Abstract Market Theory

Financial markets play a profoundly significant and increasingly troubling role in global society, their operations and effects engaged with even the most mundane levels of the everyday life. At the same time, theoretical reflections on what constitute these markets, let alone the market as such, remain scarce. This disparity was cast in a particularly dramatic light by the global financial crisis.
Drawing on a variety of sources in recent and contemporary philosophy, finance, the history of modern mathematics, sociology and anthropology, Abstract Market Theory elaborates a new philosophy of the market in order to begin to redress this significant gap between reality and theory. Starting with an examination of derivatives, financial instruments integral to the crisis, the book in its first part (The Being of the Market) provides an answer to the question 'what is the market?'. The central contention is that the market is the real subsistent surface for the inscription of price. Its second part (The Realisation of the Market) considers the socio-political character of global capitalism in order to specify the position and role of the market in it. Here, it is argued, we must see capitalism as that form of society in which value is absolutely exposed to price, and where even debt – an object of substantial concern in the contemporary polity – constitutes no genuine constraint to the consequences of the pricing process of the market. Abstract Market Theory makes a key contribution by foregrounding again basic questions – concerning the market, price, capitalism and debt – and to thereby attempt to reinvigorate the withered relationship between economic theory and the specifically philosophical mode of thought, in order to engage with important, yet poorly conceived, features of contemporary social reality.

Jon Roffe is a Vice-Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of New South Wales, and an editor of Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy. He is the editor of a number of volumes on recent and contemporary French philosophy, and the author of Badiou's Deleuze, The Works of Gilles Deleuze, and the co-author of Lacan Deleuze Badiou.