“Where money is not itself the community, it must dissolve the community.”⁵⁰⁶ With the transition of exchange value to a position of predominance, with the inversion of the predominant relationship between commodity and money (from C-M-C to M-C-M), money becomes the community, it embodies in one subject that nexus rerum which would now be indecipherable in the world outside it, in the world of “horrid chance.”⁵⁰⁷ This is how inversion is applied here: the very agent of the Convention inherits the function of the Canon, it takes on the dignity and the powers of the order it has undermined.

History Makes Experiments

The central role played by sacrifice in archaic societies has now been taken over by experiment.

The cruel priests who raised the knife over the altar are now the conspirators.

As a premise to any discourse on experiment, here is a passage that Marx crossed out of The German Ideology: “In the main we have so far considered only one aspect of human activity, the shaping of nature by men.⁵⁰⁸ The other aspect, the shaping of men by men …”

Post-history is inhabited by people who believe in “causes,” in “mankind,” in “society,” in many other hypostases, but it is ruled by a scornful (perhaps even transcendental) being for whom all is material, all is exchangeable, all is exploitable: a perpetual manipulator, who invents forms and throws them away, grows tired of everyday materials and is always looking for new ones, who digs up the Amazon forests and drills pack ice so as to add a flavor, a distant aroma, to the kykeòn served in the Eleusinian Mysteries.

The unnamable present.

Marx refers to post-history when he writes about the transition from “history” to “universal history”: an experimental phase of history, in which everything forms a single corpus, in which nothing is external to society, in which everything acts on everything, as in the resonant primordial cosmos. Its empirical background is the world market: a one-way exit from Borniertheit, from provincial narrow-mindedness. The world market reinvents a sort of fate (in the same way that post-history revives all archaic categories, which are now applied to a reality that inverts the reality in which those categories were born).

“The further the separate spheres, which interact on one another, extend in the course of this development, the more the primal isolation of the separate nationalities is destroyed by the developed mode of production and intercourse and the division of labor between various nations spontaneously [naturwüchsig] brought forth by these, the more history becomes world history.⁵⁰⁹ Thus, for instance, if in England a machine is invented, which deprives countless workers of bread in India and China, and overturns whole forms of existence of these empires, this invention becomes a world-historical fact …”

“From this it follows that this transformation of history into universal history is not indeed a mere abstract act on the part of the ‘self-consciousness,’ the world spirit, or of any other metaphysical ghost, but a quite material, empirically verifiable act, an act the proof of which every individual furnishes as he comes and goes, eats, drinks and clothes himself.”⁵¹⁰ Nothing is more metaphysical than that “quite material, empirically verifiable act” and it can be said that the true fulfillment of metaphysics, almost its return to the state of mystery, where all is acted out in the absence of words, with a silent display of objects, takes place precisely with what Marx describes as a “transformation of history into universal history.”