Oikos

On the Economy and Ecology of Home

“At a certain season of our life we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house….
Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never instant’s truce between virtue and vice.
Goodness is the only investment that never fails.”
- H. Thoreau

“…for we still lack what is most necessary, and superfluous excess is the enemy of the necessary.”
- F. Nietzsche

C.J. Sentell
December 2008

Home is where we start from. A beginning point, a place of origin, home is a conceptual and
geographical necessity of the most ineluctable sort. No doubt this necessity points to a type of
foundation, to wit, to the foundation of the home. And while I would want to immediately put such a
foundation into erasure, it is cold outside and it is bearing the weight of the walls keeping me warm.
And so I begin at home with the figure of the oikos: the house, domicile, or dwelling place. A site of
protection, a shelter against the elements, a covering from the wind and rain, the home provides
respite from the sounds and furies raging around – though surely not within – us daily. The home is
a place of retreat, where we retire to recuperate and find solace from a relentless world.
A shallow cave, an emptied tree trunk, broad leaves interlaced overhead, walls of earth and
grass, of steel and glass, homes comes in many shapes and sizes. At times organized with
deliberation, purposiveness, and care, at other times in a haste derived from inattention, misfortune,
or crisis, the home is what we might provisionally call a contingent necessity. A certain type or
category of need, contingent necessity designates those needs outside of any absolute necessity – an
ontotheological concept par excellance – by inquiring into particular historical or genealogical
trajectories for those conditions without which it would not be possible. Simultaneously the
consequence and the condition of a given form of life, contingent necessities are those functions and
factors, elements and parts, that have come, by way of a prior organization, to ineliminably
accompany the continuation of a certain process in a particular environment.
We require a home of some kind, that is, even if are without a home, even if we are
homeless. This is because being homeless – whether in the literal, political, or existential sense – is
thinkable only in light of the contingent necessity of home. When we are homeless, we ache for
home, for any home. When we wander, home lingers and compels, if vaguely and with only a hint of

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nostalgia, due to its inexorable role in our lives, its inevitable horizon for experience. To travel is to
not be at home, which, strangely, makes traveling primarily about home, about being away from
home. When we are exiles in a foreign country, when we are resident aliens cast amid lands cursed
with injustice, we yearn for home. And so to return home is to come back to a starting point, an
origin. It is to be rejoined and made whole with that which was in the beginning.
In this sense, contingent necessity is a concept at home within a working philosophical
anthropology, a mode of inquiry turning around a hypothetical gesture, the as if of human life in
community. Such a gesture is extended from a spirit of affirmative criticism, which says yes and no
and so, aimed at understanding, empathy, and transformation. To say that the home is a contingent
necessity is to affirm its place in structuring the habits of everyday life while simultaneously denying
its boundaries as fixed and static; it is to deploy a concept that seeks a new home, a new place for life
amid a changing landscape. The boundaries of the home are expanded, or expandable, by the extent
to which experience is reconstructed along new and experimental axes of inquiry, seeking to
integrate the harmonies and disruptions always already at work within experience, incorporating
them to construct a place for a more enriching future. Such an expansion involves transforming the
home place, where the comings and goings of everyday life intersect and collide in so many
predictably disparate ways, into a space where the lives of people and things are opened onto
increasingly wide fields for experimental living.
And if we continue with the figure of the human home, certain other such contingent
necessities begin to emerge. That is, we turn to food and water, the sustenance for the individual
organism, which is transferred into the energy required for the localized continuation of ways and
forms of life; to clothing or some covering for the naked skin, a home for the singular body, we
might say, that is but another boundary between the flesh and the elements; to work, labor, or
productive activity taken up in the motion of everyday life, expending the energy consumed for its
sake and in the service of a tomorrow not yet arrived; and, of course, to the singularity of the gift of
death, the absolute limiting horizon of a particular arrangement of matter in motion. Thus we end up
with a rather unique set of universals – contingent universals, if I am allowed such a phrase – that
include food, sex, work, and death, which, as if a histos at the hearth of a home, weaves our lives into
a fabric of eating, loving, working, and dying.
All of these circulate in and around the home, within, between, and beyond the borders of the
house. Coming and going. Staying, hiding, resting. Loving, laughing, lying, and dying. Home is a
dwelling place. A place to dwell within, as well as a place from which to dwell, home is the base
place for a way of life. Or, home is a form within which a way of dwelling takes place. We move

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about the home, from place to place and room to room. With designated places for the necessary
contingencies of life – for cooking and eating, for bathing, sleeping, and defecating, for making love
and talking together and engaging in play – the home follows a principle of organization that to
greater and lesser degrees satisfies these needs by delineating their boundaries. The needs of human
life play themselves out within and beyond the walls of the place of everyday dwelling. Within this
place, these needs are satisfied to the extent that the movement of those undergoing change over time
are able to move about the home in enabling ways. By accounting for needs through the provision of
space, the home is that place within which the fulfillment and satisfaction of needs becomes possible.
Within the home, therefore, there is movement, a flow of goods and personhoods. Put
another way, and perhaps more precisely, it is through the home that these flow. A hole opens up in
the oikos. The doors and windows are opened onto the outside; its boundaries become porous, letting
in flies and mice, not to mention the wind and rain. But this really is just to dramatize – on the stage
of seasonal cleaning, e.g., spring cleaning, i.e., cleaning the house, airing and sweeping it out,
burning sage in a quiet corner – an always already. Such a dramatization forgets that doors and
windows are already being opened and closed as we come and go from home, which elides the
uncomfortable and costly fact that there are always drafts, gaps, and spacings between our walls and
windows. This elision, letting in what we want kept out and keeping out what we need to let in, is in
fact an excess, exceeding of the boundaries of the home while simultaneously reinforcing its borders.
But it is this movement in general that interests me, the movement we admit and accept in the
course of our daily motions in and out and through the home. How are we best able to discern the
principle by which they move? Through what conduits do these motions constitute the determinate
set of possibilities available for a given form of life? And how do such possibilities relate to and
reconstruct the principle operative within this ongoing motion? Where is the home situated and what
is its function? How can the home be reorganized as a potential site of resistance to the economies
that have come to dominate its movements? Such questions, to be sure, turn around a more
expansive genealogy of domestic life, a more robust archeology of the oikos, and are answerable
proscriptively only in a hypothetical voice. But even this voice, articulated by means of an
experimental as if, nevertheless falls within the logic of the path, which is surely related to the trace
and its tracings over this palimpsest world. And so I accept the necessity of following one direction
at a time. This is because, speaking with Derrida, I believe in, or at least hope for, a within and a
beyond of transcendental criticism. Derrida:
To see to it that the beyond does not return to the within is to recognize in the contortion the necessity of a
pathway. That pathway must leave a track in the text. Without that track, abandoned to the simple content

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 of its conclusions, the ultra-transcendental text will so closely resemble the precritical text as to be
indistinguishable from it. We must now form and meditate upon the law of this resemblance.1
The place for such a future meditation comes in the form of the erasure of concepts, which, as if a
trace along the path, a track in the text, can only be erased after having appeared. That is, I too
attempt to think genealogically about critical narratives, beyond any simple act of memory, within
what is always an impossible improvisation, a subjunctive extension of my voice slowed to the pace
and space of script.
But this gesture beyond memory is not an elision of the past. Rather, and by means of a
rueful affirmation, it seeks a mode of inquiry beyond the present as now – as if beyond the moment
removed from time – by seeking a present of today, in the flow of forces that would relentlessly work
to reappropriate critical thinking for their own ends. To speak with Derrida, to resist such
reappropriation is to “bear witness, in the manner of an ethical or political act, for today and
tomorrow.” 2 It is to work tirelessly against a totalizing economy that displaces criticism into internal
exile, a resident alien within its own place. The topography of this economy is mapped by the
metaphysics of presence, its trails inexorably winding through the ridges and spurs carved into the
land by the logic of identity. And if we are to go anywhere a pathway is required, and one can only
walk one path at a time. But strictly speaking, there is no proper trailhead along this path, for it is
“precisely the quest for a rightful beginning, an absolute point of departure, a principle
responsibility,” that is put into question in this beyond and within to transcendental criticism.3
Putting this origin, or archê, into question, however, nevertheless entails that its value
must make its necessity felt before letting itself be erased. The concept of the archê-trace must comply with
both that necessity and that erasure. It is in fact contradictory and not acceptable within the logic of
identity. The trace is not only the disappearance of origin – within the discourse that we sustain and
according to the path that we follow it means that the origin did not even disappear, that it was never
constituted except reciprocally by a nonorigin, the trace, which thus becomes the origin of the origin. From
then on…one must indeed speak of an originary trace or archê-trace. Yet we know that that concept
destroys its name and that, if all begins with the trace, there is above all no originary trace.4
The archê must make its presence felt before being erased, accepting and defying at once the logic of
identity and the logic of presence. Initiating a detour along the way, erasure provokes us to another

1
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press. (1974, 1997), pg. 61.
2
Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death. Translated by David Wills. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
(1992,1995), pg. 35.
3
Jacques Derrida, “Différance” in Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press. (1982), pg. 6.
4
Derrida, Of Grammatology, pg. 61.

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logic, the (non)logic of deconstruction, where the “trace is the différance, which opens appearance
5
and signification.” This trace “is not a presence but the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates
itself, displaces itself, refers itself,” and so “it properly has no site” and “erasure belongs to its
structure.”6
And so I begin, again for the first time, from where I am: at home, not in space but spacing,
that is, a place undergoing change over time, in and from where I am able, from where I was thrown
into place, in the space-becoming of time and the time-becoming of space of today, always already
exceeding the now. Such a spacing place – which is different from but related to a spacious place –
displaces the moment of presence, the original condition that functions as a transcendental archê. By
making possible the presence of the present, and so the appearance of the oikos, an origin
immediately erased, covered over, there is nothing left but a trace to follow, a pathway through the
forest that with each step brings me closer to the non-originary origin, the non-placed place of the
oikos. Here I hope to dwell, if but briefly considering this place adequate for a future home, if the
home in fact has a future. Within this dwelling I will circulate within and beyond the boundaries of
the oikos, following certain economic detours along the way, between this place and this sign. And
so here I gesture toward the first waypoint in this inquiry.

Home Economics
Beginning again from a certain beginning, it is not totally out of place to assume that there is an
operative principle at work in the home. The experience of home is one of variously organized order.
The home is an institution transmitting certain calls to order, certain habits of action, and certain
forms of life, across generations. In this way, the home, one of the most preciously banal gifts
handed down from mothers and fathers, retaining traces of the homes that marked the lives of the
generations from which we emerge. How those homes come to be organized, and how individuals
living within them manage its affairs, forms a contingently necessary horizon from and against which
the order of our own homes takes shape. In this way, we can speak of an archê at work within the
oikos. Archê, from the Greek meaning principle, ultimate underlying substance, or final
indemonstrable principle, it also is a beginning or starting point. And as Derrida reminds us, this
archê “names at once the commencement and the commandment.” Commencing and commanding,
originating and ordering, the archê invokes both operations simultaneously. Derrida writes:

5
Derrida, Of Grammatology, pg. 65.
6
Derrida, “Différance”, pg. 24.

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 This name apparently coordinates two principles in one: the principle according to nature or history, there
where things commence – physical, historical, or ontological principle – but also the principle according to
the law, there where men and gods command, there where authority, social order are exercised, in this
place from which order is given – nomological principle.7
The archê, then, points us in two directions at once: on the one hand, to the beginnings of orders and
the origins of laws, while on the other hand to the laws of origins and orders of beginnings. We now
are in a position to begin understanding how the archê of the oikos initiates activity by issuing calls
to order. Again, a basic example of this involves, precisely and literally, the base of the oikos: the
orders imposed by way of the seemingly simple act of constructing the floor plan of a house. By
arranging various spaces, such a plan makes certain forms of life possible. It conditions particular
habits of motion by providing spaces for specific activities to occur and habitats for certain creatures
to thrive. But at the same time, and in the same instituting movement that gives such possibilities
their meaning, these spaces are circumscribed by what they exclude, namely, other forms of life and
so other types of creatures and habits as well.
In this way, these calls to order function as instruments by which the management of the
home is accomplished, forming an assemblage of techniques proper to its activity. It is this activity of
household management, and the means and ends involved in its motion, which lead to the
development of particular forms of techne proper to its aims. The oikos and archê together, then, call
for certain techne that are the means to the ends proper to household management. We arrive, thus,
at the art of ordering the home. Oikos finds nemein, or to manage. Nemein, from nomos – law, use,
possession, or that which is habitual – leads us to oikos-nomos: the law of the home, the use of the
household place, the possession of a lineage, or the habitual practices characteristic within a place of
dwelling. Coeval and co-constitutive with oikos, then, is this nomos, this management of movements
within the dwelling place that takes place by way of certain laws or habits of motion that are in a
particular place.
This principle, this law of the home found in the home, constitutes the economy of
domesticity. It is the economy of the home, the domestic economy, whose proper ends are the
satisfaction of the needs for those dwelling in its place. The propriety of the domestic economy, that
is, is based within a logic of the proper: what belongs, what is appropriate for those undergoing
change over time, whose dwelling is a relation as if to property. The habits of motion proper to such
a place are the principles by which those motions are managed. From such principles, and by means

7
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press. (1995), pg. 1.

