Necro-Economy: Adam Smith and Death in the life of the Universal

Abstract

This essay takes as its starting point Hegel's contention that Adam Smith's conception of the market constitutes a theory of humanity's unconsciousproduction of the universal, which Hegel understands as human life. Hegel's reference to life allows us, in turn, to relate Smith to recent reflections on biopower and biopolitics, from Foucault and Agamben and raises the question of the relative suppression, in this discourse, of economics in favor of politics understood as sovereignty. The essay then looks at the role of death in the market and at the emergence, necessary to the equilibrium of the market, of the figure of the one who can be allowed to die with impunity, the economic analogue to Agamben's Homo Sacer.