THE OSCHOLARS LIBRARY

Bataille/ Wilde: An Economic and Aesthetic Genealogy of the Gift

Richard Dellamora
Trent University

[This article first appeared in Angelaki, Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 6:2 (August 2001): 91-99 (Special issue: Gift, Theft, Apology), and is here republished by kind permission.]

    Several years ago, Jonathan Dollimore signaled the opening of a new phase of Wilde criticism when he argued that Oscar Wilde's brand of individualism aimed at subverting the stable ego of humanist culture and bourgeois subjectivity.  ‘Art,’ in Wilde's words, ‘is Individualism and Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force.  Therein lies its immense value.  For what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit.’ [1] Dollimore recontextualizes Wilde in light of the focus on the dissolution of the masculine ego in bodily sensation that characterizes the subject in postmodern critical theory.[2] Secondly, Dollimore places Wilde in the genealogy of Continental anti-humanist philosophy.  In the words of Richard Ellmann: ‘for his own reasons and in his own way... [Wilde] laid the basis for many critical positions which are still debated in much the same terms, and which we like to attribute to more ponderous names.’ [3] In this essay, I argue that Wilde's situatedness as a sexual dissident who was also a socialist impelled him to rethink the terms of political economy in ways that find counterparts in the work of latterday writers such as Georges Bataille and Michel Foucault.  Bataille's critique of Marxist economics and Foucault's insistence, following Bataille, on experiences ‘in which the subject reaches decomposition, leaves itself, at the limits of its own impossibility,’ continue a set of meditations that Wilde pursued in the early 1890s in his political writing, plays, and letter from prison. [4]

Within Wilde studies, critics have tended to back away from Dollimore's assertions.  Joseph Bristow, Alan Sinfield, and others point out that the inversion of customary values in Wilde's plays is incomplete.[5]  Contradictions in Wilde's comedies are, however, inescapable given the fact that he was an avant-garde thinker who wrote in genres such as the well-made play, Society comedy, and Ibsenite social drama that are, by definition, bourgeois.  Working within these constraints, Wilde wrote so as to emphasize rather than to conceal or ignore the faultlines.  When he mimes conventional attitudes, he underscores them in order to provoke his audience.[6]

Wilde's political thought synthesizes elements of liberalism, utilitarianism, including what Timothy Weiss aptly refers to as aesthetic utilitarianism, socialism, anarchism, and communism.[7]  In this essay, I attempt to suggest the coherence of his view by considering it in light of what Georges Bataille refers to as ‘general economy.’  Bataille argues that, although economists, whether capitalist or Marxist, are usually preoccupied with questions associated with the scarcity of resources, life exists in excess of the means necessary to production and reproduction.[8] When we insist on understanding the world as a function of human production and reproduction, we lose sight of this fact.  For Wilde and Bataille, however, existence is and must be characterized by such terms as excess, loss, and ‘nonproductive expenditure.’[9]   In refusing to accept human purpose as the norm of existence, both Wilde and Bataille may be described as anti-humanist.  Nonetheless, their view is more truly human than that of others because it recognizes that an anthropocentric economics will ultimately destroy the material bases of existence.  Wilde's double emphasis in ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ on social justice and the affirmation of individual presence in the world coheres in light of a general economy that is characterized by both surplus and loss.  Wilde sought a rethinking of the elements of economy that would eventually result in a transformation of the subject, of human intimacy, and of social relations.  This rethinking was both practical and theoretical.  It was also ethical, and it is in ethical terms that he is most radical for Wilde endorses what Bataille refers to as ‘the movement of exuberance’ that gives the lie to the class structure of industrial capitalism by affirming the ‘truth’ of the ‘explosive nature’ of human beings (Bataille 75).

In ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism,’ Wilde argues that the first goal of social policy should be the elimination of poverty.  This end can be achieved only by socializing property.  He also argues that modern industry has made possible the end of human drudgery.  Not production and economic growth but individual self-development is the irreducible norm against which social organization must be judged.  Thus far, Wilde's view is compatible with that of Marx and Engels when they say, in the Communist Manifesto: ‘We shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.’  Wilde's sense of timing, however, differs from that of Marx and Engels.  In the Manifesto, the statement is apocalyptic in the strict sense of occurring after the end of history: that is, after the triumph of the proletariat will permit the abolition of ‘class antagonisms’ and the dismantling of what Marx and Engels refer to as ‘the public power.’[10]   Wilde couples apocalypse in this sense with the demand that the norm of ‘the free development of each’ be recognized now.[11]  Both temporal dimensions, the here and now plus the future as it exists beyond the limits of history, are apocalyptic albeit in different meanings of the word.  Both are compatible with Marx; but both are not compatible with the totalizing, altogether sublimating force of apocalyptic narrative in this section of the Manifesto.[12] 

