Investment Without Term: A Radical Economy For Daily Practice

With the widespread employment of algorithmic trading in the stock market, the acceleration of economic time and its disassociation from ‘lived’ time proves a necessary site for discourse. The model of an investment that does not entail an expected return – reliant on investment’s etymological context as the ‘act of putting on’ and ‘surrounding’ – allows one inhabitation or presence without the calculation of discrete time. I situate this critique within Jacques Derrida’s Given Time and Alain Badiou’s politics of ‘subtraction’, suggesting new media art (re)opens the field of desire to think and practice such investment without term: a conceptualization of an economy of time apart from the time and speed of the economic.