In short scope and lucid prose, Felipe Maia’s Trading Futures makes a provocative argument about such fundamental topics as justice, capitalism, theology, and time. The book’s central claim is that finance and theology are in competition today with each striving to imagine, define, and produce radically different futures. The double entendre of the book’s title neatly captures its argument: on the one hand, “trading futures” stands in metonymically for the larger scheme of financial capitalism; and on the other hand the text urges that we “trade futures” by exchanging what financial capitalism threatens in exchange for what a theology of hope promises for the future. This book is a pleasure to read: the text is generally insightful, efficiently crafted, creative, well-constructed, and well-informed; it is also speculative, suggestive, at turns elliptical, and impressionistic. Compositionally and argumentatively, the text seems to owe a distinct debt to Jacques Derrida (which some readers will appreciate and others not).
The book’s argument suggests a neat division of its chapters into two parts: the first addresses “future-talk” within financialized capitalism (Chapters 1–3); and the second constructs Can alternative kind of future-talk drawing from (mostly) Christian eschatological forms of hope (Chapters 4–6). Maia relies extensively on existing scholarship to develop the book’s argument: he draws on both popular and specialized studies to portray the logic of financialization (prominently including Thomas Piketty, David Graeber, Donald MacKenzie, Martijn Konings, and Ivan Ascher); he takes cues from established figures currently or recently at work in and around political theology for much of his theoretical orientation (primarily Catherine Keller, Adam Kotsko, and Jacques Derrida); and he arrives at his conclusion through engagement with contemporary work in the ambit of Black studies (drawing from Fred Moten, Calvin Warren, Vincent Lloyd, and Joseph Winters). And some of the book’s most original moments can be found in its original readings of Latin American liberation theologians, Franz Hinkelammert and Rubem Alves, as well as in the argumentative structure that conjoins this disparate material. In what follows I try to indicate the broad outlines of the argument before concluding with an assessment of the project as a whole.
While financialization might refer merely to the recent growth of the financial sector (vis-à-vis other aspects of the economy), Trading Futures argues that the growth of finance represents a qualitative transformation of capitalism that produces catastrophic changes at all levels of contemporary political-economies. For Maia, financialization produces new means of generating profits, new means of exercising control over humanity, and most fundamentally, he argues, a new orientation toward the future. Financialization (which is historically coextensive and symbiotic with neolibralism and yet analytically distinct from it), in this view, circulates at the highest echelons of wealth and power, but also permeates society, shaping the lives of capitalists and laborers alike. The effects of financialization are wide-ranging, but borrowing Ivan Ascher’s pithy formulation, Maia suggests that where industrial capital had commanded the means of production, financial capital commands the means of prediction. Rather than deriving profits directly from the production of commodities, finance turns money into more money by carefully managing risk, by rendering the future calculable, and by subjecting the future to its calculations.
Maia argues that the logic of finance—managing the future to generate profit—unfolds at the most abstract level of derivatives, and at the somewhat more concrete level of their underlying securities, but also within the quite material patterns of labor within workplaces, and down to the ways a person’s life chances will be lived out as a function of individual consumption, credit, and debt. From the perspective of the poor and the worker adopted by Liberation Theology, he argues that financialization increases the precarity of labor and drives laborers into debt (in part by increasing the demand for “flexibility” in response to fluctuating markets; and in part by simply capturing a larger share of profits that might otherwise go to wages). From FICO scores, credit cards, student loans, and mortgages to securities and derivatives---Maia emphasizes a singular logic of finance connecting hedge funds to workers’ pocketbooks: at every level, he argues, financial capitalism consumes the future to generate profit. The first part of Trading Futures pictures financialized capitalism as a system whose power derives from governing time. Finance—through its predictive capacity—projects, molds, and devours a future made in its image. By imposing debt, finance subjects humanity to lifetimes of repayment.
Against this picture of financialization’s grasp on the future, the second part of Trading Futures proposes a theology of time grounded in a conception of the future as what is “not—yet,” and Chapters 4–6 mine the archive of Liberation Theology to flesh out this alternative vision. Here Maia draws on the German-Chilean-Costa-Rican theologian Franz Hinkelammert (1931– ), “whose lifelong project has been to develop a theological critique of capitalism” (p. 89), and the Brazilian-and-U.S.-American-educated theologian and poet Rubem Alves (1933–2014), “an author whose scholarship cannot be framed in any particular disciplinary regime” (p. 112). For Maia, these thinkers represent a radical strain of the tradition of Liberation Theology that presses temporality to the forefront.
