Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy is organized around an exclusive disjunction of dignity or price, equality or equivalence. In his 1797 Doctrine of Right, however, Kant places enslaved black people on the wrong side of this disjunction when he speculates that their status as currency may offer insight into the origins of money. Recent work in black studies has begun to speculate on the link between blackness and money in modernity, and this paper draws attention to Kant’s role as an unlikely (...) and unwitting precursor for monetary theories of blackness. Precisely in his attempt to secure the priceless and unconditional character of freedom and dignity, it argues, Kant ends up demonstrating the positional value of both. (shrink)

Love and money, according to the intuitive logic of Christian political theology, stand in opposition to each other. Where economic relations obtain, relations of love are understood to be absent or distorted. The opposition between the two has led social theorists and political theologians—including John Milbank, Kathryn Tanner, and Daniel M. Bell—to understand Christian love as a reservoir of opposition to the politics of contemporary financialized capital. This opposition, however, ignores the complex interrelationship that has characterized Christian thought about love (...) and money. Love and money—and their apparent competitive relationship—have been understood throughout the history of Christian thought on the basis of a relationship both maintain to the notion of indebtedness. This paper argues that any apparent tension between Christian theological caritas and oikonomia must to be contextualized in terms of a shared relationship between both of these concepts and the organization and administration of relations of debt and obligation. (shrink)

In The Kingdom and the Glory, Giorgio Agamben traces a genealogy of the concept of ‘economy’ through the development of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.1 While the more detailed metaphysics of the Trinity—the distinctions between ‘being,’ ‘nature,’ ‘essence,’ and ‘persons’ that drove the debates at Nicea and Chalcedon—were still in the process of development, Agamben argues that the concept of economy formed a kind of ‘placeholder’ for these concepts, holding together the mystery of the Trinity with the seeming ambivalence (...) of the world. Through a series of genealogical twists, this ‘economic’ paradigm in theology turns out to form the basis of modern economic governmentality—the ‘Petersonian’ counterpart to the ‘Schmittian’ shape of modern sovereignty. While Agamben links the language of ‘economy’ in early Trinitarian thought to the problem of the Trinitarian unity, he does so by delinking its use from the economy of salvation. As a result, the later history of the Trinitarian doctrine is characterized (on Agamben’s reading) by an increasing separation of the ‘economy’ and the ‘ontology’ of the Trinity; an inseparable division is opened up in Christian thought between ‘being’ and ‘acting,’ one which haunts Trinitarian doctrine and spills over into the history of Western political, philosophical, and economic thinking. In this paper, I intend to retrace this ‘economic’ lineage, but in order to re-link the questions of the Trinity and salvation; it is clear that the stakes for patristic writers, in working out a Trinitarian theology, were precisely salvation. The lines between heresy and orthodoxy are consistently argued in terms of their relationship to the possibility of salvation—the possibility of a triumph over sin and death. Only once re-situated in this way can the economic ‘theodicy’ of divine administration and the mature formulation of the ‘immanent’ metaphysics of the Trinity be read—as Karl Rahner famously claims—as the same thing. I will proceed first of all by retracing Agamben’s own steps—reconstructing his argument about the centrality of the category of ‘economy’ within Trinitarian theology. Secondly, I will intervene within Agamben’s genealogy at a key juncture, one that is passed over by Agamben’s own text: the Arian controversy. It is with the Arian controversy and the articulation of Nicene Trinitarianism that Agamben locates the break between ‘being’ and ‘activity’ or ‘economy,’ and so it is by re-narrating this controversy that an alternative account of the relationship between these terms in Trinitarian thought can be narrated. Finally, I will draw out a different, intrinsic relationship between Trinitarian ‘being’ and ‘activity’ than the one presumed by Agamben; one in which a relative break is conditioned by a more fundamental soteriological unity. This has, in turn, consequences for how the ‘economic paradigm’—in both its earlier Christian context and in its modern governmental instantiations—operates: the economic-theological paradigm produces the political-theological or ‘ontological’ paradigm of sovereignty to which it is linked. (shrink)

The philosophy of Gilles Deleuze has, in recent decades, occupied the attention of Anglophone continental philosophy and cultural theory largely in light of the perceived political significance of his work. In particular, his analysis of capitalism in the texts co-authored with Felix Guattari, and his articulation of the logic of control — a logic which, he claimed, could be found emerging in the wake of those societies that Michel Foucault had characterized according to the logic of discipline — have served (...) as the basis of an increasingly large body of extension and commentary. In this essay, I intend to highlight one particularly important aspect of the logic of control: the mechanism by which control captures practices of communication. This mechanism can be described, I argue, by reference to a concept that is familiar to statisticians, economists, and practitioners of ‘numerical’ social sciences: exogeneity. Additionally, I want to challenge the notion that antagonism to the logic of control can coincide with the affirmation of logics of ‘plurality’ or ‘multitude.’ The logic of control, insofar as it relies on exogeneity, is already a logic of radical plurality. (shrink)