Deleuze and Lyotard on the irreducible duplicity of money

Jon Roffe (University of Melbourne)

(Co-authored with Ashley Woodward) A central debate in monetary economics concerns, not the nature, but the status of money. On the side of orthodox economics, money is most often viewed as property, as a discrete entity or set of discrete entities, and may be described at the limit as one commodity among others. Most heterodox approaches to economics argue, to the contrary, that money is at root a social relation. This opposition is in turn played out in two views about the origins of money: the private production of a fiat currency on the one hand, and a State-driven institution of circulating debt (or a sedimentation of the exploitation of labour) on the other. Regardless of these differences, both trajectories emphasise the essential unity of money. That is, while money may play many roles - often thought to be three in number: a unit of account, a store of value and the primary medium of exchange - it is as such a single thing.

The interest of both Lyotard and Deleuze's accounts of money lies in the fact that they affirm both the orthodox and heterodox account at the same time, while insisting that, regardless of which position is adopted, a second form of money is required to account for the entire circuit of capitalism. It is not just that money is at once (socially rooted) credit and personal property, but that both require a relationship to a second form of money that ground and unsettle its effectiveness as measurement, store of value and medium of exchange.

The aim of this paper is to argue for the significance of Deleuze and Lyotard's contributions as a necessary corrective and important supplement to these mainstream views. We first detail the two views, presented in Anti-Oedipus and Libidinal Economy respectively, touching in particular on the central role of dissimulation in both accounts, before exploring the differences between them.

Jon Roffe is McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Melbourne, the author of Badiou’s Deleuze (Acumen 2012), Muttering for the Sake of Stars (Surpllus 2012), and the co-author Lacan Deleuze Badiou (EUP 2014).