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What happens to economic life when meaning and value come apart? Drawing on Friedrich Nietzsche, E.M. Cioran, and Jean Baudrillard, this book shows how the latest trends in digital finance restage the dilemmas of nihilism in new ways. From cryptocurrencies and meme stocks to Silicon Valley venture capital and the global boom in artificial intelligence, economic life today thrives on the ambiguous allure of nothingness, annihilation, and disappearance.
Samman brings the financial status of contemporary nihilism into focus, connecting its signal moods and sentiments to the system-logics of world finance. All the historical moods of nihilism now circulate through the financial system, he argues, and each further wave of technological advance provides yet more means of speculating on these moods. The result is a lucrative new culture of financial nihilism with no end in sight. For readers interested in philosophy and the history of capitalism, Currency of Nihilism offers an unsettling perspective on the nihilistic structures of feeling that underwrite the contemporary financial system.
"Currency of Nihilism is most definitely the book to read on nihilism in the twenty-first century—fabulously creative, absolutely important, theoretically compelling. My sense is that Nietzsche and Baudrillard would be reading this book with rapt attention." —Arthur Kroker, University of Victoria
"Samman develops a genuine philosophy of history, founded on the common substance of language and money—namely on nothing. The connection he forges between nihilism and finance establishes a new paradigm for understanding economic modernity. Never before has nothing been something worth taking more seriously." —Noam Yuran, Bar-Ilan University
"In this theoretically rich reflection on the vacuum at the heart of finance and the technologies that now exploit it, Samman provides us with an original and discomforting diagnosis of our political and cultural present." —William Davies, Goldsmiths, University of London
"Currency of Nihilism provides a masterful illustration of a chronic sickness in finance. It is, in this sense, a scream of negation. But the text is also characterised by the kind of deep thought and stylistic craft that is a potent reminder of humanity's 'power-to'." —Chris Rogers, Finance and Society
Introduction: Balenciaga Occupies Wall Street
1. History of Nihilism
2. Economy of Nothingness
3. Nihilism and Finance
4. Financial Nihilism
5. Financial Void
Conclusion: Metaphysical Boom and Bust
Notes
Bibliography
Index