Currency of nihilism
Book launch
18:15-19.45
Friday 30 October 2026
College Building A130
City St George’s, University of London
Register to attend here
Join us at CITYPERC to launch Amin Samman’s new book, Currency of Nihilism. Giulia Dal Maso will act as discussant.
What happens to economic life when meaning and value come apart? In his new book, Amin Samman shows how the latest trends in digital finance restage the dilemmas of nihilism in new ways. From cryptocurrencies and meme stocks to Silicon Valley venture capital and the global boom in artificial intelligence, economic life today thrives on the ambiguous allure of nothingness, annihilation, and disappearance. All the historical moods of nihilism now circulate through the financial system, Samman argues, and each further wave of technological advance provides yet more means of speculating on these moods. The result is a lucrative new culture of financial nihilism with no end in sight.
The event is free and open to all but registration is required. Please register to attend here: https://www.citystgeorges.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/2026/october/book-launch-currency-of-nihilism.
Amin Samman is Reader in International Political Economy at City St George’s, University of London. His research explores the temporal, historical, and existential dimensions of contemporary finance. He is founder and editor-in-chief of the journal Finance and Society, author of History in Financial Times (Stanford University Press, 2019), and editor of Clickbait Capitalism (Manchester University Press, 2023). Currency of Nihilism (Stanford University Press, 2026) is his latest book.
Giulia Dal Maso is Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) at the University of Cambridge. Her work has appeared in journals such as Finance and Society, South Atlantic Quarterly, Historical Materialism, Journal of Cultural Economy, and Antipode. She is the author of Risky Expertise in Chinese Financialisation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and is currently writing Longevity Capitalism, under contract with Verso.