Limit Concept Of Use Value example essay topic

In this situation, the use value obtains another significant meaning, it becomes something like a limit, an inherent part of the limit concept discussed by Marx, and no commodity or object in general can correlate with that concept. We are able to understand only one consequence of that concept here, although there are a lot of other alternatives: if it itself retains some use-value, this limit-concept of use-value is in advance infected, that is, preoccupied, inhabited, haunted by its other, namely, what will be born from the wooden head of the table, the commodity-form, and its ghost dance. However, there is a certain distinction between the commodity form and the notion of the use value, Marx was able to use that distinction in his analytical processes, and probably so can we. Moreover, if the commodity form is not considered the use value, or if there is absence of the physical presence, it can have a profound impact on that very wooden table we have discussed above.

It affects and bereaves it in advance, like the ghost, it will soon become, but, according to Derrida, this is precisely where the haunting begins. However, to engage in haunting does not explicitly imply physical presence, thus it is crucial to discuss haunting within a conceptual framework of a concept, the concepts of being and time being the first ones in that particular case. That is what Derrida refers to as a haunt ology. Ontology opposes it only in a movement of exorcism. Ontology is a conjuration.

14 Derrida is interested in trying to see which aspects of Marx's legacy might still be useful in the 1990's. It is clear that this is to be no simple application of Marxism, but more a matter of recapturing a spirit or specter. It is to be a spectro politics, an examination of the ways in which Marx and Marxism still haunts us, still has influence. What we need to do is to reconsider and reassert the spirit of Marx, even if some of the concrete applications of Marxism have been catastrophic and dated, as in Soviet communism. This includes the need to reawaken the notion of dialectic and struggle, and even hegemony, but in a more general way, without the specific central emphasis on class. A rather standard Marxist critique of liberal capitalism follows, including criticism of the evacuation of the real public spaces by the media, who construct a new phantom State.

Marxism is badly needed, at least to explain the discrepancies between people in these new orders, and to criticize the ideal picture that is presented of liberal capitalism. We need to preserve the critical and self-critical strain, even if we need to discard concepts such as mode of production, social class... the International, the dictatorship of the proletariat, a single party state and totalitarian monstrosity. Derrida also likes the Messianic affirmation of Marxism, including its promise to produce revolutionary action. Deconstruction can operate properly only within the space left by Marxist critique, which is both rational and universal in its appeal. Derrida suggests that such a haunting is not only an empirical hypothesis.

Without that very haunting, people would not be able to define the concept of the use value, as well as the notion of value at large, or do anything else of the kind. One could not even complicate, divide, or fracture adequately the concept of use-value by suggesting, as Marx, for instance, such an evident fact: for its first presumed owner, the man who takes it to market as use-value meant for others, the first use-value is an exchange-value. 15 Marx suggests that any particular use / value can be possibly utilized by another person, or become a subject of multiple usages, and that very notion makes it possible for it to evolve to the market of equivalences. Are then any particular ghosts here or just the spectral notion at large? That is one of the most important and significant questions that need to be answered. It is not clear whether Marx is done with the ghost at large, or whether he wanted to achieve that, when he states that this ghost is nothing more than the consequence of the free market economy, which will disappear as well as all the other forms of production.