Money: Between philosophy and psychoanalysis

Money: Between philosophy and psychoanalysis Yordanka Dimitrova The title of the present essay is an allusion to Lyotard’s “Emma: Between philosophy and psychoanalysis” (1989). The main subject of my discussion, within the context of philosophy and psychoanalysis is philosophy of money, and more particular cultural phenomenology of money. The common place and issue that bridges the coast between philosophy and psychoanalysis, from one side, and cultural phenomenology, from the other, is the embodiment and the so called ‘mind body problem’. Within my research interest and field the embodiment apply to money. This essay takes up the question of money in the spirit of the Marx-Freud tradition, as the first part of the essay - Marx’s The Fetish Character of Money and Foucault’s ‘Money is simulacrum’ - is concerned with Marx and the second part is devoted to Sigmund Freud’s attitude about money. The connection between Marx and Freud, provided here, is through Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History, (1985). Brown’s concern is the notion of embodiment. He is one of the most interesting philosophers and commentators of Marx and Freud, who returned ‘the sacred’ to the analysis of ‘money’ and demeaned both equally. For Brown, ‘money’ and ‘the sacred’ were both sublimated products of a revulsion from the body. And such sublimation, whether aimed at god or mammon, is “the denial of life and the body…. The more the life of the body passes into things, the less life there is in the body, and at the same time the increasing accumulation of things represents an ever fuller articulation of the lost life of the body.” (Norman O. Brown, 1985: 297). In the third part of my essay I follow the postmodern perspective, discussing in short some of Jean-Franзois Lyotard’s works. As Claire Nouvet, asserts in her The Inarticulate Affect: Lyotard and Psychoanalytic Testimony (2003), “Philosophy rarely, if ever, engages psychoanalysis. It is then all the more noteworthy when a philosopher takes the risk of such an engagement. Jean-Francois Lyotard took this chance repeately and in different modes.” (Nouvet, 2003) If Lyotard’s work ‘Libidinal Economy’ is devoted to Freud, after The Differend – “his book of philosophy” as Lyotard himself called it – the task of philosophical thinking changed and Lyotard’s philosophical thought asks to confront that monster which scandalizes the very rules of philosophical cognition: not libido, but affect. At the end of “Emma: Between philosophy and psychoanalysis” (1989) Lyotard’s reading of Freud’s famous case study, he bluntly asserts: “I am not convinced to the psychoanalysis that it has one, is philosophical”. Emphasizing on the cultural phenomenology of money, my conclusion is on how the notions of money, provided through the discussed philosophers are current and applicable for the evolution of money, from fiat money to crypto currency between philosophy and psychoanalysis. Marx’s The Fetish Character of Money and Foucault’s Money is simulacrum The fetish character of money is neglected in theories that use fetishism as a basis for their theories of social domination. Mario Wenning, in his article The Reality behind Commodity Fetishism (2002)  Mario Wenning, (20020 The Reality behind Commodity Fetishism, Forum for Philosophy and Culture (2002) - http://www.cogito.de/sicetnon/artikel/historie/fetishism.htm, asserts that In the development of Marxist philosophy one can realize a decisive shift with regard to the amount of attention writers have paid to the notion of commodity fetishism. While neomarxist philosophers of the first half of the twentieth century have made abundant efforts to apply the concept to modern Capitalist societies (Georg Lukacs Georg Lukacs: History and Class Consciousness, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1971 p.297ff. Theodor W. Adorno Theodor W. Adorno: Über den Fetischcharakter der Musik und die Regression des Hörens, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 7/3 1928, pp. 321-56.), more recent commentators, mainly associating themselves with what has been called analytical Marxism, either seem to neglect it totally or deal with it only marginally. I agree with Wenning, who argues in favor of an interpretation that looks at fetishism as, in an important sense, a real phenomenon. Marx analysis of the commodity fetish is extremely important for philosophy of money, cultural phenomenology of money and philosophy and psychoanalysis of money, not only in understanding the commodity form but also to get a grasp of what the structural components that enable its persistence are. In Marx, we have an analysis of the fetishism of