Living Coin

Impossible Exchange [Verso-2001] Jean Baudrillard

Commodity exchange, the abstraction of the commodity of the general equivalent, and everything which describes the movement of value and the historic form of capital is one thing. The current situation, in which money is the object of a universal passion reaching far beyond value and commodity exchange, is quite another thing.

This fetishism of money, before which all activities are equivalent, expresses the fact that none of these activities any longer has any distinct end-goal. Money then becomes the universal transcription of a world bereft of meaning. This fetish money, around which global speculations revolve - far above and beyond the reproduction of capital - has nothing to do with wealth or the production of wealth.

It expresses the breakdown of meaning, the impossibility of exchanging the world for its meaning, and at the same time the need to transfigure that impossiblity into a sign of some kind - indeed, of the most nondescript kind: the sign which will best express the meaninglessness of the world.