The great metaphor for George Foster’s thesis of the image of the limited good, published in the 1960s, preceded George Foster by one hundred years: it is the talisman in Balzac’s La Peau de Chagrin, or The Wild Ass’s Skin. Treasure, treasure-hunting and rarity are all bound up with each other in a stubborn cosmic vision of the distribution of goods in the world that appears in our dreams, love life and friendship. This world is ruled, as I will point out multitudinously in this essay, by Nemesis. No one saw the affective changes that were occurring in the switch between the regime of the old economy and the new – the economy of Polanyi’s Great Transformation, the economy of growth – better than Jules Michelet. Michelet, writing in 1846, picks up on the difference between the terms 'treasure' and "money" to demarcate a division not only between the emotional regimes of wealth but in how these dominant affects correspond to a basic division between urban and rural soc
“I’m so bored. I hate my life.” - Britney Spears
Das Langweilige ist interessant geworden, weil das Interessante angefangen hat langweilig zu werden. – Thomas Mann
"Never for money/always for love" - The Talking Heads