Wilde combines commitment to socialism with the repudiation of productivist norms of human behavior.  He emphasizes not production but expenditure, not labour but consumption.  In endorsing both concepts under the general rubric of ‘work,’ he transvalues the word so as to mean ‘activity of any kind’ (260) freely chosen by individuals.  He also transvalues consumption away from the meaning of the concept in Marx.  For Marx, consumption in excess of need exists at the expense of the workers whose vital force has been alienated within the very form of the commodities that are consumed.  In this respect, consumption is a metaphoric form of cannibalism that can become altogether too close to literal truth.  Wildean economy depends instead upon a concept of consumption in excess of need since only this mode of consumption escapes the slavery of the existing economic system, with its singleminded insistence on production and reproduction.  Only in this way can work cease to have the meaning of alienated existence that it has in Marx.  In Wilde's view, pleasure, ‘spending,’ including nonreproductive sexual practices, can also be forms of work.  Wilde's revalidation of pleasure, sexual practice, and consumption indicate that the demand for a transformation of political economy is indissociable in his mind from the transformation of the sexual economy.  Although this demand is most easily associated with his own interests (including sexual) in other men, the validation of luxury in Wilde's plays signifies his intent generally to displace the sex/gender system. 

Validating consumption meant challenging the tradition of conservative social commentary that had long associated ‘luxury’ with effeminacy.  As Linda Dowling and Thaïs Morgan argue, at the end of the 19th century, this polemic was directed both against avant-garde writers generally and emergent male homosexuals in particular.[13]  Women too were associated with excessive consumption.  In his 1899 study, The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen underscores the connection between bourgeois women and the consumption of luxury goods and high culture as a sign of the status distinction or ‘emulation’ sought by the wealthy.[14]  Consumption in the plays--such as Mrs. Marchmont and Lady Basildon's exaggerated interest in eating in An Ideal Husband--can be construed in Veblen's terms as indeed can segments of Wilde's audience and particular productions of the plays, then and now.  But as the women's contrivance that they approach the table without their husbands indicates, Wilde endorses the pleasure that women take for its own sake rather than for its symbolic significance within a particular economy.  This emphasis was extremely important in a decade when even feminists felt that women's worth had to be validated in terms of sacrifice to a larger good.[15]  His presentation suggests instead that men and women would benefit from living in a society in which, in the words of Mona Caird, ‘women would be able to choose the work for which they were best suited.’[16]   Contemporary feminists such as Elaine Showalter have emphasized that feminist thinking in the 1890s took a markedly apocalyptic term.[17]   Wilde's apocalyptic intonation reverberates with the inflection of women such as Mona Caird, who ends her 1892 essay by citing Hegel's maxim that: ‘'The master does not become really free till he has liberated his slave'‘ (306).

Although Bataille's concept of general economy is insistently heterosexual,[18] it shares Wilde's emphasis on what Bataille refers to as ‘perverse sexual activity (i.e., deflected from genital finality).’[19]   The role enforced upon Wilde at the time of the trials as an exponent of male homosexuality is not what is most significant for his socialism.[20]  Rather, male-male sexual dissidence in Wilde, connoted in the writing, actual in his life, is crucial insofar as it enabled him to recognize that political economy was structured in terms of a heterosexual/homosexual binary.[21]  This insight propels the differential representation of gender and consumption in the plays; it also propels him towards exorbitant demands not only on behalf of pleasures but also in favor of the recovery of intimacy between men and women.  Sexual dissidence in Wilde's plays is directed not so much towards legitimating desire between men--though it does have that object--as it is towards reinventing gender and sexuality in relations between men and women.  Social and moral conservatives of the 1890s were anxious in the extreme about the project that I refer to as the reinvention of heterosexuality.  When Eliza Lynn Linton, for example, attacks Caird, she warns that feminists, ‘the’ so-called ‘wild women,’ intend to impose ‘a new human nature and a new political economy’ upon ‘the imperial policy of our grand old country!’[22] 

