The Weight of All Flesh: On the Subject-Matter of Political Economy

This book offers a radically new interpretation of Marx’s labor theory of value as one concerned with the afterlife of political theology in secular modernity. What Marx characterized as the dual character of the labor embodied in the commodity, it argues, is the doctrine of the King’s Two Bodies transferred from the political theology of sovereignty to the realm of political economy. This genealogy, leading from the fetishism of the royal body to the fetishism of the commodity, also suggests a new understanding of the irrational core at the center of economic busyness today, its 24/7 pace. The frenetic negotiations of our busy-bodies continue and translate into the doxology of everyday life, the liturgical labor that once sustained the sovereign’s glory. Maintaining that an effective critique of capitalist political economy must engage with this liturgical dimension, the book proposes a counter-activity, which it calls “paradoxological.”