Recent years have seen greater interest in the theoretical foundations of abstract finance and their intersection with questions of philosophy and sociology. In particular, exchanges between authors such as Donald MacKenzie, Timothy Johnson, Elie Ayache, and others have debated the deterministic or contingent dynamics of markets, as well as their interdependency with the theories that purport to describe them. Working in this tradition, Elena Esposito raises a novel question in her 2011 book, The Future of Futures: could the exchange of derivative securities within financial markets entail, not so much the provision of liquidity, but the transaction of time? In this article, I reconstruct Esposito’s analysis, arguing that the proper response to this question should be affirmative. Particular emphasis is laid on what I take to be the two fundamental and controversial premises which support this argument: first, the endogeneity of time-relations involved in financial markets; and second, the revisability of these time-relations. The advantage of recasting Esposito’s position in this way is the defence it enables against various criticisms articulated in theory and philosophy circles, such as those of Ray Brassier. Finally, I discuss the significance of Esposito’s theory, not only for this class of financial transactions, but also for certain issues in the philosophy of time.
Limited scholarly attention has been committed to the analysis of Nietzsche’s 1873 Time-Atom Theory, a fragment whose contentions strike both the seasoned and unseasoned reader of the Nachlass as especially speculative and grandiose. The principal objective of this essay is to critically review and extend the recent aspects of this limited commentary, focusing on the work of Gregory Whitlock, Robin Small and Keith Ansell-Pearson. I argue that an important and overlooked ambiguity is latent in Nietzsche’s framing of his argument, which impinges upon the scope and purpose of the fragment. I consider the question posed by Small as to the status of the time-points in the fragment which, I contend, Nietzsche does not hold to be empirical. Thirdly, I discuss a central point of debate between Whitlock, Small and Ansell-Pearson: the extent of the analogy between Roger Boscovich and Nietzsche. I submit in conclusion that the connections between the two have been over-emphasised in the context of the 1873 fragment, and that this relationship cannot yield a complete account of Nietzsche’s approach.
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