Social Dissonance and Living Currency: Mattin With Klossowski

Mattin's Social Dissonance addresses the split between the social reality of economic exchange determined by the commodity form, on the one hand, and the phantasm or myth of the self as an agent of its own experience and as an immediate given, on the other hand. It is thus concerned with what Mattin calls ‘alienation from above’ and ‘alienation from below’. One of its key formulations with regard to the latter form of alienation is the notion of ‘phantasmatic subjectivity’, through which a reified yet naturalised phantom of the self is projected, masking the reality of cognitive and sub-cognitive processes. In this article, I propose a comparative discussion of Mattin's project with the French writer Pierre Klossowski's essay Living Currency (1970). Working with the influences of Nietzsche, Sade and Fourier, Klossowski also conceives of the self as a fixing or commodification of the impulses. Mattin and Klossowski are thus engaged with each other in their respective accounts of the phantasmatic construction of subjectivity. The article then follows through the divergences of the consequences derived from this analysis.