commodities where objects lose the solidity of their use value and become spectral figures under the aspect of exchange value. Their ghostly nature results from their absorption into a network of social relations, where their values fluctuate independently of their corporeal being. Human subjects themselves experience this de-realization because commodities are products of their labor. According to Marx, in a capitalist society, the real producers of commodities remain largely invisible and we only approach their products "through the relations which the act of exchange establishes between the products" Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin, 1990., p.165 We access the products through the exchange of money with those institutions that glean profit from the labor. Since we only ever relate to those products through the exchange of money, we forget the "secret hidden under the apparent movements in the relative values of commodities". Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin, 1990., p.168 For Marx, that is labor. He asserts that "It is... precisely this finished form of the world of commodities—the money form—which conceals the social character of private labour and the social relations between the individual workers, by making those relations appear as relations between material objects, instead of revealing them plainly" Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin, 1990., p.168-169 For Foucault reading of Marx, we learn that if the symbol of power in archaic Greece, associated with the an absent commodity and wealth was the scepter, the staff of command, which circulated in the Assembly when anyone had to speak, put forward his views, take part in a decision, or swear an oath, in a market society like that studied by the classical economists, money become the sign for an absent commodity. The visible circulation of money hides the true political relations. Through the monetary sign, wealth looks like it circulates, is distributed, and shared according to both nature and skill, necessity and chance. The economic and the political are linked, but out of synch with each other; their dependence is hidden and the monetary sign is the instrument of, at the same time, their dependence, their dislocation, and the occultation of this dislocated dependence. M. Foucault, 2013, Lectures on the Will to Know, Ed. A. Davidson, Transl.Burchell, G., Palgrave Macmillan UK, pp. 141-142 In seventh and sixth century Greek society money is no longer entirely a magical-political symbol like the scepter, but it is far from being already the occulting representation of classical economics. It is the instrument of a power which is being shifted (while preserving itself), and which, through an interplay of new regulations, ensures the preservation of class domination. At this point, money is no longer a symbol which effectuates and is not yet a representative sign. It should be understood as a fixed series of superimposed substitutions [religious, economic, political]. These substitutions are superimposed on and replace each other. For Foucault, this is the simulacrum: real operations, indefinite series—creating fixation (not representation). Whereas the sign “represents,” the simulacrum replaces one substitution for another. It is its reality as simulacrum that has enabled money to remain for a long time not only an economic instrument but a thing issuing from and returning to power. For Foucault, the functioning of money is not accounted for by a theory of the signifier, but rather by analysis of the simulacrum. M. Foucault, 2013, Lectures on the Will to Know, Ed. A. Davidson, Transl.Burchell, G., Palgrave Macmillan UK, pp. 141-142 According to Foucault, money was simulacrum before becoming sign. It is as simulacrum that it is sign: getting it to function as sign in a market economy is an avatar of its real history as simulacrum. Simulacrum of a nature of things, of a value exclusive to it, of a real equivalence. What Marx called “fetishism.” To summarize all this, let’s say that money is linked to power as simulacrum.’ M. Foucault, 2013, Lectures on the Will to Know, Ed. A. Davidson, Transl.Burchell, G., Palgrave Macmillan UK, pp. 141-142 With the evolution of money, the use of credit and plastic cards and the advent of crypto currency Foucault’s account on money as simulacrum is well recognized and re-established. John J. Chung, 2009, Money as Simulacrum: The Legal Nature and Reality of Money, 5 HASTINGS Bus. L. J. 109,159 (2009). Assen I. Dimitrov, Review: Ecology of Virtual Realities, On Alexander Gungov, From Virtuality of Gold Coins to Virtual Currencies Backed by Gold, In Gungov, Alexander, Alexander Lazarov, Plamen Makariev, Silvia Mineva and Olya Harizanova Ecology of Virtual Realities. 