The New Financial Subject
on finishing my manuscript, Butler, and Malabou
“Heidegger says that in philosophy you can only have one idea.”[i]
It must have been almost ten years ago when I got the idea for the title of what will be my first book: The New Financial Subject. Back then, I didn’t have a subtitle yet but it’s become Of Habit, Class, and the Milieu. Today (Tuesday, when I’m writing this), I finished editing the last bits, going through the bibliography one last time. It’s done!
So, ten years ago, when I wrote the title on a yellow sticky note in my room in the College Néerlandais, a modernist masterpiece designed by Dudok, I’d just finished reading Subjects of Desire, Butler’s PhD on the French reception of Hegel which is a madhatter history bent in translation. Yet, it’d occurred to me that Butler’s understanding of bodies corresponded to Hegel’s Anthropology, which is what Malabou is known for and later they indeed co-authored a piece on the Master-Slave Dialectic, “Be my Body for Me.” According to me it’s a super interesting piece for anyone working on Butler. I always saw it as revealing the groundwork for Gender Trouble but whenever I say this… the comment just falls flat. So maybe I’m wrong.
In any case, they both have a similar kind of understanding of individuation — and being obsessed with finance, I was thinking but what does finance do to us, on a deeper, anthropological level?
The title stayed the same without staying the same. It morphed. It changed shape. The subject gradually also became the subject of philosophy. How does finance shape the subject and how did the subject of philosophy change after the advent of finance?
This is where the journey started and today it came to an end. Or at least, I will receive proofs. I will still need to do the boring work. But after that, I will get to do the fun part again: talk about it with people (or I hopefully will). I do have some doubts as to whether my class analysis still holds. Maybe it does but needs to be revisited, which is also what I’m doing at the moment—revisiting class, reading and listening to Clara Mattei who definitely is my new hero. Go listen to this. It’s historic.
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I’m also proud because the book will appear in the Contemporary French Thought Series, which also published Malabou’s The Heidegger Change. I’ll now just have to wait for 9 to 12 months for it to be actually published…
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[i] Benjamin Dalton and Malabou, “What Should We Do with Plasticity? An Interview with Catherine Malabou,” Paragraph 42, no. 2 (2019): 241.