From Derrida to Zucman, thinking liquidity as the metaphysics of capital
Introduction: Liquidation, or the Modern Passion for Disappearance
Some words crystallize an entire epoch. To liquidate is one of them.
Behind its bureaucratic clarity — to settle, to close, to end — hides a passion: the will to make disappearance orderly.
To liquidate means to erase without scandal, to render the world legible, computable, fluid. It is to convert the resistance of the real into the transparency of the sign.
But beneath this neat verb lies something larger — a metaphysical operation through which modernity strives to dissolve whatever resists circulation: matter, debt, the body, time.
Liquidity has become our language of salvation. In finance, morality, climate policy, even intimacy — everything must flow.
Yet the modern obsession with the liquid carries its repression: absolute liquidity is also the erasure of duration, of memory, of debt.
It does not free the world; it flattens it.
Derrida, in Specters of Marx, had already sensed this: behind the movement of capital lurks a haunted economy, a circulation without incarnation.
This ambivalence resurfaces today in the debate around Gabriel Zucman’s global wealth tax.
To tax non-liquid assets — unlisted shares, real estate, private equity — is to demand that wealth solidify, that it cease floating in abstraction and return to the realm of the tangible.
It is a fiscal gesture, but also a metaphysical one: after rendering everything fluid, humanity now seeks an anchor.
This essay reads liquidate as a total concept — at the crossroads of language, finance, and ontology.
From the accountant’s ledger to Derrida’s différance, from Marx’s ghost to Zucman’s tax, the liquid emerges as the form through which the modern world both circulates and dissolves itself.
I. Liquidity as a Modern Myth: From Circulation to Transparency
1. From Gold to Algorithm: The Genealogy of the Liquid
Western economic history can be read as a slow conquest of liquidity.
The shift from gold to paper in the nineteenth century displaced value from matter to trust.
The deregulation of the 1980s, followed by algorithmic finance in the 2000s, completed the process: wealth ceased to be substance and became velocity.
Each era intensified a shared belief — that everything can be made fluid.
Lyotard saw in postmodernity the triumph of the performative: the true is what circulates.
Foucault, in his lectures on neoliberalism, described a governmentality of flows — managing not production but circulation itself.
Liquidity thus became a political ideal, a moralized form of transparency.
2. The Ideology of Flow
For Keynes, the “preference for liquidity” was a prudential reflex.
For Bauman, it became an ethic.
In the liquid world, immobility is sin: what doesn’t move is suspect.
Derrida would have recognized here the return of the metaphysics of presence — the fantasy of a meaning so pure it leaves no remainder.
Liquid modernity is the promise of total circulation, a universe without sediment or delay.
II. “To Liquidate”: Semiotics of Disappearance
Etymologically, liquidare means “to make smooth, to melt, to flow.”
But in its economic use, the verb reverses itself: to liquidate is to end, to purge, to erase.
It carries within it the contradiction of modernity — to produce movement through destruction.
Every liquidation is a ritual of purification.
To liquidate a debt is to wipe away its memory, to convert relation into equivalence.
Derrida would call this the logic of the pharmakon: the cure that poisons.
Liquidity heals by simplifying, but it kills by forgetting.
It is the violence of clarity — the refusal of residue, of slowness, of opacity.
III. The Economy as Material Deconstruction: Rendering the Illiquid Liquid
1. The Cult of Conversion
Contemporary capitalism no longer produces things; it produces liquidity.
Its purpose is not fabrication but liquefaction — turning everything into circulation: assets, data, human attention.
The hierarchy is inverted: wealth no longer generates liquidity; liquidity generates wealth.
The fantasy here is the abolition of time.
To render liquid is to deny duration, to compress the interval between promise and realization.
But Derrida reminds us that meaning itself depends on delay — on the trace, on différance.
Absolute liquidity, therefore, is the dream of pure presence — and thus, paradoxically, of annihilation.
2. Anthropology of the Liquid: Killing the Gift
In the societies analyzed by Marcel Mauss, value emerges from delay — from the gift that demands a counter-gift.
Liquidity abolishes this rhythm. To liquidate is to kill the symbolic debt, to eliminate reciprocity.
Credit, from credere, once meant faith. It now means speed.
Where Mauss saw cycle and return, the liquid economy installs the non-returning flow — a world where nothing owes, only moves.
III bis. Securitization: Liquidity as Fetish
Securitization, born in the 1970s, perfected the dream of liquidity.
It transformed illiquid debts into tradable securities — promises into circulation.
Philosophically, it replaced the thing with its sign.
