Money Wisdom #435

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 

Money Wisdom #434

What does not exist... ...is expressed positively by money not spent and thus not given to what exists.

Pierre Klossowski Living Currency (1970 trans 2017) p.69

Money Wisdom #433

Such is the economy of the soul elaborated through Klossowski's work: first, there are impulses, with their rises and falls in intensity, their elations and depressions, which have no meaning or goal in themselves; second, these impulses give rise to phantasms, which constitute the incommunicable depth and singularity of the individual soul; third, under the obsessive constraint of the phantasm, simulacra are produced, which are the reproduction or repetition of the phantasm through the exaggeration of stereotypes. Impulses, phantasms, simulacra-stereotypes: a threefold circuit.

Daniel W Smith Introduction to

Pierre Klossowski Living Currency (1970 trans 2017) p. 10

Money Wisdom #432

But a phantasm, for its part, needs to use something: its elaboration is bound up with the use of pleasure or suffering. The fact that the phantasm uses up the individual is a sign of the constraint that comes from the phantasm's own unity. The elaboration of the phantasm gives way to a state of continuous compensation and hence to exchanges. But for an exchange to take place, there must be an equivalent, that is, the fabricated object must be worth something else, both in the sphere of the phantasm, elaborated at the expense of individual unity and in the external sphere, at the level of the individual itself.

Pierre Klossowski Living Currency (1970 trans 2017) p.61