Not All Ladders Are for Climbing: Money, Gifts, and the Social Body in Los intereses creados

Jacinto Benavente's Los intereses creados (1907) offers a cultural cartography of Spain's maturing capitalist society. While for most critics the play either portrays the cultural milieu's moral relativism, or love's triumph over venality, my study begins with the thematization of interest to show how Los intereses creados stages the fin-de-siècle crisis as a clash of moral codes, only partially involving moral relativism, self-interest, and venality. While posing as a triumphant love story, I argue, the play traces instead the integration of the social body into a monetary economy through a performance masterfully orchestrated by a bourgeois dramatist (Crispín), sanctioned by modern institutions of power and discourse, and carried out through sophisticated cultural and ideological devices (theatricality, objectivity, and consensus). Love, honor, kinship—previously treated as incommensurable values—are displaced or converted into measurable assets. Like Simmel's "life detail," economic transactions occurring in the play make visible the ideological architecture and mechanisms of power that inform a new understanding of personal and societal bonds, one where pecuniary exchange agglutinates the social body and performs as a vehicle for desire, where speech and bodies circulate like money, and where interests, consensus, and theatricality bind in a more (allegedly) democratic fashion than love, honor, biology, and kinship, successfully resisting the never-ending ethical temporality opened by the gift.