Critical Finance Studies: An Interdisciplinary Manifesto

Abstract

Finance, it seems, is no longer merely the life blood of business, but constitutes ‘the circulatory system of contemporary society’ as such (Finansmarknadsradet, 2009, p. 3). At the heart (if it has one) of this financialized societal body, the advocates of the financial system are indefatigably marketing the monetary needs of the financially predisposed consumers, as well as providing the monetary means through which these financialized lives may be consummated. Georg Simmel (1990, p. 219) very appositely defines those well off consumers, ‘those who own a considerable amount of money bemittelt, that is, equipped with means.’ A financially bemittelt consumer, ‘cleansed of everything that is not merely a means’ (ibid., p. 232), is perchance best conceived of as a Musilean man without qualities, a feature and contentless human being completely dependent on the financial world, or, more precisely, money, to form its character. ‘The fact that money is detached from all specific contents and exists only as a quantity earns for money and for those people who are interested in money the quality of characterlessness’ (Simmel, 1990, p. 216). This uncanny impersonality, equipped with money, the ‘metaphysical quality [...] to extend beyond every particular use,’ provides for the financialized subject an opportunity to ‘realize the possibility of all values as the value of all possibilities’ (ibid., p. 221); that is to say, to separate itself off entirely from the sensual qualities and values of this world as it is, to transcend the carnal boundaries of the experiential world and establish beyond it an existence based exclusively on intellect, a cognitive Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics 24(1) 1–6 ©2012 SAGE Publications India Private Limited SAGE Publications Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC DOI: 10.1177/0260107912471454 http://jie.sagepub.com Editorial