Juno Moneta: On the Erotics of the Marketplace

I. Introduction Over two hundred years ago, William Blackstone began his famous Commentaries on property by observing that "[t]here is nothing which so generally strikes the imagination, and engages the affection of mankind, as the right of property. "1 Blackstone's desire for wealth should not surprise us. Etymology tells us that money is a woman. Our word "money" derives from Juno Moneta. Juno, queen of the gods, was the Roman goddess of Womanhood, the personification of the feminine. Her title "Moneta" means She Who Reminds and Warns.2 The word "money" tells us that the feminine is a reminder - a warning. This reflects the Hegelian insistence not only that the market is fundamentally erotic, but that market relations are the most basic and primitive form of eroticism. It also echoes the Lacanian understanding that the feminine is the primal commodity.3 My work as a lawyer and a legal scholar is an encounter with Hegelian and Lacanian theory. I posit that property - the law of the market place and the feminine are both phallic. They serve parallel functions in the creation of subjectivity (i.e., the capability of being both a legal actor who can bear rights and assume duties as well as a sexed being who can speak and engage in social relations). In both theories, subjectivity is intersubjectivity mediated by objectivity. Property, according to Hegelian philosophy, and the feminine, according to Lacanian psychoanalysis, are fictions that serve as the defining external objects that enable us to make ourselves into acting subjects. By serving as objects of exchange between subjects, property and the feminine simultaneously enable subjects to recognize other humans as individual subjects - as the mediators of relationship, they enable us to desire and be desired. This creation of subjectivity is simultaneously the creation of the realm which Lacan called the symbolic: law, language and sexuality. I will explain my terminology in more detail shortly. Lacan interests me as a feminist because he simultaneously divorced sexuality from anatomy while explaining how sexuality is not only confused with, but figured by, anatomy. By reading Lacan together with Hegelian property jurisprudence, I show how property and markets are erotic and, therefore, are also figured in legal discourse by bodily metaphors. My theory is a thorough-going reconstruction of both feminist and property theory. I believe my theory gives a more complex and faithful account of sexual difference than do either of the two dominant schools of legal feminism -- cultural feminism and so-called radical feminism- which are simple negations or mirror images of masculinism reflecting back traditional gender stereotypes. That is, both implicitly accept the American imagery of masculinity as atomistic individuality and femininity as the opposite or complement of masculinity. The primary difference is that cultural feminists embrace the resulting vision of femininity as authentic, while radical feminists reject it as the abased condition of women imposed upon us by men in patriarchal society. My theory also helps to explain why we as a society tenaciously cling to certain property law doctrines despite their disutility and stubbornly continue to maintain certain legal theories despite overwhelming empirical evidence to the contrary. This article is intended for attorneys as well as jurisprudes and critical theorists, although different aspects will no doubt appeal to different segments of my audience. I believe that my theory is not merely of theoretical interest. I have personally found that my approach has been extremely useful not only in my teaching but also in my doctrinal scholarship and in my legal practice as a commercial lawyer. Readers of my doctrinal scholarship, as well as lawyers with whom I practice, are often surprised that I see an intimate connection between the work and my admittedly outre theorizing. Let me try to explain. …