Desire and Intellect: Individuation in Capitalism, or Simmel vs. Marx

• Published in: Polish sociological review Vol. 204; no. 4; pp. 499 - 514
• Main Author: Ratajczak, Mikołaj
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Warsaw Polish Sociological Association 2018; Polskie Towarzystwo Socjologiczne; THE POLISH SOCIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION; Polskie Towarzystwo Socjologiczne (Polish Sociological Association)
• Subjects: Capitalism; Capitalist societies; Cooperation; Identity formation; Materialism; Philosophy; Political economy; Politics; Simmel, Georg (1858-1918); Social Philosophy; Social reality; Social sciences; Society; Sociology; Subjectivity; Theory; Transgender persons; New York; Los Angeles California; United States > US; desire; intellect; Capital; subject; individuation; modernity
• ISSN: 1231-1413; 2657-4276
• DOI: 10.26412/psr204.06

The aim of this text is to compare Simmel's and Marx's notions of two subjective faculties, desire and intellect, and the role each plays in modern capitalist societies. While Simmel understands the faculties as individual, Marx's critique of political economy presents their social, public, and trans-individual character. These two perspectives differ over the particular economic sphere in which we ought to locate the social production of subjectivity. Simmel locates such production in market exchange, the formal, symbolic expression of which is money, thereby leading to the notion of an intersubjective social reality as the effect of monetary relations between desiring and calculating individual subjects. Marx, for his part, treats both desire and intellect as trans-individual faculties, and locates the social production of subjectivity in the sphere of production as subsumed under capital.