The Subject-Object Of Commodity Fetishism, Biopolitics, Immortality, Sacrifice, and Bioracism

Abstract

The Subject-Object Of Commodity Fetishism, Biopolitics, Immortality, Sacrifice, and Bioracism A. Kiarina Kordela (bio) PREFACE As the editors of the present volume state in their introduction, the "what" in their title aims at preventing the latent anthropomorphism entailed in the question "Who comes after the subject?" Both questions share the assumption that the advent of postmodernism amounts to the death of the subject as had been gradually conceived since early modernity up until and including modernism. Yet the editors' shift from "who" to "what" is instrumental in reflecting the fact that, whatever it is that recent theories may propose as the postmodern successor of the subject, they unanimously conceive it as transcending human-centered models and their entailed dichotomies, such as subject-object, individual-collective, human-animal, or human-machine. This is why that which "comes after the subject" is often also referred to as the posthuman. Here I am embarking on a double project. On the one hand, I shall argue that the subject of all secular capitalist modernity, since roughly the seventeenth century, has essentially always already come after itself—that is, it has always been posthuman—even as it is first the postmodern discourse that becomes acutely aware of the posthuman character of subjectivity and advances it as what is increasingly becoming a point of no contention, at least among certain theoretical circles. As I shall show, the fact that the subject of secular capitalist modernity has always been the posthuman subject-object is due to the two central, and concomitant, processes that define modernity: the development of the capitalist mode of production and the secularization of thought. As for the belated self-consciousness of the [End Page 37] posthuman character of humanity in the postmodern era of advanced global capitalism, this owes to the general tardiness of consciousness, which can grasp the structures and logic of its own conditions—in this case, capitalism and secularization—only once the latter's potential approximates, if it has not reached, its fullest actualization. On the other hand, I shall turn to another postmodern concept, biopolitics, to redefine it according to the posthuman character of subjectivity. Both lines of thought will eventually lead us to examine the biopolitical reappropriation of certain Judeo-Christian, which is also to say strictly speaking premodern, concepts, specifically: eternity, immortality, Jubilee, and sacrifice. I shall conclude by briefly hinting to the consequences of this reappropriation of religious categories for understanding contemporary racism.1 THE SUBJECT-OBJECT OF COMMODITY FETISHISM If today we speak of the posthuman condition or the subject qua subject-object, and if bodies of knowledge and science become possible that enable the existence of humans as living organisms with intraspecies biological and machinic components, it is because in the capitalist mode of production humans become inseparable from the means and the products of production,2 which by now range from plants and animals to machines and biogenetically produced life, to information, language, and affects. When Jacques Lacan says that "man thinks with his object," we must take him literally—man thinks with his product (1981, 62). Karl Marx spells out more clearly Lacan's point in his notorious theory of commodity fetishism. The radically new and, as Marx calls it, "mysterious" "character of the product of labour—as soon as it assumes the form of a commodity"—lies in "the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men's own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things" (1990, 164–65). While struggling to grasp this mysterious phenomenon in Capital, Volume 1, Marx can barely believe his own words when he writes that "the fetishism of the commodity" designates the fact that a "definite social relation between men themselves … assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things," or that "to the producers … the [End Page 38] social relations between their private labours appear … as material [dinglich—thingly] relations between persons and social relations between things" (165–66). As Étienne Balibar comments in his La Philosophie de Marx (1993), this fetishistic inversion is paradoxically possible not because of the thingliness or materiality of the commodities, but...