Debt and Guilt 9781350063433

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Debt and Guilt
 9781350063433

Table of contents :
Contents......Page 6
Introduction......Page 8
The problematic context......Page 14
Appropriation......Page 17
Exchange......Page 26
Gift......Page 35
Debt......Page 39
The neoliberal turn......Page 46
The society of generalized debt......Page 53
The paradigm of man in debt......Page 61
Beyond the boundaries of economic science......Page 68
Religion, politics, and economics......Page 72
“Faith” in the era of the predominance of finance......Page 79
Debt and sacrifice......Page 83
Guilt and violence: At the origin of juridical power......Page 87
Bare life and the law......Page 96
Capitalism: A cult with no theology......Page 101
Economy and regulatory experimentation......Page 108
The invention of oikonomia......Page 115
Debt as investment......Page 123
The guilt of being in debt......Page 132
Establishing the rule: Psychic dimension and social sphere......Page 139
Feminism and neoliberalism......Page 145
The mystery of guilt and the psychic life of power......Page 152
Envisioning new ways of assuming power......Page 160
Conclusions......Page 166
Bibliography......Page 170
Index......Page 178

Citation preview

DEBT AND GUILT

BLOOMSBURY POLITICAL THEOLOGIES Edited by Ward Blanton (University of Kent), Arthur Bradley (Lancaster University), Michael Dillon (Lancaster University), and Yvonne Sherwood (University of Kent) This series explores the past, present, and future of political theology. Taking its cue from the ground-breaking work of such figures as Derrida, Agamben, Badiou, and Žižek, it seeks to provide a forum for new research on the theologico-political nexus including cutting edge monographs, edited collections, and translations of classic works. By privileging creative, interdisciplinary and experimental work that resists easy categorization, this series not only re-assets the timeliness of political theology in our epoch but seeks to extend political theological reflection into new territory: law, economics, finance, technology, media, film, and art. In Bloomsbury Political Theologies, we seek to reinvent the ancient problem of political theology for the 21st century. International Advisory Board Agata Bielik-Robson (University of Nottingham) Howard Caygill (Kingston University) Simon Critchley (New School of Social Research) Roberto Esposito (Scuola Normale Superiore) Elettra Stimilli (Sapienza University of Rome) Miguel Vatter (University of New South Wales) Titles in the series: Massimo Cacciari, The Withholding Power: An Essay on Political Theology Michel de Certeau, The Weakness of Belief Charlie Gere, Unnatural Theology Andrew Gibson, Modernity and the Political Fix Elettra Stimilli, Debt and Guilt Thomas Lynch, Apocalyptic Political Theology

DEBT AND GUILT A political philosophy

ELETTRA STIMILLI Translated by STEFANIA PORCELLI

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC, and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published as Debito e colpa, Ediesse 2015 This version published 2019 Copyright © Elettra Stimilli, 2015, 2019 Elettra Stimilli has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover design: Irene Martinez-Costa Cover image © Claire Fontaine: P.I.G.S., 2011 (detail of Greece) Matchsticks. plaster wall, concealed corridor, H.D. video projection. Photo © Nacho López / Courtesy: Claire Fontaine and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León The translation of the work was funded by the “Scuola Normale Superiore” and the “Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca”. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-6342-6 PB: 978-1-3500-6343-3 ePDF: 978-1-3500-6339-6 eBook: 978-1-3500-6340-2 Series: Political Theologies Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS



Introduction 1

1 Debt: Between appropriation, exchange, and gift 7 The problematic context 7 Appropriation 10 Exchange 19 Gift 28 Debt 32

2 An open question 39 The neoliberal turn 39 The society of generalized debt 46 The paradigm of man in debt 54

3 Between political theology and economic theology 61 Beyond the boundaries of economic science 61 Religion, politics, and economics 65 “Faith” in the era of the predominance of finance 72 Debt and sacrifice 76 Guilt and violence: At the origin of juridical power 80

4 The religion of debt 89 Bare life and the law 89 Capitalism: A cult with no theology 94 Economy and regulatory experimentation 101 The invention of oikonomia 108 Debt as investment 116

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Contents

5 The psychic life of debt 125 The guilt of being in debt 125 Establishing the rule: Psychic dimension and social sphere 132 Feminism and neoliberalism 138 The mystery of guilt and the psychic life of power 145 Envisioning new ways of assuming power 153



Conclusions 159

Bibliography  163 Index  171

Introduction

This study began in the first phase of the recent financial crisis, during which the problem of debt emerged primarily in the United States where, following the expansion of extremely complex and risky financial products, new forms of private debt spread in unprecedented ways that led to the collapse of the entire American economic system. However, the crisis soon reached beyond US borders. Between 2011 and 2012, as Greece—along with other countries in the European Union, including Italy—risked default, debt became a topical issue in Europe alongside austerity policies promoted by the so-called troika (European Central Bank, International Monetary Fund, and European Commission). “Austerity” became the key word that prevailed in European economic policies led by the “German model” that advanced the perception that indebted countries were “guilty.” Hence the link between “debt” and “guilt”—inherent in the German word Schuld/Schulden, which contains both meanings—and from which this study takes its cues. The main purpose of this book is to unveil the theoretical implications of this semantic relationship by engaging with the most relevant studies on debt published in the past few years, and by

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considering the debate that followed the publication of a previous work of mine on the same topic—The Debt of the Living:  Ascesis and Capitalism (see Stimilli 2017)—which I  began to write when the crisis was only beginning and which was published in Italian in the midst of the economic emergency of 2011. The present book builds on the previous one, although each can be easily read independently. In the light of the recent economic recovery measures, which aim at opposing systems of austerity ruling in Europe thus far, I  would like to reflect on the dispositif underlying the economy of debt that has prevailed in recent years. The question I will attempt to answer concerns the extent to which the “condition of debt” tackled by the recent austerity regime can be identified as a condition to be emended, as indicated by the burden of sacrifices imposed by policies of austerity. I  also wonder whether the economy of debt and the policies aimed at relaunching the economy really correspond to two opposite perspectives, as it would appear at first glance; or whether, instead, there is a more complex mechanism that they share despite their somewhat divergent intentions, and which engages individual lives in such a radical way that it even becomes plausible to speak of a real “anthropological mutation.” Following the trajectory of well-known research—such as Max Weber’s classic study or, more recently, that of Michel Foucault—and returning to the prophetic words of a fragment by Walter Benjamin on capitalism as a cult that creates debt, this work intends to place the problem of debt in a more articulated context than the strictly technical milieu of economists, using resources from various disciplines in an attempt to conduct a survey in which economy is

INTRODUCTION

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no longer placed in overly narrow boundaries, but within the broader space that it deserves. It is not easy to return to topics one has already tackled. When I  was asked to write this book, I  hesitated; I  was convinced that I  could not deal with issues I  had already had the opportunity to explore in a different way. The direct confrontation with questions that are currently pressing—through an investigation that takes its cues specifically from the contemporary situation but that will carry out a broader theoretical reflection—has instead allowed me to open new fields of inquiry, which I hope can contribute something to the present debate. I have treasured the opportunities I have had to discuss these issues. In the end, this book is nothing more than an attempt at a single long answer to all the questions raised on those occasions. I  sometimes changed my position, but at times I  relied on the same arguments placed in a new context. In particular, I  remember attending the Conference on the Autonomy of the Political at the Jan Van Eyck Academy in Maastricht in 2011, and the Annual Conference of the British Society for Phenomenology in Oxford, as well as the seminar at the Center for a Critical Philosophy at the University of Pisa in 2013. The discussions at the seminar on “Feminism and Neoliberalism” organized at the University of Salerno in 2013; the discussion with Maurizio Lazzarato at the roundtable organized at the 2013 Belgrade Book Fair; the seminar at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of St. Gallen that same year; and participation in the International Conference on “Political Abilities:  The Sense of Subjectification” at the University of Innsbruck in 2014 were also very

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fertile. Particularly fruitful for this work was the organization of the Permanent Seminar of the Associazione Italiana Walter Benjamin that was held in Rome between 2013 and 2014. If my previous book was mostly written within the walls of libraries, but with the urgency to bring to light something that, although coming from a distant past, had much to do with the present, in this work I tried to think as much as possible about old and new readers in the attempt to start a dialogue with them, and to reflect again and from different points of view on what is part of a common experience. I hope to have succeeded at least in part. *** Finally, I would like to thank those who, more or less directly, made the completion of this work possible, or who contributed to its realization in various forms. Thanking people often means the acknowledgment of debt. On this occasion especially, I would like instead to try to keep the two areas distinct in the belief that gratitude does not respond to the logic of debt. I would like to thank Dario Gentili (together with the other curators of the series Fondamenti of the Italian publishing house Ediesse) for asking me to write this book and for discussing on several occasions with me many of the issues examined here. The conversation with Roberto Esposito was very important. The discussions with Paolo Virno, Massimo De Carolis, and Paolo Napoli were very beneficial, along with the opportunities for dialogue and collaboration I  was offered in the past years. I would like to thank everyone for their interest and their availability. I would also like to thank Giorgio Agamben, as the confrontation with his research remains an important part of my work. Finally, my gratitude goes to the many people too numerous to

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list here, and those whose names I do not even know or remember, but are still in my memory for their inspiration. I cannot forget, at this point, the experience of domestic life, difficult yet valuable for carrying out this work. My thoughts go to those who are part of it.

1 Debt: Between appropriation, exchange, and gift

The problematic context To be in debt is the model of contemporary experience. The economic crisis has led to the emergence of a phenomenon of enormous proportions that nevertheless remains opaque and is therefore worth investigating. As noted by Melinda Cooper, “the early 1970s set off a process by which the United States transformed itself into the focal point of an effective debt imperialism—. . . an empire that sustains itself rather as the evanescent focal point of a perpetually renewed debt” (2008: 30). “Nevertheless,” writes Cooper, If there is something that distinguishes the contemporary debt form, it is not simply its paradoxical relationship to U.S. imperial power, but also the level of production at which it operates. What is

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at stake in the accumulation of capital today is the regeneration of the biosphere—that is, the limits of the earth itself. . . . the delirium of the debt form . . . in effect enables capital to reproduce itself in a realm of pure promise, in excess of the earth’s actual limits . . . It dreams of reproducing the self-valorization of debt in the form of biological autopoiesis. (30–1) Cooper’s work, published in the United States in 2008, aims at analyzing the enormous changes that occurred in the postindustrial economy following the development of the new biotechnologies and the resulting transformation of biological life itself into surplus value. The economic crisis has, however, made apparent that the phenomenon of putting life at the heart of world economic processes—fundamentally centered on new ways of production and on sophisticated financial operations—is not confined solely to the biological domain, but extends to the very human capacity for giving shape and attributing an economic value to life itself. I  think it is worth reflecting on this idea once again in order to understand what is really at stake in today’s debt-based economy. The unfortunate history of recent years is well known. After 2001, the lowering of interest rates by the Federal Reserve increased credit as never before, especially in the United States, thereby creating a bubble in the housing market, and an expansion of consumer lending whose only guarantee were secondary mortgages on purchased houses. Between 2000 and 2005, housing prices and mortgages contracted by American households doubled compared to those recorded in the years immediately preceding. Living standards of middle- and lowincome people were no longer directly related to the income based

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on the job they held. The big US lenders began to issue products even to those who had neither income nor jobs, and who could not offer any guarantee. These loans, later known as subprime mortgages, were extremely risky given the high rate of insolvency they involved. As Joseph Stiglitz wrote in the newspaper La Repubblica on May 6, 2008: “The real estate bubble fueled unprecedented consumption; money came out of the house as from a cash machine at a fast pace.” In this way, unlimited consumption supported by private debt became the main engine of American economy. It is for this reason that, following Obama’s election in 2008, economist Michael Hudson— who in his 1972 book Super Imperialism already identified public debt as the driving force behind American world domination (Hudson [1972] 2003)—prompted the administration of the newly elected president to pay attention to the “new psychology of debt,” due to its relevance for the global economy (see Hudson 2009). Since the global economy fell into crisis between 2008 and 2009, there has been a massive, continuous transformation: the problems initially linked to an unprecedented increase in private debt have involved the public debt of many economically advanced countries. Instead of reducing the overall debt and resuscitating the economy, this shift laid the groundwork for a further crisis: sovereign debt—a term in economic jargon that mirrors the ambiguity of the phenomenon to which it refers. Public interventions were first directed at restoring the minimum levels of banks’ assets to avoid staggering bankruptcies. An unprecedented amount of public money has been used to rescue large private corporations, especially financial ones. Though beginning in the United States, the crisis has spread all over the world, especially to Europe, where a division has occurred between the “German model”

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that favored a policy of austerity, and the most indebted countries such as Greece, Portugal, and Italy, which in many respects have suffered under that policy. If a form of global indebtedness is at the center of the mechanisms of world economy, it is worth asking ourselves what is at stake in it and why it is that, after production and consumption, debt has become the central figure in our day. To try to answer these questions, it may be useful to place the issue of debt in a wider context that involves a preliminary comparison with what the dominant economic and political discourse considers modes associated with the system of production: appropriation and exchange. Within this scenario, we can also place a specific analysis of the gift. Since it is that which can neither be subtracted nor traded, the gift is at the margins of the logic of classical economy; however, as a social fact resulting from services that create bonds, it is part of a formulation of economy that aims to delineate its contours in a different way and, in this sense, is particularly ripe for an investigation that seeks to take advantage of resources originating from different points of view than the strictly economic one. This is just one attempt to find new tools to deal with the complexity we are encountering.

