Money, Desire & the Body:
Economic exchange & perversion

Instructor: Anna Longo Date & Time: June 4th, 11th, 18th, and 25th. 09:00-11:30 ET

DESCRIPTION: Pierre Klossowski’s Living Currency is a dense essay that denounces capitalism as a perverse regime of universal prostitution. As he explains, institutional norms are not substantially different from the rules governing the secret societies of crime described by Sade in his novels. In both cases, money is the condition for buying and selling bodies in order to provide oneself with the means to satisfy desires: the difference is that the Sadian pervert act for the sake of self-enjoyment under the spell of a phantasm, whereas economic agents are compelled by needs and they strive for acquiring the fabricated objects that are essential for maintaining their body for reproductive ends. However, as Klossowski claims, economic institutions are but the result of an impulse or a desire for the moralistic repression of the driving force of gratuitous (unproductive) self-enjoyment in order to preserve the integrity of the body, i.e., the basic property that allows for production and monetary exchange.

In response to the destructive and repressive outcomes of Sade and the world of industrial fabrication, Living Currency is a thought experiment that imagines a reality finally free from prostitution (the monetization of bodies) since bodies are identified with currency: this would allow for the free exchange of bodies as well as for considering the body as wealth (the multiplicity that can be spent rather than the site of lack) by undermining the notion of an individual property. Despite its provocative originality, the influence of this essay cannot be underestimated: Deleuze & Guattari’s notion of desiring-production and Lyotard’s libidinal economy are directly inspired by Klossowski’s theory of pre-subjective impulses, while Foucault’s reflection on the function of money is derived from his concept of simulacrum. In the first part of this Seminar, we will read Living currency after having introduced its author. In the second part, we will investigate how Klossowski’s transgressive thought was appropriated and transformed by the main figures of post-structuralist economic theory.

IMAGE: Balthus (Baltusz Klossowski de Rola). The Street. 1933

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