“The mother of every insane form: fetishistic interest and capitalistic perversion”

Abstract

ABSTRACT Money is the epitome of Marx’s fetishised commodity. And, in Marxist discussions of the connected topics of currency and commodity fetishism, it often is left under-appreciated that such fetishism reaches its apotheosis only with the development of ‘interest-bearing capital.’ Herein, I perform two complementary gestures, one as regards Marxism and another with respect to psychoanalysis. Apropos Marxism, I counter-balance the usual, long-standing (over)emphasis on commodity fetishism as per the first volume of Das Kapital with a foregrounding of this fetishism as per the third volume. Apropos psychoanalysis, I shift away from its traditional fixation on reducing financial matters to libidinal contents. I explore instead the implications of the forms of capitalist fetishism for reconsidering the forms of intra-subjective defence mechanisms. This leads me to posit a complementary inversion of Lacan’s dictum according to which ‘repression is always the return of the repressed’: The return of the repressed sometimes is the most effective repression. To pose a rhetorical question paraphrasing Brecht: What is the laundering of money compared with the laundering that is money?