The Ghost in the Financial Machine

Abstract

This essay lays out an argument that leads back from some debates in contemporary social studies of finance to arguments that have not been fully developed in some classic writings of Marcel Mauss (1990 [1954]) and Max Weber (2009 [1920]). My starting point is Jacques Derrida’s (1994) famous argument about the “impossibility” of the gift, which annuls itself by its implicit expectation (a negative performative) of a return. I focus here on the idea of the “return” as one entry into a new approach to contemporary financial devices. Derrida’s argument about the logical impossibility of the pure gift is in fact anticipated in the very first pages of Mauss’s classic essay “The Gift,” in the perception by Mauss of the inner contradiction between the voluntary and the compulsory as well as the disinterested and the self- serving elements of the gift. Two facts about Mauss’s study have been lost from view. One is that his entire and fundamental interest throughout his essay is in the question of the force behind the obligation to return. The second point is that Mauss’s thorough archaeology of the gift (in both primitive and archaic societies) was wholly motivated by his interest in the moral force behind the modern contract (legal, impersonal, obligatory, etc.). Bearing these two points in mind allows us to understand better what may have been Mauss’s rich and only partial answer to his question, that is, that the obligation to return lay in the spirit of the thing given (the famous hau of Polynesia), which in turn provided a dynamic and forceful connection between giver and receiver, and the first giver and the second giver/returner, and so forth.