From mastery to resignation – a possible periodisation of financialized subjectivity

The rise of finance capital as distinct from other moments in the development of capitalism has seen a clear tendency in the cultural depiction of subjective agency: the hubris of the financial masters of the universe first turned into a violent quest for a reality beyond mediation and then into a post-crisis resignation of affective anaesthesia. Hubris, violence and resignation can all be analysed as specific reactions to a certain inability to affect or be affected by the world. Taking this distinction between the ability to affect and be affected as a point of departure, the present paper proposes a periodisation of finance fiction and questions its relation to recent cultural and economic history. What are the historical conditions of possibility of hubris, violence and resignation as predominant subjective constitutions under financialization? And how can they be understood as negotiations of the ability to affect and be affected?