Maia argues that Hinkelammert’s formative experience lay partly in the cultural and political efflorescence that surrounded the Unidad Popular movement and Salvador Allende’s presidency in 1960s and 1970s Chile, but even more so in the violent response dealt to this movement by Augusto Pinochet’s coup, crackdown, and subsequent repressive dictatorship. Hinkelammert “is haunted by arguments that depict violence and state-sponsored terrorism as necessary means to obtain a certain type of society,” Maia argues, with the particular upshot that “Pinochet’s coup and the ensuing market-driven ideology that he inaugurated in Chile must be thought of as a symptom of a deeply theological sensibility,” which necessitated “a theological *critique* of capitalism” in response (pp. 95, 97). That response would focus on the “idolatry” of capitalism and the problems of state-violence and sacrifice that accompany it in the emergence of the neoliberal regime in Chile. For Maia, Hinkelammert importantly demonstrates a logic of capitalism that sacrifices the present in the name of a projected future.
Where Maia finds an account of neoliberalism’s foreclosure of the future in Hinkelammert, he finds resources with which to resist that violence and with which to project a different future in Alves. He argues that Alves discovers “hope as an affective, creative, and imaginative force that can support the takeover of the means of production of future-talk … [as] a summons that prepares the way for what may come.” For Maia “the recognition of suffering as the condition of possibility of a liberating hope is Alves’s most meaningful contribution to the shaping of liberation theology” (pp. 112, 119). Centrally, in Alves, “The inadequacy of the present is bodily felt, not superimposed from an external promise. Alves firmly argues that the human consciousness of the future is born out of the inadequatio of the inhumanity of the reality of suffering” (p. 117). For Maia, Alves’s exuberant, poetic aesthetics—his “politics of beauty” (p. 126)—exceed both the confines of the present moment imposed by capitalist realism, and even strain the boundaries of theology itself.
Maia’s readings of Hinkelammert and Alves tell a persuasive story about the figuration of a hope within the development of Liberation Theologies that frames the future as unknowable and unmasterable, and therefore disrupts the present with a potentially emancipatory force. Brief overtures aligning Maia’s argument with currents in queer theory, disability studies, and Black studies in its introduction and conclusion notwithstanding, this is the core argument presented in Trading Futures: a Christian eschatological imagination inflected by twentieth century Liberation Theology as “a critical reflection on hope” that can provide the resources necessary for creating an alternative to financialized capitalism (p. 10). Maia develops a lucid picture of the domineering temporality of finance, and contrasts that with subtle renderings of alternatives drawn from the tradition of Liberation Theology in constructing that argument. Trading Futures effectively shows that agents of financial capitalism and theologians of liberation can differ profoundly in their orientations toward the future.
Whether or not such a theology provides a counter to the discourse of finance, however, is another question. Trading Futures seems to deliver both less and more than promised by its subtitle, “a theological critique of financialized capitalism”—less insofar as the liberation traditions Maia draws on predate the specific valences of the current era of finance he details; less insofar as his readings of theology are free-standing rather than woven into the account of financialized capitalism with any great specificity; less again insofar as the mechanism by which this theology might challenge the hegemony of financial future-talk is unclear. The hope for a future “not—yet” described by Maia would seem as reasonably well-suited to any and perhaps every political moment (rather than being specifically attuned to our own), and as remote. But at the same time, the argument seems to be more than an iteration of a specifically Christian theology.
In concluding his reading of Rubem Alves, Maia writes that “the poetico-metaphorical overabundance of Alves’s writings speaks to his commitment to the naming of absences as the proper name for Christian hope” (p. 128). And yet just pages before, Maia is much more capacious and improper in allowing that Alves “divides his life into three periods. ‘In the first phase we only spoke of things as big as the universe: God. Then God died, and we stepped back a little and searched for political heroes. We left theology for politics, then politics failed us, and we went to our backyards to play with spinning tops’”, nevertheless continuing to argue that Alves’s “mature writings demonstrate a disciplinary eclecticism and a religious incredulity that distanced him from theological circles” (p. 125). If Trading Futures is not the kind of book whose argument necessarily compels its readers, and if it is less than a critique in that sense, in its eclecticism it also seems to be a bit more than theology, offering a series of provocative formulations, penetrating engagements, and diverse food for thought for readers who —like Alves— might be interested in generating “other senses, other directions, other meanings, other affects” in response to our moment (p. 129). Theological or not. Dominated by finance or otherwise.
