Book Review: Money Talks: In Therapy, Society, and Life

Society and Economy, 2018

The Meaning and Madness of Money. An Eco-semiotic Analysis (5th ed.) 0. Abstract In this paper, I propose an overall model of the semantic and semiotic functions of money and capital forms, based on an ecological view of human activity. The meaning of money is replaced in a structured human perspective, and a critical discussion is outlined on the grounds of the material and capital flows and functions identified.

Law & Liberty, 2016

Book review of The Ontology and Function of Money.

Journal of Economic Sociology 2013 1 (1), pp. 41-65., 2013

The article is devoted to the recent discussion within the field of economic sociology about the nature of money in its purely theoretical manner. Multiple circumstances and fundamental ideas of sociological discourse which included works of Bruce Carruthers, Nigel Dodd, Viviana Zelizer, Geoffrey Ingham, and Costas Lapavitsas, were analyzed. At the first part of the article author particularly reviews the original sources of theoretical contradictions among modern sociologists of money. Ontological, epistemological, methodological as well as political and ideological issues were included. The second part discusses the core polemics and the demarcation of the leading trends in the field. The author finally concludes with the recognition of major options for the future sociological investigations of money.

The Japanese Political Economy, 2019

South Atlantic Quarterly, 2015

This paper contends that political economy may profit from an understanding of money that is both able to account for its systemic importance as well as money’s specific role for the contemporary distribution of wealth. ‘Money-ness’ is a strategic factor in profit-making and capital accumulation. If we accord moneyness to all those instruments that make the repackaging of credit and other financial assets and liabilities and their capitalization possible, we arrive at an understanding of money that underscores the Marxian analysis of the structural importance of the money relation for capital accumulation that is up to speed with current financial innovations. As a social structure and process, moneymaking through capital permeates society. As a public-private deal between the state, rentiers, banks, and taxpayers that has existed since the foundation of the Bank of England in 1694, it binds these actors together in shifting relations of dependence. Under financial capitalism today, what counts as money and how far moneyness stretches into the realms of financial innovation has been a core object of struggle in the public-private deal of money creation.

1969

Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 2013

Sociologický časopis / Czech Sociological Review, 2017

Market and Society (Cambridge University Press), 2009

We are living in another one-world moment like Magellan’s. I seek to throw light on this moment in history, first by examining Polanyi’s analysis of the part played by money in “the great transformation” of the nineteenth century and in the disaster that followed from it (1914–1945). My own version takes off from Polanyi’s emphasis, even as it differs from his – of “the long twentieth century” going back to the revolutions of the 1860s. From this I develop some general arguments concerning money’s role in a “human economy,” a concept that Polanyi sometimes referred to. I end with some remarks about the political lessons to be gained from revisiting The Great Transformation (1944) today.

The title of the present essay is an allusion to Lyotard's " Emma: Between philosophy and psychoanalysis " (1989). The main subject of my discussion, within the context of philosophy and psychoanalysis is philosophy of money, and more particular cultural phenomenology of money. The common place and issue that bridges the coast between philosophy and psychoanalysis, from one side, and cultural phenomenology, from the other, is the embodiment and the so called 'mind body problem'. Within my research interest and field the embodiment apply to money. This essay takes up the question of money in the spirit of the Marx-Freud tradition, as the first part of the essay-Marx's The Fetish Character of Money and Foucault's 'Money is simulacrum'-is concerned with Marx and the second part is devoted to Sigmund Freud's attitude about money. The connection between Marx and Freud, provided here, is through Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History, (1985). Brown's concern is the notion of embodiment. He is one of the most interesting philosophers and commentators of Marx and Freud, who returned 'the sacred' to the analysis of 'money' and demeaned both equally. For Brown, 'money' and 'the sacred' were both sublimated products of a revulsion from the body. And such sublimation, whether aimed at god or mammon, is " the denial of life and the body…. The more the life of the body passes into things, the less life there is in the body, and at the same time the increasing accumulation of things represents an ever fuller articulation of the lost life of the body. " (Norman O. Brown, 1985: 297). In the third part of my essay I follow the postmodern perspective, discussing in short some of Jean-Franзois Lyotard's works. As Claire Nouvet, asserts in her The Inarticulate Affect: Lyotard and Psychoanalytic Testimony (2003), " Philosophy rarely, if ever, engages psychoanalysis. It is then all the more noteworthy when a philosopher takes the risk of such an engagement. Jean-Francois Lyotard took this chance repeately and in different modes. " (Nouvet,

2003

Economic theory, since the time of Smith and Hume, has been operating with a model of homo oeconomicus as an autonomous, rational, self-interested calculator of cost-for-benefit. This presumed rationality of 'economic man' supposedly guarantees, in turn, the fundamental rationality of the 'self-regulating', 'efficient' market. Classical political economy, neoclassical economics and neoliberalism have all operated with this model. But the recent 'global financial crisis' was yet another reminder-if one were needed-that the psychology of markets and financial dealers can seem far from rational. Even Alan Greenspan had to admit of the 2008-9 financial crash: 'Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders' equity (myself especially) are in a state of shocked disbelief '. Or, as the economist Ian McDonald has put it: 'Homo oeconomicus, that cool calculator of self-interest, couldn't possibly have been so incautious in protecting her or his wealth'. From its inception, psychoanalysis has viewed the psychology of money as profoundly irrational-as a realm of illusion, neurosis, phantasy and psychopathology, both individual and collective. Freud, Ferenczi, Jones and Abraham were just the earliest psychoanalytic theorists to decode monetary transactions and relationships into their presumed unconscious motives. And yet, psychoanalysis itself has been notoriously reluctant to speak frankly of its own economics as a profession and business-of how 'filthy lucre' is the indispensable stuff of its own transactions. This essay stages a confrontation between two discourses, psychoanalysis and economics, which for much of their history have been mutually indifferent and mutually opaque. By confronting the implied subjects of these discourses with each other's models of reason or sanity in money matters, rather than of irrationality or psychopathology, it questions the equation of economic rationality with individuated self-interest while seeking to deconstruct the century-old dichotomy between homo oeconomicus and homo psychologicus.