Le propriétaire qui épargne empêche les autres de jouir sans jouir lui-même ; pour lui, ni possession ni propriété. Comme l’avare, il couve son trésor il n’en use pas. Qu’il en repaisse ses yeux, qu’il le couche avec lui, qu’il s’endorme en l’embrassant : il aura beau faire, les écus n’engendrent pas les écus. Point de propriété entière sans jouissance, point de jouissance sans consommation, point de consommation sans perte de la propriété : telle est l’inflexible nécessité dans laquelle le jugement de Dieu a placé le propriétaire. Malédiction sur la propriété!

Back in April 2010, in a post called “Amant ou mari,” I made some initial comments on Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s comparison of possessors and proprietors with lovers and husbands. In What is Property? he said: “If I may venture the comparison: a lover is a possessor, a husband is a proprietor.”At the time, I was primarily concerned with gathering clues to what Proudhon really meant by “possession” in his various works—but I was also just beginning to explore the sexually charged language that he sometimes used to discuss property (language which Tucker’s translations sometimes obscured.) I have finally had a chance, in the context of my current work on Proudhon and feminism, to take another, closer look at this potential subtext and, while it is a commonplace that dirty minds can always find a dirty joke, it’s hard to deny that there is a good deal in the works on property that begs to be read as double entendre. And the fact that, in several instances, the more libidinal reading actually makes more sense than Tucker’s rather staid, economic interpretations suggests that perhaps I am not simply indulging my own bad passions. Now, once you have set out on a search for double meanings, there is always plenty of potential material to be sifted through. Not every reference to “possession” need be taken “in the biblical sense,” and many of a philosopher’s references to “penetration” will be perfectly innocent. But there are moments when Proudhon doesn’t leave much open to question: The rent has become for the proprietor the token of his lechery, the instrument of his solitary pleasures. [The System of Economic Contradictions] And, of course, there is the passage from What is Property? (quoted at the top of this post) where Proudhon literally depicts the proprietor (of a particular sort) sleeping with his money in his arms. Here is the full section.

The proprietor who consumes annihilates the products: it is far worse when he decides to save. The things that he has put aside pass into another world; they are never seen again, not even the caput mortuum [worthless remains], the manure. If there were means to journey to the moon, and the proprietors took a fancy to carry their savings there, after a while our whole terraqueous globe would be transported to its satellite. The proprietor who saves prevents others from enjoying without enjoying himself; for him, neither possession, nor property. Like the miser he broods [literally, like a hen] over his treasure, but does not use it [use it up, or exploit it]. Let him feast his eyes on it, let him lie down with it, let him fall asleep embracing it: no matter, the coins will not beget coins. No complete property without enjoyment [jouissance, which has a range of meanings including “use,” “pleasure” and “orgasm”], no enjoyment without consumption [or consummation], no consumption without loss of property: such is the inflexible necessity [in the sense of inevitability] in which the judgment of God has placed the proprietor. A curse on property!

[The translations are my own. Benjamin R. Tucker chose less provocative renderings, which generally capture the basic arguments, but tend to mute and muddle things a bit, consistently rendering “enjoyment” in terms of “coming into possession.” This certainly hasn’t helped clarify what Proudhon really meant by “possession,” the keyword that English-speaking anarchists have tended to attach themselves to, a keyword that Proudhon admitted he had not really defined very well. Anyway…]

There are some interesting details here, at least one of which seems to have been obscured by a real translation error. Tucker apparently mistook fumier (manure, dung) for fumée (smoke), which would not have been as good a match for caput mortuum, and the mistake obscures a possible echo of Pierre Leroux’s theory of the circulus, an anti-Malthusian theory of natural circulation which led Leroux (like others in those early days of experimentation with fertilizer) to sometimes be rather preoccupied with manure. I wouldn’t have much doubt that this was indeed an indication of Leroux’s influence, except that it is so early that it may well have been an anticipation of some of the same ideas. In any event, we have an interesting similarity between the works of the two authors, and a confirmation that Proudhon was concerned with the circulating side of what I’ve been calling “the larger antinomy” in terms that allow us to draw fairly straightforward connections to figures like Leroux and Joseph Déjacque. But the much more interesting detail, relatively unobscured in Tucker’s translation but outside our “common sense” about the terms of Proudhon’s work, is that there are at least three sorts of property-relations described in the second paragraph: alongside the lover/possessor and the husband/proprietor, we have another figure, a sort of mother hen (though also almost certainly a “he”) who takes his property to bed, but without consummation, jouissance or issue.