Money Wisdom #507

 "...the first substance to function simultaneously as a general measure of value, a general means of payment and of exchange and general store of value was the coined money that first became generally used early in sixth-century BCE Ionia, of which the commercial centre was Miletos. And so the revolution in thought marked by presocratic cosmology occurred at exactly the same time and in exactly the same place as the first society in history to be pervasively monetised."

 Richard Seaford The Origins of Philosophy in Ancient Greece and Ancient India (2020) p.253 

Money Wisdom #506

 "Herakleitean fire and karma reifying projections (cosmisations) of - or constructed from - (inter alia) money, which is no merely a metaphor, a way of illustrating karma and Herakleitean fire but a component of them; and this is why money and karma (and money and Herakleitean fire) came into being roughly simultaneously and in the same place. It can not emphasised too strongly that I am not proposing the reduction of karma to money... ...I suggest merely that one of the factors in the emergence of the core concept in northern India from the middle of the first millennium was the simultaneous advent there of monetisation."

Richard Seaford The Origins of Philosophy in Ancient Greece and Ancient India (2020) p.208 

Money Wisdom #505

"Sometimes confused with poststructuralism, libidinal economy represents an attempt to fuse psychoanalysis with political economy. The phrase derives from Freud’s theory of psychical energy, or 'libido', but is closely linked to the reception of Nietzsche and Freud in France during the mid-to-late twentieth century. Early key texts by George Bataille (1991) and Pierre Klossowski (2017) were followed by a wave of further works during the 1970s, chief among them being Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari 1983) and Libidinal Economy (Lyotard 1993). Inspired by the political events of 1968, the thrust of such works was to break down the artificial walls between psychoanalysis and political economy, to reveal inner psychic life and capitalist history as two sides of the same coin, and in so doing, to reveal how capital organises libidinal flows and produces a particular historical configuration of desire.''

Amin Samman & Ronen Palan Systemic Unreason: A Psychic History of States and Corporations in Global Society Vol 37 2023 Issue 3

Footnote

Money Wisdom #504

 "What the dreamer values about being a god or king is aloneness in the world: 'I am alone in this world! I am all!' The endpoint of monetised individualism is the individual ownership of everything, reflected in the Indian texts as the absorption of everything into the self. But this imagined aloneness is most easily achieved by severing all ties, as a wandering renouncer. The renouncer follows the logic attributed to Alexander the Great, who remarked that - were he not Alexander - he would be Diogenes (the Cynic renouncer)."

Richard Seaford The Origins of Philosophy in Ancient Greece and Ancient India (2020) p.135