Introductory article : An ontological basis for non-reductive valuation

Catherine Malabou’s oeuvre offers a fruitful conceptualization for a recalibration of economic valuation. Her analyses of plasticity, subjectivity and so-called ontological capitalism (Malabou, 2005, 2008) show how contemporary economic structures produce not only goods and services, but forms of being, experience of time and attribution of value. In Le Change Heidegger (1998), Malabou examines the Heideggerian articulation of value and favour, arguing that value is not a mere economic given, but a mode of revelation (Erschlossenheit) and world formation. These insights provide a highly relevant ontological foundation for a theory of value in which price is only one dimension, in addition to resonance and existential receptivity. The present section elaborates on how Malabou’s ontological capitalism constitutes a necessary horizon to make the limits of the market price explicit and to think of an alternative valuation that does justice to phenomenological, existential and ethical dimensions.

Ontological Capitalism: Value as a Form of Being

Malabou’s notion  of ontological capitalism refers to the way in which contemporary capitalism colonizes being itself: it capitalizes not only labor, time, or goods, but also plasticity, subjectivity, and even receptivity. Capitalism therefore functions as an ontological apparatus: a regime that determines what manifestations are recognized as valuable (Malabou, 2008). In doing so, Malabou radically breaks with the standard view of value as a relational economic attribute. For her, value is a modality of transformation, a moment in which being shows itself differently. Capitalism appropriates this modality by reducing all forms of appearance to tradable exchange values—a process that aligns with the epistemic reduction that economics produces when it reduces time, risk, and subjectivity to computable variables. The market price is only a derivative category: a representation of value within one ontological regime. Malabou thus philosophically legitimizes my thesis that economic value formation structurally encompasses more than market value.

The “Économie de la Valeur” and the “Économie de la Faveur”

In Le Change Heidegger, Malabou (1998) analyzes two Heideggerian motifs that are directly applicable to my Theory of Resonance Value:

1. Économie de la valeur: value is not primarily exchange but approximately-being (Wertsein)—an ordering, revealing movement.
2. Économie de la faveur: favour, gift or the unexpected appearance of meaning that eludes exchange.

This second economy provides an explicit philosophical foundation for my idea of inalienable resonance value: value that does not appear as a transaction, but as a development of meaning. Where the market price appears within the realm of equivalence, resonance appears in the realm of favor and disclosure. Malabou thus shows that value always has a double structure: a measurable and an ontological-revealing one. This is in line with my definition of value as price + resonance + receptivity.

Malabou ultimately legitimizes an economic model in which value is no longer calculated or appropriated (the Gestell ), but is revealed ( Unconcealment ) and unfolded. This introductory paper positions her thoughts as a complement to Heidegger, Zambrano, and Weil, and underpins Geyskens’ project with his Ontological Economics of Time that reveals the depth of the Sorge and its broader value.