The future is persistently considered in the sociology of finance from two divergent, problematic angles. The first approach consists in supplementing financial reasoning with an acknowledgement of the expectations that are needed in order to cope with an uncertain future and justify the viability of investment decisions. The second approach, often labelled critical, sees on the contrary in the logic of finance a negation of the future and an exacerbation of the valuation of the present. This is an impasse the response to which resides, we suggest, in considering the language of future value, which is indeed inherent to a financial view on things, as a political technology. We develop this argument through an examination of significant episodes in the history of financial reasoning on future value. We explore a main philosophical implication which consists in suggesting that the medium of temporality, understood in the dominant sense of a temporal progression inside which projects and expectations unfold, is not a condition for but rather a consequence of the idea of financial valuation.

Recent years have seen greater interest in the theoretical foundations of abstract finance and their intersection with questions of philosophy and sociology. In particular, exchanges between authors such as Donald MacKenzie, Timothy Johnson, Elie Ayache, and others have debated the deterministic or contingent dynamics of markets, as well as their interdependency with the theories that purport to describe them. Working in this tradition, Elena Esposito raises a novel question in her 2011 book, The Future of Futures: could the exchange of derivative securities within financial markets entail not so much the provision of liquidity, but the transaction of time? In this article, I reconstruct Esposito's analysis, arguing that the proper response to this question should be affirmative. Particular emphasis is laid on what I take to be the two fundamental and controversial premises which support this argument: first, the endogeneity of time-relations involved in financial markets; and second, the revisability of these time- relations. The advantage of recasting Esposito's position in this way is the defence it enables against various criticisms articulated in theory and philosophy circles, such as those of Ray Brassier. Finally, I discuss the significance of Esposito's theory, not only for this class of financial transactions, but also for certain issues in the philosophy of time.

Amin Samman's History in Financial Times addresses the need to develop more nuanced ways to account for history, given that succession, as a model of making history, so clearly falls short. His emphasis on narrative throughout the book is hugely important at a moment of widespread narrative dysfunctionality in which the distinction between fact and fiction comes to be widely contested.

History in Financial Times sheds light on the historiography of contemporary finance. But there is a tension in the book that is inescapable: between the production of crisis historiography, on the one hand, and the practice of the concept of crisis, on the other. There is, in other words, a barely articulated distinction between crisis as a “metahistorical force” and crisis as a “peculiar, naturalist” category.

Exploring the historical imagination that surfaces at the time of crisis, Samman contributes to the effort to conceive of financial capitalism as a more or less distinct political, social and cultural era. The question that remains is how the narrative tropes he explores are related to finance in its narrower sense. Why does historical imagination wear these specific forms in financial times?

Loops make a fitful, but not insignificant appearance in Amin Samman's History in Financial Times. Are we locked into the category of causality by human nature, or would it be possible to invent a new one to give conceptuality to what, in the form of the loop, seems for the moment to be mere figural malaise?

In this rejoinder, I discuss three fundamental deadlocks raised by contributors to this forum. These relate to the status of historical discourse, financial market logics, and above all the figure of the ‘strange loop’, which I put forward as a means of reorienting historical thought. I also offer some preliminary remarks on why History in Financial Times departs from conventional forms of historicism in political economy, as well as a further set of reflections on the contemporaneity of the book's argumentation.