Commodity and the Postmodern Spectacle

Abstract

In Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, written after the fall of the Berlin wall and in controversary with Fukuyama’s book about the end of History, he points out that when Marx talks about commodity fetishism in his book Capital he refers to the dancing tables of a spiritualistic seance, and when he gives the example of the table, he uses the term auftritt which means enters the stage. A table is a table when it has use-value and is made of wood, an organic material that takes shape (a table), it changes and transforms itself, but it is still wood. When Marx refers to the table as a commodity which is ‘sensuously supersensitive’, placing the accent on the adverb ‘sensuously’, he emphasizes materiality, that is, a referent that is not an original, but a support that has to have a physical dimension. It is supersensitive because the table has an exchange value which is its representation of the use-value, exceeding reality while representing it. This excess is both the visible and invisible: the exchange is visible as the result of social labour, of the cooperation among men, of a collective process, it remains invisible. In commodity the immateriality of human and social relationships is presented as an exchange of relations.