ABSTRACT
Agamben’s earliest engagement with the concept of use occurs as conventional Marxist critique in Stanzas: Words and Phantasm in Western Culture (1993c[1977]). In ‘In the Phantasm of Eros’, Agamben posits that “the transfiguration of the commodity into enchanted object is the sign that the exchange value is already beginning to eclipse the use value” (Agamben, 1993g[1977]: 38); emphasis in original). While this early account identifies an erosion of the possibility of use, it is oriented to challenging its underlying utilitarian idea. This earlier account is concerned with examining the possibility of a new relation to things that consists neither in a utilitarian conception of use, nor in the logic of exchange (Murray and Whyte, 2011: 199), certainly influenced by his personal and intellectual engagement with Guy Debord, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Precisely, Agamben suggests that in the
spectacle … in which we are now living, in which everything is exhibited in its separation from itself, then spectacle and consumption are the two sides of a single impossibility of using. What cannot be used is, as such, given over to consumption or to spectacular exhibition and … the irrevocable loss of all use.
