Weight of All Flesh

Eric Santner offers a radically new interpretation of Marx's labour theory of value as one concerned with the afterlife of political theology in secular modernity. What Marx characterised as the dual character of the labour embodied in the commodity, he 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 centre of economic busyness today, its 24/7 pace.