2015. Projectoria, Sofia. http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/678/711 Sigmund Freud’s notion of money Freud observes that "Money matters are treated by civilized people in the same way as sexual matters—with the same inconsistency, prudishness and hypocrisy". Freud, S. (1913), On beginning the treatment. Standard Edition, 12:123-144. London: The Hogarth Press, 1958., p.131 Freud’s early followers — notably Abraham, Jones, and Ferenczi — trod the anal path blazed by the master. The accumulation of money is a sublimated urge to retain feces for the very pleasure of it, and the production of commodities is the psychic derivative of the expulsion of feces. Abraham's (1921) Abraham K. (1921), Contributions to the theory of the anal character. In: Selected Papers of Karl Abraham, M.D., trans. D. Bryan &. A. Strachey. New York: Basic Books, 1953, pp. 370-392. and Jones's (1918) Jones, E. (1918), Anal-erotic character traits. In: Collected Papers. Boston: Beacon Press, pp. 438-451. attention to its place in anal characterology develops Freud's (1908) Freud, S. (1908), Character and anal erotism. Standard Edition, 9:167-175. London:Hogarth Press, 1953. original insights about its psychosexuality, "the sexual and especially the anal erotic significance of money" (Aron and Hirsch, 1992). Hirsch, I. (1992), Money matters in psychoanalysis: A relational approach. In: Relational Perspectives in Psychoanalysis, ed. N. Skolnick & S. Warshaw. Hillsdale, NJ:The Analytic Press, pp. 239-256., pp. 39-40 Ferenczi (1914) Ferenczi, S. (1914), The ontogenesis of the interest in money. In: The Psychoanalysis of Money, ed. E. Borneman (trans. M. Shaw). New York: Urizen Books, 1976, pp. 81-90. augments this line of reasoning by assigning money a role in development; he argues that the adult attachment to money represents a socially useful reaction formation to repressed anal eroticism. Money, in Ferenczi’s (1976) marvelous phrase, is “nothing other than odourless, dehydrated filth that has been made to shine.” Ferenczi, S. (1914), The ontogenesis of the interest in money. In: The Psychoanalysis of Money, ed. E. Borneman (trans. M. Shaw). New York: Urizen Books, 1976, pp. 81-90. Fenichel (1938) suggests that anal-erogeneity is made use of, and strengthened, by a social system based on the accumulation of wealth and competitiveness. Fenichel, O. (1938), The drive to amass wealth. In: The Collected Papers of Otto Fenichel, 2d series, ed. H. Fenichel &. D. Rapaport. New York: Norton, 1954, pp. 89-108. The approach to money taken by Ferenczi and Fenichel was political as well as psychoanalytic. Ferenczi (1914), for example, concludes that the "capitalistic instinct . . contains . . . [both] an egoistic and an analerotic component"; standing at the disposal of the reality principle, "the delight in gold and the possession of money . . . also satisfies the pleasure principle". Fenichel, O. (1938), The drive to amass wealth. In: The Collected Papers of Otto Fenichel, 2d series, ed. H. Fenichel &. D. Rapaport. New York: Norton, 1954, pp. 88. Fenichel (1938) points out that what he identifies as the drive to amass wealth is born with capitalism, adding that in precapitalist, tribal society it did not exist, while, in a future classless society, it would have disappeared. Fenichel, O. (1938), The drive to amass wealth. In: The Collected Papers of Otto Fenichel, 2d series, ed. H. Fenichel &. D. Rapaport. New York: Norton, 1954, pp. 108. In his investigation of Sigmund Freud's attitude toward money during the different time periods of his life, Warner states that an area of conflict between Freud and the other Viennese physicians was Freud's refusal to treat any of his psychoanalytic patients without a fee. Freud believed that treating a patient in analysis for free created a transference-countertransference problem that might doom the treatment to failure. Freud's transference explanation for not taking on charity patients did not satisfy many of his Viennese physician colleagues. Warner, 1989, Sigmund Freud and money, J Am Acad Psychoanal, 1989 Winter;17(4):609-22. Jean-Francois Lyotard: Money - Between philosophy and psychoanalysis Claire Nouvet, in her The Inarticulate Affect: Lyotard and Psychoanalytic Testimony (2003), asserts that “Philosophy rarely, if ever, engages psychoanalysis. It is then all the more noteworthy when a philosopher takes the risk of such an engagement. Jean-Francois Lyotard took this chance repeataly and in different modes.” Claire Nouvet, 2003, The Inarticulate Affect: Lyotard and Psychoanalytic Testimony, Wayne State University Press, Discourse, Vol. 25, No. 1/2, The