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of the techniques ready to hand, an art of household management emerges. Such an art involves
managing the comings and goings of the members of the household, seeing to their needs, ensuring
that the appropriate amounts of resources are allocated to each. It involves directing and modifying
the flows of energy and waste, of resources both material and temporal. It involves cleaning and
cooking, caring and conditioning. At its best, in involves prudence and love and virtue; at its worst,
it involves haste and hurt and vice. Absorbing the world from birth, the home forms one of the most
subtle and pervasive environments of our lives. While its mismanagement can lead to disorder in the
lives of its inhabitants, its proper management can provide one of the most important environments
for the flourishing of human life.
Aristotle understood keenly the importance of the home, as well as the virtues involved in its
management. Virtue being an active condition stemming from being at work in certain ways, the
ways in which we are set to work condition the range of possible active states in a given life-world.
That is, the modes of possible motion in the home, in the place in which we dwell, delimits the scope
of possibilities for certain habits, actions, and ways of being-at-work in the world. This is especially
relevant for, but by no means limited to, children. “It makes no small difference,” Aristotle says, “to
be habituated in this way or that straight from childhood, but an enormous difference, or rather all the
difference.”8 Imitating, absorbing, and incorporating the environment in which they are situated, the
child in-habits the home in ways that are different only in degree, in rapidity, than with the way the
adult in-habits the home. But for all its inhabitants, home is the place of in-habitation.
A significant part of habituation, then, concerns the management of the habitation. Such
management consists in arranging and ordering its spaces and resources and motions, acquiring and
directing the flow of its necessary goods, preparing the sustenance that sustains the household,
cleaning and rearranging the detritus of everyday life, and disposing of the waste that is the
byproduct of the same. As an art – that is, because it can be done in better and worse ways, in ways
exhibiting more skill and deliberation and less care and attention – the activity of managing the
economy of the home is one proper to virtue and vice. Like all virtues, those involved in the art of
domestic economics come to be present neither by nature nor contrary to nature; rather, they come to
be present in those “who are of such a nature as to take them on, and [are] to be brought to
completion by means of habit.”9 And like all virtues, moreover, those at work within the oikos are

8
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Joe Sachs. Newburyport: Focus Publishing & R. Pullins Co.
(2002), Bekker line1130b 25, pg. 23.
9
Ibid., 1103a 25, pg. 22.

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“of such a nature as to be destroyed by deficiency and by excess.”10 In this way, virtue “is an active
condition that makes one apt at choosing, consisting in a mean condition in relation to us, which is
determined by a proportion and by the means by which a person with practical judgment would
determine it.”11 Both discovering and choosing the mean, virtue concerns an active comportment to
proportionality, and so for the management of the domestic economy to be virtuous it must aim at
balancing the flow of resources and goods, allocating them within limits in proportion to need,
ability, and desire.
Such management, of course, includes the home in terms of its constituent members and their
interrelationships. These relationships are interior to the oikos, at work between its walls, and as if in
a secrecy more or less familial. But, as has been implied throughout so far, a crucial aspect of the
domestic economy involves the boundary between the inside and the outside, between the walls of
the oikos and the streets of the polis. The relationship between the home and the community forms a
separate but equally important set of relations proper to household management. Regardless of the
virtue at work in the management of particular households, every domestic economy concerns, to
greater and lesser degrees, the ordering of the resources found and produced within the home,
preparing them for the energy required to maintain those dwelling within, working up any surplus for
exchange, and managing the flow of goods into the household from without.
For Aristotle, then, those undergoing change over time dwelling within a particular oikos,
more commonly known as a family, constituted the first community. As this unit of organization
grew and differentiated, that which was proper to all – i.e., the property held in common – was
divided and spread among new and different households. Thus arose a quantitative and qualitative
difference among homes, which developed into a set of social relationships wherein some households
needed things that other households had access to and vice versa. This process most obviously
concerns the acquisition of food and foodstuffs not produced within the home, or at least not every
home, as well as items for activities such as home crafting and cleaning. And while exchange arises
from the active interaction between households, once such goods and resources are acquired and
stored, they leave circulation either through immediate consumption or conservation for future
consumption or exchange.
In this way, there arose a particular art of acquisition proper to household management,
which the art “must find ready to hand, or itself provide, such things necessary to life, and useful for

10
Ibid., 1104a 12, pg. 23.
11
Ibid., 1107a 1, pg. 29.

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the community or state, as can be stored.”12 To this art Aristotle contrasts another art of acquisition,
namely, the art of acquiring wealth. Only the former, Aristotle argues, is proper to the art of
household management, while the latter is proper only to what he terms chrematistics. Put
differently, and more pointedly, the art of acquiring wealth is not proper to economics; economics
concerns the art of household management alone. This distinction is important because it marks two
different forms of activity, two different forms of being-at-work, which call in turn for different
means to different ends, or different operative principles of motion.
In this way, we may speak of the home as a restricted economy operating within a more
general economy of exchange. Within the restricted economy of the oikos, “there is boundary fixed,
just as there is in the other arts, for the instruments of any art are never unlimited.”13 Such limits
stem from the contingent necessity that, once certain basic needs are met, little more is required for
sustaining and reproducing human life. Such a limit is fixed, or at least fixable, for any given
community precisely because “the amount of property which is needed for the good life is not
unlimited.”14 Certain goods satisfy certain basic needs, satiating, if but for a moment, the absence,
lack, or privation felt from the center of the organism. All else, strictly speaking, is excess, beyond
the limits of need. And this is precisely why the art of acquiring wealth has no limits: it is not aimed
at satisfying limited needs, but at the further accumulation of goods and resources, and of values
embodied in wealth.
For Aristotle, barter, as an early form of exchange, does not involve the art of acquiring
wealth but rather is proper to the art of household management. Such exchange “is not contrary to
nature, but is needed for the satisfaction of men’s natural wants.”15 When these wants are fulfilled,
exchange ceases, if but for a time, because nothing else is needed. But as inhabitants of certain
homes and communities began to become dependent on other homes and other communities for the
necessities of daily life, trade developed out of this form of exchange by way of yet further
necessities contingent upon a prior stage of development. Out of such arrangements of dependency
and necessity, the development of the division of labor and the distribution of wealth were set into
motion. From such developments, and because “the necessaries of life are not easily carried about,”
the use of coins developed as an efficient means for mediating exchange. With their value inscribed

12
Aristotle, Politics. Translated by B. Jowett in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2. Edited by Jonathan
Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (1984) Bekker line1256b 10, pg. 1994.
13
Ibid., 1256b 32, pg. 1994.
14
Ibid., 1256b 32, pg. 1994.
15
Ibid., 1257a 1, pg. 1994.

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upon their face, coins began to function increasingly as a universal medium of exchange, enabling
trade across increasingly large distances, further and further from home.
It is important to note here how the rise of trade, the art of producing wealth by means of
exchange, is tied to the use of money. Functioning as the unit of exchange, coins and currency
simultaneously form the limits to exchange: they are the means and medium of exchange, outside of
which exchange of a certain form is not possible. And as the practice of employing currency
developed in particular places and at particular times, exchange was brought more fully within the
sphere of money, grafting many previous forms of exchange onto the tree of trade by means of gold,
silver, iron, and bronze bandings. In this process, exchange was transformed into a system of trade
wherein currency formed a universal system of value, thus making possible the trading of goods
across various restricted economies. Aristotle:
Therefore it is necessary for all things to be measured by some one thing…but in truth this is need, which
holds everything together, for if people were in need of nothing, or did not have similar needs, then there
would either be no exchange or not the same kind. But by conventional agreement, the currency has
become a sort of interchangeable substitute for need, and for this reason it has the name currency, because
it is not natural but by current custom, and it is in our power to change it or make it worthless.16
It is need, then, that is the primary force binding the community together, and currency (nomisma,
from nomos) the customary mode in which such needs are made interchangeable. In its capacity to
re-present values abstractly, currency makes possible the exchange of values. As a unit of measure,
currency forms the medium in which things of seemingly different values are made commensurable,
exchangeable. And because exchange is a form of social relationship arising out of the contingent
necessities of the home, integrating the oikos into the larger economy of the community, exchange is
a preliminary condition and consequence of communal life. As such, Aristotle claims that “all things
ought to be valued in currency, for in this way there will always be exchange…for there would be no
community if there were not exchange, and no exchange if there were not equality, and no equality if
there were no commensurability.”17 Currency, commensurability, exchange, and community: all of
these are at work in and through the economy of the home, or the home as the place for economics.
In this way, the art of acquiring wealth is proper to the activity of trade and not to household
management. Chrematistics, in other words, concerns trade and commerce, which aims at the
acquisition of wealth, while economics concerns the home and the resources necessary for its
sustenance and maintenance. And it is precisely here that we begin to understand how the art of

16
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1133a 20, pg. 89.
17
Ibid., 1133b 15, pg. 90.

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acquiring wealth has no limits. Because the arts aim at “accomplishing their ends to the uttermost,”
in one sense they can be said to be without limit, “for the end is always a limit.”18 In a sense there is
no end, or stopping point, to the pursuit of health, for example, and so there is no limit to practicing
the art of medicine. On the one hand, then, the ends of an art limit the possible means operative
within a given art. On the other hand, however, the end of the art of acquiring wealth is the
accumulation of more money, which it achieves by means of money. And so while it certainly seems
as if all wealth must be limited, Aristotle points out that, in fact, “we find the opposite to be the case,
for all getters of wealth increase their hoard of coin without limit.”19 Out of circulation, money
becomes a hoard, a collection of accumulated values whose sole use is limited to mediating
exchange. And so while the end of the art of wealth acquisition is also it limit, the means at work in
such an art are themselves limitless. Thus, when the acquisition of wealth is taken to be the end of
household management, the whole idea of living within that house is transformed into an endless
pursuit of wealth, or at least a struggle not to lose it. Those dwelling within such a confused home,
Aristotle says, “are intent upon living only, and not upon living well; and, as their desires are
unlimited, they also desire that the means of gratifying them should be without limit.”20 Such lives
find enjoyment only in this excess, and so they seek an art that will produce this excess of enjoyment.
Unlike economics properly understood, then, chrematistics is an unlimited art. Unlike
economics, whose ends concern the satisfaction of limited needs within the home, the end of
chrematistics is the endless satisfaction of unlimited desire by way of the accumulation of wealth.
And so while the art of household management properly involves a certain art of acquisition
governed by the exchange of contingent necessities, the art of acquisition proper to the art of
acquiring wealth properly concerns trade and commerce. The upshot, therefore, is that there is a
form of acquisition and exchange outside the accumulation of wealth, and this form is constitutive of
community, which is formed by means of exchange. Enabling exchange and community, finally,
currency circulates within an in-habited economy limited by the needs of a home.

