Michael Dutton most recently taught at Beijing Capital Normal University and Goldsmiths, University of London, and is the author of
There is magic in money, and Karl Marx knew it. Yet part of its magic lies beyond Marx’s calculations and it was Georges Bataille who showed that. Bataille shows how (labor) power or energy was not confined to the working day. It can even be traced through the symbolism on coinage. From the grotesque coinage of ancient Gauls, and on to the coins of the early Chinese revolutionary Soviet, this chapter maps the journey of affective energy through the material markers that it leaves in its wake. In the case of the Chinese revolution, however, these marked coins also take us back to the jianghu and to one of the earliest forms of vernacular resistance to establishment power in China.
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