Sexual dissidence drew Wilde towards but likewise repelled him from Marxism.  Far from being unaware of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick terms ‘homo/heterosexual definition,’ Marx and Engels helped constitute it at the moment when the concept of the homosexual was coming into existence.  Engels, for example, was familiar with the writing of the pioneering homosexual apologist, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs.[23]  In The Origin of the Family, Engels's attack on ‘the abominable practice of sodomy’ is integral to his general critique of the sex/gender system.[24]  In their correspondence, Marx and Engels bonded over the abjected bodies of leftists whom they found to be guilty of not being manly enough.  Since the two men associated sexual perversity with theoretical errancy, subjects of male-male desire were indicted with accusations of personal and political betrayal.  Andrew Parker, for example, records Marx and Engels' disdain for Johann Baptist von Schweitzer, a successful Social Democrat and labor organizer, who ‘had been arrested in 1862 ‘when two elderly ladies enjoying a quiet stroll through the public park of Mannheim came upon Schweitzer and an unidentified young man in a highly compromising situation’’ (Parker 31).  After Schweitzer, to Engels' chagrin, succeeded in uniting the General Association of German Workers, Engels wrote to Marx: ‘Guerre aux cons, paix aus trus-de cul [war on the cunts, peace to the assholes]’ (Parker 32).

Left politics has long attracted men with emotional and sexual ties to other men since, as Engels himself argues, the effort to transform political economy is impossible without the transformation of the sex/gender system and vice-versa.  Nonetheless, except in special contexts such as the circle around Walt Whitman or the group that gathered at Edward Carpenter's home at Millthorpe in England, men with sexual and emotional ties to other men have usually been called upon to sacrifice those interests on behalf of workers' rights or reform of the nuclear family.[25]  As Foucault remarks: ‘To ally oneself with the proletariat is to accept its positions, its ideology, and its motives for combat.  This means total identification.’[26]  Moreover, the investment, erotic if not sexual, that Marxist intellectuals make in manual laborers demands suppression of an emotionally and sexually expressive attraction among male homosexual radicals lest a proper masculine bonding be contaminated by its improper mate.  The resulting double bind for male homosexual socialists dictates the need to find other ways in which to imagine sexual aspects of political economy.

Wilde inhabited these tensions just as he inhabited the tensions of being an Irishman who advocated Home Rule for Ireland while earning his living as a playwright in London.[27]  As Ian Small and Regenia Gagnier have pointed out, moreover, Wilde wrote at a time when a paradigm shift had occurred in economic thinking, signaled by the publication of William Stanley Jevons's Theory of Political Economy in 1871.[28]  As a result, the labor theory of value, basic both to classical political economy and its critique by Marx, was displaced by the theory of marginal utility, which emphasized consumer preference as the leading factor in determining the price of goods.[29]  At the time, sexual and political radicals registered the impact of the shift.  Oliver Buckton, for example, notes the double positioning of Carpenter, who had been converted to socialism in 1883 by discovering ‘the Marxian theory of surplus-value’ in Henry Hyndman's England for All [Buckton 334].  In the autobiography which he began writing in 1890 [Buckton 316], however, Carpenter notes the change in thinking, observing that ‘every theory must ultimately succumb to criticism.’ [Buckton 335][30]  Marginal utility theory negated the claim to general adequacy of the labor theory of value.  This negation, in turn, meant that Socialists needed to rethink the concept of social justice. 

The shift after 1870 to a consumption-based theory of value has continued to characterize economic theory in the West, with particular emphasis on microeconomics and the twentieth-century science of marketing.  As Gagnier points out, consumer-oriented economic theory tends simply to exclude questions of social justice (125).  Wilde's socialism counters this tendency by theorizing consumption in relation to macroeconomics.  At the same time, a theory that could do justice to both labor- and consumption-value would make possible a rethinking of economy in which the estrangement and subordination of sexual dissidents would no longer be axiomatic.  Rachel Bowlby argues that Wilde's position is consistent with the emphasis not on surplus value but on a ‘surplus of pleasure’ that characterizes economics from the work of Alfred Marshall in 1890 to the present day.[31]  ‘Marshall is cited in the O.E.D. Supplement as one of the first instances of 'consumer' used in its modern sense, and 'consumption' also makes it appearance at about the same time.  Palgrave's Dictionary of Political Economy (1894) states that 'Consumers' Goods (or Consumption Goods) included all those desirable things which directly satisfy human needs and desires.' The dominance of the repeated 'desirable...desires' reflects, as in Marshall, the gradual departure from a framework assuming circumscribed, measurable 'needs'.  Etymologically, the word 'consumption' contains both these elements.  In its basic sense of wastage or using up, the expenditure involved in consumption acquired all the dissolute connotations of Victorian 'spending': the throwing away of a finite and precious substance on a solitary and debilitating pleasure.  But the link with 'consummation', more obvious in the French société de consommation, points to a more sublimely sexual meaning and to the possible fulfillment of Palgrave's unlimited 'desires.'‘[32]

