Human Economy vs. Market Economy

Boothby's concept of "human economy vs. market economy" names a structural opposition between two modes of organizing the subject's relation to the Other's desire, mediated by the Lacanian figure of das Ding. In the "human economy" — associated with Marcel Mauss's gift-exchange paradigm (as elaborated through Graeber) — subjects are kept in an ongoing, constitutively open relation to the unknown desire of the Other. Gift exchange creates obligations, debts, and encounters that cannot be fully settled or codified; the subject must perpetually negotiate the opacity of what the Other wants. This preserves the gap that structures desire as such, and maintains the proper (anxiety-generative) distance from das Ding — the impossible, pre-symbolic Thing around which social and psychic life circulates without ever possessing it.

The market economy, by contrast, functions as a phantasmatic defense: money — understood as a phantasmatic incarnation of das Ding itself — replaces the irreducible alterity of the Other's desire with a calculable, fungible medium. By doing so, it "excuses" the subject from the anxiety-laden encounter with the Other's opacity. Capitalism thereby operates as a kind of religion, with the commodity and money occupying the structural place the sacred once held — elevating an ordinary object to the dignity of the Thing (sublimation's logic) while simultaneously closing off the very lack that sustains desire. The displacement from human to market economy is thus, on Boothby's reading, a massive collective defense against anxiety, purchasing social efficiency at the cost of the subject's entanglement with otherness.

This concept appears in diaeresis-richard-boothby-embracing-the-void-rethinking-the-origin-of-the-sacred (p.192) and functions as an applied, socio-critical extension of several foundational Lacanian concepts. Most directly, it is a specification of das Ding: where Lacan's Seminar VII theorizes the Thing as the excluded, impossible centre around which desire orbits, Boothby transposes this structure onto the anthropology of exchange, asking what social formation best preserves the subject's constitutive relation to the Thing's void. The human economy, structured by gift and obligation, keeps das Ding operative — it institutionalizes the extimate logic whereby the Other's desire remains genuinely opaque, sustaining anxiety as the price of genuine sociality. The concept thus extends extimacy as well: gift exchange is a social practice that enacts the extimate topology, where the intimate kernel of social life (what binds subjects together) is simultaneously the externalized, ungraspable desire of the Other.

The concept also cross-references anxiety, desire, and jouissance in a critical register: the market economy is read as a collective apparatus for managing and domesticating anxiety — not by resolving it but by substituting a calculable object (money-as-das Ding) for the structural gap that anxiety indexes. This aligns with the Lacanian principle that the symptom is a second-order symbolic solution to anxiety; Boothby implies that the market economy is something like a civilizational symptom. The link to Capitalism as Religion (a cross-referenced concept) frames the argument teleologically: if capitalism displaces the sacred, it does so by taking over the sacred's structural function — providing a phantasmatic object that both evokes and wards off the Real of das Ding. Finally, the concept implicitly engages fetishism and interpellation, since the market economy's "excuse" from the Other's desire operates through the fetishistic disavowal built into the commodity form and through ideological hailing that naturalizes market relations as the horizon of human possibility.

Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the SacredRichard Boothby · 2023 (p.192)

Where Graeber's human economy continually required engagement with the unknown desire of the Other, the market economy tends to excuse us from having to deal with it.

The phrase "unknown desire of the Other" is theoretically loaded because it condenses the Lacanian definition of desire — always constitutively alien, borrowed from the Other's opacity — and links it directly to anxiety, which Lacan defines as the "sensation of the desire of the Other"; to "excuse us from having to deal with it" identifies the market economy not merely as an economic arrangement but as a structural defense mechanism, a socially organized avoidance of the encounter with the Real that desire and anxiety both index.