/lit/ - Literature

>>11220861
2/2
>As Karatani himself persists in calling it exchange, however, the X as pure gift is not unrelated to exchange. Rather it is the condition of the possibility of exchange as well as that of its impossibility. In “The Empire and the Nation” Karatani points out that “in commodity exchange there is something precarious, which can never be sublated”; and money is introduced precisely in order to prevent the disaster caused by this precariousness. Since nothing can guarantee a commodity to be exchanged for another, people try to store the right for exchange, that is, money. Capitalism is “a system of credit or faith that is formed to avoid the difficulties of exchange—almost like a religious world.”

>Money is a defense against the foreseeable failure of exchange. Put differently, people save money in order to avoid a pure gift, in which one not only gives without expectation of reciprocation but also incurs unrepayable debt. This precariousness in commodity exchange can be applied to the other two modes of exchange; the state recompenses its plundering by redistribution because, if it does not, the plundered community either extinguishes or destroys the plundering state in uprising; the sense of debt or guilt, which emerges when one receives a gift, is the symptom of the fear of the failure of exchange. Crises of exchange are thus essential to exchange as such. Without the possibility of its failure—without the possibility of the total loss of relationship—there would be no such thing as exchange. As the crisis of exchange, pure gift is the condition of the possibility of exchange as such. If there is exchange, there is always possibility of its failure, pure gift. Pure gift cannot be separated from exchange.

no weapon, karatani writes, can withstand the gift. he's probably right about that. but it's interesting to see perhaps the necessity for gifts to retain that spectre or shadow of the religious. maybe capitalism is itself a kind of exercise of *willed insomnia.* we have to go on living this dream because if we awaken from it we awaken to the nightmare of history.

"almost like a religious world." the most cynical and disaffected world, but also one of the most tacitly religious. god is dead, that's true. but you can always wake him up again. the question is, do you want to? what do terrorists ever do but offer unrepayable gifts, demand impossible exchanges? this is the attraction of nihilism. and yet money only stands in for something else, a system of mysterious traffic that hides the impossible, and traumatic, Real of an absolute exchange.

even in wakanda it's announced that the kingdom is built on a necessary holy lie (more than one). it was the same for gotham city. and for pic rel. crisis is basically built into the system like this, but the hauntological world may be the only one there is.