Category: Volume 23 – Number 3 – May 2013

In The Making of the Indebted Man, Maurizio Lazzarato presents “the increasing force of the creditor-debtor relationship” in the world remade by financial capitalism since the late 1970s (23). “Debt acts as a ‘capture,’ ‘predation,’ and ‘extraction’ machine on the whole of society,” he writes (29); “the creditor-debtor relation concerns the entirety of the current population as well as the population to come” (32). If, in the last chapter of Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber exculpates contemporary working-class debtors, subject to decreased wages and plied continually with credit opportunities, for incurring debt to live life above the level of mere survival, floating consumption as conviviality or social participation, Lazzarato perhaps more absolutely deindividuates debt, for in this neoliberal epoch it always already profoundly conditions any given economic circuit, whether one’s transactions are mediated by payment plan or not.[1]
 
One concern that emerges from these excerpts from K. Lorraine Graham’s Graph – with its unstinting demonstrations of the subject’s inextricability from debt, the degree to which debt saturates social relations – is the strange morphology of economic non-agency in debt culture, the extended mutations of (the alibi of) the sovereign subject of contractual exchange.  In this contemporary working class universe, a work “ethic” has become even less about sacrificing for the future than about a futurity already intractably mortgaged to or sold out for a still-precarious present: how to maneuver among seemingly non-negotiable vectors of hyper-exploitation that not only enjoin and profit from labor, but require life itself to be rented?  As Graham lays bare the intricacies of this ruthless system, she puts on display the surplus exactions of (gendered) affective labor, but more so the affect and social judgment generated around each reticulation of an ever-complexifying debt network.  What Graph finally portrays is not canny, street-smart manipulations of what exactly must be rendered – would-be debt-defying feats – but the very impossibility of being a “good” subject of debt, of navigating labyrinths designed to be so difficult to negotiate that the debtor, regardless of fidelity to dues, is dug continually deeper in arrears.
 
Take, for instance, Graham’s appropriation text (outright expropriation of pre-fabricated language or sublet?), comprised of select search results for the phrase “is not easy” combined with those for the term “austerity.”  Here the grotesquerie of the neoliberal suffocation of the welfare state posed as natural fact meets the sleazy, faux-sympathetic come-on of coping mechanisms for hire: Graham pinpoints and plays up the debt-service industry’s massaging rhetoric—“we’re here to help”—with its promise to understand rather than condemn the debtor who must pay by exposing herself if she is ever to get out of the hole, as it lures her to meet the class antagonism of debt redeemingly re-branded as life challenge.  Graham’s reframing perfectly captchas the paradox of the creditor’s invocation of bygone civility in the very act of describing a most uncivil insistence: “You can write us a letter and we will stop contacting you.”  If its inclusion of protest (“thousands of people in Lisbon protest austerity measures”) opens onto a possible opposition to working with austerity—indeed, of profiting from it—the piece also exemplifies the affective dynamics that overtax working-class virtues, preying upon vulnerability, an aversion to being beholden, and the willingness to pull the belt tighter, even as the debt economy works over labor only to extrude it. “In capitalist logics of askesis,” as Lauren Berlant observes, “the workers’ obligation is to be more rational than the system, and their recompense is to be held in a sense of pride at surviving the scene of their own attrition.” Or as Graham says: “Life is not easy for any of us, but what of that?”  Another appropriation text, on “office automation,” reads as a counter-exemplar of actor network theory: the repeated imposition of the word “automation” in discourse cribbed from corporate ad copy serves to mystify precisely which tasks the technology will perform, as human causality continually slips logics in these triumphalist formulations.  Such deskilling, dehumanizing efficiency strategies make workers mere mechanized adjuncts to operating systems: “Use office automation hardware and make action-based systems a habit. Automation design systems through supervision and labor that uplifts humanity.”  More chilling, though, is the managerial class-position in which the system stands.
 
Graph offers up its mediated representations of class epistemology through compassionate but unsparing insight into damaged identity.  In a move akin to conceptual writing, Graham’s devastating opening list poem – auto-populated by a bank statement – contrives a post-lyric for an unforgivingly evacuated precariat subjectivity: the place of self-expression has been usurped by monetized predicates of self-worth, glaringly posting their I’s proximity to economic disaster on an unremitting daily basis.  In verse reduced to the self’s bottom line, Graham reveals the brutal economistic lens seemingly internalized by the post-lyrical subject (if such flatness can signal interiority), yet her initial volley complicates that reduction insofar as it presents the self as an elusive value-field: “Value: One’s self cannot be anywhere.”  If this suggests the essential dislocation of the contemporary self, traceable only through the virtual flux of the electronic transfer of funds, it also points to the ways in which the self-as-value is continually re-generated through motion, circulation, and exchange: earnings and expenditure.
 
And yet Graham’s depiction of this volatility does not give onto a sense of more wholesome, alternate circuitries; it is rather the courage of ressentiment that frames minor but nonetheless loaded resistances. Indeed, it is the voicing of class resentment, barred from public discourse in a culture that worships and exculpates wealth, that Graham stages as a form of affective resistance.[2]  “‘Don’t be the partner that follows’”: the universality of tough love and the feminist advice dispensed by a graduate advisor is undercut by the uncounted benefits enjoyed by its purveyor (no need to follow when one receives free plane tickets to visit).  Graham’s persona spits unabashedly in the face of entitlement by reversing its epistemic hegemony: “Her employer was astonishingly perceptive though wealthy from birth. Money from birth is a lack.”  Here debt is, for once, transferred up.  That persona similarly expresses scorn for the wealthy patron at the “fancy yacht club restaurant” on whom she, as “horrible waitress,” “[dumps] a rack of lamb with blackcurrant coulis.”  The affective labor demanded of the hospitality worker is refused (so, too, any unwaged guilt or shame in the aftermath), as is a sense of debt for a ruined pair of “travel pants.”  This bad debtor, who wishes to be a better waitress only to earn better money, espouses an “antiproductivism” that “allows us to see work as a form of violence,” spurning the sentimentality, moralism, and drive to self-improvement that forced work seeks to incur (Berg 162).[3]
 
Readers of Leslie Scalapino will recognize citations of her work in several of these excerpts, as well as Graham’s own homage to Scalapino’s style and to her preoccupation both with class disparity and with representing (Buddhist) phenomenology, dislocations of agency, and uncannily decentered subjective awareness of those dislocations.[4]  In composing Graph, Graham researched Scalapino’s correspondence in the UCSD Archive for New Poetry, while reading Zither & Autobiography and The Return of Painting, The Pearl, and Orion: A Trilogy. The latter incorporates descriptions of some of Scalapino’s first jobs, such as indexing (Graham, “no subject”). Though Graham had initially thought to “trace an economics” in Scalapino’s texts, what emerges are framings of her brief investigations into the dehiscence of agency and intention in social exchange, into the primal indebted condition of human vulnerability and mortality, and into the scene of writing considered as (non)action: “Going out for a walk because she felt sick and lonely and had to go out…She just sat at the juice stand, shivering with sunstroke. The man there suspicious, wanting her to move on from her appearance”; “She knew she could die, that she would. Actions are nothing – this is impossible.  Have used them up – and writing isn’t anything.”  Scalapino is present, too, in Graham’s affecting, disjunctive text on social security payments, in which a series of statements linking the speaker’s future monthly social benefits to salary, years worked, age at time of retirement, disability, etc. is interlaced with fragments of flat, jagged, Scalapino-derived narration of conflictual incidents (e.g. a mugging), marked by metanarrative temporalizing of events and interpretations of agency within them.  Despite the actuarial complexity of Social Security, its account of a lifetime of paid work can only be a massively impoverished summation, given, for instance, its failure to reflect so much affective labor: the debt repaid by the nation-state is hardly what is owed, a disjointedness here embodied in form.
 
Instead of a more frontal stridency, Graham’s work operates through telling elision, and especially through a flattened tone filiated much more strongly with Scalapino than with other contemporary experiments in affective neutralization;[5] often, however, this yields an elegant, paradoxical equipoise, as in her final poem:
 

 

I have no spouse. I have no children. I do not intend to ever have a spouse. I do not want to ever have children.

 
This persona may be responding to an interviewer (sizing up the applicant, one imagines, as suitably hyper-exploitable live-in help), yet even if she speaks without such pointed solicitation, one wonders whether these statements express preference or coercion: has precarity robbed this subject of coupledom and reproductive futurity, such that evincing negative desire towards it can only express a weak agency rebounding from the system’s prior refusal?[6]  Or does she queer and resist the highly gendered “social necessity debt” (Berg) by opting out of the affective, symbolic, and political economy of the Child?
 
As potent in its ambivalences as in its clarities—“My birthday is June 11, and I’d appreciate a phone call or a card”—Graham’s Graph x-rays debt culture’s warping and crumpling of affective life and its implosion of life potential as peculiar to the post-2008 situation of the American working-class, in the expanded, variable modalities that class has come to assume precisely through the debt economy.  Graph not only directs a keen, critical gaze at scenes and facts of gainful employment, even the wage nexus itself; most crucially, it exposes the obscenity that those who are most exploited are also those rigged to owe, and those forced to pay, the most.  Thus Graham affords us greater purchase, and perhaps even leverage, on capital’s uneven distribution of risk and liability downwards to those already most vulnerable: Graph protests what capital takes without paying, and gives credit where credit is due.

Attack of the Zombie Debt

“Attack of the Zombie Debt” is not the title of a topical horror movie, but the headline of an article in an online financial magazine that warns of a new danger lurking in financial markets: the return of outstanding and long-term debts owed to credit card issuers, mobile phone providers, public utilities, and loan companies. Though uncollected, these debts are not simply written off after a limited period, but remain on the books for years before being sold – at very low rates – to specialized collection agencies. These agencies then pursue debtors for the outstanding amount, often operating at the edge of consumer legislation and with limited electronic information. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, this relatively new business earned around 3 billion dollars in the US in 2011. Where vampires became the poster-monsters of new patterns of consumption in periods of financial prosperity, zombies manifest an economy that, having bitten off more toxic debts than it can chew, just keeps on chewing….
 
Zombie debt is another manifestation of an apparently contagious association between finance and the walking dead. Like zombie economics, zombie banks, and zombie capitalism, the phrase seems to follow the logic of Ulrich Beck’s “zombie categories” of modernity, in which old ideas, institutions, or practices persist despite having little currency, relevance, or credibility. The figure’s return, however, also takes its generic bearings from a longer-standing gothic political-economic lexicon that goes at least as far back as Capital’s images of industrial monstrosity and dead labor feeding on living, working bodies (Marx 506, 342). At the same time – and with the pop cultural nous of reflexive political media – its sense of a shifting financial mood responds to recent transformations in the political meanings of vampirism: the exciting figure of a voracious consumerist euphoria of unlimited desire (and credit) cedes to depressive stagnation and elegies for neoliberal fiscal strategy. But the figure of the zombie extends beyond its habitual popular cultural associations and locations to occupy space in financial columns and on big-budget movie screens, suggesting its increased significance in politicized cultural commentary. Less a figure of mass, mindless and destructive culture that ought to be destroyed like all monsters, the energy called up by the zombie figure is more dispersed and more difficult to identify and target in political terms. Embodying polarization and ambivalence without resolution, the zombie is both the mass numbed into robotic subservience without higher aims or aspirations, and the system that mindlessly accumulates without human consideration or sense of value (other than share-value, of course). Zombies – fictionally and discursively – enact a practically closed circuit of persistence, paralysis, and indecision: political and humane horizons are repeatedly imagined to collapse in apocalyptic meltdown at the same time as the fears and fantasies they evoke serve to defer actual creative-destructive decisions. Significantly, however, zombies present a more material form of undeath than the specters or vampires conjured in quasi-spiritual or phantasmatic forms: zombies are dead bodies. Hence their link to economic and material conditions is stronger, as is their relation to material rather than symbolic connotations of debt.
 
Zombies draw out the current primacy of economics, manifesting the effects of the absorption of culture and the determination of politics by unforgiving market rhetoric, in which money becomes the only law, reason, or mode of judgment. A cultural – and fictional – figure from another age of imperialism, the zombie tracks global capital’s expansion across and incursion into previously distinct social and symbolic spheres. Here, horror is significant: where economic modes of credit and debt seemed to require social, symbolic, and subjective correlates in the form of belief, trust, confidence, and desire (with debt and guilt marking the complementary poles of material and symbolic investment), the globalization and technologization of capital’s circulations are less and less dependent on anything other than material inscriptions of the debt relation. The material and symbolic relation that historically distinguished and articulated the economic and political contours of debt is stretched if not severed as economy becomes the dominant factor: not only is it a question of the extent to which economy can operate without recourse to symbols, subjects, and State (all the expensive trappings of ideological apparatuses, infrastructure and investments in social bonds and consensus), but of directly controlling and affecting subjective and financial registrations of debt. Under these conditions, articulations of desire and fear replace circuits of identification and ideological investment, bypassing the necessity for credit and debt in a symbolic sense. The polarization of desire-fear is the affective trajectory marked by the axis of vampire-zombie: if the former figures capital’s expansive, individualistic, and aesthetic flights of aspiration, liberal desire, and consumption, the latter exhibits social implosion, global disaster, and political repulsion or paralysis in the (gnawed) face of precarious markets and fearful futures. Desire and fear operate in relation and oscillation, not opposition. They operate within – and in the service of – the same system, acknowledging a continuity of debt crises and credit booms. Whether “liberating” markets from regulations and state mechanisms or demanding austerity (another name for limiting State expenditure in the interests of financial freedom and responsibility), neoliberalism’s employment of desire or fear plots an arc that inscribes market politics at extensive and intensive levels: debt is global and personal. Indeed, debt becomes just another more frightening and perhaps more primal form of credit; if the latter was promoted in terms of belief and desire, the former, through fear, accomplishes the same task of securing the bonds that tie individuals not within any consensual, social, or symbolic circuit, but directly to a world defined by and as a financial system. When the control exercised almost automatically by debt works through fear alone, does this “new order” even require individual desire, belief, or symbolic and political values?

 

Un-debt

Debt-credit, desire-fear, vampire-zombie: these hyphenations suggest a shift from the antimonies sustained by modern symbolic and political formations to the rapid fluctuations of capital as it soaks up social and cultural spheres that were relatively autonomous. Indifferent to opposition and separation, its polarities are surface effects of an underlying but shadowy system: Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, or Fredric Jameson’s immense network and cannibalistic monster of finance capital. It remains both vampire – a hideous monster sucking all life’s surplus – and zombie – palpably dead but continuing to consume. And it works on two parallel or doubled levels, like Jean Baudrillard’s version of “neo-capitalism,” which undergoes phases of “systematic alternation” (expansion, consumption, liberation, contraction, restraint) as an “immense polymorphous machine” that has little need of extra-economic factors to sustain it: “the symbolic (gift and counter-gift, reciprocity and reversal, expenditure and sacrifice) no longer counts for anything.” Instead, “political economy itself only survives in a brain-dead state, but all those phantoms continue to plague the operational field of value” (35). While symbolic exchange survives as phantom and zombie, the vampire is both the immense machine that works by and for itself and the cause of zombie brain-death infecting all (human) judgments.  Zombie debt is a debt that will not die, that cannot be repaid; it signals an almost total absorption into a world financial market carrying on without thought or concern for anything other than accumulation. Hence the horror: one can neither kill nor escape the global network that circumscribes planetary existence and the zombie effects of producing so many debt-bound automatons.
 
In two recent books entitled Zombie Economics, the double relation of economy and horror turns on an axis of bad in-finitude: one plotting cycles and change, the other imagining endless debt. In both, horror tropes trace global and individual poles of financial undeath. John Quiggin’s discussion of twentieth-century economic theories and policies traces how each one – whether models of efficient markets, trickle-down, or privatization – comes to a dead end. It advertises itself as “a chilling tale” and repeatedly plays on movie lore: “for the zombies in the movies, the most common such word is ‘Brains.’ For economic zombies, the equivalent is surely ‘privatization’” (174). Each section ends optimistically with a consideration of what happens “after the zombies”; for example, the redundancy of models of privatization is succeeded by a return to a mixed economy of state and markets. In contrast, the other Zombie Economics, subtitled A Guide to Personal Finance, urges individual consumers to internalize and respond to depressive economic conditions; its “zombie economy” turns global crisis into a permanent and individual matter of protecting one’s “personal economy” (Desjardins and Emerson 5). Chapter titles blast inescapable imperatives: “no one can save you”; “save yourself by saving money”; “shooting Dad in the head”; “Ending your relationship with the financially infected”; “there is no cure.” A financial survivalist handbook, life plan, and conduct guide, it urges healthy living and implies a strict morality while reiterating the need to take care of bills and control expenditure: “every one of your bills is a zombie. Every debt, every loan, and every missed payment – they’re ghouls, and left alone, they will attract more of their kind” (Desjardins and Emerson 10). Key to this zombie model of good household management is the stimulation of fear. Zombies are already on the lawn or at the door: “there’s a mass of biting, squirming death waiting to pour itself into the house” (Desjardins and Emerson 2). Finance, credit, and debt will eat you or infect you if you do not take appropriate action. Similar threats, however, pervade the wider zombie economy; market liberalism promises prosperity on the condition that “the wrath of the ‘Electronic Herd’ of interconnected global financial markets” is never incurred (Quiggin 9).
 
Zombie banks also elicit fear, frustration, and a properly neoliberal urge to destroy. Describing financial institutions that would be unable to function and repay their debts without the injection of State credit, Yalman Onaran defines the zombie bank as a “dead bank . . . kept among the living through capital infusions from the government” (2). Crippling the global economy and potential recovery, the problem reignites arguments from the onset of the credit crisis about the correct neoliberal reaction to failing institutions. One view holds that they should be killed off rather than kept on state life support; another suggests, jump-starting the “financially undead” by freeing up the money supply. “Zombie balance sheets,” zombie companies, and zombie consumers, however, all seem to impede what Cowen calls capital’s “creative-destructive process.” The crisis should have been used as an opportunity “to clean out the system” rather than supporting “inefficient institutions” (Onaran 2). Like a videogame player confronted with a horde of zombies, there is mindless pleasure in destruction. But creation is a more problematic act, in which the paralyzing effect of the zombie comes to the fore. In fear, frustration, and impatience, the urgency of the crisis demands standard zombie movie reactions: do not hesitate; aim for the brain; kill off the undead that threaten survival and growth and open the future to more speculation. But because the complex and interdependent network of global finance works on an idea of the future (at least insofar as it predicts likelihoods of continued repayment) and operates with indeterminate “subjective” investments, there is hesitation and in-decision—moments of unpredictability suspended between advocating (creative) destruction and deferring an always-imminent meltdown. In this respect the zombie is no pharmakon, no poison-cure or effect-solution, but the very persistence of systemic and subjective in-decision and ambivalence, an un-dead-end that thrives on desire or fear, whether surfing the crest of credit or bearing the weight of debt. Zombies in this guise do not mark a breaking point, but the condition of living on after being broken. That is, they mark the condition of global, irredeemable or infinite debt without recourse to symbolic or spiritual forms.