Future of Testimony (Winter and Spring, 2003), pp. 231-247 If Lyotard’s work ‘Libidinal Economy’ is devoted to Freud, after The Differend – “his book of philosophy” as Lyotard himself called it – the task of philosophical thinking changed. Following The Differend, Lyotard’s philosophical thought asks to confront that monster which scandalizes the very rules of philosophical cognition: not libido, but affect. As Claire Nouvet asserts, “What happens when philosophy encounters psychoanalysis at this specific site: the affect?” - One can find in Lyotard a precise description of the impact of psychoanalysis on philosophy, yet “the impact of philosophy on psychoanalysis is strangely downplayed.” Claire Nouvet, 2003, The Inarticulate Affect: Lyotard and Psychoanalytic Testimony, Wayne State University Press, Discourse, Vol. 25, No. 1/2, The Future of Testimony (Winter and Spring, 2003), pp. 231-247 At the end of “Emma: Between philosophy and psychoanalysis” (1989) Lyotard’s reading of Freud’s famous case study, he bluntly asserts: “I am not convinced to the psychoanalysis that it has one, is philosophical”. In “Emma”, Lyotard discusses the way in which Sigmund Freud considers trauma, excitability and latency, and how these concepts can be addressed in philosophy. Psychic repression poses a series of questions to philosophy: Can philosophy consider the unconscious without reducing it to silence, inconsistency or unreason? Lyotard attempts to do so employing in this article his radical philosophy of language developed in his book The Differend (1983). For Lyotard Freud’s unconscious becomes an affect-phrase. In this sense, problems on how the pulsional, trauma and their repression could be translated and articulated into theoretical language arise. Lyotard analyses unconscious and its paradoxical effects on both conscious life and memory focussing on what Freud calls “deferred action” (Nachtrдglichkeit). But what interests Lyotard most in his phrasistics is how repression disrupts the phenomenological chronology of lived experiences (dies Erlebnis). The body keeps its forgotten memories that cannot be represented by philosophy. Emma’s amnesia of childhood sexual trauma is read by Lyotard as a series of differends, that is, radical disagreements, between infancy and adulthood, between affectivity and its linguistic representation. After his break with Marxism and rejection of totalising theory, Lyotard sought to develop a theory that will take account of multiple and different forces and desires at work in any political or social situation, from the writing of theory to revolutionary politics to global economics. In the early 1970s Lyotard developed a philosophy based around Sigmund Freud's theory of the libido. For Lyotard, libidinal energy can be used as a "theoretical fiction" to describe the transformations that take place in society. Lyotard's libidinal philosophy is developed in the major work Libidinal Economy and in two sets of essays, Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud [some of which is translated in Driftworks] and Des Dispositifs Pulsionnels. Libidinal Economy is an unusual and difficult work, and encompasses a complex set of theories concerning politics, economics, theory, academic style, and readings of Marx and Freud. In his libidinal philosophy Lyotard uses the idea of libidinal energy to describe events and the way they are interpreted or exploited, and he develops a philosophy of society and theory in terms of the economy of libidinal energies. Affects are structured and interpreted in systems made up of dispositifs, libidinal dispositions or set-ups, and society is composed of multitudes of different dispositions that compete to exploit the energies of libidinal events. It represents the primary processes of desire and libidinal intensity in which libidinal energy circulates in an aleatory fashion, not yet investing anything. Because the libidinal band is a moebius strip, desire circulates on only one surface; there is no inside or outside. Lyotards description of the transformations of the libidinal band is a theoretical fiction which provides an account of how the world works through the interplay of intense, excited libidinal energies and the stable structures which exploit them and dampen their intensity. Lyotard does not propose that we champion affects, singularities, intensities and libidinal energy over systems, structures, theory, concepts and representation. Thomas Csordas describes Cultural Phenomenology Csordas, T. J. (1999). Embodiment and Cultural Phenomenology. In Perspectives on Embodiment: the intersection of nature and culture. New York, London: Routledge, pp. 143-162. as considered with the notion of