Homo Libidinous and the Economy of Desire:Rereading Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money after Freud

Abstract

Georg Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money ([1900], 2004) contains one of the most pertinent and subtle diagnoses of modernity—a critique of economic reason moved by desire. This article shows that Simmel’s dialectic of desire has a significant affinity with Freud’s economic point of view in terms of the psychic apparatus being ruled by the pleasure principle. Considering these two libidinal economies I will focus on how the figure of homo oeconomicus transforms into homo libidinous and why money has become the symbol and form of modern life. The assumption is that money is not solely the fundamental principle of social reality—what we call hyper-modernity or late capitalism—but the reality principle as such.