ABSTRACT
The creation of the neologism 'financialization' symbolises the way in which current-day and so-called 'financial' capitalism acts as a system, subordinating different spans of society by imposing its normative referents and its balance of power, capturing the essential of created value and instituting mechanisms of financial annuities. Financial domination is indeed founded on the naturalisation and reification of finance – the markets – which contribute to its power and from which its anonymous character may be de-constructed. The private equity industry has developed thanks to favourable legislative, institutional and macro-economic contexts. It implicates and turns a profit for numerous actors thanks to the legal-financial arrangements at work by which high productivity can be guaranteed and all the risk transferred over to companies. The chapter seeks to analyse the modalities behind the construction of financial apparatuses, according to their nature (rhetorical, political and material), and connecting them to diverse professional logics.