 

Cultural Death

Zombies are mindless messengers, media figures that repeatedly return to dead-ends; doubles of divided cultures and dehumanized creatures; half-turned mirrors of vanishing subjective, social, symbolic, and political horizons. Their history in popular culture begins in the 1920s and 1930s as one of colonial and industrial enslavement: White Zombie (Victor Halperin, 1932), set in a repeatedly ravaged Haiti under US occupation, replays the will-sapping mechanization and exploitation of workers under factory regimes in visual echoes of the dehumanized mass of Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927) and its suppressed subterranean proletariat (Williams). Less than human, consumed by machine, modernity’s workforce is reduced to a condition of total subservience of mind, body, and collective strength. From the late 1960s, in George Romero’s series of films, zombies move from associations with mass, industrial culture and, more than side-effects of social conformism, rational bureaucratization, and voracious consumption, signify how, in the 1970s, mass culture, mass hysteria, mass media, and mass conformism mark deadlocks in the development of international capitalism. Robin Wood’s account of cinematic horrors from the 1960s to 1980s suggests how the counter-side of counter-culture connects the supposed primitivism and overt cannibalism of destructive drives to the turmoil and tension of a world in which permissiveness and market liberalization vie with conservative social and familial moralities. Zombies thus come to mark a shift in political and economic values, displaying, as Steve Beard and Steven Shaviro variously argue, how the West’s lumbering industrial workforce becomes obsolete in the face of shiny post-industrial complexes of service, technology, and consumption. The mass is now a revolting image of the past, of state and industrial society, a site of revulsion and the springboard to a new vampire world of privatized, creative, immaterial and precarious labor in which the individual is his or her own brand or business, and freedom is the potential to buy and sell on the basis of one’s human capital.
 
Return to the worker-zombies of Metropolis after the factory has closed, the gigantic machine quiet and rusting and the cavernous halls of production empty, ruined, and still; they have been sacked and left with nothing to do and nowhere to go, vacantly roaming the streets, malls, and non-spaces of a new society in which they play no part. Cast-offs, rejects, non-people, they are as obsolete and redundant as the system they used to feed. Pathetic and seething with rage, they are repackaged as the detritus of a humanity and modernity that has been superseded. All their revolting features compose a monster of physical (rotting, slow), intellectual (thoughtless, speechless), moral (cannibalistic, will-less), natural (dead) and aesthetic (pale, bloody, malformed) degradation, establishing a negativity so repellent that it thwarts any feeling or desire except horror, destruction, or flight. This monster propels a movement away from (now base) materiality, mass, social, human, industrial, modern orders of existence and toward the newly attractive world of vampiric individualism, desire, and consumption, a deregulated flight beyond economic stagnation, inefficiency, and materiality, and into flexible financial freedoms, soaring profits, and unlimited credit. This new vampire moves from bat to wolf to eerie vapor, from barbaric, bloodsucking  (foreign) aristocratic invader to puffed-up, cigar-chuffing fat bastard capitalist predator and impersonal, distributed global accumulation machine for the exploitation of surpluses with which everyone remains on close, even hospitable terms. Its negativity is repolarized according to a perfectly commodified difference poised between brand and identity: the commodity that is one’s self.
 
A-cultural (pre-modern) and a-Cultural (postmodern) barbarism conjoin in the commerce of countercultural protest and (neoliberal) economic reconfigurations. Individualistic, self-fashioned, self-reliant, unique, talented, competitive, bellicose, romantic, fast, flexible, desirable, vigorous, free, saleable, immortal and, above all, consuming, the new vampire subject and neoliberal everyperson feeds, like the bloodsucking machine, on the life and labor sold to agribusiness, on outsourcing and sweatshops, luxuriating in an unearthly existence sustained by credit, cheap loans, creative and immaterial labor. The free market remodeling of the vampire has been variously documented by Rob Latham as a figure for the technological consumption of youth and, by Jules Zanger, as the consumerist practices of the West. It extends to technical rewirings of military and queer desire, as A. R. Stone observes, and the genetic potential of rewriting bodies discussed by Donna Haraway. Moreover, as vampire-empire, it distinguishes the “spectral reign” of a network, an “apparatus of capture that lives only off the vitality of the multitude” in which “fear is the primary mechanism of control” (Empire 48, 62, 323). At the same time, Hardt and Negri’s vampire is double bound to an image of monstrous multitude in and in excess of empire: the “unruly character of the flesh as multitude,” manifests “the monstrosity of a society in which the traditional social bodies, such as the family, are breaking down” and “new, alternative networks of affection and social organization” begin to form (Multitude 193). Amid in-distinction, there emerges the difficulty and necessity of any ethical or political action: one must love some monsters and combat others, enhancing the former’s excess and attacking “the monstrous, horrible world that the global political body and capitalist exploitation have made for us” (Multitude 196).
 
Global and individual, systemic and subjective, feared and desired at the same time, these doubled figures of monstrosity are both too distant and too proximate to know which to kill and which to save. Where over-circulation (and crisis) discredit popular consuming vampires, zombies increasingly occupy the dissolving and explosively paralyzed zones of in-decision and in-distinction between uninhibited global flows and depressive subjugation. They mark the pressures of excessive liberalization of markets and the increasing porousness of psycho-geographic boundaries: apocalyptic presentations of global change in which viral epidemics, genetic experimentation, ecological disaster, demotivated populations, media violence, urban unrest, military pacification, immigration, and poverty signal a total breakdown in social relations and human(e) bonds (see, for example, Romero’s Diary of the Dead). Not simply collapsible into categories of and against posthuman developments (from biotechnological to post-industrial), the fears that imagine the reduction of bodies to raging, ravenous hordes are reactions to change in which breakdown is less a return to modernity and humanity than a descent into survivalism or barbarism. Images of small bands of people struggling against undead masses and more barbaric survivors may be dressed up as a fantasy of natural self-sufficiency to end the degeneration of contemporary existence, but they also hold up a mirror of the anti-social contract of neoliberal competition and individuation that exhausts social ties, human energies, and planetary reserves. Zombie metaphors are, in part, modes of deflection and misdirection, fantastic and nostalgic expenditure. They are also figures of an in-decisive present, in thought, image, and action, of self-consumption in increasingly rapid, vicious, and implosive spirals of in-security.
 
Recent zombie fictions (rapidly filmed by Hollywood) depict collapsing global formations and thrive on the imagination of apocalypse or trace the interminable dead-end manifested by the undead. While Isaac Marion’s Warm Bodies (2010) draws out the diminishing differences between zombie and human habits amid the ruined non-places of consumer society, Max Brooks’s 2006 World War Z critiques global flows and cultural decline, imagining a return to an American communal order at the cost of billions of dead. Elsewhere, zombies go to the heart of capitalism’s reliance on the power of the credit-debt relation; more positive renditions of the zombie as cultural critique accompany bitterly satirical images of contemporary finance capital’s obscenity and savagery in Jaspre Bark’s Way of the Barefoot Zombie. Set on a small island close to Haiti (an island that has historically witnessed disproportionate exploitation and debt), the story opposes a group of rich teenagers, calling themselves the ZLF (Zombie Liberation Front), to a group of super-rich investors. The island is owned by an exclusive management training company that teaches investors to shed their humanity (including conscience) and become as passionately single-minded about accumulation as zombies are about fresh organs. Zombies articulate a continuum of power and resistance: the undead are freed, activists return to their comfortable homes or find themselves, and management excesses are exposed. But the continuum is not altered. In two particular episodes, however, the all-encompassing zombie of debt is evinced. Published post-sub-prime collapse in 2009, Bark’s novel illustrates capital’s genius at getting something for nothing through the mortgage system: a buyer receives a credit note, takes possession of bricks and mortar, defaults on the loan, and cedes possession of actual things to creditors who only staked values. Of course, creditors at the time suffered drops in value, getting nothing for nothing. The example, however, remains timely in its interrelation of credit and debt in material and symbolic, economic and subjective terms. A mortgage wires person and private space directly into a financial network of fluctuating interest rates. Indeed, the rhetoric of household management was part of the highly effective political sales pitch of neoliberalism, directing Britain’s “Right to Buy” policy that sold off state-owned housing and promoted the privatization of national utilities in the 1980s. Home-owning became a motor of the consumer boom and was connected to greater availability of loans, credit, and mortgages enabled by the de-regulation and technologization of financial markets. Moreover, it bound individuals to an economic project in a more concrete fashion than ideology, plugging them directly into the global fluctuations of share prices and interest rates through credit and debt. Such a direct personal tie to the movements of the world economy short-circuits the need for ideological investment. Privatization also inaugurated a process of economizing all areas of life, from culture to education and care, thereby eroding – and exploiting – the difference between symbolic and social values (belief and guilt) and economic worth (credit and debt). A second episode in Way of the Barefoot Zombie goes to the heart of debt’s material and spiritual axis: Vodun ritual enables investors to dispense with the humanity that impedes the efficient acquisition of obscene wealth. Conscience—which sustains guilt with respect to symbolic, moral, and human values—can be excised, held in reserve, and then, at a price, can be redeemed, untarnished, when enough wealth has been accumulated. Not only does this move suggest that capital and humanity are inimical; it also plots a trajectory in which the former is finally relieved of its human weight, imagining a separation between debt and guilt in which one operates more efficiently without any recourse the other.

 

Spectral Debt

Debt establishes the foundation of morality and culture, both materially and economically. In Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche argues that the relation between debtor and creditor holds a primary position: “the major moral concept Schuld [guilt] has its origin in the very material concept Schulden [debts]” (498-99). Where guilt is a means of socialization and subjection interlaced with moral, legal, and religious codes, debt underpins the way those codes are inscribed and enforced. Breeding “an animal with the right to make promises” requires painful training to ensure that humans pay their debts, remember their desires, keep their word, and plan for and anticipate the future. “Man himself,” writes Nietzsche, “must first of all have become calculable, regular, necessary, even in his own image of himself, if he is able to stand security for his own future, which is what one who promises does!” (494). Debt demands a relation to time, mnemotechnical skills, and models of equivalence, rights, and exchange. Throughout, however, the social bond remains a direct and material effect of debt: training renders creatures subject to morality, custom, community, conscience, and word. It is traumatic and terrifying and the basis of all symbolic rituals (497). It forges obedience and identification in pain and blood, binding individuals to structures of exchange, obligation, and law (500). Both intensive – the consequences of debt are concentrated on individual bodies or even body parts – and extensive — encompassing every exchange, possession, thing, word or value – debt covers life and its aftermath. Under Christian morality, guilt and symbolic debt come to the fore, displacing the pain of material inscriptions with redemption, value, exchange, and reciprocity. Debt, however, does not disappear: instead it is deepened, as Gilles Deleuze argues, a shackle of suffering that “now only pays the interest on the debt”; it is “internalized” and universalized, rendered “inexhaustible, unpayable” (Nietzsche 141).
 
There are two complementary and countervailing trajectories implied in the relation between debt and guilt. Material and symbolic dimensions of debt shadow each other in accounts of cultural development: the one line culminates in modernity and stresses human values and progress; the other – superseding modernity – tracks material and machinic inscriptions, new forms of training, desire, and capitalization. In the first trajectory, psychoanalysis, of course, embraces guilt. But it, too, begins, in terror, pain, and trauma, in the myth of the primal father, where crime and murder forge the basis of symbolic relations—an ambivalent site of law, ritual, custom and culture that produces guilty and indebted subjects. As Jacques Lacan observes of the “Freudian myth,” “the order of the law can be conceived only on the basis of something more primordial, a crime” (42). With it comes “punishment, sanction, castration – the hidden key to the humanization of sexuality” (43). In the symbolic realm, debt is always something for the subject to worry about, a matter of responsibility and guilt provoked by the traumatizing effects of signification, a punishment in advance – “that self-sacrifice, that pound of flesh which is mortgaged [engagé] in his relationship to the signifier” (28). That gap, moreover, constitutes the locus of loss and mourning at the core of subjective-symbolic relations, the “place for the projection of the missing signifier” whose absence provokes a host of spectral and actual reverberations: the “phallus” – the paternal signifier to whom all debts are owed in the reintegration of group, community or psyche – “is a ghost” (Lacan 35, 50).
 
The symbolic advanced in psychoanalysis remains too closed – too phallic and logocentric – for deconstruction. Yet when it comes to matters of debt and mourning, Jacques Derrida repeatedly looks to an excess that escapes purely material or economic value, whether in the form of the “immaculate commerce” liberated by poetry, or in terms of the gift situated “aneconomically” outside all  equivalence, substitution, and circularity (“Economimesis” 9; Given 111). “Impossible” and “essential,” the gift “interrupts economy,” “system,” and “symbol,” but is not a “simple ineffable exteriority.” To give back is to “amortize” giving, a dead gift, a mortgage (Given 7, 12, 30). A symbolic equivalent returns a value in place of a thing; recognizing a debt draws any idea of giving back into a system of calculation: “the symbolic opens and constitutes the order of exchange and of debt, the law or the order of circulation in which the gift gets annulled” (Given 13). Economy, then, is not “suspended” in the move to the symbolic but manifests an “incessant movement of reappropriation of an excess” (Given 111). Something excessive, however, lies beyond appropriation—an infinite, impossible, inexhaustible debt beyond the “‘bad infinite’ that characterizes the monetary thing,” value or exploitation (Given 158). Like the gift, such a debt, if there is one, would hold open a radical alterity of time, death, mourning, and being. Yet gifts, in Given Time, remain increasingly threatened by monetary things: counterfeit money – its falsity apparently neither an impediment to the operations of capital and credit, nor requiring recourse to faith and belief – engenders a vertiginous economic overwriting of differences that occludes the possibility of an outside-gift or heterological space. That aneconomic element which sustains a relation to an outside increasingly finds itself within “the restricted economy of a differance, a calculable temporization or deferral” (Given 147). That pattern of encroachment, appropriation, and economization operates on an increasingly abstracted and global scale: the “new world order.”
 
The new world order: economic obliteration of borders, expansion and imposition of market logic, relentless capitalization, technologization, and mediatization, it absorbs domains once outside its purview, including the law, the nation-state, and culture. Its “plagues” are laid out in Derrida’s Specters of Marx (81). Running counter to the gift, the speeds at which it operates and the calculations and codes it imposes follow the “other reading” suggested in Given Time: that of “economic closure” (26-8). The reduction of temporal and geopolitical horizons threatens the possibility of sustaining some kind of history, humanity, or hegemony (the “hauptgespensts” of modernity whose “hauntology” holds on to gifts of time, death and being) and forecloses “a certain experience of the emancipatory promise” (Specters 74). The site of deconstruction and politics is “a present never identical with itself,” a “phantasmatic, anessential practice” the aim of which is “to reactivate the moment of decision that underlies any sedimented set of social relations” (Laclau 70, 78). Specters perform two related operations in deconstruction’s defense of modern values: in moving across and opening occluded borders and stagnant differentiations (“spooking” as a kind of disturbance and alert), they return to founding and impossible questions and dis-continuities that form the basis for subjective, democratic, and emancipatory decisions. But, like Hamlet before the ghost of his father, they also hesitate and question, prompting deferral rather than action. Nonetheless, there and not there, specters sustain the idea of something like historical difference and futurity, holding onto the effective memory of the possibility of some kind of symbolic system. Conjured up and mourned in order to keep alive that which has been buried, opening solidified structures and relations to the (aneconomic) decisions that animate and expose them to time, gifts, debts, promises, justice, horizons (and monsters), deconstruction works as a counter to the reductive pressures of capital’s accelerations, calculations, and expansions.

 

Debt Machine

As immaterial entities and effects, specters are conjured up as an animating difference between incorporation and institution, body and phantasm. In contrast, as excess materiality, zombies manifest body without will, soul, spirit, or consciousness. Their training is traumatizing, numbing, automatic, and suggests an inscription of debt’s more brutal and basic mnemotechnics: figures of debt-death suspended, existence given over to death-in-life, its course closed down, paralyzed and without horizon. Given their materiality and their associations with work, death, and the theft of life, it is not surprising that zombies feature in Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the transmutations of debt under capital. Following Nietzsche’s assertion of the primacy and materiality of debt, Deleuze and Guattari’s zombies embody the painful inscription entailed in breeding slaves without sovereign consciousness plotted in anti-oedipal deployments of debt from filiation (stock-breeding) and alliance (mobile debt). With the rise of bourgeois capitalism, a “primitive inscription machine” becomes “an immense machinery that renders the debt infinite,” a “debt of existence” that subjects never cease paying (Anti-Oedipus 192, 197). Infinite debt involves a spiritualization at the level of a despotic state apparatus that turns debt into social and symbolic values, and an internalization within the capitalist field through which the creditor-debtor relation becomes the motor of accumulation, surplus exploitation, and drive. It produces torpor, hatred of life and freedom, depression, guilt, and neurosis: its mechanism is the “death instinct” (Anti-Oedipus 268-9). It delivers institutional, symbolic, productive stasis, causing libidinal exhaustion, turning life against itself while celebrating a “mortifying, imaginary, and symbolic theater” (334).  A “wedding of psychoanalysis and capitalism,” the death instinct indicates how much the latter has drawn from “a transcendental death-carrying agency,” the “despotic signifier,” how much the “absorption of surplus value” that governs its expansion depends on the incorporation and exploitation of the excesses of life, energy and time into its system (335). Capital in this guise is a “death enterprise” (335).
 
Blockage, paralysis, frozen desire: it is easy to see the kinds of workers produced under the productive-symbolic regime: “the only modern myth is the myth of zombies – mortified schizos, good for work, brought back to reason” (Anti-Oedipus 335). The encoding of mnemotechnical training – the inscribing, branding, mutilating, taming and herding of bodies into a uniform and regulated mass – constitutes the cruel, painful and numbing signifying work of death, operating  intensively as debt becomes extensive:
 

Above all, the State apparatus makes the mutilation, and even death, come first. It needs them preaccomplished, for people to be born that way, crippled and zombielike. The myth of the zombie, of the living dead, is a work myth and not a war myth. Mutilation is a consequence of war, but it is a necessary condition, a presupposition of the State apparatuses and the organization of work (hence the native infirmity not only of the worker but also of the man of State himself).  (Deleuze and Guattari, Plateaus 425)

 
Bonds become binds that tie life, desire, and time to the regular circulation and rhythms of production and reproduction. In contrast, as Deleuze and Guattari develop their gothic theme in A Thousand Plateaus, the vampire manifests uncontained flows and desires, a figure of becoming unsubordinated to regimes of work, alliance, and reproduction; it is asymbolic, anomic, aneconomic, outside patterns of filiation and evolution. A co-mingling of heterogeneous forms, associated with packs, bands, and multiplicities, the vampire operates as epidemic, contagion, infection (Plateaus 241-42). Schizovampirism seems to escape the despotism associated with organized production and State-symbolic subjection and debt-death, but it also heralds “life” modulated, recoded, and dividuated by Deleuze’s notion of “control societies,” rebranded by informatics, recast as commodity and patented by financial, global, and networked powers. Depending on “floating rates of exchange,” the move to control societies sees a further extension of the hand of debt, more abstract and yet more direct because it permeates every area of life, intimately and from afar through the vast decentered network its fluctuations inhabit: “the operation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters. Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit” (“Postscript” 6).There is no outside to this network and no outside-debt in this erasure of horizons and supersession of limits: “Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt” (6).
 
