For Marx, “desire” is so often inseparable from the commodity. It is never without object. On the very first page of Capital, quoting Nicholas Barbon, Marx defines it in a footnote: “Desire implies want; it is the appetite of the mind, and …Barbon, Nicholas. 1696. A Discourse Concerning Coining the New Money Lighter. In Answer to Mr. Locke's Considerations, &c, London.
Deleuze, Gilles. 2006. “Four Propositions on Psychoanalysis” in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts & Interviews 1…
Nicholas Barbon
economist · 2 mentions across 1 reading
In this course
Barbon, a 17th-century economic theorist, enters the course as a genealogical anchor for understanding how desire becomes bound to material and commodity systems. Marx cites him to establish that desire—framed as appetite of mind—is foundational to political economy, a concept that threads through contemporary theories of how AI systems encode and operationalize human wanting. His appearance here grounds discussions of how algorithmic systems inherit and amplify these older logics of desire-as-object, making him essential for tracing cybernetic capture back beyond computation itself.
Mentioned in 1 reading
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