This book is packed with philosophy and if you don’t handle it with care it will explode in your hands. If you open it properly, however, you will find an explosion of meaning in every sentence and every word and a constant challenge for thought. Some say its writing style is difficult, which is true, no doubt. I am not here, indeed, to cajole the reader, and least of all, to condescend to vulgarize my topic.

Throughout its writing, I was guided solely by the thought of the market – a thought, as you will all agree, that is compelled to diverge and to constantly break out, lest the sequence converges and the market comes to a halt. I haven’t been interested by the domains but by their limits, and beyond their limits, by inverting the domains. I have travelled the logic of derivative pricing to its end, tracing this journey in my book, and found no final passage to the market but in inverting the traditional order of thought and in placing price before probability and absolute contingency before possibility. The result is a reconstruction of the market of contingent claims in the realm of writing and difference instead of identity and delimitation of states.

Both in the philosophical argument and in the writing strategy, I have avoided every naivety in thought and every comforting station, finding the disappearance of the market as the last contingency that it is necessary to think, especially in these days. This is the moment when the book, as a binder, and the market, as a domain, can no longer contain thought and when their non naive recovery requires a total revolution. One in which the metaphysics of the market becomes the market as metaphysics and the interior of the book becomes the world inverted.

Elie Ayache