This shift in thinking posed major challenges to radical theory at the fin de siècle.  Marxist economic theory is based on a double naturalism: a reduction of economic value to (male) labour and a concept of production based on a metaphoric displacement of the function of women in reproduction.  These axioms dislodge the role of women in production, especially in the home, while providing an incorrect and prejudicial view of what counts as men's work.[33]  In light of the Manifesto's commitment to ‘the free development of each,’ consider the following statement from Capital:

The realm of freedom actually begins only where labor which is in fact determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it is beyond the sphere of actual material production.  Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilized man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production.  With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase.  Freedom in this field can only consist in socialized men, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favorable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity.  Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis.[34]

The overwhelming predominance of production in Marx's concept of economy is evident in the relative proportions allotted in the paragraph to ‘civilized man's’ struggle with ‘Nature,’ on the one hand, and, on the other, the blossoming forth of culture at the end.  The organic metaphor appropriates to a single gender the work of production and reproduction that properly belongs to men and women at the same time that production is sublimated from the ‘realm of necessity’ to that of the ‘realm of freedom.’ Erased at the level of (re)production, women are doubly effaced by the validation of cultural production at the expense of production directed merely to the fulfillment of human needs.  Moreover, the realm of culture too exists under the aegis of production.

As I will argue later, male homosexual cultural production, even male sex, can be subsumed within this master plot; but these operations encounter difficulty, in particular at the end of the century when the demands of normalization required the regulation of an ever widening range of sexual perversions.[35]  As Wilde knew and as irritated patrons of Kettner's Restaurant felt when Wilde entertained young working-class men there, late Victorian theoretical emphasis on consumption carried major implications for understanding class, sex, and gender in new and different ways. 

Within these terms, Wilde's economic views, as put forward in ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ and suggested in the plays, are neither contradictory nor fragmentary.  To demonstrate their coherence requires, however, an economic model that emphasizes consumption without negating the facts of industrial production.  Dollimore notes that the ‘exclusion’ of Wilde from anglophone ‘cultural criticism and literary theory’ contrasts to the more serious attention that he has received in Europe (4 n. 1).  The theory of general economy that the French Surrealist, Georges Bataille, puts forward in his book The Accursed Share, has a number of characteristics in common with Wilde. Like Wilde, Bataille attempts to think through the category of economics by framing it in aesthetic terms and in relation to the category of the perverse--interpreted as non-(re)productive expenditure.  In this respect, Bataille's economic thinking is in sharp contrast both to Marx and to the highly unWildean thought of Freud and those under his impress, who conceptualize economic motive in terms of anality.[36]  Instead, Bataille proceeds on the assumption that life exists in excess of the possible needs of both production and reproduction.  ‘I will begin with a basic fact,’ he says.  ‘The living organism, in a situation determined by the play of energy on the surface of the globe, ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life; the excess energy (wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e. g., an organism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically’ (21).  Bataille questions the assumption, taken over by Freud from 19th-century economic anthropology, that all economic interactions are concerned with the acquisition of things.  Instead, he draws on Marcell Mauss's concept of the gift to argue that gift-exchange is another primary mode of human relations.  Based on this material, he proposes the concept of a ‘general economy’ that includes along with barter and exchange for money, the ritualized destruction of property, including human beings, as well as rituals of expenditure or gift-giving.[37] 

Bataille's contention that ‘the squandering of energy’ (193) is as important as the production of material value is consonant with Alfred Marshall's postulate of the consumer's desire for a ‘surplus of pleasure.’  Within the new modes of sexual politics, commercial development, and economic theory of the 1890s, Wilde attempts to rethink social transformation and transformations in gender and sexuality by validating both social welfare in the industrial economy and novel experiences of pleasure and consumption for groups such as manual workers, women, and homosexuals.  What he does not validate is the total organization of the economy in the light of human reason.  In Bataille's words: ‘From the start, the introduction of labor into the world replaced intimacy, the depth of desire and its free outbreaks, with rational progression, where what matters is no longer the truth of the present moment, but, rather, the subsequent results of operations.  The first labor established the world of things....Once the world of things was posited, man himself became one of the things of this world, at least for the time in which he labored.  It is this degradation that man has always tried to escape.  In his strange myths, in his cruel rites, man is in search of a lost intimacy from the first’ (Bataille 57).  

