Elvis' Fame: The Commodity Form and the Form of the Person

Abstract

In honoring Wolfgang Holdheim with this Festschrift, we are also, I think, honoring two institutions to which he devoted his life. One is the system of graduate education in the United States, which made it possible for non-Americans like me (and for students, Americans, and foreigners alike, who had no financial resources) to receive an education of extraordinary quality. The second is the discipline of Comparative Literature, of which Wolfgang was so eminent a practitioner, and especially that tradition of Comparative Literature which was formed around a generation of refugees from Nazism. From Wolfgang and from the discipline he taught, I learned a set of rigorous standards of scholarship and an ethos of theoretical reflection which have been formative for my work. They also opened my mind to a practice of interdisciplinarity which has taken me in unexpected directions not the least of them the strange pathways of the law. This essay is part of a larger project in which I examine the line drawn between the domains of the gift and the commodity in contemporary capitalist societies, and in which I try to specify the logic (or the conflicting logics) that allow it to be drawn at a particular point. My focus is the category of the person insofar as it is both a key support of the institution of private property and in some respects its opposite. I examine some of the struggles that are taking place to commodify aspects of this category that were previously uncommodified, and I ask whether and why it matters that they should be reserved from commodification. In trying to map these shifts in the status of the person, I make extensive use of changes in legal doctrine, since they offer a relatively precise way of tracing and documenting an often diffuse and generalized process of social change. Since the law is never a simple reflection or instrument of socio-economic