The riddle of value, or, where to begin?

Abstract

The article starts with a discussion of the Marxian concept of capital and progressively expands the scope of the problems raised by it. What is at issue is the very notion of a political economy of value. With this in view, post-structuralist, anthropological, psychoanalytic and feminist debates are addressed in order to discuss the nature of language as well as of the latter's translation into what appears as its outside. Opposing the nature/culture divide and other corresponding binaries – within which one of the terms often appears as static, lacking, dumb or passive –, the article concludes by proposing an enlarged view of what constitutes social relations, in which Life figures as a system of self-reference wherein the presumed difference between what is material and what is ideological can no longer be sustained.