embodiment and embodied practices as dynamic, insofar as they are socially, culturally, and historically contained. For Csordas, the notion of embodiment encompassing and operating on several levels: Embodiment as corporeality – inhabiting and experiencing through a body; Embodiment as relational corporeality – negotiating inter-subjectivity, both materially and semiotically in a world shared by multiple bodies; Embodiment as performance of cultural practice – a more abstract notion referring to the idea that embodiment both is, and is not limited to corporeality, but engages cultural inter-subjectivity and performance through predominant communicative forms. As Csordas explains, “The phrase ‘cultural phenomenology of embodiment’ denotes an attempt to gain purchase on the understanding of culture and self from the starting point of our bodies as being-in-the-world, and requires recognition that our bodies are at once the wellspring of existence and the site of experience. In effect, embodiment is our fundamental existential condition, our corporeality or bodiliness in relation to the world and other people. For research in the human sciences, embodiment is “an indeterminate methodological field defined by perceptual experience and mode of presence and engagement in the world” Thomas Csordas, Embodiment and cultural phenomenology, In In Gail Weiss & Honi Fern Haber (eds.), Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersection of Nature and Culture. Routledge 143--62 (1999) http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g9781405189491_chunk_g978140518949111 (Csordas 1994 : 12). Cultural phenomenology of money embodiment is the theme of Pierre Klossowski’s work “Living Currency” ( La Monnaie Vivante,1970) Klossowski, Pierre. Living Currency. Trans. Jordan Levinson. N.d. TS. Monoskop Wiki for Collaborative Studies of Art, Media and the Humanities. Web. May 21, 2015.. Pierre Klossowski, a close associate of Georges Bataille and Gilles Deleuze, and an early translator of Walter Benjamin, who influenced Michel Foucault, Maurice Blanchot, and Jean-Franзois Lyotard, coined the expression “Living Currency”. In the letter that opens Living Currency, Foucault describes it as “the greatest book of our times”, explaining “it’s so great a book that everything else falls back and only counts half as much anymore. Living Currency was originally published in 1970, only two years prior to the publication of Deleuze & Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and four years prior to the publication of Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy (in which the work of Klossowski plays a key role). The most developed reading of Klossowski’s Living Currency comes from Jean-Franзois Lyotard in his Libidinal Economy. With Lyotard using Les Lois de l’hospitalité and what he calls Klossowski’s ‘Roberte sign’ to help illustrate ‘the tensor sign’—the tension within the sign itself, or its incompossible intensities within language—the Roberte sign allows Lyotard to confront the nihilism he sees as inherent within semiotics, or the discursive bias that stands against a pure Nietzschean flux of intensities. For in contrasting the nihilistic usage of the simulacrum by Augustine, which posits an (absent) Truth or God that is only ‘true’ in its ‘non-presence’ to Klossowski’s more affirmative usage of the simulacrum, Lyotard and Klossowski alike follow Nietzsche in illustrating the role of the phantasm for the simulacrum. Lyotard, Jean-Franзois. Libidinal Economy. Trans. Iain Hamilton Grant. Bloomington, United States: Indiana University Press, 1993. Print.As Lyotard notes in Libidinal Economy “ Klossowski’s quasi-economic study ‘living currency’ envisions between money and flesh, the tension between the phantasm and currency. A parody of contemporary political economy, Living Currency uses affect and the exorbitant to address the sensuous libidinal currency moving through and alongside its economic counterparts. Klossowski pressures the dialectic of use and non-use, breaking down this distinction to argue that the functional and the non-functional, industrial processes and art, are both libidinal and rational, since the drives ignore such externally imposed distinctions. For Klossowski, humans are “living currency,” and money is the mediator between libidinal pleasure and the industrial/institutional world of normative imposition. Both Lyotard and Klossowski argue that the destruction of political economy and metaphysics are combined. For as Klossowski concludes in his essay: “Industrial slaves must either establish a strict relationship between their bodily presence and the money it brings in, or replace the function of money, and be money