Time gratuitously given without demands for reciprocation seems to be the lesson dispensed in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. It is what buys time, what bends it in your favor.

The consequences of the withholding or absence of this gesture can be observed in Marx’s “Imperialism in India.” There a maxim that Marx posited as truth turns inevitably from self-sufficiency of being to isolation, an inherently dyspeptic position taken up to further characterize a whole modernism that ends with the forced conclusion of the individual as superfluous, as left behind in an advanced industrial society and, at best, as revolutionary to the extent that his self-awareness as error, as contradiction, at the appointed hour comes to be celebrated precisely for its embodied condition, i.e. for having a body capable of commanding the future of economic systems catered to the needs of the individual, e.g. patient-centered health care, or student-centered learning, or customer-based service.

Today we are far enough removed to recognize the obligatory flavor to communal bonds the Marxist view imparts. Why demand from the other what could have been freely given? Yet this other awareness comes too late, since what is it that supports the relation of man to his wants, needs and desires in capitalist forms of exchange – what makes him beholden to these things – if none other than this promise of community, the desire for belonging and approval?

Where concepts all are made congruent in the interest of increase in inertial weight or force (which is not the same as flight), this indicates of the subject an over-investiture of thoughts in certain directions at the expense of others. This disproportion is what gives away the anticipation of a future ideal in the present moment of economic systems that feeds on the individual in his dependency as a continuation of this forced condensation that yields a false conclusion, which cannot be otherwise as long as some or most of the energy necessary for the stabilization and recovery of “sufficient force as signifying material” (C. Metz) is instead bound up in the modernist carry over of thought in its restricted movement.   

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