ABSTRACT

This chapter brings a cultural symptomology of libidinal economy to bear on the political economy of global financial crisis. It focuses on the sector of the global markets where the crisis first emerged, the sub-prime mortgage derivatives market, and while Freud's Civilization and its Discontents provides contours of a general interpretive framework. A libidinal economy of reciprocal relations of erotic passion, care and affection, mutual loyalty and responsibility, love relations that are more than life stands at the centre of the household. The value of real estate resonates with deep-seated needs of the household's domestic economy of emotional and material asymmetrical reciprocal relations of interdependency. In times of Economic insecurity and liminality the house assumes added and amplified value. The sub-prime mortgage market is a further refinement of the uncoupling of the relationship between the money economy of the market and the libidinal moral domestic economy of the oikos and becomes increasingly based on relatively fictive households.