“Lease your body”: a encantação do corpo e o fetichismo da mercadoria

Abstract

Diverging from the post-modern conception which holds that the contemporary times would be the historical moment of an economy of the body built upon the ruins of its symbolic economy, the present article advocates the conception that the economy of the body in contemporary times is a consequence of the articulation between the economic infra-structure and capitalism’s symbolic economy, taken to the paroxismal limit of its acceleration. The article explores the connections between: on one hand, the subject’s structural and transhistorical alienation and his/her ‘enchantment’ towards objects; on the other hand, the capitalism’s subject’s contingent and historical alienation and the commodity fetishism. This way, the article aims to establish a sequence which evolutes from the lost jouissance of the body to the jouissance of the real body, pointing out how they provide the basis for the emergence of the jouissance producer of commodities. Following, it highlights how the latter, therefore, anticipates and makes it possible the jouissance of body-commodity.