Abstract
The global economic crisis offers a powerful instance of how financial shocks shape the biosphere at the intersection of labour and life. In financial times, capitalism activates two interdependent processes, a process of contamination that somehow blurs the borders between life and financial matters, and a process of abstraction, which increases the emotional distance between object and subject, thus interrupting the potential for change embedded in experiences of fear that accompany environmental crises. These processes involve key tenets of contemporary neo-liberal capitalism, namely financialization and entrepreneurship, and produce new subjectivities.
 This is, in my view, central to understand our current organization of ecological concerns and the way biopolitical events, such as the financialization of the economy, organize our collective perception of the possible and alternative ecological configurations to the one we live in. By recognizing the working of a process of contamination and a process of distancing implicit in the financialization of life we are able to acknowledge that "ecological relationships are semiotics" (von UexKull, 1982 [1940]) in the sense that they involve the construction and organization of signs, perceptions, affects, interpretations and meanings. Understanding this new semiotics of power is essential to engaging with actual practices of governance of the sustainability discourses. Operationally, these practices and discourses have deprived ecological knowledge of one of its fundamental ingredient, namely a future (Chakrabarty, 2009), conceived as a historical process of change that involves the subject-object relationship and which constitutes both the knower and the known. The result is an interrupted understanding of the way bio-political events reorganize collective perceptions of possible configurations of the ecological system that are "alter" to the one we live in.
Highlights
This is, in my view, central to understand our current organization of ecological concerns and the way biopolitical events, such as the financialization of the economy, organize our collective perception of the possible and alternative ecological configurations to the one we live in
In proclaiming the way capitalism opens the gate to a new society through workers' political awareness and consequent empowerment, Marx and Engels (1888 [1848]) wrote of how modern bourgeois society ‘is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells’
Climate change has been named as ‘the greatest and widest-ranging market failure’ (Stern 2006), and the global financial crisis and the consequent global economic crisis have been linked to systemic fiascoes driven by commercial banks’ excessive risk taking decisions, the existence of uninsured systemic risk of financial institutions and the opacity of financial markets
Summary
This is, in my view, central to understand our current organization of ecological concerns and the way biopolitical events, such as the financialization of the economy, organize our collective perception of the possible and alternative ecological configurations to the one we live in. I argue that capitalism’s resilience, its ability to de-activate the transformative political potential that the twin crises have offered, stems from the modulation of a relation between financial matters and biopolitical matters, those involving the figure of the entrepreneur.
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