Page 11 - Valentino Cattelan - Credere is credit and creed: trust, money, and religion in western and islamic finance

IANUS n. 29-2024 ISSN 1974-9805

informed every theory and practice... Its being pure relation (and in this aspect
representative, in fact, of its times), without incorporating any content of the
relation, does not contradict it at all. Since in the reality, energy is nothing else
23
than relation» .
If, as highlighted by the influential post-war German cultural theorist Hans
24
Blumenberg , it is certainly true that money stands as Simmel’s ‘proto-metaphor’
for Life in the latter’s nascent Lebensphilosophie, the Life of money itself, as
commented by Robert Savage, «turns out to be pure circulation, sociation, and
25
interactivity, an endless cycle of extensions and intensifications of value
26
emerging through processes of social exchange» .
Money, both as ‘material’ (when in the present form of price) and ‘energy’
(when in future form of credit) of any exchange, enjoys the metaphysical quality
of being absolute medium, so «to realize the possibility of all values as the value of
all possibilities» . At the same time, while projecting the singular (present or
27
future) exchange in the whole of economic Life of a certain social group, it also
mirrors this Life into the single life of each social relation as the ‘place’ of
28
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meaning either for price (in the present) or credit (in the future).
Furthermore, the practice of money-exchange in any symbolic form becomes
necessarily inserted in a sociological landscape (space) and horizon (time), whose
actors may act either according to the prevalence of personal or impersonal ties.
These alternative socio-types (which coexist in economic and financial
interactions, since they are complementary in most human experiences) can be
described in terms of ‘community’ (Gemeinschaft) and ‘society’ (Gesellschaft) of
credit when, respectively, human relations are grounded on personal or
impersonal ties in the management of money.
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23 Quoted in DENEAULT (ed.), Georg Simmel. L’argent dans la culture modern et autres essais sur
l’«économie de la vie», 2006, 5 (Author’s translation from the French language).
24 BLUMENBERG, Money or Life: metaphors of Georg Simmel’s philosophy, in Theory, Culture & Society,
29 (7/8), 2012 (trans. From the German original version of 1976 by Savage), 249-262.
25 On the connection of this idea of ‘endless cycle’ to Afterlife, hence religion, see the last section
of this article.
26 BLUMENBERG, Money or Life: metaphors of Georg Simmel’s philosophy, op. cit., 249.
27 SIMMEL, The philosophy of money, op. cit., 221.
28 INGHAM, Money is a social relation, in Review of Social Economy (Special Issues on Critical
Realism), 54 (4), 1996, 507-529. See also MAURER, The anthropology of money, in Annual Review of
Anthropology, 35, 2006, 15-36.
29 The initial paragraphs of this section are taken from CATTELAN, The Life of EU money: value,
credit and capital as societal processes, in GIMIGLIANO - CATTELAN (eds.), Money law, capital, and the
changing identity of the European Union, London, 2022, 1-2. See also CATTELAN, Sacred Euro: sovereign
debt(s) and EU’s bare credit in the Corona crisis, in GEPHART (ed.), In the realm of Corona normativities: a
momentary snapshot of a dynamic discourse, Frankfurt, 2020, 195-208.
30 The two types of ‘community’ (Gemeinschaft) and ‘society’ (Gesellschaft) were originally
conceptualized by German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies (1855-1936): TÖNNIES, Gemeinschaft und
Gesellschaft, Leipzig, 1887. They respectively correspond to two possible modalities of social
grouping, where Gemeinschaft lies in mutual bonds, close personal interaction and feelings of

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