IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/jculte/v5y2012i4p391-406.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Speculating On Careless Lives

Author

Listed:
  • Shaun French
  • James Kneale

Abstract

This paper is concerned with biofinancialisation; that is, with the ways in which contemporary processes of financialisation and biopolitics intermesh and interpolate. While the significance of the relation between the bios and circuits of finance has begun to be recognised, biofinancialisation remains little interrogated. In seeking to address this lacuna, the paper focuses on the recent transformation of the UK after-retirement market and, in particular, the invention of enhanced and impaired pension annuities. Enhanced annuity products like the ‘smokers’ pension’ provide, we argue, a striking example of the ways in which biofinancialisation works to fashion new worlds for capitalist accumulation, in this case through the capitalisation of morbidity and of the residual vital capacities of life, and the ways in which novel forms of biofinancial subject and subjectivity are produced to populate such worlds -- to make them live. The paper concludes by identifying three political fracture points or fault lines in the enterprise to secure life biofinancially through the enhancing of annuities: first, the promise of reconciliation; second, the promise of autonomy and freedom; and, third, the promise of a good retirement.

Suggested Citation

  • Shaun French & James Kneale, 2012. "Speculating On Careless Lives," Journal of Cultural Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 5(4), pages 391-406, June.
  • Handle: RePEc:taf:jculte:v:5:y:2012:i:4:p:391-406
    DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2012.703619
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/17530350.2012.703619
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/17530350.2012.703619?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Christian Marazzi, 2010. "The Violence of Financial Capitalism," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 1584350830, April.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Matthias Bernt & Laura Colini & Daniel Förste, 2017. "Privatization, Financialization and State Restructuring in Eastern Germany: The case of Am südpark," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 41(4), pages 555-571, July.
    2. Leigh Johnson, 2013. "Index Insurance and the Articulation of Risk-Bearing Subjects," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 45(11), pages 2663-2681, November.
    3. Kar, Sohini, 2023. "Domestic values: gendered labor and the uncanniness of critique in marketing life insurance for women," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 120591, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    4. French, Shaun & Kneale, James, 2015. "Insuring biofinance: Alcohol, risk and the limits of life," economic sociology. perspectives and conversations, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, vol. 17(1), pages 16-24.
    5. Leigh Johnson, 2015. "Catastrophic fixes: cyclical devaluation and accumulation through climate change impacts," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 47(12), pages 2503-2521, December.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Jeon, Heesang, 2015. "Knowledge and Contemporary Capitalism in Light of Marx's Value Theory," Thesis Commons g5njk, Center for Open Science.
    2. Grahame F. Thompson, 2017. "Time, trading and algorithms in financial sector security," New Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 22(1), pages 1-11, January.
    3. Annie McClanahan, 2013. "Investing In The Future," Journal of Cultural Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 6(1), pages 78-93, February.
    4. Louis Moreno, 2014. "The urban process under financialised capitalism," City, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 18(3), pages 244-268, June.
    5. Geoff Mann, 2017. "Haute finance in the not-so-quiet revolution: and the bombing of la Bourse de Montréal," Journal of Cultural Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 10(4), pages 364-376, July.
    6. Alfredo Macias Vazquez & Pablo Alonso Gonzalez, 2016. "Knowledge Economy and the Commons," Review of Radical Political Economics, Union for Radical Political Economics, vol. 48(1), pages 140-157, March.
    7. Fabian Frenzel & Armin Beverungen, 2015. "Value struggles in the creative city: A People’s Republic of Stokes Croft?," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 52(6), pages 1020-1036, May.
    8. Alessandro Caiani & Andrea Fumagalli & Stefano Lucarelli, 2014. "Contemporary Capitalism as a New Monetary Economy of Production: The Logic of Conventions, M&A, and LBOs," Forum for Social Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 43(3), pages 223-253, December.
    9. Jeremy Valentine, 2014. "Rent and Political Economy in Culture Industry Work," Journal of Cultural Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 7(2), pages 194-208, May.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:jculte:v:5:y:2012:i:4:p:391-406. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/RJCE20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.