Finance Capital and the Time of the Novel or, Money Without Narrative Qualities

Abstract

Amplified by recent economic crises, the engagement with the logic of finance capital has in the past few years frequently been carried out on the plane of time. Works such as Franco Berardi’s The Soul at Work and After the Future, Slavoj Žižek’s Living in the End Times, Christian Marazzi’s Capital and Language, Bernard Stiegler’s For a New Critique of Political Economy, and of course the recent work of Paul Virilio are but a few of many examples of a wider theoretical interest in the relation between finance capital and the modalities of thinking time it requires (and abolishes) that directly mirror a distinct formal and narratological shift in recent novelistic production. Yet, the essay shows, the contemporary novel has for about fifteen years been able to generate precisely those answers other forms of thought have as of yet failed to produce, illustrating rather surprisingly that, in contrast to the novel, theory and criticism has added little to our analysis of the actual structural and epistemological foundations of a crisis often merely described and taxonomized, yet not more rigorously understood than that which Fredric Jameson already cursorily diagnosed in 1994 as a “weakness in imagination,” existing “for whatever reason.” Recent changes in novelistic form, in particular since the novel’s artistic function and ontology consists precisely in being a form of questioning time, allow us to illustrate the precise relation between structural and epistemological form that undergo a distinct change as we move into full finance capital and to understand the resulting epistemological crisis that is often mischaracterized as a crisis of time (hence falsely universalizing and ontologizing time and ultimately exempting time from time).