This panel critically interrogates the relationship between financial economics and religion as they bear on futurity and conceptions of temporality. Over the last several decades, discourse on “financialization” has significantly affected the way that a variety of fields theorize capitalism and its history. Religious studies as a field has been less interested in this discourse. This panel asks how logics of finance intersect with theories and histories of religion. Particularly, we are interested in how regimes and structures of power, sovereignty, race, and coloniality have historically been constituted through this intersection. Panelists pursue this from several distinct, yet intersecting, areas of inquiry: through theorizing the philosophical and theological grounds of financial logics; identifying long durée histories of financialization; resituating these theoretical explorations through the lens of Black radical politics and education; and articulating ways that the political and social impacts of financialization extend beyond the Anglosphere.
This paper offers a reading of both Aristotle’s discussion of δύναμις [dunamis] and ἐνέργεια [enérgeia]—‘potentiality’ and ‘act’—as well as the Italian philosopher Giorgo Agamben’s critical appropriation of it. Identifying Aristotle’s emphasis on the teleological priority of ἐνέργεια, or ‘act,’ with the structure of both sovereign power and financial capitalism, Agamben ties the possibility of a form of life not captive to the politics of sovereignty to what he refers to as “impotentiality,” a use of potentiality which refuses the temptation to subordinate potentiality to its capacity to be actualized. Using Aristotle’s own example of Thales of Miletus, one of the earliest recorded examples of an options contract, I will argue that the concept of impotentiality haunts the margins of Aristotle’s discussion of δύναμις precisely where Agamben does not go looking for it—in his account of money and finance.
Two common sayings about money: “Time is money,” and “Money makes the world go round.” When taking a closer look, these phrases conceal odd logics. What does it mean to suggest that time is equivalent to money? That money generates the world’s movement? What theories of temporality and historical movement allow us to see time, money, and causality in these ways? I argue that the history of financial capital shows how theological and critical articulations of history were both influenced by and determinative of economic logics that lead to financialization. Far from––as Agamben and others argue––beginning in 1971 with the U.S. rejection of the gold standard, I suggest that financialization has a longer history: one which is freighted with more than merely analogical relationships to religious logics, and which implicates the history of religion in relation to the Atlantic slave trade and the colonial enterprises which facilitated it.
Black studies manifestos contain strategies for pedagogical insurgency adequate to the contemporary moment, where the perfection of slavery coincides with the perfection of the university. On the one hand, the right-wing frames higher education as a form of mind-control; on the other, left-wing professors bemoan the ineffectiveness of education all together. The gap between represents a crisis of faith, not only in higher education but also in the aborted project of racial democracy. Instead of shoring up the language of the humanities, the university, and the nation, I reconfigure the rise of fascism, anti-DEI measures, and artificial intelligence through the logic of supersessionism, where the problem of secularizing knowledge and immanentizing God will always require a movement from slavery to segregation to neo-segregation, or “white-over-black.” I close with a call to pedagogical power that transforms educators and students into militant accomplices through opening meaningful occasions for risk and rebellion.
This paper explores the idea of preventive restraint, which lies at the heart of Thomas Robert Malthus’s classical political economy. Preventive restraint entails a conception of futurity that promises economic equilibrium, which must emerge from the present condition of imposed austerity and discipline. In this idea of preventive restraint lies notions of providence and redemption that shape much of Malthusian political economy. Following this, scholars offered important insights about the theological ground of Malthusian political economy. Under discussion in the paper is how Malthusian theological political economy helped shape, while being contested, the famine governance in Colonial South India. To investigate this question, I consider a debate between Sir Richard Temple, who was the British colonial administrator in India during the great famine of 1876-1878, and William Digby, who was a prominent journalist based in Madras. The debate was whether or not famine relief schemes would constitute excessive government intervention, thus risking the economic equilibrium that was supposed to be achieved by productive activity. This debate, I suggest, provides a generative resource to think about the idea of futurity that underlies the relationship between restraints and redemption, labor and time, and market and governance in colonial South Asia.