SPECULATING ON CARELESS LIVES

Abstract

This paper is concerned with biofinancialisation; that is, with the ways in which contemporary processes of financialisation and biopolitics intermesh and interpolate. While the significance of the relation between the bios and circuits of finance has begun to be recognised, biofinancialisation remains little interrogated. In seeking to address this lacuna, the paper focuses on the recent transformation of the UK after-retirement market and, in particular, the invention of enhanced and impaired pension annuities. Enhanced annuity products like the ‘smokers’ pension’ provide, we argue, a striking example of the ways in which biofinancialisation works to fashion new worlds for capitalist accumulation, in this case through the capitalisation of morbidity and of the residual vital capacities of life, and the ways in which novel forms of biofinancial subject and subjectivity are produced to populate such worlds – to make them live. The paper concludes by identifying three political fracture points or fault lines in the enterprise to secure life biofinancially through the enhancing of annuities: first, the promise of reconciliation; second, the promise of autonomy and freedom; and, third, the promise of a good retirement.

Keywords:

• biopolitics
• financialisation
• subjects
• pensions
• annuity

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank Ben Anderson and the two other anonymous referees, Paul Langley and Andrew Leyshon for their generous comments which have considerably improved the paper's argument. The paper has also benefited immensely from discussions with Christian Berndt, Joe Deville, Leigh Johnson, Mark Kear, Donncha Marron and Liz McFall. Shaun French would like to acknowledge the generous support of the British Academy small grant programme (SG090467: ‘Calculating careless lives’) which helped to fund the research presented in this paper. We are grateful to Elaine Watts for cartographic assistance.

Notes

1. The term ‘capital/life/subject relation’ is adapted from Anderson's (2011) use of the descriptor ‘capital/life relation’.

2. ‘Double entry’ is a technical actuarial term which refers to the fact that the Anderton tables are constructed with respect to both age and duration (that is, years to live) (Anderton 1995).