The Idea of Finance

Abstract

The idea of finance points us to two related but distinguishable profound perspectives for understanding and interrogating finance capital and its place in any modern economy. First, the idea of finance relates to the internal split of the modern economy. It refers to the primordial crack or lack at the birth of the modern economy that both causes and traces an inherent imbalance at the core of any economy. This split is constitutive of the modern economy. There is always an internal gap within the economy, and finance capital is the form of appearance of both the economy and its inherent gap. Contrary to popular opinion, finance or finance capital has no separate existence of its own; it is part of the spatial-temporal processes of the economy. The idea of finance captures the thinking that for an economy to exist as a monetary economy it must be divided against itself. The basic insight here is that the “external” opposition between Main Street (real production) and Wall Street (mere financial activities, so-called casino capitalism) is grounded in the modern economy’s immanent self-opposition.