The Law of the Archive

To again begin with the oikos and the archê, we follow yet another path. As Derrida is anxious to
point out, this path leads to the archive whose “only meaning,” he says, “comes to it from the Greek
arkeion: initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the

18
Aristotle, Politics, 1257b, 27, pg. 1995.
19
Ibid., 1257b 34, pg.1995.
20
Ibid., 1258a 2, pg. 1996.

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archons, those who commanded.”21 As those who rule, as those who hand down law, the figure of
the archon integrates the oikos of the archê and the archê of the oikos into a visible site of power and
authority by means of the law. Derrida says that the “concept of the archive shelters in itself, of
course, this memory of the name arkhe. But it also shelters itself from this memory which it shelters:
which comes down to saying also that it forgets it”.22 In the home of the lawgivers, the archive is
first placed, hidden from view but located in a particular place. As soon as it is placed, however, its
keepers forget where they hid it, thus suspending with this forgetting any possibility of finding it. “It
is thus,” Derrida continues, “in this domiciliation, in this house arrest, that archives take place. The
dwelling, this place where they [the archons] dwell permanently, marks this institutional passage
from the private to the public, which does not always mean from the secret to the nonsecret.”23 And
so it is within the house of the archons that the border between the public and private, which is not
the same as the nonsecret and the secret, the unrevealed and the revealed, finds its origin.
Thus, in the oikos of the archons dwells the archê of nomos. Joining place and law, the
domicile of the archon lays in situ at what Derrida calls “the intersection of the topological and the
nomological,” where the scene of domesticity merges with the scene of politics.24 The point at the
center of this intersection, where the consolidation of topos and nomos occurs, is the home already
situated within the community, within living distance from the home of the archons, the archive, the
source of law, which, contrary to Aristotle’s need, is the force holding the parts together as a whole.
This is what Derrida calls the “topo-nomology” of the home as archive, as the place of the archive,
where an “archontic dimension of domiciliation” is at work.25 This dimension, he writes, expresses
an “archic, in truth patriarchic, function, without which no archive would ever come into play or
appear as such. To shelter itself and, sheltered, to conceal itself.”26 By placing the archive in the
home of those who rule, the nomos is situated topographically, which is to say that the (public) law is
(in principle) able to be located, even while it is concealed behind the (private) façade of its domicile.
But this power is not merely topo-nomological, for Derrida also suggests this archontic power
gathers the functions of unification, of identification, of classification, [and] must be paired with what we
will call the power of consignation….[or,] consigning through gathering together signs…in a system or a
synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration.27

21
Derrida, Archive Fever, pg. 2.
22
Ibid.
23
Ibid.
24
Ibid., pg. 3.
25
Ibid.
26
Ibid.
27
Ibid.

12
Established simultaneously as the shelter and source of the law, then, the power of the archive –
precisely and decisively a patriarchic power – is a function of the power of the archons, who gather
the disparate parts into a whole through the force of law and give name and order to the signs
meaningful for community life. And so within this force, grounded as it is in the patriarchal power
of the home, lies the inherent violence of the archive. According to Derrida, such violence is
the first figure of an archive, because every archive…is at once institutive and conservative. Revolutionary
and traditional. An eco-nomic archive in this double sense: it keeps, it puts in reserve, it saves, but in an
unnatural fashion, that is to say in making the law (nomos) or in making people respect the law. A moment
ago we called it nomological. It has the force of law, of a law which is the law of the house (oikos), of the
house as place, domicile, family, lineage, or institution.28
And while I will return to the double sense of the economy of the archive below, it suffices to note
here how such an institution is contrary to nature, which is not to say that it is abnormal, but precisely
the opposite: it is the founding of norms by means of a systematic classification of identities.
Archontic power, then, dwells and gathers by force, consigning names to things, assigning them
places within the founding boundaries of the home. Within this synchronic domicile, the systematic
articulation of differences is reproduced under the unity of the sign, the law dwelling under the figure
of a single roof and a single name, the point of its origin.
Archontic power, then, is not be restricted to a particular person or house. Rather, it is
dispersed across the topology of a community, which is born and sustained by means of the force of
its nomology. Indeed, Derrida notes the political function of the archive in a footnote: “There is no
political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can
always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its
constitution, and its interpretation.”29 It is by the means of access to the archive, then, that Derrida
suggests an analysis of political power can be accomplished, which suggests that when the place of
the archive was the same place as the home of archons, it was inevitable – perhaps even necessary –
for the archive to be exclusive, for access to be limited to all but the powerful. It was their home,
after all. But in this way we might be tempted to think that the “effective democratization” expressed
in this genealogical account represents such power at its nadir. Perhaps. But Derrida directs our
attention elsewhere, deflecting the course of our inquiry to the uninhabited, inhabituated space
making possible our various selective emphases, that is, to différance.

28
Ibid., pg. 7.
29
Ibid., pg. 4.

13
 For Derrida, différance is neither a method nor a concept nor a thing. 30 Indeed, différance is
not even a word, with its mute graphic difference standing as a tacit monument to the body of the
sign. Neither word, concept, nor thing, Derrida suggests the sheaf as a more appropriate figure for
this non-word, this non-concept, for the motion proper to différance does not aim at “describing a
history and narrating its stages, text by text, context by context, demonstrating the economy that each
time imposed this graphic disorder.” Instead, it concerns what Derrida terms the “general system of
this economy.”31 Différance is proper to an economy more general than that which its graphic
disorder disrupts. Within such a general economy, Derrida suggests, the sheaf “seems to mark more
appropriately that the assemblage to be proposed has the complex structure of a weaving, an
interlacing which permits the different threads and different lines of meaning – or of force – to go off
again in different directions, just as it is always ready to tie itself up with others.”32 The work of
différance, as if an assembling sheaf, moves within the warp and woof of a more restricted economy,
differencing and deferring its lines of force and meaning within and beyond its own limits.
In this way, there is an economy of différance. It is an economic (non)concept “designating
the production of differing/deferring” always already at work within various restricted economies.
Différance initiates a certain economic detour within and beyond a certain eco-nomic logic of
presence. By itself, Derrida explains, différance “would be more ‘originary,’ but one would no
longer be able to call it ‘origin’ or ‘ground,’ those notions belonging essentially to the history of
onto-theology, to the system functioning as the effacing of difference.”33 The emphasis here on the
subjunctive would, simultaneously deploying the tense of possibility while withdrawing from its
limits, Derrida notes:
For the economic character of différance in no way implies that the deferred presence can always be found
again, that we have here only an investment that provisionally and calculatedly delays the perception of its
profit or the profit of its perception…If the displaced presentation remains definitively and implacably
postponed, it is not that a certain present remains absent of hidden. Rather, différance maintains our
relationship with that which we necessarily misconstrue, and which exceeds the alternative of presence and
absence.34
Simultaneously inhibiting and prohibiting, accepting and denying, différance resists the relentless
drive of (re)appropriation forming the inside to the logic of presence. In this way, like the trace,

30
Ibid., pg. 3, Cf. Letter to Japanese friend (seminar handout)
31
Ibid.
32
Ibid.
33
Derrida, “Différance”, pg. 23.
34
Ibid., pg. 20.

14
“[o]ne cannot think…différance…on the basis of the present, or of the presence of the present.”35
That is, although différance “makes possible the presentation of the being-present, it is never
presented as such. It is never offered to the present. Or to anyone. Reserving itself, not exposing
itself, in regular fashion it exceeds the order of truth at a certain precise point, but without
dissimulating itself as something.”36 This reserving refusal, like the mute letter standing as a tacit
monument to its graphic disordering, is silent. It is a non-present tomb, a home for the absent. Thus:
The a of differance, thus, is not heard; it remains silent, secret and discreet as a tomb: oikësis. And thereby
let us anticipate the delineation of a site, the familial residence and tomb of the proper in which is
produced, by differance, the economy of death. This stone – provided that one knows how to decipher its
inscription – is not far from announcing the death of the tyrant.37
At work within the tomb, within the oikësis of the familial past, différance produces an economy of
death. It is as if such an economy is the tomb of the proper as familial residence, of what belongs to
propriety and belongs as property in the face of the absolute economy of death. And so on the silent
face of this tomb, différance is the mark by which – if the future in fact has a future, and if we have
the tools by which to decipher it in that future – the death of a certain tyrant will be written.
This tyrant has multiple figurations. Derrida here is alluding to the figure of Antigone, which
Hegel had engaged on similar grounds as well.38 But alternatively, and for the inquiry at hand, this
tyrant takes on yet further figurations. For example, it may be taken for the archons, to those who
denied access to the law while enforcing by means of its patriarchal principle exclusion from it; or it
may be the tyranny of presence, which presents the totality of an inside, a whole without an outside, a
synchronic system within which presence and absence become normative forces; or, finally, it may
be a particular economy that has come to dwell in the place of archival law, dominating and
transforming the home in the process, namely, capitalism. But in any case, it is by means of its
differing-deferring that différance supplants its own place within both a topology of concepts and a
nomology of signs, displacing itself beyond any restricted economy to a general economy, which is
always already engaging and refusing (re)entrance into the economy of presence.
To pursue the difference différance produces between these two economies, it is worth
accounting for the way in which, scattered among his texts and surely within his own archives,
Derrida has repeatedly attempted to indicate how a new, rigorous and indeed even “scientific”
relating of restricted to general economies might disrupt and displace the economy of presence. And

35
Ibid., pg. 21.
36
Ibid., pg. 6.
37
Ibid., pg. 4.
38
Ibid.

15
it is amid such differences that Derrida acknowledges “the point of greatest obscurity, on the very
enigma of différance, on precisely that which divides its very concept by means of a strange
cleavage.”39 Of this obscurity, he asks:
How are we to think simultaneously, on the one hand, différance, as the economic detour which, in the
element of the same, always aims at coming back to the pleasure or presence that have been deferred by
calculation, and, on the other hand, différance as the relation to an impossible presence, as expenditure
without reserve, as the irreparable loss of presence, the irreversible usage of energy, that is, as the death
instinct, and as the entirely other relationship that apparently interrupts every economy?40
How do we think, that is, différance within a restricted economy, whose aim is to continually return
to the pleasure of profit it makes possible, and différance within a general economy, whose motion
renders such profit meaningless by the excessive loss of presence? To begin to answer this double
eco-nomic question, we may understand restricted economy as any synchronic, totalizing system that
attempts to account for every thing appearing within that system by attributing to it meaning and
sense. Nothing, strictly speaking, lies outside a restricted economy precisely because everything is
accounted for inside such an economy. A restricted economy, Derrida says, “takes no part in
expenditure without reserve, death, opening itself to nonmeaning, etc.” A general economy, on the
other hand, is one “that takes into account the nonreserve, that keeps in reserve the nonreserve, if it
can be put thus.”41 Superceding any particular restricted economy, then, general economy is open-
ended, excessive in its expanse and without limits, thus creating passageways within and beyond the
restricted logic of totalizing horizons. By means of différance, general economy makes possible the
synchronic appearance of restricted economy as such.
Between these economies is a difference that, if I am allowed the indulgence, makes a
différance. That is, and more precisely, between these economies Derrida locates “a relationship
between a différance that can make a profit on its investment and a différance that misses its profit,
the investiture of a presence that is pure and without loss here being confused with absolute loss,
with death.”42 Within restricted economies profit is possible; one can, so to speak, make a profit
from one’s investments, which are secured by means of an investiture in presence that appears pure
and without loss – that is, in tact. Within a general economy, however, profit is missed precisely
because it is impossible. Lacking an investiture of presence, general economy lacks limits,
expending without reserve, in limitless excess, opening onto nonmeaning, onto death – indeed,

39
Ibid., pg. 14.
40
Ibid., pg. 19.
41
Ibid.
42
Ibid.

16
absolute death. And so by confusing and refusing the relationship between restricted and general
economies, we fail to comprehend the difference différance makes.