Global control obliterates distinctions of outside and inside, allowing neither boundaries nor bodies – geopolitical, planetary, subjective, genetic or symbolic – to impede its flows and transformations. Finance, biotechnology, and digital media have established an almost total economization. It is a horror story that has been told repeatedly: “biopolitics” charts neoliberalism’s “unlimited generalization of the form of the market” (Foucault 243); economics “becomes the explicit discourse of a whole society” (Baudrillard 33-4); stocks and share calculations have “invaded . . . our notion of value” and require all questions – not only economic but aesthetic, semantic, and metaphysical – to be “posed from within the logic of the financial (in)security of mobile values” (Goux, “Values” 160); and everything, sacred or profane, falls into the “magnetic field of the political economy (of market exchange-value)” in a “total bankerization of existence, by the combined powers of finance and computers” (Goux, Sacred Economies 202; “Cash” 99). Now “dependency upon the market extends into every area of life” (Beck and Beck-Gernstein, 203), while economic thinking “undoes the major oppositions of traditional thought” (Goux, “Values” 165), and “techno-mediatic powers,” political “good news,” and financial calculation supplant the basic concepts and oppositions of critical discourse (Derrida, Specters 67, 75). Or they enact their own “practical deconstruction” (Derrida and Stiegler, Echographies 36). Even the capacity to think critically and effectively is problematic, some positions seeming little more than “dead ends” in that they fail “to recognize adequately the contemporary object of critique:” given that the object has “mutated,” critique seems “depotentialized” in advance (Hardt and Negri, Empire 137-8).
 
What remains is “symbolic misery”: Bernard Stiegler’s term for the reduction and economization of life under control, consumption, and technological mediation. The term signifies the cultural and symbolic impoverishment and proletarianization of existence as a “herd-becoming of behavior and loss of individuation,” a saturation of memory and diminution of spaces of “symbolic sharing” (“Suffocated Desire” 54-7). Anticipation and desire are eroded as planning, calculation, and control reduce the future to questions of predictability and short-term management: subjectivity, Stiegler underlines, is depressed and desire demotivated in the face of “generalized discredit” (Decadence 88). Short-term financial investment undermines other social, symbolic, and individual futures defined as the “investment in common desire” (Stiegler, New Critique 6). Speculation, in contrast, “freezes time” by trying to cancel out any past or future that cannot be measured or predicted in terms of the present (New Critique 107). The question of the future returns to debt, to its power of harnessing and delimiting futures based on calculations of profit or return. Against the economic absorption of libido, belief, and time, Stiegler proposes a return to longer-term, symbolic investments, invoking models of gift and the sacred to open horizons to exchanges “not enslaved to immediate subsistence” (Decadence 89).
 
Recent economic discourse had already – and inimically – reworked the very terms invoked by Stiegler to hold open another path of symbolic credit, investment, and desire: their opposing trajectory pointed towards completely opposite ends and implications, dragging aneconomy more tightly within an expanded orbit of exchange and speculation. George Gilder argues that giving and ideas of the gift become central to the new entrepreneurial economy of risky, creative, and generous investment. As Goux glosses the process, gift-giving now forms the model for rather than the exception to economic expenditure, providing capital with “legitimation” as a “theology of chance” (“General Economics” 213). Gilder’s creative, altruistic entrepreneur, romanticized as capitalist hero, came to prominence during the neoliberal 1980s: part of the project of transforming work and economy in terms of “human capital.” Individuality and life as a whole can thus be reformulated according to calculations that aim to optimize the potential manifested in the analysis of “human capital:” an individual’s life becomes the object of speculation, training, self-fashioning, and invention aimed at making “him into a sort of permanent and multiple enterprise” (Foucault 242). As Maurizio Lazzarato develops the idea, technologies of the self thus involve “the mobilization, engagement, and activation of subjectivity through the techniques of business management and social government” (37-8). As stated in management guidebooks and practices, individuals must identify with the entirety of the consumer and corporate mechanism that encompasses existence and embrace all its codes. In order to perform to one’s potential, one must think of and invest in oneself as a brand – what management guru Tom Peters calls “the brand called you” – and engage all the techniques, skills, training, and networking necessary to promote, differentiate, manage, and market that brand.

 

Fear Management

One figure of this injunction to entrepreneurial internalization, self-fashioning, and flexibility – a figure, appropriately enough, returning to cultural prominence in the 1980s – is the vampire. Reinvented as fabulously speculative and immaterially potent, the vampire is oblivious to any final debt repayment (death) or any natural, material and physical limitation (transmogrification). Like triumphant neoliberalism, it exists beyond all borders (domestic, ideological, cultural or, national), its unreality a figure for an immanent expansion of capital’s incessant reinvention. As a figure of the euphoric economic transvaluation of all social, individual, and political positions, its only role lies in feeding and feeding on the vital flows of global circulation: blood must keep flowing. To be otherwise, of course, is to be a zombie. The move to a crisis-consciousness dispatches any euphoric identifications with and internalizations of the vampire figure, along with an entrepreneurial rhetoric of credit, growth, and endless immaterial expansion. Financial crisis signals the “failure” of neoliberal business models and the exploitation of “human capital” (Lazzarato 109, 113). Yet, as zombie, this system just carries on, exploiting the crisis it engendered. How does one put a bullet in the brain of a decentered network of electronic, emotional, and economic impulses?
 
The move from euphoria to depression, from vampire to zombie, might discredit but does not mark the end of neoliberalism. Nor does it temper excess except in the way that credit reappears as the debt it always was. For all the manufactured differences, rises and falls, or shifts in mood, a systemic continuity remains in place: credit is just another name for debt. Debt does not relinquish its hold easily, pressing for a continued and expanding neoliberal program of social transvaluation. Austerity becomes the means for extending the power and control exercised by financial markets over the State to ensure continued adherence to, even further internalization of, the debtor-creditor relation: “finance is a war machine for privatization, which transforms social debt into credit, into individual insurance, and rent (shareholders) and thus, individual property” (Lazzarato 113). If credit, vamped-up in the 1980s, encouraged everyone to “buy in” to this power relation through mortgages, privatized shares, loans, and credit cards, global zombie debt makes plain the other-same side of the coin, requiring individuals to take on any costs, responsibilities, and risks previously assumed the State, whether  welfare, education, housing, health, unemployment, or pensions: “not only – far from it – those of innovation, but also and especially those of precariousness, poverty, unemployment, a failing health system, housing shortages, etc.” (Lazzarato 51).  Extensive in the form of global markets and global debts, the power relation is also highly individuated and intensively modulated through specific networks of control, access, and lending. Debt becomes the mechanism to engage every body, every role, and every relationship, permeating every sphere beyond banking, especially those associated with social bonds:
 

All the designations of the social divisions of labour in neoliberal societies (“consumer”, “beneficiary”, “worker”, “entrepreneur”, “unemployed”, “tourist” etc.) are now invested by the subjective figure of the “indebted man” which transforms them into indebted consumers, indebted welfare users, and finally, as in the case of Greece, “indebted citizens.” (Lazzarato 38)

 
A universe of debt is literally installed through the extension and internalization of financial models. Debt is realized rather than spiritualized, its subjectivization manifesting a de- or dis-spirited indebtedness based on performance, finance, and credit-worthiness rather than on the socially- and symbolically-framed investment of individual desires, aspirations, and beliefs. Debt knows no bounds and employs only direct bonds of control; it has no outside except the penury of no credit rating, and even then it administers its controls according to the same procedures and principles: mothers, children, and the unemployed receive all sorts of benefits – renamed as “credits” – for health, education, wages, and insurance; immigrants are judged according to (economically calculable and redeemable) point-values, thereby locating their existence within the power relation of debt and subjecting them to a variety of procedures of assessment, monitoring, accreditation, and regulation.
 
These procedures enact a kind of training, inscription, and coding akin to inaugural debt. But they seem to have little need of symbolic or spiritual coordinates. Increasingly, too, this training is inscribed automatically, without the production of belief, the evocations of desire, or the long-term investments in structures that sustain relations that are more than economic. The separation of symbolic and economic structures, for all their isomorphism, has a history: from the paternally-sanctioned realities of exchange founded on gold to paper currency and virtual share value, the story has been one of abstraction and autonomization in banking. In line with the Big Bang that deregulated markets and accelerated technological exchanges, Goux argues that the shift to stocks and financial capitalism manifests an “abstract operational symbolization” at a remove from any human world of symbols (Symbolic 130).  Direct human intervention is increasingly removed from decision-making processes as the credit card installs an “autonomization of operations” that replaces human labor insofar as it “internalizes” banking operations (Goux, “Cash” 120-121). Credit cards directly approve or refuse funds so that debt is individuated, general, and inevitable: “we carry with us the creditor-debtor relation – in our pockets and wallets, encoded on the magnetic strip of plastic that hides two seemingly harmless operations: the automatic institution of the credit relation, which thereby establishes permanent debt” (Lazzarato 20). No decisions have to be made, no thought; it is an automatic subjugation manifesting “a molecular, intrapersonal, and pre-individual hold on subjectivity that does not pass through reflexive consciousness and its representations, nor through the self” (Lazzarato 146-9). As an “Automatic Teller Machine”, the “subject” has only to remember a few responses and insert a short personal numeric code calibrated to that card alone, a “dividual” responding to the modulations of an automated network.
 
A symbolic and transindividual framework sustaining subjectivity through desire, motivation, and belief becomes unnecessary when the credit-debt power relation has been inscribed automatically: responses are pre-coded just as futures are predicted. Desire cedes to fear; thought to reaction- and real-time. Horizons close; no one cares. Ideological apparatuses that shape productive individuals and social consensus become obsolete and expensive. Guilt, a debt beyond exchange, is supplanted by material inscriptions and control procedures that define and maintain “indebted man.” Neither will nor desire, consciousness or self-reflection remain in play. Alternatives are foreclosed:  “the logic of debt is stifling the possibilities for action” (Lazzarato 71). One can readily see the revolting outlines of a new zombie. All that is required for the operation of the credit-debt relation is fear, a mechanism sustained by training and threats of loss, by technological disconnection or non-ranking from ratings agencies. Fear attends financial markets; it signifies our being wired into an affective and economic network, a nervous system. Writing in the 1990s, Goux observed how the mobility of share values involves a “vulnerability” to thousands of direct and indirect variables, an incessantly alternating present that is never quite present, flickering rates of return or loss outlining fragile, uncertain, and nerve-wracking fluctuations of existence: “life overwhelmed by the globalization of value” (“Value” 159-60). Permanent in-security is evinced in fluctuating circuits of exchange and the reactions they prompt, an electro-emotional network in which machine, human difference, and temporality are reduced to near zero, vacillations of affect accompanying oscillations of digits. As Goux describes it, this network is
 

a constant, driven time of anxiety, hypersensitive to worldwide information, tense, unpredictable, irrational, subject to the whim of ungovernable impulses, brief crazes that spread like a viral infection, a paradoxical time that balances the most weighty matters of the economic and political life of nations upon the most delicate and febrile factors of human psychology (euphoria, depression, optimism, confidence, anxiety). (“Values” 160)

 
Without objects to stabilize or ground its flows, its default setting is anxiety and insecurity.
 
Fear, at least temporarily, settles on some figure. Where anxiety underpins the circulations of global financial capitalism, undead and unreal figures from popular culture provide familiar forms through which to reshape, contain, or direct the inherent instability of an abstracted yet all-too real system in relentless pursuit of surplus. Like the mathematical modelling of disaster scenarios using zombies (for example, exercises in “Zombie Preparedness” undertaken in the US by the Centers for Disease Control), cultural forms deploy their own modes of planning, predicting, and retraining; if not calculating futures, these modes occlude, habituate or divert those futures in fantastically apocalyptic dead-ends that keep on returning. Born of frustration, in-decision, and stasis, these urgent fantasies of destruction and creation, disaster and survival are played out and held at bay, precarious (non)precipitation meeting (in)decisive (un)dead-end: kill-kill-kill; pay-pay-pay; spend-spend-spend; save-save-save. But who, what, and where are the zombies? Capital, banks, political-economy, debt, shareholders, stakeholders, creditors, investors, managers, oneself?  Fear opens onto unpredictable possibility, monstrosity, or event, and quickly closes again. If rapid global fluctuations, uncertainties, and anxieties are, in fear, downloaded in an automated debt relation, the result may be the kind of pacification that shocks and numbs en masse like it did to workers in modernity. Constantly exposed to images of financial apocalypse, the zombies roaming streets and clicking on screens may be too habituated, too inoculated by familiarity or numbed by fear, to see beyond the material and imagined disasters of global debt. Trained to feel, perform, and react, their automation allows no time for reflection, action, or motivation. Like life and desire, time is paralyzed in a present that calculates and closes off any future other than that of the market privileging accumulation over expenditure, and is denied any final expenditure or vital-destructive opening: it is zombie, neither living nor dead but frozen between the two, life in stasis, death arrested, in debt forever. In constant electronic flux, an overstimulation of organisms, it may also generate a hyperactivity, restlessness, and undirected overflow that comes from immersion in and resistance to the multiple and divergent messages of media-managed capital’s debt impulse. A tension might remain between new procedures controlled more directly by economic debt, and the expectations and aspirations associated with forms of subjectivity defined in symbolic, social, and historical terms. In that tension—a space of incomplete transition and in-credulity—there is some hope of resistance, as Lazzarato notes: confronting “subjectivities that consider public assistance, retirement, education, etc., as collective rights guaranteed by past struggles is not the same as governing ‘debtors,’ small business owners, and minor shareholders” (114). If the transition allows space for disaffection, the general “herdification” identified in symbolically immiserated economies and techno-media also produces energies in excess of control; Stiegler’s disindividuated herd is permanently unsettled, disquieted, without form and identity, yet irrepressibly “furious” (“Suffocated desire” 55). Enter the “zoombie”: the fast-moving, voracious and extremely contagious mutation for an age of speed and sensory overstimulation. In 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002) and 28 Weeks Later (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, 2007), the zoombie is an entity born of global media and urban violence, of biotechnical experimentation and militarized control: the name of the virus it spreads across the world is “RAGE.”

 

They have signed our I.O.U. and we can no longer not acknowledge it.  Any more than our own children.  This is what tradition is, the heritage that drives you crazy.  People have not the slightest idea of this, they have no need to know that they are paying (automatic withdrawal) nor whom they are paying …  when they do anything whatsoever, make war or love, speculate on the energy crisis, construct socialism, write novels, open concentration camps for poets or homosexuals, buy bread or hijack a plane, have themselves elected by secret ballot, bury their own, criticize the media without rhyme or reason, say absolutely anything about chador or the ayatollah, dream of a great safari, found reviews, teach, or piss against a tree…  This story, the trap of who signs an I.O.U. for the other such that the other finds himself engaged before having known a thing about it, even before having opened his eyes, this children’s story is a love story and is ours—if you still want it.  From the very first light of dawn.

-Derrida, “Envois” 10^th September 1977

(Post Card 100-101)

 

The Purloined Future

What then, to paraphrase Derrida in Spectres of Marx, is the state of the debt?  When in 2008 we began to speak of a credit crunch, what we really meant was a debt crisis in which repayment of substantial loans became attenuated, and banks and other financial institutions became insolvent. This complex situation is not, however, merely a case of a few large debtors defaulting on payments.  Allow me to spend a little time unpacking the aetiology of everything that has resulted from this crisis, including the bankruptcy of global financial institutions and of sovereign states.  Debt and credit are not the fortunate or unfortunate outcomes of banking practices; they are the very point of banking and indeed of capitalism itself, perhaps of all economy as such.  The classical purpose of a bank is to lend money on the basis of the deposits of its so-called customers (individuals and companies who have placed their money in the bank for what Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality might identify as security reasons).  Using depositors’ money or money borrowed at a low rate of interest from another bank, the bank lends to others at a greater rate of interest. As long as these loans are repaid on schedule, theoretically the bank will initiate an infinite chain of profit.  In so doing, banking as such both introduces credit into the economy—enabling growth, employment, and wealth creation—and initiates indebtedness, which ties individuals to the bank and the system of capital in general.  On this view, credit and debt are not merely necessary, but essential to the operation of the entire capitalist system.  Once the bank lends money to an individual or company, that money is deposited back in the bank.  The bank has thereby increased its deposits base by leveraging its capital without any actual “new” money coming into circulation.  Having increased its deposits, the bank is free to repeat this process ad infinitum within the limit of retaining the cash ratio required by law for capitalization.  In this way, banks generate large balance sheets of assets (loans and advances) and liabilities (customer accounts) from a relatively low deposit base and minimal cash ratio; at its height in 2008, the Royal Bank of Scotland had assets of £1.9 trillion (greater than the entire GDP of its sovereign guarantor of the United Kingdom, making it the largest company by asset size in the world at that time).[1]  This form of phantasmagoria makes the commodity fetish look like a concrete tower block, and calls to mind Aristotle’s distinction in the Politics between economy and chresematics: the former is the management of goods essential to the maintenance of life; the latter, as the accumulation of wealth for its own sake, is the originary ruin of the former.[2]  According to this distinction, it makes no sense to speak of economics in relation to banking; perhaps universities today should rename their Business Schools, trapped within the curriculum of orthodox economic theory, along Aristotelian lines.

 

The banking business model is unique within capitalism because it requires minimal equity (the difference between assets and liabilities). As a result, and despite appearances, banking is a less than secure enterprise.  In this situation banks must manage the risk of loan defaults, and one might say that the business of banks is precisely the management of risk.  Banks are placed at risk when liabilities begin to exceed equity in an unmanageable way.  In 2008, at the start of the financial crisis, Barclays had sixty times more assets (due loans) than equity.  The median leverage ratio of banks in the US in 2008 was 35 to 1, and 45 to 1 in Europe.  What this meant was that only 1/35^th of US bank assets had to go bad before the banks would be insolvent, and 1/40^th in Europe. If only 2.5% of loans were defaulted on, in other words, the European banks would collapse.  This is exactly what happened with the subprime mortgage collapse in the US housing market, when it became clear that money had systematically been loaned to those with little prospect of making their repayments.  As this market began to unravel, banks sitting on over-leveraged positions began to collapse in a domino effect—from Bear Stearns to Lehman Brothers in the US and Northern Rock to HBOS in the UK—resulting in bailouts for the system by Central Banks (i.e., the State) as the guarantor and lender of last resort.  These collapses and the so-called credit crunch in personal and company finances arose when banks quickly attempted to deleverage by contracting their assets without harming their equity ratios.  This means offering less credit and calling in as much debt as possible; because this is the exact opposite of the banking business model, the entire system came close to collapse when financial institutions stopped lending even to each other, viewing one another as risky prospects and potentially bad debtors.

