Conclusion: Ambivalences of the Derivative

Summary

Ten years on from the crash, Lordon cautions his activist readers against the dead end of the ‘anti-political’ philosophy of vivre sans (‘living without’): that is, it is not possible to ‘leave’ the economy, because ‘economy’ means the division of labour and the social relations of our material reproduction. For him, there is nothing inevitable about this division of labour being based around markets or the capitalist employment relation, and while it will take a long time to overcome these forms, it is always possible to ‘faire mieux’ (‘do better’). For several of the thinkers discussed in Chapter 3, this requires grasping derivatives and financial technologies. The use of the derivative as a concept in this study is not to endorse current political economic conditions; rather, it aims to gesture to how the reimagining of the derivative carried out by French artists and intellectuals shows the potentially socially productive role of the humanities in the reconstruction of our post-crash world. Literary and film theory are appropriate modes for engaging with financial derivatives because they can fictionalise and hence remake them, as Hanna might say. Literature, says Citton, does not offer ‘solutions’ to social and economic issues, but rather different ways of thinking about problems, and this is also true more generally of film and literary theory. In this sense, they are part of what sociologists see as a wider cultural contestation of how the financial crisis and attendant concepts are ‘imagined’. Thinking the derivative from the point of view of texts and images may help generate agency vis-à-vis finance itself; in this sense, Beller's speculative engagement with blockchain technologies to find new ways of funding projects and creating the future – of imagining ‘what could potentially be the beauty of our mutual indebtedness’ – would merely be the extension of Hanna's literary experiments in Argent.

I have argued in this book that, for several of the thinkers studied, part of the importance of the 2008 financial crisis is that it is the moment in which the contemporary configuration of media and economic processes is crystallised in a vision of derivative images. It is a moment within, as Beller shows, a much longer history of the relation between images and economy; it is also thus that the history of derivatives, as Szendy puts it, ‘began a long time ago; and it is yet to come’.