Chrematistic Deviations

Abstract

What was actually produced when the first derivatives wriggled their way out of the conventional financial trajectories? When one understood that a transaction did not have to be a transaction of something, but that the transaction itself, which was nothing, could be transacted? And what does this tell us about the functioning of the economy? These questions will be addressed by making a detour through some passages in Aristotle’s economic writings, hoping thereby to demonstrate that financial derivation, far from being simply a hyperbolic tool of speculation, is an economic geno-practice, the productive play, the mobility itself, of economy, its inventive, deviatory clinamen or line of flight on which new ‘economies’ are engendered.