Fabula in Theory: Noam Yuran

The Fabula Festival’s theoretical-humanistic event, in collaboration with the publishing house Analecta, is dedicated to Israeli philosopher and one of the leading contemporary theoreticians of capitalism, Noam Yuran. Noam's teaching and research turn to the history of economic thought as a way to explore alternative conceptualizations of the relations between economy and society. Yuran, a Senior Lecturer at Bar-Ilan University, studies how capitalist logic shapes our social norms, intimate relationships and consumer subjectivity. 

The event places focus on Yuran's book The Sexual Economy of Capitalism, to be published in Slovenian translation by Analecta. In Sexual Economy Yuran maps the erotic dimension of capitalism onto concrete economic questions around money, goods, private property, and capital. Yuran offers readers a powerful understanding of capitalism in its unique articulation of love, sex, and money. In analysing marital relations, advertising, consumption and financial practices, Yuran shows how capitalism exploits the boundaries between what can be bought and what is outside the financial domain – but only seemingly. His theory goes beyond classical economic debates. Yuran argues that capitalist society is based on a paradox where the category of what money cannot buy is not a form of monetary limitation, but extension. Capitalism, through the eroticisation of consumption and advertising, creates a cultural economy that transforms the relations between sexuality, consumption and power. The book also examines the role of visual media in shaping 20th-century consumer subjectivity, at the intersection of economy, eroticism and social norms.

In What Money Wants: An Economy of Desire (2014), Noam Yuran argues that money is not merely a technical tool in the administration of goods, but a vehicle for complex human desires. His works help us understand how deeply capitalism has penetrated the most intimate recesses of humankind, profoundly reshaping our values and attitudes.

The talk will be hosted by Alenka Zupančič.

The event will be held in English, with simultaneous translation into Slovenian.