Christoph Türcke’s Studies on the Origins of Money in Sacrifice

Abstract

This paper examines the contribution of the German philosopher Christoph Türcke to the understanding of the origins of money, which according to his paleo-historical and phylogenetic reconstruction are to be found in sacrifice, the oldest form of religion. The study is part of a broader, mostly bibliographical research about capitalism as religion, which purpose is to analyze capitalism as everyday life religion. Türcke approached the Critical Theory and Freud's psychoanalysis, adding to these, a theory of traumatic compulsion to repetition as a creative force in culture and Civilization. In his work "Mehr! Philosophie des Geldes" (More! Philosophy of Money), referred to Simmel's homonymous book, Türcke traces back the origins of money and currency to the mechanism of ritual sacrifice. According to him, sacrifice is based on the payment of a debt or guilt that is exchanged for an offering of equivalent value, the victim. In the sacrifice ritual and its compulsive repetition, Türcke locates both the starting point of Homo sapiens mentalization process and the beginning of payment in human history. Since then and despite of all the changes he underwent money never lost its deep rootedness in the sacred sphere.