Volatility and foresight : risk, derivatives, and Kierkegaard's Christian discourses

This essay explores the use of financial instruments and the way such instruments discipline actors to envisage time, the future, and its possibilities. Through the construction of a contrastive theological account of futurity, using the Christian Discourses of the Danish theologian-philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55), I wish to show the contingency of the finance-disciplined future as informed by derivative practices, and also the power that Christian accounts of the future have not only to reorient imaginations within late financial capitalism but also to challenge the seeming naturality or inevitability of financial capitalism's vision of the future. For Kierkegaard's "Christian," the future is neither a singularly totalizing present nor a risk to be hedged against; rather, it is an invitation to be as birds of the air. The anxiety for one's future must be met with a proper account of "today"-and this all with a proper measure of hopefulness amidst risk. Kierkegaard's Christian hope concerns both the formation of one's own deepest expectations as well as a deep concern for one's neighbor. This essay therefore seeks to sketch two accounts of the future-one disciplined by the practice of derivatives trading and the other disciplined by Christian eschatological convictions. Both contain their own particular raison d'être, and this essay seeks to demonstrate the fault lines between the two accounts. The latter, theologically attuned account casts significant pressure upon the former in ways illuminating for the study of theological ethics and constructive theology generally.