The article compares the views of Giorgio Agamben and Karl Marx on what both
interpret as a mystery inherent in the nature of economic relations. While Marx connects this feature with the formation of capitalism, Agamben traces its source to
early Christian thought. Both however regard the mystery as a historically determined particular form of an economy (in a broad sense), and both see it as the result
of a process of inversion. Although Agamben rejects Marx’s interpretation of labor
as a “generic essence” of mankind that is understood as mostly biological, and a constantly active volitional impulse, the author shows that their concepts have a number
of important correspondences.
This pertains primarily to the heterogeneity in the very phenomena of work and
life. Although that heterogeneity has a biological and asocial character, it is less the
result of natural processes than it is a product of the economic structure itself (a dispositif in Agamben’s terminology). Marx ironically remarked that the term “laborcommodity” is merely licentia poetica, which in fact refers to a terrible reality in
which the exploitation of labor takes on the appearance of a fair exchange between
its seller and buyer; and this can be read as an indication of an inverted form of that
dream of happiness, which according to Agamben supports the dispositifs that manage people’s lives for the sake of what is called their salvation.