Money and Mnemotechnics

Jon Roffe (University of New South Wales)

It is broadly agreed that money plays three key roles: a means of exchange, a store of value, and a unit of account. Depending on a variety of other presuppositions, however, which of these functions is primary (historically, functionally, and logically) differs a great deal. The goal of this paper is to consider a necessary condition for any use of money that is rarely the object of economic thought: social memory, such that it is the locus of the inscription of monetary activity, credits and debts. The importance of this condition is particularly prominent in new digital forms of currency, such as Bitcoin, and the blockchain protocol that it makes use of. I will consider this problematic in light of Nietzsche’s analysis of memory in the second Essay of the Genealogy of Morals, and Bernard Stiegler’s remarkable analysis of social mnemotechics.

Jon Roffe is a Vice-Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of New South Wales, a founding editor of Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy, the founding convenor of the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy and an affiliate of the Sydney School of Continental Philosophy. The co-editor of a number of books on twentieth-century French philosophy, Jon is the author of Badiou’s Deleuze (Acumen 2012), Abstract Market Theory (Palgrave 2015), Gilles Deleuze’s Empiricism and Subjectivity (EUP 2016), The Works of Gilles Deleuze (forthcoming re-press 2017), and the co-author of Lacan Deleuze Badiou (EUP 2014).