 

Banks are equally keen to obviate risk within the banking system, and financial markets have developed sophisticated financial products to do just this.  The trade in derivative products (options and futures) exceeds tenfold the total value of the world’s economic output.  Derivatives are designed to hedge risk and take out insurance against uncertainty by fixing prices in the future. Like the leveraging of a bank’s capital, however, trade in derivatives generates financial transactions based on the original asset price, but far in excess of it; when those transactions begin to unfurl, derivatives have the opposite effect of magnifying risk rather than hedging it.  For this reason, in 1989 J. P. Morgan pioneered the Credit Default Swap that allows one to both leverage capital and hedge it against risk.  Swapping positions in the market is a relatively recent method of alleviating potential uncertainty by mitigating exposure to risk. This makes it much more likely that you will be able to repay the money borrowed from the bank for your business activity, making you a sounder debtor and so able to borrow more money.  Credit Default Swaps (CDS) allow banks to lend money and insure themselves against default by making someone else take on the risk associated with the debt.  Suitably insured, the bank can relax about holding onto enough capital reserves, and so can continue to lend again and again based on its assets register (which, we recall, is really the outstanding loans owed to it).  Regulators accepted the argument for CDS because they were thought to spread risk throughout the financial system rather than concentrate it in one place, thus making individual banks safer prospects.  However, the first difficulty with CDS is that they are designed to produce an economic impossibility, i.e., to make lending risk free. But the profit derived from an investment is unfortunately directly related to the risk involved.  The second difficulty is precisely that CDS spread risk throughout the system in undetectable and unmanageable ways; this risk is multiplied by the practice of securitization, in which bundles of debt are sold to off-shore shell companies, which take on the bank’s risk, break it up, re-engineer it, and sell it again to investors, with each re-sale deliberately designed to disguise the debt’s riskier aspects.  The shell company enables the bank to remove the loan from its balance sheet and thereby appear to decrease its asset to equity ratio, making the bank look less leveraged and more credit worthy, and allowing it to lend further money (that again will be risk-free through further CDS).  As Derrida says in Given Time, “the counterfeiter will have figured out how to indebt himself infinitely, and will have given himself the chance of escaping in this way from the mastery of reappropriation.  He will have figured out how to break indefinitely the circle or the symmetry” (150). In other words, the producer of counterfeit money can never lose; counterfeit money is risk free money.  The practice of repeatedly packing and securitizing debt makes it practically impossible to keep track of the quality of that debt.  AIG collapsed and was bailed out by the US Treasury at the cost of $173 billion because it underwrote the insurance for the majority of the world trade in CDS.  If AIG had not been bailed out by the Federal Reserve, a long and distinguished list of companies faced astronomical loses, including Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, Barclays, BNP Paribas, and Société Générale.  The market capitalization of AIG was only $2 billion dollars, meaning that it cost eighty-five times its value to bail out (Lancaster 62). When governments (or Central Banks) bail out commercial banks, they do so not by transferring capital from their own reserves, but by selling their own debt, or, more strictly speaking, by selling their own capacity to repay debt in the form of bonds.  The more secure the nation and the higher its credit rating, the lower the interest paid on bonds and the safer the investment for bond buyers.  The more stretched the nation-state, the more it will cost in interest payments to attract bond investors.  When the bond market stops believing in a nation’s capacity to repay the debt, that country quickly runs into trouble. Unable to borrow money in the form of bond issues, it is forced to seek its own bailout to meet its obligations, notably its guarantee to underwrite the debts of its own banks.  As a condition of the bailout, international lenders—such as the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank—insist on the nation-state making itself more credit-worthy by spending less on public services in order to be better able to repay their international debt.  This is the situation experienced across Europe, where the citizens whose borrowed deposits in banks made the entire system possible now face austerity measures to prevent the collapse of the system.  They are paying the price of someone else having borrowed their money.

 

Money Worries

This is exactly what Derrida proposes in Given Time: that any economic exchange involves the production of a certain reciprocity of debt. This is especially the case with the gift.  Any gift, however freely given, indebts the recipient to the giver and so initiates further exchanges, whether of material goods or of more abstract considerations like gratitude and clienthood.  The giver is involved not in an excessive generosity without reserve but in a relation of sacrifice, in which there is always the return and the expectation of return of a certain credit to the giver.  The question of sacrifice in the gift is significant in his 1977-78 seminar; sacrifice later becomes the predicate through which Derrida begins his sustained deconstruction of sovereignty in his analysis of the death sentence and the animal.[3]  The business of sacrifice is always the business of the sovereign—the one who is allowed to put to death without legal consequence—whether the sovereign who commutes the death sentence, or the sovereign human subject who sacrifices animal life in order to sustain human development.  In thinking capital punishment and the continuum of planetary life, Derrida attempts to think an economy without sacrifice in which no other is subordinated to the utility of any other.[4]  The seminar on the gift is therefore an important nascent step in the development of Derrida’s thought on sovereignty.  Here he distinguishes the “pure gift (if there is any)” from sacrifice:
 

The sacrifice proposes an offering but only in the form of a destruction against which it exchanges, hopes for, or counts on a benefit, namely, a surplus-value or at least an amortization, a protection, and a security. (Given 137)

 
The purity of the gift itself is always a matter of compromise, but what interests me in the context of systemic debt is the idea that securitization disarticulates sacrifice; namely, it turns a sacrifice from a gift into an offering that expects a return.  In the case of CDS, we have a sacrifice (the lending of money) that is immunized against risk and already deconstructs its own sacrificial status.  In the case of student loans, for example, the ideological trick is to appear to be making a sacrifice, even offering a gift, by paying the loan up-front for the student, but already to have calculated the return in the form of future interest payments, the indebtedness of citizens, the capacity to sell further debt, and the credit for having reduced the sovereign deficit, even if in fact it is accelerating sovereign debt.

 

Rather than the gift itself as the main focus of Given Time, I would like to turn to the Baudelaire text that informs the second half of Derrida’s seminar, to worry through certain philosophical problems. (I mean “worry” here in the philosophical sense that one worries a knotty topic rather than worry in the sense that one lies awake at night worrying about the mortgage.)  I want to consider the fictional nature of debt, given that, as Derrida says, “the symbolic opens and constitutes the order of exchange and of debt” (Given 13). Were it a product of the novelistic imagination, the banking business model described in the first half of this essay would surely be condemned as an improbable fiction.  The relation between accounting and recounting is one of the important subtexts of Derrida’s book, and I think there are two important strands to follow, given the debt crisis.  The first is the question of counterfeit money versus “real” money:
 

We can no longer avoid the question of what money is: true money or counterfeit money, which can only be what it is, false or counterfeit, to the extent to which no one knows it is false, that is, to the extent to which it circulates, appears, functions as good and true money. (Given 59)

 

Derrida here is thinking of Baudelaire’s La fausse monnaie, which tells the story of two friends who meet a beggar in the street, one of whom gives him a substantial gift only to reveal to his friend (the narrator) that it is a counterfeit coin.  The narrator wonders at his friend’s motives and imagines that he has offered the coin in order to create an event in the otherwise desperate life of the beggar, speculating about what may result in the circulation of and speculation on this counterfeit money to the benefit or possible detriment of the beggar.  The narrator is horrified to discover that in fact his friend is motivated to do the beggar good (and earn the moral credit of alms to the poor) by offering him a large donation, while resting secure in the knowledge that he has not given away any of his own real money. The question that imposes itself today, however, is whether a financial product derived from leveraged or packaged debt constitutes real money or counterfeit money, that is, the simulacrum of money.  When CDS are spread throughout the global financial system, how far can we say that this system is based on real money or not?  Might we say that the whole of banking depends upon the fictional structure of money, every bit as fictional as Baudelaire’s text?  The business of what is real and what is virtual in the financial system has surely brought us quite quickly to the border of the gift and the economy of sacrifice.  The future is a fiction invented by those who have lived in the past.  The circulation of student loans, for instance, is a perfect example of counterfeit money become true capital:
 

Is not the truth of capital, then, inasmuch as it produces interest without labour, by working all by itself as we say, counterfeit money?  Is there a real difference here between real and counterfeit once there is capital?  And credit?  Everything depends on the act of faith… This text by Baudelaire deals, in effect, with the relations among fiction in general, literary fiction and capitalism, such as they might be photographed acting out a scene in the heart of the modern capital. (Given 124)

 

The untested and risky assumption concerning the borrowing and repayment of tuition loans, say, is precisely the equivalent of the fausse-amie who throws a counterfeit coin in the beggar’s bowl: it will create an event but not for the reasons lenders think, justify to themselves, or hope for return on.

 

The second and related strand is the question of the link between the modern phenomenon of literature, the financial system, and religion, namely, “credit” or, as crédit is usually translated from the French, “faith.”  An enormous and unspoken act of collective belief is required every morning in order for the stock market to open and for banks to continue trading.  Who, other than a true believer, could possibly tolerate the use of his bank account to fund CDS?
 

Everything is [an] act of faith, phenomenon of credit or credence, of belief and conventional authority in this text which perhaps says something essential about what here links literature to belief, to credit and thus to capital, to economy and thus to politics.  Authority is constituted by accreditation, both in the sense of legitimation as effect of belief or credulity, and of bank credit, of capitalized interest. (Given 97)

 

Derrida is writing here in 1977, four years after the establishment of the Chicago Board Options Exchange, which institutionalised the trade in futures and options, but four years before the introduction of swaps into the financial system and twelve years before the construction of the first credit default swap (engineered by J.P. Morgan to cover Exxon’s exposure following the environmental disaster of the Exxon Valdes in Alaska). Derrida, like Marx and Mauss before him, has nevertheless correctly and presciently located the fictional nature of credit.[5]  One accepts a fiction on trust, on the basis that it is nothing other than a fiction; we take the narrator’s word. Literary fiction contains a referential system that maintains the literary aporia throughout, accounting at the same time for the truth and the falsehood of the knowledge literature conveys about itself, distinguishing rigorously between metaphorical and referential language, and delineating a difference between speech acts in books and speech acts in the real world.  The referential system of money, in contrast, would seem to be much more shaky than literature because it both requires a greater trust and fails to properly delineate the difference between money and counterfeit money, the real and the virtual.  Derrida takes this question further in an aside to the final chapter of Given Time:
 

Let us locate in passing here the space of a complex task: To study for example, in so-called modern literature, that is, contemporaneous with a capital—city, polis, metropolis—of a state and with a state of capital, the transformation of monetary forms (metallic, fiduciary—the bank note—or scriptural—the bank check), a certain rarification of payments in cash, the recourse to credit cards, the coded signature, and so forth, in short, a certain dematerialization of money, and therefore of all the scenes that depend upon it.  “Counterfeit Money” and Les Faux-monnayeurs belong to a specific period in the history of money. (Given 110)

 

Derrida is referring to Gide’s novel but we should note in passing that in French les faux-monnayeurs comes to stand by metonymic substitution for all fakery and all counterfeiting in general.  This might well be an example of what Derrida would call a white mythology of credit, one of the coins erased in Nietzsche’s pocket whose fictional structure we no longer recognise.  The history of banking since Derrida’s seminar has been shaped not only by the accelerated dematerialisation of money from the virtuality of credit cards and checks into the imaginary structure of CDS, but also by the eclipse of the author, if I might play on Roland Barthes for a moment.  The entire difficulty of the financial crisis since 2008 has been based upon the inability to distinguish between good and bad debt due to the anonymity of debtors and to debts being packaged, securitised, and swapped.  It simply became impossible to decide whether one was dealing with a reliable narrator or not.  In fact the story of the narrator (i.e., the debtor) had ceased to be important, and what came to matter was the mediating extra-diegetic narrative of the financial institutions that sold on the debt and the credit rating agency that confirmed the provenance of the story.  Since both were interested parties, they were by definition unreliable narrators. There is no discrimination between the narratives of debtors, banks, central banks, public expenditure, and government. Everyone will be given the benefit of the doubt; the assumption behind student loans and sovereign bailouts is that everyone is a good debtor.  This is the story that the national governments are telling themselves and the international bond market, and much will depend upon this credulity.

 

The question of debt is closely related to both literature and philosophy. Dickens’s Little Dorrit provides a good example of the way that debt is a considerable question for literature itself, of counting and recounting, of credit and faith, of debt and obligation, all of which would require a longer and closer reading than is possible here.  The narrative account draws upon the reserves of a debtor in the Marshalsea prison, William Dorrit, who is freed as a consequence of the intervention of Arthur Clennam.  Clennam is an ostensibly disinterested Dickensian hero who wishes to see justice done to the Dorrits without expectation of gratitude or return.  He pays the debts of Edward Dorrit, the wastrel son, and assists in the discovery of an unclaimed inheritance that enables William Dorrit to leave the Marshalsea. In turn, for this is a Dickens novel, Clennam is ruined by bad investments in a seemingly risk-free stock venture, and is imprisoned in the Marshalsea. Clennam’s mother reveals to Amy (Edward’s daughter) that she is heir to a great legacy, but Little Dorrit refuses her inheritance, and when Clennam’s business partner returns a rich man from an enterprise in Russia, he pays off Clennam’s debts.  Of course, Clennam’s previous motives do not constitute a pure gift, consciously or unconsciously: he acted out of his love for Amy and at the end of the novel they are married as debt-free equals.  Dickens’s narrative is provocative today because the narrator of the novel characterises Amy as the “child of the Marshalsea,” that is, the child born into debt and who only ever knows a life of debt, just as Barthes once characterised the subject as un bilan de faillite.[6] George Orwell criticised Dickens because he thought Dickens was unable to see a world beyond individual philanthropy, i.e., a society beyond the pure gift (“Can Socialists be Happy?”).  He was unable to see a welfare state that would take responsibility for Little Dorrit and educate her, perhaps even send her to a public university rather than leave her to achieve social mobility through, first, the inheritance of a gift and, secondly, through marriage.  Given Little Dorrit’s socio-economic origins, prior to 2012 she probably would have received state-funded bursaries to attend a London university. And although the Marshalsea was historically situated in Bermondsey, within a few miles of the Houses of Parliament and the site of the 2010 “tuition fees riots,” she probably would not have been charged with horses and beaten with batons in the pursuit of her future.

 

A different fate, however, is indicated by Baudelaire’s “Beat Up the Poor!” (Assommons les pauvres!),” which Derrida describes as a “symmetrical counterpoint” to “La fausse monnaie,”[7]  Derrida spends much less time on this narrative but it is worth dwelling on today. Baudelaire’s narrator recounts: “For fifteen days I had shut myself up in my room and had surrounded myself with the most popular books of the day… that treat of the art of making people happy, wise, and rich in twenty-four hours” (101).  One can readily imagine the contemporary equivalents of these books on what is now fatuously described as “well-being.”  It is enough to make one sick: “I had digested—or rather swallowed—all the lubrications of all the purveyors of public happiness—of those who advise the poor to become slaves, and of those who encourage them to believe that they are all dethroned kings” (101). Neo-liberalism now would like the professional classes of tomorrow to be indebted to the state and then to measure their “well-being” as an indicator of national success:[8] “It will be readily understood that I was in a dazed state of mind bordering on idiocy” (101).  What intrigues me here is that the narrator, the being (re)counter (as opposed to a bean counter) has been brought to the state of ideologically induced stupidity through reading, and a marathon of reading at that: fifteen days locked in a room on his own, like an academic researching the condition of well-being.  He leaves his room “with a terrible thirst” because “the passion for bad literature engenders a proportionate need for fresh air and cooling drinks” (101).  Having consumed vast quantities of idiocy, he must now wash it away, exchanging a thirst for non-knowledge with a need for the disinfectant of alcohol and oxygen.  In other words, he enters into a credit default swap in which he hedges the time spent on bankrupt ideas against his faith in fresh air.  He has earned his drink after the sacrifice of solitary reading.  As he is about to enter a bar, he comes across a beggar.  Unlike the two friends in “La fausse monnaie,” he does not give the beggar alms but, encouraged by the voices in his head, decides instead that “a man is the equal of another only if he can prove it, and to be worthy of liberty a man must fight for it” (102).[9] Accordingly he beats up the beggar, “pounding his head against the wall… sure that in this deserted suburb no policeman would disturb me for some time” (102).  While “kettling” the beggar (to borrow a culinary metaphor from London’s Metropolitan Police Force), a philosophical miracle occurs: “O bliss of the philosopher when he sees the truth of his theory verified!” The beggar proves himself the equal of the narrator by retaliating: “[he] proceeded to give me two black eyes, to knock out four of my teeth and … to beat me to a pulp” (102).  The narrator describes himself as satisfied as “one of the Porch sophists,” and declaring the beggar his equal, shares out his purse, telling him that should another beggar ask him for alms, he ought to apply the narrator’s “theory” and teach the other the same painful lesson concerning equality (102-103).  The text ends with the beggar swearing that he understands the theory and vowing to follow this advice.

 

By any reckoning this is a remarkable text; how shall we read it?  On the one hand, we might take it as a neo-liberal allegory of tough-love for the poor, who must not be satisfied by handouts but should learn to stand on their own two feet and take on board the lessons of a sacrificial economy in which equal status is attained through beating the other to a pulp.  On the other hand, and in contrast to “La fausse monnaie,” the moral of this story might be that awakening from the torpor of idiocy-inducing ideology, the narrator has the revelation that not only must he give to the beggar but also—as Derrida says in his brief reading of this text—he must give well (“il faut bien payer”) (Given 139). The narrator gives a gift to the poor that does not merely offer money in return for indebtedness or spiritual advancement but goes beyond the material benefit of the gift to give added value in the form of a theory of giving.  This would be the excessive violence of the pure gift or a gift without conditions that taught the poor a lesson.  In this sense it is the perfect allegory for school children, university applicants, and student protesters whose futures have been mortgaged before their education has even begun and who are for their troubles beaten up by the state that is offering the gift of a student loan.  Perhaps, rather than suffering like Dickens’s children of the Marshalsea, they will prove themselves equal to their creditors by being worthy enough of liberty to fight for it.

 

Let me conclude by way of reference to the epigraph from The Post Card that has overseen this paper from the very beginning.  Here Derrida has in mind the Platonic tradition to which we are all indebted in every aspect of our daily lives.  I think the striking sentence in this paragraph is the first one: “They have signed our I.O.U. and we can no longer not acknowledge it.”  It is not that we have signed an IOU for the debt that we owe to Socrates and Plato but that they in advance of us have mortgaged our future, signed “our I.O.U.” for us before we have even begun to live and think in the world.  Derrida specifically names this structure as a fiction, “a story, the trap of who signs an I.O.U. for the other such that the other finds himself engaged before having known a thing about it.”  In this way we are all infinitely indebted to the philosophical tradition before we have even begun to read or started to take up our place of study.[10]  Derrida calls this a “children’s story” and a “love story.”  It is certainly the story of our children today, who have had their IOU signed in advance by a generation of politicians who have thrown them into debt before they have even begun to read.  As we saw above, inhabiting capitalism is never a question of “paying off the debt”; it is always a case of having had the IOU signed for us in advance of our entry into capital.  The task then is not to refuse debt but to affirm another register of debt, an infinite and un-payable debt: our debts to the western tradition, to philosophy, and to the university.  One cannot live without faith or debt.  Today we need to articulate a counter-faith: a belief in the public realm, publicly funded institutions, the idea of the university, and a belief in the necessity of critical thought.  This would be a catechism so simple that it would be worthy of the phrase “a child’s story.”  If the IOU is also a love story, it is a tale of how we do not fall in love but of how love instead falls upon us, smothering us with its dialectic of our infinite debt to the one we love in advance of any engagement with him, her, or it.  In this sense it is also the story of university managers and higher education policy leaders who are indebted to the very idea of the institution they serve prior to any understanding of what the institution might mean.  They have had their IOU signed for them in advance of their entrance into the Principal’s Office, and in this way their debts and duties are infinite.  These Chancellors, Vice-Chancellors and Presidents have a choice today, to accept the credit default swap that passes the debt of the university from state to student, or, to affirm the gift of higher education by refusing this sacrificial economy.  They may well predominately choose the former and so, like Baudelaire’s narrator, beat up the poor, but they will not do so from the same theoretical motivation.  Rather, they will be like the somnambulant friend in “La fausse monnaie,” thinking they are doing good by offering counterfeit money and seeking advancement while hedging themselves and their institutions against loss.  They, like Baudelaire’s false alms giver, deserve our contempt: “I will never forgive him the ineptitude of his calculation… The most irreparable of vices is to do evil out of stupidity” (qtd. in Given 164).

