Against Financial Derivatives: Toward an Ethics of Representation

Abstract

Financial derivatives add an extra degree of symbolic abstraction to the figural form of money. Since the deregulation of the late twentieth century, the financial sector has attained pre-eminence within the economy. At the same time, speculative derivatives have become the most powerful sector of finance, and they are now the driving force behind the economy and thus the biggest influence on human life in the twenty-first century. Yet little attention has been paid to the moral implications of attributing such a degree of autonomous power to symbols, and this chapter aims to remedy that deficiency. Using the recent work of thinkers like Arjun Appadurai and Elie Ayache, it shows that financial derivatives would have been recognized by thinkers of the past as magical and idolatrous.