This revised edition of the first complete translation of the seminal work 'Die Philosophie des Geldes' by Georg Simmel includes a new preface by David Frisby.

This article interrogates the relationship between two apparently disjointed themes: the consensual presentation and mainstreaming of the global problem of climate change on the one hand and the debate in political theory/philosophy that centers around the emergence and consolidation of a post-political and post-democratic condition on the other. The argument advanced in this article attempts to tease out this apparently paradoxical condition. On the one hand, the climate is seemingly politicized as never before and has been propelled high on the (...) policy agenda. On the other hand, a number of increasingly influential political philosophers insist on how the post-politicization (or de-politicization) of the public sphere (in parallel and intertwined with processes of neoliberalization) have been key markers of the political process over the past few decades. We proceed in four steps. First, we briefly outline the basic contours of the argument and its premises. Second, we explore the ways in which the present climate conundrum is predominantly staged through the mobilization of particular apocalyptic imaginaries. Third, we argue that this specific (re-)presentation of climate change and its associated policies is sustained by decidedly populist gestures. Finally, we discuss how this particular choreographing of climate change is one of the arenas through which a post-political frame and post-democratic political configuration have been mediated. (shrink)

The figure of today’s threat is the suddenly irrupting, locally self-organizing, systemically self-amplifying threat of large-scale disruption. This form of threat, fed by instability and metastability, is not only indiscriminate, it is also indiscrimin able; it is indistinguishable from the general environment. The figure of the environment shifts: from the harmony of a natural balance to the normality of a generalized crisis environment so encompassing in its endemic threat-form as to connect, across the spectrum, the polar extremes of war and (...) the weather. Michel Foucault characterizes the dominant contemporary regime of power, coincident with the rise of neoliberalism, as ‘environmental’: a governmentality which will act on the environment and systematically modify its variables. Its actions, he emphasizes, are not standardizing since the shift in the figure of the environment has moved it out of reach of normalization. Given the indiscriminateness of the environment’s autonomous activity, environmentality must work through the ‘regulation of effects’ rather than of causes. It must remain operationally ‘open to unknowns’ and catch nonlinear, transversal phenomena before they amplify the stirrings to actual crisis proportions. What systematicity is this? And: does power’s becoming-environmental mean that, politically, we are dealing with natural subjects? Where Foucault’s question ends is where, today, we must begin, in light of how the recomposition of power whose dawning he glimpsed in 1979 has since played out. In the context of Foucault’s theories of power, the question amounts to asking: is this still ‘biopolitics’? (shrink)

This article looks at the increasing prominence of bioterrorist threat scenarios in recent US foreign policy. Germ warfare, it argues, is being depicted as the paradigmatic threat of the post-Cold War era, not only because of its affinity for cross-border movement but also because it blurs the lines between deliberate attack and spontaneous natural catastrophe. The article looks at the possible implications of this move for understandings of war, strategy and public health. It also seeks to contextualize the US’s growing (...) military interest in biodefence research within the commercial strategies of the biotech and pharmaceutical industries. In its methodology, the article weaves together elements from defence literature, scientific perspectives on infectious disease, catastrophe theory and political economy. The conceptual underpinnings of the strategy of pre-emptive warfare, it argues, lie as much in the theory of biological emergence as in official US defence strategy. (shrink)

This article uses the ‘Ticking Bomb Scenario’ as a starting point for a broader discussion of what I term the ‘liberal narrative of speed’, the argument within liberal thought that the accelerating pace of events in the world requires a transition of authority from slow-moving, democratic legislative bodies, to energetic, efficient and unitary executives. However, this article argues that the source of this transfer of power is not because of any structural misfit between democracy and acceleration . Instead, through an (...) investigation of the ontology of speed I argue that speed produces not a functional threat to democratic politics, but an existential one. Acceleration unsettles stable political identities, and produces a time of uncertainty, in which people are wary of engaging in democratic debate and compromise, preferring instead the certainty of unitary executive leadership. In this regards the anti-democratic tendency of acceleration is to be located in the way in which it inculcates a sense of ressentiment against a future that is contingent and uncertainty. (shrink)

This article examines the financial technology of derivatives. Derivatives are financial products whose values are based on possible fluctuations in the values of underlying assets. Hence derivatives markets are markets that trade in the risks of other markets. In order for derivatives markets to function, forms of prognostication that can assess the possible future fluctuations of the underlying markets are necessary. What such prognostications do, the article argues, is to create information out of future possibilities. Building upon a notion of (...) virtuality derived from Gilles Deleuze, Ulrich Beck and Niklas Luhmann, the article shows how market risks and uncertainties, by means of prognostications, cease to be mere possibilities and instead come to have virtual existence. Through the technology of derivatives, uncertainty and risk can be rendered virtual and be traded. The article suggests that this technology is an example of a new way in which capitalism is now expanding self-referentially as it creates markets out of markets; and of how it is colonizing the future by developing new technologies for ‘hyper-speculation’, that is, speculation not in the possible developments of a given asset but simply in the risk of such speculation. (shrink)

The article is an introduction to a special section in TCS on the work of Niklas Luhmann. The first part of the article provides a general introduction to Luhmann's work with an emphasis on the basic elements of Luhmann's general systems theory, in particular Luhmann's notions of autopoiesis and meaning, and the traditions on which it is based. The second part of the text is a presentation of the articles in the special section.

In a first retrospective of Niklas Luhmann's work, it is surprising to see that concepts regarding time and temporality received comparatively little attention. This article starts with the hypothesis that, over the years, Luhmann tended to subsume and deal with topics regarding time under the notion of `contingency'. Identified as the central ` Eigenwert' of modern societies, Luhmann seems to suggest that contingency ended up modifying the three classical time dimensions. In the case of the future dimension, the question arises (...) of what effect a modification of contingency through contingency as social Eigenwert might yield. The answer proposed is that this effect lies in our contemporary tendency to see the future as a field of risk-calculation. (shrink)

Every constitution defines and is defined by a period in time. Like all law the creation and application of constitutions require reference to the past and future respectively. Every instance of constitution‐making is an attempt to control behavior over an extended period of time. Therefore constitutions will be drafted, both in style and substance, to reflect that temporal ambition. The effectiveness of a constitution also requires that its interpretation makes reference to the understanding of its rules held by the constitution‐makers. (...) As a result, and notwithstanding the efforts to make it suitable over a long period by its creators, every constitution is bound to become unsuitable. Courts employ a number of devices to cope with the inevitable obsolescence of constitutions but, sooner or later, every constitution will have to be discarded and a new constitutional era begun. (shrink)