The Coiners of Language

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The Coiners of Language Oklahoma Project for Discourse and Theory ; V. 16 Goux, Jean-Joseph. University of Oklahoma Press 0806126590 9780806126593 9780806171593 English Gide, André,--1869-1951.--Faux-monnayeurs, Literature and society--France--History, Discourse analysis, Literary, Counterfeiters in literature, Gold standard in literature, Economics in literature, Language and culture, Money in literature. 1996 PQ2613.I2F334713 1996eb 843/.912 Gide, André,--1869-1951.--Faux-monnayeurs, Literature and society--France--History, Discourse analysis, Literary, Counterfeiters in literature, Gold standard in literature, Economics in literature, Language and culture, Money in literature.

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The Coiners of Language Oklahoma Project for Discourse and Theory

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OKLAHOMA PROJECT FOR DISCOURSE AND THEORY SERIES EDITORS Robert Con Davis, University of Oklahoma Ronald Schleifer, University of Oklahoma ADVISORY BOARD Maya Angelou, Wake Forest University Jonathan Culler, Cornell University Jacques Derrida, University of California, Irvine Shoshana Felman, Yale University Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University Sandra M. Gilbert, Princeton University Richard Macksey, Johns Hopkins University J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine Marjorie Perloff, Stanford University Edward W. Said, Columbia University Thomas A. Sebeok, Indiana University at Bloomington Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, University of Pittsburgh Cornel West, Princeton University

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The Coiners of Language by Jean-Joseph Goux Translated by Jennifer Curtiss Gage University of Oklahoma Press Norman and London

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Published with the generous assistance of the French Ministry of Culture. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Goux, Jean-Joseph, 1943[Monnayeurs du langage. English] The coiners of language / by Jean-Joseph Goux; translated by Jennifer Curtiss Gage. p. cm. (Oklahoma project for discourse and theory; v. 16) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN: 0-8061-2657-4 1. Gide, André, 1869-1951. Faux-monnayeurs. 2. Literature and societyFranceHistory. 3. Discourse analysis, Literary. 4. Counterfeiters in literature. 5. Gold standard in literature. 6. Economics in literature. 7. Language and culture. 8. Money in literature. I. Title. II. Series. PQ2613.I2F334713 1994 94-8098 843 .912dc20 CIP The Coiners of Language is Volume 16 of the Oklahoma Project for Discourse and Theory. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources, Inc. Copyright © 1984 by Editions Galilée. Translation copyright © 1994 by the University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the University. All rights reserved. Manufactured in the U.S.A. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

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CONTENTS Series Editors' Foreword

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Translator's Acknowledgments

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Part I. The Counterfeiters 1. The False Gold Coin

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2. The Crisis of Convertibility

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3. Gresham's Law

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4. A Numismatic Fiction

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5. The Three Paternities

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6. The Novel of General Equivalents

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7. The Crystal Archetype

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8. The Pure Novel and the Mise en Abyme

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9. Iconoclasms

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Part II. Archetype, Token, and Treasury 10. Realism and Convertibility

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11. Mallarmé's Money

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12. Money and Reason

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13. The Law and the Treasury

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14. The Inconvertible Signifier

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15. The Myth of Paper Money

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16. The Treasure Trove of Memory

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Notes

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SERIES EDITORS' FOREWORD The Oklahoma Project for Discourse & Theory is a series of interdisciplinary texts whose purpose is to explore the cultural institutions that constitute the human sciences, to see them in relation to one another, and, perhaps above all, to see them as products of particular discursive practices. To this end, we hope that the Oklahoma Project will promote dialogue within and across traditional disciplinespsychology, philology, linguistics, history, art history, aesthetics, logic, political economy, religion, philosophy, anthropology, communications, and the likein texts that theoretically are located across disciplines. In recent years, in a host of new and traditional areas, there has been great interest in such discursive and theoretical frameworks. Yet we conceive of the Oklahoma Project as going beyond local inquiries, providing a larger forum for interdiscursive theoretical discussions and dialogue. Our agenda in previous books and certainly in this one has been to present through the University of Oklahoma Press a series of critical volumes that set up a theoretical encounter among disciplines, an interchange not limited to literature but covering virtually the whole range of the human sciences. It is a critical series with an important reference in literary studiesthus mirroring the modern development of discourse theorybut including all approaches, other than quantitative studies, open to semiotic and post-semiotic analysis and to the wider concerns of cultural studies. Regardless of its particular domain, each book in the series will investigate characteristically post-Freudian, post-Saussurean, and post-Marxist questions about culture and the discourses that constitute different cultural phenomena. The

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Oklahoma Project is a sustained dialogue intended to make a significant contribution to the contemporary understanding of the human sciences in the contexts of cultural theory and cultural studies. The title of the series reflects, of course, its home base, the University of Oklahoma. But it also signals in a significant way the particularity of the local functions within historical and conceptual frameworks for understanding culture. Oklahoma is a haunting place-name in American culture. A Choctaw phrase meaning "red people," it goes back to the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in Mississippi in 1830. For Franz Kafka, it conjured up the idea of America itself, both the indigenous Indian peoples of North America and the vertiginous space of the vast plains. It is also the place-name, the "American" starting point, with which Wallace Stevens begins his Collected Poems. Historically, too, it is a place in which American territorial and political expansion was reenacted in a single day in a retracing called the Oklahoma land run. Geographically, it is the heartland of the continent. As suchin the interdisciplinary Oklahoma Project for Discourse & Theorywe are hoping to describe, above all, multifaceted interests within and across various studies of discourse and culture. Such interests are akin to what Kierkegaard calls the "inbetween" aspect of experience, the "inter esse," and, perhaps more pertinently, what Nietzsche describes as the always political functioning of concepts, art works, and languagethe functioning of power as well as knowledge in discourse and theory. Such politics, occasioning dialogue and bringing together powerfully struggling and often unarticulated positions, disciplines, and assumptions, is always local, always particular. In some ways, such interests function in broad feminist critiques of language, theory, and culture as well as microphilosophical and microhistorical critiques of the definitions of truth and art existing within ideologies of "disinterested" meaning. They function in the interested examination of particular disciplines and general disciplinary histories. They function (to allude to two of our early titles) in the very interests of theory and the particularity of the postmodern age in which many of us find ourselves. In such interested particulars, we believe, the human sciences are articulated. We hope that the books of the Oklahoma Project will provide sites of such interest and that in them,

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individually and collectively, the monologues of traditional scholarly discourse will become heteroglosses, just as such placenames as Oklahoma and such commonplace words and concepts as discourse and theory can become sites for the dialogue and play of culture. ROBERT CON DAVIS RONALD SCHLEIFER NORMAN, OKLAHOMA

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TRANSLATOR'S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank Brown University's Department of French Studies, and Henry Majewski in particular, for making travel funds available to enable me to consult with the author during the preparation of this translation. I am grateful for the liberal and congenial hospitality of Colette Deblé, Bernard Noël, and Claudette and Jean-Joseph Goux. For assistance with philosophical terms and references, my thanks go to Jonathan Vogel. Among the many friends and colleagues whose encouragement was crucial to the completion of this translation, Annie Smart, Laura d'Angelo, Deborah Lyons, Brook and Jill Moles, and Pierre Saint-Amand deserve special mention. JENNIFER CURTISS GAGE

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PART I THE COUNTERFEITERS Was it purely by chance that the crisis of realism in the novel and in painting coincided with the end of gold money?* Or that the birth of ''abstract'' art coincided with the shocking invention of inconvertible monetary signs, now in general use? Can we not see in this double crisis of money and language the collapse of guarantees and frames of reference, a rupture between sign and thing, undermining representation and ushering in the age of the floating signifier? André Gide's novel The Counterfeiters is in this connection an exemplary work of literature. Until now, it has not been thoroughly examined with these developments in mind. The "counterfeiting" of the title reaches beyond monetary fraudulence to broach the question of the ground upon which values and meaning are based: counterfeiting becomes the central metaphor for calling into question the role of general equivalents. Considered as a whole, the internal economy of The Counterfeiters is revealing: not only do language and money, in their closely homologous relation, come under attack, but in addition the value of paternity, and all other values that regulate exchanges, *Translator's note [hereafter TN]: While the French argent/monnaie pair has a parallel in English in "money/currency," the usage of these terms is not fully congruent in the two languages. Thus monnaie is rendered variously as "currency" or as "money," depending on the context and the emphasis of the particular instance. The reader is referred to the first footnote in chapter 4 below for a more detailed discussion of the distinction between argent and monnaie, and to Goux's previously published Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), with its extensive treatment of the concepts applied to the present study. Symbolic Economies combines major portions of Economie et symbolique (Paris: Seuil, 1973) and Les iconoclastes (Paris: Seuil, 1978).

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are questioned. Gold, father, language, phallus: continuously serving mutually as metaphors for each other, these structurally homologous general equivalents, with their respective functions in measurement, exchange, and reserve, simultaneously undergo a fundamental crisis that is also the crisis of the novel as a genre. Gide fictionalizes the shift from a society founded on legitimation by representation to a society dominated by the inconvertibility of signifiers, that refer to one another like tokens in infinite slippage, with no standard or treasury* to offer the guarantee of a transcendental signifier or referent. After analyzing Gide's novel in terms of this symbolic juncture, we shall see the crisis confirmed from various angles in Mallarmé, Valéry, Saussure, and others whose work shows signs of undermining the regime of "gold-language" so richly illustrated by Hugo, Zola, and others at the triumphant height of the nineteenth century. Thus the structural homology between money and language, expressed in the coherent interplay of metaphors in literary fiction, makes it possible to locate a historical turning point. The bygone era of "gold-language," the basis for realist and expressive mechanisms of classical representation, has been succeeded by the present age of "token-language" with its vanishing frames of reference and floating signifiers. Exploring this logic of substitutionswhich affects monetary signs as well as linguistic signs, the economic as well as the literary realmwill make it possible to account for some of the major characteristics of our mode of symbolizing and, from its antinomies, to venture a step toward the probable. *TN: The French word trésor is rich in possible translations: the same word can mean "treasure," "treasury," and "thesaurus." While the primary sense intended here is a repository or reserve of wealth in the form of money or precious metals, the other registers of meaning evoked by trésor are not without pertinence, as will become clear; rather than rigidly adhering to a single word in English, the translation will vary according to context.

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Chapter 1 The False Gold Coin In the middle section of The Counterfeiters, one of the characters a novelist writing a book also to be entitled The Counterfeiters airs his ideas about the novel he is in the process of writing. His interlocutors are incredulous. Not surprisingly, it is difficult to explain the idea of a novel without a subject: for example, a novel that is no more than the story of a novel being written, a novel in which the ideas are more important than the charactersin short, a pure or abstract novel. But why should what was possible in music, and even in painting, be impossible in literature? Thus far the only certainty about this novel in gestation, which the novelist is trying to theorize, is its title; and even this is not absolutely certain, for it is a deceptive title. Why The Counterfeiters? the novelist is asked: "Who are these counterfeiters?" 1 The answer, quite obviously, is of very direct concern to the real reader of Gide's novel; for it seems likely that the strategy of inventing a character who is a novelist writing a novel with the same title as the one right in front of the reader would indicate some connection between the real novel and the fictive novel, between the external, framing title and the title nested within. However, there will be no direct answer to the question, "Who are these counterfeiters?" Edouard (this is the name Gide gives his novelist) reacts to it at first by saying he has no idea. His first thoughts in connection with counterfeiters had been of certain of his fellow writers. But the label had become so broad that it was becoming more difficult to be precise, or even concrete. The question could not have been answered by starting with a story and describing its charactersby narrating a plot involving counterfeitersbut rather by taking off from economic con-

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cepts. But Edouard is unable to speak of these. Is a novelist still a novelist if, instead of promising characters and a story, he begins to expound upon ideasnot just any ideas, but economic theory? However, Edouard feels the urge to do just that: If he allowed his mind to follow its bent, it soon tumbled headlong into abstractions, where it was as comfortable as a fish in water. Ideas of exchange, of depreciation, of inflation, etc., gradually invaded his book (like the theory of clothes in Carlyle's Sartor Resartus) and usurped the place of the characters. As it was impossible for Edouard to speak of this, he kept silent in the most awkward manner, and his silence, which seemed like an admission of penury, began to make the other three very uncomfortable. (192) [189] Such is the false position in which Edouard finds himself. Economic ideas are usurping the roles of the characters. A tendency toward the abstractnot any abstraction whatsoever, but the abstract concepts of political economy (change, devaluation, inflation)gnaws at the naive certainty of novelistic representation. Both character and plot become impossible. How can a novelist dare utter this? How can he admit to his readers that he is working to bring about the death of the novel as a genre? At this pointno doubt in order to be more concrete (or more figurative) and to regain in his companions' eyes the identity of a true novelistEdouard has recourse to a very tangible comparison. "Counterfeiting" was too abstract a notion to be conveyed, and "counterfeiters" a misleading personification, a betrayal of Edouard's explicit preference for ideas over people. But "counterfeit money" is a concrete thing that one can hold in one's hands, and at the same time it is potentially an image for something more abstract, something it can symbolize or illustrate. Thus it is that, midway through the book, Edouard uses a comparison with a counterfeit coin to reply to the question his three interlocutors ask about the title of his novel in progress: "Has it ever happened to you to hold a counterfeit coin in your hands?" he asked at last. "Yes," said Bernard; but the two women's "No" drowned his voice. "Well, imagine a false ten-franc gold piece. In reality it's not worth two sous. But it will be worth ten francs as long as no one recognizes it to be false. So if I start from the idea that . . ."

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"But why start from an idea?" interrupted Bernard impatiently. "If you were to start from a fact and make a good exposition of it, the idea would come of its own accord to inhabit it. If I were writing The Counterfeiters I should begin by showing the counterfeit cointhe little ten-franc piece you were speaking of just now." So saying, he pulled out of his pocket a small coin, which he flung on to the table. "Just hear how true it rings. Almost the same sound as the real one. One would swear it was gold. I was taken in by it this morning, just as the grocer who passed it on to me had been taken in himself, he told me. It isn't quite the same weight, I think; but it has the brightness and the sound of a real piece; it is coated with gold, so that, all the same, it is worth a little more than two sous; but it's made of glass. It'll wear transparent. No; don't rub it: you'll spoil it. One can almost see through it, as it is." Edouard had seized it and was considering it with the utmost curiosity. "But where did the grocer get it from?" "He didn't know. He thinks he has had it in his drawer some days. He amused himself by passing it off on me to see whether I should be taken in. Upon my word, I was just going to accept it! But as he's an honest man, he undeceived me; then he let me have it for five francs. He wanted to keep it to show what he calls 'amateurs.' I thought there couldn't be a better one than the author of The Counterfeiters; and it was to show you that I took it. But now that you have examined it, give it back to me! I'm sorry that the reality doesn't interest you." "Yes, it does"; said Edouard, "but it disturbs me too." "That's a pity," rejoined Bernard. (192-93) [189] Thus counterfeit money is here invoked as the central image, which sets the seal on the novelist's whole enterprise. The book is stamped with a claim to compositional purity, with the metaphor of the titlelike the guarantee of measure stamped on a coin, its legend or title, which entitles the bearer to a certain value. It is not simply language that is compared to money (a comparison we shall see in Mallarmé), but a certain novelistic language that becomes increasingly problematic for Edouard and that is implicitly metaphorized in the counterfeit coin. What does this image mean? The question is all the more pointed as it is clear that Gide's writing, this novel that the reader is in the process of reading, is caught in the same metaphor: it is undoubtedly this counterfeit coin, itself. Now the counterfeiting in question is not just any counterfeiting. The faked money illustrated by Gide presents a particularity that makes it exceptional: it is crystal money. Though covered

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with a layer of real gold, which gives it the appearance of a genuine coin, it will become transparent with wean That a novel not only is entitled The Counterfeiters but also makes use of a monetary metaphor on multiple levels to comment on the status of language should be enough to excite our interest. Is there not a complex homology between language and money a homology far more subtle than it first appears, and one that, if deployed according to its own logic, ends up challenging major conceptual categories? Values, law, exchange, idea, nature, sign, representation: all these notions are enlisted in the parallel between language and money. Let us seriously consider the implicit comparison between the novel and the false coin. We cannot avoid the following conclusion: the novel is like the false coin, which shines and jingles like a genuine coin, so convincingly that one would swear it was truly goldwhereas this gold is really no more than a superficial layer covering a crystalline substance, destined to be worn transparent with use. Now what would this use signify if not the reading and rereading of a novel that is thus gradually stripped of its golden appearance as a genuine novel, until it becomes as transparent as crystal? The critical reader is warned that there is crystal beneath the golden surface and that he must wear this thin deceptive layer of yellow metal down to sheer transparency that will allow him to see through it. To read, to use the value of the words in the book: does this not wear away (abîmer) the superficial appearance of the novelistic coin, in order to uncover gradually the crystalline transparence of a pure construction?* "It isn't quite the same weight, I think; but it has the brightness and the sound of a real piece; it is coated with gold, so that, all the same, it is worth a little more than two sous; but it's made of glass. It'll wear transparent. No; don't rub it; you'll spoil [abîmer] it. One can almost see through it, as it is." (192) [189] Abîmer: isn't Edouard's novel The Counterfeiters a mise en abyme of Gide's The Counterfeiters? The coin is already abîmé. *TN: The French verb user means not simply "to use" but "to use up" or "to wear out." In addition to carrying this notion further, the verb abîmer, meaning "to wear out, spoil or destroy," suggests the term mise en abyme, a concept whose pertinence will be explicitly addressed in chapter 8.

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We can almost see through it. Beneath the gold, crystal: beneath the gold of the realist novel, the crystal of abstraction. But further still, the fact that the novel under examination explicitly makes counterfeiting the very image of modern novelistic production in its essence, and that this novel is at the same time a novel of crisis, a specular gesture showing a novelist at work on a novel with the same title as the one you are reading and announcing the demise of the realist novel (with plot and characters): that all these elements are combined in a coherent syndrome is curious and merits closer analysis. How does counterfeiting function as the central and entitling metaphor in which the very genre of the novel is upended, and which expresses the fundamental crisis the genre is undergoing? Or again, more precisely: to what literary and historical configuration does this novel by Gide correspond, associating as it does in a single syndrome three elements that might appear to be unrelated but that The Counterfeiters forces us to conceive together: (I) the invasion of novelistic fiction by the economic metaphor, to the point that characters are replaced by economic abstractions; (2) the choice of the reflexive or specular structure (the novel about a novel being written . . . ); and (3) the decisive crisis of realist representation ("characters," "stories") with the explicit (if not actually accomplished) aim of creating a literature that is "pure" or "abstract" (in a sense similar to abstract painting)? What might be the logic of this syndrome? What necessary relationships exist among these three aspects that might overdetermine their convergence in a novel written in 1925, that is, at a time notable for its unprecedented rupture with the history of signifying practices? The genuine gold coin in circulation could thus symbolize naive semanticism, faith in surface figuration, while the crystal could be the pure construction hidden beneath this covering. Pure construction, or perhaps a theorizing layer: for by making his main character a novelist, Gide in turn fills his entire novel with a crystalline core that has repercussions for any naive reading of the composition. The constant probing of the writing process, in Edouard's journal, punctures the realist reading of the novel and thus functions as a simultaneously transparent and reflective base that constitutes the novel's theoretical, abstract, speculative "interior."

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The only novel that Gide managed to write is a trick novel, a counterfeit of the real thing. It is a work with all the external trappings of the genre, one that "passes itself off as" the real thing (or is sold as such on the "mental goods" market of which Mallarmé speaks), but whose substance and internal composition make it something other than a novel: it is a challenge to the novelistic form, a critical essay disguised as a novel by the brilliant depiction of pathetic themes woven or engraved in it; a true novel, but one consumed from the inside by critical reflection, by a perspicacity that wears through (abîme) its fine appearance and discredits its face value, until it is devalued to a mere cheat of a token devoid of opacity and color, a clear crystal of no account among the circulating moneys that the authentic writer must mint. Thus Gide denounces fiction produced by a linguistic regime trying to present itself as homologous to the circulation of gold money. To read this book would therefore be to read through it, to show how it succeeds in deluding us, slipping through our fingers with its shiny surface (so cleverly put into relief by its effigy); but to read through it is also to wear away or use up (user) this brilliant surface by means of repeated handling, to expose the transparence of crystal underneath. There are two possible readings: a naive one, which accepts the story as legal tender and the characters at face value, and another, which, suspiciously aware of the imposture of all fiction, scratches the golden surface to find out what it is really made ofto see if the author puts his money where his mouth is. We might say that there is a greengrocer's reading and an amateur's reading: a twofold approach, simultaneously different and identical; a double circulation or double economy. This doubling must give the lie to the naive interpretation and bring suspicion down upon the value of authenticity itself. To read this text doubly would therefore be to take turns as grocer and as amateur. Faced with the appearance of genuine gold that is stamped with an effigy and an incription, the greengrocer is at first taken in. But once he wises up to the trick, he leaves the coin to the amateur. He has gained nothing by the transactionquite the contrary, since, taken in by appearances, he first accepted the coin at face value and then he gives it up for half the price. For the

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amateur, this is a real find. This odd coin which in itself has no commercial value, most certainly not the value that is fraudulently marked on its reverse, possesses an incomparable curiosity value: it is priceless. I intend to show, moreover, through an analysis of the novel's intertwining themes, that the homology or reciprocal metaphor is not limited to monetary fraud and linguistic deception. Another major theme of this fuguelike composition is the falseness of the father. It is highly significant that the novel begins with the discovery by the high school student Bernard that the man he thinks of as his fatherJudge Profitendieu, the magistrateis not his real father: Bernard's family name is a lie. The boy will refer to his father as "false" [Fr. faux, 197]. And the theme of the false or repudiated father will return in other guises, in the nasty old count whose death is not mourned even by his sons, and again in the pastor who preaches without truly believingone element of the Protestant theme developed in Gide's novel. Thus gold, language, and the fatherthree forms of the general equivalentsimultaneously court suspicion: counterfeiting becomes the central metaphor for the historical crisis of a certain type of value-form. Valuesnot merely economic but also semantic, ethical, religious, and juridicalare riddled with suspicion. The themes of Gide's novel, then, bear witness to a crisis of representation, since the general equivalents he illustrates are Representatives. At the same time, his literary devices are formally in the grip of a challenge to the representational system similar to the challenge already experienced in the field of painting. The lead held by painting over literature, and the necessity for the latter to find its own way toward a homologue of painterly abstraction, are formulated with perfect clarity in The Counterfeiters, in the person of a second writer-character, Strouvilhou, who will lead us gradually to another dimension of the monetary metaphor for language. Here, the emphasis is somewhat ironically, even cynically, upon the destruction of meaning, clearly implied in the destruction of the face (of the portrait), or more broadly in the determination to avoid all resemblance. In order for literature to achieve a status homologous to that of nonfigurative painting, language must be cleansed of all meaning.

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I have often wondered by what miracle painting has gone so far ahead, and how it happens that literature has let itself be outdistanced. In painting today, just see how the 'motif,' as it used to be called, has fallen into discredit. A fine subject! It makes one laugh. Painters don't even dare venture on a portrait unless they can be sure of avoiding every trace of resemblance. If we manage our affairs well, and leave me alone for that, I don't ask for more than two years before a future poet will think himself dishonoured if anyone can understand a word of what he says. Yes, Monsieur le Comte, will you wager? All sense, all meaning will be considered anti-poetical. Illogicality shall be our guiding star. What a fine title for a reviewThe Scavengers [Les Nettoyeurs]!" (332-33) [320] Here a different version of the literary crisis confronting Edouard is formulated. In contrast with Edouard's patience as he gropes his way toward a "pure novel" is an iconoclastic gesture that assimilates the purging of meaning to the destruction of the figure: two attempts to cope with the same representational rupture. But according to the first solution, the anecdotes of naturalist literature should be supplanted by the crystalline construction of an ideal and reflexive novel; the second, more violent, solution disavows all signification, to put an end to the false situation of "poetical inflation" (330) [319] by devouring the last vestiges of meaning, scavenger-like. By means of a generalized deflation of language, Strouvilhou wishes to puncture the credibility of poetic expression, to "demonetize" the "hackneyed effusions of high-sounding lyrical verse" (332) [320]. In opposition to Edouard's ''constructivist'' approach is the "destructivist" stance taken by Strouvilhou, who appeals to the keen minds of youth to demolish the economic system of established language: "One can always find hands for a work of destruction. Shall we found a school with no other object but to pull things down?... Would you be afraid?" (332) [320]. Now these two solutionsEdouard's, of which his interlocutors remain skeptical, and Strouvilhou's, which aims to terrify the literary world with its radicalismhave something remarkable in common: in both cases, moneythe general equivalent of economic exchanges, this universal measure of commercial values constitutes the crucial metaphorical reference that aptly illustrates the operation and conveys its import. More precisely still: good money never serves as the point of comparison; this is the function of either false money (in Edouard's case) or bad money,

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the worthless token (in the case of Strouvilhou, as I shall emphasize). In one way or another, the bankruptcy of a circulation of values based on gold money becomes a metaphor for the failure of the realist or representational system of language. It is as if the inability to maintain an exchange system based on gold value becomes the best metaphor for the inability to take for granted a literary language based on time-honored values of realism and of expressivity. For Edouard as for Strouvilhou, the linguistic order based on the gold value of language is headed for bankruptcy. "To tell the truth, my dear count, I must own that of all nauseating human emanations, literature is one of those which disgust me most. I can see nothing in it but compromise and flattery. And I go so far as to doubt whether it can be anything elseat any rate until it has made a clean sweep of the past. We live upon nothing but feelings which have been taken for granted once for all and which the reader imagines he experiences, because he believes everything he sees in print; the author speculates on this as he does on the conventions which he believes to be the foundations of his art. These feelings ring as false as counters, but they pass current. And as everyone knows that 'bad money drives out good,' a man who should offer the public real coins would seem to be defrauding us. In a world in which everyone cheats, it's the honest man who passes for a charlatan. I give you fair warningif I edit a review, it will be in order to prick bladdersin order to demonetize fine feelings, and those promissary notes which go by the name of words." "Upon my soul, I should very much like to know how you'll set about it." "Let me alone and you'll soon see... I have often thought it oven" "No one will understand what you're after; no one will follow you." "Oh, come now! The cleverest young men of the present day are already on their guard against poetical inflation. They perfectly recognize a gas bag when they see oneeven in the disguise of scientifically elaborate metre, and trimmed up with all the hackneyed effusions of high-sounding lyrical verse. One can always find hands for a work of destruction. Shall we found a school with no other object but to pull things down?... Would you be afraid?" (331-32; Bussy's translation slightly modified) [319-20] Strouvilhou decries literature as a whole. For him the very word takes on a pejorative sense: literature smells fishy. It is the realm of affectation. The sentiments it expresses are devoid of authenticity; they are based on mere convention. Strouvilhou denounces them as the bloated, puffy products of inflation. Expression and representation as values are no longer self-evident; the regime of gold holdings is no more than an illusion, the old language has been exposed as a sham. Only deflation or

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demonetization carried to the extremethe negation of all significationmakes possible a return to the real. Thus Strouvilhou implicitly links the demonetization of language (that is, the lucid recognition of its inconvertibility) with the crisis of representation. Painting has already abandoned the motif: it has rejected the reproduction of objects. Literature in its turn will abandon all meaning, all signification. It too will eschew figuration. The monetary metaphor for the complete loss of convertibility of the means of exchange fuels the premises embodied in Gide's character Strouvilhou, to demonstrate the impotence and the anachronism of representation and expression in literature. Far from being incidental, the economic metaphor is sustained, continuous, coherent: there is the author's speculation on what readers take for granted, leading to "poetical inflation," to sentiments that "ring as false as counters" but still ''pass current''; there is the economic adage (to which I shall return) warning that "bad money drives out good"; instead of offering "real coins" to the public, the author uses words as a means of "defrauding us," a way to "demonetize fine feelings"; words are compared to "promissory notes" (332) [319]. All of these metaphors establish a homology between the language crisis of the moment and a veritable bankruptcy in which the means of monetary exchange have lost all credit, all coverage. Here we touch upon a crux of the present investigation: the discovery that, in the end, money turns out to be a mere token, the last remaining vestige of its civil sacredness vanishing in the numismatic masquerade whereby the weight of value and the value of weight no longer count. The token is a parody of money. It imitates gold money just as the monkey apes the man. This toy monkey-money makes a mockery of what it mimics. In the reciprocal metaphor linking money and language as close parallels, the language token will be seen to coincide with a nominalist interpretation.

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Chapter 2 The Crisis of Convertibility The implicit distinction between gold-language and token-language that underlies Gide's pattern of metaphor leads us to a more detailed analysis of money, in order to clarify monetary metaphors for language. Remarkably enough, we need look no further for an adequate analysis than the work of the writer's uncle, Charles Gide, a wellknown economist.* This family tie must be taken into consideration. Is it sheer coincidence that both Gides, uncle and nephew alikeone in the theoretical language of political economy and the other in the language of fictionare troubled by the same monetary object? I shall return to this connection, which requires us to read Charles's Political Economy (1883) and André's The Counterfeiters together, to interweave the uncle's analysis with the nephew's novel, to consider the exchanges between the economist's money and the writer's money. For the moment, I should like to focus on a precious distinction, taken from Charles Gide's Principes d'économie politique. The various forms taken by money can be arranged in a gradationwhich also constitutes a degradation. There are at least four types of money: gold (or silver) money, of fully intrinsic worth; representative paper money, with guaranteed convertibility; fiduciary paper money, incompletely guaranteed; *Professor of political economy at the University of Montpellier, and later at the Collège de France, Charles Gide (18471932) was the author of Principes d'économie politique (1883), of Histoire des doctrines économiques des Physiocrates à nos jours (Paris: Société Anonyme du Recueil Sirey, 1926), and of numerous publications that manifest his militant support of the Coopératiste school. This movement originated in the ideas of F. M. C. Fourier, who is among the subjects of Charles Gide's study.

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and conventional paper money, sometimes referred to as "fictional (or fictive) money," which is inconvertible and circulates only as forced currency.* The general equivalent begins as a small ingot, a fragment of the treasury that is released on the market; in the end, it is a mere paper token whose value is purely fictional. This scheme of degradation in the means of exchange is unquestionably present in the monetary metaphor for language in The Counterfeiters. Gide's novel implicitly registers the fact that literary language can no longer be compared to gold money, or even to representative paper money; it has been demoted to the status of a token with no backing, to a conventional or "fictive" money. Thus a moment in the internal history of literature takes shape for Gide. Any conception of the novel or of poetry that still claimed to rely on gold-language, or representative language, would necessarily be a literature of deception. And yet, the younger Gide would continue, this necessity inherent in the history of literatureits present and (in light of the crisis of "values" in the bourgeois world) ineluctable momentis not perceived by everyone. Awareness of it is still limited to a creative avantgarde groping toward a new literature. As a result, two solutions are available to the writer who intends to place a linguistic currency on the market. Such a writer can admit and protest the bankruptcy of language, denouncing the illusion of convertibility through a writing that explicitly presents itself as inconvertible. This is the iconoclastic path chosen by Strouvilhou. But the writer can alsoand this is Edouard's choice (more or less representative of Gide's)pretend to remain within the economic system of gold-language or of representative language while at the same time evading this system by means of a clever trick. The result of this ambiguitythe solution chosen to maintain itis in the production of false currency: money that is ostensibly faithful to the old regime of circulating gold but is in fact an ingenious forgery that masks an absence of gold. This counterfeit money makes it possible to perpetrate deception on the medal market; reduced to a mere token, a conventional or fictive currency, it will be *In part 2, chapter 13, I shall discuss in greater detail the distinction Charles Gide draws among the three sorts of paper money ("representative," "fiduciary," "conventional").

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revealed as such to those who know how to wear away its metallic surface. But let us be even more explicit. What is the precise correspondence between conceptions of language (and thus of literature) and the four types of circulating general equivalent that I have just enumerated in order of increasing disembodiment of value? The type of language that could be compared to gold money would be a full, adequate language. In it and through it, the real would be conveyed without mediation, both as the objective reality of the external world and as the subjective reality of the internal world. This type of language would be expressive in its subjective aspect, relating to the soul and to others, and it would be descriptive in its aspect of relation to the external world. Such a gold-language formulates truth immediately, thus dispensing those who avail themselves of it from questioning the linguistic medium. It is conceived as the adequate vehicle of meaning, as that by which soul and world are fully signified, and this plenitude of linguistic signification completely obviates any question as to the value of language in its relationship to being. If we now consider a system in which language is compared to representative paper currency, we encounter another situation. In this case, the relationship between language and being begins to be problematic. Just as in the economic sphere there arises the question of convertibility, that is, the existence or not of a deposit serving to back the tokens in circulation, likewise in the domain of signification the truth value of language will become a crucial concern. Language will no longer be conceived as fully expressing (or as being capable of adequately expressing) reality or being; it will necessarily be conceived as a means, a relatively autonomous instrument, by which it is possible to represent reality to varying degrees of exactitude. Here the risk of speculation divorced from the real will no longer be conceived simply as an intellectual deviation, but rather as the risk of all language when it is removed from the narrow confines of experience. In other words, the metaphysical confidence according to which Being can be expressed in language will gradually disappear before the less reassuring notion that language is an instrument that, under certain conditions (such as intuition and experience), makes it possible to give a valid representation of reality. I have shown elsewhere how a certain uneasiness regarding the exis-

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tence or nonexistence of reserves guaranteeing the convertibility of conceptual language is betrayed in utterly explicit monetary metaphors used by Schopenhauer and Bergson. Thus Schopenhauer wrote that while the scholar may have the advantage of those with natural understanding or intuitive knowledge by virtue of his "possession of a wealth of cases and facts (historical knowledge) and of causal determinations (natural science), all in well-ordered connection, easily surveyed," still "the much knowledge of the ordinary scholar is dead... because it consists entirely in abstract knowledge.... Such a mind is like a bank with liabilities tenfold in excess of its cash reserve, whereby in the end it becomes bankrupt." 1 Finally, when language is conceived neither in an imaginary of gold money, nor even in the imaginary of a convertible banknote, when it is identified with conventional or fictive money, a forced currency, we have reached a moment of true crisis of confidence in the value of language. It is certain that one of the major movements in contemporary language theorythat is, the movement beginning with Saussure and developed in linguistic structuralismis wholly based on an imaginary of inconvertibility. Saussure's affirmation that linguistic value has no root in things and their natural relationships, and Hjelmslev's assertion that when commercial value and linguistic value are compared, the standard has no parallel in language, correspond faithfully to a conception of language that would make it the homologue of a conventional currency. Nothing anchors linguistic value in a space outside of language. This is why language is a game; it is only a system of pure relations, a relational and differential system, with nothing comparable to the guarantee of a treasury or reserve, or to a standard of measure.* This conception of language is tied to a whole imaginary of structure, of pure relation, of game, convention, and pure sym*On this point see my analysis of the relations between language and money in the chapter "La réduction du matériel," La nouvelle critique (1971), reprinted in Economie et symbolique, 115-24. On the question of the loss of the gold standard, see also chapter 5. "Les étalons figuratifs: L'or, le phallus," and chapter 9, "Le symbol insensé," in Goux, Les iconoclastes, 101-13 and 161-69, respectively. ''Figurative Standards: Gold and the Phallus'' also appears in English in Symbolic Economies, 112-21; "La réduction du matériel" and "Le symbol insensé" are not included in the English edition of Symbolic Economies. I shall return to Saussure's "banking" theory of language in chapter 5 below.

