Since the social machine entirely replaces the machine of the stoicheīa toū kósmou, nature itself and its elements (which until then had been the quintessential receptacles of power) have to be totally stripped of their authority and made indifferent to each other since they have “no value,” they are not energized by that primal breath that has now shifted to human labor.

Commodity means something that is additional to immediate use, which implies a destruction of the immediate, but its reutilization in a further process (exchange value is transformed into use-value). Its basis is an improper use of the object, in the same way that metaphor is an improper use of the word. Once the object acquires the secondary character as a commodity, then the essence of the commodity is such that the object turns out to be primarily a commodity, namely exchange value—and only at a given moment (after circulation and purchase) is it an object of use. This is an inversion produced by exchange, but every exchange is based upon it, except where the circulation takes place in the same body. And the body of the community is irreversibly harmed, in the exchange process, by contact with the body of another community. The derived characteristics that strike against the origin, undermine it, sweep it away in their interplay—while still appearing to be derived—are also distant, liminal characteristics (the first exchange is between community and community, on the border), which then strikes back within the community, “with disruptive action.”⁴⁷⁸

The excluded commodity is a commodity that becomes a universal equivalent and therefore adds to its own particular use-value a second kind of use-value, which it now acquires from being a general equivalent. The excluded commodity becomes a desirable object insofar as it is equivalent to the exchange. Apart from particular desires for individual objects, there is a universal desire for exchange: “the commodity singled out as the universal equivalent, is now an object of a universal need arising from the very process of exchange, and it has the same use-value to everybody, viz., that of serving as the depository of exchange value, of being a universal means of exchange.” By the detour of the excluded commodity we have arrived as far as identifying a general object of desire, a measuring unit of use—and this, absurdly, is the universal possibility of exchange. The heart of desire is not an object, but the possibility of exchanging objects.⁴⁷⁹

The whole theology of commodities is a process at the end of which the exchange value is transformed back into use value: this process is the delay—Freud’s Aufschub—that generates the whole phantasmagoria of the commodity, “the separation of purchase and sale.”⁴⁸⁰ And this separation is the generic form of schism and duplicity, which “breaks down the limits of the organic social interchange, which are locally rooted and rendered sacred by tradition and foolish sentiment.”⁴⁸¹ It is “the general form taken by the rupture and separation of all elements which in that social interchange were once united.”⁴⁸² It is the impossibility of innocence. The same can be said of the word, insofar as it is detached from its correspondence, its kinship, its affinity with what it represents, above all insofar as it is fixed in a simulacrum—writing—which is entirely extraneous to the body, and establishes itself as an incorruptible and independent existence, in the same way as the “money-crystal” does.⁴⁸³