Money God

The "Money God" is Boothby's coinage for the structural position money occupies in capitalist society: not a deity in the traditional theological sense, but a faceless, anonymous force that performs the function of the sacred Big Other. The theoretical move is to read money through the lens of das Ding — money colonizes the void at the center of desire, standing in for the impossible, unreachable Thing that structures the subject's longing. Because every subject in capitalist society is always-already addressed by money's logic before any explicit ideological address can occur, money operates as a pre-subjective interpellating agency. Subjects are constituted as formally "free" agents — free to buy, sell, compete — not through conscious ideological inculcation but through their structural relation to money as the substance that promises access to jouissance. In this sense, the Money God is not worshipped through ritual but through the very form of daily economic life.

What distinguishes the Money God from the traditional God is precisely its anonymity and its indifference to the social bond. Classical theological interpellation — Althusser's policeman's "Hey, you there!" writ cosmic — addresses the subject as a particular, recognized, and named being. The Money God addresses no one in particular and everyone at once, reducing subjects to interchangeable units of purchasing power. This structural equivalence atomizes the social body: where traditional religious interpellation could, at least formally, generate a community of the faithful, the Money God's interpellation forecloses collective solidarity by anchoring each subject individually to their private relation with the void of desire. The concept thus functions as a specification of how das Ding is socially filled — or rather, how the promise of filling it is endlessly circulated — under the capitalist discursive regime.

The concept appears once in the corpus, in diaeresis-richard-boothby-embracing-the-void-rethinking-the-origin-of-the-sacred (p. 199), and sits at the intersection of several canonical concepts. It extends the concept of Interpellation by arguing that money supersedes the classic Althusserian mechanism: rather than a particular ideological apparatus doing the hailing, the Money God hails through the structural form of economic life itself, prior to any specific address. This radicalization converges with the post-Althusserian critique that interpellation leaves out jouissance — the Money God interpellates precisely by offering the structural promise of jouissance, the fantasy of access to das Ding. The concept is simultaneously a specification of Das Ding: money occupies the structural place of the Thing, the "beyond-of-the-signified" around which desire endlessly orbits. Rather than sublimating das Ding in the manner of courtly love or art, capitalist society installs money as its perpetual, anonymous stand-in, producing the endless metonymic slide of Desire from commodity to commodity. The relationship to Alienation is equally direct: money as Big Other intensifies the vel of alienation, since the "free" capitalist subject is constituted through a forced choice — participate in the money economy or lose any symbolic existence — that mirrors the structure of "your money or your life." Finally, the Money God functions as a Master Signifier of capitalist Ideology, but one that, unlike classical master signifiers, disavows its own emptiness by appearing as a positive, quantifiable substance rather than an admitted void.

Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the SacredRichard Boothby · 2023 (p.199)

Money is the magic substance that interpellates every member of capitalist society. And in that system, money really does become a kind of god, though a god that is unmistakably different from the traditional one.

The phrase "magic substance" is theoretically loaded because it condenses both the fetish character of money (a material thing invested with immaterial, quasi-sacred power) and the Lacanian logic of das Ding as a void-filling substance; the qualification "unmistakably different from the traditional one" marks the structural novelty — this god interpellates anonymously and without community, foreclosing the solidarity that theological Big Others at least formally promised.