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bol reduced to mathematical operativity. This imaginary of the operative and autonomous signifier constitutes a coherent epistemological, philosophical, ideological, and literary configuration that pervades modernity; and it would be easy to indicate all the theoretical conceptions and writings that, in one form or another, spring directly from it. Among all these, the particular interest of Gide's novel is that it comes into existence at a turning point, straddling the nostalgic memory of a gold-language or a representative language, and the simultaneously positive and negative prescience that this language is no longer tenable, that it no longer corresponds to the actual conditions of the circulation of signs. To abandon covered or convertible language for language without backing is to leave behind all illusions of an objective reality to be reflected or of a subjective reality to be expressed. And here two solutions suggest themselves: one would aim directly at an a priori and abstract construction, producing a crystal that refers only to its own formal regularity and its intrinsic relational coherence; the other, in a seemingly opposite movement (which actually belongs to the same moment), would register the radical absence of any transcendental treasury of meaning, debunking the illusion of an extralinguistic referent and affirming in a tragic key the play of a floating signifier now recognized as meaningless. The constructivist approach (which harks back to a Platonic and Kantian idealism, though in the intellectualist form of structure) and the tragic-destructive mode (which sees the senseless drift of signifiers as semiotic proof of Nietzsche's affirmation of the death of God, the head cashier at the central bank of meaning): these two approaches, then, are "silhouetted" by Gide in the two characters of Edouard and Strouvilhou. If despite its hybrid nature Gide's novel contains a core of genius, it lies in his anticipation of half a century of issues in literature and the philosophy of language. As early as 1925 Gide saw the problem that was to confront literature head-on in a system of inconvertible signs. He perceived that the novelist was thenceforth doomed to a reflection on the linguistic mediumto a writing that was both specular and structuralist or again, radically, to an affirmation of the senselessness of language. Moreover, Gide's use of the metaphor of economic (monetary) value as his central metaphor (for all other values) seems to me

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eminently indicative of a social regime in which all religious, aesthetic, ethical, and philosophical significations, tending to lose their own solidity and their appearance of autonomy, yield to the bald perception of a direct link between economic and intellectual life. The novelist invented by Gide islike Gide himselfovercome by the economist's perception of the world. "Ideas of exchange, of depreciation, of inflation, etc., gradually invaded his book ... and usurped the place of the characters" (192) [189]. There is no doubt that, beyond reflecting certain particularities of the author (a Protestant and the nephew of a renowned professor of political economy), Gide's novel is a symptom of the collapse of certain profound ideological mediations between economic life and life proper. Existence tends toward a reduction to economic existence. Experience is subsumed wholesale into the political economy. This trend explains why Gide's novelist (like Gide himself) is unable to write a "genuine" novel: for such a novel presumes a psychology and a metaphysics, a complex of relations with ethical, religious, and philosophical values, insofar as they appear (correctly or incorrectly) to be relatively autonomous with respect to economic functions. Gide's novel marks (or prefigures) the moment at which economism becomes the only world conception that modern society can engender. It is important to emphasize that Gide is certainly aware of the historical moment in which both the subject and the writing of his novel are inscribed. Though written after World War I, the novel takes place before this war. Now between this "before" and "after," there occurred considerable and irreversible upheavals, not least in the economic system and, more particularly, in the monetary system that it comprises. For it was precisely at this time (with World War I) that gold money disappeared in France, and that England began to circulate banknotes without gold backing (in 1919). The regime of inconvertibility was intended as a temporary one, but convertibility was in fact never reestablished. On 30 July 1919, in his Journal of ''The Counterfeiters" (begun in June of that yearthat is, immediately after the war and continued until 1925, when he considers his novel finished), Gide writes the following: "For instance, the whole story of the counterfeit gold pieces can only occur before the war, since at present gold pieces are outlawed.'' 2 This remark is extremely

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telling with respect to the circumstances surrounding the writing of The Counterfeiters: the novel is conceived precisely at the time of a qualitative rupture in the mode of economic exchange, but is fictionally set at a moment in history when gold money is still in force. Gide's fiction is therefore influenced by the disjunction between past and present, between the vanishing order and the emerging order of the monetary object. Even if the action internal to the novel necessarily takes place before the war, at a time when gold coins are still in circulation, it is profoundly haunted by the disappearance of gold money and the advent of the regime of inconvertibility. Poised at the divide between two systems of exchange, the novel expresses the contradiction between a persistent nostalgic attachment to gold currency, and a realistic, or rather theoretical, acceptance of the dizzying novelty of inconvertibility. Formally as well as thematically, we encounter this contradiction continuously throughout the novel. To be sure, the overdetermination that causes the aesthetic regime and the entire mode of symbolizing to veer from representation to abstraction cannot be reduced to the state of monetary affairs alone. But the monetary situation is itself the acute manifestation of a profound transformation in social interactions. Thus the change in the status of money that is explicitly recorded by Gide in his Journal of "The Counterfeiters" is not unrelated to the switch from a competitive liberal economy to a more monopolistic economy. There is a close link between state regulation of the market and the inconvertible token. From the moment when the function of circulating money is reduced to that of a forced currency, no more than a conventional sign, its arbitrary value is entirely dependent on government regulations. The shift from gold money to paper money, and then to inconvertible currency, is therefore part and parcel of a qualitative growth in the economic role of the state.* And it is indeed the case that the disappearance of gold money in France and England is precisely contemporaneous with the oft-described shift from a liberal economy to a monopolistic economy, in the first decades of the twentieth century. In this new phase, money can be defined quite accurately as an *See below, part 2, chapter 13, "The Law and the Treasury."

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"instrument of government policy," whereas "the orthodox economists of the nineteenth century would have shuddered at this definition" 3even though money had already been the force behind complex power plays in the past. The subordination of industry to the banking apparatus (the increasingly evident domination of the industrial sector by financial establishments)a widely recognized feature of this new phase of capitalismcontrasts with the importance of industrial capital during the classic phase of the nineteenth century. This transformation is immediately translated into the status of the monetary object. Not only do banking operations on values (and therefore procedures involving scriptural money) by and large dominate all other monetary exchanges, but they also play a leading role in the production of commodities for the market. Thus the shift from gold money to token-money is one of the effects of a structurally transformed social formation upon the field of exchanges. In latching on to this monetary difference, and to all of its homologues in signifying practices, including language, Gide records a major schism in the mode of symbolizing. Shaping Gide's fiction is nothing less than the end of the embodied general equivalent's dominion over all relations, nothing less than the decline of ideological legitimation through the exchange of the equivalent (which, as will become clearer, is an integral part of the regime of representation) and the birth of a new form of legitimation.

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Chapter 3 Gresham's Law Especially in the first part of his novel, Gide depicts numerous operations that involve the concrete exchange of notes or coins, and that at the same time illustrate the relations among his characters as mediated by an abstraction: monetary value. Pocket, wallet, drawer, closet: all are physical places from which money comes, or to which it returns. Loan, gamble, purchase, alms, gift, investment, dowry: in these transactions relationships between subjects are defined as, even reduced to, a (quantifiable) relation to a sum of money. But these are not just isolated instances. Major sequences of the novel could be formally analyzed on the basis of purely monetary relations, even if an affective or ethical surplus value determines the vectored orientation of these quantitative currents. Thus, one of the most prominent narrative threads is indicated by a vectored series of monetary intersections. The monetary logic according to which the plot unfolds could be schematized as follows: (1) Vincent's mother has given him 5,000 francs (to help launch his career); (2) he should have used this sum to aid his mistress, Laura, who is "in distress," but (3) Vincent loses the sum gambling; (4) Robert de Passavant, who feels responsible for this loss, gives him the same amount to gamble all over again; (5) Vincent wins 50,000; (6) this success gains him the infatuated admiration of Lilian (Lady Griffith); (7) again he is in a position to give the money to Laura, but now it is to end their relationship; and so forth. It is thus apparent that, throughout long sections of the novel, the narrative chain follows the course of a circulation of value that dictates the successive relations of the characters. The story obeys a monetary logic.

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As if to reproduce this circuit of value on another level, the counterfeit coin affair develops. At this point, we are still in the realm of the "reality effect" produced by novelistic representation: a "real" counterfeiting operation is recounted in The Counterfeitersa plot that might be enough to justify the title, if this "real" counterfeiting did not, as it turns out, occupy such a marginal space in the interweaving of stories, and if this marginality were not accentuated by the counterfeiter's passing false coins virtually as a matter of child's play. Still, this level plays a major signifying role. It is itself part of the mise en abyme procedure: as if a reality effect were inscribed off in the corner as the objective referent for the metaphorical series consisting of linguistic, ethical, and paternal counterfeitings. At the same time, in this novel of which Gide wrote, "It must not be neatly rounded off, but rather disperse, disintegrate," 1 it is as if the circulation of false coins established some sort of communication between distant characters. Counterfeit money is the universal medium that binds together individuals who are otherwise only loosely connected. Thus Strouvilhou, the originator of the counterfeit operation, uses young boys from good families to pass the false ten-franc coins. Judge Profitendieu, who is Bernard's false father, investigates the trafficking. One of the coins reaches Edouard, via Bernard, and becomes the image of his work as a counterfeit novelist. The writer receives a visit from Judge Profitendieu: young Georges, son of the magistrate Molinier, who is Edouard's brother-in-law, is compromised; and for this reason Profitendieu wishes to hush up the affair. Edouard, to whom in his writing "it very rarely happens that I make direct use of what occurs to me in real life" (362) [347], must once again recognize that "the story of the false coins, as related by Profitendieu, did not seem to me capable of being turned to account" (362) [348]. He warns his nephew Georges and the boy's friends, who are risking arrest, to stop the trafficking. The children discard their remaining coins, and Strouvilhou, also warned, takes measures without delay. In this fabric of encounters and their repercussions, the strongest knot is the pointed, central scene explaining "the theory of the novel," with which I began my discussion of the novel. Here, in the body of a single circulating object, affective counterfeit-

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ing is brought back-to-back, or face-to-face, with the metaphorical counterfeiting for which it provides the image. Strouvilhou is simultaneously a real counterfeiter, the director of the iconoclastic review that aims to demonetize language, and an intransigent Nietzschean who claims to have detached himself from all collective values common to the masses. His counterfeiting takes on the aspect of a bald-faced swindle based on an individualistic scorn for all communal values. All around him, Strouvilhou sees conventions produced by a mass of men, that is, an "addition of a number of sordid units" that can never "result in an enchanting total" (329) [316]. His forger's ethics proceed from a fierce hatred of all collective principles. Since "bad money drives out good," why not produce bad money to take over the market? The adage proffered by Strouvilhou is quite precisely invoked by Charles Gide in his Political Economy: "In every country where two kinds of legal moneys are in circulation, bad money always drives out good.'' 2 These words express one of the most curious laws of political economy. The sentence (the law) analyzed by Charles Gide is repeated almost word for word by his nephew. The point here is not to evaluate the novelist's debt to the economist, the nephew's debit with respect to this uncle who took the place of André's father when the latter died prematurely. But a juxtaposition of the two works cannot fail to enrich our reading. What then does it mean to say that "bad money drives out good"? A surprise is in store for us: the borrowing between economics and literature goes both ways; literary fiction and economics stand in chiasmic relation to one another. Indeed, from the beginning of his analysis, Charles Gide stresses the fact that long before Sir Thomas Gresham, Lord Chancellor to Queen Elizabeth I, Aristophanes had pointed to this curious phenomenon and judiciously analyzed it in his play The Frogs. Charles Gide cites Aristophanes' treatment of the monetary metaphor: I'll tell you what I think about the way This city treats her soundest men today: By a coincidence more sad than funny, It's very like the way we treat our money. The noble silver drachma, that of old We were so proud of, and the recent gold, Coins that rang true, clean-stamped and worth their weight

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Throughout the world, have ceased to circulate. Instead, the purses of Athenian shoppers Are full of shoddy silver-plated coppers. Just so, when men are needed by the nation, The best have been withdrawn from circulation. 3 Intending to signify that mediocre citizens make noisy careers in the agora, where they circulate interminably, entering and remaining in social commerce despite their negligible value, whereas the best citizens remain at home, treasured by their families and friends (or else they are ostracized, forced to leave the city to make their value felt elsewhere), Aristophanes employs a cleverly calculated economic metaphor, actually articulating a law that applies to the circulation of coins. But why is good money used only at home (for hoarding) or abroad, while it is excluded from the most current circulation? Those who wish to accumulate coins for a possible emergency, explains Charles Gide, keep the best ones for themselves, returning the less good ones to circulation. Thus, during the French Revolution, those who wanted to save money held on to gold louis rather than to assignats.* A large quantity of good money thus disappeared at critical moments and the invasion by assignats only escalated. The bad money (the assignats or promissory notes, which were not only legal tender but also forced currency until widespread bankruptcy precipitated their depreciation) drove the shiny, full-weighted gold into hiding in individual coffers. This noncirculating monetary mass might be released into circulation only when a foreign creditor refused all other means of payment. The chiasmus emerges from Strouvilhou's application of the same law to the public's relationship to literature. What circulates best, and most quickly, is a form of language that is loaded with conventional meaning, expressing "feelings which have been taken for granted once for all" (332) [319]- The reader latches on to it because it is written, and because "he believes everything he sees in print" (332) [319]. Writing, the letter, the printed object appear to guarantee value as did the assignat, which, by virtue of being printed, was given credence. The author speculates on *The term assignats designates a paper currency issued during the French Revolution in exchange for confiscated lands taken as security.

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these conventions just as the issuing authority exploits the confidence that is due what is surrounded with the signs of legality. Thus, although language is padded with hollow, inauthentic meaning, its currency is assured by the credence accorded to the letter. Still further, this convention seems to render an authentic money suspect, unworthy of credence, and drives such a money to the margins of linguistic circulation, expelling it from the market of established significations. Only bad tokens continue to circulate. In a shocking and yet persistent inversion, authentic money is suspected of being false, for it is rare; whereas the currency in circulation, that which conventionally passes as good, is actually false. This dialectic is what determines Strouvilhou's strategy: it leads him to refrain from passing genuine money (a literature that rings true) on the language market, for it would be denounced as false and soon driven out of the dominant system of exchange. What he proposes is no less than a literature with a sledgehammer. Strouvilhou, in whose mouth Gide places unanswerable Nietzschean utterances, hates the gregariousness of language, whatever tilts the meanings of words toward what is common, average, middling, statistical, meantoward the perspective of the herd. And if it is inevitable that all meaning becomes communal, conventional, then the only possible act is to "destroy," to "pull things down," to "make a clean sweep'' (332) [31920].* Gide's Strouvilhou does not promise to release into circulation a new treasury of significationsfrom some new poetic gold rush, revealing rich deposits in the yet-unexplored recesses of the soul. With the promissory notes that are words, there is no way of enforcing the promise to pay, of increasing confidence in the existence of a gold backing to guarantee payment when due. Quite the contrary, what is called for is a massive inflation of words, their demonetization. The absence of any profound signification, any transcendental signified behind the frenetic cir*This linguistic version of Gresham's law is echoed by Ernst Jünger in a metaphor that takes a slightly different tack. What happens, Jünger asks, when the mind refuses to enter into commerce, to trade on its ideas? In his view, it gains in purity and in richness, for "the inexpressible is debased by trying to express itself and become communicable; it resembles gold which must be mixed with copper if it is to be used in exchange." Ernst Jünger, Le coeur aventureux (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), 10.

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culation of printed notes, must be acknowledged as desirable and intentionally sought after. Poetry will thus give up on representing anything, and even on signifying anything. Like the assignat, poetry will be a sign without intended meaning. "I don't ask for more than two years before a future poet will think himself dishonoured if anyone can understand a word of what he says" (333) [320]. Poetics will no longer strive for more authentic meaning. The universal counterfeiting of affective expression will be answered by a single strategy: a purge of meaning, a thorough scouring as by scavengers. "All sense, all meaning will be considered anti-poetical" (333) [320]. This Nietzschean mania for positive nihilism seeks to induce linguistic purification by promoting to excess, to the point of absurdity, the release into circulation of inconvertible signifiers. It explains why, in the thematic intrigue of counterfeiting, it is Strouvilhou who makes and distributes the false currency. But it is not certain that Gide's Strouvilhou exhausts the metaphorical lode tapped by Gresham's law as applied to signifying exchange. In this double repulsion of true meaning in the circulation of values, with meaning driven toward both Inside and Outside (inward to the individual's hidden hoard, and outward to an alterity that goes beyond the commonly met forms of the other) can be detected a law of linguistic economy that has much to teach us about what we call the Unconscious and about Transfer(ence)of funds, or of some fundamental depth of being. Authentic individual significations can never be completely negotiated on the trivial language market, but are necessarily held back in the innermost private treasure chest; or else they can be metabolized only in a foreign transaction, over the heads of the individual's everyday others, in a place that cannot fall for the illusion of false money: it is somewhat surprising to what degree this enigmatic arrangement in the economy of signifiers dovetails with a more general logic of exchange. If what we call the Unconscious and what we call the Other exist, it is perhaps because, by virtue of a law that rules signifying exchange as imperiously as it does political economy, bad money drives out good; that is, among individually experienced significations, it is by definition always and only the least that can actually serve as general equivalent in common circulation. It follows that the Unconscious is the treasury of significations that

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cannot be metabolized: the "good" money withdrawn from linguistic commerce, in which only everyday tokens are rapidly exchanged. Only in the extraordinary relation to a stranger (the Other), who transcends the boundaries of the arbitrariness of forced or conventional currencies, can this authentic money possibly surface from the closely guarded vaults of interiority. The Other accepts only good money: this is precisely what is meant by transference in psychoanalysis. In the market of signifiers, the Other is the transcendent partner in an external exchange, a "foreign trade" that accepts only genuine signifying money. From these multiple homological connections emerges a generalized Gresham's law that applies both to human subjects, as Aristophanes suggests, and to language, as illustrated by Strouvilhou. Just as subjects, objects, and signs manifest certain common structures of exchange, they are governed by a single law of circulation. Gresham's law is not exclusively economic but concerns exchange in general: communication.

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Chapter 4 A Numismatic Fiction That currency should appear both in the title and as the central metaphor of Gide's novel can be completely understood only in light of structural considerations that make it impossible to identify currency (monnaie), which institutes a certain system of relations, with money (argent), seen simply as a quantitative force, as purchasing power charged with affective value. If money can become a metaphor for language (and also for many other things with a certain status of value and of meaning), it is because it constitutes a particular form of economic value, and that this form itself admits a certain number of quite precise historical modalities. It is therefore necessary to go beyond the blurry affective notion of money, always located in the register of expenditure and acquisition, to accede to that of currency as a qualitatively determined structure of exchange.* Only then do *On the difference between money (argent) and currency (monnaie), the reader is referred to my text ''Remarques sur le mode de symboliser capitalist," in Psychanalyse et politique (Paris: Seuil, 1974); and Symbolic Economies, 30, 65-66, 128, originally published in Economie et symbolique, 76, 209-210, and Les iconoclastes, 153. The Freudian interpretation of money (argent) in its "anal" signification could not be applied to currency (monnaie); in the chapter ''Numismatics" I attempted to demonstrate the structural homology of currency with the phallocentric system of exchange. What excrement represents above all, in general, is a value of affective giving and exchange, a value that can be subsequently conferred upon any object capable of being given or exchanged in order to give pleasure to someone or for one's own pleasureand thus, in particular, but not essentially, upon money. We must therefore point to a radical distinction between money (argent), in its capacity as a "neurotic" signifier of gift and affective exchange-value m general, and currency (monnaie) whose real position or social function is as the general equivalent of commodities Money is a subjective notion, connected with the idea of wealth; currency is an objective concept relating to the social organization of economic exchanges. . .. money (argent) is invested with a signifying value that does not necessarily coincide with the objective role of currency (monnaie) . . . this signifying value of money, as gift and affective (Footnote continued on next page)

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all the registers for which money (by virtue of its homologous structure) can serve as a metaphor become evident. I have elsewhere undertaken to set forth all the structural registers presenting a "general equivalent" value-form, whatever the type of value.** Starting from the logico-historical stages of the genesis of the money formthat is, the "general equivalent" form of economic exchangesI attempted to show that the same structural genesis (with its four principal phases: the simple, extended, general, and money forms) could be found in domains that diverge widely from one another as to the "values" exchanged. Gold money is not alone in fulfilling the "general equivalent" function; in other registers, where it is a question not of economic value but of other types of value, this function belongs variously to language, to the father, and to the signifying element designated as the phallus in the dialectic of the unconscious. Gold, the Father, the Phallus, and Language seem thus to occupy perfectly homologous positions, all functioning as the general equivalents of exchanges in a universal logic of exchanges and values. The coherence and pertinence of this homology, which made it possible to extend the notion of the general equivalent in new directions beyond the realm of economic exchanges and values, were demonstrated through a historical analysis that confirmed the common structure of the various domains compared. It is impossible to recapitulate here all of the twists and turns of the process that led to the following conclusions: that the Father becomes the general equivalent of subjects, Language the general equivalent of signs, and the Phallus the general equiva(Footnote continued from previous page) exchange-value, differs essentially from the real function of currency as a universal equivalent not of any object whatsoever but specifically of commodities. With the signification of money, then, a secondary signification is grafted onto the real function of currency, this semanticiza-tion of the use of money must be distinguished from the real economic role of the monetary instrument of exchange in society. Thus, generally speaking, it is not moneyeither as an empirical reality or (still less) as an unconscious and neurotic signifierthat we consider to be isomorphic to the phallus; what is analogous to the phallic function in the exchange system of drives is the function of currency in the organization of economic exchanges. (Economie et symbolique. 75-76. Symbolic Economies, 30) **For an extended discussion of the structural homology of various registers of the general equivalent, including currency and phallocentric exchange, see chapter 1, "Numismatics," in Symbolic Economies, 9-63 ("Numismatiques," in Economie et symbolique, 53-113).

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lent of objects, all in a way that is structurally and genetically homologous to the gradual accession of a single element, Gold, to the rank of general equivalent of commodities. Thus analyzed in its structure and genesis is the mono form (monocentrism, monovalence) of substitutions and exchanges in the Western mode of symbolizing. Gide's The Counterfeiters (as will by now have become clear) seems to be a particularly fertile field for the application and verification of this complex set of homologies. Gide's novel provides the fiction of this theoretical numismatics. Its radical subject is the historical crisis of the general equivalent formthat is, the crisis of the dominant value-form of the bourgeois world. The theoretical interest that the novel holds for the present purposes of analysis is evident even if, on other counts, this work of fiction is not entirely satisfying as to the aesthetic doctrine that it promulgates.* By building the novel, starting with its very title, on the monetary metaphor, and by subordinating to this metaphor all questions of "values" and of "meaning" (values now revealed to be false), Gide explores the homology that exists among all the registers of the general equivalent. Above all, it is the homology between money and languageas befits a reflexive literary fictionthat constitutes the metaphor's most substantial core. I have already emphasized this homologous pair, and I shall return to it. But these are not the only registers of the general equivalent that Gide invokes. By tracing certain other thematic threads woven throughout the warp and woof of the text, I shall now demonstrate that the other registers analyzed in "Numismatics" are not absent, and that they are caught up in the same critical junction as language and money. For if the truth of language is contested along with the truth of gold, the truth of the father is also challenged. Counterfeiting is also, and emphaticallyeven first of allthe demonetization of the value of paternity. Fathers are not absent from Gide's novel; quite the contrary, they are all over the place. But they have lost their legitimacy. The signs of paternity have been divorced from the being of the father. The signifiers produced by fathers no longer refer to a *But one of this book's ruses, and a virtually explicit one, is to bet on its own theoretical interest (crystal prevailing over gold money).

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Truth that, going beyond their appearance as signs, constitutes their transcendental guarantee. Such is Gide's suspicion. It is not difficult to see this suspicion as corresponding closely to a certain crisis of linguistic and monetary legitimacy. Language, money, father: simultaneously metaphorizing each other in reciprocal homological interplay, their fundamental crisisthe crisis of a historical form of valueis exposed. Monetary falseness confers a title upon the crisis of the dominant value-form, a crisis that affects language and the father as well. More precisely, if as demonstrated in "Numismatics" a homology can be established between the father and money, insofar as both are general equivalents (the former for subjects, the latter for objects), an analysis of the place and the displacement of paternity in The Counterfeiters requires us to distinguish the three functions of the general equivalent. To this end, the analysis begun in "Numismatics" can be applied and extended here. Precious metal that becomes money through an evolution in the forms of exchange comes to fulfill three quite distinct functions: (1) that of the measure of values, (2) that of the means of exchange, and (3) that of the instrument of payment and of hoarding or reserve. This distinction, which appears to me to be a crucial one, has never been fully applied to the logic of exchange with all of its ramifications for parallel noneconomic forms of the general equivalentfor example, language and paternity. It is this distinction that underlies the differences among archetype, token, and treasury, and its relevance far exceeds the realm of economic exchange. It becomes evident that these three functions of the general equivalent are located in quite different ontological registers. Insofar as gold is the measure of values, it need not be present and available. It is possible, for example, to price the value of a given commodity in units of gold, without the actual intervention of the gold that serves this measurement function. The quantity of gold functioning as a unit of measurement need only be constant, as a standard to which everyone can refer. Thus, as Marx clearly states, because "the expression of the values of commodities in gold is ideal, the money requisite for this operation can also take the form of imaginary or ideal gold." 1 The terms employed by Marx, "imaginary" and "ideal," are apt

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descriptions of this particular register The difficulty begins when it comes to choosing a precise name for this register of the measurement of values: should it be designated as the ideal or as the imaginary register? Marx's analysis uses both terms, "ideal" and "imaginary," in conjunction. My previous analysis gave inadequate consideration to this question, on the one hand identifying this register with that of the imaginary (in the Lacanian sense) while maintaining that it was not unrelated to a world of "ideas," forms, models, images, that is, finally, of eidos, in a Platonic sense.* It now seems to me that the latter is the direction that the designation of this register must take. The term imaginary suggests an inferior being, a secondary or lesser status, which by no means belongs to the measurement function. For all that it is ideal, this function is not imaginary: it is neither dreamlike nor fictive. Indeed, it should be emphasized that the function fulfilled by the monetary standard, this measuring of values, is closely related to the site of archetypes. It is worth noting that the polysemy of the word archetype attests very directly to this link: there is absolutely no need to invoke concepts in order to affirm that the function of the standard of measure is shared by the archetype. Indeed, the dictionary definition of the word archetype includes this sense: "the model after which a material or intellectual work is made." 2 Archetypal money is a certain quantity of precious metal whose ''intrinsic'' value serves as the unit of measure for comparative evaluation of any other goods or labor. It is quite a remarkable fact, one that merits emphasis, that historically the general equivalent first appeared not in the form of circulating money but in the form of archetype-money. The standard as a unit of measurement by far precedes the coin as an instrument of exchange. Thus in ancient Egyptthe appearance of barter (direct exchange of commodities for other commodities) notwithstandingthere existed an ideal unit of measurement that made it possible to evaluate what was exchanged. Transcending all real exchanges is the immobile standard, the archetypal unit that can measure goods and services without itself being concretely present. Just as in the domain of economic values the archetype-moneythis unique *See my Symbolic Economies, 48, 199 (Economie et symbolique, 95; Les iconoclastes, 172).

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immobile standard (generally placed in the sanctuary), which governs exchanges without participating in themlogically and historically precedes circulating money, likewise in the domain of significations, the archetype (here in the Platonic sense) precedes the concept, which is the product of an exchange. I shall return to the subject of the archetype. Nevertheless, I should add that this precedence by no means signifies that the archetypal function of the general equivalent can be eliminated or supplanted by its function in exchange; it can, however, be relegated to secondary status. The second function of the general equivalent to command our attention is that of the medium (or instrument) of exchange. Here money enters circulation. The general equivalent (in the form of a gold coin, for example) participates directly in the market. Not only does money have an evaluative function, but it is the medium that makes real exchanges possible. Stilland this is a notable characteristic of money considered as a simple instrument of exchangethe matter of this money gradually becomes a matter of indifference, and it can be replaced by any sign or token whatsoever. Thus, if the general equivalent is an archetype in its measurement function, it tends to become a token in its function as the medium of exchange. Indeed, as a mediator of exchanges, money has only a symbolic existence, and can be replaced by conventional symbolstokens devoid of intrinsic value. This is the specific register of the symbolic (in the sense of the purely symbolic). Third, and finally, there are certain functions in which gold must be present in its metallic body as the real equivalent of commodities, as the money-commodity: when it functions as the instrument of payment or of reserve. When it comes to paying (not on the everyday market, but in a transaction for which conventional tokens are no longer acceptable), or better still when it is a matter of accumulating a treasure whose value will be considered as real and not dependent on an ephemeral agreement, gold is necessary in person, and no longer in its ideal form or its purely symbolic form. This new register can be designated as that of the real. In this case, a token-money will no longer do the trick; only money in its own capacity as commodity will suffice; and specifically what is required, as certain economists assert, is an actual fragment of bullion. It is a matter, therefore, of treasury-money.

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This analysis of the three functions of the general equivalent has shown us three possible registers of existence for money (ideality, symbolicity, and reality), which could also be linked to three different modalities of the monetary object: archetype, token, treasury. It would be impossible to overestimate the importance of these distinctions for a sociosymbolic analysis of historical phenomena, or for a hermeneutic approach, more particularly one based on an analysis of the status of exchange (in the generalized sense implied by a broad conception of communication). It would seem that Marx missed his chance here to produce a more subtle, nonreductive theory of the links between exchange and social consciousnesseven if he did recognize the "theological subtleties" implicated in the analysis of the money form. For on the basis of this distinction among three registers, it becomes possible to conceive ideology no longer simply as the contents of ideas, notions, or conceptions but as the structure of interrelations among ideality, symbolicity, and reality in a given social formation. Once the reciprocal relations among these three functions are understood as they are played out in exchangethat is, in the mode of communicationit should be possible to grasp the mode of constitution or construction of the "real." This is also why it seems to me to be of exemplary methodological importance to bring to light a homology between language and money (or more generally between signs and commodities), inasmuch as language and money both appear to be structurally homologous cases within a structure of social ''communication" that defines the historically specific mode of existence of a given society. Thus, for example, a society such as ancient Egyptwhere the general equivalent already exists but in a noncirculating form as ideal standard, while goods, evaluated in relation to this unique measure, are still exchanged on the market as if in barter, i.e., nonmonetary tradepresents a case that is very different, as to the structure of the registers discussed above, from a society such as ancient Greece. Indeed, in the latter case, we encounter a moment in the evolution of exchanges in which the three functions of the general equivalent are simultaneously embodied in the same monetary object, while remaining distinct functions. The gold (or rather silver) coin fulfills all at once

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(a) the archetypal function (it is identical to the archetype); (b) the token function (it circulates, it must be accepted in all transactions, it has a nominal value that is guaranteed by the state); and (c) the treasury or bullion function, since it retains in its substance an intrinsic value (which by right coincides with its nominal value, but which is in fact autonomous with respect to this nominal value, since when removed from circulation, whether kept as is or melted down, the coin retains this intrinsic value). The case of Greece, where monetary circulation resembles what it will become in the modern (postmedieval) era, is itself quite different from what we see today when, with the circulation of a token that progressively loses all backing and convertibility, the symbolic register enjoys a nearly exclusive domination both over the ideal register of the archetype and over the real register of the treasury. It is important, then, to determinefor each historical mode of exchange (economic and signifying exchange alike, in all the registers that we have shown to be homologous)the roles played by archetype, token, and treasury, respectively, in the logic of metabolisms. It will become evident that there are a number of possible economies of the general equivalent, and that their differenceswhich are not only economic but able to affect exchange in general and the status of value and meaningmake it possible to analyze the essential aspects of the "mode of symbolizing" of a social formation, including, among other aspects, the status of its aesthetic or religious representations. It will also become clear that if the economic and signifying practices of contemporary technological society are, as I shall emphasize, dominated by the logic of the token, in the register of the purely symbolic, this domination helps explain certain philosophical and aesthetic conceptions that have developed in this society, and enables us above all to predict how such a unilateral emphasis on one of the functions of the general equivalent necessarily leads to more or less hidden readjustments in the two other functions.

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Chapter 5 The Three Paternities At the beginning of The Counterfeiters, Bernard, happening upon a secret drawer beneath a marble slab topping a console table, finds a packet of old letters addressed to his mother. From one of them he learns that the man he has always thought of as his father is not his real father. From the beginning then, there is a crucial revelation, a shock, bearing on the truth of the father: the father is false. An illusion is brutally shattered, a lie laid bare: His Honor, Judge Profitendieu, the man of law, "the person I used to call my father" (58) [59], was only a substitute for "my real father" (58) [60]. Impelled by this inaugural discovery, the son rebels against the familial lie and leaves home, embarking on endless soulsearching (one of the motifs of the novel's rigid structure) to find a way to behave toward this man to whom he refers henceforth as "my supposed father, who stood in my father's place" (200) [197]. Whence the question that arises from the very first, before the cascade of counterfeitings in the realm of representation or substitution: can a father be replaced? What does an "in place of" structure mean in the context of filiation and paternity? Why is surrogation irremediably experienced here as usurpation, lie, falsehood? Is there no limit to the play of substitutions when it comes to the person of the father? It all begins, then, with a disavowal of filiation: an aggressive letter of repudiation addressed to the judge, the man of law, the sanctimonious "honest bourgeois" whom Bernard thought to be his father and whose name he bears. It is a letter of reimbursementor rather, of nonrecognition, of refusal to honor a debt:

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Sir, Owing to an accidental discovery I happened to make this afternoon, I have become aware that I must cease to regard you as my father. This is an immense relief to me. Realizing as I do how little affection I feel for you, I have for a long time past been thinking myself an unnatural son; I prefer knowing I am not your son at all. (16) [22-23] And, after two pages of explanations, the letter ends: "I sign this letter with that ridiculous name of yours, which I should like to fling back in your face, and which I am longing and hoping soon to dishonour" (17) [24]. Thus this false father's name, Profitendieu ridiculously resonating with the name of God (Dieu) as an occasion for profit, as a value on which to capitalizeis disowned by the son. Having borrowed this fraudulently attributed family name, the son returns it, or wishes he could return it, to its owner as a sign or emblem that no longer fulfills its (de)nominating function. The son is now acquitted of his debt to God and profit (God and capital) inscribed together in the name of the bourgeois, the authoritarian man of law. Bernard feels himself relieved of a burden. His letter solemnly declares that he will owe nothing further to his father, his so-called fatherneither affectively nor economically (since his mother was richer than his father when they married, it is to her that the financial debt is actually owed): "The idea of owing you anything is intolerable to me" (17) [23]. Profitendieu's son would rather know himself to be a bastard child, a "natural" or illegitimate child (a child of nature and not of law), than to be the son of this authoritarian judge who was himself the victim of deceit. From this pontificating man of law who "from every event of lifeeven the smallest . . . invariably, intolerably, extracts, as with a forceps, some moral teaching,'' who ''interprets and twists everything to suit his own dogmas" (22) [28]from this man the now disabused son, freed of his false belief in legitimate filial ties, revokes all credit and disavows all debt. That the The Counterfeiters, which weaves together various strands clustered around the core question of the loss of standards (metaphorized by the monetary object) begins with this falsified paternity clinches the very dense structural overdetermination of Gide's text. Furthermore, the connection that may be established between money and father is explicitly suggested by

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an epigraph Gide borrows from Shakespeare's Cymbeline to open the chapter in which Bernard, one day after discovering his illegitimacy, wakes up unable to remember what he dreamed. We are all bastards; And that most venerable man which I Did call my father, was I know not where When I was stamp'd. (II, v) The father (here as genitor) is the man who, through the act of conception, transmits a form: like the imprint of a seal upon wax, like the image struck on a medal or a coin. Natural paternity is the minting of a money imprinted with a stamped effigy. Just as a sovereign issues coins, stamping the substance of gold with his noble and regal effigy, which guarantees the coin's authenticity and legality for exchanges, the father imprints his image and resemblance upon the child to be born. Thus, forever and always, in accordance with a persistent imaginary configuration whose relevance to the mythical archaeology of the major philosophical dualism I have demonstrated elsewhere, the father is the one who confers form, while the mother contributes matter.* The father's seal is the "idea" of the child, for whom the mother provides a body, a materiality. Thus Bernardbefore divorcing his unknown genitor even more radically from the one who raised him, and while he tries to analyze "the surest thing I've inherited from my real father," i.e., his ''fatal curiosity'' (59) [60]returns to that enigmatic point of origin where the father is the issuing authority that imposes a form on which the authenticity of circulating currency is based. The Shakespearean epigraph suggests Bernard's own identification with a coin. Later on, he himself makes the comparison explicitly, when musing on the myth of "the blood speaking" in natural paternity (200) [196-97]. We are all bastards, Shakespeare says, in the eyes of natural paternity; and only by adopting a nonconceptional notion of the father will Bernard be able to escape the bastardy that he has just discovered. From this moment on, he will dream of "ringing true," of giving off "a pure, authentic sound" (201) [198] at the *See "In the father's image," in chapter 10, "Sexual Difference and History," in Symbolic Economies, 217-21 ("A l'image du père," in chapter 11, "Différence des sexes et périple de l'histoire," in Les iconoclastes, 196-202).

