of the implicit, which is the title, the whole interpretation by Brandon McDowell, etc., goes very much in that direction. I think if Hegel thinks backwards, he thinks backwards into a past which never existed, which didn't pre-exist any of this backward movement. I mean, you can imagine, one way of figuring, one way of talking about Hegel's procedure It is to say he only explicaes what was already implicit in the beginning. Nothing was implicit in the beginning. It's only by progression that he created a certain past which was never present, which was not present in the beginning. So this seeming move forward is actually a move of construction.
It's a movement of progress of the concept. And there is somehow the coincidence of the two. What else? Yes, on the question of interpretation, intervention, yes, first capital and non-relation. I think Alenka already pointed out some essential things. But if you look, I mean, to put it in completely Marxist terms, of course, not only capital, commodity is a relation. I mean, commodity is what you can exchange for another commodity, which presupposes a contract. The very notion of commodity presupposes a relation which is a contractual relation.
I exchange this commodity for another. And the exchangeability of commodities is what constitutes the commodity as such. And Marx's point is that, of course, what he develops, There is a whole logic of relations based on commodity as an elementary particle. And there is another logic of what he calls class struggle, which is precisely the logic of non-relation. There is no class relation. But this non-relation is inscribed in the inner torsions and contradictions of the relations themselves, the relations based on commodity, money and capital. So there is a sort of incommensurability between pure class struggle, as it were,
and this logic of constructing the economic reality and social relations. But this class struggle in itself doesn't exist. It's nothing else but the series of contradictions which inhabit the social relations. And in Ardisa you have this, the lonely hour of the last instance never strikes. There is no last instance economy which would be somewhere on which we could base the whole discourse and structure. It never strikes. It's only inscribed in the inner contradictions of the social edifice. And yes, to say something, okay this is getting late, on the question of interpretation
and political action. I think one of the unfortunate things in the history of Marxism was that the thesis 11 got such prominence that it somehow started to mean philosophers only interpreted the world, the point is to change it and it opposes interpretation and change. Either we interpret the world or we engage in political action. I think it's a false dilemma. It's a false dilemma. And I think some of the best Marxists have always seen this. You have in Alte Serp precisely the notion of theoretical practice, which is theory is as much a practice as any other practice.
And you have in Adorno this famous adage that practice is an eminently theoretical notion. It's not like let's engage in practice. You have to have a theoretical framing to engage in practice. And of course, interpretation is always an intervention in the very ideological framework in which certain realities are presented as evident. And this is precisely critique of political economy. I mean, political economy presents certain facts of human endeavors as evident and being given about human nature, whatever, and frame this and showing that the very field in which these things are interpreted as something evident
and showing that they have been actually artificially produced, concocted and extorted in so many ways, and actually stepping from the perspective of social relations to the perspective of class struggle as the inner distortion which underlies any seemingly equal contract. Then this interpretation, the very critique of political economy, is actually dismantling precisely the evidence of certain social facts. This is an intervention. This is an intervention. This, again, then the question can be asked what political action follows from this and what forms,
but this is a multi-layered question. It just cannot be, you cannot oppose this to the question of interpretation. Okay, sorry I spoke long, but there are just some of the points, some of the comments I have to your very, very complex paper. Thanks. I'll just, I agreed with, you know, largely agreed with everything you said. One thing about the form matter, the reason why I use the word matter is because it seems to me, well, if there is a contrast between dialectical idealism and dialectical materialism, it's a claim that what is it about the psychoanalytic unconscious that is material, if anything?