themselves: Simultaneously the equivalent of wealth, and wealth itself”. Klossowski, Pierre. Living Currency. Trans. Jordan Levinson. N.d. TS. Monoskop Wiki for Collaborative Studies of Art, Media and the Humanities. Web. May 21, 2015. Norman O. Brown: Beyond Marx and Freud, beyond the masculine and feminine money or digital money (cryptocurrence as “universal androgyne” If Marx’s Fetish Character of Money is noting else but simulacrum M. Foucault, 2013, Lectures on the Will to Know, Ed. A. Davidson, Transl.Burchell, G., Palgrave Macmillan UK, pp. 141-142 John J. Chung, 2009, Money as Simulacrum: The Legal Nature and Reality of Money, 5 HASTINGS Bus. L. J. 109,159 (2009). Assen I. Dimitrov, Review: Ecology of Virtual Realities, On Alexander Gungov, From Virtuality of Gold Coins to Virtual Currencies Backed by Gold, In Gungov, Alexander, Alexander Lazarov, Plamen Makariev, Silvia Mineva and Olya Harizanova Ecology of Virtual Realities. 2015. Projectoria, Sofia. http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/678/711, quite far from the embodiment, Freud’s philosophy of money is all about the embodiment’ John J. Chung, 2009, Money as Simulacrum: The Legal Nature and Reality of Money, 5 HASTINGS Bus. L. J. 109,159 (2009). Assen I. Dimitrov, Review: Ecology of Virtual Realities, On Alexander Gungov, From Virtuality of Gold Coins to Virtual Currencies Backed by Gold, In Gungov, Alexander, Alexander Lazarov, Plamen Makariev, Silvia Mineva and Olya Harizanova Ecology of Virtual Realities. 2015. Projectoria, Sofia. http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/678/711 Due to the notion of embodiment and its significance for the phenomenology, in particular cultural phenomenology (of money), here I am referring to my PhD thesis: Cultural Phenomenology of Money. my choice for reconciling Marx’s The Fetish Character of Money and Foucault’s ‘Money is simulacrum’, is the position of American classicist Norman O. Brown. Brown offers a radical analysis and critique of the work of Freud. Brown’s interest in psychoanalysis began when Herbert Marcuse suggested to him to deep into Freud’s Life Against Death. In the 1950s, Marcuse and Brown, together with Trilling in Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture (1955), challenged this interpretation of Freud. They believed that Freud showed that a high price has been paid for civilization, and that Freud's critical element was to be found in his late metahistorical studies, works considered unscientific by orthodox analysts and reactionary by the neo-Freudians. Marcuse and Brown shared a similar general outlook and devoted the most attention to the same Freudian concepts. Brown’s concern with his Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History, (1985) is the notion of embodiment. Brown is one of the most interesting philosophers and commentators of Marx and Freud, who returned ‘the sacred’ to the analysis of ‘money’ and demeaned both equally. For Brown, ‘money’ and ‘the sacred’ were both sublimated products of a revulsion from the body. And such sublimation, whether aimed at god or mammon, is “the denial of life and the body…. The more the life of the body passes into things, the less life there is in the body, and at the same time the increasing accumulation of things represents an ever fuller articulation of the lost life of the body.” (Norman O. Brown, 1985: 297). To Brown, the exchange relation is imbued with guilt, and the debtor–creditor relation with sadomasochism. In this, Brown followed Nietzsche, for whom all religions are “systems of cruelties” and for whom all creditors enjoy “a warrant for and a title to cruelty”. Modern usage confirms the link of debt with both sadomasochism and the sacred: “bonds” impose conditions known as “covenants” on debtors. Creditors in the ancient world “could inflict every kind of indignity and torture upon the body of the debtor; for example, cut from it as much as seemed commensurate with the size of the debt.” Creditors can take pleasure in “being allowed to vent [their] power on one who is powerless, the volutptuous pleasure ‘de faire le mal pour le plaisir de la faire,’ the enjoyment of violation.” Similarly, Brown’s gold is more a fetishized projection of intrapsychic drama than an alienated embodiment of real social power. His moneyed subjects lack class, race, nationality, and gender. For Marx, what made gold valuable was that it embodied human labor and served as the universal exchange equivalent for all other commodities, whose value arises from the labor that made them. But the nature of market relations — anonymous, mathematical — is to hide the social nature of production and exchange behind the veil of money. To Brown, as