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least shockof setting himself apart from those who "ring false." Thus the difference between counterfeit money and genuine money is a metaphor (reversible, besides) for the difference between true and false filiality (and paternity). The son is like circulating money whose guarantee of value and whose original form issue from the father who stamped him in his own image. This paternity, first required in its real (natural, biological) function, is later summoned as a higher guarantee, in an imprint no longer springing from the conceptional, but rather as the indelible mark of upbringing upon the mind. Further on, we shall see how the monetary metaphor develops when Bernard, confronting Laura, finds himself in a new relation to his father and to the law. In the thematics of The Counterfeiters, however, the father is not simply the "honest bourgeois." For if Bernard's discovery of a letter addressed to his mother touches off the decisive crisis that disqualifies the magistrate-fatherthe man who speaks in the name of the law and who makes a profit off of Godthe figure of the father will undergo a second disqualification in the novel: this time in the devaluation of the noble father, the aristocrat with his ancestral prerogatives. The episode with the Comte de Passavant, Robert's elderly father, does not expose the genealogical lie of filiation, unmasking the imposter-father as a mere surrogate for the real father; in this episode, the Comte's death renders painfully obvious to all concerned what they already knew to be true: the deceased was the object of universal hatred and was especially detested by his own son, who nowin another question of authenticitymust recognize that despite the convention of filial love and the formalism of well-bred politeness, his heart was not in it. After the old count's death, Robert de Passavant confesses thus: "Look here, my dear fellow, I don't want to appear cynical. but I have a horror of reach-me-down sentiments. In my early days I cut out my filial love according to the pattern I had in my heart; but I soon saw that my measurements had been too ample, and I was obliged to take it in. The old man never in his life occasioned me anything but trouble and vexation and constraint. If he had any tenderness left, it was certainly not to me that he showed it. My first impulses of affection towards him, in the days before I knew how to behave, brought me nothing but snubsand I learnt my lesson. You must have seen for yourself when you were attending him . . . Did he

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ever thank you? Did you ever get the slightest look, the smallest smile from him? He always thought everything his due. Oh, he was what people call a character! I think he must have made my mother very unhappy, and yet he loved herthat is, if he ever really loved anyone. I think he made everyone who came near him sufferhis servants, his dogs, his horses, his mistresses; not his friends, for he had none. A general sigh of relief will go up at his death. He was, I believe, a man of great distinction in 'his line,' as people say; but I have never been able to discover what it was. He was very intelligent, undoubtedly. At heart, I hadI still havea certain admiration for himbut as for making play with a handkerchiefas for wringing tears out . . . no, thank you, I'm no longer child enough for that." (41-42) [45-46] No regret is felt at the old man's demise; far from eliciting tears and mourning, the Comte's death is greeted with "a general sigh of relief." The hateful man is reduced to a pretentious, hard, nasty, imperious figure who always believed everything was owed to him. This bad father who "didn't care to be spoken to first" (43) [47], even by his wifethis count whose name, Passavant ("passes first''), sums up all his aristocratic pretentionswill never be revered as the dead ancestor the mere mention of whom is enough to open up the dimension of the world beyond. Here the dead father is not a horizon of transcendence, a sacred site opening onto God. Instead of fulfilling the immemorial religious function of the ancestor as the object of worship, he remains a dead old man, lying motionless on his deathbed. In the attentive eyes of his young son Gontran, who dimly senses that he ought to be waiting for some experience of numinous import here, the Count will never become a dead Father. As soon as Séraphine has left him, Gontran falls upon his knees at the foot of the bed; he buries his head in the sheets, but he cannot succeed in weeping. No emotion stirs his heart; his eyes remain despairingly dry. Then he gets up and looks at the impassive face on the bed. At this solemn moment, he would like to have some rare, sublime experiencehear a message from the world beyondsend his thought flying into ethereal regions, inaccessible to mortal senses. But no! his thought remains obstinately grovelling on the earth; he looks at the dead man's bloodless hands and wonders for how much longer the nails will go on growing. The sight of the unclasped hands grates on him. He would like to join them, to make them hold the crucifix. (44) [47-48] A fundamental resonance is missing, as if a meaning, a value, a numinous intensity that should have sprung forth here and

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opened up a transcendental dimension (toward the world beyond the senses, toward the realm of the ethereal, the sublime) were absent. An immemorial valence that ought to have unfolded here all the richness of its higher meaning, to have uncovered the sparkling purity of its treasures, its metaphysical signification, remains unused, fallow, untranslatedas if, for all his son's attentiveness, this indifferent corpse still failed to summon up the boundless echoes that should emanate from a deceased ancestor. In the inability of the father's corpse to signal from the world beyond to his son can be seen the failure of the very function of signifying. For the sign, of course, has both body and soul: a perceptible signifier and an intelligible signified. Only when the signifying body refers to a signified soul is there a sign (and, in more general terms, representation or expression). Meaning, then, is the immortal soul of the body of signs, and it remains alive, transcendent, even when the body is dead. When the motionless mummy of the signifier no longer harbors any soul or signified, then something has gone wrong with the symbolic functionparticularly when the body of the sign is the body of the father. For what the corpse or tomb of the father ought to signify is the transcendence of the signified, the eternity of the spirit beyond the perishable matter of the body. In its most profound signification, the spirit is none other than the soul of the dead fathera soul that can come back to haunt the living like a "ghost," but that can also confer ultimate spiritual meaning, as the transcendent site of ancestral lineage and as unwritten law for the future of its sons. Now, to say, as Gide does in The Counterfeiters, that the father's corpse occasions no further thought in his son is to say that the symbol whose function is to produce thought, the sign whose function is to create meaning, has ceased to do so. The father's body no longer summons up the world beyond. This is as much as to say that there is no more transcendental meaning, or even: no more signifying function as such. Signifiers can continue to circulate in their operative value, but they have lost any evocative meaning anchored in a guarantee above and beyond operations of exchange. This is the crisis of counterfeiting: language, money, and father have all ceased to be the nucleus of a guarantee of meaning and values. There is no more transcendental signified, no more

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eternal standard. As a result, the counterfeiting process takes overin linguistic, monetary, and intersubjective circulation, and every register of the general equivalent structure. Whereas Bernard's discovery that his father Profitendieu is not his true father takes place at the beginning of the novel, and while the theme of Comte de Passavant's death is also present at the beginning, it is only toward the end of this book permeated from start to finish with variations on Protestantism that the motif of the pastor crops up. In the arabesques and counterpoints of the Protestant theme, the figure of the pastorlike those of the man of law and the elderly noblemanis placed under the sign of the problematic father. Here again the demonetization of paternity alludes to a fundamental collapse of transcendent values. Armand suspects his father, Pastor Vedel, of being false, of merely playing at being pastor, in a comedy of faith, a public performance of conviction. ". . . What made you say just now that your father played the part of pastor? Don't you think he is in earnest?" "My revered father has so arranged his life that he hasn't the right nowor even the powernot to be in earnest. Yes, it's his profession to be in earnest. He's a professor of earnestness. He inculcates faith; it's his raison d'être; it's the rô1e he has chosen and he must go through with it to the very end. But as for knowing what goes on in what he calls his 'inner consciousness' . . . It would be indiscreet to enquire. And I don't think he ever enquires himself. He manages in such a way that he never has time to. He has crammed his life full of a lot of obligations which would lose all meaning if his conviction failed; so that in a manner they necessitate his conviction and at the same time keep it going. He imagines he believes, because he continues to act as if he did. If his faith failed, my dear fellow, why, it would be a catastrophic collapse! And reflect, that at the same time my family would cease to have anything to live on. That's a fact that must be taken into consideration, old boy. Papa's faith is our means of subsistence. So that to come and ask me if Papa's faith is genuine, is not, you must admit, a very tactful proceeding on your part." (373-74) [358] Here, falsehood is opposed to sincerity, depth, authenticity of beliefs. In his son's eyes, Pastor Vedel is a counterfeiter of religious values. To all appearances, he produces signs that represent authentic values, but they have no backing in him, in his innermost self. Even though the monetary metaphor is not explicit in this passage, here clearly is another of the metaphoric modes of counterfeiting. Pastor Vedel's words are only tokens, not corresponding to any

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repository in the treasury of inner life. This is a case of inflation. This psychological dimension, that of the soulsincerity opposed to falsehood, authenticity to playacting, depth to surface, truth to liesis insistently expressed through the monetary metaphor; and this insistence merits further consideration, as I intend to demonstrate later on by analyzing the dissociation of the functions of the general equivalent, which results in the drift of the inconvertible token. The treasure is internal; it is interiority itself. Hidden inside, deep in the shelter of the "inner consciousness", it serves as a metaphor for the depth and richness of the inner self, the authenticity of intuitions, of directly experienced, tried-and-true images. And conversely the token, the false coin, and the banknotewhich have no intrinsic value but must be backed by the ever-hypothetical reserves of an issuing authorityunremittingly signify what is external, superficial, not experienced directly: the lie, the potential falseness of what circulates and is exchanged. This question of faith involves not only the speaker's but the listener's. What is at stake is the fiduciary (fiducia: confidence, faith, trust). The term applies to fictive values, those based on the trust conferred upon their issuer. Now the split within the father, as suspected by the son, becomes for the latter a permanent consciousness of schism. There is no longer any truth in thoughts and feelings: "Whatever I say or do, there's always one part of myself which stays behind, and watches the other part compromise itself, which laughs at and hisses it, or applauds it. When one is divided in that way, how is it possible to be sincere? I have got to the point of ceasing to understand what the word means." (371-72) [356] This is why the father's vocation cannot be transmitted to the son. There is a rupture in symbolic reproduction. The pastor's son, suspecting that his father plays the part of pastor, does not want to inherit the burden of his father's soul. Somewhere something has snapped. "You seem to forget, my dear friend, that my parents wanted to make a pastor of me. They nourished me on pious preceptsfed me up with them, if I may say so. . .. But finally they were obliged to recognize that I hadn't the vocation. It's a pity. I might have made a first-class preacher. But my vocation was to write The Nocturnal Vase. (374) [358-59]

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Thus a scatalogical darkness is opposed, as if in protest, to the fake gold of "force-fed" feelings. Perhaps the role of the religious man needs to be linked even more closely to the Protestant theme explored throughout Gide's novel, a theme to which I shall return in greater detail in connection with iconoclasm. The pastor is a man of the cloth, but not a father in the strict Catholic sense. The congregation does not address him as "Father." And it is because, as a Protestant, he is not an ecclesiastical father that he can have children of the flesh. He is literally, not metaphorically, father to a family: a father not figuratively but properly speaking. Between "Father" and "Pastor," as between Catholicism and Protestantism, the figure of the father is lost. The metaphorical dimension of paternity vanishes before the prosaic concreteness of profane paternity. Thus in Gide's novel Protestantism is consonant with a crisis in the father's imageboth a crisis in the image and a crisis in the father. When the paternal figure loses its relief, its face fading like the golden effigy rubbed off a coin in common circulation, the figure or character disappears from the novel and from life in general. What is left? On the one hand, the father in person, reduced to a mere structural element in kinship relations; and on the other, abstract ideas of transcendence, cut loose from their moorings. The present living father is dissociated from the measuring dimension he is supposed to embody. The implications of this split for a history of values will become progressively apparent as we continue our investigation. Here Gide's Protestant thematics are both index and source of the modernity of the symptoms evinced by his fiction. Thus, with Profitendieu, Passavant, and Vedel, what appears at first as full paternity soon turns out to be the void left by the father's absence. The man of law, the magistrate who discriminates good from evil and justice from injustice, who metes out punishments by evaluating the seriousness of the crime according to law and code (instituting an equivalence between the crime and the punishment): from the very first (all it takes is the discovery of a secret kept by the mother), this father is denounced as a false father. Next the nobleman with his name, title, and pedigreewho by his blood, his birthright (lineage and genealogy), is entitled to the prerogatives of nobilitythis father

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too has ceased in his son's eyes to occupy the ancestral site of the dead, sanctified father. Finally, the man of religion, who by the living word revives the meaning of Scripture, who preaches virtue and the path of good, who sorts the deeds to be done from those to be eschewed: this one as well falls victim to his son's suspicion. His words, words, words, his declarations of intention, professions of faith, sermons, and moral precepts notwithstanding, what does this father have in the way of true conviction, deep in his heart of hearts, his soul of souls? Something remarkable becomes clear. If instead of the social status of these three fathers (the bourgeois jurist, the elderly aristocrat, the pastor) their status as nonfathers in the eyes of their sons is considered; if in short they are considered in the light of their fundamental deficiency, which disqualifies them from carrying out the paternal function, what emerges unmistakably are the three functions of the general equivalent, with each of the three fathers corresponding closely to one of these functions. Thus in the register of reality, Bernard discovers that Judge Profitendieu is not his real father. The old Comte de Passavant, though in fact the real father of his sons Robert and Gontran, is not transformed into the dead Father, transcendentalized in the ideal register of measurement, to which I have referred as the register of the archetype. Finally, for Armand, the word of the father is cut off from any grounding in the treasure-house of inner consciousness, making his language a floating inconvertible signifier, with the token's status of pure symbol-icity. It is as if, by some striking structural necessity (of which Gide's systematic intuition is quite astonishing), the three functions of the general equivalent and the three registers they determine (reality, ideality, symbolicity) were played out by the three defaulting fathers of The Counterfeiters.* Here again, it can be verified that the triple register of archetype, token, and treasury that we have discerned in the functioning of money is not a characteristic peculiar to money *One significant aspect cannot be overlooked: the man who is first exposed as a false father in the register of biological reality (Bernard discovers that Profitendieu is not his genitor) will in the end be rehabilitated by Bernard as an authentic father in the neighboring register of archetypal paternity (in the sense in which this word is used to distinguish one of the three functions of the general equivalent); I shall return to this aspect below.

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alone; its logic can be uncovered at other structural levels governed by a general equivalent function, and particularly at the level of paternity. It will not be too difficult to demonstrate, further on, that this same divison is encountered in language, and that it makes possible precise distinctions in the determination of the historical status of language (and of signification in general) in a given configuration of exchange. In this threefold division of functions of the equivalent, we seem to have come upon a very generalized structure that, while manifested in economic exchange, far exceeds this realm and affects communication in general. Indeed, it is in terms of such necessary structures of "communication" that economic exchange itself must be understood.

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Chapter 6 The Novel of General Equivalents For the present analysisleaving aside all the novelistic intricacies of Gide's book in order to extract above all the lode of the monetary metaphorthe chapter that brings Laura and Bernard face to face (following upon the chapter in which "Edouard explains his theory of the novel") is interesting for its density and overall movement, but especially for the extraordinarily systematic series of signifying elements it brings into play. Indeed, it comprises all or nearly all of the registers that, dispersed throughout the network of the text, are directly or indirectly indebted to the money metaphor. In other words, all the major signifiers identified in the foregoing discussion with the general equivalent structure, since they present a logical and historical homology with money, appear in succession in this chapter, aligned along a single metaphorical axis for which money constitutes the exemplary point of reference. But further still, the general equivalent is not invoked neutrally. The moment Gide captures is that of a passage from suspicion to trust. Everything founded on the principle of the general equivalentmoney, father, language, selfhaving been shown to be susceptible to the risk of inauthenticity (counterfeit money, false father, unreliable conceptual abstraction, conventionally formulated self), is now perceived in its true nature: its potential, and profound, obedience to a superior law. Bernard seems to discover, thanks to his love for Laura, the possible existence of a full, authentic language, distinct from "bad" abstraction, of a true father, a respectable State, a sincere self that rings true and is actually worth what it claims to be worth. What Bernard discovers, or rediscovers, is how the founding,

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regulating dimension of the general equivalent makes possible a certain relation to truth and law (which no longer stand in contradiction to desire). Bernard moves from destruction to reconciliation. As a result he is explicitly contrasted with Edouard, whose novel The Counterfeiters bears witness to an acute crisis of faith in the dominant value-form. For the writer, as opposed to the naive adolescent in love, the very principle of exchanges brought to a certain degree of abstraction implies a schism from truth. If Gide places Bernard's declaration of love to Laura just after the decisive chapter in which ''Edouard explains his theory of the novel" to a reluctant audience, it is to contrast the adolescent's restored faith in genuine currency with the inner scission of the ideologue or "idea-monger" (203) [200], who senses that there is no link henceforth between what he feels and what he thinks. Whereas Bernard exhibits a naive faith in the possibility of escaping from abstraction, falsehood, and inauthenticity, and of rediscovering beyond them the riches of the heart, Edouard becomes the critical symptom of a more acute and irremediable alienation in an exchange system dominated by the general equivalent. What emerges from Bernard's speech is germane to this study for the metaphorical system implicit in it. Relations to language, paternity, the State, and the self are broached in this order, and in comparable thematic termsall of which, in turn, dovetail in the monetary image. There is thus no need to force this text in order to discover the problematics of general equivalents unfolding with surprising coherence. In short, the character invented by Gide can be defined in its relation to a general numismatics. It is no mere coincidence, of course, that it is through a relationship with a woman that Bernard moves beyondor thinks he moves beyondthe effect of fraudulence that attends all the elements entering into the monetary logic of the general equivalent. It is not by chance that a woman enables him to resolve the oppositions that appear insurmountable to him: between nature and law, truth and convention, desire and reason, heart and mind. In the highly consistent structural system that is set up in Gide's novel, two female characters (Laura and Sophroniska) occupy a very precise place in opposition to everything belonging to the logic of monetary abstraction, while in contrast a third woman, Lilianthrough the insatiable doubled desire of

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money and the phallusinflames the drives at the bottom of this system. In the relationship between Laura and Bernard, it is she, Laura, who will enable him once again to locate the thread of his true feelings behind the smoke screen of philosophical abstractions. He will return to his real affects, which had been obscured by conceptual thought. The dialogue between Bernard and Laura thus begins with his soul-searching, hairsplitting meditation in the style of Cartesian doubt. Bernard has been deformed by Cartesian philosophy, which has stamped him with an artificial mode of thought. But with Laura, he will regain his true nature. "I wanted to ask you, Laura," said Bernard, "whether you think there exists anything in this world that mayn't become a subject of doubt. . .. So much so, that I wonder whether one couldn't take doubt itself as a starting point; for that, at any rate, will never fail us. I may doubt the reality of everything, but not the reality of my doubt. I should like . . . Forgive me if I express myself pedanticallyI am not pedantic by nature, but I have just left the lycée, and you have no idea what a stamp is impressed on the mind by the philosophical training of our last year; I will get rid of it, I promise you." (195) [192] Fresh from his philosophy course, the young student has acquired a bad habit: that of metaphysical meditation. He has followed Decartes's speculative inclination, from methodical doubt to hyperbolic doubt. And now he feels he too is in over his head, without any solid bottom beneath him to shore up his certitude. Can one not doubt everything, including one's own existence? But if I doubt, it means I amand so forth. Bernard, the apprentice philosopher, interrupts the meditative chain to apologize for the professorial, dissertative mode in which his worries are cast. Behind the rationalist blather and the alienation of conceptual thought, there is the truth of the heart; and straightaway Laura hears this Cartesian philosophical discourse, which repeats the movement of the second Meditation, as a rationalization. Indeed, her immediate reply is: "Why this parenthesis? You would like . . . ?" (195) [192]. Now, Bernard had not expressed any desire; and his discourse was not parenthetical. Behind the abstract formulation of a doubt of metaphysical contours, Laura heard the displaced expression of an affective doubt.

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What forces Bernard to tune his language to his feelings, to make what he says coincide with what he thinks, is his love for Laura. Gradually, words lose their inconvertibility for him. The verbal inflation that divides the purely conceptual meaning of language from actually experienced feelings tends to deflate in the difficult effort ''to express a sincere feeling": "Oh, if you only knew how maddening is to have in one's head quantities of phrases from great authors, which come irresistibly to one's lips when one wants to express a sincere feeling. This feeling of mine is so new to me that I haven't yet been able to invent a language for it." (198) [195] It is thus no mere coincidence that, as I shall indicate, Bernard's relationship to Laura leads to a reversal in each of the registers where falsity had previously been denounced: the falseness of the father, of the concept, of money, of the self, and even the falseness of the State (first reduced to a simple convention). In his dialogue with the woman he loves (who barely speaks herself, except to encourage Bernard to overcome his reticence), all of these registers are systematically present, and in each case what had first been considered as the very site of falsehood is set on its head, becoming the site of a possible truth. Laura perceives Bernard's discourse as oblique, and she senses that this obliqueness is the effect of an unuttered thought. In the dialectic of love that brings these two characters face-to-facein proximity as well as oppositionLaura is the one who makes possible the expression of truth, the advent of authenticity. "You mustn't be ashamed of your thoughts" (196) [193], she tells Bernard; and also: "I can only care for you as you ate naturally" (200) [197]. Thus all deceptions, lies, and counterfeitings, the scaffolding of abstract transpositions that separated Bernard from himself, are gradually dissolved in the recognition of his feelings of love, and in his avowal of these feelings. This path of authenticity will progressively overtake and destroy all forms of counterfeiting. "It was you, Laura, who taught me to know myself; so different from what I thought I was! I was playing the part of a dreadful person and making desperate efforts to resemble him. When I think of the letter I wrote my supposed father [mort faux père] before I left home, I feel very much ashamed, I assure you." (198) [195]

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After language comes the relationship to the father. For if the discovery of false paternity was the novel's inaugural crisis, setting off a generalized suspicion of counterfeiting with respect to all values, conversely the return to truth takes place through a reevaluation of the site of paternity. It is worth noting that Bernard will be able once again to love his father's name as his own and to overmaster his anarchist rebelliousness only when he accepts the difference between the biological father and the father who raised him. Bernard accedes to the notion of a paternal function that, rather than being reducible to the male's role in procreation as genitor, consists of the transmission of a symbolic heritage through education. Then the man who is the false father in terms of biological genealogy can nevertheless be the true father (a pater, distinct from the genitor) in terms of his educational contribution. There was a very long silence. Bernard broke it: "Do you believe one can love someone else's child as much as one's own, really?" "I don't know if I believe it, but I hope it." "For my part, I believe one can. And, on the contrary, I don't believe in what people call so foolishly 'the blood speaking.' I believe this idea that the blood speaks is a mere myth. I have read somewhere that among certain tribes of South Sea Islanders, it is the custom to adopt other people's children, and that these adopted children are often preferred to the others. The book saidI remember it quite well'made more of.' Do you know what I think now? . . . I think that my supposed father who stood in my father's place, never said or did anything that could let it be suspected that I was not his real son; that in writing to him as I did, that I had always felt the difference, I was lying; that, on the contrary, he showed a kind of predilection for me, which I felt perfectly, so that my ingratitude towards him was all the more abominable; and that I behaved very ill to him. Laura, my friend, I should like to ask you . . . Do you think I ought to beg his pardon and go back to him?" (200) [196-97] Thus the surrogate father is also a true father when it is a question not of the deceptive "blood speaking" but rather of an authority and love located beyond the transmission of sperm. From the moment when Bernard accedes to this notion, he himself becomes a true son, able to say: "I almost get to like my name" (201) [197]. Now straightaway, after this declaration of reconciliation with his father's name (Profitendieu), which had previously struck him as ridiculous, Bernard goes on to speak of

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his affective relationship to the State. He had previously felt like an "anarchist," and "outlaw"; now he understands that if, as some say, "the State is nothing but a convention" (201) [198], it must therefore be respected all the more. The conventional character of the institution calls for an effort of integrity, of bona fides, and not for irresponsible rebellion. Bernard is an anarchist no longer. ''Convention'' is not synonymous with "lie": language, the father, the State, or money may in some sense be conventional institutions, but this fact demands from us a respect for the law in which they originate (or which they themselves constitute) and not destructive mistrust. As soon as he accepts his name, the name he inherited from his father, Bernard discovers the profound truth of the nomos of this entire numismatic chain. "I realized that the other day because of the indignation that seized me when I heard the tourist at the frontier speak of his pleasure in cheating the customs. 'Robbing the State is robbing no one,' he said. My feeling of antagonism made me suddenly understand what the State was. And I began to have an affection for it, simply because it was being injured. I had never thought about it before. 'The State is nothing but a convention,' he said, too. What a fine thing a convention would be that rested on the bona fides of every individual! . . . if only there were nothing but honest folk." (201) [197-98] Integrity, that rectitude of mind and heart which guides us to strict observance of the duties dictated by civil and moral law, here becomes the signal virtue, for it is the virtue that prevents all counterfeitings. A nostalgia for the authentic stamp of truth in one's relations to others and to oneself obsesses Bernard's reconciled mind. After his love for his father and his respect for the State, he expresses, in terms of the monetary metaphor, his love of what is true, pure, and authentic as a quality of soul, a quality of self. "Why, if anyone were to ask me to-day what virtue I considered the finest, I should answer without hesitationhonesty. Oh, Laura! I should like all my life long, at the very smallest shock, to ring true, with a pure, authentic sound. Nearly all the people I have known ring false. To be worth exactly what one seems to be worthnot to try to seem to be worth more. . .. One wants to deceive people, and one is so much occupied with seeming, that one ends by not knowing what one really is . . . Forgive me for talking like this. They are my last night's reflections."

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"You were thinking of the little coin you showed us yesterday. When I go away . . ." (201) [198] Here Gide goes for broke, giving free rein to the monetary metaphor of which he weaves his characters' speech. Not only language but the subject itself is comparable to money. Bernard implicitly compares himself to a coin. He wishes to "ring true, with a pure, authentic sound" in contrast to most of the people he knows, who "ring false," give off a hollow sound: what can they be worth? By seeking to pass themselves off as trueto pass their seeming off for being, to deceive at any price, to masquerade as valuable currencythey end up not knowing their true worth. The question of being and seeming is directly related to that of value, for when value becomes exclusively exchange value, then appearance counts for more than being on the intersubjective market. For others, value is in a surface that no longer coincides with the inner being, with the self. Laura understands what connects this dialectic of being and seeming, formulated in a monetary lexicon, to the little counterfeit coin. But she does not understand that Bernard is thinking here of his value in her eyes: "I am afraid that when I no longer feel you near me, I shall be worth nothing at allor hardly anything" (201) [198], he says, also wondering whether Laura would "have made this confession, if Edouard . . . had been worth more?'' (202) [198]. Thus, as can be clearly seen in yet other elements of The Counterfeiters, Gide presents characters whose being is entirely mediated by the system of exchange value. Gide reaches the limits of psychological analysis in his effort to formulate the psychology of his characters in the vocabulary of political economy. In so doing, Gide the writer represents himself in the character of the novelist Edouard, of whose work he says quite pointedly: "Ideas of exchange, of depreciation, of inflation, etc., gradually invaded his book . . . and usurped the place of the characters" (192) [189]. Taking the place of characters are abstract notions borrowed from life and from economic conceptualization. Bernard goes so far as to identify himself metaphorically with a coin. It can thus be understoodand this is one of the most interesting aspects of Gide's novel, which constitutes an exceptionally lucid diagnosisthat if the character neces-

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sarily disappears from this genre, its disappearance is tied to the political-economization of all social relations in advanced bourgeois society. It is as if the value-form consisting of the circulating general equivalent had become the "form of objectivity" that is suited to an entire society, and that reifies individuals' relations to each other and to themselves. What Gide has grasped, then, is that in a society mediated exclusively by commercial relationsthat is, a society in which the relations described by political economy end up as the only viable relations, the structural model for all relationsthere is a "depersonalization" of the subject (this depersonalization is expressed in Edouard) which has its literary correlative in the elimination of the fictional character. By presenting a novelist who leaves off depicting characters and reconstituting a "slice of life" in his writing, a novelist whose language is invaded by notions of value, exchange, inflation, devaluation, and so on, Gide himself places his novel at the historical moment when bourgeois individuality is dissolving in a progressive politicaleconomization of social relations. The novel is the record of a usurpation. The little counterfeit coin, the one Bernard had shown the novelist Edouard (and which turned out to be the precise image of the book Edouard was in the process of writing), takes us to the end of the chain, as the concrete illustration of Bernard's reflection on falsity and truth. In a single movement of love, with Laura* as its object, Bernard experiences the potential authenticity of language, of the father, of the State, of himself, and of money. It is significant that immediately upon regaining this sense of true value, Bernard expresses his opposition to the theory of writing propounded by Edouard. Bernard wants to believe in the author's faith. He disapproves of the abstract constructions that threaten to make Edouard's novel a "novel of ideas." Before relinquishing to Laura the fake coin, which had served to illustrate the novelist's method, Bernard declares to her: "That method of working he described to us seemed to me absurd. A good novel gets itself written more naively than that. And first of all, one must believe in one's own storydon't you think soand tell it quite simply?" (203) [200]. *TN: The name Laura is homonymous in French with the phrase l'or a (literally "gold has").

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For Bernard, the author's sincerity is again restored to its place as an essential principle of all writing. He opposes literary counterfeiting. He regains his belief in the author's truthfulness. Once again he argues in favor of literary faith: trust in the relation between words and things, an illusion of communication between the writer's soul and the reader's soul. By reestablishing embodied standards that circulate, Bernard restores belief in the truth of representation. Quite explicitly, the relation between desire and the law is changed. Before, Bernard felt like a "rebel," an "outlaw," an "anarchist''; now in his relationship to Laura, he experiences his desire as closely compatible with law, or rather, he no longer aspires to a freedom previously considered "as the supreme good" (198) [195]. "I took myself for a rebel, an outlaw, who tramples underfoot everything that opposes his desire; and now here I find that when I am with you I have no desires" (198) [195]. And at this point he is reconciled with his father, himself, and his name, as well as with language and the State; quite significantly, he distances himself from the false coin, which he hands over to Laura. Bernard rose. Laura took his hand: "Just one thingthat little coin you showed us yesterday . . . in remembrance of you, when I go away"she pulled herself together and this time was able to finish her sentence"would you give it to me?" "Here it is," said Bernard, "take it." (204) [200] This false coin no longer belongs to him, no longer interests him after the long conversation in the course of which Bernard achieves an inner reconciliation with the truth dimension of general equivalentsthat is, their function as standard of values (the ideal measuring dimension of the archetype) rather than their function as pure substitute (token) or as empirical presence (treasury). As in the Platonic scenario, Eros is what affords access to the transcendent measure. Thus relations to language, money, the father, the State, and the proper name are aligned along a single metaphorical axis, which itself dictates the central question of all: that of truth. This is the metaphorical axis of the standard of measures. Bernard's love for Laura is what enables him to rediscover the truth of

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values, to reconcile himself in a single movement with language, the father, the proper name, the State, all of which are directly and continuously subsumed in a metaphor of monetary authenticity. Bernard goes beyond the simple logic of pure substitutions, which leads to the infinite play of abstraction and convention in the absence of any originary measuring value for an anchor. But he also goes beyond the empirical logic of the present and corporeal thing itself. He recognizes a third register, which is that of originary, transcendent measurement. Bernard accedes to the idea of the measuring point of view from which real exchanges can be governed. Without the transcendental site of this point of view (which is not, properly speaking, an optically realizable "viewpoint") there can be only counterfeit money, through either the deceptive use of real values or the lack of precise correspondence between the reserves and the tokens in circulation. But this intuitive accession in turn has repercussions in the order of exchanges (relations to the world and to others) by making it possible to conceive an entity that is at once measuring, embodied, and exchangeable. It is quite remarkable that we encounter here, in a rigorous mutual "isotopy," all the elements whose structural congruence I demonstrated in "Numismatics." Here the theoretical approach introduced in that text encounters an exemplary interpretive application. Gide's novel contains, without exception, all the elements shown by my earlier genetic and structural analysis to be constituted as "general equivalents" of exchanges and placed according to a metabolic determination in the position of hegemonic, regulating signifiers. It could be said that this objective homology is what enables Gide to use his monetary metaphor so effectively. Beginning with an image of counterfeit money, Gide sets in motion an extraordinarily broad and coherent metaphorical field, because the sites of all general equivalents manifest an objective signifying homology. Locating all of the isotopic elements that Gide very cleverly and almost systematically brings into play makes it possible to assert that Gide has written the novel of general equivalents and the novel that calls them into question. This is the radical subject of the novelto the point where the fictional intuition that dictated Gide's arrangement seems to anticipate in some way the present theoretical analysis of these patterns.

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Chapter 7 The Crystal Archetype Very early on, Gide's notes in an unpublished section of his journal (cited by Jean Delay) precisely formulate a constructivist conception of the novel, in opposition to a simply representative conception. The aim of the novel is not to reflect reality, as a mirror would; it must be constructed a priori. "The novel must now prove that it can be something other than a mirror held up along the waythat it can be superior and a priorithat is, deduced, composed, that is, a work of art." 1 Already in 1894, in this brief manifesto of the novel of the future, Gide rejects virtually wholesale the traditional aesthetic of the realist novel. This conception may be recognized as the turning point that, in a development parallel to that in painting, will lead to abstraction. Similar formulations could be found in the writings of Kandinsky or Malevitch: the painting, no longer the mirror (imitation, copy, re-presentation) of external nature, must obey internal laws that are specific to painting, laws that cannot be drawn from the object painted. Abstract painting originates in the painter's a priori, in the internal source of all painterly organization, without a dependence on perceptive data.* If the theoreticians of abstract painting turned to Plato (as did Mondrian) or to an implicit Hegelianism (as did Kandinsky) in search of philosophical support for the revolution they were staging, it is clear that Gide adopts a somewhat Kantian tone in the formulation of his theoretical argument. For Gide it is *Cf. my analyses in "The Unrepresentable," chapter 8 in Symbolic Economies 168-97, which combines chapter 4, "L'infigurable," and chapter 7, "Société et sujet: La rupture nonfigurative," of Les iconoclastes (65-99, 129-43).

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essential to discover the novel's a priori forms, which it is possible to deduce transcendentally, without recourse to the matter furnished by experience. If the realist novel depends on empirical knowledge, the "deduced" or "composed" novellike mathematics for Kantdepends only on a transcendental knowledge: a sort of "a priori synthetic judgment." The shadow of the philosopher of Königsberg hovers over the young Gide's meditation, as this statement indicates: "The novel will prove that it can paint something other than realityemotion and thought directly; it will show to what extent it can be deduced, prior to the experience of things." 2 Thus the realist novel, which paints reality (the metaphor itself points to a homology with pictorial art) would grow out of an empirical philosophy (including the empiricist aspect of Cartesian philosophy), whereas the "deduced" or "composed" novel would grow out of objective or transcendental idealism.* It was this sort of a priori novel that Gide never stopped trying to write. But he never made good on this intention. With The Counterfeiters, a late work, Gide resumes a project begun in his youth, but he succeeds only halfway, diluting it in the execution. What painting had accomplished very rapidly remained for literature an enigmatic and shaky enterprise in 1925. In The Counterfeiters, Gide's planned "a priori novel" is an object of representation rather than something actually realized in defiance of all representation. Gide writes not an "a priori novel" but the story of a novelist who endeavors to write one. Day by day Edouard describes his work as a writer as a "struggle between the facts presented by reality and the ideal reality" (188) [186], or again, similarly, between "the resistance of facts" and ''our ideal construction" (204) [201]. His intention is to begin with the idea. True, he will admit factsbut only on the *Gide was indeed influenced by his readings of Plato and Kant. In 1891 he read the latter's observations on the beautiful and the sublime, of which he wrote: "It is really a moral treatise. . .. Morality must be a priori." On this point see Rejean Robidoux, Le traité du Narcisse (théorie du symbole) d'André Gide (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1978). I would state further that this decisive influence should be conceived not as a fortuitous convergence but as the philosophical and aesthetic underpinnings of Gide's Protestant orientation. Indeed, Protestant theologians have commonly affirmed Kant to be the philosopher of Protestantism; see, for example, Paul Tillich's remarks in A History of Christian Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 362.

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condition that they conform to a preexisting thought. "I accept reality coming as a proof in support of my thought, but not as preceding it" (394) [376]. Through Edouard, an unresolved, open-ended conflict between form and matter, ideality and reality, is aired. Thus formulated, these dictates are more Platonic than Kantian. Indeed, Gide persistently manifests a poetic Platonism. Edouard's formulas notwithstanding, it is not in The Counterfeiters that this Platonism is most plainly asserted. A passage of his Treatise on Narcissus is illuminating in this regard, all the more so in that the profoundly Platonic nostalgia expressed therein is couched in a metaphor of crystal: the same crystal, then, that lies beneath the visible gold coating of the coin that illustrates Edouard's project. In paradise, Narcissus dreams: When will time, ceasing its flight, give respite to this flow? Forms, divine and eternal forms! you who will reappear only with this pause, oh when, in what night, what silence, will you recrystallize? Paradise must always be remade, and does not exist in some distant Thule. It dwells beneath appearances. Each thing contains in virtuality the inner harmony of its being, just as each salt contains within it the archetype of its crystal; come a silent night in which the densest waters fall, there will bloom secret pyramids of quartz. . .. Everything strains toward its lost form. . . . 3 This text by Gide the poet, in the guise of Narcissus, sheds light on the Gide of The Counterfeiters in more than one way. The river of time flows ceaselessly, and Narcissus cries out for a restful silence in which Forms, divine and eternal forms, can reappear, resuming their crystalline structure; for beneath the surface lies the Form, intact. And just as each salt contains within it the virtual archetype that in a maternal fluid will enable it to become crystal, every object encloses deep inside it the invisible essence that will make it an ideal and eternal Form as soon as it is enveloped by the silent dense waters. The Form that was given up for lost, the object's crystal structure, its celestial idea, will reappear. Thus two worlds are in opposition: the world of temporal flux or appearance and that of eternal forms; a world of agitation, of passage and flight, and another, paradisiacal and celestial, in which is revealed the essence of things, a crystalline truth.

