Abstract
We have arrived at an elementary definition of the market as the exclusive and univocal medium of price, and a schematic concept of price as integrally quantitative and essentially contingent. It remains to determine the precise nature of the relationship between price and the market, on the one hand, and the relationship between the market and the social on the other. The latter problematic will be treated in the second half of the book, but the first will receive, in this chapter and the next, two complementary answers: that price is inscribed, and that price is intensive. These features are doubled by determinations proper to the market conceived as a medium: the market will be defined as an inscriptive and intensive surface.
Inscription and description — The doctrine of the primacy of inscription — The thematic of inscription in mathematical formalism — Meillassoux on the empty sign — Deleuze, the sign, intensity — The threefold scene of writing — Price and statement — Recapitulation
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Notes
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 6.
Nelson Goodman and W.V. Quine, ‘Towards a Constructive Nominalism’, The Journal of Symbolic Logic, 12:4 (1947): 105–22.
Hilbert, ‘On the Infinite’, in From Frege to Godel, (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 377. This is to further leave aside the fact that, for Hilbert, mathematics is concerned in the first instance with thought: ‘Let an object of our thought be called a thought-object [Gedankending], or, briefly, an object and let it be denoted by a sign.’ (Hilbert, ‘Foundations of Logic and Arithmetic’, in From Frege to Godel, 131) It is this relationship of denotation that is undermined or rather exceeded by Quine and Goodman.
In his very early piece ‘Mark and Lack’, Alain Badiou shows himself to be definitively Hilbertian on this score, since while he insists on the irreduci-bility of inscription (marks) for mathematics, these marks remain thematized in an entirely vague, even idealist, fashion. The issue of the individuation of the sign, which will be key here, remains unexamined by Badiou. It is no surprise then that Justin Clemens, in a wide-ranging comparative piece on Badiou that turns around the figure of the inscribed letter, writes the following: ‘The attentive reader will undoubtedly have noticed that […] I have never posed the question: what is a letter for Badiou? This question is unanswerable in anything but a metaphorical fashion. Letters are as close as one gets to the real […] Being is literal, as we would expect from a devotee of Lucretius and Mallarmé. Yet letters, in some radical way, must be non-phenomenal for Badiou.’ Justin Clemens, ‘Letters as the Condition of Conditions for Alain Badiou’, Communication and Cognition 36: 1–2 (2003), 94.
Dena Shottenkirk, ‘The Consequences of Goodman’s Nominalism for his Terminology’, in Nominalism and Its Aftermath: The Philosophy of Nelson Goodman, ed. Dena Shottenkirk, (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009), 52.
David Hilbert cited in Paolo Mancosu, From Brouwer to Hilbert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 195.
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: Athlone Press, 1989), 27.
Haïm Vidal Séphipa, ‘Introduction à l’étude de l’intensif’, Langages 18 (1970): 104–20.
Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Continuum, 2008), 3.
See, of course, Jacques Derrida, ‘Freud and the scene of writing’, in Writing and Difference (New York: Routledge, 2001), 246–91.
Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, in On Metapsychology, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin, 1991), 303.
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams part 2 (Standard Edition of Freud Volume IV), trans. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), 540.
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Ernest Mossner (London: Penguin, 1985), I.4.6; 300, 301.
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin Boundas (London: Athlone, 1990), 230.
J. Lacan, Compte rendu du Seminaire d l’ethique in Ornicar? No.28 (Paris: Navarin, 1984), 17.
Jacques Lacan, ‘The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power’, in Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink in collaboration with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg (London: WW Norton and Company, 2002), 496.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 167.
Michel Foucault, The Archeaology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1989), 63.
Duncan Foley, Adam’s Fallacy: A Guide to Economic Theology (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Belknap Press, 2006).
Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Séan Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 4–6.
Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of the Medical Gaze, trans. AM Sheridan (London: Taylor and Francis, 2003), 199.
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© 2015 Jon Roffe
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Roffe, J. (2015). The Writing of Price. In: Abstract Market Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137511751_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137511751_4
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