ABSTRACT
“'Kanna' and the Monetization of Affect,” the second chapter of the book, offers to interpret Bangladeshi writer Akhtaruzzaman Elias's short story “Kanna” through the lens of Marxist theories of money. Although Foucauldian theories of neoliberalism tend to ignore object relations in their prognosis of neoliberalism, objects and commodities—especially money—are the most powerful indicators of the changes that have taken place in South Asia in the past 40 years. This chapter weighs in on the conditioning effect that money has even on the most intimate feelings by referring to Elias's compelling story, showing how money is able to mediate the grief of a father who has lost his son to a common illness. “Kanna” forces us to see how object relations affect the manner in which subjects respond to the commoditized world, questioning, in the process, the efficacy of theorizing neoliberalism through the figure of the economic subject.