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One could hardly be closer to Plato. This striking text unambiguously explains what crystal, and therefore crystal money, signifies for Gide. Beneath the perceptible surface of a gold coin, made to enter into the ceaseless flux of circulating commercial values, there is another reality. The friends of Earth and the greengrocers of literature will not see beyond the appearance; certain devoted individuals and the friends of Ideas will discover the crystalline structure. This is Form, eternitythe pure novel, the Idea of the novel: the Archetype. There is a coherence of destiny and design in Gide's course of thinking. Forit bears repeatingthere is no more direct path to The Counterfeiters, Gide's late novel, than his precocious Treatise on Narcissus, the poetic theory of the symbol. Already in this beginning, crystalthe internal substance of the novel's counterfeit moneytells what it is, and the Platonic (and Kantian) aspect of Gide's aesthetic is lucidly articulated. Let us reread the following lines: Appearances are imperfect: they stammer the truths they conceal; these half-words the Poet must understand, then restate. Is what the scientist does any different? He too seeks the archetype of things and their laws of succession; he recomposes a world ideally simple at last, where all is normality and order. But the scholar seeks these first forms in a slow and timorous induction, through countless examples; for he stops at the appearance and, desirous of certainty, forbids himself to guess. The Poet, on the other hand, who knows he creates, guesses through each thingand a single one of them, as symbol, is enough to reveal its archetype; he knows that its appearance is only a pretext, a garment that hides it and stops the uninitiated eyebut which shows us that It is there. The devoted Poet contemplates, he attends to symbols, and in silence plunges deep into the heart of thingsand when this visionary has perceived the Idea, the innermost harmonious Number of its Being, which holds up the imperfect form, he seizes it; then unconcerned with this transitory form that covered it in time, he knows how to restore its eternal form, its true and fated formparadisiacal and crystalline. For the work is a crystala piece of Paradise in which the Idea blossoms again in its higher purity: in which, as in lost Eden, the normal and necessary order has arranged all forms in a reciprocal and symmetrical dependence, in which the pride of the word does not supplant the Thoughtin which sure rhythmic phrases, still symbols, but pure symbols, become transparent and revelatory. 4 The Platonic luster of these lines is by itself an Open Sesame, a golden key. The aesthetic exposed in them is bathed in the light of

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an ancient philosophical tradition according to which visible things are but appearances, clothing that hides the truth. What is important is to reach above (or beneath) these trappings to the heart of things, toward law and idea, toward the number of Being, and there to grasp the true Form, celestial crystalline Form, in which the superior order of things is revealed. Both the scholar and the poet seek this archetype, though they do so in two different ways: the scholar, slow and timorous, must accumulate facts and examples in order to discover Form; the poet need only receive everything as a symbol in order to perceive the Idea, the eternal harmony of the inner Number. He can then fashion this Form into a crystal, a work of language that expresses thought. The crystal of the work is this partial paradise where the archetype blooms afresh, thanks to the transparency of language. Such is the nature of Gide's crystal. That the inner substance of the coin in The Counterfeiters is crystal is no haphazard invention. This crystal bespeaks the hope and nostalgia of the young Gide, whose thought combined Plato with Mallarmé. For Mallarmé's work also, before Gide's, was dominated by this aesthetic of the Idea: speech, in its essential state, evokes the Idea; it suggests the flower "absent from all bouquets" in a reminiscence unencumbered by "the direct and the palpable." 5 And yet how far it is from the sublime reverie of Gide's Narcissus, dreaming of the poetic work as a lovely crystal leading toward Paradise, to the novelist of The Counterfeiters, who improvises a patchy specular novel, a pure novelso pure that no human hand will ever be able to write it! For, in actuality, it will not be a crystal offered by the poet in a grandiose gesture to the uninitiated who raise their eyes toward the empyrean, but rather a gold coina false onethat the novelist will place in circulation in the language market, for the literary greengrocers. How did we get from the Temple to the stock market, from the Acropolis to the cash register, from the empyrean to the emporium? How did holy language, with its sure rhythmic phrases meant for the visionary revelation of the Idea, become this representative currency with the "facility and directness" of money (to borrow a phrase of Mallarmean stamp)? How did speech, the stuff of "dream and song," become this coin passed silently from hand to hand, in the "universal journalistic style"?6

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Examining the internal coherence of the signifying structure with which Gide grappled, we must infer that it is most likely not wholly purposeful, premeditated; but certainly a fiction obeys constraints and patterns that give rise to an intrinsic rigor, beyond the author's reflexive cogitation. There is a veracity in good fiction that must be taken into account beyond, or before, the categories of the known and the unknown. It is as if the Poet's sacred missionto make the work of art this crystal in which ''the Idea blooms again in its higher purity"had been debased to the reflexive work of the novelist who builds upon abstract ideas. The idea loses its Platonic purity, its Apollonian numen, to become a concept, an abstraction of the intellect. Thus while Gide's aesthetic aims are animated by the same philosophical inspiration, from the Treatise on Narcissus to The Counterfeiters, there is in the latter a displacement toward the world of prose: a shift from poet to novelist, from the sacred to the profane, from Ideas to ideasin a word, from the Crystal that restores the eternal form of Archetypes to the paltry crystal circulating through the petty subterfuge of a counterfeiting. This "degradation" could not find any better expression than Gide's invention, which makes crystal the substance of a circulating currency. The eternal crystal of a thought that is faithful to the Archetype of things enters the language market, like ordinary money in everyday exchange. It would seem that here, in a nutshell, is a major evolution in Western thought. According to an aphorism of Heidegger's, Being is degraded to value. Let us say, in other words, that archetypal meaning "degenerates" into conceptual meaning; in the movement of substitutions and exchange, logos becomes logic, the "money of the mind." 7 Archetypal value descends into the market, participates in vulgar transactions, and thus, faded and worn through use, loses its sacred numen. The standard is no longer what measures, from its transcendent site, the meaning and value of signs and things that are compared and exchanged; rather, it enters into trade itself. It moves from the sacred transcendental function of Measure (ideality) to the profane function in which it can gradually be replaced by simple signs of itself (pure symbolicity). As a result, inexorably, the "tokenization" of the general equivalent stems from the very logic of intensified circulation, through the play of successive substitutions, with infinite displacements and delays.

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The history of value in the West is the inexorable shift from Archetypes to tokens, a shift that some, in language of a very different extraction from my own, would call a degradation, or even nihilism. The "history of metaphysics" is the monetary history of the economy, the evolution of what used to be a divine, numinous standard, situated above exchangethe inestimable source of what is valuedinto another value on the exchange mart. In the token system, the advanced stage of the reign of general equivalence, the dimension of the archetypal measure soon becomes the most neglected dimension of all, the one most excluded by the very logic of signifying metabolisms. The numen has become idea, idea has become concept, and the concept itself is no longer signification but merely a pure value in the "arbitrary and differential" system of the play of signifiers.* Gide's fiction appears at a moment in the history of exchanges when the universal equivalent, shaken in its capacity as archetype of the One (the axis aligning Father, Gold, Language, and Phallus), begins to lose credibility in its role as the Representative, as a result of its progressive demotion from this function to that of a token, a mere signifying element whose convertibility is suspended, hypothetical. Fiction, while trying to sustain a dimension of ideality in language (through reference to the archetype) imperceptibly moves this ideality toward a pure intellectual construction. The poem, adequate to the Idea, becomes the more prosaic novel of ideas. Pure crystal, which first (in the work of the young Gide) signified fidelity to the archetype, becomes in The Counterfeiters rather the crystal of understanding of which Hegel speaks 8 or even the "artificially composed" core9 that is the invisible substructure of every work of fiction, however splendidly gilded and inspired it may be. In sum, Gide takes the position that the gold coin is no longer credible (its guarantees have crumbled), and that the task at hand is to seek a new ideality in the register of constructive abstraction (the crystal). Here Gide foreshadows the crisis of an era in which structure tries to make up for the central collapse of all standard values. It was to take half a century for this aesthetic, *The reader is referred to part 2, chapter 14 below, on Saussure's distinction between "signification" and "value" using a comparison with money.

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philosophical, and epistemological configuration to realize its full scope. Thus the formal crystal is both the inevitable result of a world that, having put into circulation tokens with no backing, has lost its authenticity, andalreadyan attempt to replace this total devaluation of pure currency (economic and linguistic alike) with a structure capable of resisting erosion by wear and tear, an a priori construction capable of standing up to the non-sense of a representation that has become deceptive. Formalism, structuralism, and abstraction are all effects of the loss of credibility of all representation, and at the same time they are attempts to counter the devaluation and discreditation of profoundly experienced meaning with the eternity and solidity of a geometry of the intellect. Through its structural a prioris, the crystal of form attempts to regain the site of Ideas, but it can be no more than a rationalistic construction in the cultural milieu where capitalism and Protestantism have established the reign of the iconoclastic concept.

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Chapter 8 The Pure Novel and the Mise en Abyme Sophroniska, who already suspects writers of conjuring up characters who lack foundations in reality, doubts that Bach's musicand particularly The Art of the Fugue, that fine mathematical mechanism composed according to purely formal laws can become a model for literary writing. She sees it only as a monument to scienceto be sure, a monument turned heavenwards; but this heaven is as rational as that of the astronomers, and the soul that rises up to it discovers only an implacable, unbending machine. In short, Bach's Protestant God seems to be the god of philosophers and scientists. His music is constructed in the image, not of the shadowy arches of a Gothic nave, but rather of an observatory or planetarium dome. This work of pure literature, devoid of pathos and humanity, seems suited only to a chosen fewjust as in Plato's philosophy, the mystical contemplation of Forms beyond the seductions of the perceptible world and illusory mimesis is limited to a select elite. But furthermore, painting and music make their own demands, which are not the same as those of literature. Because Edouard cannot wholly abandon his former relation to objective reality, he is torn between two opposing sets of requirements. Though refusing to submit to empirical events, he does not completely move over to the side of pure form. Divided between his attraction to the "ideal construction" and "the resistance of facts" (205) [201], the fiction writer finds himself in a position that the narrator explicitly denounces: "The illogical nature of his remarks was flagrantpainfully obvious to everyone. It was clear that Edouard housed in his brain two incompatible require-

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ments and that he was wearing himself out in the desire to reconcile them" (188-89) [186]. But this antinomy in which he struggles itself becomes the subject of the book he is writing. "I am beginning to catch sight of what I might call the 'deep-lying subject' of my book. It isit will beno doubt, the rivalry between the real world and the representation of it which we make to ourselves" (205) [201]. The same notion is formulated even more distinctly as follows: "In fact that will be the subject; the struggle between the facts presented by reality and the ideal reality" (188) [186]. It has by now become clear that this rift between "facts" and "ideas," this opposition between two requirementswhich, though irreconcilable, together end up constituting the subject of the novelis metaphorized by the production and circulation of a counterfeit coin. The falseness of the coin signifies the aesthetic forgery of the novel, which hesitates between gold and crystal, between image and abstraction, between representative gilding and ideal transparence. There is no homogeneous fusion, no perfectly smelted alloy, no consistent stamp of integrity. And it is fairly clear that the contradictionthe logical failure, one might say, that Gide choses to attribute to his fictive figure of the novelistis also the major contradiction with which he himself struggles as the writer of The Counterfeiters: with the result that his book constitutes a false novel, still heavily influenced by the codes of the most classic realism (this is all too painfully obvious at times), but whose devices are also affected by another imperative.* The novel's device consists of a succession of cross-sections cut into the monocentric perspective, multiplying the viewpoints in a literary version of "cubism" (to which I shall return). Above all, the mise en abyme of the "counterfeiters" probes the mode of *It is this aspect which, predictably, has elicited the most negative judgments of this novel. The Counterfeiters remains Gide's most severely criticized work. Critics have disparaged its substance as volatile (Jean Hytier, André Gide [Paris: Charlot, 1946]) or as paltry (Germaine Braée, André Gide, l'insaisissable Protée [Paris: Belles Lettres, 1953]); it has been labeled impossible to summarize (Wallace Fowlie, André Gide, His Life and Art [New York: Macmillan, 1965], as well as confusing. To such criticism Gide responded: "It would have been simple to muster widespread support by writing The Counterfeiters after the manner of familiar novels, describing places and characters, analyzing feelings, explaining situations. . .. "Journal d'André Gide, 1889-1939 (Paris: Gallimard-P1éiade, 1948), 938.

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representation from within the representation itself. Gide's method, his crafty work of forgery, is to place en abyme* his reflexive struggle with the text he is writing (or with literature in general) through the character of Edouard, while deflecting this relation enough so that Edouard at work on the fictive Counterfeiters is and is not the possible image of the scriptor of the real Counterfeiters. This first contrivance is itself complicated by the unexpected intervention of the voice defining itself as that of the author of the whole novel that the reader is in the process of reading; this author's voice reflects upon the psychology of all the characters he has just invented, wondering how he is to continue the story. The result is a combination of nesting and dislocation that requires us to distinguish at least three "writers" in connection with the text we are reading: (1) the scriptor of The Counterfeiters (referring to the instance responsible for generating the writing of which André Gide is the agent); (2) the narrator of The Counterfeiters (the instance of enunciation of the novel, at first invisible but in at least two places surfacing linguistically as the "author" of what we have just read, who "judges his characters,"** including Edouard, as purely fictional creations; and (3) the writer Edouard, the central figure in Gide's Counterfeiters, who plans to write the fictive book entitled The Counterfeiters. All three "writers" could be said, quite properly, to be writing a novel entitled The Counterfeiters, even though these three "beings" occupy quite different logical and ontological positions. However, there is yet another "writer," a fourth, who sends this mirror effect on a path to infinity. Edouard's conception of the book he is planning to write splits it between the presentation of reality and an effort to stylize it: ''In order to arrive at this effectdo you follow me?I invent the character of a novelist, whom I make my central figure; and the subject of the book, if you must have one, is just that very struggle between *On the mise en abyme in connection with reflexive or specular literature as well as with the visual arts, the reader is referred to Lucien Dällenbach's illuminating work Le récit spéculaire: Essai sur la mise en abyme (Paris: Seuil, 1977), available in English translation as The Mirror in the Text, trans. Jeremy Whitely with Emma Hughes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). **The title of chapter 7 of the second part of The Counterfeiters is "L'auteur juge ses personnages."

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what reality offers him and what he himself desires to make of it" (187-88) [185]. This writing stratagem invented by Edouard for his novel The Counterfeiters is precisely the same as the stratagem proposed by Gide in his novel of the same title, in which he indeed creates a novelist, Edouard, as the main character. Edouard's position in The Counterfeiters is therefore homologous to the position of the novelist who is to be the central figure in Edouard's fictive novel entitled The Counterfeiters. The effect of this type of construction en abyme is to open a window onto a dizzying view of infinity. Here the eye of the deviceor its blind spotbecomes apparent as the vanishing point where the representation is seen reproducing itself in virtual infinity, without any possible endpoint. The novel about a novel about a novel (ad infinitum) pulls the bottom out from under the representation by reflecting it.* Now just as this Edouard invented by Edouard enables the novelist within Gide's novel to resolve the schism between facts and a priori construction, the novelist in Gide's novel, Edouard, is clearly what makes it possible for Gide to bridge the same gap. Thus writing within writingwhich leads to the production of a "false" novelis the fundamental stratagem making it possible to resolve the eternal conflict between "the facts presented by reality *The first examples Gide gives (in an 1893 journal entry) of what he refers to as "mise en abyme"borrowing an expression belonging to the art of heraldryare not Hamlet and Wilhelm Meister but certain pictorial instances of the device: "Thus, in certain paintings by Memling or Quentin Metzys, a small dark convex mirror reflects in turn the interior of the room where the scene of the paintings takes place." André Gide, Journal, 1889-1939, 41. The allusion to Quentin Metzys is all the more striking because one of this artist's best-known paintings using the technique of the mise en abyme in the form of a convex mirror is entitled The Banker and His Wife, or The Gold-Weigher. The painting (located in the Louvre, where Gide was able to study it) thus prefigures rather curiously the conjunction that Gide will illustrate in The Counterfeiters, joining the mise en abyme device with the theme of assaying the authenticity of gold, of measuring its value. It is only natural to wonder about the possibility of some necessary connection between, on the one hand, the theme of the evaluation of gold and, on the other, the mechanism of infinitely doubled representation (the speculative and the specular, speculation and specularity), a stratagem that seems to persist until it reaches a breaking point in Gide's novel. No doubt the virtually transcendental question of the measuring point of view frames both the painterly device of monocentric perspective and the mechanism of economic evaluation through the general equivalent (gold) which functions as the unique measure of exchangeable values. Both instances air the question of the point of view from which evaluation (or representation) is made. It is worth noting that the mise en abyme of The Counterfeiters is more radical and complex than that of Gide's Paludes, which is not "infinite."

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and the ideal reality" (188) [186] by exposing this conflict. Through the nested structure of the novel about the novel within the novel, the principal subject of the book becomes the question of representation. Representing representation is the only means of exhibiting and treating the "deep-lying subject" (205) [201] of the novel, the problem of "the rivalry between the real world and the representation of it which we make to ourselves" (205) [201]. At certain crucial points, however, the raise en abyme structure almost inevitably induces the reader to assume a simple equation between Edouard writing The Counterfeiters and Gide writing the novel by the same title. This identification between a real agent and a fictional character no longer involves a naive blurring between author and narrator, but rather a meticulously calculated mirror mechanism by means of which the scriptor inserts an image of his own writing process within the frame of his writing. The parallel publication of the Journal of "The Counterfeiters, "in which Gide reports on the process of writing his novelin terms that could at times be uttered by the fictive novelistcomplicates the speculation and the dislocation. The strategy is that of the painting by the painter who paints himself in the process of painting the painting that we see already painted: the obvious supposition is that in the fictive painting can be found a progressively smaller, implicitly infinite image of the painter and the paintingjust as in Gide's novel The Counterfeiters, the character Edouard is writing a novel entitled The Counterfeiters in which a novelist character is writing a novel, a brief description of which recalls the structure of The Counterfeiters, and so on. This device indicates not a radical rejection of representation but rather an exploration of its limits, in the form of a question that doubles back upon itself: what does representation represent? Inside the frame another frame is outlined: the frame within which the painting is shown itself becomes an object of representation. The representation of the frame becomes the frame of the representation. Or better still: an active reflection upon the conditions of production of the representation leads to this mirror structure in which the act of producing a novel becomes the subject of the novel, in an infinite loop whose speculative principle is supplied by modernity, which recognizes

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the virtually ontological value of a veritable scriptural cogito as the foundation of a new form of literature. To be sure, Gide does remain at the center. A writer figure is the "main character," and he is the primary agent for the deployment of the fiction. However, not only does this position allow other points of view that cannot be reduced to its own perspective to subsist, but furthermore, it is devoured from the inside by the raise en abyme procedure, not confined to a simple reflecting consciousness but opening onto an infinite image of the process of production of the literary device. Thus the centrality of the "hero" is no longer simply epic, or even biographical. It is no longer what guarantees the "point of view" and makes it possible to constitute the world in painting. What matters most of all is no longer the representation of the world but, in a crucial conversion, the operation that produces this representation. The goal of the book is now to furnish an image not of reality but of the process of production that makes it possible to constitute an image of reality. This conversion is both thematized and practiced by Gide in such a way that the thematization and the practice refer to each other reciprocally in the mirror effect of the mise en abyme. Thus, in a sort of fictive version of Gide's Journal of "The Counterfeiters, ''Edouard reflects upon the novel he is in the process of writing: "To tell the truth, of the actual book not a line has been written. But I have worked at it a great deal. I think of it every day and incessantly. I work at it in a very odd manner, as I'll tell you. Day by day in a note-book, I note the state of the novel in my mind; yes, it's a kind of diary that I keep as one might do of a child. . .. That is to say. that instead of contenting myself with resolving each difficulty as it presents itself (and every work of art is only the sum or the product of the solutions of a quantity of small difficulties), I set forth each of these difficulties and study it. My note-book contains, as it were, a running criticism of my novelor rather of the novel in general. Just think how interesting such a notebook kept by Dickens or Balzac would be; if we had the diary of the Education Sentimentale or of The Brothers Karamazof!the story of the workof its gestation! How thrilling it would be . . . more interesting than the work itself. . . ." Edouard vaguely hoped that someone would ask him to read these notes. But not one of the three showed the slightest curiosity. Instead: "My poor friend," said Laura, with a touch of sadness, "it's quite clear that you'll never write this novel of yours." "Well, let me tell you," cried Edouard impetuously, "that I don't care. Yes, if I don't succeed in writing the book, it'll be because the history of the

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book will have interested me more than the book itselftaken the book's place; and it'll be a very good thing." (189) [18687] The novel, in "gestation" like a child, is no longer considered a final product, completed, closed, delivered for consumption "as is" by the reader, a "bottom line'' bearing no traces of the process that produced it. What is most worthy of our attention is not the work but the history of the work. Instead of serving up the solutions to difficulties (as if every work were a sum or a product of such solutions), the writer unleashes the difficulties, lets them loose upon the text. Instead of a finished novel, what commands our attention now is a report on the problematic and critical process of the novel (of the one in the process of being written, but also the process of the novel in general). "Yes, if I don't succeed in writing the book, it'll be because the history of the book will have interested me more than the book itselftaken the book's place; and it'll be a very good thing" (189) [186-87]. Here Gide thematizes a turning point in the interest of the novel which seems to me to be of considerable importance, inasmuch as this new interest, still hesitant and enigmatic in literature at the time when Gide wrote The Counterfeiters, has since acquired both a theoretical and a practical import that retrospectively validate that earlier moment. It is as if exclusive attention to the signifying object were supplanted by an interest in the process of producing the object, the latter seen as containing more meaning (value) than the finished object holds. The generation of the signifying object becomes charged with all the passion formerly reserved for the completed object. On the one hand, there is the work process, the work in progress (in Gide's own words, "running criticism,'' "history," "gestation"); on the other there is the finished work, the "sum" or "product." The displacement is clearly expressed here in terms that suggest the vocabulary of political economy (travail, produit) at the same time as they signify something specific in the field of literature. It seems to me particularly striking that the mechanism of Gide's novel, expressed in the title metaphor that he puts into circulation, is founded entirely upon this double function. For if Gide's operation in The Counterfeiters consists entirely of framing the literary question in terms of the political economy, it is of no small significance that the question is put not only in terms of money

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but also in terms of the relation between labor and product. Through arguments that inextricably involve both economic exchange and linguistic exchange, the relations between the textual product and the labor of language are displaced and problematized as relations between the commodity (including the money-commodity) and the labor that produces this commodity. The deepest meaningfor it is the origin of meaningis not in the work produced but in the production of the work, a history that is labor and gestation. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Gide rediscovers in the novel a condition that Hegel had already formulated and applied to philosophical thought at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Truth does not "remain detached from diversity, like a finished article from the instrument that shapes it." The path itself is part of the truthleading us to the inevitable monetary metaphor, which converges remarkably with Gide's imaginary: "[T]ruth is not like a stamped coin that is issued ready from the mint and so can be taken up and used, "writes Hegel. 1 Truth is not like a capitalizable gold money but rather like productive labor that gives all money its value. Thus, just as for the philosopher of history the hard labor of consciousness upon itself and in its struggles with its other is the path truth takes and what gives truth value, so for Gide it is not the finished worklike some gold money issued on the language marketthat has value but rather the trace of the patient day-today history of the creation of the work; or yet again, perhaps finally, its wholly ideal construction, its crystal. Furthermore, as everything clearly points to the fact that this displacement involves the question of representation, we observe the composition of a singularly dense fabric of overdetermination that makes Gide's book, behind the classical novel at the surface, a locus of fracture, reflection, and diffraction, and truly the strange crystal that it was intended to constitute, beneath an indistinguishable shell. The reification of the commodity and money is laid bare in the revelation, beneath the object's appearance of autonomy and of value in itself, of an operation of production that is the source of all value. Still more generally, reification is the mode of objectivity (or of apparent objectivity) that prevails in a sociosymbolic system dominated by the circulating general equivalent value-

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form; the critique of reification would thus appear to uncover this false objectivity whose manifestations include a certain type of representation. Does Gide's novel not present a homologous criticism of the literary object? With the labor of construction revealed behind the facade of the realist novel that purports to be a full and immediate representation, is the value (or meaning) of the resulting object not displaced toward the operation of production itself? This displacement is necessarily accompanied by a discrediting of the representational system dominated by the realist object. Is the result not a critique of linguistic reificationframed, significantly, by the monetary metaphor? I put forth these questions not to deduce from them that Gide consciously applied to literature a critique taking its model from Marxalthough it is known that Gide drew increasingly closer to the theoretical positions of Marxism precisely in the years following the writing of The Counterfeiters. If indeed Gide provides in this fiction a sort of "critique of the literary economy," calling into question the novelistic object (a "mental commodity") along the lines of Marx's dismantling of economic processes (in a parallel that could never have occurred to Marx, attached as he was to a realist vision of literature), it is because both Gide and Marx are part of the same historical process, and especially because of the development of certain critical orientations that make it possible to challenge this process. In an earlier text, "The Inscription of Labor," 2 I put forth the basic elements (and the critical consequences) of a homology between monetary value and linguistic meaning in terms that may shed some light on Gidean "counterfeiting." Instead of exchange-meaning (which is also representation-meaning, as corroborated by Mallarmé's metaphor) corresponding to the dominance of circulation over production and to the reification of the general equivalent, the critical scriptor proposes a production-meaning. The labor of the text is no longer to be subordinated to a meaning defined by the semantic market, which is governed by the exchangist principle of general equivalence. In Gide's text, counterfeiting consists of maintaining an exchangemeaning (in the gold layer covering the coin) while subverting this appearance through an underlying production-meaning (the crystal, metaphorizing the constructive aspect). It is well worth noting that Gide sets up this opposition directly on the basis of

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the monetary metaphor. It is as if the sphere of exchange corresponded to gold-languagewith exchange to be understood here as implying the equivalence of the object and what signifies it in the act of representation, a relationship precisely recalling Mallarmé's use of money as a metaphor for expository prose; whereas production, whether understood as textual labor or as the idealist generation of a meaning more "originary" than realist representation, corresponded to the crystalline interior. Something crucial is occurring in this process, something that brings us to the limits of the sociosymbolic system in which our thought is at present constituted. There is a return, a critical retracing, not only from the product to the labor of production but also from the signifier to what generates it: we are confronted with the process by which meaning is engendered. For the same movement reaches at once beyond the product to the question of the source and measure of Value, and beyond perceptible signs, representations, and images to the productive and measuring source of Meaning. Indeed, in both cases we come upon the site of a measure beyond exchange, a measure of transcendental effect. The site of measurement necessarily harks back to the position of an "arche" from which evaluation can take place, and which therefore makes possible the transcendental regulation of substitutions.* It is therefore no accident that, along with the monetary metaphor linking Gide's concerns to the political economy, we find in addition an altogether different horizon, a philosophical one, in which we recognize a struggle with Platonic or Kantian preoccupationsincludng a priori ideas or even archetypes that constitute the locus of the question of the productive source of meaning. In Mallarmé, as in Gide, the critique of the representational reification of language is founded upon Platonic allusions. Nevertheless, the critical movement outlined by both of these modern writers is closely connected to the critique of economic reification. In fact, the two movements are homologous, and each inscription of the monetary metaphor strengthens the homology. It is not the monetary metaphor itself but rather its coherent use that proves the solidity of this homol*In "Numismatics" (Symbolic Economies 9-63: Economie et symbolique, 53-113) I attempted to demonstrate the structural necessity of this site.

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ogy, which could also be proven independently of this specific confirmation. The moment described here can be discerned in the long run as arising from a new exploration of value, implicating the very notions of meaning, origin, circulation, production of meaning, and so on. The parallel between language and money, literature and the political economy, is not a mere juxtaposition, but is made possible and operative by processes at work simultaneously in both economies. What we have here is a change in the principle of legitimation, a change that reverberates far beyond literatureso far as to transform the sociosymbolic regime itself. It is as if we are witnessing a shift from a legitimation based on the exchange of equivalents and on representation (the two aspects being closely correlative) to another type of legitimation, still tentative, that seeks to found itself directly on the production process itself, or, still more profoundly, on the site of Measures, which holds the meaning of this process. As a transition between the "perspectival" (realist) novel and an abstract type of novel, The Counterfeiters couldto press further the homology with the history of paintingbe designated a cubist novel. In its internal form, cubism is that brief moment in the history of European painting when the object is still represented or figured, but when it is also disfigured by the internal logic of the painting. The destruction of monocentric perspective here reaches a critical pass: it is effected through the multiplication of points of view with respect to a single object, all combined in the same painting. Cubism destroys perspective by pluralizing angles of vision and connecting them to each other according to a nonobjective logic. In this sense, it is the immediate precursor of abstract art, all the while remaining ultimately attached to representation. Delaunay clearly saw that, in "introducing several points of view upon an object on the canvas," 3 cubism still belongs to the realm of perspectival vision. It modifies this vision, exposing the pictorial convention of perspective, but never completely abandons the convention. Formally speaking, Gide's novel occupies a similar position. It retains figuration (plot, characters) while breaking, fragmenting, diffracting unitary representation. Gide's novel is cubist in that it multiplies the angles of vision and combines them within a

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single novelistic frame whose unity is difficult, if not impossible, to find. Point of view has not yet been abandoned, nor is focalized individuality renounced, but there is a multiplication of the cross-sections of reality, taken from different viewpoints that are impossible to coordinate. In this respect, Gide knew what he was doing. "The novel, as I recognize or imagine it, comprises diverse points of view subject to the diversity of the characters it creates; it is, in its essence, deconcentrated." 4 Utilizing a complex construction, with dislocations, fractures, changes in narrative level, and various points of view in combination, Gide breaks up the guitar and the fruit bowl in the same way a Braque or a Picasso does.* Thus, just as in painting the combined points of view upon which cubism plays lead inexorably to the dissolution of figuration (and first of all of the human figure, the portrait: the figure is defigured, the face defaced), so in literature the attempt to multiply points of view cannot but lead to the increasing dissolution of the integrity of the character. A certain Cartesian idea of the ontological unity of the ego cogitans as the center of vision is undone at the same time as the literary certainty of a character capable of placing the world within a frame from his unique perspective collapses. Historically, the cubist multiplication of points of view can only signify acute doubt as to the possibility of finding a harmony between the singular perspective of individuals and a universal point of view. Classical monocentric perspective implies that it is somehow possible to coordinate the plurality of accidental points of view, that the diverse angles may ultimately coincide, that the universal viewpoint of Science (or of objective perception) can coexist compatibly, in the same consciousness of self, with the singular viewpoint of reflexive individual subjectivity. The optimistic metaphysics of the bourgeois era is, like its economy and philosophy, founded on a belief in an ever-possible harmonization embracing the telos of individuals as individuals and the universalist telos of the collectivity, through a coordination of viewpoints and vanishing points extending even to political forms of representation. *The only point of view that could serve as "umbilical point" is the reflection upon writing. Here the novel finds a focal point, but precisely in the problematic mode pointing toward the conditions of production of the representation.

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Now this ideal configuration of harmony is closely linked to the mediating function performed by circulating general equivalents. In this regime, universal values are also circulating values. What functions as measure is not withdrawn in an inaccessible transcendence beyond exchange (like the sacralized archetypal standard kept in a sanctuary); rather, it also descends into circulation as the effective means of exchange for transactions among individuals. In the circulating general equivalent, the ideal function of the universal measure of values coincides with the substitutive or symbolic function of the instrument of exchange in practical interindividual relations. There is therefore a complete hornology between the exchangist monocentrism produced by the circulating general equivalent and monocentric perspective. In both cases, the individual subject becomes the possible site of a universal measure. Thus it is possible to explain structurally the oft-observed historical solidarity linking a certain type of market society to the appearance of monocentric perspective during the Renaissance. The exchange of vital activities, under the sway of the principle of the circulating general equivalent, entails the potential for coincidence of the subjective point of view and the universal point of view in a single representation. It is therefore not surprising that the crisis of general equivalents and the crisis of perspectival representation should occur at the same moment. The entire configuration of exchangist centrality, in which various subjective points of view coincide with the universal point of view, is shaken. Thus in Gide's Counterfeiters the simultaneous crises of general equivalents and of perspective are played out with an exemplary coherence. The Counterfeiters is at once the novel of diverse points of view and the novel that uses the monetary metaphor to record the undermining of the exchangist system based on a certain modality of the universal equivalent. A perversion of values (counterfeiting) is the form taken by the crisis of a certain historical modality of valuethe modality that was governed by the complete (at once measuring, circulating, and embodied) general equivalent. At present, circulating moneywhich makes possible effective exchanges between individuals with competing points of view no longer coincides with a hypothetical universal measuring money, in the register of the archetype. Nor does this circulating

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money coincide with an embodied money, in the register of the real. The functions of measurement, exchange, and deposit have been disentwined from each other: what used to be a complete general equivalent (when gold and its homologues were in circulation) now explodes in a generalized counterfeiting effect.

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Chapter 9 Iconoclasms A Protestant theme unfolds in Gide's fuguelike novel. It is low-key, but if amplified, if its ramifications are traced, it shows up as one of the most overdetermined nodes in The Counterfeiters. I will go so far as to say that the false coin itself is the product of the Protestant problem confronted by Gide's novel. The coin synthesizes and allegorizes the tensions and the contradictions of this problem. Let us pursue the case of Edouard. The novelist indulges his penchant for abstraction (crystal) while giving it a more seductive, more colorfulbut also more deceptiveimage (the gold effigy). Edouard's spontaneous orientation toward ideas, and the pitfalls such a leaning holds in store for the writing of a "real" novel, are constantly repeated. It is said of him that "[i]f he allowed his mind to follow its bent, it soon tumbled headlong into abstractions" (192) [189]. All those around him suspect he is creating a novel of ideas, dictated by ideas, aiming at ideas: Sophroniska asks: "Aren't you afraid, when you abandon reality in this way, of losing yourself in regions of deadly abstraction and of making a novel about ideas instead of about human beings?" (189-90) [187]. This risk is justified, it seems, by the very aim of this fictive writer who aspires to the metaphysical: "The novel has dealt with the contrariness of fate, good or evil fortune, social relationships, the conflicts of passions and of characters but not with the very essence of man's being" (123) [123]. This ambiguous and difficult position held by Gide's character Edouard, whom Gide explicitly makes a Protestant, is also the position that Gide from time to time claims as his own, in his role as a writer of Protestant background, that is, one shaped by a

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religion known to emphasize pure ethics and to proscribe images as anathema. In the pages of his Journalwhere he mentions by name certain of his friends (such as Pierre Louys and even Valéry) does Gide himself not write: "I represented for him, for them, the Protestant, the moralist, the Puritan, the sacrificer of form to idea, the anti-artist, the enemy"? 1 This enumeration forms a long equation with "Protestant" as its initial term. Being a religion without images (and without any metaphysical expression of the feminine), one that leaves no room for effusions of the soul, that emphasizes the rationality of faith, Protestantism seems favorable to theoretical thought and conceptual abstraction, but suspicious with regard to the seductions of form, and opposed to art.* Gide, conscious of this orientation of some part of his being, constructs a novelist who is struggling withboth determined by and in agonizing opposition tothis sensibility (the most "modern" one possible, short of authentic atheism). The tension underlying Edouard's quest is rooted in the incompatibility between the Protestant direction of his sensibility (toward conceptual abstraction, which refuses all imagery, realistic as well as fantastic) and the demands of novelistic fiction, still dominated by the myth of the depiction of manners and personalities. It is not as a Protestant that Gide (or Edouard) can write a novel, but only from a combative marginal position even though, here, his struggle takes him inexorably back to *Max Weber emphasized "the entirely negative attitude of Puritanism to all the sensuous and emotional elements in culture and in religion, because they are of no use towards salvation and promote sentimental illusions and idolatrous superstitions." The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1930), 105. Thus Puritan iconoclasm goes so far as to consider all purely sentimental personal relations as an idolatry of the flesh. Weber, of course, links this extreme rationalization of behavior and belief (the ultimate stage in the process of disenchantment with the world) to modern economic practices, taking a cue from Marx's numerous references to historical links between the development of capitalism and the Reformation. Regarding the relation between Protestantism and art, it should be added that the iconoclastic tendency (the ban on religious painting), as if in reaction, fostered to an extraordinary degree the development of musical expression, which escapes the figurative prohibition. The reference to Bach's music as a model for an abstract literary writing can be understood along these lines. On the connection between Protestantism and music, see H. Jaeger's remarks in "La mystique protestante et anglicane," in La mystique et les mystiques (Paris: Desclée de Brower, 1965), 257 ff.: the exclusion of anything that might suggest an immanent presence of God in the world means faith is placed solely in the audible (speech and music), through which soul speaks to soul.