Market Economics
Stopping for now, I begin again elsewhere, amid yet further fragments of text and memory, and yet
closer and closer to home. With Aristotle I noted how there are two markets in which good and
resources flow, namely, the economy of the household and the economy of the market. As the
economy of the home involves the restricted circulation of goods and resources driven by necessity,
the economy of the market involves the general circulation of such items driven by wealth
acquisition. The distinction between economics and chrematistics, then, tracks simultaneously two
different economies, each operating according to separate principles of motion, suggesting prime
facie a certain tension, if not mutual exclusion, at work at their intersection. And so because each of
these economies are always already at work in conjunction, transforming each other in the process,
the question becomes how such differences effect the nature of exchange, it participants, and the
goods transacted in the process. And so it is to Marx that I now turn, for while he notes Aristotle’s
distinction approvingly in a footnote, he nevertheless accepts its conflation – at least as it has been
handed down in modern political economy – so as to begin again, picking up traces left in Aristotle’s
textual wake, following their path to further developments.
For Marx the circulation of commodities takes two forms, namely, the simple circulation of
commodities as money and the circulation of money as capital. The difference between money and
capital, that is, is a difference in their form of circulation, which aim at different ends. In the simple
circulation of commodities, both the beginning and ending points of the movement are commodities:
a commodity is made and exchanged for money, which is then converted into another commodity so
as to satisfy need. In the circulation of money as capital, however, both the beginning and ending
points of the movement are money: money is put into motion to buy a commodity only in order to
sell it at a higher price, thus making a profit. Each of these are phases in the process of circulation,
and exchange is the “total movement” of “[t]hese two phases, taken together in their unity.”43 The
money operative in the second phase of circulation, however, creates the condition for the possibility
of capital. Of this entire circulatory process, Marx writes:
The transformation of a sum of money into means of production and labor-power is the first phase of the
movement undergone by the quantum of value which is going to function as capital. It takes place in the
market, within the sphere of circulation. The second phase of the movement, the process of production, is

43
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. New York: Vintage Books. (1976), pg. 248.

17
 complete as soon as the means of production have been converted into commodities whose value exceeds
that of their component parts, and therefore contains the capital originally advanced plus a surplus-value.
These commodities must be then thrown back into the sphere of circulation. They must be sold, their value
must be realized in money, this money must be transformed once again into capital, and so on, again and
again. This cycle, in which the same phases are continually gone through in succession, forms the
circulation of capital….44
Capital, then, is money in motion aimed at its own valorization, at its own increase, which is without
limit. This unlimited advancement, whereby value is added to itself in the process of circulation, is
how money performs its own valorization and, in so doing, becomes capital. And because this
process is unlimited, offering as it does the prospect of infinite wealth, capital is incessantly inserted
and withdrawn from circulation so as to facilitate accumulation.
It is important to note, however, how the motion from a particular commodity with a
particular use-value to the universal equivalent of money is the movement from the particular to the
universal. On the other hand, the movement from money to commodity is one from the universal to
the particular – that is, from the universal equivalent of money to another particular commodity.
Now certainly there is a differential of power at work in each of these movements, namely, that it is
much easier to go from the universal to the particular than it is to go from the particular to the
universal. And so the unique relationship of money to power stems from its being simultaneously
universally fungible and limitless; that is, it can be represent the value of any thing and any thing can
be exchanged for it. The power it confers, then, is necessarily social, and in two ways. On the one
hand, the use of money as abstracted value is a social and legal convention, contingent upon
institutions that set and guarantee the value of money. Thus, currency and law: nomisma and nomos.
On the other hand, the production of commodities whose value is convertible into money is a social
process because it involves labor-time, the value of which is set by the socially necessary conditions
of labor and production.
For Marx and Aristotle, then, money is the medium in which commodities circulate. Money,
as the universal exchange equivalent, just is the converted form of commodities in which their
particular use-values have been extinguished, with the particular commodity assuming the universal
form of money. So whereas the simple circulation of commodities consists of the exchange of
qualitatively different use-values, the circulation of capital consists of the exchange of quantitatively
different exchange-values.45 The difference between these exchange-values, “this increment or

44
Marx, Capital, pg. 789.
45
Ibid., pg. 251.

18
excess over the original value,” is surplus value, which is the excess produced in the production and
circulation of commodities. In this way, surplus value is the value beyond original value, appearing
as if by magic from merely being in motion. The as if is important here, for such excess value does
not, in fact, constitute an epiphenomenal byproduct of the circulation of money. That is, for money
to enter into circulation and exit again in the form of valorized money – i.e., money that has gained in
value, i.e., capital – “our friend the money owner must be lucky enough to find within the sphere of
circulation, on the market, a commodity whose use-value possesses the peculiar property of being a
source of value, whose actual consumption is therefore itself an objectification of labor, hence a
creation of value.”46 The commodity that meets this peculiar requirement is labor-power, which is
“the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in the physical form, the living
personality, of a human being, capabilities which he sets in motion whenever he produces a use-value
of any kind.”47 Labor-power, he writes, “exists only as a capacity of the living individual. Its
production consequently presupposes his existence. Given the existence of the individual, the
production of labor-power consists in his reproduction of himself or his maintenance.”48
In order for this commodity to function in the sphere of circulation, however, its possessor
must be “the free proprietor of his own labor-capacity, hence of his person.”49 This idea of self-
ownership, or the “free individual” – that is, that the individual owns herself and can sell her labor-
capacity on the market – is the first central condition that makes labor-power the commodity that can
produce the difference in value necessary for capital, i.e. surplus value. Crucially, the circulation of
capital is dependent upon the law of the state: in the eyes of the law, people are viewed as equals who
own their body and its products. In this way, the individual can both alienate their labor-power while
at the same time “avoid renouncing rights of ownership over it,” choosing not to sell their labor-
power, or, more simply and eventually, choosing to be unemployed and thereby electing one’s self a
vagabond.50 But the second essential condition which allows for labor-power to appear on the
market as the commodity is that the worker is be compelled to offer her capacity for labor, existing in
her body alone as a commodity, rather than being able to offer commodities that are produced from
her own labor. That is, the worker cannot have at her disposal the means of production, but must be
compelled to only have at her disposal the labor of her own body.

46
Ibid., pg. 270.
47
Ibid.
48
Ibid., pg. 274.
49
Ibid., pg. 271.
50
Ibid.

19
 The value of labor-power is determined, then, just as it is with every other commodity, i.e.,
“by the labor-time necessary for the production, and consequently also the reproduction, of this
specific article.”51 Marx continues: “Therefore the labor-time necessary for the production of labor-
power is the same as that necessary for the production of those means of subsistence; in other words,
the value of labor-power is the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of its
owner.”52 The value of labor-power, then, is value of the means of subsistence (i.e., food, housing,
clothing, etc.) necessary to replenish the worker’s body and provide for their reproduction. But this
reproduction is not simply one of life and bodies by means of sexual reproduction – though it
certainly includes various economies of sex – and is actually and more importantly the cultural
reproduction of entire forms of life. Marx writes:
The way in which men produce their means of subsistence depends first of all on the nature of the actual
means of subsistence they find in existence and have to reproduce. This mode of production must not be
considered simply as being the reproduction of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a
definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life,
so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and
with how they produce.53
The value of the means of subsistence, then, is a known or knowable “datum” in any given society,
based on both biological and cultural factors, and determined by a wide array of historical and moral
elements that comprise “the level of civilization attained by a country.”54 In this way, the price of
food and housing in a given community – in short, the question of the minimum living wage – is the
central feature of the determination of the value of labor-power. Adjusting to the level just high
enough to facilitate reproduction, the value of the means of subsistence is the baseline or foundation
for the surplus-value available in any given capitalist market. And such a foundation is
simultaneously the foundation of the home, the oikos, where the maintenance and reproduction of
that most important commodity for capitalism resides. Dwelling within its walls are a mother and a
father and their children, that is, the workers and the workers of the future.
The value of labor-power, then, is just that amount of subsistence necessary to keep the
workers alive, working, and reproducing the next generation of workers. And so while maintaining
this domestic economy at greater and lesser degrees of affluence is how the division of labor is
transmitted across generations, it is the workers at the lowest level of subsistence that set the

51
Ibid., pg. 274.
52
Ibid.
53
Karl Marx, The German Ideology, in The Marx-Engles Reader, Edited by Robert Tucker. New York: W.W.
Norton & Company. (1978), pg. 150.
54
Marx, Capital, pg. 275.

20
minimum value of labor-power. This is because, in short, their maintenance and reproduction is the
cheapest. And capital requires such a minimum – the bare minimum, we might say, the “merely”
necessary – for its bottom line. This minimum is the bottom line. And so capital seeks this line, this
line of necessity, which is a thin line that is not a borderline. Nor is it necessary a skinny line, though
it certainly often is, especially outside the places most thoroughly colonized by its logic. This logic
demands a constant and ever-renewed pool of laborers, compelled by contingent necessity to bring to
the market the only commodity they have to offer – their labor-power. Through this process the free
worker continually and necessarily subjugates herself to those whom she is compelled to sell her
labor so as to secure the means of subsistence, i.e., those who control access to the means of
production. Without the means of securing the contingent necessities of life, the worker is as free as
she is able to live off air alone.
In this way, the logic of capital is a logic of colonization, compulsively seeking to increase
the bottom line by maintaining and reproducing the homes of certain contingent yet necessary places
at the lowest level of subsistence. And so in the process of working within societies more or less
organized by the market logic of capital, the home of the worker is a place of central importance,
both for the production of surplus value (and therefore capital), as well as the site of a particular
domination by way of contingent necessity. Capital, that is, penetrates straight to the hearth of the
home. And as Marx points out, because “[t]he process of the consumption of labor-power is at the
same time the production process of commodities and of surplus-value,” the worker participates and
contributes to the circuit of exploitation keeping them alienated from that which would free them of
their toil, i.e., access to the means of subsistence.55 Toil is labor forcibly rendered for the sole benefit
of an other. In their production, they reproduce their own subjugation; in their consumption, they
enable and activate an analogic slavery.
The law of capital, that is, operates by seeking those places where the social relations of
capital have not fully penetrated and transforming them in turn. In this way, capital seeks to integrate
and incorporate every outside into its inside and is thus everlastingly committed to the erasure of
everything it brings within its scope. Within this scope, ever expanding into places not ordered by its
spaces, capital reorders the social relations according to its inexorable logic of accumulation by
dispossession.56 Forever bringing that which is outside into its inside, co-opting and commodifying
every appearance of exteriority, capital is compelled to be in circulation, for outside it petrifies into a
hoard. Hoarding removes money from circulation, taking it out of the market and thereby ending its

55
Ibid., pg. 279.
56
The phrase is David Harvey’s. Cf. A Brief History to Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2005).

