Page 245 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

230 Rafael Sánchez

Highlighting how much a capitalist logic of increase is, from the start,
intrinsic to the economic relations between the Three Divine Persons there
is a strictly Hegelian way of talking about the quintessential Christian
mystery of the Trinity that throws light on how the squatters’ religiosity
possibly relates to their ceaselessly seizing proclivities. Thus, according to
Mark Taylor, Hegel’s speculative system—for whom the Incarnation pre-
figures “the self-reflexive structure of the Absolute Idea”—“prepares the
way” for later accounts of capitalism, such as Marx’s, where the structural
parallels between God and money are distinctly brought out. This is so
because, already in Hegel and very much in line with the “economic”
structure of his system, Spirit behaves as a universal currency or equivalent
that, much like money for Marx, mediates between thoroughly heteroge-
neous dimensions. Thus, while Spirit mediates between the Son and the
Father or the “particular” and the “individual” throughout history, contin-
uously bringing a fallen creation back to its originating source, so too, as
their universal equivalent, does money for Marx mediate among heteroge-
neous commodities. Furthermore, it does so within an economic circuit
that, much as in the case of religion or speculative philosophy, amounts to
a circle always closing or returning to itself. In line with such an under-
standing, if God, as both “interior” to and “outside” every system of
exchange and hence “omnipresent,” is “money in more than a trivial sense,”
then money, and, by extension, capitalism are quite metaphysical entities.
It is precisely on account of such a momentous convergence between reli-
gious and economic structures that, as much in capitalism as in Christianity,
“immaterial structures are constitutive of ostensibly material realities”
(Taylor 1999, 157–158).
It is important to realize here that whether in the case of God, the
Absolute, or Money, the universal equivalent embodies excess. To stay with
the economy for a moment, it is clear that money can only behave as the
universal equivalent of a welter of heterogeneous commodities on the basis
of a “surplus” that, beyond the production of use values or the mere satis-
faction of immediate needs, calls for the realization of exchange (ibid.,
158). In turn, when money evolves historically into its “most developed
form” of capital, with exchange value taking off from use value, “growing

wealth” becomes “an end in itself.” In other words, as “the self-reflexivity
of the exchange process becomes clear,” “exchange value posits itself” as
such “only by realizing itself [that is], increasing its value” in a process that
is, in principle, limitless (160). It is at this point that the Spirit of Christianity
and that of capitalism fuse into a single, spectral agency poised to take over
the world.
One night in the summer of 2006, Hermana Juana asked me if I could
drive her and two sisters from the building to inspect some abandoned