psychoanalysis lacks a theory of work, so does orthodox Marxism lack an understanding of the passions that sustain the disguise. With credit comes a set of passions entirely different from those of gold. For Brown, money is part of the “commitment to mathematize the world, intrinsic to modern science.” But modern science has now almost completely mathematized money. Most money now lives a ghostly electronic life. For Brown, in contrast with the dry, tight, fixed, “masculine” aura of gold, modern credit money seems protean, liquid, and “feminine.” Following Brown’s gender distinction of money and having in mind the advent of cryptocurrency and blockchain, perhaps is reasonable to ask – What would be the gender of the cryptocurrency? The crypto money suggests the gender ambiguity. The digital money are androgyny, the combination of masculine and feminine or lacking rigid gender roles. To say that a culture or relationship is androgynous is to say that it lacks rigid gender roles. Perhaps it is true for the crypto money culture. One shall call here what Aristophanes tells the audience about Androgyny, in the myth from Plato’s Symposium. The Symposium: and, The Phaedrus; Plato's erotic dialogues. Translated and with introduction and commentaries by William S. Cobb. Albany: State University of New York Press. 1993. The philosophical concept of the “Universal Androgyne” (or “Universal Hermaphrodite”) – a perfect merging of the sexes that predated the current corrupted world or the decentralized communication and crypto economy (blockchain and bitcoin) and/or was the utopia of the next Crypto Enlightenment – would play also a role in future crypto world. For Brown, Marx noted the fact, inexplicable by the medium-of-exchange theory of money, that it is intrinsic to the nature of money to get condensed in useless objects, and that this is also an intrinsic feature of capitalism inherited from the precapitalist stage: “In the early stages of the circulation of commodities it is the surplus use-values alone that are converted into money. Gold and silver thus become of themselves social expressions for superfluity of wealth.” It is just here that Marx came close to the notion of money as prestige, and to the connection between prestige and the practically useless, the “surplus use-value.” Instead we find Marx in the first volume of Capital making prestige the essential value of money; that is to say, the essence of money is not its function in exchange, but power. And Marx asserts that: Under capitalism “social power becomes the private power of private persons.” (Marx, Capital, I, 149) As Brown suggests: “The value of money does not lie in the value with which the labor theory of value is concerned. And conversely— this is the crucial point— the labor theory of value does not contain the answer to the problem of power.” (Brown 4571-4572). For Brown, ‘Money is the heart of the new accumulation complex; the capacity of money to bear interest is its energy; its body is that fundamental institution of civilized man, the city.’ (Norman O. Brown,  Life Against Death). In conclusion Startups experimenting with blockchain technology for financial institutions are already receiving funding from banks like JPMorgan. Goldman Sachs, in an Emerging Theme Radar note, from December 2015, sent to its clients, has declared that the technology has the capability of drastic change: “While the Bitcoin hype cycle has gone quiet, Silicon Valley and Wall Street are betting that the underlying technology behind it, the Blockchain, can change… well everything.”  The slogan of the Financial Times, from 2007, which launched a new advertising campaign, with a marketing strap-line boldly proclaiming that ‘We live in FINANCIAL TIMES’, seven years later, shall be reshaped as that currently We live in a Blockchain times and space. Our culture is money culture and knowledge culture and what money “is” and “does” shapes and is shaped by, our identity and culture. Perhaps, most of us are unprepared for the advent and future of CryptoCurrency and BlockChain: decentralized fast moving economy, knowledge and communication, that would transform our identity and culture, and turn us to digital living currency. Good or bad, as the Good and Bad money, we shall be prepared to be unprepared. As cultural phenomenologist Steven Connor elaborates, cultural phenomenology would have to be prepared to be unprepared. Such unpreparation comes also from embodiment, from mind/body problem, from psychoanalyses. Perhaps “cultural tautology” of money and humans as living (digital) currency, is good ground for an unprepared Cultural Phenomenology of Money, an insights in philosophy and psychoanalysis of money.