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The less you are, the less you manifest [äußerst] your life, the more you have, the greater is your divested [entäußertes] life, the more you accumulate on your alienated essence. Everything that the economist takes from you in terms of life and humanity, he substitutes it for you in terms of money and wealth, and everything that you can’t do, your money can do. It can eat, drink, go to the ball or the play, it knows art, learning, the historical curiosities, the political power, it can travel, it can assimilate all that for you; it can buy everything; it is true capability. But the thing that does all this may do nothing else than make itself, buy itself, for everything else is really its servant, and when I have the lord, then I have the servant and I don’t need its servant. All passions and acts must thus submit to greed. The worker must only have as much as he needs to live, and he must only want to live, in order to have.” – Marx, economic philosophical manuscript. Albert Hir

I'm sorry my posts have been so rare, lately. But not since I was a lad of 20, working the grass game, have I been driven as hard as recently. Surely by the end of this month my work load will have fallen, but at the moment I am sweating it out, like a dumb donkey. So, a brief scribble... As Derrida’s séance over Marx raised up the spirits that were in his work, in this, the era of his supposed ‘death’, so too, Marx, in metaphoric and word, raised up the spirits in the classical economists, all of which hover around the fetishism of commodities. It is odd that Derrida seems to be the first to have taken Marx’s gothic streak seriously – he was, after all, a child of German romanticism, and who learned more from Heine’s prose style? … well, perhaps Nietzsche, as Mann points out. When Marx overlays the transformations of money into commodity and commodity into money with the parodic language of alchemy, he is following a theme that goes back not only to Faust, but to the beginning of