The world of production knows no models and sets itself no limits. For its limit can only be everything. From the maximum fragmentation, caused by the absence of models, it seeks to move toward maximum unity, which is that of an everything fully and immediately possessed—and this claim to totality lingers, like a phantom, over every movement of the process, not least because the lack of totality gives rise to a peculiar angst. That lingering phantom, that temporary remedy, is Kitsch.

(“In bourgeois economics—and in the epoch of production to which it corresponds—this complete working-out of the human content appears as a complete emptying out, this universal objectification as total alienation, and the tearing-down of all limited, one-sided aims as sacrifice of the human end-in-itself to an entirely external end.⁴⁶⁵ This is why the childish world of antiquity appears on one side as a superior world. On the other side, it actually is superior wherever one is seeking the closed figure, form, and a set limit. It is satisfaction from a limited standpoint; while the modern gives no satisfaction; or, where it appears satisfied with itself, it is vulgar.” Beware, tread with caution: here, perhaps, we are getting close to one of the grand secrets of kitsch: an art of the limited and of the canonical, of measures tuned to a cosmic order, conceals instead a corrosive, “reckless” movement. “Vulgar” is something that sees the fragment as totality, that rests in the fragment with an expression of satisfaction, firmness, legality: then the simoom of the relentless haine du bourgeois rises up to reap revenge. And yet art has always been accompanied by kitsch! Yes, but, in order to fix its shadow, the process had to expand across the whole planet—the couple embracing in front of the sunset had to make up for the absence of a model. Ancient kitsch suggests an even deeper secret: the guilt inherent in anything whatsoever that becomes image, the reverberation of the violence of giving a name.)

Marx, looking at the origins, wavered between two visions of the earth: as an “extension of the body” of man, or as his “great workshop, the arsenal which furnishes both means and material of labor.”⁴⁶⁶ They are the two opposite modes that we continually encounter in thought: on the one hand, the analogical chain of symbolic correspondences by which the earth is enveloped as soon as it is regarded as an “extension of the body” of man (and this is seen from the way in which, despite constant secularization, terms like “heart,” “brain,” “flesh” are still symbolic poles); on the other hand, the dissociation hailed by the Enlightenment, the experimental use of everything, the absence of assumptions: this is the image of the “great workshop.” But Marx’s attention (and his passion) are always directed toward the second pole. He regards the existence of the first as obvious, but clearly finds it too tedious to specify its characteristics: for him it is enough to posit a condition of belonging, both at the beginning and—but here it is more embarrassing—at the end; and to suppose a considerable number of states of separation in all that occurs between these two phases. Marx examines these with tireless, whirling rapture, always referring eloquently to something lost or to be regained. But his eloquence comes to a halt—and he becomes distracted—as soon as the opportunity arises to specify exactly what has been lost, exactly what might be regained. None of this means that Marx has given two incompatible descriptions of the origins of the “earth”: they are, indeed, discordant and contradictory, but have always coexisted in history: one is the latency of the other. Marx displays all his personal acumen in placing them together. This is because the euhemeristic gesture, the severing of correspondences, always operates even where the order of analogies is established. Indeed, that order can be considered as a conciliatory response, a suturing of correspondences, which ritually follows every act of severing.