I am going to end up talking about love, but let me start by talking about money. Money, as Marx tells us, is the enemy of mankind and social bonds. 'If you suppose man to be man and his relation to be a human one,' he writes, 'then you can only exchange love for love, trust for trust.' Money, on the other hand, 'changes fidelity into infidelity, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, slave into master, master into slave, stupidity into wisdom, wisdom into stupidity. It is the universal confusion and exchange of all things, an inverted world.' Money commodifies; it enables the exchange of like with unlike. It remains always potential, open-ended. What happens when love and money get mixed up? And can love be said to have its own economy?

LRB 5 October 2000 | PDF Download