Money, slavery, myth

Abstract

The article engages relays between the origins of money and origins of slavery, using Marxist reconstructions of “substance” in order to approach the negative zone of anti-blackness. In one move, I read money and slavery as two sides of the same coin: expressions of anxieties concerning equivalences that cannot be in reality (money) and inequalities that persist in democratic life (slavery). In another, I continue to argue that slavery exerts an important role in the story of capitalism, not only as a past index for a “mode of production,” but more importantly in encrypting a certain monetary form of domination that translates the realization of commensurability. While there have been connections drawn between the origin of freedom in slavery, the origin of subjectivity in the money-form, and the origin of money in slavery, the vanishing mediator in this triad is blackness, a negative substance whose flexible uses and appearances are driven towards its own actualized disappearance in scenes of racial violence. If money masks the impossibility of commensurability, and labor and race ground the conditions for commensurability exemplified in freedom, slavery marks the space of incommensurability itself. In the line from Aristotle to Marx, the slave can serve as the first non-substantialist origin story for exchange.