The history of the Enlightenment lightly rejects limit. Since its god is convention, since everything is material on which convention works, it is a question at most of changing the convention each time resistance is met. But all conventions have a shared faith in convention itself—and the material can one day rebel against that very faith. Then the limit reappears, by now an exotic figure, unveiled and venerated in Greece even while the first procedures were being devised to cancel it. Today we have it before us once more: it is the most disturbing of figures, the most ambiguous of memories. Simone Weil was the only one who clearly recognized its proper name. Anyone who hasn’t recognized it in thought is forced to see it emerge from events, translated and disguised in the jargon of systems, complexity, control. Or otherwise in the concern over a material that is disappearing, a power irreversibly worn down, an unfillable absence. And each time the ancient exorcism rings out: we will find new conventions, we will carry out drastic changes in method. The circle repeats itself, but ever narrower, until it tightens in a noose.
The exchange society is based on breaking the limit, but it does not accept that state of natural fragmentation in which it finds itself from moment to moment. It does not accept it since it considers the point of reference to be the whole. It doesn’t matter that the picture is continually a different one: what matters is that there is always a frame, and that the frame, as far as possible, remains the same. Otherwise the pictures would flood the passageways. And so one passes from the complete and imperfectible totality of the canon to a totality that frames every fragment as its télos: every fragment would be temporary, awaiting the promised prospect of a whole that would redeem it. Progress: an idea that is weak and almost innocuous in its helplessness, if behind it, once again, there were not yet again the looming outline of totality, which imposes a tight, uncontrollable, greedy bond on a reality that operates through a continual severing of bonds.
The transition from the world of the canon to that of convention is achieved by substituting the “sacred limit” with the “barrier,” as Marx explained in his Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie (Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy). Changing a set of doctrines means changing a world. Changing a convention means reaching different results inside the same world. And the results are compared on the basis of their efficiency in terms of development. Violating the “sacred limit” means abandoning an order that is social because it is the order of the world. Breaking down a “barrier” means putting forward a new procedure.
Monsieur le Capital creates an artificial nature, which claims to be more natural than nature. Through credit, capital creates the illusion that it is capable of continuous self-generation, as opposed to being a hobbled, periodical self-generation—like that of nature. The crisis that affects capital is in fact cyclical, it is Madame la Terre who makes her presence felt and destroys the sham of artificial nature. Here again, capital shows its aspect of explicit esotericism: continuous self-generation is the end result of initiation. But inversion requires it to be declared as an immediate reality and immediately perceptible.
Capital is defined by Marx as an uninterrupted breaking down of barriers—“where advance beyond the point of departure is the only presupposition.” At the same time Marx lies in wait for the (approaching) moment when capital will reach its own limit. But what is the limit for something that is perpetually breaking down limits? Marx, despite all his roaring vituperation, could barely hide his deepest fear: the fear that there was no such limit. And the same fear emerged, much more innocently, in Rosa Luxemburg’s indignation against Mikhail Tugan-Baranovsky: “Assuming the accumulation of capital to be without limits, one has obviously proved the unlimited capacity of capitalism to survive.” Indeed, entirely absent in Marx’s speculative system was péras, or any other strict notion of limit. Development, by definition, appeared undefined. Indeed, it was that very assumption of constant movement that aroused sudden outbursts of lyricism. And once again it would be Luxemburg who displays them in their most exposed and transparent form: “This would be tangible proof that the capitalist mode of production, alleged to spur on technology to its highest achievements, in fact sets large social limits to technical progress, in form of the profit motive on which it is based. It would show that as soon as these limits are abolished, technical progress will develop such a powerful drive that the technical marvels of capitalist production will be child’s play in comparison.” The bad breaking down of limits would then be counterbalanced by another one, which is good and unrestrainable. Capitalism and socialism, quarrelsome and cheeky infants, play the same game, though with bitter clashes of style, “twin and rival forms of a single identical faith.”