Money, language, and thought : literary and philosophic economies from the medieval to the modern era
Marc Shell explores the interactions between linguistic and economic production as they inform discourse from Chretien de Troyes to Heidegger. Close readings of works such as the medieval grail legends, The Merchant of Venice, Goethe's Faust, and Poe's "The Gold Bug" reveal how discourse has responded to the dissociation of symbol from thing characteristic of money, and how the development of increasingly symbolic currencies has involved changes in the meaning of meaning. Pursuing his investigations into the modern era, Shell points out significant internalization of economic form in Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger. He demonstrates how literature and philosophy have been driven to account self-critically for a "money of the mind" that pervades all discourse, and concludes with a discomforting thesis about the cultural and political limits of literature and philosophy
Print Book, English, 1993
Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1993
xiii, 245 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm
9780801846939, 0801846935
1012025044
Introduction: From Electrum to Electricity
1. The Gold Bug: Introduction to "the Industry of Letters" in America. Monetary and Aesthetic Theory. The Bug for Gold. The Humbug: Entomological Specimen, Species of Madness, and Specie. From Nothing to Something. The Goolah Bug: Linguistic Goolah and Monetary Goole. Last Words
2. The Blank Check: Accounting for the Grail. Dearth and Plenitude. Promise and Delivery. An Exchange Contract. Ideal and Real Estate. Checking Out the Eucharist
3. The Wether and the Ewe: Verbal Usury in The Merchant of Venice. Use, Ewes, and Iewes. From Courtship to Court. My Purse, My Person. Cancellations. Redemption?
4. Language and Property: The Economics of Translation in Goethe's Faust. Translation. Wealth and Poetry. Paper Money and Language. The Evocation of Helen. The Law of the Fist (Faustrecht). The Dead Pledge (Faustpfand). The Dialectical Plot
5. Money of the Mind: Dialectic and Monetary Form in Kant and Hegel. Suppression and Adequation in Kant. Against Formalism. Sublation and the Modus Tollens. Checkers and Cheeks. The Difference. Putting Hegel Down
6. "What is Truth?": Lessing's Numismatics and Heidegger's Alchemy. Nathan the Wise. On the Essence of Truth. On the Epigram
App. I: Beyond Chrysography
App. II: Likeness and Likelihood
App. III: The Money Complex of Psychoanalysis