Review of 'The Wisdom of Money' by Pascal Bruckner

My first book review in yonks. I have a couple sitting in draft (one on Lisa Adkins' The Time of Money and one on Klossowski's Living Currency) but its been so long - and they are both such important books - that I need to re-read and re-write them, to do them justice. I don't think this book by Bruckner falls into that 'important' category, but it's a good read nonetheless.

Anyway, as always if you like please, PLEASE give it a 'helpful' vote on Amazon. I want to be the number one money book reviewer on Amazon and your button click will make my dream come true. It's an odd ambition I know, but don't judge me. x

Link to Amazon

Flawed but at times insightful essays from a rare perspective in English-language discourse on money

"This is a beautiful-looking, relatively short book that is very well written. Initially it appeared as if it was to be a 'memoir of money' - like James Buchan's Frozen Desire - but, as an earlier reviewer says, it ends up feeling more like a collection of essays around the theme of money. Bruckner does try to tie together his disparate structure through the motif of the Golden Calf, but it feels like decoration. The base material of Bruckner's understanding of money is actually its ambivalence.

I'm unsure as to why Bruckner didn't use this base material to build a bridge between the essays because it's apparent from the opening words on the sleeve note; 'Money is an evil that does good, and a good that does evil'.

The first part of the book - The Worshippers and the Despisers - is where Bruckner is at his best. If you want a primer on the theology of money (an area of profound insight often overlooked by academics and dismissed by economists) then Bruckner's opening 40 pages are worth the price of the book, alone.

You might think that because of money's ambivalence, Bruckner would be justified in his use of aphorisms that simultaneously juxtapose and resolve conflicting dynamics (as in those opening lines). However, this stylistic choice raised a couple of issues for me.

Firstly, and less importantly, his aphoristic writing style became numbing after a while; certainly for a good chunk of the second half of the book I felt a bit bludgeoned by aphorisms. Secondly, and this is the criticism of more moment, aphorism can indicate a certain perversion of one's thought process. It's a delicate balance. An aphorism that neatly summarizes some argument that's preceded it, can be a powerful explanatory tool and its use is thereby wholly justified. But sometimes, with Bruckner, I was left with the feeling that the argument had been constructed for the purpose of justifying the aphorism; in other words, my feeling was that his stylistic choice determined the substance of his argument. This can be a dangerous and ruinous path for any thinker.

Bruckner relies on an exposition of his opinion backed up with examples (from literature, politics, etc) rather than a specification of theory and process. This allows his words to more easily make the journey from page to mind, but it means that when he tries to flesh out some moral judgment, he falls down. Perhaps, because ambivalence is the baseline to his melody, Bruckner ends up in the same spot as Norman O Brown did in Life Against Death (which he mentions in his most explicit reference to psychoanalytical thought) - and, according to Jung at least, it was the problem area for Freud, too. When fleshing out his moral judgement, Bruckner effectively ends up describing a desired outcome as being the result of sublimation (good) and an unwanted outcome as being the result of repression (bad), and yet he fails to distinguish between those two processes in a satisfactory or meaningful way. Because of Bruckner's theme of ambivalence and his metaphysical commitment, which conceives of money as a product of human imagination, I think this sublimation/repression critique is an apt one.

And further to this, the great (and ultimately unforgivable) omission from Bruckner's work is Simmel. Ambivalence completely underscores Simmel's conception of money in The Philosophy of Money. As that's generally regarded as the greatest work on the philosophy of money, it really needed including in Bruckner's book. His analysis would have benefited from an understanding of Simmel's ideas about money. But perhaps even more puzzling for me - given his understandable bent toward French texts - was Bruckner's failure in invoke Bataille. He mentions him only in passing and then not in the context of Bataille's work on economy. He talks more about Keynes than Bataille, and yet Bataille's The Accursed Share was a response to Keynes. Bruckner says things like "...being human always resides in excess and not in simple survival." This cries out for an exposition of Bataille's conceptions of sovereignty, sacrifice and waste.

What I ended up with then, at points, was an irresolvable conflict between Bruckner's prejudices and my own which, in my view, was due to his failure to give a meaningful exposition of his theory of money. I don't think this fatally wounded the book. I think there is much to be thankful for in Bruckner's French (small 'c') conservative perspective. It is a voice not often heard in English language discourse around money, which is perhaps more used to more left leaning intellectuals such as Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Delueze, Goux etc. However, in a stark choice between Buchan's Frozen Desire and Bruckner's The Wisdom of Money - both of which share that small 'c' perspective and the same literary feel - I'd say Buchan's would be the one to pick up first."