I try to demonstrate that, putting certain categories of semiotics and philosophy of language to interpret the critique of Marx's political economy, money is not a sign but a code: paraphrasing Lacan, it could be said that capital is configured like a language. It is not, however, a neutral language, but a linguistic praxis capable of hiding a material situation through abstractions. If this is correct, we do not need to ask how a matter (the structure) acts on a series of semantic and ideological chains (the superstructure), but to what extent capital itself, considered as a text, functions as a formal model (using Marx's words: a <em>formelle bestimmung</em>) for the organization of all matter in which its domain of abstraction extends. The "structural causality" on which Jameson relies in <em>The Political Unconscious</em> is thus the result of the dialectical link between mechanical and expressive causalities.</p> ER -