on May 13, 2025
Published on May 6, 2025 Updated on May 9, 2025

Guest Lecture: Kristina Roney

Sex as Investment in Honoré de Balzac’s Comédie humaine: Des Liaisons Fructueuses

Kristina Roney is a professor at Washington and Lee University in the US and part of the Fulbright research program at CY AS. 

Balzac, Society and the Birth of Modern Finance is a monograph project studying the rise of modern financial markets in France during its transition from a traditional agricultural to modern industrial economy through the literature of Honoré de Balzac. It traces the advancement of industrial financial markets from banking and credit to bonds, onto industrial specialization and investment portfolio diversification, before finally progressing into purely speculative products such as newspaper subscriptions and insurance policies. This trajectory demonstrates a clear divergence away from the material nature of an agricultural economy’s focus on land as sole source of investment and into increasingly nebulous forms of intangible investment commodities. This can further lead to investments in an ultimate, albeit informal, but purely intangible and sensual experience of sex to be covered in this final chapter. As Dorothy Kelly so aptly notes in her analysis of La Cousine Bette, “[w]hen men are unfaithful and pursue their own desires heedless of their families, sex disconnects from marriage and becomes a commodity that undermines the family’s well-being.”[1] Although the prior statement refers exclusively to male infidelity, this gendered approach reveals the historical events that set such schemes into motion and the motivations behind engagement by each of the two sexes.

 

Date: May 13th, 2025 from 2pm to 3pm.

The hybrid guest lecture is organised in person at the Auditorium of MIR in Neuville-sur-Oise and remotely on Zoom.

To attend the remote guest lecture, please connect to Zoom:  https://cyu-fr.zoom.us/j/96913355143

The video will be online on the CY AS YouTube channel