Appropriation Even by analyzing the little data available on the internet, it is not difficult to identify the major cause of the global economic disaster we have witnessed as a new form of undue appropriation for which small oligarchic groups, connected to the high echelons of politics and finance, are responsible. Hence the enormous increase in the level

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of poverty and the growing gap between rich and poor found even in more economically developed countries. I think it is difficult not to agree on this point, and it is an important point of discussion in light of the different perspectives that have emerged from the recent debate on “common goods,” particularly heated in Italy, which has opened a fruitful political discussion “beyond the private and the public” (see Hardt and Negri 2009) as well as a rethinking of the role of the law (Marella 2012; Rodotà 2012; Mattei 2014). However, I believe that this kind of approach, though quite convincing in the face of some undeniable facts, must continue to be problematized so that we can try to confront the complexity of the phenomenon we are witnessing in a new way. Therefore, I would like to dwell on the notion of “appropriation,” not generically understood as a theft, but rather as a political process. The question we are going to answer here is, in what sense is the act of appropriation related to political action and, therefore, what kind of institution does it calls into question. As is known, the first to elucidate the political reach of economic appropriation was Karl Marx with the theory of surplus value, under which a certain amount of unpaid labor is appropriated during the capitalist production process, thereby exploiting the worker (see Marx 1977). Who clearly illustrated the terms of the problem from an institutional point of view, however, was the German jurist Carl Schmitt—a well-known supporter of Nazism, as well as the theoretician of the concept of “the political”—who in 1953 devoted an essay to this specific theme that is perhaps less well known than his others, but which, even though proceeding in an entirely different direction, brings Marx’s position to its extreme consequences.

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What makes this text interesting is that it identifies “appropriation” as the primary action underlying every juridical order, every economic structure, and every stage of associated life, thereby defining it from the very beginning as a political dispositif. To explain this move, Schmitt returns to the original meaning of the Greek word nomos, normally translated as “law.” This trajectory, which appears to be a return to the origins of Western culture, allows him to outline some “simple and authentic categories, at once basic and inclusive” (Schmitt [1953] 1993: 52) that may be useful in understanding in what sense appropriation was the premise for the most important modern institutional and political forms. His perspective is not, and cannot be, neutral. But the synthesis, clarity, and density that characterize his discourse offer stimulating ideas to reflect upon. Schmitt specifies that the Greek noun nomos derives from the Greek verb nemein and is therefore a nomen actionis, that is, an action or process whose content is given by its referent verb. “The first meaning of nemein,” Schmitt writes, “is:  nehmen [to take or appropriate].” The German term used in this regard is nehmen, which—as Schmitt points out—has its root in the Greek verb that is also at the origin of the German word Nahme, which means precisely “appropriation.” Therefore, if “nomos is a nomen actionis of nemein,” its first meaning is now referred to the act of taking, and “so there is a linguistic relation between the Greek words nemein and nomos and the German words nehmen and Nahme.” As a result, “the first meaning of nomos is appropriation” (54), meaning that the process of establishing legal norms linked to this semantic field is in this sense connected to an act of appropriation.

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The Greek verb nemein, Schmitt continues, also means “divide or distribute,” in German teilen. “Accordingly, the second meaning of nomos is the action and the process of division and distribution” (ibid.). “Abstractly speaking, nomos is law and property, i.e., the part or shares of goods.” Third, Schmitt observes, nemein means pasturage, in German weiden. “This is the productive work which normally occurs with ownership.” And, he adds:  “The commutative right of buying and selling in the market presupposes ownership as well as production deriving from the primary division” (55). According to Schmitt, each of these three processes— appropriation, distribution, and production—“is part and parcel of the history of legal and social order” (ibid.). However, to establish a chronological succession, he states that in Europe, at least until the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century, “any appropriation was recognized as the precondition and foundation for any further distribution and production” (56). European history would then be a history of appropriation of lands without an owner—or, as one might say beyond Schmitt’s text, appropriation of common land—as well as a history of conquest of land belonging to the “enemy.” The act of appropriation, therefore, appears in this view as originally linked to the process of the formation of juridical norms and to the political action underlying the establishment of the modern nation-state. From this point of view, seizure, capture, theft or, more simply, conquest are the founding acts of state organization through which the distinction between friend and enemy was made possible, a distinction that in Schmitt’s perspective defines the nature of a political institution. Such a distinction produces mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion that define the political institution itself.

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On this point, one could object to Schmitt by arguing that technical progress, and the resulting extraordinary increase in production, subsequently tended to dissolve the necessity of appropriation, restricting conquest and theft to the realm beyond the boundaries of the so-called civilized world. But, as Marx was able to convincingly demonstrate, since its origins, the capitalist economy at the heart of this process has relied on an openly predatory action. Indeed, Schmitt acknowledges that Marx was able to reveal, even from an entirely different point of view, “the veiled forms of appropriation whereby the workers’ surplus value is seized by the capitalists” (62). It is worth noting, then, that for both Schmitt and Marx, “appropriation” is at the origin of a specifically political tension, which becomes apparent in the conflict between opposing sides. For Schmitt, it is through appropriation that “the extreme consequence of the political grouping of a friend and an enemy is revealed” (Schmitt [1932] 1996:  35). The modern nation-state is, in his view, the concrete historical institution that configures itself by making the distinction friend/enemy a political distinction. He identifies instead the economicistic drift of liberalism as a neutralizing force that undermines the political constitutive energy of the state. In this sense, Marx’s criticism of political economy—which tends to recover within the classical economic sphere the political premise that the “appropriation whereby the workers’ surplus value is seized by the capitalists,” and the consequent “class struggle,” are identified as the political “enemies” to be challenged—touches a crucial point in Schmitt’s theory. However, while Marx’s discourse is developed entirely on the material level of economy, relegating the institutional field to the superstructure, Schmitt instead focuses on juridical

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discourse, denying the economic field the political status it possesses for Marx. Schmitt’s reflection, though problematic in many ways, is particularly interesting for the issues that we will later address in that it allows us to clarify, even within the Marxian discourse, the extent to which it is possible to see in appropriation a political act that, in Schmitt’s terms, is identified with the action of ordering linked to the institution of the state and to the definition within it of the right of property. Even more interesting is that, since the early 1950s, Schmitt did not hesitate to address the problem of the “historical destiny of appropriation” and the role of the “political” in the “era of the unity of the world”—what today we would call globalization—in which the world market undeniably dominates, homogenizing and unifying the different corners of the planet. He discusses this specific topic in an exchange of letters with Alexandre Kojève, a well-known thinker of his time, as well as an official of the French Ministry of Commerce and, above all, author of the innovative Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (see Kojève 1969) that marked not only the study of political philosophy but an entire era. His name is also attached to the theme of “the end of history” that became predominant in the international debates in the years immediately following the fall of the Berlin Wall, thanks especially to Francis Fukuyama’s book The End of History (see Fukuyama 1992). As is evident in this correspondence, Kojève received Schmitt’s paper “Appropriation/Distribution/Production” directly from the author and, in his letters to Schmitt, directly addresses the role of politics and the function of the act of appropriation in the era

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of global market’s total domination. Both recognize the crisis of the modern nation-state and the connection between its juridical structure and economy’s global dominance. But for Schmitt the act of “appropriation” at the core of the issue of nomos and of judicial order is not yet over. From his point of view, this original, constitutive and legal act, on which the juridical determinants of politics are based, is still at work. In keeping with the text of 1953, appropriation is still recognized by Schmitt as an indispensable and “autonomous” premise, and as the foundation of two other aspects (“distribution” and “production”) that in his view characterize the political institution as such. For Schmitt, the problem of nomos—of political struggle around nomos, and of the power that is founded on it—also exists in the era of global politics, in the era of the “unity of the world.” Indeed, he does “not consider our Earth, no matter how small it may have become, to be a planning unit” (Kojève and Schmitt 2001: 102). From his point of view, there is still “the sense [which is] a plurality and, therefore, enables meaningful enmity, and is hence justifiably historically noteworthy of an opposition to the unity of the world, i.e. against the assumption [which he attributes to Kojève] that the cycle of time is already over” (ibid.). According to Schmitt, it is true that in the era of the “great space” the question of power undergoes profound transformations. In place of world politics a kind of “world police” is established, and instead of the wars thus far known, there exists a single “civil war.” Proceeding from this awareness, in his letter of May 16, 1955, Kojève asks Schmitt whether there are “still States in the real sense of the word, thus governments which are anything other than administrations and politics [Politik](=war) which meant something more than Police” (97). Once it has become a global police,

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politics seems to be reduced to simple administration:  “Certainly there is still a kind of ‘foreign policy.’ Domestic politics, however, no longer exists:  everybody wants, of course, the same thing, namely nothing; for they are, by and large, if not satisfied [befriedigt] at least contented [zufrieden]” (190). Schmitt is aware of this. In his 1953 essay he writes: “When the standard of living continues to rise, distribution becomes increasingly easier and less precarious, and then appropriation ultimately becomes something not only immoral but even economically irrational and absurd” (Schmitt [1953] 1993: 59). In the fifth corollary, inserted in the 1958 reedition of the essay, he adds: In an essay of 18 January 1957, Alexandre Kojève coined . . . the term “bestowing capitalism.” With that he meant to say that modern, tendentially enlightened capitalism, which aims at increasing the purchasing power of workers and at the industrial development of underdeveloped countries, now means something that is substantially different from the appropriative capitalism Marx referred to. Kojève, however, must be reminded that there can be no man capable of giving what, in one way or another, he has not taken. Only a god who has created the world from nothing can give without taking, and then only in terms of this world which he has created from nothing. (Schmitt 1985: 504) Despite his criticism of Kojève, Schmitt also concedes that in the growing predominance of economy, humanity would find itself in a completely changed state:  “Like the bees,” he writes in a text of 1959, “mankind finally has found its formula in the beehive. Things govern themselves; man confronts himself; . . . man can give without taking” (Schmitt 2003:  347). It should be noted that in the second

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edition of Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Kojève uses very similar words in a famous note added in 1968, which focuses on the description of the “end of history” that is parallel to the fulfillment of the “universal and homogeneous State” at the end of his reading of the Phenomenology of the Spirit. According to him, the end of history coincides with the return of humans to an animal state and with the radical transformation of language, which is thus in fact like that of “bees” (Kojève 1969: 160). In other words, with the global affirmation of economy, humanity would appear increasingly satisfied with what it possesses, as the animal is in its environment. The dialogue between Schmitt and Kojève in many ways highlights the farsightedness of their analyses, which, not surprisingly, have influenced many interpretations of global politics after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the advent of the global market. The latest facts, however, have also shown their weakness and the inconsistency of most interpretations of globalization that moved in the same direction. An elevated “standard of living” did not correspond to an “easier and less precarious” distribution. Instead, an implosion of the middle class that almost led to its full disappearance massively hit the Western countries. The gap between poverty and wealth has increased dramatically on a global level, becoming one of the most important aspects of the recent economic crisis (see Dienst 2011). New analyses of the phenomenon and new reflections on the fate of politics in the global market crisis have become necessary. It is therefore worth wondering whether the dissolution of the “political” in the management of the global economy is irreversible, as emerges from Kojève’s thinking; or if there is any room of “autonomy,” as hoped by Schmitt; or whether what has happened is neither dissolution nor

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autonomy, but a more complex process that derives perhaps from the establishment of a different type of institution, neither strictly economic nor exclusively juridical, but administrative (as is also emphasized in the correspondence between the two), which simultaneously involves the state and the market, transforming the configuration they took on in modern times. A further reflection on the definition of “borders” that characterized the institution of the state and the right of property has become necessary (see Mezzadra and Neilson 2013). Yet, the recent emergence of an unprecedented form of global indebtedness raises the question of the role of appropriation in world economic politics. Along with the appropriation of the surplus value rightly identified by Marx as the driving force of capitalist economy, other factors come to the foreground that encourage us to rethink not only the function of the classical forms of production, but above all the clear-cut separation between capital and labor presupposed by such processes of appropriation. To understand this transition, we must now confront—as far as is possible within the limits of this work—the theory of exchange and free market.