Wilde's approach posits the belief that the symbolic structure of exchange permits a degree of free expenditure of energy; that ‘intimacy’ can exist, even in a world as debased as late Victorian England; and that loss is not only necessary but can--to adapt a phrase from Roland Barthes' A Lover's Discourse--’become the site, however exiguous of an affirmation.’[38]  The frivolous and witty display of luxury in plays such as The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband signifies the existence of desire and wealth beyond the limits of emulation.  Likewise, the affirmation of love in the plays depends upon displacing the meaning of that word beyond the place it has in ensuring the consolidation of property within the bourgeois home.  

Wilde's plays typically include moments when the affirmation of love moves beyond the limits of that term within given contexts.  For example, in Salomé, a play with a strong address to independent women, feminists, and male homosexuals, Salomé's words in the final moments (‘the mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death’) project beyond the exchanges of phallicized desire that characterize her relations with others in the play.[39] 

In An Ideal Husband, which was playing in the West End at the time of the trials, there are two such moments.  At the end of Act Two, the tightly buttoned Sir Robert Chiltern reproaches his wife, whose view of marriage is both moral and highly utilitarian.  Confessing that he has ‘loved’ her ‘wildly,’ he complains:

Why can't you women love us, faults and all?  Why do you place us on monstrous pedestals?  We have all feet of clay, women as well as men: but when we men love women, we love them knowing their weaknesses, their follies, their imperfections, love them all the more, it may be, for that reason.  It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love.  It is when we are wounded by our own hands, or by the hands of others, that love should come to cure us--else what use is love at all?  All sins, except a sin against itself, Love should forgive.  All lives, save loveless lives, true Love should pardon.[40] 

Chiltern's insistence upon love to the point of loss exceeds the functional value of the term within the contexts of marriage, Society, and political life in which the Chilterns circulate.  At the very end of the play, when Lady Chiltern has decided to demand neither the sacrifice of her husband's career nor her own as a leading Liberal party activist, the pair are reconciled.  Returning to the stage on which her husband sits, ‘wrapt in thought,’ Lady Chiltern says: ‘Aren't you coming in, Robert?’  He replies: ‘Gertrude, is it love you you feel for me, or it is pity merely?  She replies, kissing him: ‘It is love, Robert.  Love, and only love.  For both of us a new life is beginning.’ (243, 243).

Needless to say, audiences and critics disagree among themselves as to whether to receive this ending ironically or to credit its full apocalyptic force.  The question is undecidable given the fact that Lady Chiltern's assertion can be true only if the couple live outside the context of political corruption that characterizes the world of the play.  Of course, they don't; and yet Lady Chiltern's affirmation demands exactly such a transformation.  This demand is apocalyptic in the sense that I described at the outset as Wilde's demand that terms like love, marriage, man, and woman be liable to transvaluation here and now.

Under the constraint of literal imprisonment, Wilde attempted to think through the concept of love as he had experienced it in his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas.  Wilde urges his absent Other that, in addition to having lavished ‘every luxury’ upon him, he also bestowed an ‘affection, tenderness and love that whatever you may think is not to be procured for money.’[41]  In contrast, Wilde belatedly (re)cognizes Bosie's love for him to have been an expression of hatred for his father (125-126), an observation that Bataille inadvertently echoes when he describes ‘nonproductive expenditure’ as the act of ‘a youthful man, capable of wasting and destroying without reason,’ the ‘satisfaction’ of whose ‘needs’ is opposed by his ‘father.’[42]  In contrast to a love that is a form of Oedipal hatred, Wilde continues to affirm his love: ‘Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are: by which we can see life as a whole: by which and by which alone we can understand others in their real as in their ideal relation’ (126).

