Boštjan Nedoh (ZRC SAZU)



A Theft without a Thief: Anamorphosis of Surplus Value 


In his book Stealing the Mona Lisa, Darian Leader reports on the surprising consequences of the theft of the Mona Lisa painting from Louvre in 1911: the theft significantly increased the number of visitors to the Louvre, who did not visit the painting itself, but the empty space left behind by the missing masterpiece. For Leader, the theft of the Mona Lisa made itself visible by showing the split between the void (das Ding) and the image that occupies this empty space. This view is entirely consistent with Lacan’s idea that the theft can only take place within the symbolic, insofar as it presupposes the difference between the symbol and the empty place of its inscription. As he argued in the Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’, only the symbolic can be absent from its place, not the real. The real always drags its own place behind it. In contrast to the theft of the Mona Lisa, however, Dupin’s theft of the letter was effective precisely to the extent that it remained invisible: Dupin left the duplicate of the letter in the place of the stolen letter itself. The duplicate of the letter made the theft invisible. This case raises the more general question of how structural thefts—thefts without thieves—are possible, such as the thefts of surplus labour time in the wage system or (homologically) of the subject's gaze in anamorphosis. Why are we so obsessed with visible theft, but remain indifferent to invisible (structural) theft, even though we know it well?