Although the background of our topic is to be found in the concrete and urgent economic, social and political crisis that Europe and the United States are undergoing, and although the immediate causes of this crisis are by no means shrouded in mystery, I will take a somewhat more philosophical approach to the question of debt, and to the question from which it cannot be separated—that of credit. A crisis as severe as this one, despite or because of the suffering it produces, should be the occasion for rethinking engrained attitudes, behaviors and practices, as well as the notions that inform them. Such a rethinking is one of few positive opportunities offered by the current crisis, even if the reflections it provokes remain unable to provide for its positive resolution. In any case, to the extent that this crisis involves systemic issues, any potential solution will require an understanding not just of immediate causes, but also of longer-range contributing factors. It is in this direction that the following remarks seek to move, albeit in a preliminary and tentative manner.
 
Since I will be discussing texts and attitudes not usually associated with economics or politics, let me begin by stating my conviction that modern economic policies, attitudes and behaviors are decisively informed by factors that derive from the Judeo-Christian theological tradition—and that this holds true for an age that prides itself on being secular. I will argue that discussions of debt, and of the present crisis to which it contributes, can benefit from taking into account a dimension of the problem that is usually ignored or minimized, and that could be designated “economic theology”—a term meant to call attention to its relation to the notion of political theology, dating from the eighteenth century but today largely associated with the writings of Carl Schmitt. I do not present either of these perspectives as definitive or exhaustive, but I do want to suggest that they can provide insights into an economic and political situation that seems ever more irrational and dysfunctional—possibly even suicidal—with every passing day. It is a situation in which members of “democratic” societies—not just policy-makers and representatives but also substantial segments of those victimized by these designated “decision-makers”—continue to endorse the parties, policies and institutions directly and indirectly responsible for the deterioration of their living conditions. My hope is that by contributing to our understanding of how such behavior can persist in the face of what should be the dissuasive effect of the policies it endorses, an economic-theological analysis of political behavior and attitudes can perhaps prepare the way for modifying these dominant tendencies—although I harbor no illusions about the power of discursive analyses to translate directly into critical transformative action.
 
Since what I am calling an economic-theological perspective is foreign to most approaches to the question of debt today, let me begin by briefly reviewing a text that convinced me of its relevance. In a fragmentary essay, written around 1921 and never published in his lifetime, Walter Benjamin argued that capitalism should be considered not just the product of Christianity, as Max Weber elaborated in his classic study, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), but as its direct successor and heir. In other words, capitalism is to be considered not only as a socio-economic system but as a religion. The basis for this assertion is to be found in the fact that capitalism “serves essentially to allay the same cares, torments, and troubles previously addressed by the so-called religions” (Benjamin, Selected Writings 1: 288, trans. modified). I will not go into Benjamin’s significant qualification of such religions as “so-called”, since that would lead us too far afield from our present concerns. By “so-called religions” we can safely assume that Benjamin meant most established, institutionalized religions – in short religion as it has been known and practiced. With this caveat in mind, Benjamin goes on to argue that the essence of capitalism is that it is “a purely cultic religion”, i.e. in one that consists less in dogmatic tenets or beliefs than in ritual practices. What distinguishes this new religion from its predecessors, he continues, is that it is “probably the first instance of a cult that creates guilt, not atonement” (288)—indeed that produces, extends and universalizes (today we might say globalizes) guilt. The word that Benjamin uses in German to describe what he takes to be the essential effect of capitalism as a religion is Schuld—more exactly, verschuldend: culpabilizing. As is well known since Nietzsche wrote his Genealogy of Morals, Schuld can mean not just “guilt” in the moral, religious and legal sense, but also debt or obligation. If Nietzsche sought the origins of the moral-religious-legal sense of the word in what he took to be the inborn tendency of thinking to seek out or produce equivalences (e.g. GM 2.20); Benjamin in this fragment is content to emphasize “the demonic ambiguity of this word,” which he sees epitomized in the works of Freud, Marx and, above all, Nietzsche (SW 1: 289). This “demonic ambiguity”—bringing together a concept that is primarily economic, debt, with one used in religious, moral and legal discourses, guilt—is symptomatic of the relevance of economic theology. However contingent such a fact of linguistic usage may seem, the convergence of economic, moral, religious and legal significances in a single word, other examples of which can be found in many languages, demands our attention. Precisely because no one individual or institution decides about the meaning of words, such “spontaneous” verbal usage should be seen as reflecting experiences, conflicts and problems that official agencies have not successfully censored and are often even reluctant to acknowledge.
 
The first question that Benjamin’s argument implies, but does not explicitly address, has to do with those “cares, torments and troubles” that capitalism qua (so-called) religion allays. On the basis of this 1921 text, as well as his study of The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, written only a few years later—I want to suggest that these cares, anxieties and troubles are the result not just of general aspects of human existence, but rather are historically and culturally specific. They have to do with a crisis in what can be called the Christian Salvational narrative, one which becomes particularly acute as a consequence of the Protestant Reformation and subsequent Wars of Religion. The Christian Good News, its message of possible grace that would overcome the finitude of what Benjamin calls die Lebenden or die Lebendigen—“the living”— becomes increasingly problematic in the aftermath of this internal crisis. The “cares, torments and troubles” mentioned at the outset of Benjamin’s fragment are thus historically marked by the crisis of a culture that sees itself faced with a religious problem for which it cannot find a religious solution (Origin 79).
 
Like Max Weber before him, Benjamin distinguishes sharply between Luther’s extreme antinomianism, which questions the salvational potential of all human action—“good works”— and Calvin’s more moderate position, which allows worldly success to be interpreted as a sign of election. The Lutherian “storming of the work,” as Benjamin puts it in the 1924 version of the text, attacks the redemptive potential of good works—epitomized by, but not limited to, the sacraments administered by the Church (Gesammelte Schriften 1.1: 317). This critique of good works can also be seen as operative in the cult-religion of capitalism, since according to Benjamin the celebration of the cult no longer seeks atonement, but rather the globalization of guilt and debt. Indeed, the capitalist cult drives this tendency so that not even the Divine Creator is spared:
 

A monstrous guilty conscience that does not know how to expiate, seizes upon the cult, not in order to atone for this guilt but to universalize it … and finally and above all to include God Himself in this guilt. (GS 6: 101, my trans.)

 

It is of the essence of the religious movement that is capitalism that it endure to the end, to the final and complete culpabilization of God in a world of consummate despair, which is precisely hoped for. Therein resides what is historically unheard-of in Capitalism: that religion no longer seeks to reform being but rather to reduce it to ruins. (SW 1: 288-89, trans. modified)

 
If you recall that the German word I have translated as “culpabilization”—Verschuldung—also means “being or becoming indebted,” you will begin to see that what today has become known as the “sovereign debt” crisis of nation-states, was already at the heart of Benjamin’s discussion, written in 1921, i.e. in the immediate aftermath of the reparations payments imposed on Germany and its allies by the victorious powers at the end of World War I. For Benjamin’s argument it is not insignificant that the justification of such reparations, which plunged Germany into debt for years to come, resided in the so-called “Kriegsschuld” (War-Guilt) theory, ensconced in Article 231 of the Versailles Peace Treaty theory, ascribing sole responsibility for the War and its destruction to Germany and its allies.
 
Benjamin, to be sure, seems to want to see in the globalization of debt and guilt through capitalism a kind of nihilistic—or Apocalyptic—preface to what might be a radically new, perhaps revolutionary world. Although I will not dwell on this aspect of his text, I note in passing that it bears comparison with Derrida’s fascination in his later writings with the concept of “auto-immunity”—that is, the tendency of organizations to turn their protective mechanisms, initially directed against everything foreign, against themselves, potentially and paradoxically reopening access to hitherto excluded alien factors and thus introducing the possibility of a deconstructive self-transformation.
 
By contrast, what is more directly relevant to Benjamin’s notion of “the demonic ambiguity” of the German word, Schuld— is an experience I had many years ago, while driving from Paris to Strasbourg on a near-deserted highway. The trip took about five hours and so to pass the time, I played several tapes I had been given of the “Messenger Lectures” held by Paul de Man at Cornell University in February-March of 1983. As I listened to one of those lectures, I was puzzled by a single word, which despite repeated attempts I found myself unable to decipher. I remained hung up then, as now, on another “demonic ambiguity” – this time not in a single word, but in the homophonic proximity of two ostensibly quite different words. I could not decide whether de Man, speaking almost perfect English but with a slight Flemish accent and intonation, was saying “debt” or “death.” I have never bothered to look up the printed versions of these lectures, since the confusion of these two words turned out to be the most important message I took away from de Man’s “Messenger Lectures.” And it remains a useful guideline for reading Benjamin as well. For the inseparability of the two words is already anticipated by “Capitalism as Religion.” If guilt and debt are inseparable in the German word, Schuld, then a possible cause of their convergence resounds in the near-homophony of “debt” and “death.”
 
Let me try to indicate where I see this configuration at work in “Capitalism as Religion.” Benjamin describes capitalism as a cult-religion that strives to attain permanente Dauer, or “permanent duration” (259). This formulation already signals how the cult “allays the cares, torments and troubles” it addresses: it does so by demonstrating its own ability to survive. Although it is difficult not to associate Benjamin’s phrase with the Marxist notion of “permanent revolution” made famous by Trotsky, Benjamin’s term is closer to Marx’s original meaning, which designates the ability of the proletariat to maintain a revolutionary position for an extended period of class struggle. Benjamin simply inverts the terms: it is not the Proletariat whose struggle is ongoing, but rather the capitalist cult. Its “permanent duration” is also exhausting and self-consumptive: it seeks to establish an interminable holiday, one that Benjamin appears to describe, using a French phrase, as “sans rêve et sans merci [without dream or mercy]” (SW 1: 288) — but which more likely is a misprint for a quite different phrase, namely “without truce [trêve] or mercy.”[1] (Marx uses almost the same phrase in the French version of Capital to describe the way in which capital extends the workday “sans trêve ni merci” [Le Capital I.X]). But whereas Marx uses the phrase to designate the tendency of the system to extend the workday, Benjamin by contrast applies it to the “holiday” – Festtag – a day that is both holy, but also supposed to constitute a respite from work. There is thus the implication that the perennialization of the capitalist cult no longer relates to work, i.e. to productive activity, but to consumption. I will return to this shortly.
 
At any rate, the phrase suggests that the practice of the capitalist cult is part of an ongoing battle, in which the worshippers exhaust themselves in the effort to survive. The impossibility of their achieving permanence, or unlimited duration, clashes with the impossibility of renouncing it. The result is a war without end, truce or mercy. One is reminded first of the current “war against terror”—by definition without end, since terror is a feeling that can never be eliminated, much less by force—and second, of the perpetual “sales” that in the United States, by contrast with Europe, have become quasi-permanent. Like the rituals that constitute the practice of a cult, each “sale” must be at once of limited duration, in order to promote a sense of the irrevocable passage of time, and at the same time endlessly repeatable. Through this convergence of temporal restriction and unlimited repetition, such a cult can create the impression of infinitizing finitude, and thereby contribute to allaying, temporarily, those “cares, torments and troubles” that arise when the path to grace (or survival) appears to be blocked. The American institution of endless “sales” gives new meaning to the notion of salvation: one “saves” by spending, by acquiring commodities, increasingly on credit—with the result that the private indebtedness of American consumers is among the highest in the world. The master-word of American advertising, “save,” says it all: only by spending on credit—only by increasing one’s indebtedness—can one save, and thereby be saved.
 
While this mixture of increased debt and promised redemption as a way of assuaging anxieties may be specific to the American cult of consumption, its roots go back a long way. And it is here that the perspective of economic theology proves particularly illuminating. This perspective suggests that certain recent discursive events should be taken more seriously, more symptomatically, than they have been. I am thinking of the famous or infamous statement of Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, who, in response to criticism related to the 2008 banking crisis, in a much-quoted interview with the Times of London (Nov. 7, 2009) declared that he and other bankers were “doing God’s work”. Or when Eli Wiesel, at a roundtable held at NY’s exclusive 21 Club on February 27, 2009, explained the boundless confidence he and others placed in Bernie Madoff by recalling that, “We thought he was God.” I want to suggest that these statements are neither simply verbal exaggerations nor mere jokes, as Blankfein himself later claimed, but rather symptoms of the way a tradition, whose sense of self-identity and of value remains rooted in the founding myth of monotheism, continues to inform the ways in which many people have responded to financial and political threats. If Madoff could appear as God to his clients and victims—many of whom were raised in a culture that is proud of its messianic origins—and if Blankfein could claim that bankers are doing “God’s work,” it is because a certain faith in the inseparability of debt and deification still has the power of allaying the “cares, torments and troubles” that continue to haunt people today.
 
One further point that Benjamin makes in “Capitalism as Religion” that seems relevant here is that the God who is drawn into the human network of guilt and debt is one that is unreif—“unripe” or “immature”—and who therefore can be worshipped only while hidden: “Its God must be hidden from it and may be addressed only when his guilt is at its zenith. The cult is celebrated before an unripe deity; every idea, every conception of it offends against the secret of this immaturity” (SW 1: 289).
 
It is as if the Creator himself has taken on the characteristic of a debt that has not yet arrived at “maturity.” In the age of speculative finance capitalism, profit appears to be created often through the maturing of interest-bearing debt, just as Bernie Madoff’s wealth, success and power were all based on his ability to manipulate and to conceal indebtedness—the so-called “Ponzi scheme” that some, including Paul Krugman, have suggested could be applied to many of today’s legal financial speculative activities. In this context it is illuminating to reread Blankfein’s remarks that led up to his comparison of the bankers’ mission with the “work of God.” Bankers, he argued, are vital to the life of society insofar as they “help companies to grow by helping them to raise capital. Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth. It’s a virtuous cycle” (Carney).
 
In this supply-side economic perspective, Blankfein takes up an argument that Benjamin already noted in his description of capitalism as religion: if the cult produces debt and indebtedness, it is not just for its own sake but as a way of producing “interest.” Debt, in short, produces life. But only insofar as its debt is repaid – “redeemed” — with interest. “I know that my Redeemer liveth” here translates as: I know that I will be repaid with interest.” In both cases it is a question of a profitable “return”. What is truly productive, in Blankfein’s eyes, is the movement of capital, which today generally consists in a cycle not just of lending and reimbursement, but of indebtedness calculated to produce a productive return (and of which “hedge funds” are just one more prominent institutional example). By facilitating the circulation of capital, bankers and other financial speculators claim to contribute to the “virtuous cycle” of growth and more growth; the proliferation of wealth is the major expression of this virtuous cycle. In Capital, but even more in the Grundrisse, Marx exposes this view as ultimately theological: not labor, but the circulation of capital appears to produce and reproduce life. Capital, for Blankfein, enables companies “to grow,” which “in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth.” In the German language today, the capitalist entrepreneur is almost universally designated as the “work-giver”: Arbeitgeber. He “gives” or creates work, albeit never gratis. In the same lexicon, the worker is called the Arbeitnehmer: literally the “taker of work.” The tradition that informs such discourse can be traced back to the first book of Genesis. Blankfein’s virtuous cycle of the production of wealth, labor and life itself through capital is modeled on the story of a creation that is not simply ex nihilo but rather eo ipso. It can be debated whether God created the universe out of nothing or whether something – the wind upon the waters, for instance, was already there, but the very notion of a creation of an articulated world presupposes a Creator who antedates the creation just as a subject antedates his deliberate action. The notion of creation, then, enthrones the idea of a self-identical being free of any constitutive or irreducible obligation or indebtedness. The Divine Being of the Creator thus serves as a model for property in its purest form. The being of a monotheistic Creator-God belongs to Him exclusively, since it depends on nothing outside of Himself. And if that God is considered to be a living being, the same must be said of his life: it has no antecedents, is sui generis.
 
It is not surprising, then, that the story of Creation as told in Genesis is designed to demonstrate that this self-referential structure has to be seen as the ideal model for all living creatures even if for various reasons, they cannot “live up” to it. All created creatures thus remain informed by and indebted to—their origin.
 
Let me highlight what I consider in this context to be the most relevant aspects of this story. On the third day of the Creation, God begins to create living beings, namely, “herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself” (King James Version, Gen. 1.11, emphasis added). This conveys an image of life that reflects the self-identical being of the Creator: life is described as self-reproducing (seed-bearing), requiring no external intervention, since it already contains the seeds of its future within itself. This conception of life as self-reproductive determines a second trait of the Creation. Every creature, vegetable, animal or human, is created “after his kind.”  This formula is repeated seven times during the Creation story (Gen. 1.1, 11, 12, 21, 24, 25). Creaturely life is thus designated as generic life, but not yet as gendered, since gender in Genesis is inseparable from division, alterity and ultimately singularity. Living creatures are created as what Feuerbach and, after him, Marx call Gattungswesen, or “species-being.” As such they can be considered exempt from the finitude of singular living beings (the possibility of species extinction has no place in this prelapsarian world, although it will return with a vengeance after the Fall).
 
In short, the creation of the living qua “kind” suggests a conception of creaturely life that is not limited by death. This does not mean that the living are not indebted, for they are. They owe their lives to their Creator—just as the debtor will owe his debt to the creditor. But the only payback demanded at first is that they reproduce themselves: that their lives grow and multiply. So doing, they continue the process of creation, not ex nihilo, but ex vivo: life, conceived as independent of death, reproduces itself with interest, just as credit conceived to create debt reproduces itself in its reimbursement with interest. Life is represented as a self-identical process of spontaneous augmentation, deriving from the self-presence of the One Divine Creator. Throughout this process, Life remains what it was, namely self-identical, defined only by its own movement of self-expansion and never by its termination.
 
With the Fall, everything changes. Everything—and nothing. One must begin by asking why there should be a Fall at all. Often interpreted as the first act of human freedom, this act does not take place in a vacuum. It is not recounted as purely spontaneous, but as the result of a dialogue with the serpent. When Eve is first approached by the serpent, she repeats the interdiction of God, not “to eat” or even “to touch” the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, “lest ye die.” The serpent responds by assuring Eve that “Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3.4-5). The serpent tempts Eve with the possibility of becoming like the gods, to be accomplished by acquiring knowledge of good and evil. But why should knowledge of Good and Evil put the knower in a position akin to that of the gods? The question is especially intriguing, since in the Garden of Eden there was only good and only one God. To know good as something different from evil, then, is to know something that exceeds the boundaries of the prelapsarian state of Creation—it is to know something radically other—or to know nothing at all. Such knowledge is reserved for a being that transcends those boundaries—in short, for God as Creator. The fact that the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is placed in the midst of the Garden of Eden can be interpreted as a sign of the internal limitation of the earth, even in its pristine state.
 