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his initial sensibility, since what the writer aims to write is a pure, abstract novel, expressing ''the very essence of man's being,'' in the manner of speculative philosophy or of music such as Bach's. Only the most abstract metaphysics or the most formalized music could satisfy his internal necessity. Whence the conflict between (perceptible) form and (abstract) idea, the conflict that is at the heart both of this novel and of Gide's whole aesthetic approach, beginning with the Treatise on Narcissus. Thus the crystal coin covered with gold, the abstract idea circulating beneath the deceptive appearance of a brilliant effigy, this ambiguous solution in The Counterfeiters, derives its full meaning only in relation to the Protestant antinomy in which Gide moves. In order to satisfy the artist (iconophile) in him, he chooses to no longer appear to sacrifice perceptible form to the ideabut he constructs a pious lie. We think he is creating a novelistic painting, a pictorial novel, but it is a theory of literature disguised as a novel. Thus Gide has chosen to problematize in the character of Edouard the relation of mutual exclusion that obtains between the Protestant religion and artistic emotion (just as Mallarmé, conversely, extols the aesthetic value of the Catholic religion, and is known to have been obsessed with the formal model of the mass). The best evidence for this Protestant climate is the description of the chapel during the old pastor's sermon: I should have liked to know what Olivier was thinking; I reflected that as he had been brought up a Catholic, the Protestant service must be new to him and that this was probably his first visit to the chapel. The singular faculty of depersonalization which I possess and which enables me to feel other people's emotions as if they were my own, compelled me, as it were, to enter into Olivier's feelingsthose that I imagined him to be experiencing; and though he kept his eyes shut, or perhaps for that very reason, I felt as if, like him, I were seeing for the first time the bare walls, the abstract and chilly light which fell upon the congregation, the relentless outline of the pulpit on the background of the white wall, the straightness of the lines, the rigidity of the columns which support the gallery, the whole spirit of this angular and colourless architecture and its repellent want of grace, its uncompromising inflexibility, its parsimony. It can only be because I have been accustomed to it since childhood, that I have not felt all this sooner. . .. (98) [99] The wording of the description is unequivocal: the bare walls, the abstract light, the background of white wall against which

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the pulpit is relentlessly outlined, the uncompromising straight lines, rigid columns, and angular colorless architecture: this scene is an abstract picture dominated by the right angle and the color white. Protestant iconoclasm, which is for Hegel the very condition of speculative philosophy, appears here under Edouard's gaze as an ethic and an aesthetic of austerity: it might at first seem to be the sublime stripping of the soul, its separation from the perceptible, allowing it to ascend toward the immaculate world of pure and unrepresentable ideas; but in a repercussion whose effects Gide has measured, it opens onto rationalist platitude, ethical drought, and emotional frigidity. The sublime, threadbare from daily wear, having by virtue of being unimaginable drained all other impulses dry, subsides into the repellent, the uncompromising, the parsimonious. Such is the ambiguity of "this early starvation of the senses which drives the soul so perilously far beyond appearances" (98) [99]. The divorce of reason from sensuality, the mortal rift between pure thought and emotion, were experienced by Kant and Hegel, each in his way seeking an impossible Aesthetics that would lead to a reconciliation of the two. Gide, as a novelist, bears witness to this tension in a completely different way when he says simply that in the old pastor's office, "[t]he atmosphere of the room was so austere that it seemed as if any flower must wither in it at once" (105) [105]. The fictive novelist seeks to escape from Puritanism, to become the iconoclast of this iconoclasm. This difficult position, as the novel, this counterfeiting, attests, is between the gold of the image and the crystal of the idea. The novel analyzes what remains Protestant in the novelist, what cannot become other than Protestant. "A certain love of the arduousa horror of indulgence (towards oneself, I mean) is perhaps the part of my Puritan upbringing which I find it hardest to free myself from" (124) [124]. But how can one cleanse oneself of what is "pure," how can spots be removed from what is devoid of mark or color? How can white be bleached? Edouard's contradiction lies in planning a ''pure novel'' even as he wants to cleanse himself of the pure, of Puritanism. For the pure, here, is not a true victory, nor a true innocence. Edouard sees Puritanism rather as an affectation of whiteness and a sustained inability to feel not only in emotions but through the sensesto sense, in particular to scent even unpleasant odors: Protestants' noses are stuffy, blocked ("bouché" [102]).

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In his harsh criticism of the Protestantism within him, Edouard decries its lack of awareness of the shadow, its refusal to perceive what is black, sickening, corrupt, putrid, in order to remain at any price high up in the snowy peaks where the air is always pure, fresh, transparentas if this will to sensual privation, in its very movement of escape upward, led one to ignore the infernal element within: [A]mong Catholics you find a self-appreciation, and among Jews a self-depreciation, of which Protestants seem to me very rarely capable. If Jews' noses are too long, Protestants' are bunged up; no doubt of it. And I myself, all the time I was plunged in their atmosphere, didn't perceive its peculiar qualitysomething ineffably alpine and paradisiacal and foolish. (101) [102]. But it is also against the bare white ground of this absence of images and color that we are to understand, by contrast, the young Dhurmer's excessive demands regarding literature: his desire that words portray, depict, paint images; especially, as if by chance, in the case of a womana woman's dress, as Olivier's schoolmate says in speaking of a book: "I've got as far as page thirty without coming across a single colour or a single word that makes a picture. He speaks of a woman and I don't know whether her dress was red or blue. As far as I'm concerned, if there are no colours, it's useless, I can see nothing." And feeling that the less he was taken in earnest, the more he must exaggerate, he repeated: "absolutely nothing!" (5) [13] A woman has to be imaginedis imagination itself. And it would be only too easy to show how, in the failed relationship between Edouard and Laura, what is at stake is a defective relation both to the feminine and to the image.* Through Edouard, Gide suggests the place of a sort of Bach or Mondrian of literature. But the novel he writes is not homologous to a painting by Mondrianunless we can conceive of a geomet*Edouard's homosexuality could thus be read as a symbol of this deficiency in the realm of the imaginal. The scene Gide has chosen to create is a strange one: it is in the chapel itselfwhile he is contemplating the white, bare, rigid, abstract architecture before him, and meditating both upon Laura (whom he no longer loves) and upon "this early starvation of the senses which drives the soul so perilously far beyond appearances" (98) [99]that Edouard tries to seduce his young nephew Olivier.

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ric composition revealed by scratching away the surface of a realist painting. Beneath the gold, crystal: the work of a counterfeiter. Beneath the crust of a classical novel with plot and character, the pure calculated geometry of an abstract painting. Beneath the old-gold leaf that covers a very Catholic icon, the conceptual purity of a Protestant composition. Did Gide have to resort to this counterfeiting operation as a ploy to clear customs on the border separating literary genres to leave the "essay" for the territory of the "novel"? By declaring his work "a novel," he crosses the border into the imagination. But he brings with him a coin that, under the cover of a fictional work, conceals the calculation of structuralist reasoning. Gide's position is off-kilter, his literary stance askew. What he writes is neither wholly an abstract novel nor entirely a realist novel. He does not completely cross over to the side of the pure geometric fiction that he invokes. This ambiguous, false form finds a faithful counterpart in one of the ambiguities on one level of the novel's contents. Edouard projects a pure, formal novel, like a Bach fugue, a priori like Kantian classification of categories, crystalline like an ideal archetype; but at the same time he suffers from abstraction and from a reflexive tendency that affects his images of the world, of himself and of others. Sophroniska, the psychoanalyst, diagnoses this dissociation, and Edouard himself wonders: is it not my inability to let my heart speak "that is driving my work into abstraction and artificiality" (91) [93]? What prevails here is not a militant iconoclasm but rather, quite the contrary, the experience of a loss of the capacity to imagine and to represent. The iconoclastic position is not occupied as the impregnable site of a superior truth, from which every last image would be subjected to pitiless destruction; rather it is suffered by a subject against his will, it is experienced as a deficiency, a failing, an impotence. Protestant iconoclasm is always torn. And from this wound to the soul there arises constantly a romantic anti-iconoclasm that restores the affective and cognitive function of the imaginary. This movement is barely perceptible here, but it seems nevertheless that the fictive writer is less profoundly disturbed by an overly successful mimesis than by an actual collapse of imaginable resources. What collapses is the very capacity to produce an

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image, to dream up characters, to show more interest in people than in ideas; as if the deeply rooted, internalized fear of idolizing the creature thus conjured up made it impossible to have a living relation to the world and to oneself and completely banished any naive adherence to the novelistic myth requiring a vivid imagination of characters. For what eats away at the image, what erodes and soon eliminates it, is abstractionhere so cleverly shown as economic abstraction ("inflation," "devaluation," "(ex)change"), which threatens purely and simply to supplant the characters. Depiction or portrayal (of manners, personalities, places, events) is dissolved, erased by the diffusive and corrosive effect of an abstract idealism that is metaphorized in economic ideas, and ultimately in the strange but coherent notion of a transparent money. Thus Gide creates the novel of the impossibility of the novel for a consciousness that no longer shares the illusions of naive semanticism, that no longer puts any stock in representative realism. In so doing, he indirectly but knowingly links this disqualification of the traditional form of the novel to a scission afflicting Protestant subjectivity, which is the most acute and most advanced form of "modern" subjectivity.* Three corresponding iconoclastic themes are connected and intertwined in The Counterfeiters. First, there is an economic iconoclasm: money, effacing the qualitative differences among materials and labors, leads to the undifferentiated homogeneity of exchange value, under the control of the general equivalent. The same process is manifested in the leveled relief, the effaced effigy (the disappearance of the perceptible figure) on the gold coin, exposing the crystal coin, the pure arbitrary sign of circulating currency. Second, there is a literary iconoclasm: in the same movement of abstraction, the figures of characters are replaced with ideaswhich in the end are economic concepts. ("Ideas of exchange, of depreciation, of inflation, etc., gradually invaded his book . . . and usurped the place of the characters" (192) [189]. *Gide is of interest to us because he symptomatizes certain contradictions of the Protestant mind; living as we do in modernity, we share in the necessary and constituent contradictions of the Protestant mind.

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Third is the Protestant iconoclasm: consonant with the first two forms, this is the "peculiar quality" of the atmosphere of "purity" and "abstraction," both ethical and affective. Gide's fiction is quite remarkable for the way in which it interweaves these three iconoclastic leanings and exposes, through the uncertainties of the reflexive writer Edouard, the symptomatic evidence of a crisis of representation couched simultaneously in economic, literary, and religious terms. Clearly André Gide, by virtue of his subjective position in a field of highly complex cultural signifiers, symptomatizes this crisis more than he conceives it rationally. A detailed analysis of this set of circumstances in their historical depth would be a lengthy undertaking, beyond the scope of the present study. It would require reexamining the widely recognized historical solidarity (underlined by Marx, Sombart, and Weber) between the Protestant ethic and the capitalist system. Additionally, emphasis would have to be given to the close ties between Protestant iconoclasm and modern speculative philosophy. Finally, the pursuit of the "pure novel"as well as the existential difficulty of its radical productionwould have to be shown in relation to a certain phase of the capitalist economy, experienced from the standpoint of the Protestant ethic.

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PART II ARCHETYPE, TOKEN, AND TREASURY Three distinct registers of the monetary object are interwoven, unraveled, and by turns subordinated to one another according to the prevalent regime of exchange. As the standard measure, the general equivalent is an archetype to which ideal reference is made for the evaluation of all objects. As the instrument of exchange, the general equivalent is an intermediary that participates in the constant movement of circulation, and whose substance is a matter of indifference that defers to its functional status as simple sign or pure symbol. As a means of payment or reserve, the general equivalent is real wealth, a present object that is endowed with value considered to be intrinsic, natural, or in-itself (although in its very being it depends for this endowment of value on the site of Measure/ment) and that is irreplaceable. These three ontological registers can be neither separated nor fused in their principle, but are variously arranged and intertwined in what we mistakenly lump together under the single rubric money. The being of language corresponds to the same arrangement of registers: the logics of value and those of meaning are congruent. In this second part of the present study, some of the figures traced by these parallel weavings and unravelings will be described and analyzed, from other angles, along other tacks, in other moments of the same modern sociosymbolic circumstances as those exemplified in the case of The Counterfeiters. After first emphasizing the triumphant reign of gold-language (represented by Zola, and metaphorized by Valéry) and then

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decoding the fundamental challenge to this regime in the rupture introduced by Mallarmé, we shall reach the limits of monetary reason in Musil and finally, with a detour via Goethe and Charles Gide, arrive at the contemporary impass of the signifier's inconvertibility. Then, considering anew the dimensions of treasury and archetype, my analysis will point to the possibility within our socialitysubject to increasingly overwhelming domination by the logic of the "pure substitute"of a desire for a new relation to the measuring agency. This relation, as yet only dimly distinguishable, attempts to move beyond the unilaterality of the "senseless symbol" that now governs our exchanges.

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Chapter 10 Realism and Convertibility As long as gold circulates "in person," we are in the realm of realist literature. When gold is replaced by tokens (of dubious convertibility) we enter the domain of nonfigurative experience. The counterproof of this affirmation, which may appear overly radical, would be Zola, the very author that Gide's hero invokes only to refute him. Zola furnishes a counterproof both in the construction of his novels (which are realist to the point of "naturalism") and in the very thematics treated in them. The best thematic example is without a doubt Zola's novel entitled, simply, Money, at the center of which is (to cite one from among a plethora of vivid descriptions) "this tinkling of gold, this streaming of gold, from morning till night, from year's end to year's end, in the depths of this cellar, to which the gold came in coins, from which it went away in ingots, to come back again in coins and go away again in ingots perhaps, indefinitely, with the sole object of leaving in the trader's hands a few particles of gold." 1 Here we are squarely in the regime of circulating gold. A coin is not a conventional token but a fragment of bullion. The novel also recounts a process of financial speculation that is never cut off from the reserves of gold. Circulation takes place in the closest proximity to intrinsic or "natural" value. Zola's reliance on the formal mechanisms of representative realism seems to me to be in tune with the thematics of his novel, with their striking emphasis on the presence of circulating gold. True, "fiction" also entails a risk, which affects all operations on values. Equated with deception, fiction is produced precisely when the relation to gold is dissolved. "Falsehood and fiction had always dwelt in his safes, which unknown holes seemed to

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empty of their gold," writes Zola of the businessman Saccard. 2 But this character exists in a universe where he is constantly reckoning no longer on "the lying wealth of the facade" but on "the solid edifice of fortune, the true royalty of gold enthroning itself upon full sacks." 3 Thus emerges the opposition between the fiction of a purely arithmetic or nominal operationconstantly threatened by the risk of a hole or leakand the reality resting solidly on a foundation of gold. There could be no clearer clue to the quite precisely rendered economic imaginary underlying the relation between deceptive fiction (an operation without reference to any stores of gold) and truthful realism based on the solid support of gold existing "in person." Fiction is a deceitful operation resulting from a leak in the gold reserve, whereas truth and solidity imply the presence of full sacks, the guarantee of gold itself, "in person." To find such an economic opposition in a writer who propounds a virtually scientific naturalism (an attempt to perceive* the thing itself) as superior to a literature of invention (of fiction) seems to me undeniably to reveal a profound overdetermination that affects the relations between the imaginary of language and the status of economic exchange. It is significant that in the story of Saccard, behind the abstract, speculative financial operation beset with the risk that masses of paper securities may suddenly lose all their value, a link to the reserve deposits nevertheless remains possible. The novel's theme is thus overdetermined by the structure (both imaginary and real) of economic exchanges. Zola's Money, a realist (or naturalist) novel whose monetary theme is conceived in terms of the regime of circulating gold, of coffers and reserves, contrasts starkly with Gide's Counterfeiters, a critical and reflexive novel whose monetary theme is conceived within the regime of false coins or banknotesto such a degree that, in a way Zola never dreamed of, money explicitly becomes the very image of the falseness of language. A comparison of Zola's Money with The Counterfeiters confirms the hypothesis that there is a close sociohistorical correla*TN: more so than the English "perceive," the French verb percevoir retains the double meaning of the Latin percipio: first, concretely to seize, receive, or acquire (e.g., money or goods); and second, to take in through the senses.

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tion between the painterly or literary aesthetic founded on representative realism and the type of monetary circulation in which gold, as general equivalent, circulates in personthat is, in which the exchange function coincides with the payment or depository function; the comparison confirms likewise the equally close correlation between the new aesthetic based on nonfiguration or abstraction and a type of economic circulation in which money is reduced to a "token" that lacks any intrinsic value, and whose convertibility is increasingly hypothetical. Indeed, in the latter case, the exchange function (corresponding to the register of the purely symbolic) is completely dissociated from the repository function (corresponding to the register of the real); no longer is it possible for the substitutive operation of replacement, "in place of," to coincide in the monetary object with the presentation of the treasury "in person." Thus, corresponding to the general equivalent that is both circulating and "real" is an aesthetic based on the realist illusion (as in Diderot or in Zola), whereas the general equivalent whose function is confined to circulation (as in the pure symbolicity of the token), without any trace of concrete embodiment, finds its aesthetic counterpart in literature and painting that increasingly question the medium that makes them possible and reject the illusions of realism. The linguistic signifier refers to the linguistic signifier, in an operation that could be termed horizontal; no referent appears to be presented directly, in person, through the sign. What I see as the uniqueness of The Counterfeiters lies in the way it simultaneously dismantles the illusions of realism in language and convertibility in money. Economically, the correlation of which I am speaking is all the more telling because the nineteenth century, the age of Balzac and Zola, is a unique period with respect to the history of money and that of monetary doctrines. "In the nineteenth century, a time of stable money, of the uncontested gold standard, and of the convertible note, the economist believed that products were exchanged for other products, and that money was neutral." 4 This is the era of the triumph of industrial capitalism in Europe. It is significant that during this same period the novelist also believed in the convertibility of language into referential reality. The writer postulates that language can be exchanged for things, and with a full and complete equivalence that constitutes its

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power of representation. Just as the economist thinks that money is neutral, the novelist does not question the linguistic medium he uses, but considers it transparent, since reality is presented directly through language in an operation of equivalence (exchange) that equates the word with the thing. The language of Balzac and Zola could thus be seen as enjoying the same status as bourgeois money with its stability, uncontested gold standard, guaranteed convertibility, and the immediacy of exchange that makes it a neutral medium. The circulating gold coin is simultaneously the measure of values, the treasury of values, and the instrument of exchange. In it, the three functions of the general equivalent are interwoven and merged. Trade establishes an equivalence between real values: money is worth commodities just as commodities are worth money, in which they express their price. Likewise, with the gold-language of the realist aesthetic, things are evaluated in terms of language, but at the same time language is directly equated with things. Gold-language, however, is not only that language which fully conveys reality. It is also the language that expresses the truth of the speaking subject. Not only can the external world can be represented objectively in this language, but a soul or a person can be adequately exposed in it. In this sense gold-language, founding and perpetuating the myth of the ''author,'' is a language profoundly imprinted with the subjectivity of a singular individual, a subject who is both source and master of his tongue. Thus, for Victor Hugo, the writer resembles a prince. He mints money, imprinting his mark on the obverse of language. "Every great writer stamps his prose with his own effigy." 5 Or better still: "Poets are like kings. They must mint money. Their effigy must remain upon the ideas they put into circulation." 6 If he is great, a writer leaves his own mark through the originality of his style, the stamp of an impression that gives a new form, a new face to linguistic signs. The writer, not only the author but the issuing authority, is truly auctoritas. Opposing the process of democratic and commercial use that uses up, leveling the relief and effacing the stamp down to the banality of an image eroded into common coin (along the lines of the impoverished generality of the common idea that belongs to no one), the great writer endows language with a uniqueness informed by his own image and likeness. While the masses use linguistic money on the

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anonymous market, the poet, like a prince, renews inchoate gold with the distinction of his face, the stamp of his imperial profile. He counters the egalitarian leveling of the crowded marketplace the erosion of the sharp image, rendering the coin unrecognizablewith his name and his identity, the precise outlines of his peerless features. Victor Hugo was the son of an imperial general. In a sarcastic and disillusioned echo of Hugo's over-lofty dictum that "every great writer stamps his prose with his own effigy," Valéry gibes: "Hugo is a billionairenot a prince." 7 It is as if Valéry, taking up the metaphorical challenge, places Hugo back in the bourgeois regime of linguistic circulation. Hugo's undeniable verbal wealth is not enough to place him among the aristocracy of letters: he is rich, but no monarch. If his language is spendthrift, extravagant, it glitters more through quantity than through its quality or rank. Resounding in his solid chest, his money talksbut not with authority. And yet, the image of the monetary stamp is not distasteful to Valéryquite the contrary. He brings it up elsewhere, elaborating upon it in luxurious detail, playing the economic and political metaphor to the hilt. True, here it is a question not of the "great writer" but of the "potent mind": ''The potent mind, in the manner of political power, mints his own money and refuses to admit into his secret empire coins that do not bear his sign. It is not enough to have gold; it must have his own mark. His wealth is in his image. His capital of fundamental ideas is stamped with his effigy; he has struck them or resmelted them; and he has given them a form so sharp, he has minted them in a gold so hard that they will circulate throughout the world unaltered in character and in alloy." 8 It would be impossible to show more clearly the homology between the production of an exchangeable language and the issuance of gold money. The potent mind is an imperial issuing authority that, within the intellectual territory under its sway, enjoys a monopoly on the minting of money. His treasury fund ("capital of fundamental ideas") circulates only stamped with his effigy. What is stamped with the author's face is not a banknote, not a token vulnerable to rapid erosion, but a gold so hard (of such fine mettle) that it can resist the wear and tear of circulation. Possessing an intrinsic value, this language-money

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is also stamped with an irreducible, subjective imprint, which constitutes its legality and potencybut this "subject" is a "prince" whose image appears as a guarantee of purity and worth. Here Valéry metaphorizes a precise moment in the history of linguistic confidence, when gold-language, stamped with the author's effigy, corresponds to a particular set of sociosymbolic circumstances. The sovereign ego (the great writer, the mental giant) becomes the universal measure of values, and at the same time the issuing authority of a treasury (his own treasury), which thus minted becomes exchangeable, negotiable. It is clear that the three functions of the general equivalentmeasurement, reserve, and exchangeconverge, interwoven in a single monetary object, instituting the unique individual as the axis of this economy: at this moment of the imperialist cogito, or romantic genius, the powers of the author are revered as the source and informing principle of meaning. Hugo and Balzac are the princes of gold-language, in which the triumphant nineteenth century was able to prove its absolute confidence in the secure, pure-minted gold of linguistic money. It is this great economic age of gold-language (realist with respect to the object and expressive with respect to the subject) that shows signs of declining with the profound Mallarmean crisis in poetry (or later, and differently, with other challenges such as Gide's, as we have already seen). The questioning of gold-language is tantamount to challenging both realist representation ("journalistic" writing) and the romantic notion of the expression in language of the omnipotent author's unique personality: this questioning is what Mallarmé practices. To his dismay, he finds that the sovereign author's linguistic stamp is an illusion or an imposture. In opposition to a language marked with the prideful effigy of the writer as imperial ruler of linguistic circulation, Mallarmé urges that the poet's voice "be stilled and the initiative taken by the words themselves." 9 It is notable that Mallarmé names this historical rupture: he calls it "the death of Victor Hugo." The "crisis in poetry" (from which the inevitable monetary metaphors will be extracted) occurs with the death of this "giant" who ''was himself poetry personified,'' who "nearly abolished the philosopher's, speaker's, or historian's right to self-expression," whose practice "was

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coming to be the definition of verse." 10 When this authority turns out to be missing, the reader finally becomes disconcerted. This "crisis of verse" is a crisis of linguistic currency. What we see happening in the beginning of the twentieth century is the disentwining of the three functions of the general equivalent. The problem of reference is posed in art and literature as well as in monetary circulation itself. If in the economic domain it can be said that "reference to a concrete commodity-money" is abandoned, 11 pointing to an acute problem both in the measurement of values (standard) and in relation to reserve funds (the hypothetical convertibility of the token), likewise in painting and in literature the illusion of a possible and direct representation of reality will give way to "abstraction" and to an increasingly virulent reflection upon the medium itself. It is as if a certain privileged moment, in which the interweaving of archetype, token, and treasury made possible the "effect of the real," gave way to a new form of interplay among the three registers. At the time when Gide was exploring the archetype of literary crystal, Kandinskyrejecting any possibility of an equivalence between objects and painting (an equivalence postulated by realist painting, and theorized by Diderot among others) sought a path in the direction of pictorial essences, of a priori ideas or archetypes, as if only a return to measuring principles or "profound roots" common to different phenomena could take over when the realist referent and the mechanisms of representation had broken down.* The monetary elements of this disengagement of the three registers are to be found not far beneath the surface in those who broke with realism in representation, whether to pursue formal idealism (as with Mallarmé) or to practice writing as game or as labor. *Kandinsky seeks, for example, "the archetypal straight lines," which are the horizontal line, the vertical line, and the diagonal line. See Point, Ligne, Plan (1926; Paris: Denoël-Gonthier, 1970), 67, 135.

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Chapter 11 Mallarmé'S Money Metaphor here more than elsewherebecause drawn from secret buried treasurewields its weight in gold. How are we to read these monetary metaphors for language that into Mallarmé's finely chiseled prose irrupt with the heavy tribute of political economy? That these images are not random but painstakingly weighed on the scales of the most patient reviser makes us think twice about including them along with the others subjected to our scrutiny. But it is also with the most acute awareness of their overdetermination that I pry them loose from the syntactic and lexical filigree of gold in which they are mounted. One of the undeniable ideals of our time is to divide words into two different categories: first, for vulgar or immediate, second, for essential purposes. The first is for narrative, instruction, or description (even though an adequate exchange of human thoughts might well be achieved through the silent exchange of money). The elementary use of language involves that universal journalistic style which characterizes all kinds of contemporary writing, with the exception of literature. 1 Then, further on: Language, in the hands of the mob, leads to the same facility and directness as does money. But, in the Poet's hands, it is turned, above all, to dream and song; and, by the constituent virtue and necessity of an art which lives on fiction, it achieves it full efficacy. (42-43) What does this metaphor mean? How does it help illuminate the aesthetic horizon in which Mallarmé situates his poetic work, and how does it help situate this poetic work in a historical regime of monetary exchange?

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First of all, it should be noted that what Mallarmé compares to money is nonpoetic language. Mallarmé solidly exploits this metaphor (which in his hands regains its density and mystery) to tell the difference between literature and what is not literature. The monetary metaphor for language, in Mallarmé, discriminates: everyday speech, not the authentic language of the poem, is money. And in Mallarmé's Divagation premiere on the subject of poetry, his concern is to draw a sharp line between the two states of speech. The clear formulation of this imperative immediately precedes his use of the money metaphor. "One of the undeniable ideals of our time is to divide words into two different categories: first, for vulgar or immediate, second, for essential purposes" (42). Speech in the raw, or in its unrefined, elementary use, serves the "universal journalistic style"that is, all types of writing except for literature. Given its function of exchange and representation, this crude speech could well be replaced by the silence of a crass monetary transaction. Literature, on the other handwhen it is poetryis speech in its essential state. All the images aglitter throughout this text work concertedly to set the vulgarity of ordinary discourse in opposition to the essentiality of truly poetic language. Now this opposition coincides with another one: that of matter to idea. The Decadent or Mystic Schools (as they call themselves or as they were hastily labeled by the public press) find their common meeting-ground in an Idealism which (as in the case of fugues and sonatas) shuns the materials in nature, avoids any thought that might tend to arrange them too directly or precisely, and retains only the suggestiveness of things. The poet must establish a careful relationship between two images, from which a third element, clear and fusible, will be distilled and caught by our imagination. We renounce that erroneous esthetic (even though it has been responsible for certain masterpieces) which would have the poet fill the delicate pages of his book with the actual and palpable wood of trees, rather than with the forest's shuddering or the silent scattering of thunder through the foliage. A few well-chosen sounds blown heavenward on the trumpet of true majesty will suffice to conjure up the architecture of the ideal and only habitable palace palace of no palpable stone, else the book could not be properly closed. (39-40) Idealism, for Mallarmé, is the point where all poetic movements dominated by "musical awareness" converge. These movements, encouraged by the example of music (specifically, sonatas

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and fugueségenres particularly known for the formal and abstract constraints that organize their composition), eschew "the materials in nature" and their organization by any vulgar, overly direct thought. It is around this major opposition that the light and the heavy, the opaque and the transparent, the accidental and the essential, the massive and the subtle, will be able to organize their polarity, each pair adding a supplementary suggestion to enrich the primary, founding division between materiality and ideality. Thus, in Mallarmé's text, "delicate pages" contrast with the "actual and palpable wood of trees," the pure notion or "essence in all purity" with ''the direct and the palpable." On the one hand, there is subtlety and purity; on the other, density and proximity. In contrast to the flower that narration, instruction, and descriptionall being forms of vulgar speechaim to designate by an unambiguous denotation is the ''essence, and softness: the flower which is absent from all bouquets" (42). And again, the architecture of a palace, suggested by music alone, is opposed to the real palace built of stone. On the one hand, there are evocation, suggestion, allusion, reminiscence, the transparence of ether, essential value; and on the other, the natural object, the object that exists, the flower itself and the stone itself, all the realtoo realthings described by reporting or description, the "universal journalistic style." What emerges, then, is the connection Mallarmé establishes between language that represents and money. Speech in its vulgar state is language that institutes an unambiguous relation between words and things. Thus, in narration, instruction, and description, language is used as a means of reporting reality, of providing a sort of reflection or reproductionan objective representation of reality. This type of language, which makes it possible to report facts using a discourse endowed with empirical truth, "serves the universal journalistic style." In this discourse, information on perceptible reality is gathered with the aim of informing the reader. All speech that lays claim to truththe truth of facts and not that of fictionspartakes of this "elementary use." In a word, speech in the raw, according to Mallarmé, is a form of discourse oriented toward the referent, the thing itself, which this discourse presents to the imagination or understanding as if through language itself, beyond its signifiers and

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signifieds. Common speech is denotative discourse. It designates the "actual dense wood of trees" or else the palace stones, or the flower in the bouquet, "the direct and the palpable." That Mallarmé is concerned here with language that represents is clearly emphasized: according to him, in this utilitarian language, which is that of the "mob," speech functions only as a sort of representative currency, facilitating exchange: Why should we perform the miracle by which a natural object is almost made to disappear beneath the magic waving wand of the written word, if not to divorce that object from the direct and the palpable, and so conjure up its essence in all purity? When I say: "a flower!" then from that forgetfulness to which my voice consigns all floral form, something different from the usual calyces arises. something all music, essence, and softness: the flower which is absent from all bouquets. Language, in the hands of the mob, leads to the same facility and directness as does money [numéraire].* But, in the Poet's hands, it is turned, above all, to dream and song; and, by the constituent virtue and necessity of an art which lives on fiction, it achieves its full efficacy. (42-43) But if we are to understand, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that this crude speech is supposed to re-present things themselves, directly and immediately, how does the revamped money metaphor fit in here, and how is the quite striking solidarity that Mallarmé establishes between the economic use of numéraire and representation legitimized? Numéraire is the mass of currency issued for circulation. To pay in numéraire is to pay in cold hard cash. The money invoked here by Mallarmé is therefore a metallic money (gold? silver?) whose legal value is identical to its intrinsic value. In what sense can raw speech, which refers to the thing itself in an immediate representation, be compared to numéraire? In the sense that this commodity-money can be substituted directly, through commercial exchange, for a material good, for a visible, tangible commodity. In such an exchange, money "represents," immediately, an object of equal value. Likewise, vulgar speech presents itself as equi-valence or re-presentation with respect to the things it designates. The word wood refers to the "actual and palpable *TN: The term numéraire ("currency" or "money") is from the Latin humerare, "to count."

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wood of trees," as the word flower denotes a real flower, present in a bouquet. Thus, in the case of crude speech, the linguistic market operates on the basis of "the direct and the palpable." The word is worth the thing. All discourses of narration, instruction, and description, all discourses of reporting, are involved in this vulgar commerce: The first [category of words] is for narrative, instruction, or description (even though an adequate exchange of human thoughts might well be achieved through the silent exchange of money). The elementary use of language involves that universal journalistic style which characterizes all kinds of contemporary writing, with the exception of literature. (42) Vulgar speech is therefore the greengrocer's or housewife's speech, whose only function is to establish a relation of direct correspondence between words and things, just as money is equivalent to commodities and commodities to money. Whether this relation is conceived in the from M = C = M, money becoming commodity, which becomes money again, or as C = M = C, the commodity becoming money, which again becomes a commodity, the relation among linguistic signs (money) and nonlinguistic signs (commodities) is always one of unambiguous substitution that enables us to affirm that a given word represents a certain thing, just as a given sum of money "represents" a certain quantity of commodities. We are not in the realm of barter, since money, the general equivalent, legally governs the market and the movement of substitutions; rather, we are in the domain of unambiguous and elementary trade, in which money is like a commodity and in which the commodity is worth money. Let us say, then, to complete the hornology, that instead of the immediate image (barter), it is the clear and distinct concept (general equivalent) that governs the effect of representation. Rather than substitution by images (which are reversible in their wealth of associations), there is a regulated, unambiguous exchange in which the linguistic concept is so well fixed that it can constitute the thing as object. In his monetary metaphor for language, then, Mallarmé establishes a striking parallel between the economic regime of exchanges, based on real money (concrete commodity-money with intrinsic value), and the cognitive and aesthetic regime

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of realist representation. Commercial exchange, governed by real money (and not by fiduciary or fictive money) manifests the same logic as that of linguistic exchange with its fundamental postulate of an objective representation of the world in discourse. From Mallarmé's perspective, then, circulating gold money and realist representation partake of the same mode of substitutions. However, the same is not true of poetic speech, in its opposition to "journalistic" language. Here it is a question of speech in its essential state, not in its crude state. What is at stake in the linguistic market is no longer the object that actually exists, but rather some Idea that conserves only the virtuality of this object. While "[s]peech is no more than a commercial approach to reality," by contrast, "[i]n literature, allusion is sufficient: essences are distilled and then embodied in Idea. Song, when it becomes impalpable joy, will rise to heaven" (40). Essential speech will therefore stand for the "Idea," "essence," or "pure notion"not, as in some crude material commerce, for the thing itself. Poetry operates by allusion, connotation, suggestion, reminiscence, "a third element, clear and fusible . . . distilled and caught by our imagination [divination]" (40); it is only in transparence that the ''essence and softness'' (42) is presented in the poem. What matters in the poetic transaction is not the real object, but what the word suggests musically to memory; not Matter denoted through an objective representation, but rather Idea suggested in an internal evocation that makes the melody of the soul resound (since "[e]ach soul is a melody; its strands must be bound up," 37). Such is the Idealism of essential speech. Rather than establishing a relation of representation (of exchange) between words and things, this poetic speech addressed to the soul instead "borrows" some "wealth" from hidden "deposits." The raw speech of universal reporting is involved in an immediate and concrete process of exchange. Its meaning comes from what it is equated to. It is the signifying substitute for a real thing, as money is the possible equivalent of a material good. In contrast, essential speech has only evocative meaning, recalling to consciousness the pure riches buried in the mine of the soul. It is not an articulation of concepts giving a purchase on the fabric of reality, but rather a generation of the Idea, in a sense that is

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perhaps close to the most original Platonic intuition (remembrance) while remaining distinct from the philosophical derivatives in which the Idea approaches the concept. What is this "pure notion," this "Idea," this "essential value" wrested from Mnemosyne like a ''rough sketch of one of the poems immanent to humanity'' in their pristine state? Mallarmé contrasts two types of meaning: the first is meaning as exchange value, which is an unambiguous denomination responding to the demands of objectivity and of the rationality of everyday exchanges. The other is meaning as numinosity (dream, song, music), which evokes and suggests, appeals to memory, and takes place in the dimension of an ideality that, far from leading to "ideas," is rather the essential imaginary. What the poet Mallarmé names the Idea belongs to the register of the imaginal, the "flower which is absent from any bouquet," whose pure notion or "essence" evoked by poetic speech is as remote from the concept of the flower as from the real flower. Nor is it a question of the Idea of the flower, if Plato is read in the light of a modern or Aristotelian philosophy. And yet what Mallarmé discovers is no doubt the occulted truth of Platonism: isn't Eros what makes access to Ideas possible, and wasn't the Academy placed under the patronage of Apollo and the Muses? 2 Mallarméthe translator of and commentator on George Cox's Manual of Mythology3rediscovers the musical and imaginal dimension of the Platonic Archetype, a truth that had been progressively forgotten in the history of philosophy, which rapidly assimilated the archetype to the concept (in the logical formalism of extension and comprehension, beginning with Aristotle). When Mallarmé speaks of Idealism, where "musical awareness" is dominant, he is resuscitating a dimension of original, almost prephilosophical Platonism, which placed poets and philosophers together under the same patronage, that of the Muses and of Apollo. It is when the myriad elements of beauty rush together and array themselves in their "essential value" that the pure notion musically arises, "essence and softness." It springs only from the poet's establishing "a careful relationship between two images, from which a third element, clear and fusible, will be distilled and caught by our imagination" (40).

