On Capital and Labour

Luxury has to be regarded simultaneously as an economic fact and as a medium to communicate social relationships. Like the physical definition of light as the duality of particle and waveform, the luxury duality manifests itself as material element and fluid phenomenon; it is a quantitative measure of capital (economic) as much as a qualitative measure of labour (social).

Capital is set within specific economic parameters; at any given time capital is the accumulated labour, in the form of materials, facilities, technologies, that serves as a means of (new) production. From this definition, Karl Marx – in 1847, at a time when the production of luxury commodities was set explicitly against industrialised manufacture – expanded the definition of capital thus:

Since the relationship between commodities mirrors as well as produces social relationships, the above defines capital as the social relation of production. At the end of this (material) production comes the commodity that, in the present context of luxury, reflects at the same time the accumulated labour invested in its making as much as it transfers the social relationship of production into a social hierarchy where this relationship is demarcated through exclusive access and socio-economic dominance. Luxury goods serve as the reified and commodified expression of the social relationship of their production. In principle, this role is assumed by any object within a capitalist economy, but in luxury the role of capital as accumulation of exchange – as well as symbolic values and of the ‘social magnitudes’ that ratify dependencies – is particularly pronounced. Since aspects of need or function are secondary to luxury, the relational aspects within its social meaning are paramount.

The above quote from Marx on capital situates my discussion within the realm of a materialist political economy, where I consider a very fruitful debate on luxury to be situated.

In volume two of The Beast and the Sovereign, the second year of these seminars, Derrida turns to Robinson Crusoe as one of his two main intertexts; the other is Heidegger's 1929–30 lectures The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. Welt– Endlichkeit– Einsamkeit, first published in 1975). Returning to questions raised via Hobbes and Rousseau in Chapter 2, this chapter will consider the question of men, such as the American ‘savages and cannibals’ in Robinson Crusoe, with a range of intertexts from Maubert de Gouvest to Jules Verne and Cixous. The cannibals in Robinson Crusoe are a community, or at least a collectivity with common purpose, albeit portrayed as ‘inhuman’. The indigenous peoples of the New World can also be represented as ‘outside the law’, men ‘in the wild’– sometimes figured as wolves, the antithesis of both the obedient dog and the lamb (a potential victim, requiring ‘protection’) in La Fontaine's Fables. The savage can also be represented as free and natural in a positive sense– an inspiration to throw off the shackles of tyranny– however, he is not a citizen.

Introduction: The Beast and the Sovereign and lycological intertexts

In this chapter I shall set off from the posthumous publication of Derrida's 2001–2 seminars, The Beast and the Sovereign volume 1, to follow the figure of the wolf, particularly the genealogy of the key phrase ‘lupus est homo homini’ (usually translated as ‘man is a wolf to man’) and its various mongrel offspring. Derrida cites a range of classical and Early Modern authors, circling, perhaps doggedly, around Plato, Plautus, Plutarch, La Fontaine, Hobbes and Rousseau amongst others, explicit intertexts and interlocutors for him. For Derrida, while there exists an extensive political bestiary (including the fox and the lion), it is the wolf who is pre-eminently both sovereign and beast in political discourse. The wolf thus makes us think about a certain characterisation of man, man's self-definition, and how this impacts on possible constructions of community (social existence), of a just or unjust society (the social pact), and ultimately the state (polis). I should note again that I shall echo the he/man language of the sources I am using because it allows the reader to look for the ambiguity or tension between man as human being and man as male, which is often critical to, for example, Rousseau's writing and his reception, and indeed to that of many other philosophers of the time, and even today. Chapter 3 will focus explicitly on sexual difference, women and wolves. Through the different treatments of the wolf, and of wolfish man, I shall briefly track the questions of the representation of the savage, and tyranny and enslavement, in these authors; these will be pursued further in Chapters 4 and 5 respectively. This will include worrying at the notorious voracious appetite of the wolf– and the way in which the shift from brute hunger (the need to survive) to perfectible taste (choice and distinction) is depicted as quintessentially human in a number of authors. I shall conclude with man's relation to the animal wolf, and a first pass at the politics of what we eat. The wolf is the undomesticated, free animal par excellence, in spite of (or relative to) the physical similarity between wolves and dogs, domesticated par excellence, trained to obey their master's law.

