Presentation by Solange Manche and Annual General Meeting

Solange Manche, a beneficiary of the Trevor Brown Bursary in 2020 to support her change year at the Ecole Normale Supérieur, will give a presentation on “Finance’s Phineas Gage: Thinking Financialization and Subject Formation with Contemporary French Thought”.

In this talk, Solange will present how the thought of Stiegler, Malabou, and Lordon can shed a new light upon the way we think about the relation between individuation and financialization.

After the 2007-2008 financial crash, it became clear that finance is not limited to the screens of the stock exchange. Finance has now become so entangled with our daily existence that theoretical and philosophical considerations of financialization have declared the emergence of a new subject, starting with Michel Foucault’s entrepreneur of the self.

Since then, a number of subjects have been added to the list: Randy Martin’s financialized self, Paul Langley’s Foucauldian uncertain subject, Maurizio Lazzarato’s indebted man, Rob Aitken’s bodies that are turned into objects for financial income, Michel Feher’s rated agents, and most recently Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou’s homo speculans.

Whereas these accounts remain primarily Foucauldian and Deleuzian, Solange will argue that the new milieu that finance gives rise to is also the background from which Stiegler’s, Malabou’s, and Lordon’s ontologies have developed, thereby offering theoretical tools that are more appropriate to our times.

Solange Manche is a PhD candidate in French, working on the thought of Bernard Stiegler, Catherine Malabou, and Frédéric Lordon. She in particular explores how their ontologies inform their critique of contemporary capitalism and brings their perspective to financialization studies.

The talk will be preceded at 7pm by the Society’s Annual General Meeting. The “formal” notice of meeting and other papers relating to the AGM will be sent to members in early May.

Please register your attendance at the talk and the AGM  using the booking section below – just click on the “+” button to the right of the quantity field in the tickets box and then click on “get tickets” and proceed to checkout.

Guests are welcome, although of course they will not be able to vote at the AGM so they may prefer to arrive at 8pm just for the talk.

Tickets are free and light refreshments will be served.