Cite as:
Monique David-Ménard, ‘The Animism of Modern Property’, lecture presented at the symposium The Social Life of Things, ICI Berlin, 3 March 2022, video recording, mp4, 01:01:24 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e220303-1>
Lecture
3 Mar 2022
3 Mar 2022
The Animism of Modern Property
By Monique David-Ménard
In 1842, Karl Marx denounced a new law prohibiting the poor from pilfering fallen wood in the forests of the Rhineland. He saw in this apparently local case a major transformation of modern societies. By identifying which new anthropology serves as the basis for the legal invention of property rights, which make things face the wills of owners, Marx affirms a strange proximity between human beings and inanimate things. On the side of the legislators, to prohibit ‘poverty’ from collecting brushwood for heating and to price this wood to make the poor pay for it, means to adore ‘wooden idols’; it amounts to a primitive religion, which Marx will later call fetishism. For the poor, collecting fallen wood means, by law, to identify with a new form of social and political exclusion. Their identification with the dead twigs is much more than a metaphor as it is the matter of an animist experience. It is a paradoxical animism, an animism of the inanimate. This is why Marx compares the savageness of the nobles and the bourgeois to that of the Cubans colonized by the Spaniards in the sixteenth century.
If all societies are animistic, is the modern animism invented by property rights worse than that of non-modern societies, and in any case more unconscious of itself? This talk will compare Marx’s diagnosis with Marilyn Strathern’s affirmation that ‘property is our myth’.
Venue
ICI Berlin(Click for further documentation)
Organized by
ICI BerlinVideo in English
Format: mp4Length: 01:01:24
First published on: https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/the-animism-of-modern-property/
Rights: © ICI Berlin
Part of the Symposium
The Social Life of Things
Objects are produced and exchanged, desired and transferred. While they can be said to condense and contain the ‘real’ of social relations, they never become fully transparent. Instead, problematizing oppositions between the inside and the outside, the subjective and the social, they are media for social relations and conflicts, as well as media that help constitute and transform subjects with their singular desires and forms of enjoyment. How are objects differently constructed and animated by the social and the individual? In what sense do moderns remain animist in their relation to the unconscious and to notions of ownership and property? Engaging with Monique David-Ménard’s book La Vie sociale des choses: L’Animisme et les objects (2020), this symposium seeks to explore how the always local opacity of objects entangles psychoanalysis and anthropology, philosophy and politics.
Venue
ICI Berlin(Click for further documentation)
With
Marcus CoelenMonique David-Ménard
Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky
Iracema Dulley
Christoph F. E. Holzhey
Vladimir Safatle