The problem is that if you accept that material is always inscribed within a content, then you're going to say that there is no formless content. So then the question is, why are the categories of structural linguistics the key categories for characterizing the particularity of psychic content? that the symptoms in other words the over determination that is characteristic of unconscious functioning is tracked in terms of metonymy all these linguistic operations
so you're using a theory here to understand the unconscious and I guess my question is that's I have no problem with that But then the Hegelian is going to ask you, what is it about the conceptual content of this theory that is somehow kind of, why is determinant negation not at work in this content? And I'm not sure, yeah, I think that's what the Hegelian will ask you. And about the thinking, actually, I completely agree. It's like he doesn't think, I mean, the whole point is that, yes, there is no pre-existing past in Hegel. So I agree that it's not about explicitation. It's about constructing what was never there,
what was never there prior to the construction. And this is why I think Hegel is absolutely the most radical anti-Aristotelian is because in Aristotle, becoming is actualization. All becoming is actualization. whereas for Hegel becoming is actualization is desubstantialization which is to say it's this construction of what what was never what was not there before and this is why I think contrary to kind of an anti-Hegelian doxer, Hegel is a thinker of you know he's not
he subverts the classical or kind of the naive opposition between teleology and randomness. That's the challenge of Hegel is to show how things that seem to be accidents are actually, can be understood as necessary, but the necessity was never there before. The necessity was not there prior to the actualization. And this is why, you know, It's the virklikite, effectivity. It's actuality without potentiality. It's an actuality that was never potential. That was never potential. Which is why I think you have to rethink the distinction between possibility and impossibility. Which is why his thinking of antagonism is really...
This is why I think he has... Yeah, he's such a, you know, the most radical... Well, an extraordinary thinker of antagonism. because antagonism can never be recoded in terms of what people take to be the distinction between the possible and the impossible as based upon kind of our non-dialectical understanding and then I agreed with everything else I'll just try to be very brief. I mean, on the point of being a bit facile, but just to bounce off the other comments
of Lorenzo, Elenka, and Mladen. I mean, because I think many of us are trying to work on this question of the relationship between capitalism and human subjectivity, insofar as human subjectivity is based on the non-relation or indetermination. And I found in Lorenzo's formulation of the difference between there is no relation and there is a non-relation. Perhaps there's something more at stake there than a metaphysical debate, but maybe that's a good formulation for what capitalism does. So capitalism is that system which translates the fact that there is no relation into the idea that the non-relation is, and it does this through the genius of money. I think that's the real genius of money, which is both the form of all relations in capitalism, but of course money is a
totally desubstantialized kind of relation. And then, just to be a little mischievous, you can bring back Deleuze and Guattari, actually kind of interesting, in their idea that capitalism doesn't work with codes, you know, let's say forms of relation, but it works with just an axiomatic of numbers. And that's its kind of genius, that it imitates the extreme plasticity, the indetermination somehow of the human being. But it re-inscribes it in terms of an axiomatic of money. And so money becomes the form of formlessness, you could say, in capitalism. I mean, this is, let's say, I'm a bit previewing. This is what I, myself, I'm thinking about now. I haven't quite figured it out, but I try to develop that tomorrow. But somehow the genius of money is to give a social form to the indetermination of the human being,
but in a very impoverished way, of course, because we're simply reduced to money exchanges. But there's some kind of extreme genius in money as well that has the power to do that. Thanks. Thanks. Well, I'll say one thing I guess. If you talk about real abstractions and if money is a real abstraction and if you go to son-rettle roots, if you say that these real abstractions are operating behind the back of consciousness, In other words, you'll say that kind of the real abstraction of money as universal
exchange is the condition for conceptual abstraction. And I think that there's a, well, I have some, the question is like what's the order of explanation here? And I think there's a problem with the term, with the notion of abstraction here. I think it's ill-defined. I think this is based on a Kantian as opposed to a Hegelian account. I mean, Son Rettel's account is Kantian and not Hegelian. And I think if you're a Hegelian, of course, you'll accept this. But I think it's, yeah, the genius of money is what, whether the genius of money was some kind of miraculous dispensation. You know, how did it happen? How did this genius, you know, install itself
and become this kind of fundamental, this monstrous kind of equivalent that coordinates all of human existence now. And I think you have to be careful about not deifying this kind of monstrous plasticity of money by making it something that just sprang into being independently of human practices. Thank you so much, Ray, for a really thoughtful paper. Thanks to everyone for coming as well today.
Tomorrow, of course, we'll pick up with another exciting round of lectures. We'll start with Aaron Schuster in the morning, then we'll move to Alenka Zpancic in the afternoon and conclude with Slavoj Zizek in the evening. So I hope to see you tomorrow. and Sunday of course will be our final day. So thanks so much. Good night.