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Aristotle’s Discourses Oikonomia versus Crhmatistikh Surplus-enjoyment (plus-de-jouir) is the fantasy required for knowledge to appear both consistent (without involving a contradictory split) and objective (without supporting a specific power position). And, as mentioned earlier, Lacan introduced this concept as the semantic equivalent of the economic surplus-value. Just as the latter’s condition of possibility lies in the split character of commodities as both use-values and exchange-values, surplus-enjoyment emerges out of the primary fact that “objective knowledge” is split, appearing as a transitive deduction, while requiring, in order to sustain this appearance, a fantasy that presupposes the purported outcome of the deduction. And although surplus is transhistorical, in the past historical blocks it did not manifest itself as either surplus-value or surplus-enjoyment because exchange, economic and semantic alike, was based on and motivated by the perpetual sustenance of an a priori or “natural” equilibrium, both with regard to the values of the exchanged products, which remained equilibrate since they did not procure surplus-value, and with regard to power hierarchies, in which power positions were both explicit and stable. It is this difference between the capitalist and the past blocks that Marx attempts to foreground in his reading of Aristotle. Aristotle had already argued that value existed since the most primitive societies, since “the technique of exchange can be applied to” all “pieces of property,” and exchange “has its origin in a state of affairs often to be found in nature, namely, men having too much of this and not enough of that” (Marx 1990, 151; Aristotle, 82; 1257a5). Nor did value have to wait until the invention of currency to emerge in the world. As Marx puts it commenting on Aristotle’s analysis of value, when the latter writes 63 64 / Being, Time, Bios “ ‘5 beds = 1 house (Klinai pente anti oikias)’ is indistinguishable from ‘5 beds = a certain amount of money (Klinai pente anti . . . osou ai pente klinai),’ ” what he thereby presupposes is that “ ‘[t]here can be no exchange’ . . . ‘without equality, and no equality without commensurability’ (‘out’ isoths mh oushs summetrias’).’ ” This means, Marx continues, “that the house should be qualitatively equated with the bed, and that these things, being distinct to the senses could not be compared with each other as commensurable magnitudes if they lacked this essential identity,” which is expressed in the “concept of value” (1990, 151). Nevertheless, Aristotle “abandons” here “the further analysis of the form of value,” concluding that “ ‘it is, however, in reality, impossible . . . that such unlike things can be commensurable,’ ” so that “this form of equation can only be something foreign to the true nature of the things”; it can only be “ ‘makeshift for practical purposes’ ” (151; citing throughout Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, bk. V, ch. 5). Aristotle falls short in understanding “what is this homogeneous element, i.e., the common substance, which the house represents from the point of view of the bed, in the value expression of the bed,” for the fact remains that: “Towards the bed, the house represents something equal, in so far as it represents what is really equal, both in the bed and in the house” (Marx 1990, 151; emphasis mine). This “common substance” which is value, and which is the real substance of both the bed and the house, Marx identifies as “human labour,” insofar as “in the form of the commodityvalues , all labour is expressed as equal human labour and therefore as labour of equal quality”—the quality of value. “Aristotle himself was unable to extract this fact” and to complete his analysis of the form of value, Marx continues, “because Greek society was founded on the labour of slaves, hence had as its natural basis the inequality of men and their labour-powers” (151–152). The emergence of a value that produces surplus-value is possible only in a society in which “men” appear equal. Lacan makes the same point in the context of energy, a concept of similar structure and history as value: Not that energy hasn’t always been there. Except that people who had slaves didn’t realise that one could establish equations for the price of their food and what they did in their latifundia. There are no examples of energy calculations in the use of slaves. There is not the hint of an equation as to their output. Cato never did it. It took machines for us to realize [3.149.252.37] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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