Exchange An important contribution to the understanding of the situation we are facing may come from a perspective that is able to liberate the critique of political economy from a consideration of the economic– political discourse carried out in the classical terms of “ideology,” aimed at exposing the false “illusions” on which it is based. Rather than expose the areas of dysfunction of the system, which are

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apparent, I think we should instead understand the mechanisms and the dangers inherent in its areas of operation. One of these areas is, indeed, economic exchange. It is significant in this regard that the most widespread criticisms of capitalist economy tend to reduce “interest” in the economic sense, on which the theory of exchange is articulated, to “private interest” and to underestimate the fact that the market, as a place of exchange, is in the first place an institution of a collective phenomenon. Each agent takes part in it not only because they are moved by personal interest, but above all because they depend on the interests of all other participants, and therefore depend on the “value” that each of them assigns to a certain good. The problem then lies in understanding the sense of this dependence within a mechanism driven by individual freedoms. Aristotle’s reflection on economy is the theoretical premise on which the modern economic discourse is based. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the question of exchange is first discussed by Aristotle in a treatise devoted to public life. As it is well known, in the first book of Politics Aristotle speaks of oikonomia as a necessary premise for the polis, where man is “by nature a political animal” and lives his life in common (Pol. 1.2.1253a). Oikonomia, according to Aristotle, basically deals with domestic administration, with the nourishment of organic life (zoé), without which political life (bíos politikós) would be impossible. He thus places the economic within the limits of the necessary, within the natural dimension. Aristotle cannot help but couple this with a phenomenon that, even beyond the limits of biological life, he also defines as “natural”: the fact that men naturally tend to specialize in work, thus producing more than

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what they need. Hence the necessity to sell what is produced in excess, at first in the form of barter, then through real exchange. In his perspective, a consequence of this is the possibility to use the goods one possesses in two different ways: as objects of use and as means of exchange. “Both belong to the thing as such,” argues Aristotle, “but not in the same manner”: “for one is the proper” use of the object, “and the other the improper or secondary use of it,” that is exchange (ibid.). Although included in a discourse on politics, economy is identified by Aristotle as its indispensable yet extraneous premise and, as such, confined to the realm of the “natural,” which is outside the public domain of political discourse and practice. In this sense, it can be said that his intent is to clearly separate the economic from the political sphere. When, in The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, Adam Smith—generally considered the precursor to the modern discipline of economics—tries to define the basis of economy, he does so by recalling the Aristotelian framework. For Smith, economic life is indeed intended to meet the needs of human beings, but above all it comes from human nature’s natural disposition “to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another” (1902:  55). This ability is also linked to another aptitude identified by Aristotle as properly human, the division of labor, which results in the overproduction of goods. Moreover, according to Smith, excessive goods are at first simply bartered and only later exchanged thanks to more streamlined trade techniques. Smith recuperates the Aristotelian distinction of goods as objects of use and means of exchange, but he transforms it drastically in

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ways that deeply influenced the modern economic discourse:  he translates the Aristotelian distinction in terms of value. This is the moment in which the market is configured as an essentially collective phenomenon and economy is thus somewhat linked to politics from within. Politics, in this sense, is the valuation that for Smith becomes the founding institution of a relationship based on exchange. As determined by Aristotle, however, the economic is rooted in the natural sphere and does not belong to the political. Not only is the “value in use” of produced goods distinguished from their “value in exchange,” since the former “expresses the utility of some particular objects,” but the latter expresses “the power of purchasing other goods which the possession of that object conveys” (73), thus becoming “commodity.” Identifying value, the principle of exchange, is defined by equivalence, which is what distinguishes this mode of acquisition from other forms, such as appropriation, theft, or even gift. Through valuation, the goods acquire a form of objectivity that differs from the objectivity of the value in use, but that becomes equally strong in the exchange process. In this sense, it can be said that in the classical and neoclassical economic theories, the relationship of exchange is a relationship mediated by the objectivity of value. The need to identify an objective criterion for the valuation of goods in fact prompts Smith to consider the value in exchange of an object as equal to the objective cost of the labor employed to produce it. In this way, not only does the process of production become the exchangeable commodity par excellence, but, above all, the exchangeability of goods is based on a substance that, in this

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sense, appears to be “objective” and confers on goods an intrinsic value independent of their possibility of being exchanged. Marx’s criticism of capitalist economy is also based on this assumption. Marx identifies the political significance of value. By focusing his analysis on the labor at the basis of exchange and, in particular, on the amount of labor expropriated by the capitalist from the worker, he locates the political domain of economy in the appropriation of the modes of production rather than in valuation—on which the institution of the market is based—without completely disengaging his criticism from the “natural” sphere that the modern economic discourse tends to support. What in the classical economic discourse allows exchange to assert itself as a natural, simple and immediate form, is the fact that value is identified as intrinsic to goods, that is, as coinciding with the objective cost of the labor used to produce them. This is also the case in neoclassical theory, for example in that of Léon Walras, who, however, no longer identifies value in “labor,” but in the “utility” of goods and in the fact that they are “by nature” rare, that is, available only in limited quantities. Scarcity is therefore in this sense an effective property of goods that, together with their “utility,” gives them an objective value as in the neoclassical framework. Despite their differences, classic and neoclassical theorists share the search for an “objective substance” with which to identify the value of goods, a search that is also present in Marx. This is what allows both schools to give historical and theoretical priority to barter— as Aristotle had already done—making exchange an extension of barter. However, from the beginning of economic theory, the “natural” rooting of exchange in barter, first determined by Aristotle

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and furthered by Smith when confronted with the necessity to find an objective value of goods independent of their exchangeability, conflicted with the equally natural human tendency to communicate, which has been identified in modern economic discourse as a basis for exchange. In this approach, communication is responsible for the very ability to valuate and, therefore, for the intrinsic mechanism that feeds the market as an institution. Speaking about the human inclination toward exchange in The Wealth of Nations, Smith leaves the question open as to “whether this propensity be one of those original principles in human nature, of which no further account can be given; or whether, as seems more probable, it be the necessary consequence of the faculty of reason and speech” (1902:  55). However, in lectures held at the University of Glasgow in 1763—which serve as a kind of preliminary draft for the 1776 treatise—Smith lingers on the question. Here, the human tendency to exchange lies in the fact that men have the “power of persuasion” (1869: 171). According to Smith, therefore, the disposition to trade and exchange material goods derives from the human disposition to spiritual trade and to the exchange of ideas. The one, as it were, cannot exist without the other. The propensity to exchange is therefore based on the same communicative structure of human practice and manifests itself in language through the exchange of words and the properly human faculty of persuasion. This consideration, which in The Wealth of Nations is only given as probable at best, is instead proposed as a certainty in the Lectures. In other words, the tendency to exchange is closely related to the communicative faculties of reason and speech. This complicates the thesis on utility and interest in exchange.

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Indeed, on the one hand, Smith states in a known passage that: It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities. (1902: 56) From this perspective, in the modern economic theory, homo oeconomicus coincides with the selfish individual whose rationality aims at the exclusive maximization of personal well-being. However, a reading that considers the many aspects that flow into the modern definition of the market requires a deeper analysis. In Smith’s paradigm, it is not only in the interest of personal wellbeing that each specializes one’s own business to increase production and to transform growth into increased personal wealth through the exchange of surplus goods, but the process—with the intervention of an “invisible hand”—automatically leads to an increase in the general prosperity, in the “common good,” thanks to the fact that it is rooted in the human faculty of language, and to the fact that man can fully realize his nature only if he inscribes all his activities in the domain of communication and exchange. The persuasion from which, according to Smith, exchange originates is indeed an exclusively human faculty not found in any other animal. “Nobody,” Smith writes, “ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog” (55). Among men, on the contrary, the most dissimilar geniuses are of use to one another; the different produces of their respective talents, by the general disposition to trade, barter, and exchange,

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being brought, as it were, into a common stock, where every man may purchase whatever part of the produce of other men’s talents he has occasion for. (59–60) The emphasis on the human tendency to look for fellow creatures as necessary elements for the development of the species, and a vision that tends toward mutual integration, characterize, from Smith onward, a substantial part of economic discourse. The market as a place of exchange therefore appears not only as a dispositif different from, albeit complementary to, the act of appropriation underlying the juridical power of the state and the foundation of production in the Marxian sense, but above all it appears as the institution in charge of valuation. This aspect is also present in the theory of self-regulation developed by neoclassical economists, according to whom the market is the institution that can independently determine the rules of its own operation. In the traditional studies that focus on ideology, all this is but an illusion aimed at hiding the preeminent role of private interests acting in market economy. “Interest” and “utility” can thus be criticized in the light of utilitarian and instrumental reason, and the vision of market as the harmonization between “private interest” and “public good”—the invisible hand—is reduced to a myth or to an ideological illusion, because of the intrinsic contradictions of capitalism. In this type of critique, the most negative aspects of the market emerge, such as instrumental selfishness or exploitation aimed at satisfying private interests. These criticisms, though in many ways more than justified, may, however, obfuscate the complexity of the issue. If the point here is not so much to reveal the areas of dysfunction in the system, which

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are apparent, but rather to understand the mechanisms and dangers inherent in its operating areas, then it may be useful to refer to the idea of the market developed by Michel Foucault in his late studies on economic power, which marked an era in the research in this field by offering new interpretative tools for understanding political economy. At the heart of Foucault’s work on the subject—which began with his course at the Collège de France in 1977–8 (see Foucault 2009)—is the conviction that economic rationality is a governmental rationality, that is, one that aims at direct individual lives through the establishment not of repressive and violent norms, but rather of norms focused on desires, passions, the same criteria humans use to valuate and choose. In this sense, according to Foucault, the privileged context in which economy exercises its political dominance is not production—as in Marxian critique of political economy— but precisely in the market as a regulatory institution founded on valuation and on the administrative logic of the agents involved. It is through the institution of the market that economy becomes a form of political government. Based on these assumptions, the market for Foucault is a “site of truth” (2008:  30):  this means not so much that in its being “a site of truth” it can be either respected and accepted or unmasked as an illusion. What matters, instead, is that in the market values are produced that are accepted as true by everyone:  “inasmuch as it enables production, need, supply, demand, value, and price, etcetera, to be linked together through exchange, the market constitutes a site of veridiction” (32); in other words, the market dictates the set of rules on which economic discourse must be articulated.

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This is a new rationality, centered on a new type of government that is exercised based on the freedom of the market and its agents. Interest acts here at the same time as a carrier of utility and freedom, and ends up coinciding with what exceeds personal goals in an immediate confluence with the “common interest.” Through exchange, in fact, the maximization of each interest never identifies exclusively with the satisfaction of individually defined purposes; but above all it nourishes the mechanism that makes the market a public institution whose sole purpose is its own self-production, from which profit emerges as an end in itself that is essential to its functioning. Even in Marx’s discourse, the idea of exploitation through appropriation relies on the theory of profit at the basis of the increase in capital. Foucault’s analysis, which reconstructs the modes of constitution and the mechanisms underlying the institution of the market, aims at defining the way in which economy in fact became a form of political government. This perspective, fundamental to the trajectory that we are following, is useful in understanding how the dispositif underlying the phenomenon of debt is not so much the result of the degeneration of the market’s self-regulation, but rather the inherent consequence of such self-regulation.