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Mallarme's pursuit of the idea (like André Gide's of the archetype) thus attests to a poetic Platonism.* It is certainly no accident that, at the very moment when the purely conceptual mode of thought, along with realist representation (the universal description of positivism), triumphs, poetic experience is the last stronghold of Platonism: a paradox that he who sought to rid the city-state of poets could not have foreseen. Instrumental rationalism, once dominant, necessarily relegates the archetypal dimension intuited by Plato to the marginal domain of poetry. It would not be difficult to read Rimbaud, and especially to reread Artaud's experience, in this light. But with Artaud, "poetry" assumes a metaphysical mission that far exceeds it, and that can no longer fit within the boundaries of simple literary marginality. In this sense, Artaud is perhaps the last poet before an awakening to a transcendence that could no longer be confined to poetry alone, but that necessarily explores what has been variously known as "religion," or ''mysticism," or" alchemy,'' or" initiation," or what is called "the experience of the unconscious." But how can the idealist and Platonic dimension sought by Mallarmé be inscribedif only by contrastin the logic of the monetary metaphor for language? Mallarmé's comparison of language and money can be understood only by distinguishing among the separate functions of the general equivalent. While vulgar or representative speech, the speech of universal reporting, would be homologous to the circulating general equivalent (in which two functions, that of exchange and that of reserve, are combined), "essential speech," which refers to the Idea of "pure notion," would be homologous to the measuring general equivalent, in the ideal register of the archetype. And just as circulating gold loses its sacred character in everyday exchange, in which *The clearest expression of this Platonism is doubtless the following formulation found in Mallarmé's "An Uninterrupted Spectacle": "Reality is an artifice, useful for setting the average intellect among the mirages of a fact; but it rests for this very reason on some universal agreement: let us see whether there is not, in the ideal, a necessary, obvious, simple aspect that may serve as a type. I want to write, for myself alone, as it struck my poet's eye, such an Anecdote, before it is made public by reporters erected by the mob to assign to each thing its common character." "Un spectacle ininterrompu," Oeuvres completes, 276. Here Mallarmé distinguishes between two universalities: a representative universality, that of reporters who assign to each thing its common character, constituting it as a fact to which reality is attributed; and an ideal universality, which refers to a type that only the poet perceives.

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no longer the archetypal gold immured in the temple, the standard measure that governs profane exchanges from on high it functions as a representative currency facilitating exchange, just so, the circulating speech of the concept and of realist representation is a profane, prosaic speech in comparison with some "primary state" of a linguistic utterance founded on the enchantment of remembrance. What governs Mallarmé's comparison, then, is the underlying opposition between a commodity-money and an archetype-money. Just as in the market economy the general equivalent not only measures (as archetype) but also circulates (it is both ingot and token), so in the mercantile linguistics of the concept and of realist representation, language is no longer a sacred archetypal measure, but merely an instrument for the exchange of human thought and a means of adequation to an objectivized reality. Mallarmé's metaphor therefore contains a critique of the political economy of exchanges in modern society, dominated by the circulating general equivalent, and of its correlative mode of representation. As a poet, Mallarmé records in the sphere of language the disappearance or structural repression of the measuring dimension, which yields to the dominant exchangist dimension; this latter is also the dimension of representation.* Without rehearsing in detail the deductions that have led me to this affirmation, I believe that Mallarmé's comparison is structurally and historically justified. It could be shown that when the three different registers of the general equivalent (measurement, exchange, reserve fund) are combined and embodied in one and the same objectas is the case with commoditymoney, which combines the functions of archetype, token, and treasurywe have before us a mode of exchange or of symbolizing that tends, in cognitive and aesthetic terms, toward a realist and objectivist representation of the world. Mallarmé, then, may be considered quite justified in speaking of the "facility and directness" of money and in connecting the exchange of coins to the objectivist *It goes without saying that, where language is concerned, we can no longer speak of a quantitative and numerical "measure," but rather of a site of transcendental impact, which gives rise to measure, the place of the Other or of the code, which preexists all exchange and governs exchanges. In "Numismatics," I explored the inexorable structural necessity of this place of measure (which is also the place of the "arche'' in the various domains where general equivalents are constituted).

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discourse of denotation. For the same mode of exchangeboth economic and signifyingproduces both this type of monetary exchange and the cognitive and aesthetic principle of realist representation. Remarkably enough, we find the same metaphoric connection in both Gide and Mallarmé: metallic money with real value (commodity-money) is a metaphor for realist and representative language. But crystalline essentiality, the "pure notion," does not belong to this crudely commercial language that establishes an unambiguous equivalence between words and things. This language carries out exchanges in the register of the real (the word takes the place of the thing), but it fails with respect to a higher function, a more restricted, more sacred function, which is that of the revelation of pure Forms. When this circulating money-language reigns, a function of Ideality (which Gide identifies as a revelation of archetypes, and Mallarmé as the evocation of a "pure notion") is lacking. This missing function would require not a denotative language, oriented toward the designated object, but rather a connotative language, given to unleashing some reminiscence, to evoking eternal notions. What leads Gide to the fiction of a crystal money is a demarcation, very similar to Mallarmé's, between two modes of language: as if the two states of speechcrude and essential could be fraudulently combined in a type of speech that, while passing itself off as common (like the greengrocer's cold hard coin), conceals the crystal of a conception made for enthusiasts. The contradiction between the masses and the poet, between the greengrocer and the amateur, is overcome through the device of counterfeiting. The Mallarmean antinomy, which led the poet to pursue the experience of a type of speech beyond the comprehension of the masses, jealously guarding its exclusive sacred role, is avoided through Gide's stratagem of a double language. The same money fits the bill for both the profane and the initiated and yet, if the apparent reconciliation is obtained only at the price of the falseness of this mental commodity, how successfully is this antinomy overcome? Mallarmé firmly rejects this compromise. For him, the treasure of which the poet is guardian has no calculable value. It is of a gold that no quantitative measure could appraise: the dazzling gold of poetry, a radiance amassed like the

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phantasmagoric rays that illuminate the clouds at sunset, could not be subjected to the accountability of the banker's arithmetic reasoning. This is the gist of what Mallarmé signifies in the highly colored, elliptical prose of his text entitled "Gold" ("Or"). And nearly all the fragments collectively entitled "Grands faitsdivers'' (first published in Divagations) tackle the political economy, in order to distinguish literature from it. The gold of which the merchant, the financier, and the banker speak is a "quite hollow universal deity, unprepossessing, unceremonioius." 4 It has no glitter, luster, or glory. When the moment comes to tally and display it conspiciuously, in dramatic circumstancesas in a bankruptcyone could rightfully expect "luxuriant displays as of a ship sinking, under protest, celebrating sky and water with its blaze." And yet even in bankruptcy or financial ruin, in the wreckage of a major business, when billions are at stake, "money [numéraire], an instrument of dreadful precision, clear to consciences, loses its very meaning.'' A bank going under entails "vagueness, mediocrity, grey" (398). The catastrophic collapse of a financial company occasions no spectacular outpouring of gold. At phantasmagorical sunsets when only clouds collapse, in the abandonment of the dream that man works on them, a liquifying treasure creeps, gleams at the horizon: from this I get a notion of what may be the sums, by hundreds and beyond, equal to those which, uttered in an indictment, during a financial trial, leave hearers cold as to their existence. The inability of digits, grandiloquent, to translate, here stems from one case; one seeks, with the following clue: that if a number increases and recedes toward the improbable, it inscribes more zeroessignifying that its total is spiritually equal to nothing, or nearly. (398) Numbers fail utterly to evoke the least bit of treasure. Reduced to financial accounting, the billion is but "smoke," "apart from the time it takes to palm it"the touch* confirms its reality, otherwise indifferent. The "hollow universal deity" is devoid of brilliance. This want of light (smoke, grey) cannot but cast suspicion upon the modern religion of numéraire, this worship of a god kept always under lock and key, sequestered out *TN: The French verb toucher, "to touch," can also mean "to cash" (a check).

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of sight. "The lack of dazzle, of the least interest, underlines that to choose a god is not to confine it to the shadows of strongbox and pocket" (398). The cold, methodical exhibition of figures with strings of zeroes supplants hierophantic display. The god of finance is never present in person. "Behold its lack of splendor, at the very moment or instance when it ought to shine. Even those famous checks detract from it."* And yet the poet's disappointment with the inability of numbers to translate the glitter of the treasure is not cause for complaint, for the spiritual void of the financier's gold is what shores up and justifies the writer's sacred mission. The poet's gold is not money, that precise numéraire that "loses its very meaning"; it is rather the treasury of words uttered, rich in the eternal Idea evoked by this thesaurus. "No complaint of my curiosity let down by the reluctance of gold in theatrical circumstances to appear blinding, lucid, cynical: except for my musing that, no doubt, because of money's failure to shine abstractly, the gift arises, in the writer, to gather up the radiant brilliance in words he proffers like those of Truth and Beauty" (398-99). Money and the wordlike the banker and the writerare thus parallel only in the contrast that sets them off against one another. The poet's mission is founded on the failure of actual currency-money. The loss of meaning from the function of numéraire is what calls back, commands, underwrites the writer's gift of producing the radiant brilliance of Ideas. Since minted, countable gold, caught up in the computations of meaningless quantification, is but an empty god, lackluster and unglorious, it is left to the writer (the poet, but also perhaps the philosopher, in the alchemical sense) to amass a treasure of another order, of incalculable wealth, referring to transcendent Measure. What is suggested by the word goldthe treasures of its symbolic signification (glitter, light, sun, wealth, purity, immutability)is of greater worth than real gold, unprepossessing numéraire with no flair, no pomp, a hollow deity, a mere instrument of quantification. There are thus two golds: the financier's and the poet's. And yet the opposition is not so simple. Its development can be traced: *This allusion to checks appears only in the first version of "Fait-divers," in February 1893 (Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes, 1577-78).

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this division between two golds stems from a bifurcation, the splitting of our need along two separate paths. For Mallarmé, "there are open to the mind's seeking only two paths altogether, where our need divides: to wit, aesthetics for one, and for the other, the political economy." 5 The gold of true beauty is a shining radiance, distinct from the dull gold of monetary traffic. The financier coldly calculates a quantitative gold whose exchange in everyday circulation is theorized by political economists. If a coin bears on its obverse the mark of a face (sometimes a princely one) or of an honorable seal, the reverse betrays its function of quantitative evaluation. "The coin, unearthed in the arena, shows, heads, a serene face and, tails, the crude universal number." 6 As a measure of economic values, a medium of circulation for the exchange of commodities, an instrument of payment for goods and services, the yellow metal has lost, in its everyday heads or tails, the sumptuous sparkle that the very word treasure still conjures in the imagination. Signified gold is now richer and more dazzling than the monetary cipher manipulated in the arithmetic of banking. This bifurcation belongs, in truth, to the secret destiny of alchemy. The age-old quest for the philosopher's gold in the alchemist's laboratory has been converted to the objective of political economy: "Of this last aim primarily was alchemy the glorious, hurried, and dark forerunner." 7 To make gold, not from lead in some obscure crucible of concoctions, calcinations, solutions, and coagulations, but in the surplus value of industry, trade, and financial speculation: in our present-day economy, the philosopher's stone has become the prosaic money in the ledgers of capital. "The null stone, called the philosopher's, dreaming gold: but it heralds, in finance, the credit of the future, preceding capital or reducing it to the humility of currency." From alchemy "prodigious dreams have been transferred'' to political economy. 8 Still, literature remains. And literature, no doubt, as the alchemy of the word, is the sole legitimate offspring of those erstwhile secret manipulations. "Some deference, better, toward the defunct alchemist's laboratory, would be to resumewithout the cruciblemanipulations, poisons, cooled off otherwise than into gemstones; to continue with the mind alone." Poetry is the true alchemy, using no visible furnace or alembic, but rather internal means.

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If the gold of money is not the true treasure, it is left to the writer, the modern alchemist, to "gather up the radiant brilliance in words" and to do so with a "subtle dose of essences, harmful or goodfeelings," for ''I say that, between the old crafts and the witchery that poetry will remain, there exists a secret parity." 9 The poet, and not the financier bent on accumulating an overly empirical treasure, in his worhsip of vulgar gold, reorients the eternal dream of a gold that is truly the philosopher's. Mallarmé reassigns to the poet the task that has always been the object of alchemy, which is now as far removed from empirical alembics and retorts as it is from that gold which is subject to accounting and speculation in economic exchange. The poet's gold is a valence of the Idea, an originary metaphor that says "aura," "sun," "beauty," ''truth," and that is betrayed by the monetary cipher. Whence the divorce between the literary existence"which is spent awakening the presence, within, of harmonies and significations"10 and the commercial. Mallarmé consents to this split between word and numérairetwo irreconcilable ordersas the "sacrifice" upon which is founded the writer's royal, if anonymous, status. The poet is a heretic, destined to be martyred, to suffer "trials," perhaps unto death. 11 He refuses to submit to "the quite hollow universal deity" through which the idea of a supreme impersonal power has been imposed concretely upon one and all. Gold, now, squarely, strikes the race: or, as if its age-old dawning had repelled the doubt, among men, of a supreme impersonal power, rather their blind average, it describes its trajectory toward omnipotencethe glitter, sole, detained for an imperturbable noon. Addhe pays in cash [comptant]* loyally who, because of the raw brilliance immediately quashed, declares himself subject. (410) Gold reigns everywhere, whereas the poet, isolated, "talent apart" (411),** risks his life by refusing to pay allegiance to this *TN: This French term for "cash" echoes the counting of numéraire. **Others have pointed out the etymology of talent (Greek talanton, Latin talentum). properly speaking a unit of weight measurement in ancient Greece, and by extension a coin representing the value of an amount of gold or silver weighing one talent; whence its figurative use to designate either a person's aptitude (value) for certain pursuits, or the person himself. In this phrase Mallarmé, equating the poet with a value, coin, or gold a cut above the rest, reactivates the monetary figure of literary talent.

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false unique and omnipotent god. Others would oblige him to fuse the two incompatible and irreconcilable orders of values, "force him to recognize the thought, essence, in the residue, money" (410; emphasis added), but the poet chooses essence and quintessenceat the risk of starving to death. (If economic exchange appears to posit, in Marx's terms, an identical essencemarket valuebetween objects considered to be of equal value, this "essence" is not an Idea but a residue, caput mortuum, a homogeneous excretion, an undifferentiated abstraction produced by a universal digestion that reduces all value to economic excrement.) The poet, as the willing martyr of the eternal cause of philosopher's gold, opposes the established power of common gold. Never will he consent to enter the marketplace, to exchange his work for a salary that would equate the written page to a sum of money, a quantitative evaluation of market price. ''No sale but that man traffics with his soul, or else he does not understand" (412). And this is why the working "comrade" (409), the laborer digging in the earth from the crack of dawn, must not envy the poet's fate. If the "pure man of letters" escapes the payroll "pact" that establishes an equivalence between the "force exerted" and its payment, it is only at the price of a pitiless exclusion, a perilous rejection (412, 409). The poet, the solitary sacrificial opponent of the omnipotence of money, resists currency's universal claim to reduce all values to market value. The exceptional attitude assigned to the poet, his job, is to resist the numéraire or the political-economization of truth.

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Chapter 12 Money and Reason In Robert Musil's novel The Man without Qualities, Arnheimone of the main characters, who is both an important businessman and a thinkerdevelops a series of arguments relating to the "mind (or spirit) of money." These reflections uncontestably have a place in our exploration of the logic of the general equivalent as it is exposed in literary texts. Arnheim experiences (or observes) the political-economiza-tion of existence: "[T]oday a stage has been reached when one could express all sorts of relationsfrom love to pure logicin the language of supply and demand, of security and discount, at least as well as one can express them in psychological or religious terms." 1 The cold, precise language of economics seems to provide the most adequate formulation of truth. Musil makes a detailed case for this fiction according to which everything can be expressed and analyzed in terms borrowed from political economy. It thus seems obvious to Arnheim that the object of modern man's faith is not God but "the head of the world concern" (249). And a new analysis of faith itself would show that "every human creed is probably only a special case of the general principle of the credit-system" (277). True, Arnheim continues, belief is essential to life; a belief is always necessary, but "once this belief, which cannot be accounted for and for which there can be no compensation, is exhausted, collapse soon follows: epochs and empires crumble just as commercial concerns do when they lose their credit" (277). But not only the sublime ideas of God and faith can (and no doubt must, in Arnheim's view) be expressed in the rigorous abstract language of political economy. Other more profane and

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prosaic realities are embraced by the same conceptual interpretation. Thus clothing, as is commonly acknowledged, lends to its wearer qualities that he does not necessarily possess. It can be said that "[s]uch objects are like debtors who pay back the sums we lend them with fantastic interest; and in fact there are only debtor-objects. This quality that clothes have is also possessed by convictions, prejudices, theories, hopes, belief in anything, thought" (275). The economic notion of value, lent and repaid with interest, thus constitutes a fundamental way of understanding the object in general, and even all forms of ideology. Ideas are the site of a surplus value founded on a general principle of usury. We lend them a certain value, but what we receive from them exceeds this value; they always repay us with interest fantastic interest. But these are only examples; let us trace them back to their general principles. Arnheim, the head of a companythe "man who knew that sooner or later empires would have to be governed in the same way that factories are run" (252)believes that ethics, like science, obeys a principle of rationality for which the logic of money is the basis and even, in all likelihood, the cause. Between money and rationalismwhether it is a matter of rationalism applied to behavior, as in morality, or to thought, as in sciencethere is a kinship that makes money, in its very mind or spirit, something both moral and real. Let us consider the case of ethics as it figures in Arnheim's meditation: Moral riches are closely related to material riches: that he was well aware of. And it is easy enough to see why it is so. For the soul replaces morality by logic; if a soul has morality, there are actually no longer any moral problems for it, but only logical ones. The soul asks itself whether what it wants to do falls under this commandment or that, whether its intention is to be interpreted this way or that, and much more of the same kind, all of which is the same as when a crowd of people that has been wildly dashing along has gymnastic discipline imposed on it and. when the signal is given, swings to the right, extends arms, bends its knees. But logic presupposes the existence of experiences that can be repeated. It is clear that wherever events followed upon each other as in a vortex where nothing ever returns we could never formulate the profound discovery that A equals A or that the greater is not the lesser, but we should simply dreama state that every thinker abhors. And so too the same applies to morality, and if there were nothing that could be repeated, then nothing could be demanded of us either, and without the

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privilege of making demands on human beings, morality would be no pleasure to anyone. This quality of repeatability, which is inherent in morality and intellect, is also inherent, and to the highest degree, in money. Money positively consists of this quality and, so long as it is constant in value, breaks down all the pleasures of the world into those little blocks of purchasing power by means of which one can build up whatever one likes. Money is therefore moral and reasonable; and since, as is well known, the converse is not the case, i.e. not every moral and reasonable being has money, it may be concluded that these qualities originally lie with money, or at least that money is the crown of a moral and reasonable existence. (250-51) The identity principle assures us of the existence of invariants. It enables us to discover the same in the other and makes it possible to conceive of the repetition of the same through difference. This principle of reason is also the principle of morality and of money. Value is the invariant that subsists in difference, and which moreover is divisible and quantifiable. It is therefore not enough to say that money is rational and moral; it is the very origin of reason and ethics. But what has just been demonstrated with respect to morals can be even more easily shown with respect to science: For every weighing up of things, every drawing up of an account of things, every sort of measuring, also presupposes that the object to be weighed or measured does not change during those mental operations; and wherever this nevertheless happens, all one's acuteness of perception must be applied to the task of finding something immutable even in the mutation itself. Thus money is akin to all the powers of the mind, and it is on its pattern that the scientists and scholars split the world up into atoms, laws, hypotheses. and weird and wonderful mathematical symbols; and out of these fictions the technicians build up a world of new objects. This was as familiar to this owner of a gigantic industry, well informed as he was concerning the nature of the forces in his service, as the moral concepts of the Bible are to an average German novel-reader. (251-52) There exists then a structural solidarity between monetary value and the scientific concept. The logic of money is logic itself, operating on invariants. The substitution of one entity for another "identical" one also attests to this invariance, which in turn makes repetition possible. The metaphysics of sameness is what governs both the political economy and scientific thought. And just as the human convention known as "money" makes profits and gains possible, the conceptual fictions of scientists

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enable technicians to produce new objects. Science and technics obey monetary rationalityor, conversely, monetary rationality dictates the reign of science and technology. "Money changes everything into a mere concept" (296). Arnheim tells us that this reign of Measure, in its ethical and scientific senses, is best realized in capitalism. For if violence is necessary in all societies, it is in capitalism that it is most internalized and best disguised as liberty. Thus, in a long meditation addressed to God, Arnheim tells him: But is not money a method of managing human relationships that is every bit as sure as physical force, and one that allows us to do without the crude application of the latter? It is a spiritualised force, a pliant, highly developed and creative form, a unique form, of force. Does not commerce rest on cunning and compulsion, on outwitting and exploiting the other? But the difference is that here they are civilised, wholly transferred into man's psyche, and even, indeed, garbed in the guise of his liberty. Capitalism, as the organisation of egoism based on a hierarchy that develops from the capacity to get hold of money, is positively the greatest and at the same time also the most humane form of order that we have been able to develop to Thy Glory. Human action cannot provide any measurement more exact! (253) In this passage, money is not only the universal measure of the value of commodities but also the common measure that makes it possible to govern all human relations, that constitutes the ideal standard for all activities. The reign of money is the reign of the unique measure, in relation to which all things and all human activities can be evaluated. And it is out of ineluctable necessity that this interrogative, exclamatory speech is addressed to God to the one and only god. The same homologous movement is common to the numerical uniformity of monetary measure, the uniformity of scientific measure (which makes it possible to translate the world uniformly into numbers), and the uniqueness of the deity. A certain monotheistic configuration of the "general equivalent" value-form is clearly apparent here. Monetary rationality, founded on the unique standard measure of values, belongs to the same system as a certain theological mono-valence.* *This structural and genetic solidarity between money and monotheism is discussed in "Numismatics," Symbolic Economies, in particular pp. 43 and 45 ("Numismatiques," Economie et symbolique, in particular 89 and 91).

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To be sure, if Arnheim understands the impossibility of renouncing the rationalism of existence, another voicethe feminine voice of Diotimashows him the limits of this rationalism. "Arnheim fared not otherwise than the whole age in which he lived. This age worshipped money, order, knowledge, calculating, measuring, and weighingall in all, that is, the spirit of money and its kinand at the same time deplored this" (254). Diotima represents the other aspect, the mystery of feelings, the soul. But the rift cannot be closed, and it is the language of political economy that has the last word: "'After all, a man conscious of his responsibilities,' Arnheim told himself with conviction, 'even when he gives of his soul, must expend only the interest, and never the capital!'" (257). In raising money (or more precisely currency, as a structure) to a universal category of the total social being, to a uniform expression of the very essence of the modern world ruled by commercial value and instrumental rationality, Musil's character describes a world governed in its ethos and its episteme by the principal of universal equivalence. To a remarkable degree, Musil's scheme corresponds to Lukàcs's analyses of what connects the market form of exchange value, the rationalization of production, and the formalist, calculating rationalism of bourgeois thought and modern science. It could easily be said, in Lukàcsian terms, that Arnheim exalts the formidable powers of reification (which makes it possible to abstract, objectify, and quantify, to submit all of human life to calculation). He links reification in generalthe production of invariants that are independent of contents, qualities, and differences, constituting a world of stable objects among which abstract relations can be establishedto the phenomenon of money, and praises it as the prerequisite of a centralized economic and political power that runs the whole of society like a gigantic factory. The purely technical organization of technics is the ultimate consequence of the exchangist abstraction that manifests itself in money. All power (over things and people alike) is thus conceived according to a commercial-scientific model. The very notion of God, humorously defined as "the head of the world concern," is conditioned by reified thought. In the logic of the capitalism of organization, God cannot be conceived otherwise than as the supreme entrepreneur: "Arnheim would

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advise the Lord to organise the Millenium on business principles and entrust the administration of it to a big business man, one, it went without saying, who must also have encyclopaedic knowledge and a philosophic outlook" (253). It is worth noting that this fantastic formulation, curiously associating God with Capital (and even, as well, with philosophical Logos), enters logically into the scheme of structural solidarities that I described in "Numismatics," with God, State, Logos, and Capital arranged in a uniform series of structural homologies. Musil's character conceives of a certain form of power, founded on the governance of all relations by reified general equivalents.* We have seen that Arnheim's speech on "the spirit of money"as the supreme principle of calculating rationality and as the form of objectivity in a world subject both to the power of technology and to the laws of commercial exchangeconverges with Lukàcs's analyses of the phenomenon of reification (as well as with my analyses in "Numismatics" of an even more generalized theory of various registers in which this same structure is manifested); the problematics of the calculable object also intersects with a certain aspect of Heidegger's thought. This intersection is not as strange as it might first appear, once we recognize what the thought of Lukàcs and that of Heidegger have in common on certain important points (such as the critique of instrumental rationalism). 2 One of the texts that sheds most light on this kinship is the analysis by the philosopher of Being of Rilke's Elegies. "Self-willing man," writes Heidegger, "every*See the chart on p. 54 of Symbolic Economies (Economie et symbolique, 100). These overall congruencies also provide a possible theoretical basis for the connection that has been drawn between Gide's Counterfeiters and certain works by Melville in which financial discourse and ethical or philosophical discourse often serve reciprocally as metaphors for each other. See Charles Feidelson, Symbolism and American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953). I would add that Rudolf Steiner's curious metaphysics of political economy could also be interpreted in light of these congruencies. Attempting to conceive the economic process in terms of Nature, Labor, and Mind/Spirit, Steiner's 1922 lecture reads: "Money is the thing absolutely indifferent to the single factors in the economic life, in so far as they are still influenced by Nature. For this very reason Money becomes the means of expression, the instrument, the medium for the Spirit to enter into the economic organism in the divison of Labour" (74). "Money is the Spirit at work in the economic organism" (75). Money, or again in another of its forms, as Capital, is "the Spirit realised" (75); whence the identity between Spirit and Capital, to the point that the terms can be seen as interchangeable. World-Economy: The Formation of a Science of World-Economics (London: Rudolf Steiner Publishing, 1922).

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where reckons with things and men as with objects. What is so reckoned becomes merchandise." 3 He holds his balance, constantly evaluating, up to the objectivized world. Thus ventured into the unshielded, man moves within the medium of "businesses" and "exchanges." Self-assertive man lives by staking his will. He lives essentially by risking his nature in the vibration of money and the currency of values. As this constant trader and middle-man, man is the "merchant." He weighs and measures constantly, yet does not know the real weight of things. Nor does he ever know what in himself is truly weighty and preponderant. (135) For the merchant, who sees being as only a value, and value as a numerical quantity, evaluation is a weighing that has no knowledge of the true weight, the inner weight. The "object-character of technological dominion" not only establishes all things as producible in the process of production; it also delivers the products of production by means of the market. In self-assertive production, the humanness of man and the thingness of things dissolve into the calculated market value of a market which not only spans the whole earth as a world market, but also, as the will to will, trades in the nature of Being and thus subjects all beings to the trade of a calculation that dominates most tenaciously in those areas where there is no need of numbers. (114-15) This reign of things without substance is the world of objectivization, of technical dominion over the earth. It could be said that Heidegger, like Lukàcs (or like the character in Musil's novel), expresses in his own way the historical solidarity linking the advanced reign of the general equivalent value-form to a domination by instrumental rationality. Now, for Heidegger (reading Rilke), the merchant's evaluation, making every being an object and every object a commodity, is to be contrasted with another balance, another scale or measure: that of the Angel. What is customary in today's world is "the unprotected market of the exchangers." What is uncommon is "the passage of the balance of the Angel." But "who makes the balance pass over from the merchant to the Angel?" (136). In times of distress, it is first of all the poet, who, like Orpheus lamenting the loss of Eurydice, turns "unshieldedness as such into the Open'' and transmutes it "into the heart's space of the invisible":

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. . . When from the merchant's hand the balance passes over to that Angel who, in the heavens, stills it, appeases it by the equalizing of space. . . . 4 This Angel's measure, which holds itself beyond the quantitative reifying measure of the merchant, evokes in turn the issue formulated by Gide in terms of gold moneythe currency of the greengrocer's thinking, of realist languageas opposed to crystal money, which is hidden from the prosaic merchant. This comparison of two types of measure looms even larger if we consider the Gide of the period before The Counterfeiters, the author of the Treatise on Narcissus. This theory of the symbol articulates the poet's mission. Through the pure crystal of the work of art, the poet evokes a transcendent reality that reveals "the archetype of things": "the work of art is a crystala piece of Paradise in which the Idea blossoms again in its superior purity." 5 To discover the archetype of things and to say it in the crystal of poetry, then, is to accede to the measure of the Angel. Thus The Counterfeiters appears as a compromise between two languages and two types of measure. Still caught up in the traffic of objectivist thought (the "realist'' part of the novel), it pines nostalgically for a crystalline paradise where the Angel, and not the tradesman, is the sole measure of meaning. That poetry is to be conceived as a measure is explicitly formulated by Heidegger in his discussion of Hölderlin: "To write poetry is measure-taking"; "Hölderlin sees the nature of the 'poetic' in the taking of the measure." It is clear that this measure is neither that of "everyday opinion, which likes to claim that it is the standard for all thinking and reflection," 6 nor that of scientific (quantitative) representation, which uses instruments and numbers. The poet measures by expressing aspects of Heaven, images in which the invisible, and the unknown deity, are imagined. In the register not of quantitative values but of meaning, a transcendent site is thus found, a measure that exists prior to all negotiable, exchangeable, communicable significations and that makes communication possible. Whether this site is called that of Measure, or of the Other, or of Archetypes, the function is one and the same; it is what makes evaluation and signification possible. I shall return to the question of what becomes of this site when the economy of values is dominated by the logic of the token.

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Chapter 13 The Law and the Treasury Like Musil's fiction, Lukàcs's analysis, while shedding light on the ontological structure of money (its link to the metaphysics of sameness and to domination by instrumental rationality), leaves out one key resource that might assist in the examination of the principle of the general equivalent. This missing element is an awareness of the simultaneously distinct and reciprocal relations among the three functions. But an understanding of the intricate interweaving of the archetype, the token, and the treasury is precisely what enables us to develop further our analysis of the contemporary mode of signifying. For the regime of exchanges (at all the various levels laid out in ''Numismatics") is governed no longer by the visible, embodied general equivalent "in general," but rather by a particular one of its modes, rooted in inconvertibility. This regime of noncoverage (which affects the question of representation) forces us to take note of the increasingly complete dissociation of the three functions, their progressive disentwinement and their autonomous drift within our contemporary mode of symbolizing. The crux here lies in the inconvertibility we find in the system of monetary exchanges and the homology between this inconvertibility and a certain signifying regime. Indeed, it appears that all present-day questions concerning the nature of the sign are overdetermined by a sociosymbolic situation dominated by the logic of the token as the operative element, with a concomitant complete eclipse of the general equivalent's two other functions as the measure of values in the ideal register and as the means of hoarding or reserve in the register of the realthe result being the general emphasis, in philosophy as in psycho-

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analysis, on the autonomy of the signifier. Our discovery of this correspondence between the structure of contemporary monetary exchange and theories of the signifier, then, would lead us to relativize the theoretical and metaphysical import of such conceptions of the sign and to describe their determined historical signification. If theories of the preeminence of the signifier and of its operative autonomy impose themselves upon contemporaries by virtue of their truth effect, this truth effect must be subjected to a critical hermeneutic examination. What is at stake in the shift from an embodied general equivalent to a purely nominal general equivalent is the question of representation. All we need do to be convinced of this is to trace, for example, the discourse of the economist who would seem most likely to shed light on the machinations of our counterfeiters of language. When in chapter 5 of his Political Economy (published the year of Marx's death) Charles Gide tackles the question of paper money, he does so with a profusion of rhetorical and theoretical precautions that are clearly indicative of an era in which paper currency did not yet reign supreme, when gold and silver coins were still passed from hand to hand in daily commerce. If we did not already know, says Charles Gide in 1883, that paper money can replace metallic money, we might have difficulty believing such a thing possible; and the title of his chapter ("Whether metallic money can be replaced by paper money") might astonish us. For, he continues, "Obviously it is impossible to substitute for wheat, coal, or any other form of wealth, mere pieces of paper with the words '100 bushels of wheat' or '100 tons of coal' written on them. Pieces of paper can neither feed nor warm us." 1 Writing does not replace the object. The word dog does not bite. The signifier and the referent are not identical. The word wheat cannot feed us, any more than the word coal can make a locomotive run. We are indebted to Charles Gide for having dared begin his treatment of the economic question of paper money with so obvious and fundamental an ontological and logical (semantic) question. He does not fail to reduce this question, almost ineluctably, to that of the relations between word and thing, signifier and referent: that is, to a question of language. He has thus spared us the necessity of demonstrating that the structures of economic exchange and those of linguistic exchange are not merely parallel but, in

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certain radical dimensions, fully congruent. That the word is not the thing, and that there even exists an unbridgeable gap between word and thing, is something of which we are constantly reminded by the circulation of paper money. As long as the means of exchange is a real money, the equivalence between money and commodity (the representation of one by the other) poses no problem. What circulates as a general equivalent seems by nature to be able to take the place of a given object, be it fabric, wheat, or coal. Charles Gide is therefore not surprised that gold can stand for wheat or coal. Ironically, he does not point out in this case that gold can neither feed nor heat uswhereas in the case of paper money, its equivalence with commodities is problematic, and Gide emphasizes that a written word cannot replace the object, that the word bread is not nourishing. If a parallel is sought between these two economic situations on the one hand and the ontology of language on the other, it becomes apparent that in one case language is considered to represent (or express) the thing (or the soul), and that in the other case, the gap between language and the object seems insurmountable. What Charles Gide intimates from the outset, between the lines but unmistakably, is that the circulation of paper money can open onto the nominalist anxiety that a word is worth nothing. That the question of the value and of the power of writing is in some sense posed straightaway, at the beginning of an analysis of paper money, is a precondition that conversely sheds light on his nephew André Gide's recourse to economic metaphors to articulate the "value" of writing. It is thus impossible not to suspect that a connection can be uncovered between, on the one hand, a certain reflection on the status of writing in its relation to meaning and to things, and on the other, the recent economic prevalence of scriptural money over all other modes of the general equivalent. And we shall see that the distinction made by Charles Gide among three sorts of paper moneys, differentiated on the basis of their value of representation, adds to the grounds for such suspicions. Let us reconsider Charles Gide's question and follow the thread of his answer. How can metallic money be replaced by paper money? If, the novelist's uncle explains, we really used gold coins for their material substance, for example, to wear

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them around the neck "as the daughters of the East wear their sequins" (314) of gold or silver, our piece of paper would be of little use to replace a gold piece. In other words, if what interested us above all in money were the material of gold itself, it would be irreplaceable. Nothing could take its place. There could be no beginning to the process of delegation that leads to the circulation of paper money. But, writes Charles Gide, money is not utilized as just another form of wealth; there is no material element in its utility. A coin, in short, is nothing if not an order that allows us to claim, by means of exchange, a certain portion of existing wealth. This role can be played by a piece of paper as well as by a fragment of metal. Thus, to follow this analysis faithfully, what enables us to replace money with any substance whatsoever is its reduction to the exchange function exclusively. Far from resembling those "daughters of the East," the Oriental women who appreciate the precious metals directly for their use value (as lovely ornaments), we are, rather, Western men who defer all sensory jouissance and accept the detour of exchange, the evacuation of the "material element," to the point of considering all money only in its metabolic function: as an order for obtaining future wealth through a market transaction. Thus the very passage from metallic money to paper money redoubles the exchangist abstraction that was already implied in the formation of a monetary general equivalent. This additional operation of detour and deferral, of différance, takes us from the object to its mere representation. For if a complex dialectic of detour, abstraction, and deferral necessary for the constitution of any circulating general equivalentalready intervenes between the stage of the simple commodity and the formation of metallic money, the subsequent passage from treasury-money to token-money implies yet another step in the direction of abstraction, of representation, as opposed to immediately perceptible presentation. And it is indeed to "representation" that Charles Gide, with an inexorable lexical necessity, links the operation of paper money. Or, more precisely, he draws in this regard a distinctionone that is highly relevant to the present studyamong three different forms of paper money: (1) the representative form; (2) the fiduciary form; and (3) the conventional form. The close parallel

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between these economic forms on the one hand, and on the other what is involved in language, or more broadly in signification in general, will become immediately apparent. For what defines the different modalities of the instrument of exchange is the degree to which the arbitrary sign is convertible into something real that possesses an intrinsic value. 1. First, in its representative form, writes Charles Gide, paper money represents simply a certain quantity of metal coin that is deposited somewhere to wit, in a bank vaultto serve as a guarantee. Thus, the American public not being fond of silver dollars, the government of this country keeps these dollars in reserve in its vaults and replaces them for the purposes of circulation with certificates that, being made of paper, are easier to handle. This first form of paper money, writes Gide, presents no difficulty. There is indeed no difficulty with this representative form because the sign of value is directly covered by a reserve. At any time, the arbitrary sign can be returned to its direct relation of equivalence with the object of which it is a sign. There is clearly a substitution, but this replacement remains within the narrowly defined legal boundaries of a representation. The gold coin no longer circulates in person, but it is not far away; it is always available, always ready to become present. It can be plainly seen here that the notion of representation is closely related to that of convertibility. As long as a deposit of gold metal exists to constantly guarantee the value of the circulating sign, we are still in the regime of representation. There is of course a separation, a distance between the sign of value and the object with intrinsic value, but the gold object is always presentnot strictly speaking "on the horizon," but deposited somewhere in a stout safe, in the vaults of a well-guarded fort. This deposit is the permanent legal guarantee of the value of the sign. Here the relations between the pure arbitrary sign of value and intrinsic value are not problematic. A Law ensures the representative value of the sign, and it can do so thanks to a treasury located at the same official government site from which it issues. 2. Second, in the fiduciary form, paper money assumes the role of a credit document, or a promise to pay a certain sum of money. Here the value of a written document is no longer guaranteed by the State but rather depends entirely upon the