The presence of that tree refers to something that is excluded from Eden, namely Evil. In a different way, the presence of the Tree of Life alongside it refers implicitly to what is also excluded from Eden, namely, death. Without being able to develop this further, let me recall that the Biblical narrative links the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil to the Tree of Life, and both to the gendering of Man. A gendered form of life is one  that does not reproduce itself spontaneously out of purely internal causes, as with the seeds of the plant. Moreover, the details of this gendering, far from confirming Man as an autonomous, homogeneous being, suggest his incompleteness, his “loneliness,” his need for others — and hence, a heterogeneity that from the start troubles the appearance of pure homogeneity implied by the idea of a self-identical, monotheistic Creation.  If Adam names “Man” as an ostensibly unified genre or species being, Eve appears as a response to and offspring of the inadequacy of a living being to live its life alone. Eve, in Hebrew Hawwâh, means “the living one” or “source of life”, is the living demonstration that to live and reproduce, a genre cannot remain identical to itself. Thus, the notion of a gendered “self” is revealed to be constitutive divided, dependent on its indebtedness to others, and therein irreducibly distinct from the notion of an identical and homogeneous Self as the source of all Being including that of living  beings.
 
It is precisely this dimension of life—as a process of living that cannot divest itself of its singularity and hence of its concomitant dependence on others—that makes Eve the ideal interlocutor for the serpent. What the serpent’s temptation appeals to is not simply a general desire to know but a singular anxiety of not knowing, and hence of not surviving. It is this anxiety, barely visible but nevertheless legible in the Biblical narrative, that leads to the Fall. This legibility, I want to suggest, appears in the justification given by God for the punishment he is about to inflict on the transgressive couple:
 

Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: [I send] him forth from the Garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. (Gen. 3.22-23, emphasis added)

 
God demands his due, refusing to allow the debtor to forget his debt to his Creditor. For there to be debt and credit, there must be a difference—a difference dependent on property, understood as the ground of self-presence. The monotheistic God is exclusive, jealously and zealously denying any relation to or parity with other gods (the ban against idols). All the more, He must jealously enforce the difference between the One God, who lives forever, and human beings, who—although created in his image—do not. Humans must learn the meaning of this image: they must acknowledge that it separates as well as joins. Humans must accept themselves as mere image. To want to be like God, on the contrary, is to want to dissolve the image into that which it images, to collapse the discontinuum of creation into identity. This tendency is expressed in the desire to touch and ingest—the tree and the apple—rather than remain satisfied with merely seeing them. Hence, divided man, Adam and Eve, must both must be punished. For they seek to dissolve the invisibility that separates every image from what it represents, and instead to collapse the two into self-sameness.
 
What is called the Fall is thus driven by the desire of the living to overcome their finitude through the acquisition of knowledge. This is confirmed by the final manner in which God completes the act of banishment: “And so he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life” (Gen. 3.24, emphasis added). “To keep the way of the tree of life” means above all to keep man away from that tree: to keep him at a distance from a life that seems to reproduce itself spontaneously. Having eaten from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, man is condemned to leave the Garden that such knowledge already transcends, since there is no Evil “in” the Garden of Eden, where everything is Good.
 
Man is thus condemned to return to the earth as to his origin that has now demonstrates its alterity. For the earth is now not a garden that grows on its own, as it were, but a soil to be tilled and worked, a ground of toil, trouble and torment. He is thus condemned to a world of work, which has to acknowledge the alterity and opacity of its surroundings, and as such is radically different from the world of creation. It no longer involves the spontaneous production and reproduction of life, but rather the heterogeneous deferral of death: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground” (Gen. 3.19). In the postlapsarian world, life emerges as a suspended death-sentence: as the effort to repay an unredeemable debt. Work, far from being the realization of the worker, signifies his consumption. If for Hegel, in his famous dialectic of master and servant, work involves a reactive acknowledgement of finitude that ultimately promises freedom, in the postlapsarian world of Genesis this promise is far more difficult to discern.
 
What I want to suggest by rereading this religious myth of creation is: first, that it provides a paradigmatic form in which those “cares, torments and troubles” mentioned by Benjamin are both allayed and reproduced; and second, that this paradigm retains more influence today, in our “secular” society, than might at first be apparent. It does so by defining human (and natural) life as a debt that must be repaid, but that also must remain unredeemed. It is this conundrum that gives rise to the messianic hope of a Redeemer, who by paying back the debt with his own life will render life once again livable. “I know that my Redeemer liveth”—words made famous by Händel’s “Messiah” more than by the Old and New Testament from which they are taken (Job 19: 25-26; 1 Corin. 15: 20). With the advent of Christ, this “knowledge” takes on a new reality—and also a new urgency. “For,” in the words of Paul, “since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead” (1 Corin. 15: 21). This “resurrection of the dead” implies the redemption of that Schuld that designates both culpability and indebtedness; but even more, that confirms indebtedness as culpability.
 
On the one hand, then, the Good News announced by Christianity to all of mankind enables it, in Benjamin’s words, to present itself as a possible solution to the “cares, torments and troubles”—the anxieties and terrors—that plague human existence. The fact that God appears on earth in the form of a singular human being is in this perspective indispensable, since it is at the level of the singular living being that those “cares, torments and troubles” must now be addressed. The appearance of this divine individual nourishes the hope that the debt can and will be repaid. But first, the guilt must be amortized, through sacrifice, which is partial payback and investment in the future. This process takes time. Meanwhile, it allows the profitable circulation of credit and debt to appear as the anticipation of a final redemption. The ultimate repayment of the debt of the living can only come with the apocalyptic end of the world, its “death” serving as punishment for its sins and as transcendence of a fallen Creation. For the Creation remains constitutively indebted to its Creator insofar as the latter’s mode of Being—pure self-identity and property—can never be attained by His creatures, while it nonetheless provides the ideal against which they are measured.
 
The notions of “soul” and, in more secular terms, of “self” mark this impossible measure. Whether as soul or as self, the effort to name that in human being which corresponds to the mono-theological paradigm of self-identity founders on the irreducible difference between the heterogeneous singularity of living beings and the homogeneous model of identity to which they are required to measure up.
 
This is why Benjamin’s version of the globalization of debt and guilt—Schuld—through the cultic religion of capitalism rings so true today. According to Benjamin’s remarks in “Capitalism as Religion,” capitalism retains the perspective of an apocalyptic end, providing the theological underpinning of what Naomi Klein has recently described as “Shock” Capitalism—which, while insisting on finitude, also seeks to control and exploit it. It seeks to impose itself as a kind of second nature that would transcend the finitude of natural beings through what appears to be an endless cycle of credit, debt, and repayment with interest—the secular correlative of an interminable spiritual process of guilt and redemption. What Benjamin, writing in the early 1920s, does not sufficiently emphasize is that this perpetual production of guilt and debt is not just endlessly destructive—reducing the world to ruins—but also enormously profitable. To be sure, the profit it produces—as the speculation of recent finance capital demonstrates anew every day—is entirely compatible with the large-scale destruction of the material, social and environmental bases of existence, whether of humans or of things. Profitable speculation can converge with physical destruction since its form of existence has become increasingly virtual: that is, “profit” is never identical with its actualization—no more than “value” in Marxian analysis is simply identical with empirically observable “price,” or “surplus value” with observable “profit.” The surplus is something that can be “realized” only by being put back into circulation, and this ultimately means back into the cycle of credit and debt: surplus-value cannot be “hoarded” as Marx’s reference to the Balzacian figure of the miser and usurer, Gobseck, emphasizes (Capital 1.24). The maximization of profit, which is never an absolute quantity insofar as it always entails a temporal relation, requires a continuous process of “investment” in which the cycle of credit and debt plays an essential role. The contemporary speculative practice of leveraged buyouts is just one of the most conspicuous mechanisms of this process: profitable for creditors and stockholders but often destructive of the enterprises thus bought out, including their employees.
 
For all of the acuity of his insight into the religious dimension of capitalism, Benjamin’s nihilistic hope that the destruction of being through capitalist universalization of debt as guilt, could somehow make way for a world that would be entirely different appears today not just overly optimistic, but also as a part of the apocalyptic perspective that also informs the cultic practices of the capitalist religion. The notion of an apocalyptic transformation of the world reflects the gnostic dimension of this religious tradition, which, although forced underground by the dominant official dogma, remains all the more active ‘underground’. The redemption of the world, sinful, guilty and indebted, can in this perspective only arrive through its total destruction. The political shift from the Cold War, based on national and super-national conflicts, to a universal “war against terror” is just the most recent symptom of this tendency to globalize the destruction it then seeks to ascribe to “terrorists” as their exclusive and spontaneous product. It should not be forgotten that the War Against Terror was first introduced by George W. Bush in his 2002 State of the Union Address as a War against the Axis of Evil, and that Bush had to be reminded by Christian theologians that on this earth, at least, such a war was never entirely winnable (which may have been precisely its function). From this perspective it is only with the final judgment that all debts will be fully redeemed and all property fully restored. The monotheological tradition reinforces the belief in the priority of the Proper and of the Property-Owner with respect to the relational network both nonetheless require to exist. The belief in this priority dominates economic thinking and political policies today, perhaps even more than it did when Benjamin first identified capitalism as a religion, so-called—at a time when the Bolshevik Revolution still seemed to hold out the possibility of an alternative to the age-old priority of the proper and of private property. This tradition can still dominate today in part at least because it continues to inform notions of identity, personal and collective, even in a secular world where the “self” has largely replaced the “soul,” conserving its theological essence all the while: which is to say, conserving the notion of an autonomy that can stay the same over time and space. It is a Self that feels compelled to adhere to the words with which God responded to Moses when asked for his name: “I am who I am,” (English Standard Version Exod. 3:14); or, in earlier translations, “I will be who I will be” (Cronin). It is this that allows for the “manufacturing” of consent even against the interests of those who espouse it.
 
Such inherited notions of identity, coupled with their reinforcement through audiovisual media, help create the conditions under which bankers such as Lloyd Blankfein can defend their activities as “God’s work,” as the creation of nothing less than the conditions of life itself. The role of creator today is assigned to the masters of debt and credit, who no longer appear to be nation-states but rather multinational private financial institutions. In recent testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, US Attorney General Eric Holder admitted that, “some of these institutions [have] become so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them” (“Transcript”). The notion of “too big to fail” thus becomes too big to be called to account by the most powerful government in the world.
 
Unfortunately, I have no consoling statement with which to conclude this analysis—and indeed, no conclusion at all, if not one of those “curious conclusions” advocated by Laurence Sterne in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1.20). Let me therefore draw at least one such conclusion from the previous remarks.
 
If Capitalism is able to assuage, however provisionally, “cares, torments and troubles” even while producing or exacerbating them, the mechanism by which it accomplishes this is through channeling anxiety into aggression. Anxiety, Freud insisted in his later work, was inseparable from the I (Ego), that part of the psyche charged with integrating the divisive tendencies of It (Id) and superego (heir to traditional values and ideals). To understand the success of capitalist politics today in channeling anxieties into aggression—into a “war against terror” that is also ultimately a war against the other (the foreigner, stranger, alien)—one must better understand the genealogy of those ideals which inform the I in its integrative efforts. If anxiety, as Freud suggests, is the reaction of the I to a danger, the system whose operation is menaced by that danger is inseparable from the self-perception of the I. What I have been suggesting is that the self-perception of this I, far from being simply universal, is informed by a distinctively monotheological – and in particular, Judeo-Christian tradition, which, from the start—in its story of creation—places the I in a double-bind, which was perhaps best formulated by Henry James in his novella, “The Figure in the Carpet.” There the patriarchal hero and renowned author, Hugh Vereker, tells his young admirer and budding critic, “I do it in my way…Go you and don’t do it in yours” (234)—a variation on the response of God to Moses: “I am who I am,” and the attendant implication that Moses and his people should go become who they are not. Perhaps a more adequate formulation of the demand that this heritage conveys might be: “Be like me, be yourself!”
 
This is also part of the message conveyed by the notion of a human being created “in the image” of a creator that can have no (graven) image because he is both singularly inimitable and universal. This universalizing of singularity creates the problem to which most “so-called religions,” including capitalism, have responded by upping the ante of sin, guilt, debt and redemption. The problem consists in the premise that any true identity, whether of God, the soul or the self, must be considered to be prior to all indebtedness to others—therefore implying that all debt can and must be quantified, even monetarized, and thus made redeemable. It is only when this widely held sense of Self as an autonomous, homogeneous property-owner, along with its correlative, a sense of life as spontaneous and self-contained, come to be sufficiently questioned so as to make room for the heterogeneity of life-in-the-singular, that anxiety may cease to be a cause for terror, and instead become a first step toward acknowledging that there are debts that cannot and should not be repaid. Only then will the sin of singularity be overcome.
 

[1] See Kautzer’s translation note in “Capitalism as Religion” (262) and my discussion in Benjamin’s -abilities (255-257).
 

 

Graeber’s First 5,000 Years of Debt

In his much-acclaimed book Debt: the First 5,000 Years, published three years into the recent global economic crisis, David Graeber identifies two “origin stories” that largely dominate commonplace understandings concerning the invention of money and the onset of debt. The first is the myth of barter. According to an idealized view of archaic human communities, before money systems developed, barter predominated as the exchange-form characteristic of basic social relations. People simply swapped goods and services to the benefit of their own interests and, by extension, to the benefit of the community as a whole. However, the barter system had its limits. From the outset, it depended on a double coincidence of wants: I have what you want and vice versa. As societies became more complex, barter required increasingly sophisticated and often cumbersome multilateral transactions and valuations to ensure the desired distribution of a larger number of goods. Thus, the story goes, some consensual medium of exchange was required to simplify the process—hence the birth of money. Graeber shows how this “origin story” of barter is founded on hypothetical language (“suppose you want eggs for your breakfast, and have only bread…”), and argues that ethnographers have yet to find any example, past or present, of a barter economy pure and simple. Rather, he points to the credit-based nature of most basic human economies as the more accurate and prevalent historical context for the development of money systems, anthropologically speaking. Here, barter is merely an epiphenomenon in the story of money—a by-product of money systems, employed by people who for some reason or other cannot use currency and are unprepared to operate within the trust-based world of credit (for instance, whilst trading with strangers or enemies during times of conflict).
 
Why then is the “origin story” of barter so widely accepted and so little questioned? How did it acquire currency? Graeber suggests that the myth was crucially important to the founding of economics as a discipline, and indeed to “the very idea that there was something called the ‘economy,’ which operated by its own rules, separate from moral or political life, that economists could take as their field of study” (27). From this perspective, money-based economies arose from the more basic situation of barter, which rested in turn upon the idea of the “objective” calculability of the value of goods—and thus the rational basis of the marketplace—outside of and prior to cultural influences or political pressures. Thus, the three (abstract) functions of money identified by classical economics—store of value, unit of account, and medium of exchange—simply built on the two most salient features of barter by adding a third element designed to enhance rather than detract from its essential workings. Graeber tells us that Adam Smith, who “effectively brought the discipline of economics into being,” had particular reasons for upholding the interpretation of money which arises from this “origin story”:
 

Above all, he objected to the notion that money was the creation of government. In this, Smith was the intellectual heir of the Liberal tradition of philosophers like John Locke, who had argued that government begins in the need to protect private property and operated best when it tried to limit itself to that function. Smith expanded on the argument, insisting that property, money and markets not only existed before political institutions but were the very foundation of human society. It followed that insofar as government should play any role in monetary affairs, it should limit itself to guaranteeing the soundness of the currency. (24)

 
The story of barter makes possible this elemental image of a world where things are primarily the possessions of individuals, where each “thing” as a form of property may be assigned an innate and rationally transactable value, and where money is less an agent than a neutral medium of exchange, made up of merely abstract units of measurement and designed to serve the entirely felicitous interests of the marketplace. On this view, far from being an expression or function of power, the advent of money is a pure effect of the market in its “free” form, from which it follows that state interference in the economy, if any, should restrict itself to upholding the currency’s essential integrity as an apt medium of exchange. (The paradox, of course, is that within this laissez-faire model, in which the government is merely an honest broker, such threats to the “soundness” of money could only come from unregulated or rogue behavior of just the kind that the free market is supposed to encourage.) For Graeber, then, the attempt to found economics as a scientific discipline on a par with Newtonian physics was not simply a matter of attaining academic credibility; even more crucially, it encouraged an analogy with the physical machinery of a Newtonian universe able to function by its own laws without ongoing divine interference, and relied on the idea of a free market operating spontaneously and effectively (that is, naturally and in everyone’s best interests) outside of state intervention.[1] The difficulty of resisting Smith’s legacy, Graeber tells us, is that by very dint of its pretensions to scientificity, the founding myth of economics offers a single, unified view of the origins and development of money that is hard to dislodge with a more nuanced and differentiated picture drawn largely from anthropological inquiry, which outlines a whole variety of “economic” habits and practices that, historically, often include “mixed-mode” rather than discrete forms of exchange.  (For Graeber, such anthropological attention-to-detail is the best defense against retroactive historical interpretation.)
 
The second story of origins singled out by Graeber in his re-telling of the history of debt is expounded by proponents of the theory of primordial debt. This comes close to the Nietzschean idea found in the second essay of the Genealogy of Morals (to which we will return), whereby the ongoing prosperity of the community promotes an increasing sense of indebtedness to one’s forebears that intensifies over time, until at last one’s ancestors are elevated to the status of gods. Here, forms of sacrifice within human communities are interpreted in terms of the repayment of debts. Nevertheless, such “gifts,” construed as a kind of payment, paradoxically lead to a heightened rather than reduced sense of debt, becoming ever more lavish in order to acknowledge (and thus reinforce) the very extent of the obligation. Primordial-debt theory suggests that, as history moved forward, governments were able to tax populations because they were able to appropriate the role of guardianship of universal debt. Once more, however, Graeber argues that there is insufficient anthropological evidence to support primordial-debt theory, and that it is itself a backward projection based on a notion of debt that is “only made possible with the advent of the modern nation-state,” the modern conception of society and of societal “duty,” and so on (69).[2] Thus, turning to the Genealogy of Morals, Graeber reads Nietzsche as dabbling in primordial-debt theory not so much to embark upon an historical exposé of the origins of debt, but rather to see what happens when one starts out from “ordinary bourgeois assumptions”—namely, that the basis of human existence is “economic,” and that “man” on earth is indebted man—in order to drive them “to a place where they can only shock a bourgeois audience.” “It’s a worthy game,” says Graeber, but one “played entirely within the confines of bourgeois thought” (79). Whether Graeber’s reading does justice to Nietzsche’s capacity to open history otherwise, his overall argument is that our conception of the origins of debt and money functions retroactively. That is to say, the “origin” is generated retrospectively in order to address or promote the concerns of the present, rather than to uncover and understand the “truth” of the past. In fact, Graeber suggests that these two myths of origin intersect more closely than one might imagine; it is only “once we can imagine human life as a series of commercial transactions that we’re capable of seeing our relation to the universe in terms of debt” (75); certainly in terms of “bourgeois thought,” historically one would have little trouble connecting beliefs about the “economic” basis of life, on the one hand, and the religious sense of “debt” on the other.
 
