Thinking through the obscene: On Noam Yuran’s The Sexual Economy of Capitalism

Abstract

The Sexual Economy of Capitalism is a unique, illuminating, and deeply disturbing book. In this essay, I seek to show that Yuran’s key themes – sex and money – are chosen precisely for their obscene, transgressive nature, and that this choice is of methodological significance. Yuran’s subject matter, I argue, sheds light on profound transformations of unwritten ethical rules and values regarding exchange and the singular, as well as their historical afterlives and residues. The conceptual core of the book – its analysis of the relationship between the market and the economy in capitalism as a relation of included exclusion, in which the market is both affected by and leaves traces on what is excluded from it – enables Yuran to reveal subtle yet incorrigibly obscene entanglements of money and sexuality in modern life.