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solvency of the individual debtor. The promissory note or bill of exchange no longer has the same universal power of representation, although in certain cases it may circulate alongside metal money. 3. Third is the form that Charles Gide calls conventional. Here, writes the economist, paper money "represents nothing at all and gives no right to anything" (315). The term paper money strictly speaking is often reserved for this type of purely conventional money. It is issued by a State that does not possess metal backing. Certainly, this paper is inscribed with the denominations of "five pounds," "ten pounds,'' and so on, and as with the preceding forms, these paper moneys all present "the appearance ... of a promise to pay a certain sum of money"; but, continues Charles Gide, ''it is well known that this is pure fiction and that the State will not redeem them, since it has no money with which to do so" (315). This third form is the diametric opposite of the representative form. There are no reserves stored anywhere to guarantee each note directly, and there is not even any possibility of convertibility. In appearance, the circulating signs are worth a certain quantity of gold or of silver, but this equivalence is a "pure fiction" because the backing (the reserve deposit, the treasury) is nowhere to be found. The vaults of the central bank are empty. The terms used by Charles Gide to define this form of circulation of monetary signs are worth underlining. They open onto a conceptual field that goes beyond economics, and that immediately and almost inevitably draws a parallel with the more general problem of representation. This paper currency "represents nothing at all"; its value is of the order of "convention," of "pure fiction" even though to all "appearances" it seems to be representative money. It is clear that every one of these notions describes a mode of signifying with a very problematic relation to signifying, and even to truth. And every one of them echoes the fundamental crisis that André Gide's Counterfeiters confronts in the domain of linguistics and literature, in their relation to being. It is noteworthy that the economic reflection makes it necessary to produce a theory of degrees of convertibility implying various relations among the real, the value, and the signifier; clearly these relations belong to a more general logic of exchange

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(of communication), a logic that encompasses language itself. It is obvious that the sequence of the three forms of paper money reflects a logical gradation: there is a progressive loss of the power of direct representation and a movement toward complete inconvertibility. In the first type of substitution, the inscribed paper is still linked to metallic funds held in reserve. In the second form, based on confidence, the value of the note is still guaranteed by right. But in the third (conventional or fictive) form, there is no longer any guaranteed backing, either in fact or by right: this is the monetary regime of the empty repository. Strictly speaking, this case cannot even be described as one of substitution, since the paper represents nothing but a purely conventional notion of value. Its worth consists wholly and solely in a decision. Only in the limited operative field of rapid exchangein the movement of exchange, of buyingcan this arbitrary value hold up. Now it is operative functionality that upholds value, instead of "eternal" intrinsic value that constantly guarantees exchangist functionality, as was the case in the beginning. Value and the exchange operation have undergone a full reversal and entered an entirely new regime of time. This dialectic of conventional paper money is worth analyzing because its principle goes beyond the field of political economy (as do all the processes that political economy describes as if they were autonomous), all the way to something crucial in the subject's relation to the signifier, to meaning, and to the Law. What is most striking about this circulation is the total dependence of the subjects of exchange on the Law, paradoxically (but the paradox is only on the surface) combined with the absolute void that opens on the side of the Law. As Charles Gide emphasizes, the value of paper money is precarious, for it depends entirely on the legislator's will and can be annihilated by the very law that created it. If the Law demonetizes paper money, the bearer of notes is left with nothing but useless scraps of paper: the loss of legal value is the loss of all value. Clearly this loss could not result in the case of wealth in the form of metallic money, for behind its legal value, such money also has a "natural" value. This "natural" or intrinsic value is actually the underpinning of its legal value. Thus in gold money there is a sort of harmony between law and nature: nominal value (Greek nomos: law) is in tune with natural value. There is thus a Law of

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the law. There is an independence with respect to local juridical and civil law in the name of "nature," which exceeds this juridical law and upon which these local decrees are ultimately founded. Such is not the case with paper money, which is totally dependent on legislative convention: the value of paper "depends solely on the will of the legislator." And not only is this dependence on the law so total, so absolute, so complete that it resembles enslavement to a despot, but the law guarantees value only as empty value. The only value signs have is the value conferred upon them by the law, and this value is at bottom an absence of value, since the paper note (a mere token) is not convertible. True, it can be used on the market, but it lacks the "vertical" guarantee that would make it a value outside of exchange on the market. Its value is strictly operative, and only on condition that this operation is a commercial exchange. Thus the depotism of the law is combined with its utter lack of vertical guarantee. It legislates only in the horizontal transaction, where it imposes its forced currency. Clearly, these two aspects are closely correlative: because it is devoid of vertical guarantee, because there is no gold reserve to back circulation and to ensure the representative value of the signifiers that are exchanged, this value cannot but become conventional, acquiring forced currency in the horizontal transaction. The State, the national treasury, the central bankthese great transpersonal agencies that ought to guarantee, in terms of authentic wealth and in the name of the law, the value of the paper tokens that circulate from hand to handcan only decree the forced currency, since these agencies have become powerless to guarantee in all places and at all times the possibility of converting fragile paper into brilliant yellow metal. The face value is but a fiction of value, the result of a scriptural convention that reigns supreme. What is striking about the conventional form of paper money is that the lack of guarantees as to the existence of a sure backing comes not from any failing on the part of an individual debtor, nor from the vicissitudes of the subjective relationship of confidence between individuals; rather, the lack of guarantee originates in the site of the Law itself. The Law no longer guarantees any convertibility of signs even though they arise from its own site, for there is no treasury on the side of this law. Thus the very

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site of Truth, the site of the transcendent code that ought to guarantee the relation between circulating signifiers and what they signify fully, profoundly, and in reality, defaults. The central issuing bank is devoid of the precious metal, empty of the cold hard gold that alone could guarantee that the circulating bills refer to some ultimate value located beyond the market of exchanges among individuals, a value always, by right, ready to be presented. The acute disturbance registered in The Counterfeiters, with its pervasive theme of defaulting fathers and the generalized suspicion it casts on the representative capacity of language through the metaphor of counterfeit money, has its epicenter here: in their relation to the real and to the truth, signs become fundamentally detached, floating, when the place that was supposed to provide their legal guarantee presents itself as lacking. As a result, the signifying convention itself becomes a counterfeiting. Indeed, I believe that this dialectic of treasury and token, intimately affecting as it does the subject's relations to signifiers, to meaning, and to the law, goes far beyond the technical and economic question of conventional money. We need only consider the major concepts implicated in this dialectic to see that domains commonly considered to be wholly unrelated to each other, such as linguistics, politics, and religion, are immediately brought into metaphorical play by it. Through the apparently economic concepts of this dialectic of exchange we are able to grasp far more general logics of social intersubjectivity. Straightaway I shall return to this in greater detail it should be emphasized that the bulk of recent contemporary thought (including Lacan's) can be seen as caught in this paradoxical moment of the despotism of the empty signifier, in this ultimate logic of the radical inconvertibility of signs. At this stage in the historical development of the signifier (if a way out is not sought in the direction of reconvertibility) there are only two possible positions. Inconvertibility upholds the relation to a despotic Law that paradoxically becomes the sole guarantee of the lack of any guarantee. Absolute enslavement to the Law lacking any treasury to back it is accompanied by the acceptance of the indefinite play of signs. The abstract law becomes the unshakable guarantee of the absurdity of signifiers. The other position, which however

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converges with the first, rejects wholesale any transcendental signified and affirms the floating, the infinite drift of signs. Both positions bear witness to a critical moment in the history of the signifier: the affirmation of the metaphysical truth of inconvertibility. But before pursuing the linguistic sign any further, let us return once more to economic circulation. The law that governs gold money and that which governs the paper note by no means afford the same guarantee. They are two utterly different regimes of relation to the legislative agency. Let us first consider gold money. Here the law guarantees the coincidence of what is written and what is real: coins are ingots whose weight and purity are guaranteed by the State and certified by the marks imprinted on the metal.* The State is that site which guarantees that intrinsic value is equal to nominal value, that the value written on the piece of metal truly corresponds to the real value of the coin as a fragment of bullion. "Here, say, is a 20-franc gold piece. By engraving on this coin the figure '2o francs' along with the arms of the state, the Government intends to certify that it really has a value of 20 francs, and that everyone may accept it in all confidence," writes Charles Gide (294). A lengthy analysis is hardly necessary in order for us to glimpse the ethical and even metaphysical relevance of this certification. By guaranteeing that nominal value is strictly equal to intrinsic value, the law of the State establishes a relation of adequation between an inscription and a reality. But further, it merely guarantees a concordance that could also very well exist without this official guarantee. Its role consists more in ratifying a fact than in instituting a relation. The law imposes nothing. Its role is to say what is, and to guarantee that it is. Rather than forcing anything, the law bears witness to the truth, certifies it. Here the role of law is one of regularization. The inscription "20 francs" simply spares us the necessity of weighing and calculating anew. Still further, the law, in order to be law, must conform to a superior principle: the intrinsic value of legal money must be rigorously equal to its nominal value. As Charles Gide writes, *"Coins are ingots of which the weight and fineness are guaranteed by the government and certified by the integrity of designs impressed on the surface of the metal." W. S. Jevons. quoted by Charles Gide, Political Economy, 287.

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"if the coin has not the value attributed to it, the State is committing a veritable perjury" (295; emphasis added). Here the legality of the State is thus not the Law in and of itself, but rather what certifies conformity to a superior Law that the legality of the State did not itself decree and to which it pledges its obedience. The particular written law depends on a transcendent unwritten Law. Clearly, we need not go out of our way to see, among the notions implicated in this concordance, the guarantee of a certain relation of adequation between words (nominal value) and things (intrinsic value), that is, between the order of language (and more precisely, of the scriptural signifier) and the order of the real. Even here this relation appears to be internal to the medium of exchange itself (the circulating general equivalent) and not necessarily to imply a relation to a nonmonetary commodity. It is at the level of the general equivalent itself that a certain concordance between the real and the purely symbolic can be struck. There is no need to enter the market and to purchase a commodity in order to be sure of a certain adequation between being and name. Outside any actual circulation or any relation to a motley assortment of commodities that differ widely in form, function, substance, and weightapart from all comparisons with relative forms of valuethere exists within the general equivalent form itself the certitude of a coincidence between being and name. This adequation occurs in the identity of two values: the intrinsic value of gold money, as a precious material, coincides with its nominal value, which is an inscribed value, a decreed value, ideally posited as measure. The law that governs the issue of the paper note is altogether different. This law is not limited merely to guaranteeing the coincidence between what is presented and what is written. It provides only an inscription. And, in the case of convertible paper money, it guarantees that this writing refers, beyond these more or less indirect operations, to a real value deposited in the safes and vaults of the State. The treasury has disappeared from circulation. The faith or credit that must be granted the law exceeds what is immediately given. Backing exists, no doubt, but it is not visible. True, there is still a vertical relation between the note and its value in itself. It stands for hidden gold, and not merely some profane commodity purchased on the market in a

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horizontal relation of equivalence. Thus there is still a dimension of transcendence, of depth. In other words, it is as if the combinatory dimension came to the fore while still leaving a place, albeit virtual, for the vertical dimension of association. Finally, in the case of conventional or fictive money, the status of the law in relation to the signifier enters a new phase. Here the State guarantees only the possibility of a horizontal metabolism, the exchange of the note for a commodity, on the marketno longer is there any gold backing. The note represents nothing. Its meaning exists entirely in the pure operation of exchange. It is a token, a pawn that has no more than an operative value in a game of reciprocal relation. The law has become what imposes the currency of the note; it is both the absolute foundation of the convention of value and what makes this convention prevail. Thus the shift from gold money to convertible currency, and from the latter to the inconvertible note, involves a radical change in the relation to the law. As a result of this shift, the law is no longer what guarantees a justice that originates outside it, but increasingly it becomes what invents, decrees, and institutes an order whose existence is answerable to nothing beyond itself. Compared to gold money, which implies a distinction between the law of the state and a superior principle that transcends this law, the circulation of paper currency is formally despotic. The forced currency is an act of fiat. The State obliges, without obliging itself. If money (numéraire < nomisma) is at its origin closely related to the law (nomos), it is clear that the theoretical "numismatics" I am proposing makes it possible to chart the various modes of this connection through history. It can be seen that the subject's relations to signifiers and to the law as played out here seem to constitute very general configurations that, far exceeding the purely economic or linguistic domains, extend into all exchange systems and affect all forms of value. All the mechanisms analyzed here define a certain status of value, whether economic, linguistic, psychological, ethical, or religious value. Although these structures are most evident in the realm of economic exchange, corresponding configurations can be discovered with somewhat more difficulty in the other areas. The question of gold and the banknote has often been exploited by sermonizers to advance the cause of the cloth: the coin with

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Caesar's effigy has not always been rendered unto Caesar. It has been weighed on the theological balance, judged according to the compatibility of its circulation with, for example, the supposed principles of a "Christian economy." Some have thought it possible to detect, in one or another facet of contemporary monetary policy, the influence of the Evil One and the gaping abyss of atheism. The disappearance of the gold standard, along with inflation and the use of "fictive" moneys, is one of the dangers most frequently decried in such contemporary prophecies. The simultaneously metaphysical and political implications of money severed from the gold standard have continuously been on the agenda perhaps nowhere more than at the heart of the Western monetary system, in the United States. It is here that the moral and religious significance of the abolition of the gold standard and the lack of gold backing finds its least subtle, and therefore most symptomatic, formulation. Here the religious dimension of the gold standard is revealed not through an obscure transfer of meaning in an indiscreet metaphor like those used by certain European economists and philosophers; rather, it is overtly, explicitly acknowledged. Confidence in money and belief in God are of a fiber. The return to an economy based on the gold standard is a religious imperative that continues to fan the flames of extreme fundamentalism. Hence the following declaration: ''Let a nation leave the gold standard .... and it will soon relegate God to second place." 2 Those who might suspect my deductions in "Numismatics" and my emphasis on the symbolic site of the standard3 of being themselves no more than speculations will be able to appreciate the naiveté (in the rhetorical sense) of the proposition and to recognize that the congruences I have described are indeed operative on some level. The disappearance of circulating gold money (sound money) and its replacement by an arbitrary or decisional money (fiat money) issued by the State are constantly decried as evil. Paper currency without metallic backing is a legalized form of counterfeiting. The legal tender law, which provides that certain "moneys such as banknotes must be accepted at face value, is immoral. The switch from gold money to fictive money goes hand in glove with the State's increasing hegemony over the individual, who loses the autonomy he had as possessor of an absolutely guaran-

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teed value. When fictive money supplants metallic money, then "the State manipulates the individual by manipulating his money." 4 The monetary atheism of token-money opens the way to political statism. The subject is now directly dependent not upon God but rather, beneath the empty heavens, upon the power of the State, which has become the despotic guarantor of the value of valueless signs. Thus the rejection of the gold standard opens the door to "the planned society and the managed economy." 5 Monetary manipulation, carried out upon the mere signs of banking by "those who see the State as Supreme and the individual as servant," results in the citizen's enslavement. 6 According to this conception, the shift from gold money to token-money coincides with statism, atheism, and the decline of the individual. I have elsewhere demonstrated the sociosymbolic solidarity linking the genesis of the unique measure to that of monotheism. 7 It is hardly surprising, then, that shaken confidence in the gold standard (the measuring general equivalent) reverberates homologically with a shaken faith in God. What is affected is the transcendental site of Measure, the absolute guarantee of all circulating values. The new system of fictive money is atheistic. And it is hardly coincidental that in the fiftiesseveral decades after United States currency had become a simple token, without metallic backingPresident Eisenhower ordered the phrase "In God We Trust" to be inscribed on all coins and banknotes circulating in the United States. The financial atheism of an American dollarreduced to a pure and simple sign lacking the transcendental signified of the gold standard, and devoid of any possible reference to a deposit present in the vaults of the central bankwas counterbalanced by a profession of monotheistic faith, symbolically compensating for the pervasive structural miscreancy. As if an explicit affirmation of faith in God could somehow magically reverse the loss of convertibility to the unique presence of gold, the State used this solemn motto to restore faith in the fiduciary.

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Chapter 14 The Inconvertible Signifier Saussure compares linguistics to political economy, both being sciences that deal with the notion of value. Is the value of a word not comparable to the value of a coin? Such a comparison teaches us that in both cases the definition of value has not one but two dimensions. [L]et us observe from the outset that even outside language all values are apparently governed by the same paradoxical principle. They are always composed: (1) of a dissimilar thing that can be exchanged for the thing of which the value is to be determined; and (2) of similar things that can be compared with the thing of which the value is to be determined. Both factors are necessary for the existence of a value. To determine what a five-franc piece is worth one must therefore know: (1) that it can be exchanged for a fixed quantity of a different thing, e.g. bread; and (2) that it can be compared with a similar value of the same system, e.g. a one-franc piece, or with coins of another system (a dollar, etc.). In the same way a word can be exchanged for something dissimilar, an idea; besides, it can be compared with something of the same nature, another word. Its value is therefore not fixed so long as one simply states that it can be "exchanged" for a given concept, i.e. that it has this or that signification: one must also compare it with similar values, with other words that stand in opposition to it. Its content is really fixed only by the concurrence of everything that exists outside it. Being part of a system, it is endowed not only with a signification but also and especially with a value, and this is something quite different. 1 This text merits a detailed analysis. In it Saussure betrays, more than elsewhere, the economic imaginary underlying his conception of language. A five-franc coin can enter into an

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exchange relation with a different object (e.g., bread) and into a relation of comparison (which may also be an exchange relation) with a similar object (other coins from the same country, or from another country in an operation of international exchange). A money can thus be defined along two axes of comparison: commodities or other moneys. Likewise, a word can be exchanged for an idea (in the dimension of signification) or it can be compared with other words (in synonymy, for example, or in translation into another language). Saussure thus establishes a parallel between price (the relation between currency and bread, for example) and signification (the relation between word and idea); but what is interesting is that straightaway he deems this relation (which might be termed vertical) unimportant. Instead, he will concentrate on the horizontal relation of like to like, which makes it possible to compare money to money and words to other words. Indeed, Saussure quickly comes to consider the word's property of representing an idea or a conceptthat is, its significationas a secondary aspect of linguistic value, one that will no longer figure in his accounting, and that will be wholly subordinated to the system of language, this ''system of pure values which are determined by nothing except the momentary arrangement of its terms," 2 which is therefore comparable to an algebra. Thus, after specifying two dimensions for the determination of value, Saussure quickly decides to focus on only one of them as determinant: not the dimension in which the word represents the idea directly, but that in which the word refers to other words (in the same language or in a foreign language). Now if the parallel drawn with political economy is taken seriously, it immediately becomes apparent that Saussure completely subordinates the direct relation between money and commodities (a five-franc coin is worth a certain quantity of bread) to the more abstract relation between money and money: the Genevan linguist is interested exclusively in financial operations, banking and exchange operations. It is of little consequence now that five francs can be exchanged for a loaf of bread (the price relation); what matters above all is what five francs are worth in terms of dollars (the exchange relation). What is of primary importance now is not the price of commodities but the "value of money," the exchange rate of the franc. Thus Saussure's comparison itself

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betrays the "banking" signification of his linguistic theory.* At no time, it should be noted, does he conceive of a word as representing an object rather than an idea; further, the comparison between the idea and the commodity diverts him definitively from the problem of the measure of meaning, the standard of prices, the origin of value. Consideration of that dimension would have necessitated confronting labor in the domain of the political economy and, in the realm of language, the various transcendent arche. Excluding this problem of the root of values, thensince "natural data have no place in linguistics" 3Saussure develops his algebraic conception of language, in which neither nature nor the idea constitutes a guarantee. He is vehemently opposed to the notion that the value of a word comes from its property of representing a preexisting idea or concept. Not only does the word clearly not represent an object (the word bread does not represent real, visible bread), but it does not even represent the concept or the idea of bread. Above all, we must resist the Platonic belief that there exist a priori concepts, preexisting ideas that are independent of all the diverse natural languages, and to which words need only point. Neither the object nor its idea preexists the language system.** If we start with the distinction among the three functions of the general equivalent that have already been set forth, it becomes clear that Saussure excludes the dimensions of transcendent measure (archetype) and of presence "in person" (reality), in order to privilege almost exclusively the function of exchange (or change, as in money changing) in the order of the purely symbolic. The word refers to neither idea nor object, but first of all to other words, and it is this pure relation, internal to language, that defines its value. Language, writes Saussure, is comparable to an algebra, for in both systems value has no root in objects and their natural relations. Saussure, then, develops an extremely detached conception of the general equivalent. Excluding from its domain the archetype and the treasury, he *See my critique of Saussure in "La réduction du matériel," Economie et symbolique 115 ff. (not included in Symbolic Economies). **In this sense it was insufficient to speak simply, as I did in "La réduction du matériel," of Saussure's idealism.

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reduces language to the register of the token. This is a remarkable example of the disentwining of the functions of the general equivalent in modernity, with the preeminence of a single function, that of the pure symbolic, over the others. In this exemplary case, it is easy to see a forerunner of the epistemological, philosophical, and even literary configuration that invaded and came to dominate an era believing in the autonomy of the purely symbolic as its foundation. Saussure, Roussel, Lacan, and many others belong to this era, in which the play of the signifier appears to be the sole truth of a world without truth. But what is most striking is the way in which Saussure is betrayed by his use of metaphors. The Genevan linguist formulates his theory of language in a world newly dominated by algebra and the bank by technological calculation and financial procedures that dictate a mechanographic and exchangist conception of the sign. 4 Marx based his theory on an economy that was overwhelmingly dominated by metallic (gold or silver) money, or at the very least by an immediately convertible currency. He might have said, as Rilke did of the beginning of the Renaissance, "In the age with which I am dealing money was still gold, still metal, a beautiful thing, the handsomest, most comprehensible of all." 5 In this type of circulation the simple sign, that which constitutes fiduciary or scriptural money, does not yet play any decisive autonomous role. It is considered to be a stand-in for a value materialized elsewhere, and against which it may be exchanged in turn. Fiduciary, scriptural money is only the circulating countermark that is offered, accepted, and circulated within the horizon of a metallic reserve that directly guarantees its value. If in its intermediary function money is already logically placed in the position of a pure symbol (for it can by right be replaced by a pure symbol possessing no intrinsic value), this system of replacement and deferral is not sufficiently generalized for the sphere of circulation to be completely under the sway of the pure substitute. The monetary instrument remains attached to its functions as means of payment and of reserve. The difference between payment "in kind" and payment "in coin" is not yet radical, since money is still a commodity. In this regime of metallic money or of the gold standard, the autonomy of the substitute has not yet developed. The substitutive function of money as mediator of exchanges has not yet gotten the better of

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the other two aspects of the general equivalent, its functions as ideal measure and as reserve deposit. The metallic coin is a miniature ingot; it is, moreover, authenticated by the Law. It therefore combines the prestige of intrinsic value (in its matter) and of nominal value (in its form). In Jevons's definition, cited by Charles Gide, "Coins are ingots of which the weight and fineness are guaranteed by the government and certified by the integrity of designs impressed on the surfaces of the metal." 6 The solid gold of the ingot, a valuable material, is legalized by a form, a face, the effigy that guarantees its weight and its worth. In the regime of true money, intrinsic value and nominal value coincide perfectly. "All legal money ought to have a metallic value strictly equal to its nominal value." 7 Here, word and thing, name and substance, coincide. The value of money is inscribed upon its matter, as if the thing, the value of the thing, and the name designating the value of this thing were all indistinguishably fused. Here again the structural solidarity that exists between this type of money and a language that presents itself as representational (Mallarmé's "universal journalistic style" with the "facility and directness'' of money) is unmistakable. Since Marx and Mallarmé, this type of money has disappeared from circulation. The fetishist illusion has been displaced, supplanted by a circulation of mere tokens, with neither reserve deposit nor standard. Here the illusion relates not to the intrinsic value of the monetary commodity, but rather to the possibility of a complete autonomy of the pure symbolic. Substituting a paper banknote for hard gold implies that nominal value is isolated to the point of being autonomized as a sufficient quality for circulation. The token replaces the metallic medal only when the latter is reduced to the token function alone, when it is used solely with a view to exchange, for exchange, and in exchange, to the exclusion of all other possible functions; thus the token can credibly be assigned the role previously played by a medal. This replacement, then, effectively affirms the total domination of the exchangist function over all other functions. It is only with the universal despotism of the token, a simple "sign of value" lacking intrinsic value of its own, that the complete domination of exchange value is practically realized. Thus, in the discontinuous history leading to the formation of the general equivalent and to the subsequent development of this

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form, the token, in performing a single function, as medium of exchange, and in separating this function from the two others (measurement and deposit), introduces a unilateral abstraction and pushes it to the endpoint, the dead end or absolute limit, of the logic of the circulating general equivalent. The reign of the token entails the illusion of the autonomy of the purely symbolic, but this appearance of autonomy is only the culminating lie of the exchangist abstraction.* The token, a word or money that has lost all evocative capacity, is thus in turn a symbol of formalized reason. The token is a minimal element figuring in calculation; it is the sign reduced to its operative value. In a token economy, the sign is a mere instrument manipulated and combined by calculating rationality. With the token, exchange no longer involves values themselves, but only arbitrary signs that refer to values by conventionbut which are not these values. Thus all exchange is effected by means of an interposed substitute, or a substitute for a substitute, and so on with infinite referral such that nothing enters the market "in person" anymore. Replacement is everywhere, presence is absent, deferment eternal, the treasure nowhere to be found. Invaded by a certain unreality, all relations are reduced to a few minimal formal conditions, a metabolism excluding any possibility of "totality," of the "implicit,'' of "truth" or "depth.'' When the token structure dominates, the two other functions inherent in all exchangethe measuring function (the site of archetypal money) and the hoarding or reserve function (the site of treasuremoney)are relegated to second place. Or again, to speak in more philosophical terms, regulatory ideality and poetic "depth" are ignored. Clearly, in modern technocratic society, exchanges of all types are overwhelmingly dominated by the token function, to the point where its operations are autonomized and the other two dimensions of the logic of exchange are almost completely repressed. The computer, mechanographic banking operations, structural formalism, the emphasis placed (in logic as in psycho* I have elsewhere analyzed Sartre's reading, based on the process of "dematerialization" of economic value, of the notion of Gidean "availability" (disponibilité), and I have demonstrated its relation to existentialism and to structuralism. "Banking on Signs," Diacritics 18, no. 2 (summer 1988): 15-25.

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analysis) upon the autonomous, inconvertible signifier: all these phenomena belong to an exchange regime that has become completely mediated by the token. This domination corresponds to the total loss of the dialogical dimension of language. It is no longer by exchanging significations in personthrough argumentation, or in the reversible space of bargainingthat meaning (parliamentary rationality) is fixed, the way a price is established as a stable point of common accord, a fulcrum agreed upon by two parties present to each other. Language, no longer a means of living dialogue, has become detached from its interlocutors, reduced to a chain of autonomous signs that can enter into mechanical operations of division, combination, and recomposition. Thus, in a perversion that is symptomatic of a whole wave of contemporary thought, the mechanographic sign becomes the very model of all signifiers, and proof that the signifierfunctioning like the calculating machine, outside the bounds of intuitive thoughtconstitutes an order that is autonomous with respect to living subjects. Soon the subject, stripped of dialogical initiative, is conceived in return as despotically subjugated to the autonomous games of the signifier. It is no more than an effect of this all-powerful game, a "pawn of the signifier." For the unconsciousness in which these mechanical operations are produced is easily couched in terms of the unconscious. The human subject is now conceived as no more than a corpselike slave obeying the despotic law of the signifier. Lacan clearly saw the shift from living dialogical speech to the machine; but he privileged the latter as an epistemological model, reducing the symbolic to what a machine can manipulate. "Speech is first of all that object of exchange with which one recognizes oneself .... The circulation of speech begins thus, and it swells until it constitutes the world of the symbol as if apart from the activity of the subject. The symbolic world is the world of the machine." 8 From simple dyadic exchange to extended circulation, and from this type of circulation to the triumph of the pure substitute, detachable, interchangeable, and autonomous: not content merely to describe this movement, Lacan seizes upon its effects to develop his conception of the symbolic. Lacan speaks of the unconscious as the play of a language machine that is detached from the activity of the subject and, like a computer

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combining algorithms, able to function without the subject. This mechanical conception of the symbolicwhich alone makes possible Lacan's distinction between the symbolic and the imaginarybetrays the technicist nature of the epistemological configuration to which Lacanism belongs.* If we were to situate Lacan's approach using a somewhat reductive sociohistorical interpretation (and thereby also to take a chance at predicting the type of criticism that his approach should elicit in the future), we might formulate it thus: Lacanism is in part an expression of the unilateral rule of the logic of the token over contemporary society. But the unconscious of modern man is precisely that which resists the mechanical signifier, that impoverished, formalized symbolic to which some would reduce the "functioning" of the soul. The unconscious is by no means located in the "unconsciousness" of the disaffected, depersonalized, ''disimagined" operations produced by language tokens. It is, rather, an untranslated protest against the modern reduction of meaning that would deprive the soul of its imaginative resources. The unconscious is constituted as what is repressed, what is not translated by formalized reason; its truth is therefore not to be found in this formalized reason and its disaffected tokens. The elevation of the purely symbolic to the height of an absolute determinant, after the cybernetic and mechanical model, is an attempt to palliate the disappearance of systems of referencebut in a way that, far from contesting this disappearance, confirms and consolidates it. In this sense the extraordinary metaphysical promotion of the purely symbolic, the virtually theological glorification of the token (in the form of the letter and the pure signifier) is the last possible stance, the last stab at staving off the irruption of a new relation to the dimension of Measure. The truly metaphysical and imaginal valences that Gideand like him, Goethe, as we shall seeascribe to the fiduciary point to something ineluctable that makes it possible to pursue the critique of the political economy beyond the analysis of what facts and technical procedures can reveal. The imaginary of paper money is not a veil, an illusion, or a false consciousness *See my article "Lacan Iconoclast," in Lacan and the Human Sciences, ed. Alexandre Leupin (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 109-19; also in Stanford Literary Review 8, nos. 1-2 (spring-fall 1991): 57-66.

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concealing an operative procedure. In opposition to this reduction (which is itself an effect of a certain type of exchange or relation), I submit that every procedure has a meaning and determines what type of relation subjects experience to themselves, to others, and to the world. Using money instead of bartering, using paper money instead of exchanging gold, signing a check instead of using paper money, and so on: each step introduces not simply a technical variation on exchange but a distinctly different drama. An adequate description of this drama would necessitate recourse to highly complex ethical, metaphysical, philosophical, and mythical significations of the type Aristotle invokes in the Nicomachean Ethics, where he examines the institution of money in the context of the ethical notion of justice and not as an autonomous economic procedure. There are an ethics and a metaphysics embodied in a particular type of exchange, in its prereflexive signifying layer. Philosophical significations as complex as the relations between nature and law, matter and thought, subject, Other, ideality, and so forth, are involved in it and brought to bear implicitly.

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Chapter 15 The Myth of Paper Money Charles Gide lived in a period so dominated still by the palpable presence of gold, in the concrete form of circulating money, that he paused in naive wonderment at the marvelous, but also diabolical, invention of paper money. Mysteriously, the creation of paper money seems tantamount to the creation of wealth itself; and in a sense, as Adam Smith showed, it is so. If, as Charles Gide tells us, we do not know who invented paper money, we do know that its earliest use on a large scale, in 1716, came about because of the financier John Law. The disaster resulting from this catastrophic system is also common knowledge. Indeed, this first attempt to issue bank notes was met with dismal failure, in the form of complete bankruptcy. When the worried bearers wished to exchange their paper for gold, it became apparent that there was none left in the coffers. And yet the question persistssince Law's failure (we can hardly fail to notice his name, which suggests that the bearers were not placing their confidence in just anybody) did not divert economic history from the destiny leading it on to increasingly mediated procedures (deferment, substitution, convention): How is the creation of paper money equivalent to the creation of wealth? Is the production of mere signs of value enough to produce value? Does this procedure not appeal to the imagination because what this troubled relation between sign and thing brings to bear is not so much a rational technique as a form of magic, pure and simple? How can a sign for gold replace gold? No doubt we are too stalewe who inhabit the century of thinking-machines, combinatorial structures, and banking operations, who are pawns of the infinite drift of substitutions and of

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the signifying chainto be susceptible any longer to the fascination of paper money or to rekindle the spark of the diabolical miracle that for Goethe was still tied to the imaginary of the banknote. These magical effects are evident in the second Faust (to which I shall return in greater detail), in which it is Mephistopheles himself, as the Emperor's fool, who conceives of the strange, unbelievable invention of truly diabolical simplicity. But a century ago, Charles Gide's imagination was still fresh (or medieval) enough for him to thrill to what he could still experience as the magic of the operation, and to call upon comparisons that are no longer available to our jaded techno-cultural imaginary. And what he invokes first of allif only to reject itis an age-old dream. "The men who first had the idea of creating paper money flattered themselves that they had thereby increased the general wealth just as if they had discovered a gold mine, or brought about the permutation of metals, the magnum opus dreamed of by the alchemists." 1 The alchemists' dream brings us closer to Goethe's Faust than to André Gide's Strouvilhou. And yet for Gide, paper money, and the principle of the token in general, remained the very symbol of deception, of the erring intellect's distance from the buried treasure that is the only true value. In comparing the token to the falsity of language, Gide continues Goethe's suspicion at a time when society's entire exchange system seems to be traveling down Mephisto's path and losing all living links to the buried treasures of which Faust speaks. It must not be forgotten that like the invention of writing long before it, and that of the phonograph not so long after itpaper money, being a substitute, elicited the deep-seated suspicion reserved for what is felt to be a Satanic artifice. The act of bringing one's soul into a commercial transactionof selling one's soulseems to be directly related to the notion of paper money; for it is to the inventor of paper money that the soul is sold. And it is not clear that we are better off effacing from our sensibility the living imagination that took shape in this association. Rather than condemning these technics, we would do better to understand what is signifiedabout the relation to the self, to others, and to the worldby these reactions of fear, these deep-seated reactions of fear: for they have to do with the relation to depth itself.

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At the beginning of the second Faust, Mephistopheles adopts the guise of the fool in the court of a medieval emperor. A council is convened to discuss affairs of state. The situation is bleak. The chancellor bemoans the corruption that pervades all classes of society; a spirit of immorality and revolt is rampant. The quartermaster fears an uprising on the part of his soldiers, who clamor to be paid. But the treasurer answers that the coffers are empty. What is to be done? The emperor, dismayed and overwhelmed by this concert of bad tidings, turns to his "fool," who, to the emperor's astonishment, instead of chiming in with his own complaint, proposes a solution: Who in this world has not some lack or need? One this, one thathere it is cash. Indeed, There is no gathering it off the pavement; Yet wisdom taps its most profound encavement In lodes and masonwork, where gold unstinted Waits underground, both minted and unminted; And who can raise it to the light of day? Man's gifts of Nature and of Mind, I say. 2 But the chancellor remains skeptical. How could this hidden wealth be brought forth? The fool (Mephistopheles) replies: I recognize the learned scholar's speech! What is not there to touch is out of reach, What is impalpable is wholly missed, The incomputable does not exist, What you can't weigh is air upon your scale, What you don't coin you think does not avail. (4917-22; Arndt 125) The emperor does not understand either. How can the fool promise to produce all the treasures buried underground? Can this be anything but empty words? The sovereign answers: All this will hardly whisk our woes away; What is your Lenten sermon good for, pray? I'm sick of the perennial how and when; We're short of moneywell, procure it, then. (4923-26; Arndt 125) The council adjourns and a celebration begins, a carnival masque: to bolster public confidence, a feint of gaity is necessary, a display of luxury and abundance.

