The Extreme Impasse...

... that is Capital I. I'm reworking my Alchemy paper for the ACLA panel "Questions of Value" that is in three weeks' time. I hope to demand from value not a measure of a different kind of labor but of a different kind of measurability itself: I ask that value be thought through the inescapability of its self-evaluation, to capitalize on the secret of its own labor, so to speak. That commodities could speak through Marx, tell their secrets through this borrowed speech is a strange kind of ventriloquism -- hetero-affection at its best. I should be familiar with the latter by now, but I'm stumbling because of the repeated realization that hey, why do I need alchemy to read Marx at all?

But it is too late to take alchemy totally out of the paper. It was what I presented in the abstract. Right now the only commonality that Capital I and alchemy share is in the logic of the secret: what both commodity value and alchemy wishes to hide by revealing is the social nature of concrete, human labor. Likewise, secrecy is always the hetero-affection at the heart of the social: I must tell myself not to divulge the secret as if I were somebody else. The possibility of someone other than myself who will know the secret is what makes a secret worthy of its name, worthy of its self-value as secret. Like abstract human labor, a secret is in principle social. That commodity fetishism under capitalism must hide the social nature of labor speaks therefore the secret of its auto-evaluation.

Cf. JD. “How to Avoid Speaking” –

This denial [dénégation] does not happen [to the secret] by accident; it is essential and originary. … The enigma … is the sharing of the secret, and not only shared to my partner in the society but the secret shared within itself, its ‘own’ partition, which divides the essence of a secret that cannot even appear to one alone except in starting to be lost, to divulge itself, hence to dissimulate itself, as secret, in showing itself: dissimulating its dissimulation. There is no secret as such; I deny it. And this is what I confide in secret to whomever allies himself to me. This is the secret of the alliance (25)

Ahhhh.... don't say I say one hor.