Wilde's affirmation of love leaves unresolved a key ambiguity in the theory of general economy.  For, in Bataille's presentation, it never becomes clear whether a gratuitous gift is possible or whether characters like the Chilterns are perpetual inmates of Society and Wilde himself hostage to the inescapable play of love and hatred in relation to Bosie.  Wilde recognizes this human fate: ‘To be entirely free, and at the same time entirely dominated by law, is the eternal paradox of human life that we realize at every moment’ (De Profundis, 123).  Bataille explains this paradox as follows:
To begin with, reflection on potlatch [in Marcel Mauss's The Gift] led me to formulate the laws of general economy.  But it may be of interest to mention a special difficulty that I was hard put to resolve.  The general principles that I introduced, which enable one to interpret a large number of facts, left irreducible elements in the potlatch, which in my mind remained the origin of those facts.  Potlatch cannot be unilaterally interpreted as a consumption of riches.  It is only recently that I have been able to reduce the difficulty, and give the principles of 'general economy’ a rather ambiguous foundation.  What it comes down to is that a squandering of energy is always the opposite of a thing, but it enters into consideration only once it has entered into the order of things, once it has been changed into a thing. (193 n. 24)

The general economy exists outside the terms of either industrial or oedipal economy; but, for us in the West, it is imaginable only in relationship to the translation of desire into ‘things.’  This paradox is the site at which the concept of the unconscious appears in Bataille's economics since the gap between desire and what is known in Freudian theory as ‘demand’ is an opacity or series of opacities that is termed the unconscious.[43]  The specific demand that a subject makes on another can never fully express desire nor can the satisfaction of demand in ‘particular existence’ (Bataille 39) provide an equivalent for desire. 

In his own terms, Wilde comes to such an insight in De Profundis.  Before the trials, his survival had depended upon the ambiguity remaining in suspension.  In An Ideal Husband, it is decided in favor of generosity to Sir Robert Chiltern.  Bataille, however, also argues that the symbolic structure of gift-exchange can validate such practices as cannibalism and human sacrifice.  This argument carries with it an important implication for a man like Wilde who, as an artist and sexual dissident, contradicted the norms that identified men as producers of material goods and women as producers of offspring and exponents of bourgeois ‘civilization’ in the mode of luxury consumption.  Bataille's model implies that those who stand outside conventional norms of gender and sexuality are liable to find themselves expended as scapegoats in rituals whose functional purpose is to maintain  in place the fictions of a gendered economy.  Accordingly, Wilde needed to be able to persuade his listeners to validate luxury, consumption, and pleasure as modes of pure loss rather than as modes of further monetary or cultural accumulation.  Were Wilde to fail in this work, he faced the unpleasant prospect that he himself might be transformed into a sacrificial object. 

This situation was not merely personal.  Elsewhere, I have argued that in the 1890s homosexual polemicists fell at times into the error of arguing the validity of sexual and emotional ties between men on the grounds of social utility.[44]  Likewise, Dowling has emphasized the tendency for homosexuals to validate male intimacy as a form of what Plato in the Symposium refers to as ‘spiritual procreancy’ (Symposium 209a), ‘that pure intellectual commerce between male lovers which brings forth the arts, philosophy, and wisdom itself.’[45]  Both arguments render homosexuals liable to be sacrificed for the greater good of the empire or the race.  Just as it was crucial that feminists like Caird insist upon individual existence as the standard in relation to which justice needs to be defined, it was important that male sexual dissidents disengage the validation of their existence from functional arguments. 

Despite the deferral of such concerns to a time after the end of history in the Communist Manifesto, I believe that the desire for justice that one hears in Marx demands transformation in an imaginable present as well as in the future.  The intensity of Marx's demand for justice moves him beyond the limits of particular existence to a general economy.  Marx's apocalyptic voice ‘carries...a call, a violence, a decision of rupture.’  In the words of Maurice Blanchot, ‘properly speaking, it says nothing; it is the urgency of what it announces, bound to an impatient and always excessive demand, since excess is its only measure: thus calling to arms, to the struggle, and even (which is what we hasten to forget) postulating the 'revolutionary terror,' recommending 'permanent revolution' and always designating revolution not as a necessity whose time has come but as imminence, since it the trait of revolution not to permit delay, in that it opens and traverses time, coming to life in an ever-present demand.’[46]  Wilde insists that the demand for a transformed existence pertains to here and now as well as to hereafter.  In its own impatient and excessive demand, Wildean economics comes home to Marx, but it demands that Marx too become otherwise.

Richard Dellamora/Trent University