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The masquerade, inspired by Greek mythology, is visited by Plutus, god of wealth and the underworld. Surrounded by an aweinspired crowd, Plutus alights from his chariot and opens a coffer aglow with molten gold boiling in brass bowls. The mob approaches the brilliant font of wealth. But the infernal god plunges a scepter in the liquid yellow metal and spatters gold upon the jostling masses, who scream in pain, fear, and rage. Then the god Pan arrives: the emperor himself is recognized through the disguise. Gnomes lead him toward Plutus's treasure, but when he leans over to look in the coffer, his beard catches fire and Plutus must extinguish the flames. After this mythological interlude, the courtiers convene again and comment gaily on the masquerade. Suddenly the quartermaster joyously announces that his troops have been paid. The treasurer cries out that his coffers, previously empty, are now overflowing with "gold." To the emperor, who in his astonishment suspects foul play in the forging of his name, the treasurer explains what has happened: RecallYour own self signed it at the time, Only last night. You stood in Great Pan's mask, And with the Chancellor we approached to ask: "Allow yourself high festive joy and nourish The common weal with but a pen's brief flourish." You signed; that night by men of thousand arts The thing was multiplied a thousand parts; So that like blessing should to all accrue, We stamped up all the lower series too, Tens, Thirties, Fifties, Hundreds did we edit, The good it did folk, you would hardly credit. Your city, else half molded in stagnation, Now teems revived in prosperous elation! Although your name has long been widely blessed, It's not been spelt with such fond interest. The alphabet has now been proved redundant: In this sign everyone finds grace abundant. (6066-82; Arndt 153) The emperor is astonished. It circulates like gold of true assay? The Court, the Army take it in full pay? I scarce believe it, though you say I ought. (6083-85: Arndt 153)

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At this point Mephistopheleswho, it turns out, inspired the chancellor's extraordinary invention of the previous night develops the theory of banks and paper money.* The emperor rewards him with a lifetime appointment as superintendant of finances and director of mines throughout the empire. Meanwhile the emperor's real fool, thought to be dead, reappears, and the sovereign, happy to see him alive, grants him great wealth in paper money. But alone of all the courtiers, the fool attaches no value to this paper. Mephistopheles assures him that this paper is worth gold, in repartee that, true to the traditional paradox, shows the fool to be the wiser of the two: FOOL: Lookdoes this really work in money's stead? MEPHISTOPHELES: Enough to keep you drunk and overfed. F: Can house and land and ox be bought for it? M: Why not? Just make your bid and seal a writ. F: A hunt, a trout-stream, park and lodge? M: Yes, all! I'd love to see you in your manor-hall! F: This night I dote on deeds of property! M: Not every jester is a fool, you see! (6165-72; Arndt 155) In Goethe's myth the banknote is the work of Mephistopheles. It is the miraculous artifice (but a black miracle) that makes it unnecessary to take up shovel and pick to seek treasures buried underground. It is the trick, the sleight of pen, that can bring back into circulation gold and wealth that had been stashed away in secret caches. If molten goldthe burning, dazzling gold flowing in the brazen bowls of the god Plutusremains out of reach, consuming those who would come near to dip into the auriferous cauldrons, by contrast a simple signature on a piece of paper can produce circulating wealth. The difference between true, inaccessible gold and the written word that becomes a sign of value is stark. Thanks to Mephisto's operation, inscribed paper is worth gold. *On paper money in Faust, see Joachim Schacht, Anthropologie culturelle de l'argent (Paris: Payot, 1973), 106. 147; and the analysis by Marc Shell, "Money and the Mind: The Economics of Translation in Goethe's Faust," MLN 95, (1980):516-62; a later version of this essay, entitled "Language and Property: The Economics of Translation in Goethe's Faust," appears in Shell's Money, Language and Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), 84-130.

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That the idea of paper money is inspired and its theory propounded by a diabolical character indicates to what extent Goethe belonged to an era that still saw this economic practice as a demonic artifice. The device of paper money confers an enormous power upon writing (a few words written in the chancellor's hand declaring simply: this paper is worth ten, and so on for the various denominations); but at the same time, this power is so easily come by that it becomes suspect. Writing acquires this apparent power of creating wealththis power of separation, representation, and delegationonly through a diabolical detour. The operation of substitution by which a written sign takes the place of gold suddenly opens up a new world of relations, but it is a world tainted with the spirit of evil. Implicit in Goethe's myth of paper money is an anticipatory critique of that regime of signifiers characterized by floating, inflation, uncontrolled slippagea far cry from the treasure held in reserve, guaranteeing authentic value. The targets of this implicit condemnation are first of all economic value and economic signifiers, but this mythological drama conceals other significations, which clearly extend beyond the sphere of economic processes and involve the sign in general. Paper wealth makes it possible to avoid going underground, descending into the realm of Plutus (the Greek equivalent of Roman Hades). The circulation of pure signs of value (and of meaning) obviates the need to go digging in the dangerous depths of the earth, where gold exists in its molten, deadly hot state. It is no longer in the chthonian vaults of the god both of the underworld and of wealth that originary values must be sought, but rather at the surface. The implication is clear: in this transformation of the signifying regime, the treasure of profound meaning does not enter directly into circulation, which has now become purely operative. Henceforth only superficial tokens, of dubious convertibility, are to be exchanged, while the gold of Plutus in Hadesthat is, the luminous images of psychic depths (the Unconscious)has lost all connection with the everyday circulation of signs. This very schism is what is diabolical. The purely combinatory and operative intelligence has been severed from the more profound, "richer" significations, the deeper levels where meaning is in a permanently melted state, a molten magma. There is no doubt that for Goethe the economic device of paper

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money serves, beyond its proper meaning, as a metaphor for a semiotic process that involves a complex relation to truth, to the unconscious, and to language. The critique of paper money has an economic meaning (scriptural money appears as a disturbing deception, exploited by the chancellor to manipulate the masses), but this economic meaning is itself a symbol of a set of existential circumstances. Paper money is a symbol of deception by the calculating intellect that has lost contact with deeply buried treasure. In other terms, it is a symbol of the loss of the symbolist dimension: instrumental consciousness manipulates conventional tokens, which have no ties to the significations of the unconscious. Once this contact has been broken, the calculating intellect can think itself capable of creating meaning, and ever more meaning, through a simple scriptural operation, the mere combination and manipulation of signs. The power of delegation (referral, deferment) that belongs to the sign has become utterly disproportionate, beyond all sense of measure. Paper money symbolizes the hubris of the pure sign. However, if in the figure of Hadesgod of the dead, of underground depths, and of wealthGoethe thematizes an opposition between ''depth" and "surface," still this "depth" cannot be simply equated with the unconscious in the modern sense. Rather, it would have to be said that the Unconscious is the site that is discovered as the symbolist dimension becomes increasingly excluded, that is, precisely when the signifier is becoming increasingly operative. It is Mephistopheles, substituting for the emperor's fool, who invents paper money: this fool's invention betrays a malevolent perspicacity. In keeping with that most traditional of theatrical traditions, the role of the fool and that of the wise man are inverted. At the end of the scene, when the emperor's original fool reappears, he plans to change his banknotes to gold and his gold to land and a house. He does not believe in the value of these notes. The progression from banknotes to gold to land and house signifies a movement closer to reality, the "material" reality of a possible immediate jouissance, in contrast to the detour or mediation interposed by gold, and even more so by the banknote. The jester is not such a fool after all, as Mephistopheles remarks: this fool will not court the risk of inconvertibility, nor be party to any system of delegated value; he goes straight to the thing itself.

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In contrast with those who accept the mediated universe of paper money (of the pure sign), or even of gold (which has a value in itself, but which remains unavailable to jouissance), the fool shows his wisdom by converting all exchange value into use value (land, a house). Use, for him, is the end of circulation. But conversely, if the fool is not so foolish, the others must also be more foolish than they appear. Paper money is folly, madness, because it inaugurates the reign of the pure sign. Detached from all reality, the sign is now a token, severed from the treasure in reserve. The sphere of exchange value becomes autonomous: this is diabolical. It is highly significant that in the second Faust a conflict emerges between the artifice of paper money and the Woman. It is as if the diabolical logic of substitutes were of no use where Woman is concerned. Thus when Faust asks that Helen be conjured up before the eyes of the emperor, through the same magical artifice that brought back wealth in the form of paper money, Mephistopheles replies that this request, involving a "deeply alien land" (6195; Arndt 156), will meet with harsher obstacles. You'd magic Helen up as cheaply As now the guilders' paper phantom. With witches' switches, troll-spawn, polter-poultice ................... But devil's trulls, though not as cheap as beans, Can hardly stand for Grecian heroines. (6197-6202; Arndt 156) Here the path veers markedly: it is impossible to reach the Woman without first descending into the dangerous, deserted depths of the realm of Mothers. This very word, Mothers, is enough to terrify Faust. The image of Helen is necessarily beyond the grasp of the logic of the token; this logic has no power over the domain of Woman. The relation to Woman constitutes the frontier of the logic of pure symbolicity, exposing the limits of this logic. That Helen cannot be conjured up in the same way as the "paper phantom" (or phantasm) that led to the invention of paper money signifies that there are several different levels of imaginative activity. In the case of Helen (in a work that closes with the eternal feminine and its power to exalt us), this imagination can

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only be a truer one, clearly distinct from the phantasmagorical effects of which Mephistopheles speaks. Undeniably, what is at stake in the symbolic character of Helen is a certain relation to the soul as the feminine anima. Once again, this question of the soul repeats in its own way the question posed by the myth of Hades-Plutus. Structurally, the banknote belongs to a mode of signifying that is cut off from the wealth of Plutus and Hades, a mode that is therefore founded on the denial of ''depths." This operative mode of signifying does not admit the passion of Persephone, who is cruelly kidnapped by the god of the underworld and forced to become his wife. In other words, the soul's mediating function between the bright world above and the dark world below (the world of interiority, of images, of depth as well as deathbut not that of the "devil") is discountedand this is what is truly Mephistophelian. The soul has lost all connection with its treasure: Mephistopheles is the one who buys the soul. The "selling of the soul" corresponds to the overbearingly instrumental intellect that performs operations upon signs (which are now autonomous, their meaning reduced to the operative function) with no further connection to any backing or reserve, which alone can guarantee convertibility in terms of "profound" reality. The excessive ease with which banknotesthese bits of writing that are nominally "worth'' gold (though gold is absent or unavailable)can be placed in circulation symbolizes the excessive cleverness of an intellect devoid of soul (of anima) manipulating linguistic tokens, reducing meaning to a mere game of signs and losing all contact with the profound sources of meaning (the wealth of Hades: molten gold). Thus Plutus in Hades embodies what is necessarily connoted by the imaginary, by "depth": for depth, in its turn, signifies. It is not something that we can simply "take or leave" without consequence. Deliberate ignorance of the world of Hades and the sufferings of the soul, such as Persephone's passion, is a Mephistophelian trick that reduces the "wealth" of meaning to a "writing" that lacks any guarantee and is easily manipulated. This ignorance and the concomitant reduction is precisely what imperial power wants, as Goethe's myth so vividly demonstrates; such is the will of an economy dominated by banking capital and the mechanographic operations it performs upon

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signs of value, to use more contemporary terms; and likewise that of the technicist imaginary. Clearly, there is a world of difference between real economic operation (described in terms of economic procedures) and what it signifies on an existential and virtually metaphysical level. In technical operations, there is a quantity of wealth in terms of economic value; in signification, there is an image of wealth (which is always a wealth of imagery) in inner, subjective terms. I believe, however, that if considered structurally, the two aspects manifest a symbolic coherence.

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Chapter 16 The Treasure Trove of Memory The words of a discourse refer to each other along a chain of speech or writing: this is the syntagmatic dimension. But in addition, each word is associated in the memory with other words, which are absent from the chain in question; they refer thus to a whole thesaurus, a treasure trove, which is to a greater or lesser degree shadowy and implicit, and which enriches the meaning of the words, giving them a more profound signification than that assigned them by their simple relation to the other words that are present. This dimensionin linguistic terms, the associative or paradigmatic axisis the one that all metaphors tend to open.*This associative dimension is dominant in romantic, symbolist, or surrealist works of literature, where it opens up the treasure chest of infinite evocations; whereas narratives of the realist school play primarily upon the axis of syntagmatic combination. It is significant that the notion of treasure seems always to surface whenever the associative dimension is described. Barthes speaks of a "memory-treasure" 1 (putting the phrase in quotation marks, which seem to make it an eternal quotation). And for Breton as well, the poetprecisely when he surrenders to the free "association" of automatic writing, which enables him to record what comes from the unconscious finds himself "suddenly in possession of the key to a treasure.'' 2 The convertibility of paper money, which is merely a form of *Saussure describes associative relations as "the inner storehouse that makes up the language of each speaker." Course in General Linguistics, 123.

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writing, thus resembles this capacity of language to open up an associative dimension providing access to profound, ultimate significations: the treasure of memory seems to guarantee the circulation of signs of values. The law of the State guarantees the existence of these deposits, but does not make them visible. In everyday circulation, banknotessimple signs of value, mere tokensare passed from hand to hand, without the participants in the exchange demanding that the backing actually be presented. The conventional purchasing power of the token replaces the intrinsic value of the gold. The treasure-fund exists, and convertibility is possible, but it is not effectively realized. Only at the critical juncture when confidence in the issuing authority fails will there be a demand for proof of convertibility, in the return of hidden gold to the surface. It will then be necessary to verify the veracity of the law of convertibility through a special operation, a particular procedure: "presence," "being-there," the display of value ''in person." Now it is not in the register of substitution, but rather in that of presence, that such a guarantee can be given. It could therefore be said that the money Charles Gide calls "conventional" has its linguistic counterpart in a type of writing reduced to combinatorial operations on signs along the syntagmatic axis. In such a regime the meaning of signs is reduced to the horizontal operations they make possible, as in a banking system. There is no longer any evocative depth, nor even virtual referral, to an internal or external reserve that guarantees their meaning. The register of a treasury of reserve funds (coupled with payment in "intrinsic" value) corresponds to two different aspects of the real: either empirical exteriority, where things are present "in person," in their objective evidence; or interiority, within the world of the soul, where the reserve deposit is the rich fund of images available to our memory, the means by which being is found present in its internal evidence. In each case, there is a reference (external or internal) founded on intrinsic value, which is not delegated, deferred, or substitutable. This register is neither the register of measure (ideal), nor that of exchangeability (purely symbolic), but constitutes rather the register of the real (and of presence). The preeminence of one or the other of these guarantees (in their semiotic and philosophical, rather than

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economic, signification) depends in turn upon the reciprocal relations linking archetype, token, and treasury. When the general equivalent exists only as a noncirculating archetype, the "real" is in the inner icon (the storehouse of images); when the general equivalent is circulating (a situation consistent, as I have indicated, with realist representation), the "real" is in the external icon, that is, in the storehouse of facts constituted in objects. It is for good reason that a probe of gold money as a metaphor for language reaches to the very quick of the soul's resources. For the soul will always be conceived as part of an auriferous and aurific economythe economy of treasury and treasure. Only a mode of thought that is already, unknowingly, obeying the substitutive logic of the simple sign of a forced currency can be oblivious to the psychological problem of intrinsic valuewhich is the problem of fundamental and originary meaning. This is not merely one psychological problem among others; it is the dimension of the soul itself, framed in terms of political economy of linguistic exchanges. In the rigorous "metaphorics" based on economic images, gold money and the treasury-fund from which it is drawn (and toward which it could return upon withdrawing from circulation) always have the meaning of originary meaning, a thought itself like a primordial image lying in the depths of the soul. And the degree of adequation or discrepancy between the circulation of the simple token (of arbitrary value) and the originary treasure chest of the soul's images constitutes the problem of counterfeiting. To repeat, it is not merely a psychological problem; it is psychology itself (the dimension of the soul), examined in terms of the economy of exchanges. The soul is treasury, deposit, backing: this wealth is what guarantees the meaning of circulating meaning. It is buried treasure, hidden, lying deep below the surface. Hegel also develops this notion, producing under the general heading of "psychology" a veritable political economy of the soul. The relations that obtain among image, sign, and soul turn upon notions of reserve, property, guarantee, production, disposition. Thus intelligence is "this night-like mine or pit in which is stored a world of infinitely many images and representations, yet

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without being in consciousness."* But the image, unconscious, can resurface from its underground reserve: moving from a hidden trove where it remains mixed, in itself, it rises to consciousness and finds a new value. It is represented (to consciousness). In order to emerge from this "subconscious mine," the images stored in it need a present intuition, and for Hegel this is remembrance (205, §454). But then, thanks to the memory, intelligence "is aware that what is only its (primarily) internal image is also an immediate object of intuition, by which it is authenticated. The image, which in the mine of intelligence was only its property, now that it has been endued with externality, comes actually into its possession" (205, §454). Such is the movement of the image. It leaves the nightlike cache, the private property of the soul, to be represented, independently of all external perception. And then, in a subsequent movement, it can become a sign, entering into circulation. The soul enters into exchange in the form of the word. But the circulation of words is automatically the death of the image. Beginning with the imaged remembrance and ending with the circulating word, the image is short-lived. Alphabetic writing, indeed, reduces all concrete signs of language to its "simple elements" (215, §459). If, according to Hegel, Leibniz exaggerated "the advantages which a complete written language . . . would have as a universal language for the intercourse of nations and especially of scholars," Hegel himself is quick to emphasize the role of commercial intercourse as a factor in the development of alphabetical language (215, §459). Now, this principle of alphabetic reduction with simple circulating elements, Hegel underlines, is not just a principle of writing; it satisfies (and this is why it is the foremost principle) the "fundamental desideratum of languagethe name" (217, §459). *Intelligence "is to be conceived as this subconscious mine, i.e. as the existent universal in which the different has not yet been realized in its separations." G. W. E Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, Being Part Three of the "Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences" (1830), trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 204, §453. "This signcreating activity may be distinctly named 'productive' Memory (the primarily abstract 'Mnemosyne'); since memory, which in ordinary life is often used as interchangeable and synonymous with remembrance (recollection), and even with conception and imagination, has always to do with signs only" (213, §458). Further citations are in the text.

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For what corresponds best to the "simple idea" is the "simple sign." Like the simple idea, the simple sign can be analyzed and recomposed abstractly. Thus a representation, which for the mind is a simple name "however ample a connotation it may include," will be a "simple immediate sign which for its own sake does not suggest anything, and has for its sole function to signify and represent sensibly the simple idea as such'' (217, §459). This suggestion of plentiful connotation echoes the metaphors of property, wealth, reserves, and hoards. Does this convergence not signify that a fundamental value, produced and stockpiled in the reservethis value attached to a hidden stash of imagined imageswill be withheld from the universal market of alphabetic and nominal exchanges? And indeed, just as the alphabet is a writing without images, the name will be a thought without images. For the movement from productive memory to a simply reproductive memory entails a loss of imagination. Reproductive memory holds the name for the thing, and the thing for the name, "apart from intuition and image" (219, §462). There is thus an iconoclasm in the process of becoming a sign in language. Words excuse us from imagining; they enable us to do without intuition and imagination. "Given the name lion, we need neither the actual vision of the animal, nor its image even: the name alone, if we understand it, is the unimaged simple representation. We think in names" (220, §462). What we have witnessed here, along with Hegel, is the formation of the word as the circulating general equivalent, along with the effacement of images entailed by this nominal circulation. In this elimination of the image through the iconoclasm of name, concept, and alphabet, production is also forgotten. Commerce with its universal exchange values reigns supreme, repressing the very production that makes it possible; for as Hegel writes, the store of images, this dark mine or pit, is the site of a production, the "internal studio" (211, §457) where the "creative imagination" is active: "the imagination which creates signs"; the "productive imagination" (211, §457)* or the ''sym*Hegel distinguishes here among three types of imagination: Reproductive Imagination, Associative Imagination. and Creative Imagination (2o8-9, §455. §456).

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bolic, allegoric, or poetical imagination" (209, §456). Thus it is in an activity of production or of creation that the treasury or wealth originates and it is always a treasure of the soul, rather than of thought: the latter knows only general categories, abstract "values" belonging to the understanding. Remarkably, this psychological process, moving from the unconscious poetics of the image to imageless nomination, is also the shift from production to exchange, or from the "internal studio" to the market. It is as if Hegel, theorizing the eviction of the image by the name, also theorized the dominion of exchange (in the form of the general equivalent) over production. It seems to me that this congruence is no mere coincidence; the "psychological" movement that Hegel sets forth is part and parcel of a logic of social exchanges that involves, simultaneously, both linguistic signs and the economy. Advanced forms of exchange, on the principle of eliminating all iconic content, produce universal simple signifiers: these are the letter and the name. For Hegeland this point is striking enough to bear repeatingletter and name correspond to one and the same principle of abstraction and universalization; both constitute the same decisive moment of extreme poverty of intuition and image, an utter dearth nevertheless deemed a gain in pure thought, a surplus value in the element of formal universality. It is not difficult to identify this moment with that phase in the logic of exchangesthe phase of the "circulating general equivalent" which I have earlier linked to money, to the (conceptual) term, and to the alphabet.* Not until this point are meaning and value conceived in their abstract universality. In tandem they oust, respectively, nonlinguistic meaning (the imagined image) and nonmonetary value (the product outside of the market). And it is hardly an accident that Hegel, having reached the word understood as devoid of intuition and of image, continues with a passage on "being as word" that is, to an ontological observation. This supreme inwardizing of representation is the supreme self-divestment of intelligence, in which it renders itself the mere being, the universal space *Cf. my Symbolic Economies 41-43, 58-59, 67-74 (Economie et symbolique, 87-89. 107-9,211-24).

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of names as such, i.e. of meaningless words. The ego, which is this abstract being, is, because subjectivity, at the same time the power over the different namesthe link which, having nothing in itself, fixes in itself series of them and keeps them in stable order. (22122, §463) Thus emerges a chain of striking solidarity. Belonging to the same moment in the logic of exchanges are not only the letter, the name, and being but also the self as the centralizer of various names and the guarantor of their order. This is the moment of the circulating general equivalent, the culmination of iconoclasm in the logic of exchanges. It also becomes evident that what we designate as the unconscious (the hidden store of images, the deep mine or well) is an effect of this same iconoclasm in the logic of exchanges, an effect in return of the nonmetabolism of images in a consciousness that, given over exclusively to exchange, is now but an empty linkage between names, devoid of intuition and images. Paul Valéry was quite sensitive to the difference between the word considered in its exchange function, and the word taken in isolation as evocative of a profound signification that is difficult, if not impossible, to define or exhaust. While the complex enigma of resonance in the soul goes unnoticed when the word circulates rapidly, the word loses this transparency when one pauses over it or lays stress upon it. 3 Rapid circulation therefore results in a transparencyeven if this limpidity is illusory. On the other hand, any slowing of the linguistic flow deepens or aggravates signification, tugging it downward into shadowy depths. The poet, for Valéry, is the one who lingers over the word, who bears down upon it in order to embrace its full effect in him and to take in its enigma. He removes it from its function as medium of exchange, "withdraw[s] it from circulation" (55) in order to experience the full value of its resonancewhat Valéry, reflecting upon the notion of depth, terms "intrinsic value." But this notion means that the poet holds language to be something other than a simple sign. Here again, with insistent coherence, the inevitable monetary hornology asserts itself; and Valéry does not try to avoid it: But how are we to thinkI should say rethink, study deeply whatever seems to merit deep studyif we hold language to be something essentially

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provisional, as a banknote or a check is provisional, what we call its "value" requiring us to forget its true nature, which is that of a piece of paper, generally dirty? The paper has passed through so many hands (56: second emphasis added) If the speaker considered language a mere banknote or a check, if he were content with only its transitory function as a medium of exchangethe function in which language, like money, is reduced to a mere signthen there would be no more poetic language. The poet demands more of language. What he expects is not to be found in the register of substitutionwhere the sign is but a provisional token waiting, in principle, to be (ex)changedbut in the register of the treasure-fund, or perhaps (as Mallarmé and Heidegger suggest) that of the transcendent measure. The axis of "value" in poetry is not where transactions and exchanges take place as in a bank, but rather where a special effort is made to seek a mooring or guarantee in a treasury, fund, or foundation that reaches beyond the circulating sign. But how can one escape the financial functioning of language? I attempt to replace the verbal formulas by value and meanings that are nonverbal, that are independent of the language used. I discover naive impulses and images, raw products of my needs and of my personal experiences. It is my life itself that is surprised, and my life must, if it can, provide my answers, for it is only in the reactions of our life that the full force, and as it were the necessity, of our truth can reside. (57) Such is the unbanklike operation performed by the poet. Shaking off the "rule of ordinary exchanges" (58), the poet attempts to replace the signs of language with nonverbal values: the treasure chest of "naive impulses and images" (57). The poet's orientation is one of depth. Valéry is not naive with respect to this depth. He conceives of "deep thought" in terms of time and of exchangeand thus in a certain perfectly defined economy. "Deep thought" is a thought that appears to us to have been able to take form and to be grasped only apart from natural time. It presses upon us something more than do the thoughts introduced by a simple exchange. "Depth?"the vague meaning of this word seems to me to compound ideas of magnitude in two dimensions: the magnitude of a certain transfor-

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mation of the object of our thought, and the magnitude of the effort that we believe was necessary to bring about this transformationor to allow it to take place. The transformation I am speaking of no doubt affects the import of a word, statement, or image, which were previously pure signstransitional elements, good or sufficient for this regime of exchanges (this natural time of which I spoke), elements that suddenly receive I know not what force or what value, a force or value that we must presume have their source close to the heart of the ineffable point of existence where thought touches, and can interest in itself, the most possible forces of a life. 4 In Valéry's reflections in "Poetry and Abstract Thought" and in this last isolated thought from his Tel Quel II, the same position with regard to depth is formulated. When, instead of being satisfied with transitory "pure signs," corresponding to thoughts "introduced by a simple exchange," we proceed, with greater gravity and weight, toward the chords signs strike in us, toward what they touch in our life, then thought becomes "profound." We no longer accept the circulating tokens of language on face value and give them back just as we have received them; rather, refusing this fiduciary act, we immediately demand the real values for which these tokens are supposed to be convenient substitutes. Thought acquires depth when it demands to cash in on the very treasury for which pure signs were merely a conventional replacement. Far from being satisfied with convertibility by right, profound thought demands an actual conversion. Then what is at stake is ''the most possible of life's forces''; "our truth" is at stake. Mere exchange value is converted by this operation into a value in itself, in a return to the source of all valorization. Thought then touches absolute value, the intimate standard of measure, the basis for all existential evaluation. This absolute value is what Valéry, with a high degree of lexical coherence, terms "intrinsic value." It is true that he finds the intrinsic nature of the value thus tapped to be deceptive; for if this is the only place where "the full force, and as it were the necessity, of our truth, can reside," this is an internal truth, more poetic than objectivewhence the reservation Valéry expresses: "But this value is only intrinsic. We have no assurance that thought transformed into this 'depth' is better attuned to experience than any other [thought]." 5

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It is remarkable that just as existentialism was affirming the end of "any possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven,"* it was not in the heavens but rather beneath the "unintelligible" earth and below dark waters, in the archaeological vaults of the unconscious, that the true a priori elements of the imagination were being discovered, and that these recalled although with differencesthe Platonic intuition of ''Ideas." It is as if what could no longer be found in the heavens by modern man's insular subjectivity, severed from the roots of consciousness, were after all to be found once more on another stage, in a symbolist and therefore enigmatic language. From a historical standpoint, the conceptions of a floating or drifting signifier (corresponding to the banker's logic of language) go hand in glove with their dialectical converse, those conceptions that plumb the depths of a spirit or soul in search of a new anchorage or repository for the circulation of signifiers that are now detached, floating. The nonrepresentational rupture corresponds to the hegemony of the token, at the same time as it opens and strips bare the site of the measuring standard and the treasury in reserve. When there is no longer an embodied general equivalent, the ideal or imaginary function regains its transcendent position outside of exchange, while the exchangist function, now autonomous, remains totally subjected to the formalist and manipulative logic of the tokenthe floating, inconvertible signifier. Thus the formalization of reason, which finds its most visible political manifestations in the bank and the computer, can be countered only by the search for "absolute" and "originary" significations that are not mediated by exchange in its alienated form. The purely operative value of the token involved in a mechanographic numbers game devoid of any transcendental signifier can be opposed only by the experience (which is problematic in any case) of standards of Measure ("poetic," "religious," "mythical ,'' "historical") that underlie the unconscious of sociality. Since in the nonrepresentational logic of social exchanges it is no longer possible for a single body simultaneously to measure (as ideality), to circulate (as symbol*Sartre's phrase, in L'existentialisme est in humanisme (Paris: Nagel, 1970). 35. emphasizes to a schematic extreme the anti-Platonic signification of existentialism.

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icity), and to be present "in person" (as reality), the three functions are disengaged, and certitude collapses, forcing us to delve againbut this time at another historical moment of transpositioninto what was repressed, what these functions governed by disimagining it to the status of a token.

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NOTES Chapter 1. The False Gold Coin 1. André Gide, The Counterfeiters, trans. Dorothy Bussy (New York: Vintage, 1973), 191 [188]. Here and throughout the present volume, page numbers in brackets refer to André Gide, Les faux-monnayeurs (Paris: Gallimard-Folio, 1978). Chapter 2. The Crisis Of Convertibility 1. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, trans. R. B. Haldane and John Kemp (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1891), 2:253 (the first emphasis is added). 2. André Gide, Journal of "The Counterfeiters," trans. Justin O'Brien, in Gide, The Counterfeiters (New York: Vintage, 1973), 413 (30 July 1919). 3. P. Vilar, Or et monnaie dans l'histoire, 1450-1920 (Paris: Flammarion, Champs, 1978), 24. Chapter 3. Gresham's Law 1. André Gide, Journal of "The Counterfeiters," 449 (8 March 1925). 2. Charles Gide, Politican Economy [no trans. name] (New York: D.C. Health, 1951), 297. Chapter 13 below examines Charles Gide's text in greater detail. 3. Aristophanes, The Frogs in The Wasps, The Poet and the Women, The Frogs, trans. David Barrett (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), 182-83 (lines 718-26). Cited by Charles Gide, Political Economy, 298n. Another translation of the passage follows: Often times have we reflected on a similar abuse, In the choice of men for office, and of coins for common use: For your old and standard pieces, valued, and approved, and tried, Here among the Grecian nations, and in all the world beside; Recognised in every realm for trusty stamp and pure assay, Are rejected and abandon'd for the trash of yesterday; For a vile, adulterate issue, drossy, counterfeit, and base,

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Which the traffic of the city passes current in their place! And the men that stood for office, noted for acknowledged worth, And for manly deeds of honour, and for honourable birth; Trained in exercise and art, in sacred dances and in song. All are ousted and supplanted by a base ignoble throng; Paltry stamp and vulgar mettle raise them to command and place, Brazen counterfeit pretenders, scoundrels of a scoundrel race; Whom the state in former ages scarce would have allow'd to stand, At the sacrifice of outcasts, as the scape-goats of the land. Time it isand long has been, renouncing all your follies past, To recur to sterling merit and intrinsic worth at last. The Frogs, in The Plays of Aristophanes, ed: Ernest Rys [no trans. name] (New York: E. P. Dutton, Everyman's Library, 1911), 2:41-42. Chapter 4. A Numismatic Fiction 1. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of the Political Economy, trans. from the 4th German ed. by Eden Paul and Cedar Paul, 2 vols. (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1930), 1:71-72. 2. Dictionnaire Larousse (1948). Chapter 7. The Crystal Archetype 1. Jean Delay, Lajeunesse d'André Gide (Paris: Gallimard, 1956-57), 2:666. 2. In Delay, La jeunesse, 666. 3. André Gide, "Le traité du Narcisse," in Romans, récits et soties, oeuvres lyriques (Paris: Gallimard-Pléiade, 1958), 6 (my emphasis). 4. Gide, "Le traité du Narcisse," 9-10. 5. Stéphane Mallarmé, "Crise de vers," in Oeuvres completes (Paris: Gallimard-Pléiade, 1945), 368; "Crisis in Poetry," in Mallarmé: Selected Prose Poems, Essays and Letters, trans. and with an introduction by Bradford Cook (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1956), 42-43. Further citations are to the English edition. Mallarmé's money will be discussed in greater detail in part 2, chapter II of the present study. 6. Mallarmé. "Crisis in Poetry," 42-43. 7. Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. T. B. Bottomore (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 200. 8. G. W. F Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1949), 713. 9. Gide, The Counterfeiters, 337 [324]. Chapter 8. The Pure Novel And The Mise En Abyme 1. G. W. E Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans J. B. Baillie (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1949), 98 and 99 (emphasis added).

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2. Jean-Joseph Goux, "L'inscription du travail," in Economie et symbolique, 125-48 (this text does not appear in Symbolic Economies). 3. Robert Delaunay, Du cubisme à l'art abstrait (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1957), 57. 4- André Gide. "Projet de Préface pour Isabelle," in Oeuvres complètes 6:261. Chapter 9. Iconoclasms 1. Journal d'André Gide, z889-1939 (Paris: Gallimard-P1éiade, 1948), 1034. Chapter 10. Realism And Convertibility 1. Emile Zola, Money, trans. Benjamin R. Tucker (Boston: B. R. Tucker, 1891), 113. 2. Zola, Money, 9. 3. Zola, Money, 9. 4. Vilar, Or et monnaie, 11. 5. Victor Hugo. Choses rues 1870-1885 (Paris: Gallimard-Folio, 1972). 272. 6. Victor Hugo, Choses rues 1849-1869 (Paris: Gallimard-Folio, 1972), 398. 7. Paul Valéry, Mauvaises pensées et autres (Paris: Gallimard, 1942), 41. 8. Paul Valéry, Tel Quel II (Paris: Gallimard, 1943). 85. 9. Mallarmé, "Crisis in Poetry," 40. 10. Mallarmé, "Crisis in Poetry," 34-35. 11. Vilar, Or et monnaie, 47. Chapter 11. Mallarmé'S Money 1. Mallarmé, "Crisis in Poetry," 42. Further citations are in the text. 2. See P. Boyancé, Le culte des Muses chez les philosophes grecs (Paris: Editions de Boccard, 1937). 3. George William Cox, A Manual of Mythology in the Form of Question and Answer (New York: Leypoldt & Holt, 1868); Stéphane Mallarmé, trans., Les dieux antiques: Nouvelle mythologie d'après G. W. Cox et les travaux de la science moderne (Paris: Gallimard, 1925). 4- Stéphane Mallarmé, "Or," in Oeuvres complètes, 398. Further citations are in the text. 5. Stéphane Mallarmé, "Magie," in Oeuvres complètes, 399. 6. Stéphane Mallarmé, "La cour," in Oeuvres complètes, 415. 7. Mallarmé, "Magie." 399-400. 8. Mallarmé. "Magie," 400. 9. Mallarmé, "Magie." 399-400.

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10. Stéphane Mallarmé, "Solitude," in Oeuvres completes, 405. 11. Stéphane Mallarmé, "Confrontation," in Oeuvres completes, 410. Further citations are in the text. Chapter 12. Money And Reason 1. Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser, vol. 2 (New York: Coward-McCann, 1954). 158. Further citations are in the text. 2. Lucien Goldmann, Lukàcs and Heidegger: Towards a New Philosophy. trans. William Q. Boelhower (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977). Goldmann points out certain problematics common to the two thinkers, some stemming no doubt from their common mentors. 3. Martin Heidegger, "What Are Poets For?" ("Wozu Dichter?"), in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 135. 4. Rainer Maria Rilke, quoted by Heidegger in "What Are Poets For?" 136. 5. André Gide, "Le traité du Narcisse," 6. 6. Martin Heidegger, ". . . Poetically Man Dwells . . ., "in Poetry, Language, Thought, 222-223. Chapter 13. The Law And The Treasury 1. Charles Gide, Political Economy, 314. Further citations are in the text. 2. Rus Walton, One Nation under God (Washington, D.C.: Third Century Publishers. 1975), 261. 3. Goux, Symbolic Economies, chaps. 1 and 4. 4. Walton, One Nation, 236. 5. Walton, One Nation, 260. 6. Walton, One Nation, 236. 7. Goux. Symbolic Economies, 43.45, 91, 164 (Economie et symbolique, 89, 91, 178; Les iconoclastes, 48). Chapter 14. The Inconvertible Signifier 1. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale (Paris: Payot, 1972), 159-60; Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, in collaboration with Albert Reidlinger, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), 115. Further citations are to the English edition. 2. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 80. 3. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 80. 4. In "Télédscripteur W. B." (Les iconoclastes 115-27; not included in Symbolic Economies), I showed how William Burroughs exploited the mechanographic signifier in his fiction.

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5. Rainer Maria Rilke, quoted by Heidegger in "What Are Poets For?" 115-16. 6. Charles Gide, Political Economy, 287. 7. Charles Gide, Political Economy, 294. 8. Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire (Paris: Seuil, 1978), 2:63 (emphasis added). Chapter 15. The Myth Of Paper Money 1. Charles Gide, Political Economy, 318. 2. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: A Tragedy, trans. Walter Arndt (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), 124 (lines 4889-96). Chapter 16. The Treasure Trove Of Memory 1. Roland Barthes, "Eléments de sémiologie," Communications 4 (1964): 115. 2. André Breton, Position politique du surréalisme (Paris: Editions du Sagittaire, 1935), 58. 3. Valéry, "Poésie et pensée abstraite," in Variété V (Paris: Gallimard, 1944), 132; "Poetry and Abstract Thought," in The Art of Poetry, trans. Denise Folliot, vol. 7 of The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, ed. Jackson Mathews, Bollingen Series 45 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958), 52-81. Further citations are to the English translation and will be given in the text. 4. Valéry, Tel Quel II, 176-77. 5. Valéry, Tel Quel II, 177.

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