Gift In the early 1920s, important studies on the economic behavior of so-called primitive or archaic societies in emerging disciplines such as anthropology and ethnology started a critical analysis of some fundamental principles of economic theory. These studies identify the major problem of economic theory in an attempt to bring the

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mechanisms of the market back to “natural laws,” or to recover the inclinations of man in his natural state. The “gift” emerges in them as an alternative form of the transmission of goods, different from those discussed by the dominant economic theory. The gift is so massively present in archaic societies that it dispels the accuracy of formulas that have become canonical in the economic sphere, such as the idea that there is a “natural economy,” or the principle that barter is the primitive form of transaction. In his essay The Gift, written in 1925, Marcel Mauss argued, as Bronislav Malinowsky had already done (1922), that in “primitive and archaic” societies exchange should be identified as a “total social” fact (Mauss 1966: 78): a unitary phenomenon that, along with economic factors, involves legal, religious, psychological, and social elements. In this sense, the gift, while being a form of exchange, should not be confused with barter that, according to the dominant economic theory, is at the origin of the real economic transition. Economy, according to this approach, develops from a fundamentally social dimension, a “total social fact,” from which it only, and subsequently, becomes autonomous. Karl Polanyi, the first economist to turn to anthropology and ethnology, looks at the studies of Bronislav Malinowski and Richard Thurnwald to refute the dominant idea of an ​​ “eternal economic man” who responds to eternal “natural laws.” His basic aim is to critique the utilitarian logic that, from his point of view, characterizes the market. To this end, the phenomenon of the gift serves as a fundamental example of a different economic logic. According to Polanyi, “The outstanding discovery of recent historical and anthropological research is that man’s economy, as a rule, is submerged in his social

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relationships ([1944] 2001:  48). The “so-called economic motives spring from the context of social life” (49), to the point that, for him, “The economic system is, in effect, a mere function of social organization” (52). In primitive societies, Polanyi writes, man “does not act so as to safeguard his individual interest in the possession of material goods; he acts so as to safeguard his social standing, his social claims, his social assets (48). “The human passions, good or bad, are merely directed toward noneconomic ends,” and all acts of exchange are not primarily in the form of barter, but “byway of free gifts that are expected to be reciprocated” (49). In his eyes, economy in a narrow sense is reduced to the expression of a specific economic system, characterized by the generalization of market relations and by its becoming independent from the fabric of social relations. The peculiarity of Western society, for Polanyi, is then the loss of the sense of the social community, which is replaced by individualistic utilitarianism: The true criticism of market society is not that it was based on economics—in a sense, every and any society must be based on it—but that its economy was based on self-interest. Such an organization of economic life is entirely unnatural, in the strictly empirical sense exceptional. (257) Although Polanyi does not directly mention Mauss in his work, but rather goes back to the studies of Malinowski and Thurnwald, the essay The Gift nevertheless seems to be the implied premise from which his study is articulated. Common to both Polanyi and Mauss is the idea that personal interest is the foundation of market economy. Both criticize the “naturalness” of utilitarian economy, that is, the fact

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that, according to the logic of the market, interest as individual search for utility would be natural. Mauss’s research on archaic societies is based on the conviction that market economy is a recent historical phenomenon and, above all, that it encompasses aspects that are totally artificial in contrast to man’s originally social nature. In the archaic societies of his studies, the phenomenon of the gift, as an element in a system of reciprocal relations, is at the origin of what are termed “social facts” that result from benefits that create connections. The freedom of the gift, indeed, obliges the receiver to return the gift, and this creates social cohesion. The obligation to return implicit in the gift is a form of exchange that produces associative bonds. A  particularly appropriate example in this regard is the ceremony of potlatch studied by Mauss (1966: 10–14 and passim). Although in many ways gift economy appears opposed to market economy, we can notice that its being rooted in a social dimension of reciprocal bonds does not contradict the whole structure of the market as the institution of social relationships at the basis of the theory of exchange that is proposed, albeit with the necessary differences, in the major classical and neoclassical economic theories. In this line, the identification of the logic of utilitarianism as the main factor in market economy provided by the theorists of the gift also appears reductive. As we have seen, the maximization of each interest does not indeed coincide solely with the satisfaction of individual goals, but rather converges in the self-reproductive mechanism of the institution of the market as a social institution. Moreover, although in most economic theories the underlying principle of commodity exchange is equivalence rather than prestige, as in the potlatch, the

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sharp contrast between the two domains proposed by the theorists of the gift does not hold in the mutated conditions of market economy. Already in the early 1990s, MAUSS (Mouvement Anti-Utilitariste dans les Sciences Sociales)—born in France as a group studying the perspectives opened by Mauss and resumed by Polanyi—had to deal with the profound change of the traditional modes of production. Flexibility, creative faculties, and the qualities typical of the world of communication, had all entered the realm of labor as forms of investment and personal prestige, as well as of self-giving:  a “great transformation” was underway, whose greatest results are now apparent, and which led the anti-utilitarian movement to reconsider its theoretical assumptions and showed its limitations in the critical analysis of the present. Yet, recent studies on the gift have attracted new interest. This happened in the very moment debt became the central paradigm of the global economy, leading to a rethinking of the very categories at the center of the most important economic theories. This shift perhaps needs more attention.

Debt Debt normally refers to things, to services, or to sums of money that have been borrowed and must be repaid. In this sense, what is borrowed is neither taken nor traded; in other words, it concerns neither appropriation nor exchange. But its existence develops in an area of indistinction between the two domains. Bearing in mind that a loan normally involves an interest, when the interest claimed is too high, the agreement risks becoming a theft to the detriment

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of the debtor. If the loan is not returned, the commitment becomes a deduction from the creditor. In both cases, it would be an act of appropriation. But if what has been taken is returned with reasonable interest, this becomes something very similar to exchange. Yet, taking a closer look, the relationship between debtor and creditor is more complex than it may at first appear if “appropriation” and “exchange” are the only categories of reference. The relationship between debtor and creditor binds over time and, in this sense, it makes debt much closer to a gift (see Atwood 2008). That the structure of debt is internal to that of the gift is evident in Mauss’s study, as this enlightening passage shows: In any society it is in the nature of the gift in the end to bring its own reward. Time has to pass before a counter-prestation can be made. Thus the notion of time is logically implied when one pays. On this point, legal and economic theory is greatly at fault. Imbued with modern ideas, current theory tends towards a priori notions of evolution, and claims to follow a so-called necessary logic; in fact, however, it remains based on old traditions. Nothing could be more dangerous than what Simiand called this “unconscious sociology.” For instance, Cuq could still say in 1910: “In primitive societies barter alone is found; in those more advanced, direct sale is practised. Sale on credit characterizes a higher stage of civilization; it appears first in an indirect manner, a combination of sale and loan.” In fact the origin of credit is different. It is to be found in a range of customs neglected by lawyers and economists as uninteresting: namely the gift, which is a complex phenomenon especially in its ancient form of total prestation

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. . . Now a gift necessarily implies the notion of credit. Economic evolution has not gone from barter to sale and from cash to credit. Barter arose from the system of gifts given and received on credit, simplified by drawing together the moments of time which had previously been distinct. Likewise purchase and sale—both direct sale and credit sale—and the loan, derive from the same source. (1966: 34–5) Mauss’s essay on the gift and the related research undoubtedly have the merit of highlighting the heterogeneous social structure to which this phenomenon gives birth; on the one hand, in opposition to the economic exchange, on the other hand, at its origin. However, the greatest contribution of these studies lies in having been able to bring to light a complex social process that puts to the test the very idea of economic relationship in the classical–modern sense. Beyond the need to point out an historic priority among gift, debt, barter, and exchange, what matters for our discussion is the fact that the economic relationship is as such connected to a social fact that, although aiming at the growth of prestige and/or wealth, does not exclusively hinge on the mere fulfillment of personal needs, utility, and interests. What moves the economic relationship is the fact of dealing in the first place with the communicative aspects that characterize human action. This is particularly true about the relationship between debtor and creditor. It is no coincidence that some scholars have traced the origin of this link to the use of money. When money is not first recognized as a means of payment or as a unit of account in the exchange of existing goods, with their intrinsic and objective value, it is rather intimately linked to language

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(see Marazzi 2014; Virno 2018) and shows itself to be the institution through which the valuation process is constituted as a phenomenon of social communication. In this sense, money is not conceived as a secondary and contingent element, a simple means used as an intermediary in the exchange of goods and services, but originally as the concrete possibility of establishing a social relationship, thanks to which social order comes into existence. This fundamental role that some scholars attribute to money does not rely on some intrinsic qualities that need only be specified, but on the unanimous agreement of those who take part in the economic relationship by recognizing in it the bond of the participants. What gives value to money is not its intrinsic utility as a means of exchange, but the faith in its general acceptance. Hence its status as “collective power” (Orléan 1982: 185), social and political power (cf. Dodd 2014). In this sense, value is not only a substantial measure, as in the dominant economic tradition, that is identified with labor by classical economists or with utility by the neoclassical ones. Instead, thanks to money, value is essentially “purchasing power.” Through this process an act of trust, or credit, comes into play:  the credit that the purchased item will retain its economic value. On the basis of this assumption, money is explicitly assimilated to “credit.” One of the most important attempts in this direction is that of Georg Simmel who, in his work on The Philosophy of Money, not only refuses to oppose currency and credit, but assimilates them. According to him, “The possibility that the claim that money represents will not be satisfied confirms the character of money as mere credit” (2004: 179). Indeed, even more explicitly he states that “money is always credit because its value rests upon the recipient’s

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confidence that he will be able to acquire a certain quantity of goods in exchange” (178). But the credit that is inherent in money is also linked to the confidence and the commitment to return an adequate amount of value that anyone who has received the money must respect. Not only, then, as Orléan says, is “monetary confidence the ‘most concentrated expression’ of economic confidence, the very energy that gives rise to market relationships” (1982: 195) but, above all, economic relations are created starting from an essential form of credit, which is the same as the link between the debtor and the creditor. In addition to the credit given and to the obligation for the recipient to return what he owes, in this link also lies the risk the debtor runs until he has paid his debt. Here the relationship between debtor and creditor reveals that it contains an implicit power relationship. In this regard, Mauss recovers in The Gift the archaic figure of the nexum of Roman and Germanic law, which refers to a relationship where the logic of the gift is not yet entirely distinct from the logic of the legally regulated contract. In nexum, the one who receives is indissolubly bound to the one who gives, so that in this, the former loses something more than the value of what he has received and becomes emptus, bought, because he pledges the full availability of his person to the donor, as well as acceptus, accepted. Thus, in order to explain in what sense “the obligation to repay is the essence of potlatch” (1966: 40), Mauss states that “the sanction for the obligation to repay is enslavement for debt” (41). Even in the oldest Roman code known as the Twelve Tables (particularly in the third table) it was envisaged that if the debtor did not return the due sum by the deadline, the creditor could

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tie him and take him with him. He became addictus, that is, he underwent the executive procedure of addictio, through which he was at the total and material disposal of the other. Although not losing his freedom or the status of Roman citizenship, the addictus became, as a matter of fact, a slave subject to a double dependence: the one given by the chains and the other due to the debt. The creditor could carry the debtor with him, tie him for sixty days and present him on the market for sale. If no buyers were found, the creditor could sell the debtor abroad (trans Tiberim) or kill him, and, if others were to claim another debt from him, divide his body into fair shares. The peculiar state of the debtor codified in Roman archaic law, who is free and a slave at the same time, must perhaps be rethought in the light of the current situation, in which debt has become the new condition to which the world’s population is subjected. Is this subjection still of the same type of the one instituted by the nexum, even if the conditions in which it manifests are different? Or is this, rather, a different kind of power whose contours still appear to be mostly blurred, despite the violence with which the phenomenon of indebtedness has progressively imposed itself? To answer these questions, it is appropriate to consider the major studies on the topic that have appeared in recent years. A  reconstruction of the debate triggered by the emergency of the problem of debt can contribute to a new reflection on the present. ❖ To focus on the problem of debt, which has become central since the beginning of the recent economic crisis, it is essential to

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place the issue in a wider context, which involves a preliminary consideration of what, in the dominant economic and political discourse, are considered the modes closely related to the system of production: appropriation and exchange. In this way, the need for a specific treatment of the gift also becomes apparent. Since it cannot be subtracted or traded, the gift is in fact at the margins of the logic of classical economy; however, as a social fact resulting from benefits that create bonds, it instead becomes part of a formulation aimed at redefining economy’s contours. This analysis, though schematic, arises from the need to attempt a new approach to the phenomenon of debt that dismantles the narrow boundaries of economic theory. Points of view different from economic science, be they social, political, philosophical, or even religious perspectives, can provide useful interpretative tools to analyze our era.

2 An open question

The neoliberal turn Since the 1980s there has been a tangible economic, political, and social change. “Neoliberalism” has emerged worldwide as a new global economic policy. Many have interpreted this turn as a simple restoration of classical liberalism: a return, that is, to the market as a natural environment, capable of achieving autonomy, stability, and growth without state intervention, which would tend to improperly influence its spontaneous course. In fact, this phenomenon is more complex than this, and its outcomes are perhaps only today becoming clear. The crisis of the Fordist production structure, already emerging at the end of the 1970s, had highlighted the difficulty of limiting within the national circuit what had appeared as a “virtuous” connection between mass production and consumption, on which the industrial model of growth was based. Margaret Thatcher’s and Ronald Reagan’s political programs, which inaugurated the new course subsequently taken up by numerous governments and enhanced by major international organizations—including the International Monetary

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Fund and the World Bank—appeared as a first attempt to respond to the ungovernable situation in which the major Western democracies found themselves, and which tended to carry out mostly ineffective national interventions in the evolution of the world market. The common political strategy was set to addressing the emerging phenomenon of globalization with the aim of redefining the roles and functions of politics and economy (especially financial economy), eventually reversing the traditional subordination of the latter to the former that had characterized the modern world. A detailed examination of this crucial shift, which has increasingly become the focus of several influential works (Harvey 2005; Dardot and Laval 2013), is outside the scope of this book. I will limit myself, for the time being, to highlighting two crucial moments of this turn that offer some essential historical and social coordinates within which to place the issue of debt, and through which we can consider the recent debate on this theme. The first aspect to consider in this sense is the profound change of capitalist production that has occurred in the last forty years. It was not simply, as some have suggested, the era of “the end of labor.” Rather, administrative and entrepreneurial rationality was extended to all areas of labor, and to the social and political domain, until the entire existence of millions of people was involved. This forming endeavor has asserted itself and the “entrepreneur of oneself ” has become the prototype to which all the leading figures of classical economy have adapted: the “laborer,” the “producer,” and the “consumer.” This shift has led to a radical questioning of the classical distinction between “action” (praxis) and “production” (poiesis), on which, starting with Aristotle, Western societies were built. Laborer, producer, and

