Yet if finance is the spirit of the age, this may disclose as much about what counts as spirit as it suggests what matters in finance. For what is said in tones of righteous dismissal regarding finance; namely, that it is unreal and ephemeral yes, but also that it engenders a mutuality of debt to which there is no final account, applies to many realms that are also currently being devalued, dismissed, disinvested. Is not the same thing, for example, said about the humanities, or the arts, or higher education itself for that matter? Might it not be more useful to inquire into what other kinds of debt might be derived from circumstances that flash abundance before our eyes only to say that it is not for us; that advertise the pleasures of risks for which so few are authorized to reap the benefits; or that bring so many strangers into contact so that they might proclaim what future they would value most?
Spirit as verb and noun: to carry away, to intoxicate, to breathe, to make active—might be brought to an end or realized under the sign of a finance that augurs winding up differently than where it began. The solids have been made molten, vaporized, and what was profaned can now be re-animated according to collectively-sustainable principles of motion. This sudden materialization of a spirit of association that brings the far near and the future present is a medium by which a transformative spirituality might itself be financed.
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