Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud

by Jean-Joseph Goux, Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Translator)

A major participant in the influential Tel Quel group in France, Jean-Joseph Goux here offers a bold reevaluation of both the Marxist economic model and the Freudian concept of the unconscious. Symbolic Economies makes available for the first time in English generous selections from Goux's Freud, Marx: Economie et symbolique (1973) and Les iconoclastes (1978). Goux brings the theories of historical materialism and of psychoanalysis into play to illuminate and enrich each other, and undertakes a compelling integration of the contributions of structuralism and post-structuralism. Looking closely at the work of such major figures as Lacan, Derrida, and Nietzsche, Goux extends the implications of Marxism and Freudianism to an interdisciplinary semiotics of value and proposes a radical concept of exchange. Literary theorists, philosophers, social scientists, cultural historians, and feminist critics alike will welcome this important and provocative work.

Genres: Philosophy

280 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

Reviews

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

If the words 'commodity fetish' turn you on, then this book is for you. This book is very theoretical. If you've been confused about the 'fad' (if that's what you want to call it) that Zizek started, or revived since the Frankfurt school in Freudo-Marxism, then this book will be a refreshingly more in depth analysis than you may be used to. Goux draws a homology between Marx's commodity form and the role of the primal father of Freud. He also elucidates some of Lacan's contributions to interpreting the latter. As a student of psychoanalysis writing a paper on postmodernism, books like these were fascinating to read because, being published in the 70's, just a decade or so after many theorists (Jameson, David Harvey) labeled the beginnings of postmodernism, it had an eerily accurate foresight into the problems we face--the decline of representation after modernism. For Goux, this is an effect of what Marx describes as a society's tendency towards abstraction, the Gold, or monetary standard serving as an assurance of value against the relative and equivalent forms of commodities (in a similar way that for Lacan, as he elucidated the Freudian phallus, wrote of it as representing desire, not desire of the phallus itself. Just as for Lacan, desire is pursued through the Other, for Marx there was no concept of amassing enjoyment/wealth without Gold to represent an abstract hedonism). Goux takes this analysis on detours as he draws similar homologies of the symbolic historical development of the sign, legal codes (eye for an eye-- commune--law), and pictorial forms. Goux writes of the meaning of this abstraction, it's enabling of an epistemological basis (he equates its rise with the rise of idealism), and writes that Western culture can be defined as testing the limits of this abstraction. We can see the concrete reality of this very theoretical work in the fact that Jameson and Harvey each equate postmodernism with the decline of said abstraction, that of the Gold standard, a monetary representation whose detachment has paralleled cultural forms where a similar unchaining of meaning occurs (such as deconstructionist emphasis on the signifier of what is signified, and endless sliding of contextualized meaning without a single referent). In short this book is very intense if you can get through it, and is a sign that perhaps theory still has some importance in the world.

[Христо · Rating 3 out of 5]

It poses an interesting hypothesis, but is too presumptuous in its strive to turn Marxian thought into an all-encompassing theory of general economies. Namely trying so very hard to integrate the Asiatic mode of production into a quasi-evolutionary cycle of economies, whereas this mode is a suture point of a theory rather than an evolutionary part.