Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophic Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era

by Marc Shell

In Money, Language, and Thought , Marc Shell explores the interactions between linguistic and economic production as they inform discourse from Chretien de Troyes to Heidegger. Close readings of works such as the medieval grail legends, The Merchant of Venice, Goethe's Faust, and Poe's "The Gold Bug" reveal how discourse has responded to the dissociation of symbol from thing characteristic of money, and how the development of increasingly symbolic currencies has involved changes in the meaning of meaning. Pursuing his investigations into the modern era, Shell points out significant internalization of economic form in Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger. He demonstrates how literature and philosophy have been driven to account self-critically for a "money of the mind" that pervades all discourse, and concludes the book with a discomforting thesis about the cultural and political limits of literature and philosophy in the modern world.

Genres: Money

264 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1982

Reviews

[Benja Graeber]

Este es un libro para personas bien versadas en filosofía y literatura occidental.

"Que el dinero y el idioma sean sistemas complementarios o competitivos de producción e intercambio trópicos indica que el dinero no sólo es un tema, un contenido metafórico... sino que también participa activamente en todas"

Personalmente lo encontré muy complicado de leer y entender. Sin embargo, la conexión entre economía monetaria y lingüística a lo largo de la historia la encontré fascinante y reveladora.

[Eavan Wong]

Shell comments on the developmental narrative entailed by the emergence of the Money-form as the general representer of Value and establish an adequate analogy between this narrative on the one hand and narratives of psycho-sexuality or language-production on the other.

[William]

Super great chapter with a close reading of Merchant of Venice in terms of money. As a literary theorist, not only does he have great conceptual readings of Merchant, he has also read surprisingly broadly across the Shakespeare cannon (reference to 2 HVI, Cymbeline, 2HIV, are frequent in footnotes). Much respect.