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consumer have not only been united by the fact that they all became entrepreneurs, but that they are also all committed to making the most of their “human capital,” thereby increasingly involving the ethical dimension in the productive field related to practice and vice versa (see Nicoli 2015). The application of theories of “human capital” to new forms of production, and their spread even to nonproductive fields, has led to a new use of the word “capitalism” in which the traditional dichotomy of “capital” and “labor” is completely upset. If the productive subject, homo faber, is the most remarkable result of modern industrial society, and the counterpart of the process was an equally productive and efficient power aimed at the construction of useful, docile workers inclined to consumption but also dedicated to sacrifice, the dominance of neoliberalism is characterized by the hegemony of the enterprise model. In entrepreneurial logic, human lives are fully involved in the activity assigned to them. This implies the total participation of individual desires. Their satisfaction is in no way the mere satisfaction of necessary needs tied to survival, nor is it delayed (as is in the classical notion of labor). The satisfaction of desires concerns the realization of individual lives in a wider sense, and is thus connected to an ethical space of existence, in which everyone becomes an “entrepreneur of oneself.” The “entrepreneur of oneself ” is an active subject, who devotes himself to the activity in which he is employed, suppressing any kind of alienation, any distance between himself and his enterprise. Hence the demand for permanent transformation, for continuous improvement, and the process of self-empowerment, which leads him to perfect his performance without restraint. The new paradigm, which incorporates the labor market—such as education and training

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(see Pinto 2012)—is “life-long learning.” From this perspective, the widespread use of the term “enterprise” is not only metaphorical, for it refers to the whole activity of the individual conceived as a continuous process of valorization. With neoliberalism, the dimension of valorization—constitutive since the beginnings of the market economy, but internally limited by its “natural” model—imposed itself in the form of “self-assessment.” It could be said that those elements, as we saw in our discussion on exchange, that in classical and neoclassical liberalism appeared between the lines of a discourse otherwise inclined to define the market as a natural structure, in the neoliberal approach instead come to the forefront, thereby creating something very different; in this way, according to some, we are today witnessing a true “anthropological mutation.” “Self-enterprise,” which is at the center of neoliberalism, implies an investment in the same aspects that—like action and language (see Marazzi 2008)—substantially characterize human life. The personal investment involved in this process is what translates into capital, modifying the role of both labor and consumption. Labor is thus “liberated” from the passivity imposed on it in its classical form. Conversely, consumption is not limited to the simple task of recovering lost forces but becomes itself a qualifying investment factor that increases the value of life itself. Rather than an original accumulation in Marx’s sense, we could speak of a continuous accumulation that not only exponentially increases over time, but whose effects cannot even be reduced solely to individual benefits. Involving what in human life cannot be appropriated, such as action and language, accumulation automatically positions itself in relation to a common good.

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What is at stake is not specific labor or consumption activities, more or less quantifiable and, in this sense, capable of being appropriated, but the potential element inherent in human life, essential to the involvement of the “workforce” in the production process from the very beginning (cf. Virno 2004). This potential unexpectedly emerges today as “human capital,” a “deposit” from which to profit in a process that instead of enriching lives, impoverishes them by necessitating the continual replenishment of the “deposit” without benefit. To describe the economic potentiality expressed in this sense by human life, anthropologist and social scientist Kaushik Sunder Rajan introduces the concept of “bio-value” (2006), which effectively defines this phenomenon, in the wake of the neologism “biopolitics” employed by Michel Foucault (see Foucault 2008). It should be noted, however, that this is not just the value of mere natural life, which is bereft of its qualities and reduced to a biological element among others. At stake is, rather, a dispositif that applies to the same power of the living human beings to give shape and value to their lives (see Bazzicalupo 2006). Is it not a coincidence that Foucault himself—explaining the new type of power introduced by neoliberalism—gradually abandoned the term “biopolitics” to focus on a new form of power he defines as “governmental?” (see Foucault 2008). At the heart of Foucault’s work is the conviction that economics is not just a scientific discipline, but a peculiar technique of political power whose effectiveness becomes evident precisely with the emergence of global neoliberal policies, which he is able to grasp with remarkable foresight. In this sense, economic rationality is in his eyes a governmental rationality that aims to govern individual lives through the establishment of norms that are not imposed from the outside, but

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which rely on desires, passions, and actions, and hinge, above all, on the same criteria of evaluation and choice typical of human life. Hence his revelation of the intimate links between the governing techniques of economic power and what he calls “subjecting techniques” or “technologies of the self.” The ways in which economic power is subjecting are, in other words, intrinsically linked to the same ways in which individuals form themselves, giving shape and value to life. His study of the various techniques of subject formation is therefore very useful in understanding the forms of subordination of neoliberal governmental power (see at least Foucault 1988, 2005, and 2017). These are the assumptions from which it is possible to reflect on the second problematic node at the heart of the neoliberal turn on which I intend to focus: the transformation of the nation-state into a “managerial state.” Since the 1980s, not only has the emergence of the new neoliberal governmental paradigm caused an enormous transformation of the modes of production, but it has also produced the establishment of more flexible, responsive, market-oriented, and consumer-oriented states. Management, conceived as a “universal” management mode, valid for any field, has been entirely transposed into the public sector as well. This move encompassed a radical change in politics and in the forms of democratic governments, which, under the influence of globalization, have contributed themselves to such transformation. Governance and its rating agencies gradually replaced national sovereignties. Many have seen in this change a crisis of the modern nation-state or even its end. In fact, even in the light of what happened during the crisis of “sovereign debt,” one can say that the state has not withdrawn but has accepted the new conditions it has contributed

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to establishing. It exercises its power in the managerial form it has taken:  it guides the activities of the supranational bodies—such as consultants, rating agencies, international agreements—to which it is also subjected and at the same time integrates the rules defined by them. This process is not only a sign of the decline of the nation-state; rather, it points to a profound transformation that led the institution of the state to become an “enterprise in the service of enterprises” (Dardot and Laval 2013: 228), which Naomi Klein calls “the corporate state” (2007: 529). The progressive transformation of politics into economy, much discussed in recent years, was not only caused by the global market’s invasion and conquest of states from outside, so to speak. Rather, the same states, especially those strong ones, embraced the entrepreneurial logic and joined it to the market. The expansion of the financial market and the financing of public debt on bond markets is the result of a process that has seen states in the forefront of dealing with managerial power that allowed them to turn from “territorial states” into “corporate states.” This change has deeply affected the status of politics and the process of establishing norms. This development is hardly attributable to the mere “ideology” developed in a strategic and intentional manner by individual power groups at the top of international organizations (as it emerges in recent analysis of the phenomenon, even of some relevance: see Harvey 2005; Gallino 2011). This transformation seems rather to be the result of a complex set of governmental practices within institutional policies, economic policies, and the same individual lives to the extent that it modified their boundaries and configuration. Starting from these assumptions and considering the latest studies on the subject, we can now try to

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understand the genesis and development of the phenomenon of debt, which in recent years has implicated individuals as well as nationstates in a form that has never been known before.

The society of generalized debt In 2011, three years after the beginning of the economic crisis, when public opinion, especially in Europe, began to pay attention to sovereign debt, several important studies on the issue of debt were published. The first is a book by David Graeber:  Debt:  The First 5,000 Years. In this book, the political activism of the Occupy Wall Street movement and the scientific work of an anthropologist find a single point of intersection. Various areas of research—including anthropology, history, economics, and religion—come together in this study in which Graeber outlines the origins of the concept of debt, while at the same time deconstructing what he calls “the dominant narrative” about the birth of the market. The two paths intertwine in a third way: a history of money. The main quality of Graeber’s book is to expand the familiar spacetime boundaries, thereby recovering a complexity that neoliberalism had ignored. First, in order to trace the origins of debt, market, and money, Graeber shows that it is necessary to reconstruct “at least” the first 5,000 years of history, as the subtitle of the book reads. But it is also necessary to go beyond the narrow limits of the West and to look further toward other lands, including not only the Middle East, India, China, but also Africa or South America where the “invisible hand” of the market left the imprints of slavery’s violence that some would like to remove.

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Graeber’s work especially dismantles economic science’s founding myth, which dates back to Adam Smith. The justification for this is the mere fact that, from an anthropological point of view, there are no examples of pure forms of barter (see Graeber 2011: 29). For Graeber, the equivalence of value between bartered goods, implicated in Smith’s approach and postulated in the paradigm of exchange, as well as the establishment of currency as a means of exchange, is a later invention. He writes: Markets aren’t real. They are mathematical models, created by imagining a self-contained world where everyone has exactly the same motivation and the same knowledge and is engaging in the same self-interested calculating exchange. Economists are aware that reality is always more complicated; but they are also aware that to come up with a mathematical model, one always has to make the world into a bit of a cartoon. There’s nothing wrong with this. The problem comes when it enables some (often these same economists) to declare that anyone who ignores the dictates of the market shall surely be punished—or that since we live in a market system, everything (except government interference) is based on principles of justice: that our economic system is one vast network of reciprocal relations in which, in the end, the accounts balance and all debts are paid. (114–15) Rejecting the fundamental myth of the market that goes back to economic science, Graeber explicitly places his work in the tradition of Marcel Mauss, who—as we have seen in our discussions about the theories of the gift—does not reduce social relations and economic systems to forms of exchange. Not only does there exist an excess

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in the human relations involved in economy that does not demand reciprocation, but, more importantly, even when there is reciprocity in the exchange, it doesn’t occur primarily in the modes of barter. Reciprocity, as recalled by Nietzsche and quoted by Graeber (76– 80), implies the elaboration of a more complex and more original relationship than the theory of exchange proposed by economic science: a “commitment” to give back is at the root of such a bond, which also emerges as a “debt.” Graeber agrees with Nietzsche that the relationship between debtor and creditor is prior to the exchange. It is from this relationship that money originates as credit due, prior to the moment in which money is understood as a simple means of exchange. “When economists speak of the origins of money,” they always see this phenomenon deriving from the development of barter. According to them, “first comes barter, then money; credit only develops later” (21). For Graeber, the process is instead the reverse, so much so that he argues that, A history of debt . . . is thus necessarily a history of money—and the easiest way to understand the role that debt has played in human society is simply to follow the forms that money has taken, and the way money has been used, across the centuries—and the arguments that inevitably ensued about what all this means. (21) From a certain point of view, money is not a “thing” at all. You can no more touch a dollar or a deutschmark than you can touch an hour or a cubic centimeter. Units of currency are merely abstract units of measurement, and . . . historically, such abstract systems of accounting emerged long before the use of any particular token of exchange. (46)

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However, if money is only a unit of measurement, what it measures is nothing more than “debt.” “A coin is, effectively, an IOU” (46), that is, a paper sheet signed with “I owe you,” with which—according to a practice widespread in the United States in the twentieth century— the debtor pledges to pay a certain amount of money. In this sense, “the value of a unit of currency is not the measure of the value of an object, but the measure of one’s trust in other human beings” (47). It can be said that this trust and this debt toward others are “the essence of society itself,” something that “existed long before money and markets” (56). This thesis is shared by theorists of “primordial debt” (such as Michel Aglietta, André Orléan, and Michael Hudson), and is resumed by Graeber precisely because the primordial “sense of debt was expressed not through the state, but through religion” (56). According to these scholars, indeed, humans are not originally oriented toward the logic of exchange and barter. In the initial stages of their history, they rather move within a cosmos surrounded by invisible forces, which gives them the idea of ​​being “in debt to the universe” (58). In this sense, not only is “human existence . . . itself a form of debt” (56), but as such, it is essentially linked to an original lack, a condition of guilt. This point is central to our discussion, and I will have the opportunity to come back to it later. For the moment, it is worth noting that for Graeber this hypothesis is also a myth, just like the theory of exchange. Despite his interest in those he calls the “primordial-debt theorists,” however, he does not hold back his reservations about their work. According to him, in fact, the biggest problem in this whole body of literature is the initial assumption: that we begin with an infinite debt to something called

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“society.” It’s this debt to society that we project onto the gods. It’s this same debt that then gets taken up by kings and national governments. (65–6) He also states: One might even say that what we really have, in the idea of primordial debt, is the ultimate nationalist myth. Once we owed our lives to the gods that created us, paid interest in the form of animal sacrifice, and ultimately paid back the principal with our lives. Now we owe it to the Nation that formed us, pay interest in the form of taxes, and when it comes time to defend the nation against its enemies, to offer to pay it with our lives. (71) However, to think of the state in this sense, as an institution opposed and presupposed to the market, is an illusory idea that does not allow one to identify the essential aspects of the problem. According to Graeber: This is a great trap of the twentieth century:  on one side is the logic of the market, where we like to imagine we all start out as individuals who don’t owe each other anything. On the other is the logic of the state, where we all begin with a debt we can never truly pay. We are constantly told that they are opposites, and that between them they contain the only real human possibilities. But it’s a false dichotomy. States created markets. Markets require states. Neither could continue without the other, at least, in anything like the forms we would recognize today. (71) If, indeed, markets and money do not automatically arise from barter, but presuppose the relationship between debtor and creditor that