21
relation as capital. Hoarding, then, is not accumulation, and in fact it is its opposite. And so it exists
as an abnormality, a deviation from the law of capital, perhaps even a monstrosity. For
the hoarding drive is boundless in nature. Qualitatively or formally considered, money is independent of
all limits, that is, it is the universal representative of material wealth because it is directly convertible into
any other commodity. But at the same time every actual sum of money is limited in amount, and therefore
has only a limited efficacy as a means of purchase. This contradiction between the quantitative limitation
and the qualitative lack of limitation of money keeps driving the hoarder back to his Sisyphean task:
accumulation. He is in the same situation as a world conqueror, who discovers a new boundary with each
country he annexes.57
The hoarder is committed to the outside, for only by means of its boundary is his limitless profit
meaningful. Ultimately, however, he fails to see that this outside is deeply inside, that the drive to
hoard is the drive for a place wherein the hoard has a use, for a retreat wherein the hoard escapes its
relation as capital. Thus we stuff the mattress with bills and scatter the couches with coins. But with
every stashing we yet realize that there is more to add, that reserved value today will be consumable
value tomorrow. And so ever we collect and fetishize.
And so while the drive to hoard may be boundless – like the drive for profit within restricted
economies – it is in the end a concept of the restricted economy of individual psychology. That is,
only a particular person or a particular group of people can be said to hoard, and thus the unbounded
gathering of profit is not the limitless accumulation of capital. The former is outside the market,
exterior to the sphere of circulation, while the latter occurs only by means of circulation, as money in
motion. The accumulation of capital, then, occurs by way of selling, of keeping commodities in
motion aiming at the valorization of its origin. Unbounded by need and driven by superfluous
excess, this process is limitless. Marx:
At the end of the movement, money emerges once again at its starting-point…. The simple circulation of
commodities…is a means to a final goal which lies outside circulation, namely the appropriation of use-
values, the satisfaction of needs. As against this, the circulation of money as capital is an end in itself, for
the valorization of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The movement of
capital is therefore limitless.58
And herein lies one of the central paradoxes of capital, namely, that its splitting is simultaneously its
accumulation. And this, moreover, is limitless. Or, as Marx says in a discussion of this law in
relation to the law of supply and demand:

57
Marx, Capital, pg. 231.
58
Ibid., pg. 253.

22
 It is not a case of two independent forces working on each other. Les des sont pipes. Capital acts on both
sides at once. If its accumulation on the one hand increases the demand for labor, it increases on the other
the supply of workers by ‘setting them free’, while at the same time the pressure of the unemployed
compels those who are employed to furnish more labor, and therefore makes the supply of labor to a certain
extent independent of the supply of workers. The movement…on this basis completes the despotism of
capital.59
Again, this situating-displacing logic of capitalist modes of production stems from the different
economies in which these crucial commodities circulate. That is, if the aim of the simple circulation
of commodities is the satisfaction of needs culminating in consumption, then the end of such
circulation results in the commodity falling outside of circulation. Its value is used up in the
satisfaction of need and desire. Conversely, if the aim of the circulation of money is the
accumulation of more money, which has no use-value itself and therefore cannot be consumed, then
the end of such circulation results only in yet another commodity, which remains able to re-enter
circulation anew at any moment.
In this way, consumption is but one way to fall outside of circulation, while the withdrawal
of money from the market is another way to fall outside of circulation. But for money to remain
capital, it must forever be in motion, aiming endlessly at its own limitless increase, and yet returning
to its initial point of departure augmented and valorized but nevertheless in the same form. And so,
just as with every other commodity, the consumption of labor-power is completed outside the
market, that is, outside the sphere of circulation. Unlike money, however, the commodity labor-
power is not able to circulate endlessly; it is consumed in the process of working, the activity of
which removes the commodity from circulation, taking it outside the sphere of the market. Limited
by time, the capacities of the human body, and the level of technological development in a given area
of production, labor-power is a commodity produced within the restricted economies of the body and
home and is consumed outside the sphere of circulation. But this outside is deeply inside.

The Economy of Deconstruction

Beginning again yet again, I return to the eco-nomic detour différance initiated between restricted
and general economy, an important consequence of which is also an exemplary case of their relation.
Derrida suggests that by relating these economies “the very project of philosophy…is displaced and
reinscribed.”60 By means of différance, he claims, the contract binding us to a certain metaphysics is

59
Ibid., pg. 793,
60
Derrida, “Différance,” pg. 19.

23
suspended; the force holding us within its economy of the same is dissipated. In this sense, all
philosophies constructed in and through the metaphysics of presence are restricted economies. Profit
is possible within a restricted economy because it is “restricted to commercial values, one might say,
…limited to the meaning and the established value of objects, and to their circulation.”61 Within such
economies, commodities circulate, aiming at their own valorization that is made possible and
meaningful only by their restricted scope. Derrida on the economy of Hegel’s phenomenology:
The circularity of absolute knowledge could dominate, could comprehend only this circulation, only the
circuit of reproductive consumption. The absolute production and destruction of value, the exceeding
energy as such, the energy which ‘can only be lost without the slightest aim, consequently without any
meaning’ – all this escapes…restricted economy. The latter can determine difference and negativity only
as facets, moments, or conditions of meaning: as work.62
Within restricted economies objects circulate, which is to say there is a particular circularity to their
systematicity. Excess is eliminated, and so too with it waste. Intelligibility permeates the whole.
Comprehension consists gathering all the elements into a synchronic whole and giving them a place
to dwell, under a single roof and a single name. Determining the possible objects that may
legitimately or meaningfully appear within its scope, the limits of restricted economy are formed by
means of a circuit of reproductive consumption: only by accounting for and re-presenting every
thing within its boundaries, by reproducing as it consumes, is such a system able to allocate sense
and meaning to its totality. There is no place for an other to meaning within such an economy; it has
no place: a-topos, literally without place, or, more precisely, absurd.
And so as with so many other economies, profit here is only made by means of work, which
consists in that motion of differencing-deferring that produces difference as negativity, outside, and
other in the first place. In this way, Hegel is indeed the great speculator.63 Within the restricted
economy of the metaphysics of presence, his speculations turned a profit, which drove him to endless
speculation toward limitless profit. Or, more simply, Aufhebung as limitless self-valorizing
accumulation. But general economy, by reserving a place for that without reserve, initiates an un-
limiting, a de-limiting, an in-habituation of the drive for profit that motivates limitless speculation
within restricted economies. Derrida, elaborating the deferring-differing différance opens up within
and beyond Hegel’s restricted economy, writes:

61
Jacques Derrida, “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism Without Reserve,” in Writing and
Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. (1978), pg. 271.
62
Ibid., pg. 271.
63
Ibid., pg. 252.

24
 Not that the phenomenology of the mind, which proceeded within the horizon of absolute knowledge or
according to the circularity of the Logos, is thus overturned. Instead of being simply overturned, it is
comprehended: not comprehended by knowledge-gathering comprehension, but inscribed within the
opening of the general economy along with its horizons of knowledge and figures of meaning. General
economy folds these horizons and figures so that they will be related not to a basis, but the nonbasis of
expenditure, not to the telos of meaning, but to the indefinite destruction of value.64
Keeping the nonreserve in reserve, affirming its excess, différance initiates an economic detour into –
Derrida now speaking with Nietzsche – “the ‘active,’ moving discord of different forces, and of
differences of forces,” which are “even celebrated and cause for dancing.”65 Within such an
economy of forces, différance is a sign marking a certain commitment “to putting into question the
primacy of presence as consciousness” by keeping open a place for excess, waste, and absurdity.66
By removing such limits, by affirming such excess, the general economy of différance works to undo
the conditioning possibilities for the unlimited speculation of profit and, what amounts to the same
thing, the endless primitive accumulation of wealth. The logic of restricted economy, on the other
hand, is one of identity: identity structuring duality, arranging binary pairs into hierarchical
oppositions, managing the possibilities of difference within a restricted economy where speculation
yields profit, and yet unbounded speculation yields limitless profit. Absurd.
Of all the restricted economies, of course, the economy of language is of considerable
importance for Derrida, and the general linguistics of Saussure in particular. Saussure’s commitment
to transcendental signification, guiding as it grounds the development of speech into writing, takes
67
speech to be originary, interior and alive and writing to be derivative, exterior, and dead. Within
this economy, speech in its purest and most natural form is a type of writing on the soul, an
ephemeral inscription on the spectral body. Speech is the natural principle by which language forms;
it is internal and immediate. Writing, however, is on the outside of the body, fallen away and
corrupted in the process. In this way, “the native unity of the voice and writing is prescriptive.
Archê-speech is writing because it is a law. A natural law. The beginning word is understood, in the
intimacy of self-presence, as the voice of the other and as commandment.”68 But why, Derrida asks
of Saussure, “does a project of general linguistics, concerning the internal system in general of
language in general, outline the limits of its field by excluding, as exteriority in general, a particular

64
Ibid., pg. 271.
65
Derrida, “Différance,” pg. 18.
66
Ibid.
67
Derrida, Of Grammatology, pg. 17.
68
Ibid.

25
system of writing, however important it might be, even were it to be in fact universal?”69 This
produces an essential tension for Saussure, who seems to want to both demonstrate and denounce the
corrupting character of writing while simultaneously emphasizing the natural and inalterable
character of speech. But as Derrida points out:
And yet nature is affected – from without – by an overturning which modifies it in its interior, denatures it
and obliges it to be separated from itself. Nature denaturing itself, being separated from itself, naturally
gathering its outside into its inside, is catastrophe, a natural event that overthrows nature, or monstrosity, a
natural deviation within nature.70
Already operating within Saussure’s economy, then, is a cleave between writing and speech that
threatens the latter with destruction by the differencing that is also their deferring. By means of the
economy of différance, the limits between restricted and general economy are already in question,
nascent in the very distinction between inside and outside that is necessary for thinking a restricted
economy at all. Always already operative within, then, general economy accounts for that which we
necessarily misconstrue in the process of delimiting the boundaries of restricted economy: the inside
origin is always already becoming transformed by what it casts as outside, homeless and in exile.
Between speech and writing, then, Derrida finds the economy of linguistics to be an
exemplary restricted economy. Within such economies there is a place for everything and everything
is in its place (or is at least placeable). As a synchronic whole, its outside is constituted by a
definitive presence on its inside. But it is precisely in this motion of boundary marking that a natural
deviation is initiated. There is a monster lurking the halls of the house of language; there is a
catastrophe at the hearth of the home, set in motion by the constitutive delimiting always already at
work within the restricted economy of the household.
But at this intersection where the economy of language meets the language of economy we
are compelled to confront the metaphor of economy itself. And while such a metaphor, of course, is
possible only within a previously determined economy of metaphor, the important point for the
inquiry at hand is the way the question of metaphor turns not only on a theory of signification, but on
a theory of value as well. Saussure too saw this connection, elaborating the analogy between
economics and linguistics at length, insisting that both, as sciences of value, involve “a necessary
intersection of the synchronic and diachronic axes.”71 That is, both linguistics and political economy
follow an “inner necessity” to divide their sciences “into two parts, each with its own principle,” e.g.,
the division of between political economy and economic history. Saussure contends that in

69
Derrida, Of Grammatology., pg. 39.
70
Ibid., pg. 41.
71
Derrida, “From Restricted to General Economy,” pg. 217.

26
linguistics, as in economics, “we are confronted with the notion of value; both sciences are concerned
with a system for equating things of different orders – labor and wages in one, and a signified and a
signifier in the other.”72 Indicating that the relation between signification and value is crucial to
linguistic – else risking “reducing language to a simple naming process” – Saussure notes:
that even outside language all values are apparently governed by the same paradoxical principle. They are
composed: 1) of a dissimilar thing that can be exchanged for the thing of which the value is to be
determined; and 2) of similar things that can be compared with the thing of which the value is to be
determined.73
Like before, meaningful exchange here turns on the possibility of equality, and yet equality itself
presupposes equating different things. Saussure situates linguistics and economics both in terms of a
synchronic theory of signification and a diachronic theory of value, which, as Derrida points out,
occurs by “metaphoric or analogic transition, by similarity or proportionality, from one to the
other.”74 In this way, the metaphor of economy “constitutes each of the two orders as much as it
does their relationship.”75 Linguistics and economics, then, do not merely share the common
analogic or metaphoric structure of economy, but each are themselves a structured system in which
elements are related in an eco-nomic way, that is, according to the laws and habits of motion
particular to their oikos, to their place of dwelling. Such a system, then, forms the home of language
and the dwelling place of political economy; it is where these sciences are at home; it is within this
space that they dwell.
But what is more, each are in fact constituted by, and are ineliminable from, the reciprocally
destabilizing motion whereby the synchrony limiting their economies within the restrictions of
signification confronts the diachronic determination of value for the elements appearing within.
Such is the general economy of différance, always already at work within restricted economy, made
it possible through the drawing its boundaries, but also exceeding it without reserve, in an operation
that is simultaneously within and beyond. In this way, we can now understand how relating
restricted to general economy is both fundamental to understanding the economy of différance and
important for the consideration of market economies (i.e., economies organized by the drive for
profit) in particular, and political economy (economies organized by the drive for power) in general.
For example, and in fact, many elements of Derrida’s account of general economy are drawn from

