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Document Details : Title: De list van God en de list van het kapitaal Subtitle: Van Jean Baudrillard naar een theologische visie op de financiële crisis Author(s): WALTERS, James Journal: Tijdschrift voor Theologie Volume: 53 Issue: 1 Date: 2013 Pages: 7-25 DOI: 10.2143/TVT.53.1.3203305 Abstract : This article explores the possible contribution to theological thought of the work of the late French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007). It does so through consideration of the prescient issue of the global financial crisis that has been taking place since 2008. Baudrillard made a distinctive and significant contribution to economic thinking. But while his unconventional arguments have led to the marginalisation of his work, I argue that his creativity and originality make him relevant both to the contemporary need for radical thought in this area and to a distinctively theological contribution, which is always unlikely to begin from the conventional wisdom. First, Baudrillard’s foundational thinking is set out relating to the changes that have taken place in consumer capitalism and his particular evolution of Marxist critique in the form of ‘simulation’. We will see how this has profound implications for our understanding of financial transactions and of money itself in an age of rapidly accelerated capital flows. We see how his account chimes with Rowan Williams’ concern that problems have arisen in the financial system due to a fundamental disconnection between money and material realities. The second section explores his earliest thinking about how economic growth and productivity serve as the social function of myth even when the evidence for their benefits is questionable. This continues through to his later critiques of the globalisation of capital markets and the view that the global market has been the positive disseminator of universal values such as democracy and human rights. Baudrillard sees a more destructive process of commodification at work that is blind to the environmental and human cost. The third section will touch on the anthropological side of Baudrillard’s work, seeing how the circulation of debt within society should be seen as central to the operations of both financial and theological systems. It will conclude that the inherent ‘indebtedness’ of our whole financial system is leading to highly destructive consequences and that this resonates with the strong theological grounds for questioning the centrality of credit within our economic system. We conclude that addressing these three fundamental areas would begin to re-establish the connections necessary to reorient economics towards wide social goods. |
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