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is at the heart of some fundamental religious experiences handed down in human history—a relationship that also characterizes the link between citizens and state institutions—then the bond between them is more complex than any bond known so far. States do not represent institutions that oppose the autonomous development of the market, but they exist and have always existed within the market. Therefore, not only does coinage of money arise from the need to impose state sovereignty in financing wars; but, above all, markets are the “side effect” (248) of a more complex process through which violence emerges at the origin of a common movement: the violent rapport of indebtedness:  “If we have become a debt society, it is because the legacy of war, conquest, and slavery has never completely gone away. It’s still there, lodged in our most intimate conceptions of honor, property, even freedom. It’s just that we can no longer see that it’s there” (164). Radical violence has emerged where the problem of debt has come to the fore in contemporary societies, even if in a transfigured form: Formal slavery has been eliminated, but . . . the idea that you can alienate your liberty, at least temporarily, endures. In fact, it determines what most of us have to do for most of our waking hours  . . . The violence has been largely pushed out of sight. But this is largely because we’re no longer able to imagine what a world based on social arrangements that did not require the continual threat of tasers and surveillance cameras would even look like. (210) Sovereign debt, which has always been one of the highest forms of capitalism’s violence, has completely assumed new forms, as in the case of US debt. Perhaps, as Graeber suggests, “we are looking at

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the final effects of the militarization of American capitalism” (382). What indeed is the role of “state monopoly” of US war debt today when China is one of the largest US public debt holders? The union between states and the market, on which capitalism has relied since its origins, has now reached unprecedented levels. On the one hand, the distinction between “friend” and “enemy” that characterized the modern institution of the state and modern politics has collapsed. On the other hand, the enormous process of “financialization of everyday life” (376) has emerged, namely the transformation of “everyone in the world into micro-corporations, or [the task] to ‘democratize credit’ ” whose only result is a generalized debt. An unprecedented “crisis of inclusion” has emerged in recent years, and in Graeber’s eyes this is the greatest sign of violence perpetrated by “a system of power and exclusion” (381). Graeber’s book aroused a lively international debate that soon also spread to Italy. Roberto Esposito has recently intervened in the discussion, taking some of Graeber’s conclusions to their extreme consequences. Esposito agrees that today’s “universal indebtedness is the consequence of the power relations between unequal parties.” This imbalance makes it similar to other forms of power of the past. However, through a philosophical analysis of the phenomenon, Esposito intends to focus on the change that has taken place. The greatest difference from the past, according to him, is that “in the society of generalized debt,” “the fate of subservience, at one time reserved for just one part, now seems to have been extended to all.” While “in the modern civilization” “the strong part [was] including the weak inside its borders,” “today it is the weak part that sucks the stronger into its own vacuum of resources” (2015: 208). Esposito states:

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The fact that all states, divided by a clear inequality of resources, are now indebted to an entity as elusive as global finance means that for the first time, perhaps, the world will experience a condition of shared suffering. . . . We are joined by a debt that separates us even from ourselves, by suspending us from a model of development that produces loss. Since everyone is included in it, we are at the same time also all excluded. (ibid.) Forms of power are undergoing a profound change; we should therefore also rethink resistance or antagonism. The general indebtedness we have witnessed also corresponds to a form of widespread violence that is difficult to fight. Graeber’s call for a bottom-up mobilization reveals the difficulty today of defining the conflict in terms of class struggle; it must, however, face the limits of a spontaneous antagonism entrusted to anarchist forms of revolt, which is ultimately the one he proposes. The work to be done in this direction is particularly complex and perhaps it will take a very long time to combine and create forms of counterpower as compact and capillary as the current modes of power. For Esposito, the greatest difficulty in overthrowing the predominant model lies not only in the fact that “another one looms at the horizon,” but above all in the evidence that “even the horizon line lies within it” (ibid.). What we can do, as far as sovereign debt is concerned, is reverse its meaning. Instead of trying to stop what is by now an unstoppable dynamic, we can speed it up, pushing it to its limit point, until it implodes. The fact that we are all debtors, or are becoming ones, means that there are no more real creditors. Every creditor is a

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debtor to another, in a chain whose first link has been lost. The problem we are facing is to transform this oppressive chain into a circuit of solidarity. (208–9) To “reverse the meaning” of debt, Esposito proposes to link it to reciprocal debt combined with the exchange of gifts that, in archaic societies, was a factor of social cohesion. But to do this, he believes that “even before changing life, we would need to change the way we interpret it—the conceptual language that we have inherited from an extremely long tradition” (209). This implies a constant confrontation with the profound change made by neoliberal policies in the same forms of power and further investigation into the meaning that debt has acquired in our day.

The paradigm of man in debt A first attempt in this direction was carried out by Maurizio Lazzarato in the book The Making of the Indebted Man. First published in French in 2011—the same year that Graeber’s book appeared—and then published in Italian and English (2012), this work is a critical investigation aimed at identifying governmental dispositifs at the basis of the society of debt. The genealogy of debt proposed here aims at a cross-examination of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals and Marx’s theory of money, while also touching on the examination of the debtor–creditor relationship carried out by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (originally published in 1972, see Deleuze and Guattari 1983) and analyzing some of the important passages of the courses held by Deleuze at the University of Vincennes between 1971 and 1973.

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Two hypotheses were proposed. First, according to Lazzarato, the true social paradigm is not the classical exchange paradigm— whether economic or symbolic—but credit. In total agreement with Graeber, he finds at the basis of the social relationship not the equal relationship normally assumed to be the premise of exchange, but the asymmetrical relationship between creditor and debtor. This relationship precedes, both historically and theoretically, the very relationship between production and wage labor. Second, the link between credit and debt emerges here as an economic relationship that cannot be decoupled from the very formation of the subject in debt as a “moral” condition. Labor, in the classical sense of the term, definitively becomes in the economy of debt “labor on the self,” and economic problems can no longer be dealt with in technical terms alone, but encompass a wider scope that also requires the use of different categories. “Viewing debt as the archetype of social relations,” Lazzarato writes, “means immediately making the economy subjective, since debt is an economic relation which, in order to exist, implies the molding and control of subjectivity.” The investigation on the man in debt thus becomes the discovery of a truth that, according to Lazzarato, concerns the entire history of capitalism: the fact that “what one defines as ‘economy’ would be quite simply impossible without the production and control of subjectivity and its forms of life” (2012:  33). To demonstrate this thesis, Lazzarato resumes the work on neoliberalism carried out by Foucault in the Birth of Biopolitics, in which homo oeconomicus is no longer simply the subject of exchange and market, but the entrepreneur of oneself. The concept of “governmentality” coined by Foucault also appears to Lazzarato as the most appropriate to define the neoliberal phase of capitalism:

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Capitalism is not a structure or a system: it develops, transforms, plans, integrates more or less well-adapted procedures according to imperatives of exploitation and domination. The power of capitalism, like the world it aims to appropriate and control, is always in the process of being made. The power bloc amassed around the debt economy is constituted through power relations that are at once heterogeneous—because responding to different logics (the State with its sovereign functions, Welfare State control of the population; industry and its capital accumulation through labor; finance, which claims to have no need of labor; the political, which creates consensus, etc.)—and complementary, because the power bloc faces a common “enemy.” The class struggle unites and consolidates these relations or splits and weakens them. Their unity and internal power relations are part of a political process in composition that cannot be taken a priori. (107) In an attempt to outline a process still in progress, Lazzarato then feels the need to distance himself from Foucault, or at least to point out that the context has completely changed compared to that referred to in Foucault’s work. “Debt,” according to Lazzarato, “reconfigures biopolitical power by demanding a production of subjectivity specific to indebted man” (104). Since the last financial crisis . . ., capitalism has abandoned the epic narratives it constructed around the supposed freedom, innovation, and creativity of the entrepreneur, the knowledge society, etc. Now the population has only to worry itself with what finance, corporations, and the Welfare State “externalize” onto society. (94)

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But if “the independence and freedom that entrepreneurism was supposed to bring to ‘labor’ have in reality led to a greater and more intense dependence” (94–5), dismissing the freely produced neoliberal subordination mechanism as ideology, as simple “rhetoric” (109) or as “illusions” (183), perhaps does not simplify the difficult task of finding new ways out of global indebtedness. It is no coincidence that Lazzarato himself goes back to this topic in his second book dedicated to the problem of debt, precisely in order to redefine the close relationship between the economic logic of neoliberal capitalism and the juridical institution of the state. On this point, he agrees with Foucault’s criticism of Marxism. “Foucault,” writes Lazzarato, “reproaches Marx and Marxists for identifying capitalism with ‘the economic logic of capital and its accumulation.’ It is impossible, he argues, to detach the economy from the institution” (2015:  132). In this regard, he believes that it is essential to bear in mind the fact that, as Foucault claims, in capitalist economy, particularly in neoliberal capitalism, “the institutional and the juridical are not ‘part of a superstructure,’ they are not in ‘a relation of pure and simple expression or instrumentality to the economy.’ They are constitutive of capitalism” (133). This relationship becomes much closer when the debt crisis has reformed power relations. All the impasses to the realization of the neoliberal axiomatics have crystallized in the crisis: the integrating force guaranteed by the social state and state of law no longer exists. The realization of the axiomatics of debt produces a personification of the capital relation in the negative and regressive figure of the indebted man, to whom a state progressively freed from its social burden and

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from democracy has little to offer besides austerity, the imposition of new sacrifices, recession and budget cuts. (164) “Appropriation,” for Lazzarato, is the basis for this process (49–52). The perpetrators, he argues, are ultimately a small, powerful group at the top of world finance and of the major national states, who obtain the greatest benefits without being touched by the repressive tax measures to which most of the population is subjected. It is undeniable that very few appropriate most of the wealth produced. Yet, I wonder if the category of “appropriation” suffices to explain the mechanism underlying global power. Its use in a critical investigation of neoliberal rationality can be a way to facilitate the analysis of a totally opaque dispositif. But to try to confront the opacity that characterizes our age, I think it is important to have the courage to overcome known categories—although, in many respects, they are still relevant for the present—and to find new ones in view of an understanding as adequate as possible to the degree of complexity with which we must deal. ❖ Since the 1980s, a new economic policy known as “neoliberalism” has imposed itself worldwide; a kind of administrative and business rationality has extended to all areas of labor, and to the social and political domain, thus affecting the entire existence of millions of people. The entrepreneur’s freedom, innovation, and creativity have established themselves as models to be followed, both at the individual level and at the political and social ones. However, since the financial crisis started in 2008, the new model that the world’s population has had to confront is “the indebted man,” and “debt” has

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been the dispositif at work in recent economic policies. The debate on this issue—two major figures of which are David Graeber and Maurizio Lazzarato—has called to attention a form of repressive power within this phenomenon that, on the one hand, brings to light an unprecedented “crisis of inclusion” as a sign of violence perpetrated by “a system of power and exclusion,” in which state and market are both involved; on the other hand, it claims instead to have unmasked the neoliberal rhetoric of freedom. The fact that the “debt” contracted by some European countries has recently been presented to the public as a “guilt” to atone for, forces us to reflect once more on the complex relationship that this process has established between individual lives and global governance. An investigation that is up to the complexity of the current phenomenon requires new tools that can change the conceptual language inherited from the past.

3 Between political theology and economic theology

Beyond the boundaries of economic science The predominance of economy in every area of political and social life that has been witnessed for the past thirty years requires a reflection on the unprecedented relationship that this process has created between the modes of individual existence and global economic management. This does not mean that such a relationship did not exist in the past. Capitalist economy, which previously had been fundamentally based on the exploitation of specific skills in the form of labor, has always had an intimate connection with individual lives. What has changed today is the fact that what is at stake is not so much (or only) specific performances, but life itself and the same human capacity to attribute value to it. This phenomenon is particularly evident in the current process of financialization of the economy.

