Money and intimacy cannot be disentangled from each other.

Evidence

In her pioneering work, the sociologist Viviana Zelizer (2007) demonstrates that social, intimate, and economic ties all intersect insidiously through individuals’ constant relational performances, in and beyond markets. Zelizer challenges the view that money merely corrupts personal relations; ordinary life blends money transactions with the reciprocities of marriage, friendship, and care work, and thus intimate and market relationships cannot be disentangled. … Hence, in the following I am less interested in the effect of economic principles (or practices) on these relationships and am more curious about the deeper (and more obscure) impact of finance’s distinct speculative imagination on our ephemeral, confused, digitally mediated desires. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 216

Categorization

• XREF: Zelizer’s relational-work view of economic life connects to the reader’s law-merchant materials on how social ties and trust structure seemingly impersonal markets.
• QUESTION: The author distinguishes economics’ effect on intimacy from finance’s speculative imagination’s impact on desire — worth tracking how sharply that distinction is maintained through the chapter.