Return is not re-turning.
The two words are one keystroke apart and name opposite operations, and the configuration built the collision on purpose, because return needs the turn's word — the word that carries life, increase, things coming back grown — and staples it to extraction.
Re-turning is the facing of the living body changing from inward to outward.
Return is the yield of the living body taken and delivered to its owner as his increase. One is the creature's own turn. The other is the creature's life collected as another's profit. The homophone is the tell.
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RETURN ON CAPITAL
Return is return-on-capital, and the financial sense is the root, not a metaphor drawn from it. Capital is advanced — seed, land, bodies — and the return is what comes back increased, the surplus the advance was made in order to extract. The planter cannot be a planter unless he plants; the planting is the advance; the return is the harvest that comes back to him and not to the ground. And the word names only the coming-back-to-the-owner. The living that produced the increase — the growing, the bearing, the crossing that the creature performed — is glossed out, so that return sounds like flourishing while meaning appropriation. It borrows the entire vocabulary of life. Things grow, bear, come back multiplied. But the increase returns to the planter, not the plant.
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THE SPECIMEN
Jefferson makes the metaphor literal, and he wrote it in his own hand to a man who wrote law.
To John Wayles Eppes, 30 June 1820:
I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man of the farm. What she produces is an addition to the capital, while his labors disappear in mere consumption. The man's labor is consumed — spent and gone. The woman's childbearing is capital — the body that produces bodies, and the bodies produced are the return.
Read the sentence for what it names and for what it glosses.
It names the addition to the capital. It glosses the child, the mother, the crossing that a life is. The producer is severed from the product so that the product can return to someone who is not the producer, and the severance is performed inside the word profitable.
And earlier, in the 1792 correspondence and the Farm Book arithmetic, the rate: a four percent profit per annum on the birth of enslaved children, credit taken for their increase over and above keeping up their numbers. A perpetual human dividend at compound interest.
The two documents are twenty-eight years apart and must be cited apart; together they are one operation stated twice — the plant earns a return for its planter by producing what is taken from it, and the taking is booked as growth.
Eppes was not a private correspondent. He had sat in the Virginia House of Delegates, the United States House, and the Senate. The planter's arithmetic and the lawmaker's are the same hand. The ledger that converts a mother's child into an addition to capital is the same instrument that writes the child's status into law as the mother's, so that the return is secured before the child draws breath. Return is not an attitude Jefferson held. It is the operation the configuration runs, and he transcribed its arithmetic.
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THE FIRST SEVERANCE, IN THE REGISTER OF FINANCE
Return is the killer instinct's first severance spoken as capital. Producer cut from product, so the product can be owned by one who did not produce it — this is the cut, and return is its financial name. The plant is severed from what came through it so that what came through it can return to the planter as his. Ask return for its middle links, and they are the same suppressed premise under improvement and settlement: that the producer is severable from the product. Recover the premise and return is exposed as metalepsis — the living glossed, only the coming-back-to-the-owner named.
[See METALEPSIS. See THE FIVE SEVERANCES.]
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THE THIRD COUNTERFEIT
Return belongs to a set. The turn has four counterfeits, one in each register where the configuration needs the turn's word:
Re-membering counterfeits the turn in memory — the past reassembled into glory, the golden age, the debt against a severed past paid forever.
The exit counterfeits the turn in movement — the door that feels like escape and preserves the room, the leaving that was budgeted.
Return counterfeits the turn in increase — the yield delivered to the owner, dressed as growth, as things flowering and bearing and coming back multiplied.
The return home counterfeits the turn in narrative — the hero's journey, the departure and homecoming, the generating function carrying itself back to its starting coordinates with a transportable boon and calling the carrying a transformation.
The forge produces a creature that does not return; the hero returns with a deliverable, and the deliverable is the yield extracted from a forging that never occurred.
Each feels like getting free, or getting whole, or getting life, or getting home.
Each keeps the seat.
Re-membering owes a debt and pays it; the exit removes a body and preserves the room; return takes the increase and books it as flourishing; the return home extracts a boon and calls the extraction an arc.
\And re-turning, against all four, gathers nothing, removes no one, owes nothing, and does not come back — the facing of the living body changing from inward to outward, the increase that stays with the one who lived it, because it was never severable in the first place.
[See RE-TURNING. See RE-MEMBERING. See THE EXIT. See THE RETURN HOME.]
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The smooth word here is return, and its smoothness is the measure of how completely the plant was glossed. Ask it who lived the growth and who collected it. The living has a body, a mother, a child, a name. The collection has a ledger. The word names the ledger and suppresses the body, and the suppression is the profit.
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[See RE-TURNING · RE-MEMBERING (the trespass) · THE EXIT · THE RETURN HOME (the narrative counterfeit) · METALEPSIS · THE FIVE SEVERANCES · THE KILLER INSTINCT · OWNERSHIP (the aseity claim) · THE LEDGER · THE SEAT · THE PLANTER AND THE PLANT]
