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In 1913 Freud warned his colleagues that civilized people will always treat two things with ‘inconsistency, prudishness and hypocrisy’: money and sex (Freud, 1913, p. 131). Following Freud's observation, there is nothing civilized about David Bennett's new book. In frankness, straight-talk, a small amount of obscenity and a significant amount of humour, The Currency of Desire writes about multiple orgasms, prostitution, fetishism, and above all, masturbation. The economy portrayed and analysed in the book is the economy of spending rather than of production, and the book has much more to say about consumption than about saving. As such, it is itself a product of the sexual revolution, participating in the sexual culture of mandatory and frequent joy. And like sex, it is both serious and pleasurable.
Bennett is neither the first to point out the similarity of metaphors and terms used in many languages to describe monetary and sexual matters, nor to discuss the degree to which the vocabulary of money/sex shapes physiology, politics, anthropology, religion, and sociology. Saving and spending, of course, come to mind, but also jewels, fluids, purse, wallet and much more, not to mention the cost-benefit analysis of falling in love, having a one-night stand, or loving a person. Indeed, for the last 300 years, the urge to exchange, the libidinal energy to waste, and the societal obligation to accumulate have shaped our language, imagination, psychology, and politics. And since economic and psychological life is determined by discourse, our entire social existence is shaped by what Bennett calls ‘the intercourse between money and sex’ (p. 3). But what happens when we dissolve metaphors into their concreteness, as one does in psychoanalysis?
Bennett discusses the rise of the shared vocabulary of economics and sex in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the slow process of abstraction of terms such as libido, energy, investment, and exchange since the Industrial Revoluti