72
Ibid., pg. 217-218.
73
Ibid.
74
Ibid.
75
Ibid.

27
Bataille, who explicitly noted the relationship of general to political economy. Derrida citing
Bataille in ostensive agreement:
The question of the general economy is situated on the level of political economy, but the science
designated by this name is only a restricted economy, (restricted to commercial values). In question is the
essential problem for the science dealing with the use of wealth. The general economy, in the first place,
makes apparent that excesses of energy are produced, and that by definition, these excesses cannot be
utilized. The excessive energy can only be lost without the slightest aim, consequently without any
meaning.76
While drawing on Bataille’s idea that the writing of sovereignty (a l a Hegel’s Herrschaft, or
lordship, freedom, or recognition, i.e., the absolute degree of putting at stake the entirety of one’s
own life by looking at death directly) conforms to general economy, Derrida nevertheless rejects his
conclusion that such an economy “is sovereignty itself,” for of course there is no such thing. Rather,
Derrida writes that sovereignty within general economy, “dissolves the value of meaning, truth, and a
grasp-of-the-thing-itself…The writing of sovereignty places discourse in relation to absolute non-
discourse. Like general economy, it is not the loss of meaning, but…the ‘relation to this loss of
meaning.’ It opens the question of meaning.”77 Sovereignty, then, is the differing-deferring
movement of a general economy that places all discourse in relation to an absolute other, between
discourse and absolute non-discourse.
Operating by means of the excess it makes apparent, general economy de-limits, or un-limits,
the strictures between necessary use and superfluous excess, the boundaries between outside and
inside, that are the very conditions of possibility for restricted economy. Between discourse and
absolute non-discourse, that is, the question of meaning opens up at the place where the synchronic
sovereignty of restricted economies is challenged, disrupted, or dissolved. Thus, situated as if within
a topo-nomology, placed as if beyond the home, general economy is already at work within political
economy. Political economy, itself a restricted economy, concerns the problems of acquiring and
utilizing wealth, which itself entails the question of sovereignty. But at each turn these economies
operate by a coeval logic of general economy, which is already at work within, making apparent the
useless, senseless waste necessary to the production of its significative and monetary wealth. The
excess and other to meaning that is the within and beyond of general economy, then, is a use without
reserve, lost inside even the slightest aim, which is to say beyond any loss at all.

76
Ibid., pg. 270.
77
Ibid.

28
 Importantly, however, this excess remains in motion, operative and efficacious within the
place of its origin, the home economy of its production. In this way, such excess remains excessively
consumable, holding open the limitless potential for profit, which is to say the insatiable desire for
wealth, that involves gorging and indulging in the bounty of a surplus made possible from without.
But in a footnote appended to the passage from Bataille above, Derrida emphasizes that it would be a
“gross error” to interpret this in a “reactionary” sense. Buried within the notes, he continues:
The consumption of the excess of energy by a determined class is…the significative reappropriation of a
surplus value within the space of a restricted economy. From this point of view, sovereignty is absolutely
revolutionary. But it is also revolutionary as concerns a revolution which would only reorganize the world
of work and would redistribute values within the space of meaning, that is to say, still within restricted
economy. This last movement…is rigorously necessary, but as a phase within the strategy of general
economy.78
General economy accounts for excess, but the consumption of that excess nevertheless occurs within
an economy restricted by the means and ends of political economy. The “absolutely revolutionary”
nature of sovereignty within general economy, then, derives from the way in which it makes a place
for an other to meaning by way of an indefinite destruction of value. The restricted revolutionary
potential of sovereignty, on the other hand, derives from the way in which sovereignty would work to
disrupt and reorganize the world of work, redistributing value within its restricted economy by
continually reemphasizing the superfluous excess that is a necessary consequence of its motion.
In this way, the economy of sovereignty is as if the economy of différance. While on the one
hand the economy of différance is general economy, on the other hand it is the work accomplished
by restricted economy in the process of its own restricting. The economy of différance initiates a
movement within restricted economies that simultaneously shows the “rigorous” borderline between
its inside and its outside, as well as the general economy that always exceeds those boundaries
already. This, in short, is the economy of deconstruction, which is always already at work,
undermining the structure of its home as it inevitably reinforces its foundations. Derrida:
The movements of deconstruction do not destroy structures from the outside. They are not possible and
effective, nor can they take accurate aim, except by inhabiting those structures. Inhabiting them in a
certain way, because one always inhabits, and all the more when one does not suspect it. Operating
necessarily from the inside, borrowing all the strategic and economic resources of subversion from the old
structure, borrowing them structurally, that is to say without being able to isolate their elements and atoms,
the enterprise of deconstruction always in a certain way falls prey to its own work.79

78
Ibid., pg. 337.
79
Derrida, Of Grammatology, pg. 24.

29
By means of the economy of différance, deconstruction puts into question the question of outside and
inside, its place within discourse displaced by the motions proper to its economy. Within such an
economy, there is no outside because there is no inside, the inside always being constituted in
relation to its outside, already an impossible and even monstrous movement. Or, the outside is
already inside by means of an ineluctable movement of differing-deferring always at work within.
Or, there is no outside at all; everything, including the outside, is already inside. Deconstruction
inhabits from this inside, for not only must one always inhabit some place, but one must inhabit that
place in a certain way, drawing from the resources at hand to accomplish that which is necessary.
In this way, différance is not merely concerned with linguistics or philosophy, but is also
importantly, and perhaps even primarily, concerned with political and market economies as well.
But this concern is not one that brings some method to bear, but is a concern for what is always
already at work with the restricted economies that produce sense, meaning, and value within
experience. Restricted, all such economies, in turn, turn around the metaphor of economy: the figure
of the home, the oikos, and the laws and habits of motion ordering and managing that which is
necessary. The borders of the home remain.

The Law of the Market

To begin again where we left the worker, living at home to work and working at home to live.
Within this domestic economy, organized as it is around a certain set of contingent necessities, was
the foundation upon which the value of labor-power is determined. And so it is circulating between
these economies of home, market, and workplace, inside and outside their boundaries, that Marx
develops his framework for understanding both the historical and contemporary trajectories of this
particular form of exchange, i.e., capitalism. For Marx, the development of the capitalist form of
exchange marks an important point of origin because, in its subsequent processes of circulation, it
has transformed everything within its wake, including the home. That is, I hope to have established
at least prima facie grounds for a reading of Marx that retains the oikos as the basic economic
conduit, with capital circulating through the home and dominating it in the process. In this sense,
there is something within and about the home that capital needs in order to be capital, dominating the
home by means of a dispossessing force that is the motive force of its own circulation.
On the one hand, then, Marx accounts for the rise of a capitalist form of exchange by
deploying and extending a narrative quite similar to Aristotle’s, including many of the elements of
his philosophical anthropology. The trajectory of this narrative aims to account for the continuous
development of capitalism as it emerged from the home, or the lack of necessities therein, which then

30
led to the developments of barter and exchange, retail and trade, money and usury, and, eventually, to
interstate commerce, the credit system, and global mercantilism, all of which are preconditions for
capital. On the other hand, however, Marx emphasizes that capitalism marks an important break
from these previous forms of organization made possible by the development of the commodity and
its circulation. And while such a development is necessary for this break, it is by no means
sufficient, for the “appearance of products as commodities requires a level of development of the
division of labor within society such that the separation of use-value from exchange-value, a
separation which first begins with barter, has already been completed.” “But such a degree of
development,” Marx continues, “is common to many economic formations of society, with the most
diverse historical characteristics.”80 The upshot to this, of course, is that the simple circulation of
commodities does not necessarily entail a capitalist form of exchange. Not all markets are capitalist
markets, the historical conditions of which “are by no means given with the mere circulation of
money and commodities.”81 So it is not the commodity that marks the advent of capital, but a type of
social relation mediated by two specific commodities, namely, money and labor-power. Marx:
In themselves, money and commodities are no more capital than the means of production and subsistence
are. They need to be transformed into capital. But this transformation can itself only take place under
particular circumstances, which meet together at this point: the confrontation of, and the contact between,
two very different kinds of commodity owners; on the one hand, the owners of money, means of
production, means of subsistence, who are eager to valorize the sum of values they have appropriated by
buying the labor-power of others; on the other hand, free workers, the sellers of their own labor-power, and
therefore the sellers of labor… And this one historical pre-condition comprises a world’s history. Capital,
therefore, announces from the outset a new epoch in the process of social production.82
In this way, capital turns on a complete transformation of social relations that is both the condition
and the consequence of an increasingly sharp division of power, which is accumulated by way of a
difference embodied in two specific commodities. The appearance of these two classes, whose
power is based on a circulation of eco-nomic forces, marks the advent of a new epoch, a
fundamentally new form of social organization transforming all previous forms in its wake.
Thinking the epochal nature of capital, then, requires a certain supposition of a time wherein these
classes were undifferentiated, or at least undivided insofar as their cleavage was not yet a separation.
In this sense, then, the narrative Marx develops has for its first condition of possibility the
definitive breaking of a certain group of people from the land on which they were dwelling. Arising

80
Marx, Capital, pg. 273.
81
Ibid., pg. 274.
82
Ibid., pgs. 874, 274.

31
out of the social and economic formations of Europe, Marx claims that the traces of capital as a
dispossessing force extend to the 14th century, when various nobles, lords, and landed gentry began
clearing their estates of the various serfs, peasants, and farmers who had lived and worked there for
generations. Within such a system of social relations, the landless dwelled within and at the leisure
of the landed, often working for them, but more importantly always having, by way of such relations,
access to the means of production necessary for subsistence. Forcibly removed, displaced from their
homes and communities, these people became vagabonds, forced to migrate to the small towns
across the countryside, and eventually into the larger, congested urban centers then coalescing. “The
creation of dense knots of humanity,” Marx writes, “corresponds to the forcible draining of men from
the surface of the land.”83 By the 15th century, and especially in England, this process took the form
of the enclosure of the commons, or the appropriation of the land held and farmed in common into
private property. And so, more generally, before the two classes of commodity owners can appear
within the market, each with their own commodities to sell, the class with only its labor to sell had to
undergo a violent dispossession that sundered them from the homes and land that sustained them
prior to capitalist forms of exchange, casting them as vagabonds on the marketplace with nothing but
their body to sell.
But not only does capital begin in a violent force of dispossession, it continues to do so time
and time again, accomplishing not merely one particular historical displacement of people, but also
and more importantly the continual systematic extermination of whole forms of life, along with the
concomitant images of any alternative future embedded within them. This process is one whose
incessant motions ceaselessly aim at the transformation of relations between people, their homes, and
how they eat and procreate and work, how they love and play and hope, and how, finally, they will
die. Marx calls this primitive accumulation, which “is nothing else than the historical process of
divorcing the producer from the means of production.”84 It is primitive because as a historical process
it forms the pre-history, or origin, of capital. Primitive accumulation, in this sense, is the archê of
capitalism; it is the origin of its law. It is the principle that makes capital possible, its origin of
motion, and the beginning of its law. In this way, the archê of capitalism is dispossession.
But as with the archê of the archons, this archê of capital remains hidden in its pre-history,
forgotten in its primitivism, covered over so that only traces remain. By the nineteenth century,
Marx says, “the very memory of the connection between agricultural laborer and communal property