To what degree is Debt: the First 5,000 Years able to resist the retroactive interpretation of debt that it is devoted to overturning? Throughout the book, Graeber wishes to counteract its insidious logic; by turning “human sociality itself” into quantifiable obligations that demand repayment, debt inevitably recasts all human relations in terms of fault, sin, and crime, redeemable “only by some great cosmic transaction that will annihilate everything” (387). He endeavors to resist this logic by drawing a distinction between what he terms “commercial” and “human” economies. In human economies, which appear in a variety of historical settings, money acts “primarily as a social currency, to create, maintain or sever relations between people rather than to purchase things” (158). Interestingly, such economies are often founded on historic systems of credit rather than barter, because the former implies “trust-based interactions” and some degree of communal solidarity and mutual aid. In human economies, however, what we owe is not reduced to a quantifiable debt requiring an exact remittance. Instead, in such communities, sociality itself is precisely the incalculable sum of debts which members share, debts to one another that they could not, nor would not wish to, fully repay. Here debt is neither sinful nor criminal, but is instead an apt expression of the bonds of human sociality. Commercial economies, meanwhile, are based on the brutality of the market, the construal of goods as property, the idea of the individual (or, put differently, the severing of people from the context of their human economies), and the abstract logic of equivalence in which even human beings become objects of exchange. As Graeber observes, in commercial economies, the reduction of human life to its market value becomes inevitable as soon as we accept that the exchange value of the object as a commodity is not inherent but merely an expression of its possible functions within the nexus of (property-based) human relations, which are really what is being bought and sold. By dint of a somewhat circular or self-reinforcing logic, then, the economic marketization of human relations breeds an impersonality which fuels “war, conquest and slavery,” and these in turn play “a central role in converting human economies into market ones” (385). Commercial economies, whether in the Axial Age of Greece, India, and China or in the Age of Great Capitalist Empires (to use Graeber’s own headings), are thus characterized by “impersonal markets, born of war, in which it was possible to treat even neighbors as if they were strangers,” thereby allowing “human life to seem like it could be reduced to a matter of means-to-end calculation” (238). Here, the criminalization of unrepaid debt amounts to nothing less than “the criminalization of the very basis of society” as exemplified by human economies (334).
 
But how exactly does “human” economy give way to the market, if not by a circular process through which the violence inherent theoretically in the logic of the market creates its own historical conditions of possibility? Looking back over his enormous survey, Graeber describes “how all this can begin to break down: how humans can become objects of exchange: first, perhaps, women given in marriage; ultimately, slaves captured in war” (208). Surely, though, the matrimonial exchange of women is a near-universal characteristic of human societies, whether “commercial” or “human”? (Graeber’s own anthropological range offers little against this truism.) And if this is so, it points to something more fundamental about so-called human communities: that they contain in themselves the basis for more or less violent forms of exchange. Such dealings are here restricted to the “origin story” of the trading of women, but surely such exchange depends on the prior existence of some broader sense of market “value,” which Graeber says arises principally with the collapse of human economies and the onset of commercial ones. Graeber’s transition from the trafficking or dealing of “women” to the creation of “slaves” implies an intensifying or worsening onset of market conditions that would only be convincing as an historical narrative if the exchange of women in matrimony were not already fundamentally a type of “slavery.” (What makes this moment all the more odd, and indeed telling, is that throughout his survey Graeber is extremely sensitive to the historic plight of women.) And this fundamental truth disturbs and disrupts the narrative of historical transition from “human” to “market” economy that Graeber wants to offer in place of the “origin stories” of barter or primordial debt.
 

The fundamental issue here is that two competing conceptions of money vie for primacy throughout Graeber’s book. On the one hand, and more theoretically, money is construed as the product of an abstract conception of equivalence introduced into notions of obligation and worth. This is the source of its violence—a violence born of deep impersonality. On the other hand, and more historically, it is viewed (contra Adam Smith) as a far from neutral medium of exchange produced by market conditions outside of state interference. Instead, in example after example, money is portrayed as nothing less than an instrument of power. (In particular, Graeber shows how the politics of taxation serve in modern times to indebt populations to their governments, destroying locally-based credit-systems and at the same time funding the war machines of the powerful: what he terms a “military-coinage-slavery complex.”) This is where its violence—a motivated violence —comes from. In the one account, then, the violence that accompanies money systems occurs as the expression of particular interests; in the other, the violence that money unleashes happens precisely because it is, to the contrary, unmotivated as such.
 
While there are moments in the book where Graeber attempts to resolve these difficulties, there are also instances that suggest the problem persists. For instance, in order to clarify his thesis, Graeber writes:
 

The story of the origins of capitalism, then, is not the story of the gradual destruction of traditional communities by the impersonal power of the market. It is, rather, the story of how an economy of credit was converted into an economy of interest; of the gradual transformation of moral networks by the intrusion of the impersonal—and often vindictive—power of the state. (332)

 
This “gradual destruction” transforms the “very essence of sociality” into the grounds for “a war of all against all” (335). Here, Graeber underscores his point that “human economies” do, precisely, operate in terms of economic rather than non-economic practices. As he repeatedly asserts, credit operates as the very basis of their social systems. Thus, he is able to suggest that the “commercial” economics of interest and of the market arise on the strength of a certain mutation or perversion of that which grounds human “society” or community in the first place. From this, it seems possible to align the fundamental logic that gives rise to money with the historical emergence of modern forms of power. Nevertheless, just a few pages later, Graeber proposes the following thesis concerning the specificity of capitalism itself:
 

This would seem to mark the difference. In the Axial Age, money was a tool of empire…. [M]oney always remained a political instrument. This is why when empires collapsed and armies were demobilized, the whole apparatus could simply melt away. Under the newly emerging capitalist order, the logic of money was granted autonomy; political and military power were then gradually reorganized around it. True, this was a financial logic that could never have existed without states and armies behind it in the first place. (320-21)

 
Something about this assertion seems counter-intuitive. We might expect to be told  that forms and practices of power shaped themselves around money from the very beginning, because there is something originary or fundamental about the “internal” or intrinsic logic of money. (Even if money as defined by the structural element of abstract equivalence developed subsequently to systems of credit, the latter contained the germ of what money is, namely an I.O.U.) But Graeber tells the story the other way around. Where money was in its more rudimentary form a sheer political instrument, only with the onset of capitalism “proper” does money’s own logic come to the fore, remaking the political world around it in its own image. No doubt Graeber has good anthropological reasons to make this case.  But the contention also smacks of the desire to resist what he sees as the foundational idea of disciplinary economics: the creation of a spontaneous free market prior to political or state intervention. For Graeber, it is almost as if power comes first, and money second as an epiphenomenon of power: “True, this was a financial logic that could never have existed without states and armies behind it in the first place.” But such a suggestion threatens to undermine what would otherwise seem the highly plausible headline claim of the book: namely, that credit—as the very basis of human sociality—holds the key to explaining how modern forms of politics and power arise (albeit by means of terrible mutation). One cannot help but wonder whether Graeber’s double and divided narrative of historical origins and development is just as retroactive as the “origin stories” he wishes to oppose; its tensions and contradictions reveal  unresolved theoretical questions in his own thesis, even as he invokes historical or anthropological complexities in order to wriggle free from the supposed demands of the reductively “simple” or “single” story  told by disciplinary economics.

 

 

Lazzarato’s Indebted Man

How can we account for this seemingly intractable retroactive impulse where the question of debt is concerned? And what are the risks of thinking, too hastily, that this impulse can be overcome? Let’s turn to another of the many recent writings on the debt crisis currently receiving a great deal of interest: Maurizio Lazzarato’s The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition.[3] Lazzarato shows how, since the energy crisis of the late 1970s, the financial transformation of national expenditure on welfare has resulted in continually rising deficits. For Lazzarato, far from an unwanted or unforeseen consequence of neoliberal policies, such indebtedness has been their ultimate aim. The intensifying privatization of national debt—linked to the ever-increasing dependency of governments on market finance and securitized credit (debt repackaged and resold in terms of tradable securities)—leads not so much to managed or manageable obligations as to a state of permanent and worsening indebtedness.  From Lazzarato’s point of view, debt is the very engine of the politics of neoliberalism. Far from having a simple economic rationale, neoliberalism is fundamentally about power: specifically, the radical polarization of creditors and debtors on a vast scale, such that the principle of asymmetry rather than the economic idea of exchange or equivalence dominates neoliberal social and political relations. Today, “debt is a universal power relation, since everyone is included within it,” even—and perhaps especially—those around the world who are too poor to afford credit or receive welfare (32).
 
The granting of so-called independence to central banks, which in effect guarantees an ever-deepening recourse to private creditors, means it is now virtually impossible to address public debt through monetary mechanisms. This in turn strengthens the reliance of the state upon the market, to the extent that we have consistently seen governments not only opening themselves to financial institutions, but playing a key role in “establishing the organizations and structures needed for them to thrive” (26). They do so both by ensuring financial deregulation in general, and by contributing in particular to developing the range and volume of public-sector securities made attractive to private investors. Against this background, recent austerity measures are in fact double-edged: on the one hand, they seem to be about restricting welfare expenditure in the interests of debt-reduction on the part of the state; on the other, by extending the privatization of welfare services as an ostensible cost-cutting exercise, they position welfare provision as part of the very same “sell-off” that produced the situation that austerity measures are supposed to address and resolve.  Thus the austerity politics associated with the sovereign debt crisis are not so much a defiant response to the global debt economy, but are themselves a feature of it. Equally, to the extent that bail-outs underwritten by the resources of nation-states draw on funds that circulate or arise in precisely the same financialized structure based on securitized, tradable debt, they do not signify a reassertion of state power over transnational capital, but rather indicate a further technique for syphoning off public money to support a largely privatized system of interests. At such a point, where all money is nothing but debt, monetary sovereignty means very little, and has in any case been greatly eroded over the past few decades by the newly forged neoliberal alliance between the state and private interests, and by the policies this demands.[4]
 
Recalling Nietzsche’s reminder of the etymological interplay of debts (Schulden) and guilt (Schuld), Lazzarato argues that the subsequent moralization of debt further allows guilt to be more or less violently attributed to the debtor rather than the creditor, whether the unemployed, students, the Greeks, or whomever. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Lazzarato insists that the current debt economy necessitates a theory of money as, first of all, debt-money. According to such a view, money itself arises neither on the strength of the exchange relations required by the circulation of the commodity, nor as an expression of the surplus value extracted from labor. Instead, money is to be understood first of all as a sign of the radical asymmetry of power. (As noted, a similar position is present in Graeber’s work, but remains equivocal.) Lazzarato writes:
 

Money is first of all debt-money, created ex nihilo, which has no material equivalent other than its power to destroy/create social relations and, in particular, modes of subjectivation. (35)

 
A key feature of the asymmetrical force from which debt-money derives is “a power to prescribe and impose modes of future exploitation, domination, and subjection” (34–35). In other words, debt-money determines, delimits, commands and controls the future as much as the present. This allows control not only of the debtor’s present, but of all their time to come, establishing an “economy of time” in which the future is reduced to the expression and experience of “a society without time, without possibility” (47).
 
As the radical asymmetry of power finds its echo and confirmation in infinite and irredeemable debt—one that simultaneously must and cannot be repaid—“indebted man” comes to the fore as both a universal and individual figure. Once again, the relation of religion (specifically, Christianity) to the capitalist debt economy is carefully traced; following Nietzsche, Lazzarato suggests that such a “man” is the one who first of all must promise or vouch for himself in the future—although he restricts the meaning of such promising (which he acknowledges is the “promise of future value”) to an avowed obligation to repay. In other words, the man who “is able to stand guarantor for himself” is simply the one who is “capable of honoring his debt” (39–40). This formulation reduces the rather more complicated story Nietzsche tells about the rise of the “sovereign individual” in the complex interstices of reactive slavish morality and active life. Be that as it may, Lazzarato draws upon Nietzschean thought (specifically, the second essay of the Genealogy of Morals, which Graeber dismisses as merely a period-bound spoof) principally to aid his argument that “[m]odern-day capitalism seems to have discovered on its own the technique described by Nietzsche of constructing a person capable of promising” (42) and thus of owing. For Lazzarato, because such debt should be understood at its source as fundamentally non-economic—that is, based on the irreducible asymmetry of power rather than the transactional equivalences of exchange—promising entails a liability that no future could ever redeem, but which will if anything only intensify in times to come. Put differently, as Lazzarato writes a little later on (according to an argument which is forcefully repeated on several occasions):
 

Finance is a formidable instrument for controlling the temporality of action, neutralizing possibilities, the “moving present,” “quivering uncertainty” and “the line where past and future meet.” It locks up possibilities within an established framework while at the same time projecting them into the future. For finance, then, the future is a mere forecast of current domination and exploitation. (71)

 
I want to suggest that Lazzarato’s argument—stridently reasserted as it is—is somewhat complicit with the “force” or “power” it seeks to critique, in that it leaves untouched two questions with which Nietzsche’s own text struggles (questions that, in his rush to identify the text as merely of its time, Graeber sorely neglects): first, the theoretical question of origins, poorly served and tellingly neglected when Lazzarato intimates the more or less accidental discovery by “modern-day capitalism” of the “technique” of debt; and, second and relatedly, the question of the conditions of the future, which is constructed throughout The Making of the Indebted Man merely as the self-identical possibility of mastery projecting itself along an infinite horizon, without difference or remainder. This is a future altogether divested of temporal flux or uncertainty. For Lazzarato, this is the true aim of neoliberalism, but I want to suggest that such a “truth” is far from incontestable.
 
These questions are strongly interrelated, of course, not just in the obvious sense that both the past and the future imply temporality, or in the banal sense that all causal or teleological thought (including some varieties of Marxism) typically assumes one to depend upon the other. More specifically, they are interrelated because the text on which Lazzarato bases the conceptual elements of his argument—the second essay of the Genealogy—is itself shot through with the uncertain question of retroactivity. For Nietzsche, this concerns the error of mixing up and muddling the “origin” with the “aim” of something, when, as he puts it:
 

there is a world of difference between the reason for something coming into existence in the first place and the ultimate use to which it is put … anything which exists, once it has somehow come into being, can be reinterpreted in the service of new intentions, repossessed, repeatedly modified to a new use by a power superior to it… all overpowering and mastering is a reinterpretation, a manipulation in the course of which the previous “meaning” and “aim” must necessarily be obscured or effaced. (58)

 
As we will see, it can be argued that the question of retroactivity is absolutely inseparable from the problem of debt with which Nietzsche struggles. This reveals certain weaknesses or omissions in Lazzarato’s treatment of debt. In particular, his analysis only pays scant critical or philosophical attention to the question of the future and the past, the “aim” and the “origin,” instead viewing them largely as extended forms of the present (which may be more or less projected from the “now”); and he fails to think them according to the highly complicated and perhaps irresolvable structure of retroactivity that makes possible the very horizon or appearance of debt, as Nietzsche’s text implies.  If granting credit opens one up to future “uncertainty,” as he puts it, Lazzarato nevertheless insists rather emphatically that the “system of debt” must “neutralize time”: “that is the risk inherent to it” (45). Money as capital thus “pre-empts the future” (74), such that to talk of a present crisis is misleading because it suggests some hope of resolution or escape, whereas in all likelihood, he suggests, we are in the midst of an irreversible and permanent catastrophe (151). But if, as Nietzsche suggests (sometimes in spite of himself), debt exists for us or appears to us as part of time’s “uncertainty”—indeed, if it takes the very form of time’s uncertainty – one wonders how it could ever secure and extend itself unproblematically beyond time, simply appropriating or objectivizing time according to its own needs. How debt could survive without remainder is a problem that is arguably intrinsic to its make-up, and which in fact only redoubles throughout debt’s perhaps inescapably retroactive interpretation. From this perspective, it appears that the question of the future is pre-empted by Lazzarato himself as much as it is by “money as capital.”
 
A further question concerns the relation of debt and sovereignty, particularly in regard to the proposition of a calculable future. Such a logic of calculability reduces the subject’s “contractual” relation to the state, and so is not simply of the order of the “economic,” but evinces a power in force. The pervasive figure of “indebted man” who foolishly tries to economize with a debt attests only to his subjection to that power. But even if we grant this logic a non- or aneconomic “origin,” one wonders if such calculation is truly becoming for the master. In Nietzschean terms, does the apprehensive need to control the future genuinely testify to the absolute self-will, the proud aggressivity and war-like venturing of the sovereign? Or does it tie him, instead, to the seemingly unbreakable structure of creditor and debtor? Put another way, on the basis of the intellectual grounds or resources of his own argument, we might ask whether Lazzarato’s God-like figure of the ultimate Creditor presiding over universal debt throughout the catastrophic time of a future-without-future is philosophically tenable.[5] There may instead be a divisible or non-self-identical core to the very structure and temporality of debt, one that could prove useful in thinking about its limits and the possibility of resistance (more so than Lazzarato’s rather poorly theorized allusions to capitalism’s contradictions or to a Nietzschean “second innocence.”)

 

 

Nietzschean debts

In the second essay of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, the principle of ressentiment that characterizes the profound break with aristocratic values through the slave revolt in morality operates on the basis of retroactivity. As such, the values derived through ressentiment are retrospectively posited as original. For Nietzsche, of course, slavish nature opts for vengefulness towards noble and higher life to compensate for its own weakness and impotence. Whereas the noble spirit places plenitude and self-reliance at the heart of aristocratic values, slavishness can do no more than found its moral system on the resentful rejection of higher life, reducing its capacity for action to the purely reactive. The image of the powerful man as the origin of evil justifies the wholly reactive moral schema of slavish life. For instance, through its account of ressentiment, the Genealogy questions the historical origins of justice as grounded in a sanctified notion of revenge, as if justice were simply a mechanism for righting wrongs or an apt expression of reactive feeling. For Nietzsche, justice develops not from the vengefulness that always supplements a concern for fairness or rights, but from what is most active in the noble spirit: “the really active feelings, such as the desire to dominate, to possess, and the like” (55). Justice, then, originates in nothing more than “the good will that prevails among those of roughly equal power to come to terms with each other”—that is, their “really active feelings”—through forms of economic and military settlement, bringing war to an end in circumstances of evenly matched force or capacity (and in the process, imposing their settlement on all those less powerful). In fact, Nietzsche suggests that “the active and aggressive forces” compel a settlement in this manner—that is, as an instance of good will among the powerful, rather than an abstractly conceived leveling in the interests of fairness or right—“in part to contain and moderate the extravagance of reactive pathos,” and to stop the spread of its “senseless raging.” Indeed, law itself is established to oppose the resentful interpretation of justice, which seeks redress for an injured party (an interpretation derived retroactively on behalf of injured parties). However, from this point of view, the justice meted out by law is neither a matter of intrinsic right, nor a case of “right and wrong as such.” Instead, “legal conditions” put into historic operation “exceptional states of emergency, partial restrictions which the will to life in its quest for power provisionally imposes on itself in order to serve its overall goal: the creation of larger units of power” fundamentally unchecked by reactive feeling (56–57).
 
