Money Wisdom #328

"Intimacy is not expressed by a thing except on one condition: that this thing be essentially the opposite of a thing, the opposite of a product, of a commodity - a consumption and a sacrifice. Since intimate feeling is a consumption, it is consumption that expresses it, not a thing, which is its negation."

Georges Bataille The Accursed Share (1988 [1967]) p.132

Money Wisdom #327

"In theory, salvation in Christianity liberates the ends of religious life from the domain of productive activity. But if the faithful's salvation is the reward for his merits, if he can achieve by it his deeds, then he has simply brought more closely into the domain of religion the concatenation that makes useful work wretched in his eyes. Hence those deeds by which a Christian tries to win his salvation can in turn be considered profanations, even the mere fact of choosing salvation as a goal appears contrary to the truth of grace. Grace alone brings about an accord with the divinity, which cannot be subjected to causal series as things can. The gift that divinity makes of itself to the faithful soul cannot be paid for."

Georges Bataille The Accursed Share (1988 [1967]) p.121

Money Wisdom #326

"In his strange myths, in his cruel rites, man is in search of a lost intimacy from the first.
[..] The animal or plant that man uses (as if they only had value for him and none for themselves) is restored to the truth of the intimate world; he receives a scared communication from it, which restores him in turn to interior freedom."

Georges Bataille The Accursed Share (1988 [1967]) p.57-58

Money Wisdom #325

"Sacrifice restores to the sacred world that which servile use has degraded, rendered profane. Servile use has made a thing (an object) of that which, in a deep sense, is of the same nature as the subject, is in a relation of intimate participation with the subject. It is not necessary that the sacrifice actually destroy the animal or plant of which man had to make a thing for his use. They must at least be destroyed as things, that is, insofar as they have become things. Destruction is the best means of negating a utilitarian relation between man and animal or man and plant."

Georges Bataille The Accursed Share (1988 [1967]) p.56

Money Wisdom #324

"As for the present historical situation, it is characterized by the fact that judgments concerning the general situation proceed form a particular point of view. As a rule, particular existence always risks succumbing for lack of resources. It contrasts with general existence whose resources are in excess and for which death has no meaning. From the particular point of view, the problems are posed in the first interest by a deficiency of resources. They are posed in the first interest by and excess of resources if one starts from the general point of view. "

Georges Bataille The Accursed Share (1988 [1967]) p.39

Money Wisdom #323

"The origin and essence of our wealth are given in the radiation of the sun, which dispenses energy - wealth - without return. The sun gives without receiving. Men were conscious of this long before astrophysics measured that ceaseless prodigality; they saw it ripen the harvests and they associated its splendor with the act of someone who gives without receiving."

Georges Bataille The Accursed Share (1988 [1967]) p.29

Money Wisdom #322

"Incomprehension does not change the final outcome in the slightest. We can ignore or forget the fact that the ground we live on is little other than a field of multiple destructions. Our ignorance only has this incontestable effect; It causes us to undergo what we could bring about in our own way, if we understood. It deprives us of the choice of an exudation that might suit us. Above all, it consigns men and their works to catastrophic destructions. For if we do not have the force to destroy the surplus energy ourselves, it cannot be used, and, like an unbroken animal that cannot be trained, it is this energy that destroys us; it is we who pay the price of the inevitable explosion."

Georges Bataille The Accursed Share (1988 [1967]) p.23-24

Money Wisdom #321

"Minds accustomed to seeing the development of productive forces as the ideal end of activity refuse to recognize that energy, which constitutes wealth, must ultimately be spent lavishly (without return), and that a series of profitable operations has absolutely no other effect than the squandering of profits. To affirm that it is necessary to dissipate a substantial portion of energy produced, sending it up in smoke, is to go against judgments that form the basis of a rational economy."

Georges Bataille The Accursed Share (1988 [1967]) p.22

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Marc Shell - 'The Past Present and Future of Money'

On Saturday, I discovered the deep joy of having an hour to kill whilst sitting in my van AND getting a decent 4G connection on my mobile phone. I did a random search on youtube for Marc Shell, as you do, and to my delight found a lecture. It's split into a three videos. Sound quality is not great, and the framing is a little odd (go closer in Mr Camera Man!),,,, but hey, its Marc Shell !



At 4.20 you'll hear Prof Shell talk about the 'One and the Many' being the guiding theme to the first, much longer section of his presentation. You know you're dealing with some serious brain power, then. As I've touched upon elsewhere on this blog, he's some done brilliant work around this theme. Not only with Money but with Sex too - see his essay on On the Want of Incest in the Human Family. I've already tried and abandoned several attempts to link these two themes - not only in a philosophical sense analogizing conceptions of the One and the Many to Universal Siblinghood, but also in an historical sense trying to find some historical narrative that reveals Money's presence, and contextualizes currency within the sexual. The obvious example - and the one I keep coming back too - is Herodotus's version of Gyges. I'll get there one day.

On history, Prof Shell presents a wonderful division of money into epochs. He suggests the two semantically related substances electrum and electricity as boundaries in money's story. Between the two bookends of money's story, he says, 'there occurred a momentous change'.

Anyway, Part Two



And, Part Three (in this part he considers the idea of Counterfeiting - I talked about the moral complexity of this in my old essay on it, and would recommend the book on JSG Boggs if you're interested in the ideas):



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Seemingly unrelated to money is this video where Prof Shell talks about his book Stutter. Because its not ABOUT  MONEY of course, I've not read it. It's a fascinating interview. And it doesn't take much to realize that, actually, themes that are both similar and the same cut across Prof Shell's work. In last year's Dylanfest (it was the centenary of Dylan Thomas's birth in 2014) I was thinking about the difference between meaning and sound - DT famously evokes 'feelings' in the reader through the rhythm and melody of his words as if speaking in the language of the unconscious - a language that seems rooted in the sounds of words more so than their meaning . Prof Shell talks about sound and meaning in the context of stuttering...... and how stuttering other verbal and literary afflictions (such as an inability to stop punning) suggest a different appreciation of meaning and sound; such that we become aware of the importance of sound and the unimportance of meaning.



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