83
Ibid., pg. 848.
84
Ibid., pg. 875.

32
had, of course, vanished.”85 The way this history vanished is crucial in Marx’s account, for it is
forgotten, covered over, and excised from memory by means of the law. This law, which Marx calls
“bloody legislation,” does not consist in any one law, but of a series of laws over the course of time.
The general function of such legislation is to legitimize the dispossession after the fact, to legalize the
expropriation and to make its consequent bifurcation appear as natural, just, and inevitable. Law, in
this sense, turns a scene of violent expropriation into a legal exchange. And remembering with
Derrida that “writing is that forgetting of the self, that exteriorization, the contrary of the interiorizing
of memory,” that it is “at once mnemotechnique and the power of forgetting,” we can begin to
understand how the writing of such laws constituted an excision from memory, seeking to erase any
vestige of common land or communal life, to forget the violence of the enclosures, and leaving
nothing but traces in their wake.86
This body of law – concerning as it does property, commerce, and the rights of both classes
with respect to one another – is in fact constitutive for Marx of the modern constitutional state. In an
important sense, then, both capital and the modern constitutional state turn around the motions of law
replacing force. Such a substitution, of course, marks only a difference in degree, not kind. Law,
after all, is always backed by the subtle and not-so-subtle threat of force; just because law is abstract,
that is, does not mean it transcends force. In this way, the laws that legalized (and legalize) the
violent dispossessions necessary for capital are covered in the blood of the dispossessed. The story
of capital is the story of the vagabond: without a home, wandering with only accidental and vague
bonds to their place of dwelling. The law actually generates the vagabond, then, by displacing and
divorcing her from her native place and from the means of securing the basic necessities for living.
Homeless, the vagabond wanders looking for food and shelter, begging when work is scarce, always
just managing to stay alive. But whether by chance or by choice, those who live outside this law are
forever subject to its violent discipline. The alternative to vagabondage, that is, entails compliance
with the law. And if such compliance is by choice or chance, a number often suffices for inclusion
within its order. But if by coercion – and Marx argues such was the case with the initial vagabond –
the mark of a more forcible order is needed to visibly signify such incorporation into the social order.
Just as the coin is impressed by the state, conferring its value by an impress of law drawing it within
its jurisdiction, the vagabond is disciplined with the brand, inscribing on the flesh that place within
the law for those who are apt to wander.

85
Ibid., pg. 889.
86
Derrida, Of Grammatology, pg. 24.

33
 Thus we move from the archê to the nomos, from the law of origin to the origin of law. In
this turn, however, instead of the law issuing either from the archive or the economy of the home, the
law of capital has permeated that home, transforming its internal and external relations into its own
image, and dispossessing its inhabitants in the process. Although constantly under elision, all wealth
necessarily entails poverty; the accumulation of resources in one place always involves the extraction
and transportation of resources from some other place. “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is,”
Marx concludes, “at the same time accumulation of misery, the torment of labor, slavery, ignorance,
brutalization and moral degradation at the opposite pole, i.e. on the side of the class that produces its
own product as capital.”87 And so just as wealth necessarily produces poverty, capitalism necessarily
produces the vagabond, the pauper. The law of capital is primitive, then, precisely because the
primitive is the coexisting past, the past that has never gone away, the past that persists. In this
sense, the violence of past accumulation persists in the accumulation always already persisting in the
motions of capital – aside from its minor and major corrections, which are all in fact necessary for its
further consolidation and growth88 – all of which by now have been thoroughly naturalized and
normalized by the law of contemporary free-market states.
Primitive accumulation is the “pre-history” of capital, then, precisely because what appears
cannot be historical because what appears is conditioned on that which we fail to remember. If the
work of history is writing, and the writing of the law is the covering over of that which we forget,
then accumulation is not primitive in the sense of no longer being at work, but rather is the violence
involved in all dispossession, always already at work within all economies ordered by the social
relations of capital. By means of the law, the memory of primitive accumulation is covered over,
making the inevitability of capital simultaneously the erasure of any possible alternative. In this
sense, primitive accumulation is the indefinite, or at least endless, destruction of value; it is the
excess and expenditure without reserve, the senseless, useless violence of wealth. But the destruction
of such value – as with linguistic value, and indeed all forms of value – is always determined
according to the laws of a restricted economy. Value, that is, is only possible within a particular
context, where the comparisons of similarity and dissimilarity make exchange possible, and so for

87
Marx, Capital, pg. 799.
88
On this Marx writes: “Modern industry’s whole form of motion whole form of motion therefore depends on the
constant transformation of a part of the working population into unemployed or semi-employed ‘hands’. The
superficiality of political economy shows itself in the fact that it views the expansion and contraction of credit as the
cause of the periodic alternations in the industrial cycle, whereas it is a mere symptom of them. Just as the heavenly
bodies always repeat a certain movement, once they have been flung into it, so also does social production, once it
has been flung into this movement of alternate expansion and contraction. Effects become causes in their turn, and
the various vicissitudes of the whole process, which always reproduces its own conditions, takes the form of
periodicity.” pg. 786.

34
both linguistics and political economy their contents are fixable “only by the concurrence of
everything that exists outside of it.”89 This diachronic distinction between inside and outside within
such a restricted economy, of course, depends upon, and gives rise to, the larger synchronic
distinction of inside-outside. General economy is both within and beyond restricted economy,
always already at work in determining the boundaries of the same, but always already exceeding
those boundaries as well.
And herein is precisely where the general economy of différance is produced by way of the
social relations of capital. Capital, like différance, is not a thing. Nor is it a concept. Nor is it a
method, whether that is understood in its analytical, economical, or cultural senses. As such, one
cannot get outside of capital, for one cannot get outside that which has no outside, whose outside is
deeply inside. But to speak of capital as a noun, as a that, is precisely to miss the point, for capital is
only a how. Capital, like différance, is always already at work within the restricted economies of the
home and market, borrowing its resources and inhabiting its places, all while making apparent the
violent excess necessary for their profit and the apparent limitless accumulation possible in their
motion. Opening up these economies from the inside, capital suspends all relation to an outside,
always exceeding its horizons of meaning and place. Both operating from the inside, inhabiting
places within restricted economies, capital and différance at once go beyond them.
The economy of capital is as the economy of différance. Limitless accumulation. Boundless
desire. Expenditure without reserve. Indefinite destruction of value. Endless dispossession. Infinite
absurdity. The world without end. Amen.

Home Ecologics
And so to again begin for the final time, if but this time. In the beginning was the word. And the
word was in contradiction. And not only did the word happen to be in contradiction, it had to be. So.
To speak of home economics is already to speak too much, to exceed the requirements of
reference. It is, in short, to be redundant. And such a redundancy is not benign. In the space
between these two words, home / economics, we stand witness to a prior formation where economics
and domesticity were coextensive, intimately intertwined, and mutually constitutive. And if we
follow the path of this trace, we arrive at a broken home. There has been a divorce within the oikos.
The signs home and economy began to lead different lives, diverging into separate viaducts and

89
Derrida, “From Restricted to General Economy,” pg. 218.

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dwelling in distinctive habitats. And it is a working hypothesis here that the life of the home has
tracked, in more and less significant ways, the life of the word.
The word, as it was in the beginning, underwent mitosis. A somatic process involving an
initial division into two parts, both carrying identical transcriptions of the other, yet each
immediately beginning a separate living trajectory. Once apart, each initiates a separate motion that
inevitably leads them to different places and by way of divergent forces. As the cell – the body of
life – so goes the sign – the body of the word. The importance of this process in the lives of the
words, as it is for the lives of things, is the maintenance and transmission of a set of meanings.
During mitosis, however, the transcription of meanings actually cease, activating epigenetic
mechanisms that – and here I am following the biologist’s terminology without deviation – bookmark
the initial meanings that then reactive upon successful division. From within the cell, the home of
life, and from within the sign, the home of the word, there emerges a mechanism preserving a past
that is interiorly inscribed, marked within the archives of each, but are subsequently covered over in
the processes of growth. Such inscriptions function as memory traces of that which was identical at
the moment of separation. As they have been handed down, then, the two signs born from oikos –
home and economy – form a scar bridging an original wound that remains painful for those dwelling
within its walls. But before such a scar could form, a body had to be in place. A wound requires
flesh, and flesh corporeality.
Thus the word, as if it were before the beginning, underwent meiosis as well. A process of
reductional division whereby the cells of the body bifurcate, splitting its inscription into incomplete
parts, fragments of meaning and flesh that require completion from elsewhere, in the future,
regaining sense only in the rebirth of fertilization. Occurring alone in places of primal production, of
reproduction, meiosis initiates and sets into motion the cycle of life. Prior to mitosis, its condition of
possibility – in short, the corporeal sine qua non – meiosis simultaneously arises out of a larger
mitotic milieu. Generation always happens from some prior place, from some prior body. Such
habitats give rise to certain characteristic habits of motion, conditioned-conditioning characteristics
of a place in motion – which, of course, includes and indeed emphasizes both the anticipated and
unanticipated disruptions – always in motion toward a (re)production of the same.
And so while for the inquiry at hand this body is both semiotic and corporeal – that is, this
body is both the word oikos and its flesh dwelling in the same – it nevertheless remains that all
bodies must to come to be born at some time and in some place. Perhaps a contingent necessity,
perhaps not, every body undergoes a being becoming birth, setting them in motion along ends as
variable as there are things. And so these bodies of word and flesh come to be, and come to be in

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some place that is their home. It is within this ineluctable environment that we can say that the body
and the word, in the beginning and before the beginning, underwent semiosis above all. It is from
Pierce that we acquire this word to work against the logic of duality characteristic of traditional
semiotics, which is actually what Derrida calls more generally “a hierarchy inside of a general
organization governed by the universal law of nature.”90 By semiosis, then, Pierce insists that it is
only by and within environments – semiotic habitats and linguistic ecologies, if you will – that words
and symbols are born, live out the course of their meaning, and die. Pierce writes:
Symbols grow. They come into being by development out of other signs, particularly from likeness or
from mixed sings partaking of the nature of likenesses and symbols. We think only in signs. These mental
signs are of a mixed nature; the symbol-parts of them are called concepts…. So it is only out of symbols
that a new symbol can grow. Omne symbolum de symbolo. A symbol, once in being, spreads among the
peoples. In use and in experience, its meaning grows. Such words as force, law, wealth, marriage, bear for
us very different meanings from those they bore to our barbarous ancestors. The symbol may, with
Emerson’s sphinx, say to man, ‘Of thine eye I am eyebeam’.91
Only from symbols do symbols come. And, like chains of signification signifying everlasting, chains
of value and need and exchange form endlessly intricate economies weaving together their outsides
into their insides, incorporating, appropriating, and reconstructing each other in their ceaseless
interstitial movement. In this movement a network of habits and habitations are linked together by
the forces at work among their boundaries. Within these boundaries an environment takes shape,
itself always already in motion from that which it came.
And so from the oikos of language and the oikos of value – both restricted economies
governed by internal laws of signification and exchange that différance makes apparent against a
general economy without reserve – we move to the language and value of the oikos. That is, we
move from economy to ecology: the oikos joins logos – a word or sign, that by which thought or
value is expressed, a condition, the power to speak, indeed, a principle. In the beginning there was
the word, and the word was made flesh. Not only this, but more: logos – accounting, reckoning,
measuring, considering, relating, explaining, reasoning, speaking, naming. Oikos-logos: accounting
and relating things in the place of dwelling, or naming the things and speaking the principles of
home. Ecology, then, changes the relation to home to one of accounting for the relations and needs
of the things at home. But once we have moved this far, the boundaries of the home are opened
against the world; its economies of need and desire are so interwoven as to be indistinguishable on

90
Jacques Derrida, “Economimesis,” in Diacritics, vol. 22 (1981), pg. 6.
91
Charles Sanders Pierce, “What is a Sign” in The Essential Pierce, vol. 2. Edited by the Pierce Edition Project.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press. (1998), pg. 10.