Derrida would see in this the logic of the supplement: the sign that compensates absence, then becomes substance.
Financial capitalism ceased to rest on production and began to rest on motion.
No longer does wealth generate the title; the title creates the wealth.
The subprime crisis exposed the aporia: liquidity had become autonomous, self-referential, spectral.
Zucman’s global tax proposal thus addresses a world already liquefied beyond recognition.
To tax capital today is to tax its ghost — to recall to presence what exists only as trace.
IV. Fiduciary and Liquid: Two Regimes of Belief
The fiduciary comes from fiducia — faith. It depends on collective trust in a sign: the note, the signature, the state.
The liquid, in contrast, appears immediate, tangible, visible.
Yet in our time these regimes have merged.
The liquid has become fiduciary (we believe in the market’s fluidity as we once believed in gold), and the fiduciary has become liquid (trust must show itself in movement).
The flow itself now performs faith.
Derrida might call this an auto-performative foundation: circulation sustains itself without external guarantee.
Liquidity becomes the new global creed.
Where the fiduciary required invisible faith, the liquid demands perpetual visibility — a live-streamed belief.
Zucman’s tax disturbs this new theology of motion. It insists that faith, to hold, requires resistance — a body, a delay, a remainder.
V. The Zucman Tax: Liquidating the Illiquid
Zucman’s global wealth tax aims to correct an asymmetry: capital is planetary, taxation remains territorial.
Its principle is to assess wealth not by what flows, but by what could flow — by its potential liquidity.
But to tax an illiquid asset is to legislate a fiction.
The state acts as if liquidity already existed.
This as if is performative: it calls the liquid into being by decree.
Derrida would name it an institutionalized différance — a levy on the future.
The state, unable to tax the real flow, taxes its anticipation.
It monetizes the promise.
This is not merely policy; it is metaphysics.
The fiscal apparatus no longer mirrors the economy — it creates it, retroactively.
Yet in seeking to make everything liquid, it confronts impossibility: one cannot tax a promise without dissolving it.
VI. Derrida, Marx, and the Spectrality of Value
In Specters of Marx, Derrida describes capital as a presence that never fully appears — an economy of ghosts.
The liquid is its perfect form: it moves, invisible yet effective.
To tax capital is to try to pin down a specter.
For Marx, money was the general equivalent — the abstraction of labor.
Derrida adds: this equivalence never stabilizes; it defers itself endlessly.
The Zucman tax exposes the paradox: to materialize a ghost, to give fiscal body to what lives only as sign.
But the liquid, by essence, escapes every container. It evaporates under the gaze that seeks to fix it.
VII. The Contemporary Overflow: Toward Total Flow
The twenty-first century has radicalized the metaphysics of liquidity.
Cryptocurrencies are pure fictions of flow — fiduciary without state, liquid without substance.
Attention markets turn human time into tradable flux — an economy where consciousness itself circulates.
Green funds and carbon markets liquefy the planet, translating ecosystems into assets, air into returns.
In each of these domains, liquidity becomes virtue.
The world’s value lies in its ability to move.
Zucman’s proposal thus reads as a counter-gesture — an attempt to slow, to re-embody, to recall the material.
But capital no longer inhabits the earth. It inhabits the current.
Conclusion: Toward an Economy of Slowness
To liquidate, finally, is to end — but elegantly.
It is a clean death, without residue, absorbed into the smooth logic of flow.
Modernity has taken this as its ethos: from logistics chains to social media, from finance to identity, one exists only by moving.
Late capitalism has replaced the morality of labor with the morality of circulation.
To work is secondary; to flow is mandatory.
And when the state tries to tax that motion, to slow it down, it confronts its own paradox: wanting to immobilize what defines itself by mobility.
Zucman’s tax is therefore not just a fiscal reform; it is a philosophical test.
It reveals the fragility of a world where liquidity has replaced solidity, speed justice, and transparency truth.
But liquidation is not fate.
Derrida reminds us that there is always a remainder, a trace that resists closure.
Perhaps this remainder is the seed of another economy — one grounded in delay, in gravity, in slowness.
An economy that does not seek to liquefy the world, but to make the non-liquid livable again — to reclaim resistance as a condition of meaning.
The universal liquidation of things reveals less a triumph than a fear: the fear of stillness.
Yet without stillness, there can be no justice, no duration, no memory.
To liquidate is to avoid debt; to inhabit is to accept it — to owe time, and to build relation from that owing.
Capitalism’s end may not come as collapse, but as evaporation.
And in that slow drying, perhaps, a promise might reappear — not to balance the accounts, but to count again what truly remains: the traces.