Uros Kranjc

The young Marx once remarked that political economy finds itself in an estranged form and is therefore in desperate need of a critical reconstruction of its object [Gegenstand]. He proposed a complete deconstruction of economic objectivity and its categories, hoping to recover the true species-life of man. In the article, we assert that contemporary economic theory remains confined by this estrangement, despite managing to ‘revolutionize’ itself out of the grip of classical political economy. The subjectivist-marginalist reliance on ‘measurable’ consumer preferences not only solidified the discipline’s estrangement, but also wrested away any remaining basic principles of economics through neoclassical reconceptualization. A break with estrangement would require novel critical economic thinking that would do away with the discontinuity between classical and neoclassical economics. It would therefore need a rich enough framework to scrutinize its principal categories. We argue that Alain Badiou’s objective phenomenology possesses a complementary synchronic structure able to conform to basic economic tenets, allowing for a comparative and synthetic approach. This would then be the basis for a new model of economic theorizing. We conclude the article with Marx’s value form, seeing it as a possible central category of a newly proposed economic framework.

ABSTRACT The article discusses the Hegelian opposition between institutions of Police and Corporation, leading to the objective spirit formed in the notion of the State. Juxtaposing both of Hegel's institutions against the usage of these notions proposed by Jacques Rancière (Police) and Alain Badiou (State of the Situation) opens a critical dividing line. We emphasize the inadequate handling of economic factors inherent in both notions, consequently obfuscating the economic conditioning of the political dimension in the social body. Moreover, we supplement both of the institutions with an economic-counterpart notion; to Police we add “Private Property” and to Corporation “State of Technology”. Further, we apply Badiou's handling of Hegel's dialectics as the dialectics of “constitutive scission”. The dialectical play of private property and state of technology is distinguished in the dialectics of algebra of places and topology of localizations. The resulting intersection is shown to be the place of torsion – corresponding to the place of the Subject – an interval, where we confront an uttered “wrong”, an interruption in the smooth counting of parts in a social body. This torsion is an immanent backside operation of the economic structure as far as it is a necessary factor in the upsurge of political subjectivity.

Thorstein Veblen once considered his work on instincts to be his only important contribution to economic theory. Instincts are the conditions and causes behind the formation of habits of thought, while the latter are the sine qua non elements of institutions. The article poses the question: If Veblenʼs relation instincts-habits of thought-institutions were to be thought of as a formal system, what role would they conceptually occupy? It interprets habits of thought as pure ideas in a Platonist fashion (eidos)—multiplicities thought as Ideas—conceived by Georg Cantorʼs theory of manifolds and philosophically assessed by Alain Badiou positing that “mathematics is ontology.” The article aims: (1) to show how habits of thought, as institutions, abstracted from all content can be thought of as set-theoretic multiplicities; (2) to relate Veblenʼs prime instinct, the instinct of workmanship, in equivalence with set theory’s axiom of the empty set—pointing towards Veblenʼs materialist orientation.