The 2008 global financial crisis originated in the US subprime mortgage market in 2007 and reached a climax in September 2008. The US went into recession at the end of 2007, followed by several European countries in 2008–9, the crisis of eurozone public debt beginning in 2010. In his history of the financial crises, Adam Tooze argues that, despite popular beliefs in both Europe and the US, the eurozone crisis is the direct consequence of the 2008 financial crisis, ‘a massive aftershock of the earthquake in the North Atlantic financial system of 2008, working its way out with a time lag through the labyrinthine political framework of the EU’. The idea, then, that 2008 was an American or Anglo-Saxon crisis is ‘deeply misleading’.

This is a book about intellectual and artistic responses in France to a crisis that arose in the US but which implicated the world. The book develops a theoretical argument about the relation between images and finance in the post-crash period through an analysis of the representation of the financial crisis in a selection of contemporary French films and texts. The central hypothesis is that financial instruments and especially derivatives are taken up as a conceptual resource for thinking about creative practice and the circulation of media images in the post-crash world. This thinking of images through derivatives is the first and central sense that I give to the phrase ‘derivative images’. More generally, the book shows how the concepts at the heart of this crash – primarily derivatives, but also notions such as the market and exchange – have been creatively recuperated by theorists to think about images. Key moments of the history of the crisis and its fallout are sketched in the course of the book (the acute political fallout in Chapters 1 and 2, the nature of derivatives and their application in film and literary theory in Chapter 3, the Kerviel affair in Chapter 4, the transatlantic interbank lending seizure in Chapter 5, and the social consequences of the crisis in Chapter 6).

When one starts to think about the financial crisis, one must first address the word ‘crisis’, a word that several of the writers surveyed in this book dislike, dispute or seek to qualify.