Desire And Disease In The Speculative Economy

This paper contrasts two kinds of representations of this relationship between crisis and risk, specifically focusing on their metaphorical displacement onto a sexualised and/or bodily discourse. In the first instance the author examines the ways in which the exuberant organic language of finance radically shifted following the financial crisis at the end of 2008, paying particular attention to how the discourses of financial regulation attempted to retrospectively distance themselves from their previous permissive attitudes. Secondly, the author examines how these ironies and inconsistencies were pre-figured and critiqued in fiction published in the years leading up to the crisis. It examines two novels, Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty and Lawrence Chua's Gold by the Inch, which both use metaphors of illness to explore the contradictions of contemporary finance. Both novels – in very different ways – use this metaphorical slippage in order to critique its implications, pointing to the very limiting meanings of risk in contemporary finance culture.