Preliminary Notes on the General Economy of International Law and Governance

This transformation, well-evident today, can be described as a move away from the multiverse of restricted economies (micro-politics) to a general economy (politics "as such"). ... The general economy destines fetishism (commodities, persons, concepts, matter, and so forth) into the abyss of its reserve potentiality for exercising its exceptionality. ... A fetish is thus an actual object that both presents the lack from which it allegedly originates and acts as a sign of such unrepresentable nothingness (that is, it is produced as a single system, a general economy of representation, when it always already differentiates its abstraction from its actual activity as a relational sign). ... The message-in-a-bottle "of the left" was perhaps this: that classlessness, humanity or any other such general abstraction (fetish, sacred factum) entail, after all, "reality." ... Yet, if international law expresses the potentiality of what can be called more generally multilateralism, then the latter can be re-cognized in a positive sense, not as some essential determination, but as the social activity and pluri-vocity of those that have nothing in common, that is, as a special kind of real abstraction, since it is the paradoxical manner of human being to not have a nature or destiny