Abstract:
Up to and during the latest series of financial crises, we have seen the market represented as a kind of subject, one with desires and will, a subject that is capable of responding in extreme fashion if this will is contravened. Given this subjectivisation of the market and the concomitant attribution of powers, we ask: if the market is a subject, what kind of subject is it? As psychoanalysis stresses that the subject is not master of its own home, the market is likewise a strangely homeless subject - on the one hand it manifests in the form of an imagined singular, subjective agent and on the other as a mysterious and ungraspable, unknowable yet powerful force. Suspecting the magic that attributes such powers to the market, this absolute master that is the market is here called to account.