Sade has the distinction of being the first modern thinker to recognize the intimate relationship between the phantasm and commercial exchange, and thus the role of currency as a sign of the incalculable value of the phantasm. Indeed, money is an integral part of the representative mode of perversion. Because the perverse phantasm is fundamentally unintelligible and non-exchangeable, only currency is sufficiently abstract to constitute its universally intelligible equivalent. But here we must distinguish in Sade between, on the one hand, the phantasmal function of money, namely the act of buying or of being sold oneself, insofar as it is only the external expression of perversity, or a means of bringing different partners together; and, on the other,
its function in mediating between the closed world of abnormalities and the world of institutional norms.
Pierre Klossowski Sade and Fourier
in Living Currency (2017) p.89