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even the closest glance. And in fact this opening up against that which would dissolve all the
boundaries of the home, this internal proliferation of a general economy without reserve,
simultaneously works to resituate the boundaries of the oikos. The economy of home is situated in
the ecology of its habitat. The home becomes the world, the global oikos whose various economies
are always already invoking its boundary as a general economic limit.
And so. That which undergoes change over time must germinate and form from some place
in the world, the place of places. Like a rock that has not been moved from its original place of
formation, such a person is an autochthon, or a human being sprung from the soil of a particular
place. They are sons and daughters of the soil, inhabitants habitually moving within their place of
birth. The vagabond, on the other hand, is an allochthon, a wanderer in a place that is not their place,
a stranger at home. But in a world where places overlap, where the borders between places are fluid
and ever changing, these designations are disrupted by a rootless rootedness; all have become or are
becoming dispossessed in the process of the inexorable logic of capital transforming every economy
into its own image. And in such a world, as Deleuze and Guattari note, “the Autochthon can hardly
be distinguished from the stranger because the stranger becomes Autochthonous in the country of the
other who is not, at the same time that the Autochthonous becomes stranger to himself, his class, his
nation, and his language: we speak the same language, and yet I do not understand you.92 If it is only
through a particular place that a body comes to know the customary habits of motion – habits that
give sense and meaning and understanding to experience – then whenever bodies move from place to
place, and especially when they are dispossessed from the beginning, then they must struggle to gain
a new sense of motion in place and time in a world always already outrunning them.
In this way, the principle at work within the oikos, managing its resources and regulating its
movements, is possible only within a wider environment, one that situates the home in relation to
other homes that is community. This relation, then, is a reproductive one; that is, the home is not a
dwelling in isolation. It has a place, a topos within the world, which places the home in an actual
place undergoing change over time. Commencing and commanding, the archê inhabits the oikos,
commanding and commencing within the confluence of other bodies in motion and at rest. As a
principle of motion it is also a point of origin establishing the habitual way in which bodies tend to
move and interact in place and time. And yet. Something always escapes. There is already excess.
Everywhere the banality of poverty and wealth dulls. With the rising tide of wealth claiming to raise
all boats into the future, the fact that capital cannot exist without exploitation yet evades substantive

92
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell.
New York: Columbia University Press (1991, 1994), pg.110.

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address. Without the subjugation of some there could be no free market; inequality and exploitation
are the conditions without which capital cannot exist. When Deleuze remarks that “the market is the
only thing that is universal in capitalism,” he is pointing to the fact that the form by which bodies
become moved and are made to rest has become universal.93 This form of the market is the archê of
the global place, its beginning the source of motion, its principles the teacher of habit. This archê
makes certain motions and habits customary, while displacing other into no place, that is, making
them absurd. The archê of capital inevitably privileges certain movements and necessarily displaces
others, moving them out of place, making them absurd.
In this way, and attempting to weave the sheaves of this inquiry together, we can understand
how a commodity is not a commodity simply because it is brought to market; rather, it is brought to
market because it is a commodity. “The process of exchange transfers commodities from hands in
which they are non-use-values to hands in which they are use-values,” Marx writes, which gives rise
to the exchange-value that brings the commodity to market. In this way, the commodity is realized
but not constituted in exchange; it expresses itself and the necessarily social nature of its production
through its exchange at the market, when it is in motion in the sphere of circulation. And it is within
this sphere of circulation that exchange becomes “a process of social metabolism,” the movement of
94
which constitutes the life processes of the social organism. These life processes arise out of the
many movements between the various restricted economies constituting a community. This form the
limits of the social organism.
But when this process of social metabolism becomes thoroughly saturated by the relations of
capital, by the relations engendered by money incessantly in motion aimed at its own valorization,
the organism takes on a similar rhythm and a similar end. Limitless, the circulation of capital is
indeed a circle, but it is not only this. For in its limitless circulation, capital accumulates, thus
transforming the motion into a spiral. As if a natural force, a living organism whose social
metabolism circulates in a spiral, overcoming and integrating all the fragments of older worlds,
taking their elements up, making every outside an inside, incorporating them into the restricted
economy afforded by its law. The spiraling motion of capital places it beyond the control of any one
person or group of people, or even an entire class of people. Like the vagabond – and indeed, like
the capitalist himself – the worker is a function of capital, a relation within capital, and therefore a
relation to its general economy of excess that makes apparent at every moment that capital insists

93
Ibid., pg. 109.
94
Marx, Capital, pg. 198.

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there is no outside to its scope. Like Marx’s analysis of property, which is always a social relation
and never a thing, accumulation too is nothing but and only yet a social relation.
In this way, too, capital is a social relation, and thus is not a thing that occurs when money is
in motion. But it is not simply a social relation, but a relation opening within and beyond the
restricted economies of market and sense. Capital is the relation opened up to a general economy,
whose expenditure without reserve places all profit and wealth in an economy of excess, cleaving a
space for an other to meaning. In this way, the original crime of capital is repeated every day, in
every active relation of every body in motion and in rest, in the social relations of capitalist
economies. But form has been sundered from content; its laws are hidden from view in the houses of
capital, which are houses with no place, atopos. And yet. While the necessary crimes of
dispossession, exploitation, and slavery endlessly penetrate and appropriate every other, the
continued circulation of capital in fact depends upon the repetition this crime over and over again.
Every outside is already inside, and this is the particular inescapability to the social relations of
capital. With every new pulse of its circulation, the original wound is reopened, further entrenching
a certain set of social relations that necessarily entail the limitless accumulations always already at
work to make them possible. And so the trauma of dispossession is displaced yet again to another
place, to a place outside that is also inside, in relation to this transcendental archê that we must now
put firmly into erasure.
But by following this trace, by picking up and integrating elements of interest to the oikos
along the way, as if in a sheaf, such questions concerning the existence of an outside to capital are
put firmly aside. So on the one hand, there is no outside to capital. But this is not because there is no
place outside of capital, for capital is not some thing restricted to topographical or nomological
surfaces. Nor does it mean that there are not economic relations outside of capital, for surely there
have been and are such economies alive within. On the other hand, however, even if there were such
a thing, – in thought or in place or relation – even if such an outside could be identified, if but
momentarily, subjunctively, it would be precisely this identification, this naming and consigning as
other, that would initiate its rather immediate appropriation. And so this appropriation, this
transformation of simple reproduction into endless accumulation, inevitably and inexorably
forecloses a certain imaginary outside to capital.
And with such an imaginary foreclosed, ethics dissipates. Actions that destroy themselves
eventually run out of place. All limitless motions in the end run out of energy. They are absurd
because they destroy the conditions that make them possible. One of the central aims of a
thoroughgoing ecology of home is to reconstruct our habits of being unaccustomed, unable, or

40
unwilling to account for the innumerable relations that are always already affecting ours and other
bodies in motion and a rest. We think that the human is enough, and yet fail so often even there. We
seem incapable of attending to the ethics, economics, and ecologies of our home places, to the habits
that characterize the relations established to ourselves and between others. Beneath this inability,
perhaps, is a fear of the everyday, a certain dread of the banal that causes us to turn away from habits
and seek principles that stand to bring particular actions and bodies under general rules and concepts.
This is why ethics, in order to be critical, must have a relation within and beyond itself. Such
critical relation is one that works to disrupt the archê of the oikos, to displace the habits of the home
that have come to in-habit every corner of its place. By interrupting habits, by disrupting the
rhythms of normality, the ecology of the home initiates an an-archê of the oikos, the habit of
suspending principles by re-disturbing their economies in various experimental and reconstructive
ways. In this way, home ecologics ceases to be simply a description of the habits of a particular
place and becomes a transformative praxis whose interruption of principle takes the form of how.
As the subject matter of economics is the arrangement and relations of the home, so the
subject matter of politics is the arrangement and relations of the collection of homes in community.
In this sense, there is a political economy that concerns the arrangements and relations of homes, the
classification of corporeal material as it is found in certain places on the surface of the earth. It is to
this arrangement that the ecology an-archê of the home is directed. There is no principle available to
guide every relation in every place. The archê suggests a principle sought and employed at every
turn, with every relation, but safely under erasure there is never any such relation available. Indeed,
there is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice. By demanding attention to each relation, an
ethics of an-archê attempts to maintain difference in the face of identity and to cultivate with care the
activity of each body in motion and at rest.
Thus the oikos is that place on the inside of an economy that is also its outside. It is the
outside that is also the inside. The place this sign marks forms an edge, a limit against limitlessness,
a boundary against an always already fleeting infinity. Above all else an economic gesture, then,
which is always already a social, ethical and political gesture as well, différance displaces the eco-
nomic logic that has come to dominate the restricted economies of various homes, making public the
excesses consumed within that are made possible by the surpluses produced beyond, and yet ever
circling around the necessities circulating within their walls. But in such a displacement, however,
différance always reopens in yet another place, folding these places within and beyond its movement,
but always and again within a particular place. This place is the home, which sets up an internal
place for critique, both within and beyond the bounds of the economy of capital. Any emergent

41
alternative to capital will not come by way of an outside, but will always already be inside, working
to make apparent how at every moment capital is in crisis by way of its lack of limitations.
Within the oikos, however, there are limits. Much is defined precisely by the limits of the
home and the satisfaction of the needs of those dwelling in its place. The oikos is limited; it limits
and is delimiting. Within such limits, within such an economy, restricted as it is within its contingent
finitude and by its foundation and inhabitants, that which is necessary for life forms the limit of its
activity. The satisfaction of contingent necessities, in other words, is the proper end of economics.
Once such necessities are met, activity can cease, at least temporarily. This is why, moreover, that
which is outside economics, or at least is not a part of it, involves exceeding the necessary. Whether
it is chrematistics, capital, general economy, or endless hoarding, these are motions without limit.
They exceed the necessary. To think the oikos as the outside of capital that is also inside is to think
the necessary. It is to resituate the home as the place from which to begin reconstructing economies
of equality and exchange that are both within and beyond capital. To do this is to dwell fully at
home, transforming the social relations of capital, the patriarchal principles of the archive, and the
forms of domination that have emerged in the spaces between. It is to disrupt the archê of the oikos
so as to inhabit the home more fully, more mindfully, more ecologically.
In this way, the oikos is transformed into a potential site of resistance inside capitalism. As it
is the place from which we start, it is also the place from which to start. The grounding figure of the
home calls into question the orders variously arranged by and between its boundaries, while
simultaneously forming the necessary horizon for meaning by functioning as a limited economy of
necessity. In both cases, such a starting point is immediately covered over, integrated into the
synchronic totality of restricted economy, its concept put into erasure by the writing of history, law,
value, and even language itself. But in the silent spacing différance effects between such economies,
situating them with respect to an ineliminable general economy without reserve, their insides cleave
into their outsides. The line between the inside and the outside, already a thin line, sliding back and
forth between the boundaries of the body at home and the body at work, turns as in the curve of a
Möbius strip. Moving up and down the length of a surface that, while connected and forming an
integral circuit, nevertheless only has one side, only one surface connecting its pathway in a limitless
continuous motion.
The outside is the inside. Begin again from home.

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