66

The paper explores a parallel between two founding innovations in contemporary epistemes, those of Marx and Saussure. It notes the isomorphism between the concepts of use value and signifier. After a brief examination of the place of the term “use value” in the Marxist tradition, it goes on to examine use value as a body, rather than in terms of need or of utility function. Through the comprehension of the concept of use value by way of the prism of the category of signifier, a series of questions, pertaining to the notion of the arbitrary, to the indivisible, to the play of what is unfixed, can be tested. We thus observe that the two concepts function as denominations for the successive moments of a given activity: the links in a chain. It can thus be argued that signifying chains play a fundamental role, as a repetition automatism, in social reproduction.