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As the sociologist Luciano Gallino claims, a “mega-machine” has been developed in recent times “in order to maximize and accumulate, in the form of capital and power together, the value extractable from the greatest possible number of human beings.” The unseen characteristic of this new form of “extraction of value” is its tendency “to embrace every moment and every aspect of existence” (2011: 5). Its strength and its success are not due “to an economy that has distorted politics with its innovations, but rather to a politics that has identified its goals with those of financial economy” (12): “As a social machine, financial capitalism has surpassed all of the previous ones . . ., because of its global extension and its capillary penetration into all social subsystems, and across all levels of society, of nature and of person” (5). On the one hand, economic operations today have reached an extreme degree of abstraction and are increasingly dependent on financial transactions that determine the world trend in a rather autonomous way from real economy and individual existences. On the other hand, however, an investment in individual life is at the heart of the new forms of entrepreneurship that characterize the neoliberal turn and the process of financialization of the economy. What has allowed this “mega-machine” to operate in such a capillary way is precisely its close relationship to the lives of individuals. An indispensable condition for this phenomenon is that the enterprise—the capitalist enterprise—has been placed at the center of all social relationships, becoming individualized in the form of “self-enterprise.” Individuals have been introduced into the process of extracting the value at the base of the capitalist machine by investing in their own existences. Despite the extreme level of abstraction achieved by economic operations that determine the world economy

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and in parallel with the closer ties between enterprises and financial markets, the growing impact of finance on markets is therefore fundamentally linked to the trend in conceiving of individual lives as “human capital” and “individual enterprises.” The distinction between real economy and financial economy, on which most of the studies in this field are based, seems to be very problematic today. More importantly, elements that were previously underestimated or considered secondary in the development of economic processes now come to the foreground. As the “entrepreneur of oneself ” becomes the central figure of economic power, those who “believe” in themselves and in the strength of the market acquire unprecedented significance. A  peculiar form of faith is at the heart of worldwide economic domination. Even the mechanism of valorization essential to the financial community, the implicit self-referentiality of the credentials that move the stock market, appear more than ever dependent on a singular type of faith:  on the “trust” of the participants rather than on the real economic value of the titles traded. Therefore, repeated attempts at presenting economic problems as exclusively technical problems, solvable by economists or governments suitably composed of experts with technical skills, collide with the fact that something more complex is at work in this process, which escapes the specialized approach of economics. The fact that faith is at the heart of economic processes has been a matter of debate at least since Paul Lafargue published the 1887 edition of the booklet titled The Religion of Capital (see Lafargue 2005), which, despite its farcical style, leads to its extremes the Marxian analogy of commodity with the “nebulous region of the religious

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world”; or since Georg Simmel highlighted the fiduciary character of money’s purchasing power and its close relationship to “credit” in The Philosophy of Money of 1900. For Simmel, as we have seen, “money is always credit because its value rests upon the recipient’s confidence that he will be able to acquire a certain quantity of goods in exchange for it.” However, “it is not only a money economy, but any economy, that depends upon such trust” (2004: 178). But, claims Simmel, in the case of credit, of trust in someone, there is an additional element which is hard to describe:  it is most clearly embodied in religious faith. When someone says that he believes in God, this does not merely express an imperfect stage of knowledge about God, but a state of mind which has nothing to do with knowledge . . . To “believe in someone,” without adding or even conceiving what it is that one believes about him, is to employ a very subtle and profound idiom. It expresses the feeling that there exists between our idea of a being and the being itself a definite connection and unity, a certain consistency in our conception of it, an assurance and lack of resistance in the surrender of the Ego to this conception, which may rest upon particular reasons, but is not explained by them. Economic credit does contain an element of this supratheoretical belief. (178) This particular fiduciary character of money has long been based on the fact that the value of a coin was determined by a specific amount of precious metal corresponding to it. Gold played this role for a long time. However, since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in August 1971, this equivalence has ended and we have witnessed the complete dematerialization of currencies. The universally accepted

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means of payment in international trade is no longer gold, nor the credit contained in the purchasing power of money due to its relationship with this metal. Instead, it is a special form of debt that is unredeemable and, as such, doomed to circulate indefinitely, entirely bereft of any real gold content, in which one cannot but believe. This was a real epochal change that paved the way for the financialization of the economy and for the recent crisis. Elements apparently extrinsic to economic life—which in past decades has been rather interested to appear rigorously located within the valid boundaries of mathematical models—have progressively come to the foreground, and “faith” has thus been more and more often the dispositif that allowed economic power to assert itself globally. It is not simply a false belief, that is, something that has to be unveiled in order for the system to regain solidity. What is at stake is the actual operation of a mechanism—intimately related to belief in religious experience—that calls for new analyses that can help us understand the difficulties we are in, and that place economy no longer within overly narrow boundaries, but give it the wider space that it deserves.

Religion, politics, and economics The relationship between economics and religion that is here called into question, and challenged from different points of view (see Giorda, Palmisano, and Turri 2013; Turri 2014), has been examined by prominent precursors including Max Weber, whose work (1920–21) is indispensable for an analysis that follows in this direction. In the light

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of the ongoing changes, much has been said in recent years about the links between politics and religion. But rare are attempts at seriously rethinking the religious dynamics of economy. If the twentieth-century debate on the subject attested to modernity’s detachment from religion, over the past twenty years a profound change has taken place that has questioned this assumption. New religious stances have emerged that directly involve the international political system and attract the attention of the general public (see Kurtz 1995). The disintegration of the bloc of the socialist countries, and the resulting change in the international political balance, have brought to light a process by which religious faith or affiliation to religious communities has increasingly become one of the main factors of integration and political and cultural identification (see Huntington 1997). Following the public affirmation of different and often opposed religious stances, political debate has increasingly dealt with the potentialities and limits of a multireligious and multicultural global society (cf. Habermas 1994). Despite the great interest as a result of research in this area, the heart of the matter has remained fundamentally unresolved. The reason for the emergence of religion in the public domain of politics remains an open question. In recent years, there has been a great discussion about the developments and the consequences of a possible multilingual and multicultural global society (see Berger and Huntington 2002; Bonney 2008; Habermas 2008; Galli 2008). But the reasons and causes that are at the origin of this phenomenon are still to be clarified. A  radical confrontation with the concurrent global dissolution of politics in the economy—or, better, with the enormous transformation of politics in its union with economy—may perhaps

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contribute to the difficult task of finding an explanation for the renewed emergence of religion on the world’s public scene. In this context, for example, one can hypothesize that the various new and developing fundamentalisms—such as the jihadists of ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria)—are, in fact, a result of the hegemony of the religious dispositif of the global economic power. Although it has been criticized (see Joas 2007), the paradigm of “secularization” (see Marramao 2005)—which defined the peculiar phenomenon through which societies and political life in the West progressively took distance from sacred behavior—has been reconsidered as a legitimate historiographic category (Norris and Inglehart 2004; Taylor 2007). A  “post-secular society” (Habermas 2005; Pollack 2003) or a European “exception” with respect to world societies have been discussed (Berger 2005). In all these cases, however, the assumption of such society’s legitimate or illegitimate existence has never really been put into question. The implicit assumption in all these discourses is the diachronic and continuous development of the transition from the religious to the political context that, depending on the position assumed with respect to the idea of ​​a secularized world, can be understood as a “progress” or a “decline,” but which never is, as such, thoroughly scrutinized. These issues were discussed in 2009 by some of the most wellknown international representatives of contemporary political debate (see Butler, Habermas, Taylor and West 2009). However, there have also been interesting discussions in Italy about the link between politics and religion with some resonance abroad. The paradigm of “secularization” has been questioned starting from a renewed use of the category of “political theology.”

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If, as Carl Schmitt writes in his well-known text, Political Theology (1922)—which begins the discussion on the subject in the twentieth century—the point in question is that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts” (Schmitt 2005: 36), then political theology refers to the relationship between the religious sphere and the political sphere within the modern institution of the nation-state. For Schmitt, however, what is at work in political theology is not only the process of secularization but above all the “structural” link between the two domains (ibid.). The resumption of the theological-political paradigm in contemporary Italian debates is essentially due to the fact that the relationship between the political and the religious is not so much considered a diachronic development from one context to the other, but rather analyzed as the tension between two elements that exist at the same time. This polarity surpasses its historical evolution, but is at the center of the peculiar sense it has acquired in Western history. Particularly interesting in this light is Giorgio Agamben’s recovery of the category of political theology in the penultimate volume of the Homo Sacer series, in which he intends to define the ways in which an economic governance has asserted itself on a global scale. Following Foucault’s research on governmentality, Agamben investigates in The Kingdom and Glory, “the paths by which and the reasons why power in the West has assumed the form of an oikonomia, that is, a government of men” (2011:  xi). To this end, he goes back to the paradigm of “political theology” by linking it to that of “economic theology,” that is, to the idea that characterizes the Christian theological notion that history coincides with a providential development. Oikonomia, in this sense, is the Greek term used by the early Fathers of the Church, which

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Agamben takes up to interpret the type of economic governance that is dominant today. Political

theology,

according

to

Agamben,

“founds

the

transcendence of sovereign power on the single God,” and economic theology “replaces this transcendence with the idea of an oikonomia,” which is of a government “conceived as immanent ordering.” According to him, “political philosophy and the modern theory of sovereignty derive from the first paradigm; modern biopolitics up to the current triumph of economy and government over every other aspect of social life derive from the second paradigm.” The purpose of his work is then to demonstrate how the two paradigms, though “antinomical,” are “functionally related” (1), not only in political and economic science, but even earlier in Christian theology. Oikonomia is in fact a theological concept, which refers both to the economy of salvation, that is, to the divine plan of saving the world, and to the intradivine economy, that is to say, how God manifests Himself in the Trinity. In its two facets, oikonomia is the strategic operator through which the perfection of divine authority, which political authority refers to in the terms of political theology, relates to the action of God in the world. For Agamben, this second aspect is fundamentally connected with economic governance, both in the sense of modern political economy—suffice it to think about Smith’s idea of ​​ the “invisible hand” that “providentially” governs the market—and in the terms of the current dominance of the economic sphere on every other social sphere. Therefore, in the perspective outlined by Agamben, an intimate bond unites political theology with economic theology:  a bond that in the most famous twentieth-century discussions on the subject remained, according to him, concealed in favor of the

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theological-political paradigm. The latter is more clearly linked to the dispositif of modern state sovereignty that it intends to preserve. Returning today to the paradigm of political theology, as Massimo Cacciari has recently done (see Cacciari 2018), entails rethinking the meaning and role of state sovereignty once its end has been decreed, or at least once it has been profoundly mined from within as a result of the dominance of economic governance. But it also means rethinking it as a complex power mechanism at the heart of Western politics (see Galli 2013; and the third issue of 2013 of the journal Filosofia Politica). This is the intent of Roberto Esposito’s recent work (see Esposito 2015), which is particularly significant for the present investigation as it is done in the light of the generalized problem of debt. For Esposito, the theological-political machine is basically a juridical instrument, which he also compares with power’s current economic drift. His analysis originates from the necessity of understanding the reasons why, in the course of the discussion that took place in the last century, political theology was in fact “impermeable to critical analysis” (2015:  1). All the categories used to break the relationship between theology and politics, such as “secularization,” have revealed their common origin, which presupposed what they were going to explain. There is nothing to be secularized if the existence of something sacred was not already admitted. The fundamental problem then, for Esposito, is the fact that “political theology” is not a contradictory category or a mere denotation of a certain historical phenomenon, but rather a “dispositif ”:  “a performative mechanism that acts on what it takes hold of ” (72). The fundamental performance of the “theological-political machine,” he argues, is to separate “what it purports to join” and to unify “what it divides, by submitting one

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part to the domination of the other” (3), as in the case, for example, of the theological legitimation of the relationship between God and the world, corresponding, on the political plane, to the juridical justification for the relationship between state sovereignty and citizens. “Political theology,” Esposito writes, “is the compulsion— one that has persisted into our times—to repeat the tendency to unify a compound through the exclusionary inclusion of its subaltern part” (81). This is the dispositif underlying the foundation of the national state. However, Esposito indicates a line of continuity between the theological-political mechanism of state sovereignty and the dispositif of power that fuels economy’s current global domination. According to Esposito, “one can well say that both the ius publicum europaeum, and the bipolar world of the postwar period as well as the globalized world (also structured along exclusionary division lines) all lie within the theological-political horizon” (81). From this point of view, global debt also falls in the theological-political logic of exclusionary inclusion: Universal indebtedness is the consequence of power relations between unequal parties that were instituted, and continuously reactivated, by the political-theological machine—with the difference that in the society of generalized debt, the fate of subservience, at one time reserved for just one part, now seems to have been extended to all. . . . The point of arrival of economicpolitical theology is identity, with no remainders, between inside and outside, whole and part, One and Two. (208) For Esposito, as well as for Agamben, a common thread thus links the theological-political dispositif to the political-economic one:  a

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contiguity that shows points of contact as well as differences. But there is also a profound discontinuity between the recent neoliberal policies and the past forms of politics related to the juridical structure of national sovereignty, which is becoming more and more visible today and on which, I think, it is necessary to continue to reflect in an attempt to understand the mechanisms that allowed the current economic power to relate to individual lives in such a capillary form that it can involve them in completely new ways. In this horizon, it may be helpful to reflect on the link between economy and religion in the era of the financialization of the economy, and in relation to the problem of debt, which is the main object of this study.

