EXCERPT Elie Ayache is an expert in derivatives pricing and author of many articles on the philosophy of derivatives trading. This theoretical work culminated in his 2010 book The Blank Swan. In this unique work whose references range from Derrida to Deleuze, Blanchot to Badiou, by way of Black, Scholes and Merton and other financial and philosophical luminaries, he recounts how his reflections on the nature of price and the market led him to an original philosophical position that converges with Quentin Meillassoux’s critique of probabilistic thinking and explorations of absolute contingency. In our interview, Ayache elaborates on The Blank Swan’s response to Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan, drawing a more radical set of conclusions from the failure of probability and setting the scene for a renewed ontological thinking in which the unfolding of time is sidelined in favour of a conception of the market as the place of a writing of the future…