This line of argument chimes well with Lazzarato’s in its emphasis on the constitutive character of power, but it is nevertheless important to recognize at its center a clear connection between reactive morality (debt) and retroactivity. Reactive life is served by the retroactive explanation of origins, in a way not dissimilar to the retroactivity of the traumatic origin with which Freud struggles in “The Wolf-Man” (the idea that the origin may be generated retrospectively by the neurotic’s phantasmatic desire). Perhaps most importantly, retroactivity is not merely one means among others to develop the interests of slavish life. Instead, through its own complicated structure of guilt-debt, retroactivity is the very form that reactive feeling takes.  As Nietzsche writes, the attempt to “sanctify revenge under the name of justice… as if justice were merely an extension of the feeling of injury” posits revenge as the basis for bringing “all the reactive feelings retroactively to a position of honour” (54). To the extent that its devotion to revenge is unremitting, unrelenting, and pitiless, the retroactive honoring of reactive feelings upholds and expresses the morality of the slave (bondage to debt or vengeful reactive/economistic thought); more fundamentally, it seems indissociable from the character of reactive feeling itself.
 
By its very title, of course, Nietzsche’s essay concerns itself with “guilt,” “bad conscience” and “related matters.”  He begins by noting that active forgetfulness is a particular strength of the man of noble spirit, and contributes to his “robust health”—in contrast to those who, like dyspeptics, are “never through with anything.” Nonetheless, a “counter-faculty” now adds itself to this “strength”: a form of memory that wills the suspension of active forgetting. This form of memory is allied to the “promising” that, from the outset, seems to draw “man” into his own definition. Someone who makes a promise, Nietzsche tells us, does so in order “that finally he would be able to vouch for himself as future” (40).  In the sense that the promiser assigns his name to a promise to open a line of credit to the future, in his own mind “man” has made himself “calculable, regular, necessary.” The “memory of the will” is, it seems, as much a feature of this calculability as the effort to “dispose of the future in advance,” which promising seeks to affirm (as Lazzarato emphasizes). Indeed, Nietzsche opens the second section of the essay by describing the interaction he has just suggested between memory and promise in terms of “the long history of responsibility” (40).  Here, he adds that the calculability of “man” as the subject of responsibility depends not only upon the uniformity or consistency of the past, present and future in the “life” of an individual, but also upon a regularity or uniformity among men, so that each is “an equal among equals.” If this implies the very seeds of slavish morality and reactive feeling (“the morality of custom and the social strait-jacket”), Nietzsche points us “by way of contrast” towards “the other end of this enormous process”: the very possibility of the “sovereign individual” no longer constrained by custom. Through “special consciousness of power and freedom,” such a man grasps his own self-sufficiency more genuinely. He can truly vouch for himself, and on this basis is entitled to promise.  Thus, as previously suggested, the “man” who promises emerges in the more complex interstices of active and slavish life. However, the type of equality demanded by reactive feeling is eschewed to the extent that this sovereign individual “respects those who are like him” only insofar as they, too, are capable of imposing their superiority upon lesser, more contemptible beings – in particular those “dogs” and “liars” who abuse their promises.
 
Nietzsche traces within this history of responsibility the origin of conscience. The point at which this word occurs—in the transition from the second to the third section of the essay—also returns to the theme that willful memory is indispensable to the self-affirmation Nietzsche wishes to celebrate. If, in order to forge memories for himself, man learnt that “the most powerful aid to memory was pain,” nonetheless Nietzsche also laments the enduring nature of that “psychology” which, conceiving of remembrances as “branded” upon the mind, equates recollection with the persistence of a certain hurt (43). While the origins of asceticism are to be found in this doctrine of painful memory, Nietzsche implies it is also the founding myth of, for instance, Germanicism itself. As such, it is backed by a litany of cruel punishments designed for those who forget their Germanness among or indeed by dint of their various crimes. By the fourth section of the essay, however, Nietzsche finds firmer footing in the question of “bad conscience” or guilt. Here, “our genealogists of morals” are of no use because they think retroactively, imputing origins in terms of derived values and showing themselves incapable of comprehending a past that does not reflect their own moral schemas. As such, they lack the “second sight,” as Nietzsche puts it, which would allow them to trace the moral idea of guilt (Schuld) back to its more material origins in the concept of debt (schulden).  Consequently, Nietzsche insists that punishment as a form of repayment developed prior to and outside of the attribution of blame, which only imposed itself much later. Before this, he argues, punishment was not meted out soberly to repay guilt, but occurred as an apt expression of anger—one that, rather than overflowing itself in wholly gratuitous cruelty and running to the very limit of its power, was instead “held in check and modified” by an equivalence between transgressive damage and the retributive pain which the punisher imputed to the punishment itself.
 
Punishment, then, took its meaning and definition—its specific form as punishment rather than mere violence—not from guilt, but from anger. And yet the very need to constitute punishment as punishment, leading as it did to the “idea of an equivalence between damage and pain,” gives force to the contractual form punishment takes as an expression of the sort of exchange-relationship one finds between creditor and debtor. Lazzarato, of course, disputes precisely this contractual or exchange form of debt, pointing instead to the more original context of those power relations which, as Nietzsche himself suggests, make “anger” possible. Yet, at this point in Nietzsche’s argument, one may well ask whether contract or exchange establishes itself as the necessary context for a sense of injury, or—vice versa—whether the experience of harm provides the explanation for the emergence of economic or contractual forms and practices of all kinds. Is it that “to repay” is first of all to repay harm done, as Nietzsche himself suggests, so that forms of exchange arise from the prior or more original experience of pain (as perhaps foremost a consequence of power)? Or, alternatively, is the very experience of pain, harm, or damage even possible outside of the very concept of injury that, Nietzsche tells us, stokes reactive feeling? (The latter, of course, is funded by a strongly economistic sense of fairness and equality.) If debts to the past are remembered only upon risk or threat of pain, or if the pledge to repay is from ancient times underwritten by the possibility of harsh bodily sacrifice, is it that pain makes possible the sense of debt and indebtedness? (Is debt indebted to pain?) Or, conversely, does the very possibility of pain emerge only on the strength of a certain set of economic relations? This persistent conundrum raises once more the problem of retroactive thinking: is it the case that Nietzschean thought leaves this matter unresolved as a way to free itself from the retroactive impulse, and thus to rejoice in a time before slavish reactivity (which may in fact serve Nietzsche’s own “retroactive” needs)? Or is it that Nietzsche falters before and thus remains embroiled in the snares of reactive-retroactive thinking?  On this basis, one might speculate about whether the Genealogy remains painfully caught in—and thus cruelly indebted to—precisely that form of thought it seeks to critique or surpass. Is it therefore impossible to approach the question of debt outside of retroactivity’s trap?
 
In the fifth section of his essay, Nietzsche draws attention to the loosening of a strict equivalence between unrestituted debt and the commensurate bodily sacrifice. This is, for him, the welcome consequence of a “more Roman conception of law” (46).[6] Thus, the “logic of this whole form of exchange” undergoes a certain shift: instead of calculating the sum to be repaid by the stringent measure of actual flesh, recompense is to be calculated in terms of the amount of pleasure extracted from the other’s suffering. The extent of the gratification may intensify depending on the relative social rankings of debtor and creditor—the lower the creditor and the higher the debtor, the greater the delight in inflicting “punishment”—so that the precise value of the pleasure in another’s distress varied according to class position. Nevertheless, in as much as it entailed what Nietzsche terms “the entitlement and right to cruelty,” this departure from a more strictly reactive system of compensation introduced the distinct possibility of a (perhaps more original) uneconomic or aneconomic element into the economy of credit and debt. For surely cruelty distinguishes itself from revenge in that it includes a gratuitous supplement – even if in the Spinozist formulation of “disinterested malice”– that would seem to better serve the sovereign aggressivity of noble life, rather than purely reactive slavish morals.  As Nietzsche observes, “the creditor partakes of a privilege of the masters” by means of a “punishment” based on the extraction of pleasure; regardless of the specific identity of creditor or debtor, this system serves the noble spirit rather than slavish life (46–47). Here again the main tenor of Lazzarato’s emphasis on power  echoes Nietzsche’s own direction of thought. If “man” is indeed the “measuring animal,” if he is developed within and by means of systems of exchange, value, and price, nevertheless this is not the whole story, or at any rate the story is far from simple. For while such apparent economism determines the very possibility of man’s self-estimation and astuteness—his “thinking as such,” Nietzsche ventures to say—nevertheless the principle of mastery that impels such economistic thinking and practice implies the extraction of a surplus that cannot simply be reassimilated to the narrow world of economic values (though, for all that, it remains a crucial part of it): “man’s feeling of superiority” (51). This is because—as the example of a law that is “more Roman” implies—the sense of masterful privilege or sovereign aggressivity extracts its supplement of “superiority” precisely by resisting the more purely economistic attitude of reactive feeling. Somewhat paradoxically, then, this “noble” surplus is able to assert its value in and over a social world defined by economic exchange, by dint of the very fact that it cannot be wholly determined by it. It is perhaps the fact that one cannot easily economize with this paradox that reinforces the enigmatic power of the master.
 
Yet such an aneconomic remainder of economy finds its mirror image in the power not simply to forgive transgressions rather than punish them, but to overlook them altogether. Such power is perhaps closely allied to the ability to decide exemptions or exceptions to the law—the very same law that, as we’ve already seen, is in any case nothing but an “exceptional state” designed to restrict sovereign will only to furnish its ultimate ambitions more effectively, not least by mediating and thus lessening the “reactive” resentments of injured parties. Despite the seemingly inexorable pattern of credit and debt which determines social relations tout court, therefore, Nietzsche observes that the developed power of the community attests to itself insofar as it no longer needs to punish its debtors—those who, according to a variety of misdeeds, transgress against the community by breaking or by failing to acknowledge their contractual obligation to it. Put differently, sovereign power is in fact the power to eschew debt, to decide against the (reactive) logic that “everything must be paid off.”
 
This feature of Nietzsche’s argument is insufficiently acknowledged by Lazzarato, even though it fits with his insistence on the non-economic origin of debt. To overlook debt—to ignore the transgressor’s “default” or their un-repaid indebtedness—is to demonstrate that one is powerful enough to survive the “loss” without needing recompense in the (economic) form of a substitution: punishment for debt. It is to assert that one is powerful enough to transcend the exchange-form of life. Indeed, on this basis great strength is affirmed, not threatened, by an ever-increasing amount of unpaid debt. Once again, the “noble” supplement extracted by the master in this state of affairs is in one sense a part or feature of and yet irreducible to the “economy” that is a principal instrument of power (albeit a power that is asymmetric and thus aneconomic in originary terms). Once more, one might contend, this very same paradox lies at the heart of the enigma of sovereignty. Yet such a paradox keeps open the question of whether recourse to the debt economy—immersion in debtor-creditor relations, whether partial or not—enhances or jeopardizes the creditor as a figure of mastery or sovereignty. Perhaps it does both at the same time.
 
The folly of retroactive thinking is made most explicit in section twelve of the essay, where Nietzsche warns against the error of confusing or conflating the “origin” with the “aim” of punishment. As we have seen, he writes that:
 

there is a world of difference between the reason for something coming into existence in the first place and the ultimate use to which it is put … anything which exists, once it has somehow come into being, can be reinterpreted in the service of new intentions, repossessed, repeatedly modified to a new use by a power superior to it… all overpowering and mastering is a reinterpretation, a manipulation in the course of which the previous “meaning” and “aim” must necessarily be obscured or effaced. (58)

 
From the perspective of the will to power, history is not the story of causal development or progression, but one of a succession of more or less violent overturnings; the most rigorous and astute analysis of the usage of a thing, or of its “aims” in the present, is therefore poorly served by the tendency to impute an “origin” based upon the (extended) terms of this same analysis—although, of course, the distortion this implies is never just a weakness, in the sense that such misrepresentation is also part of the project of “overpowering” and “mastering” that such “reinterpretation” itself serves. If this looks to be a case of taking from one hand to give to another (i.e., strengthening and weakening oneself in equal measure), nevertheless it is not quite the same as robbing Peter to pay Paul, because what is involved is not a zero-sum game. Instead, there is a definite interest at stake. If the reactive morality of the slave implies a near interminable debt, retroactive thinking extracts a surplus in precisely this form of interest, making the debt work to its credit. The use of the word “repossessed” is telling here. In English, the term suggests the legally-settled restitution of goods or property to the original owner. The German is somewhat more colloquial and violent; Neu in Beschlag genommen suggests being taken over anew, although Beschlag is constructed from the verb to strike (schlagen). The overall meaning is not so much that of “repossession” in the English sense, but of forever being violently overpowered, mastered, “struck,” albeit struck or forced into service rather than being physically accosted more directly. Still, to the extent that it implies at once an inability to repay debts and a refusal to overlook or write them off, “repossession” has some kinship with retroactivity. Retroactive reappropriation of the meaning of an “origin” at once denies that “origin” by more or less violently transforming its meaning “in the service of new intentions,” yet acknowledges it in the form of the reactive feeling which repeatedly encounters or confronts the “origin” as an almost interminable source of injury, and thus a constant source of debit or debt. Indeed, to deny (indebtedness to) the “origin” by reinterpreting it, while reinterpreting it as the basis for a pervasive sense of liability, debit, or debt—a debt from which, nevertheless, untold credit or interest may be extracted—suggests the highly complex debt economy of retroactive thinking/reactive life.
 
The Nietzschean economy of debt is further complicated and reinforced by what we might term its diachronic axis, whereby the indebtedness of the present generation to its forefathers increases as the community prospers. For Nietzsche, as the community has more and more to be thankful for, its debts become almost irredeemable. Once more, the debt-form of social life reaches a certain zenith only at the point of near insolvency: that stage at which, in order to be settled, debts could perhaps only ever be written off. While Nietzsche suggests that those of truly noble quality repay their forefathers with interest (the obvious paradox here hardly needs remarking) (70), nevertheless it is difficult in this context not to think the contrary (a la Lazzarato): namely, that the effort to repay only deepens the debt, even and perhaps especially if it is massive. Nietzsche writes of periodic “large lump” repayments (cruel sacrifices and the like), which foreground the extent of the debt and powerfully underline “the fear of the forefather and his power” (until he is, famously, “transfigured into a god”); these payments serve not to lessen or ameliorate but to inflate the debt further, raising the stakes of the entire situation. Yet this spiraling debt does not paralyze the community; on the contrary, it is merely a sign of its prosperity and strength, becoming “ever-more victorious, independent, respected, feared” (69).
 
The desire to redeem what is owed, and sometimes even to mimic the gods, surely persists so as to complicate the credit-debt structure of the community. In addition, as Nietzsche speculates (perhaps naively), the dramatic rise of atheism may come to liberate mankind from a sense of indebtedness. Nevertheless, that “the sense of guilt towards the divinity has continued to grow for several thousands of years” testifies to the long-standing and near intractable debt structure of modern society. In fact, within the space of a few lines, Nietzsche seems to backtrack on his dream of a “second innocence” born of aesthetic feeling, lamenting that “the real situation is fearfully different.”  Indeed, despite the millennial tone of the essay’s last section, which dreams of the redeeming-godless “man of the future,” Nietzsche is still to be found saying that, in the current circumstances, “an attempt at reversal would in itself be impossible.” In a line all the more striking for its contemporary resonance, he asserts: “The goal now is the pessimistic one of closing off once and for all the prospect of a definitive repayment.” An “iron possibility” takes hold through the ever-more intransigent imposition of an undischargeable duty, a remorseless guilt, “eating its way in, spreading down and out like a polyp.” No penance would be enough to atone, no repayment enough to compensate (71–75).
 
All of this would seem to be grist to Lazzarato’s mill.  However, in an ironic final twist of expropriation, even the creditor—the master, the god—is at last swept into this nightmarish scenario of total debt. As Nietzsche enigmatically hints, the forefather becomes Adam, divine banishment incarnate. This does not result in the prospect of revolutionary change but instead ushers in a godless afterlife, “essentially devoid of value,” in which the story of the gods’ fall from grace—as pure expediency—is retold in terms of Christ’s sacrifice: God becomes man and takes man’s place, so that if he succumbs to (indebted) man’s plight at all, it is only to redeem his guilt and all guilt (72). By such means, however, God himself seeks redress, seeks to redeem or re-place himself, to restore his credit. In other words, as Nietzsche puts it, he is to be found “paying himself off.” Perhaps only a God can so blithely write off debt, even his own, but one wonders whether this leaves him purely “in the black.”  Through the enigma of God’s self-torture on the cross (a self-torture which, perhaps by ironic reversal, seems to mimic the torments of slavish life), does such a death cancel all debts to the absolute credit of the divine? Or does it signal, too, just this fall into a whole world of debt, into a world that is so debt-ridden it is by now almost beyond debt, one which survives therefore only as “nihilistic renunciation,” “essentially devoid of value”? Nietzsche does not exactly tell the story this way, preferring instead to concentrate on man’s slavish torments before a God to whom all is owed (cruelly felt as “real,” “incarnate”). But the possibility that this debt—in all its impossible cruelty—is premised on the spectrality of an ultimate Creditor lingers, ghost-like, in his text. In view of this phantasmatic scene, the debate into which Nietzsche enters in the last section of the essay—whether or not his writing sets up anew or forever breaks into pieces “the shrine” of an ideal—seems a little beside the point. For Nietzsche’s text suggests that to bring down or to set up a new God may be part of the same picture. What would such an insight do to the dream or vision of a “conqueror of God and of nothingness” yet to come, with which the text concludes?
 
On the basis of this reading of Nietzsche, two objections arise to Lazzarato’s thesis. First, his idea of a catastrophic future-without-future of permanent debt depends on the analysis of an ever-intensifying asymmetry of power that elevates the creditor to near-Godlike status. While this suggestion clearly derives from a certain strand of thought in Nietzsche’s Genealogy, a debt so pervasive that it leaves no creditor intact can more radically suggest ways to think about the non-self-identical or divisible limits of sovereignty and sovereign debt. Second, and relatedly (because it implies a question of the future that Lazzarato says sovereign debt has cancelled entirely), the idea that the retroactivity so central to the possibility of debt itself is based on a false continuity between past and present, “origin” and “aim,” suggests in turn that debt itself (in the form of reactivity-retroactivity) aggresses against temporal continuity in general. If this is true, then debt’s supposed commitment to the unstinting continuity and continuation of the present for all future time to come (as an unbreakable expression of power) itself becomes questionable and resistible, not just as an idea but in terms of the practical possibilities suggested by the limit or deficit between what debt wants and what it is: in other words, its retroactivity. Once more, such a possibility arises despite some of the more dominant flourishes of Nietzsche’s remarks. Taken together, these objections to the oversimplified conceptions of sovereignty and temporality in Lazzarato’s book point towards other possibilities, other scenarios in neoliberalism’s future, than the ones he is prepared to admit. Thinking both of Graeber and Lazzarato, we might arrive at the following conclusion: Where the question of debt is concerned, taking retroactivity seriously rather than dismissing or rejecting it may prove surprisingly productive for the times to come.