ABSTRACT
This essay takes stock of recent tendencies in French theory (from Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux to Bruno Latour, Fre´de´ric Gros, and Luc Boltanski) that focus on the metaphysics of financialisation. The notion of shareholder existence, drafted from Gros’ book on ‘the security principle’, emphasises how experience has become comparable to an investment, stock option, or credit swap. This condition exceeds the familiar notion of the self-interested individual who is constantly on the lookout to extract money, social capital, or power through political manoeuvring. The shareholder exceeds the character of the Machiavellian schemer, a` la Frank Underwood in House of Cards, who, by dint of cunning and calculated risk, becomes lethally adept at turning political setbacks to personal advantage. Shareholder existence is modelled on the well-managed investment portfolio, in which the subject is at once the resource to be invested and the accounts manager of the resource. By way of Meillassoux’s reading of Mallarme´’s Coup de de´s, the essay argues that the critique of this phenomenon points to theories of unaccountable experience as the basis for a new existentialism.
