What is wealth? A gold ring, a bride-price, a shared life — which of these is the truest form of riches? This paper takes that question seriously and argues that the answer is not economic but ontological: the form of wealth that organises intimate relations determines whether relational subjects can genuinely exist as co-evolving beings, or whether one or both parties are structurally reduced to exchangeable units within a system of accumulation.
The paper develops the concept of Generative Relational Wealth (GRW): wealth that is generated through co-evolutionary activity in the relational field, that belongs to the "between" rather than to either individual, and whose most fundamental property is that use does not deplete but may augment — because GRW is stored not in any material or symbolic medium but in the permanent structural modifications of the relational attractor landscape. GRW is the self-fuel of the relational field: generated through co-evolution, it becomes the dynamic condition for further co-evolution, constituting what we call the generative relational cycle.
Against this concept, the paper maps the major traditions of wealth theory — from mercantilism and classical political economy through Marx's commodity fetishism and Federici's social reproduction theory, from Sen's capabilities approach through Mauss's gift economy and Eglash's generative justice — showing in each case what the tradition illuminates and what it misses about wealth in intimate relations. The paper then examines how traditional wealth forms (bride-price, gold, dowry) embed intimate relations within power-structured logics of accumulation, and how three mechanisms — settlement, commodification, and indebtedness — structurally foreclose genuine relational co-evolution.
A central chapter analyses the happiness jar — a thought experiment and practical paradigm in which couples record and process shared moments of happiness — as a case study in GRW accumulation, depletion-resistance, and regeneration. The analysis draws on semiotics (Peirce's index, Benjamin's aura), psychoanalysis (Lacanian drive theory, the objet petit a), and theoretical physics (relational STDP, phase-space reconstruction, the difference between symbolic and real registers) to explain why artistic processing of shared memories can reignite a withering relational cycle — and advances the conjecture, clearly marked as speculative, that the operator O(x) ~ x' generates a non-zero relational remainder R(O(x), x) != 0 that is the source of GRW's inexhaustibility.
The paper also develops feminist, psychoanalytic, epistemic-justice, and Hegelian-Marxist perspectives on GRW, arguing that: GRW is structurally non-phallic wealth that bypasses the symbolic order's power structures; care labour is GRW's primary production mechanism and relational subjectivity its highest form; the recognition of epistemic asymmetry in intimate relations is a condition for GRW generation; and the dialectical relation between material wealth (necessary condition, secondary aspect) and GRW (primary aspect, generative ground) is irreducible — without symbolic wealth, GRW cannot be sustained; without GRW, symbolic wealth is ontologically impoverished. This is Paper XV of the Philosophy of Intimacy and the Theory of Justice series, extending the eudaimonics of Paper XIV and the generativity theory of Paper IX into the domain of political economy.
DOI: 10.17613/z93h8-35960
Publication Date: 2026-06-22