Derrida is tantalizing here, I think. If commodities reduce their bearers to ghosts (!!!), value is an unghostly in that it can only be detected and indeed only exists in a mirror, that is the expression of the relative value form in the general value form. The mirror actualizes latent value no less than a Stern Gerlach magnet collapses the wave function. Ghosts cannot be seen as such in a mirror; yet value cannot be detected any where else, and is never itself seen. Which is why positivists are quite sure that value is metaphysical, ghostly. Marxists appear as occultists, though for Derrida they suffer from the delusive attempt to extirpate the spectral, the ghostly once and for all in an impossible metaphysics of presence.
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/derrida2.htm
Men no longer recognise in it the social character of their own labour. It is as if they were becoming ghosts in their turn. The "Proper" feature of spectres, like vampires, is that they are deprived of a specular image, of the true, right specular image (but who is not so deprived?). How do you recognise a ghost? By the fact that it does not recognise itself in a mirror. Now that is what happens with the commerce of the commodities among themselves. These ghosts that are commodities transform human producers into ghosts. And this whole theatrical process (visual, theoretical, but also optical, optician) sets off the effect of a mysterious mirror: if the latter does not return the right reflection, if, then, it phantomalises, this is first of all because it naturalises. The "mysteriousness" of the commodity-form as presumed reflection of the social form is the incredible manner in which this mirror sends back the image (zuruckspiegelt) when one thinks it is reflecting for men the image of the "social characteristics of men's own labour": such an "image" objectivises by naturalising. Thereby, this is its truth, it shows by hiding, it reflects these "objective" (gegenstandliche) characteristics as inscribed right on the product of labour, as the "socio-natural properties of these things" (als gesellschaftliche Natureigenschaften dieser Dinge). Therefore, and here the commerce among commodities does not wait, the returned (deformed, objectified, naturalised) image becomes that of a social relation among commodities, among these inspired, autonomous, and automatic "objects" that are séance tables. The specular becomes the spectral at the threshold of this objectifying naturalisation: "it also reflects the social relation of the producers to the sum total of labour as a social relation between objects, a relation which exists apart from and outside the producers. Through this substitution [quid pro quo], the products of labour become commodities, sensuous things which are at the same time supersensible or social" (pp. 16 65). -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20061222/f75fecee/attachment.htm>