Jean-Joseph Goux is a French philosopher. He studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, and his early philosophical work gained shape in the context of French structualism during the late 1960s and early 1970s. While his early research on symbolic economies was initially related to the work of Roland Barthes and Louis Althusser, Goux’s highly praised essay “Numismatiques,” first published in 1968 and 1969 in the journal Tel Quel, which shaped French intellectual and literary culture at a crucial historical juncture, had a decisive influence on the emerging work of Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard. Goux’s work is centered on the close relationship between language and money, focusing on the symbolic economies and the imaginaries of finance capitalism that shape modernity from the nineteenth century to the present.

Before he joined Rice, Goux taught at the Université de Paril VIII-Vincennes and the École Normale Supérieure and held visiting professorships at the University of California, San Diego, and at the University of California, Berkeley, at Duke University, Brown University, and the Université de Montréal, Canada. Goux’s books have been widely translated into English, German, Japanese, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish.