Rated Agency: A Conversation with Michel Feher and Jonathan Levy

Join us at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore for an evening with Michel Feher, as he discusses his new book, Rated Agency: Investee Politics in a Speculative Age. He will be joined in conversation by Jonathan Levy. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.

Presented in partnership with 57th Street Books and Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT)

ABOUT THE BOOK:

The hegemony of finance compels a new orientation for everyone and everything: companies care more about the moods of their shareholders than about longstanding commercial success; governments subordinate citizen welfare to appeasing creditors; and individuals are concerned less with immediate income from labor than appreciation of their capital goods, skills, connections, and reputations.

That firms, states, and people depend more on their ratings than on the product of their activities also changes how capitalism is resisted. For activists, the focus of grievances shifts from the extraction of profit to the conditions under which financial institutions allocate credit. While the exploitation of employees by their employers has hardly been curbed, the power of investors to select investees — to decide who and what is deemed creditworthy — has become a new site of social struggle.

In clear and compelling prose, Michel Feher explains the extraordinary shift in conduct and orientation generated by financialization. Above all, he articulates the new political resistances and aspirations that investees draw from their rated agency.

MICHEL FEHER, a Belgian philosopher, is the author of Powerless by Design: The Age of the International Community and the editor of Nongovernmental Politics and Europe at a Crossroads, among other titles. Founder of Cette France-là, a monitoring group on French immigration policy, Feher is also a founding editor of Zone Books.

JONATHAN LEVY teaches history at the University of Chicago. He is currently completing a book on the history of American capitalism.