Taking Excess, Exceeding Account: Aristotle Meets The Merchant of Venice

Abstract

H ow does Aristotle’s anti-mercantile critique of interest from Book 1 of the Politics find itself issuing, incongruously enough, from the mouth of Shakespeare’s Venetian merchant? I will answer in what follows that the play reproduces, for its own reasons and in its own register, the philosophical double bind disclosed in but unassimilated by the Aristotelian analysis of money: namely, that the symbolic mediation money performs is at once indispensable and inaccurate, a necessary mechanism of community and an inevitable source of injustice, the vessel and perversion of value—in short, an artifice of culture that must and cannot be escaped, and that leaves its ambiguous mark on all human transactions. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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