Commerce

Use in the book

The fierce address condemns commerce as a war of money, then imagines another commerce moved by rivalry in generosity and beneficence. It thus distinguishes actual conduct from a conditional ideal instead of abolishing the word’s positive possibilities. Philosophy too may fail to enter habitual commerce if understanding it always requires laborious reflection; this exchange occurs within a person as well as between people. The final paradox calls war a kind of commerce because long fighting binds peoples in some way even while disuniting them. Exchange here is a relation, not necessarily a commercial transaction.

Places to read

1. I, p. 47, entry 1, ¶6A polemic against money-war imagines a generous alternative.
2. I, p. 436, entry 5, ¶1Difficult philosophy may not enter ordinary exchange of thoughts.
3. II, p. 917, entry 2, ¶1Long wars establish ties between the peoples they divide.

Translation in this edition

The English translation uses exchange in the passage about thoughts and retains commerce in the trade and war passages. The qualifications kind of and in some way prevent the last comparison from becoming a simple identity of war and trade.

Use in the book

The repeated declarations in Mon cœur mis à nu XCVII tighten a polemical circle: commerce is natural, therefore infamous; honesty itself becomes speculation for gain. The comparatively least infamous merchant admits using virtue to out-earn the vicious. Candour about self-interest is a small distinction within the condemnation, not absolution.

The notebooks nevertheless rely constantly on financial models. Work bears interest in Fusées XVII; gradual skill grows like compound interest in Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXVIII; the Hygiène plans divide income among dependants and creditors. The coexistence matters. Financial language can clarify accumulation even when the pursuit of gain as an ultimate motive is condemned.

Mon cœur mis à nu CXV's instruction to earn money by working without self-interest is deliberately paradoxical. The hoped-for income serves duties, yet attention to immediate gain threatens the quality of the work that could produce it. This is not a practical guarantee that disinterested labour will be paid. It is an attempted reorientation of motive within material necessity, shadowed by the same debts that make money unavoidable.

Places to read

1. Mon cœur mis à nu XCVIIRends-moi plus que je ne te donne. — The unspoken demand reveals the supposed reciprocity.
2. Mon cœur mis à nu XCVIIl’honnêteté elle-même est une spéculation de lucre. — Virtue becomes an instrument of gain.
3. Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXVIIIcomme les intérêts composés — Financial language remains available for a positive account of growth.
4. Mon cœur mis à nu CXVtravailler d’une manière désintéressée. — The late rule separates earning from immediate self-interest.

Translation in this edition

‘Lending and repayment’ unfolds prêté-rendu; the following ‘Give me back more’ keeps the hidden surplus demand visible. ‘Without self-interest’ for désintéressée is preferable here to the modern mistaken sense of disinterested as bored. ‘Satanic’ should remain attributed to Baudelaire's moral polemic, not adopted as a factual classification of merchants.