In the last chapter, I focused on Derrida's analysis of Robinson Crusoe, which shows the savage converted by homo economicus, as Marx sees him, into Crusoe's man Friday, a servant. The wild wolf, established as a parallel to the savage in Defoe's imagined battle of the Pyrenees, is translated into Crusoe's much-loved domestic dog, both worker and companion. Lurking in the background to the servant is the man-thing (res) or living property, that is to say, the slave considered as equivalent to the master's cattle (a term which shares a root with chattel and capital) or other animals. Frederick Douglass, one of the most famous African-American abolitionists and a former slave, laments in his autobiography: ‘The dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!’ referring explicitly to the bestialisation of men who are enslaved. If you wish to cite examples of comparisons or links between slaves and animals then there are millions of possibilities, accepting and approving as well as horrified, or analytical, throughout the very long historical and very wide geographical range of slavery. Two Enlightenment abolitionists and former slaves, living in England at the time of writing their autobiographies, literalise the ‘metaphor’ in their description of their fear that their captors would eat them (as if they were animals) shortly after they have been kidnapped from their homes in present-day Ghana and Nigeria respectively.

Blindness, textual and historical

Derrida's writing invites the pursuit of its own blind spot (as his ‘leur propre tache aveugle’ is usually translated), as he locates these in systems of writing and reading. I do not even want to begin to dream of my own particular spots, stains or patches of misreading. However, my plan was to supplement Derrida's extraordinary thinking of the animot in at least two ways: the first would be by opening up his long eighteenth century (if such a thing exists, as he would say) to writings from and about the New World of that epoch concerning two more figures outside the law, the savage and the slave. Not only figures but historical individuals and peoples who cannot even be comfortably located in the past, much as, in the world of UN Declarations of Human Rights, it should have been the case. The second supplement (with no intention of making this secondary) is that of expanding his thinking of sexual difference to incorporate women writers writing on or across the animal-human borderline.

The metaphysical opposition between man and animal is largely used to define man, typically flattering the self and his semblables, sometimes with the benefit of excluding lesser men from the category of brother.

The frontier or abyss– and animals as good to think

This book will examine Jacques Derrida's contribution to a longstanding philosophical and political debate around defining the human with and against the animal, and thus constructing the nature of ‘man’ (a term used advisedly) in a way that has typically evoked a significant division, if not an abyss, between human beings and other animals, often with devastating consequences both for animals and for those presented, or, to some extent at least, perceived as, animals in human form. For however secure a frontier seems to be, it can always be breached for better or worse. My title, calked on a light comic autofiction that typically sees human beings as animal types and the life of various other animals as equally fascinating in its diversity, refers to ‘Derrida and other animals’. The ‘other’ implies that Derrida is an animal and one of many animals who will be the subject. A stronger sense of ‘other’, common in theoretical discourse, would suggest that animals are the other to the man. This book will operate in between those two senses of ‘other’, paying close attention to Derrida's analysis of the shifting borders erected around the human in attempts by numerous thinkers at different points in history to make it a more homogeneous category, as well as of counter-attempts to disturb that homogeneity. The most obvious boundary for the category of the human is that with the animal, yet it is as difficult to define ‘the animal’ as it is ‘man’.

The first sentence or phrase of Derrida's seminar series on The Beast and the Sovereign, which formed the core of the last chapter, is quite remarkable: ‘La… le’. This untranslatable couple of syllables, which might sound like a stutter, an inauspicious start, is initially translated into English as ‘Feminine… masculine’ with the French original in square brackets, which gets much closer to the connoted meaning (drawing attention to the gender of ‘la bête et le souverain’) than the sound or the literal meaning which might be rendered ‘the… the’. That rendition would lose not only the point but the subtle shift in the repeated sound– not a tuneful ‘la… la’ or a standard repeated definite article where the masculine prevails ‘le… le’, but ‘la… le’, so close and yet so different in this particular language. The dreaded gender mistake, failing to get the difference right, can be a point of terror for many Anglophone students of French, or even Anglophone teachers of French. English masks sexual difference at certain points where French reveals it (the sexed object), and vice versa (the sexed possessive); it also leans towards an objectification of the animal as ‘it’ where French can only ever render ‘it’ as ‘il’ or ‘elle’, he or she since there is no uniquely neuter pronoun in that language. The language in which Derrida is speaking also permits another stutter, sounding like ‘eh, eh’, which relates to the homophony in French between the conjunction ‘and’ (et) and the copulative ‘is’ (est).

Derrida's key reference in volume 2 of The Beast and the Sovereign, alongside Defoe, is Heidegger– who pursues the line of Aristotle and Descartes in establishing a very sharp demarcation, indeed a gulf, between man and other animals. Heidegger is also frequently evoked by Derrida in a number of different texts (notably Geschlecht I and II) for his evasion of sexual difference. Heidegger opposes truly human poetic creativity to mechanical technology which, for him, has something of the repetitive and mindless animal about it. This is rather different from the way in which the term ‘technology’ is deployed by many other philosophers today or by ethnographers or archaeologists. Whether particular technologies or technological advances are admired or deplored by different thinkers, most consider their definition of technology as integral to the hominisation of man.