“Faith” in the era of the predominance of finance Among the most recent economic and sociological studies on the relationship between economy and religion are those that come from the French School of Regulations, which counts among its members Michel Aglietta and André Orléan. This school was born in France in the early 1970s, with the main purpose of analyzing the socioeconomic situation that brought about the end of the growth pattern of the so-called Golden Age, namely the thirty “glorious” years after World War II, characterized by the mass production system and the Fordist industrial model. Contrary to what is advocated by neoclassical economists, regulationists do not consider state institutions as obstacles to economic growth, but rather as the very condition of the opportunity to regulate and facilitate development.

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In 2011, André Orléan, together with other economists, scholars of various backgrounds, and citizens, created a committee that defined itself les économistes atterrés (the horrified economists). The association, which also produced a manifesto available on the Internet (see Orléan et  al. 2011), aims to animate public debate and critical discussion about the neoliberal economic policies at the origin of the global crisis. Reflecting on the enormous changes that have occurred since the financialization of the economy, the authors of the manifesto clearly identify one of the major causes of financial market’s instability in the very methods of stock evaluation: Assessing the value of a financial title is not an operation comparable to the measurement of an objective magnitude. A financial price is the result of a judgment, a belief, a bet on the future:  there is no guarantee that markets’ judgment has some superiority over other forms of judgment. Above all, financial assessment is not neutral: it affects the measured object, engages and builds the future it imagines. In this sense, financial rating agencies contribute significantly to determining the interest rate on bond markets . . . When they lower the evaluation of a state, they raise the interest rate applied by the financial actors to buy the state’s public debt, thus increasing the bankruptcy risk they have announced. (Orléan et al. 2011) The topic of valuation as a central issue of the market economy, which we have already discussed, reemerges particularly in the studies of the economists of the School of Regulation (see Fumagalli and Lucarelli

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2010) and is directly addressed by Orléan in a book titled The Empire of Value, published in the same year as the manifesto of “the horrified economists.” The third part of this work is devoted specifically to finance and to financial market as a system that “structures the competition of investor opinions in such a way as to produce a collective judgment that commands effectively unanimous approval,” which has, in other words, “normative force” (Orléan 2014: 208). For this reason, Orléan writes, financial speculation may be said to be self-referential in the sense that the constant attempt to decipher the market’s opinion concerning the future direction of prices looks for guidance not to any standard of reference that is external to the market . . . but to the market itself. . . . what matters in a market is not the actual content of a piece of information regarding the performance of the real economy. What matters is the manner in which it is interpreted by collective market opinion. (205) In this sense, it can be said that the financial market organizes itself “to create a means by which capital can be liberated to some extent from time horizons of investment for economic purposes” (209). Stock exchanges are institutional inventions, devised for the express purpose of enabling creditors and property owners to liquidate their holdings whenever the need may arise. Liquidity creates a world in which the sole justification for a price is its legitimacy. Share prices are not meant to furnish an adequate picture of reality from the point of view of production . . . All that matters is that they are accepted by the financial community. (209–10)

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The financial community, therefore, not only does not operate on the basis of a logic of appropriation because its establishment presupposes the liquidity of holdings, but, above all, it brings to the extreme consequences a fact intrinsic to economic life: the fact, that is, that “it is a matter of confidence” in collective behavior, a matter of faith, we could say, making the religious mechanism underlying financial markets explicit. Referring to the performative dispositif of religious faith, Orléan calls this mechanism “belief in something;” namely, the fact that it is for investors to believe “the correctness of share prices.” And he adds: “The object of the belief, in other words, is what I have called a valuation” (234). In the enormous transformation caused by the world of finance, the major problem faced by regulatory economists is institutional; namely, the fact that the institution of the financial market has taken over the institution of the state by incorporating it. The dominance of financial markets over state governments is particularly evident in the neoliberal policies concerning the financing of sovereign debt. This phenomenon is particularly evident today in the European Union, where the process of financing the public debt of individual states has often been inscribed in treaties. For example, after the Treaty of Maastricht in 1992, central banks cannot directly fund members of the Union, which have to find financial lenders in the markets. In this respect, for regulationists, the problem does not so much concern the amount of public debts, since states cannot in fact not be indebted if they want to offer services and to boost growth. The point is, in their view, that the dominance of financial markets promoted by neoliberal politics has weakened the regulatory role of nation-states. The states are economic agents among others that are constantly in debt. As stated in

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the manifesto of the horrified economists, “states, apparently dissolute by nature,” subjected themselves to “the discipline of financial markets, by nature implicitly efficient and omniscient” (Orléan et al. 2011). The regulationists’ perspective, though compelling in many respects, does not take sufficient account of the active role played by states in the neoliberal turn, of their transformation into managerial states, and of their direct participation in the involvement of “capitalist enterprises” in financial markets, to the extent that in recent years, there has practically been a merging between enterprises and finance with the participation of the state institutions themselves. Another point that is perhaps underestimated by the School of Regulation is the predominance of private indebtedness—at the origin of the US collapse in 2008 and of the diffusion of the crisis around the world—that preceded the issue of public debt in the European Union (EU) member states, and which distorted the meaning of debt and cast it in a leading role in economic life. To try to reflect on these points and to tackle the question of the relationship between economy and religion, from which I began, it is particularly useful to consider the studies of the School of Regulation specifically devoted to debt.

Debt and sacrifice In 1998, in the heat of the debate about the introduction of the Euro in the first eleven European Union countries (which happened only a year later), Aglietta and Orléan published a book titled La monnaie souveraine (Sovereign Money), a multidisciplinary analysis of monetary facts. The institution of money is at the heart of various works

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by the two authors and is essentially understood by both as a social phenomenon of valorization opposed to an individualistic economy. This text is the result of a long seminar and collects essays by scholars from different disciplines driven by the same conviction: the fact that money does not belong exclusively and primarily to the economic field in the classical sense. Its social acceptance “is not reduced to the rational calculation of costs and benefits, but it mobilizes beliefs and values ​​through which the belonging to a community is established.” “The Euro,” add Aglietta and Orléan in the preface to the volume, “exists to remind us, if it is needed, that currency and sovereignty proceed from the same logic” (1998: 7). The status of money as an operator of social relations—and not simply as a means of exchange derived from barter—has very ancient historical roots, widely illustrated in the historical and anthropological essays collected in Aglietta and Orléan’s book. It concerns societies far from those based on free market, in which the religious sphere is as important as both the economic and the juridical domains. But, above all, the hypothesis from which these researchers take their cue—which is particularly relevant to the trajectory followed here—is that “money derives from debt in its relation to sovereignty, hence from a hierarchy of value” (21). The first consequence of this historical hypothesis is that, contrary to what economic science usually suggests, finance is not, in this sense, an appendage of the exchange economy, that is, a particular exchange relation that intervenes subsequently as an evolution of exchange economy. The financial bond, as a bond of debt, precedes exchange. The difference from “contemporary finance,” according to the authors of the volume, is that “the origin of debt should not be considered” as “a relationship

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between independent parties.” Debt is the social bond par excellence and is not established by previously nonsocial individuals. As “debt of life” (ibid.), it is rather identified here as the expression of a constitutive condition of human beings and society as a whole. In its archaic sense, debt is the acknowledgment of a dependence of living beings on sovereign powers, gods or ancestors, who have given part of their cosmic force, which originates from them. The gift of this force, which allows the conservation of life, counteracts the obligation of the living beings to repay, in their lifetime, the vital power they have been receiving. But the continuous series of repayments never exhausts the original debt:  this debt builds sovereignty and strengthen the community through works and days. (Ibid.) According to this approach, a primordial debt, constitutive of human beings and immediately inscribed in the religious sphere of archaic societies, marks economic, political, and social relations to this day. The principal and most ancient form of redemption of such debt is identified in these studies with sacrifice, especially in the sacrificial cult of the Vedic religion, the religion of the Indo-European people called Aryans, which around the fifteenth century BC migrated from the northwestern region of today’s Afghanistan to northwestern India. Sacrifice was an original social practice for repaying the gods for the gift of life. This practice, on the one hand, can only be infinite, as infinite as the gift of life; on the other hand, it embodies the aspiration to a complete emancipation, which recalls the form of exchange. In the sacrificial rite, a form of exchange is introduced through the practice

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of the “compensation of the executioner” (71), the one who takes responsibility for the sacrificial violence on the innocent victim. To this end, the use of archaic forms of money was introduced in the cult. They were the precursors of modern currency: “Thus, the primordial bonds of debt toward the gods, based on the logic of payment, are progressively revealed through symbolic objects which, through the mediation of a third party, concretely attest to the payment and effectiveness of the sacrifice” (102). The sacrificial rite is thus identified in these studies as the social practice that enables the transmission of power from the world of gods to that of men. Among ancient peoples— whether Babylonians, Greeks, or Romans—this transmission takes place through the establishment of sovereignty and thus through the “socialized form of a commitment of faith and debt that will become money” (109). A certain opposition between “authority” and “power” is “the intrinsic duality of the monetary fact” (11). This duality is proper to some archaic coins, which are to be understood as forms through which the “debt of life” toward divine powers is translated into “the debt of the members of the society towards the sovereignty which has granted the preservation and the development of life under certain collective conditions” (23). The return to a sovereign power capable of granting such a “debt of life,” which at times sounds almost nostalgic, is the horizon of these studies, written at the time when the autonomy of the European Central Bank, and the establishment of a Eurozone ruling over the sovereignty of individual countries, appeared as necessary answers to the crisis of the nation-states. The circumstances are in many ways different today. Since the establishment of the Eurozone, the European Central Bank has in fact become a guarantor of the debt

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that binds the individual European Union countries to respecting preestablished agreements within the Union. The idea that this bond is, in fact, nothing but the result of the dominance of financial markets on governmental activities—as the regulationists today believe—does not make the initial hypothesis of this important interdisciplinary work less problematic. Such work deserves to be read in the light of the unprecedented global form of indebtedness that we know today.

Guilt and violence: At the origin of juridical power René Girard is one of the authors referenced by the School of Regulations, or at least by its more atypical members such as André Orléan. From Girard, Orléan draws in particular the idea of ​​mimesis, that is, the generalized imitation at the basis of every social structure which, in the economic discourse of the regulationists, activates in individuals the common belief that is at the origin of the institution of money itself (cf. Orléan 2014: 50–2 and 235–36). The assumption is that, according to Girard, desire is an essentially human phenomenon, characterized by a regime of mimesis, precisely because the object of desire is never identified with the object per se, but rather with what is also desired by others (cf. Girard [1977] 1989). Human desire, in Girard’s analysis, thus reveals its conflictual and violent nature, not so much aroused by the goals to be realized, but as a motive for the desire of others. Hence the fundamental role that violence plays in Girard’s perspective, in which the sacrificial rite—which, as we have seen, is also pivotal in the economic analysis of the School of Regulation—is seen as the origin of a process of rationalization.

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For Girard, violence does not affect the social nature of human life, so to speak, from the outside as a foreign element, but rises within it, in its own desiring structure. Thus, it is necessary not to suppress it altogether, but to take it in nondestructive forms, unlike that of sacrifice:  “The sacrifice serves to protect the entire community from its own violence; it prompts the entire community to choose victims outside itself. The elements of dissension scattered throughout the community are drawn to the person of the sacrificial victim and eliminated, at least temporarily, by its sacrifice” ([1977] 1989: 8). To exist and to configure itself in a society, the social nature of human life, with its desires and, according to Girard, its violence, has to identify within itself something to which it can attribute the evil of common life in order to isolate it. This is the purpose of the sacrificial victim. The sacrificial victim attracts the violence by which the same community is permeated and diverts its course, altering from the inside the movement of a future infinite vengeance. The modern substitute for sacrifice, for Girard, is the law, which is introduced not to suppress the sacrificial rite but as an elaboration of its own logic: If our own system seems more rational, it is because it conforms more strictly to the principle of vengeance. Its insistence on the punishment of the guilty party underlines this fact. Instead of following the example of religion and attempting to forestall acts of revenge, to mitigate or sabotage its effects or to redirect them to secondary objects, our judicial system rationalizes revenge and succeeds in limiting and isolating its effects in accordance with social demands. The system treats the disease without fear of

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contagion and provides a highly effective technique for the cure and, as a secondary effect, the prevention of violence. (22) If the power associated with the sacrificial rite focuses on the innocent victim through which it defies the infinite course of revenge, juridical power is based on the constrictive character of its own intervention, which identifies the culprit and punishes him on the basis of its undisputed and indisputable authority: This rationalistic approach to vengeance . . . is the result . . . of the recognition of the sovereignty and independence of the judiciary . . . The judicial authority is beholden to no one. It is thus at the disposal of everyone, and it is universally respected. The judicial system never hesitates to confront violence head on, because it possesses a monopoly on the means of revenge. Thanks to this monopoly, the system generally succeeds in stifling the impulse to vengeance rather than spreading or aggravating it, as a similar intervention on the part of the aggrieved party would invariably do. (22–3) In the judicial system, the culprit can take the place of the innocent victim of the sacrifice precisely because those who have the power to inflict punishment—the judge, the court, and ultimately the state— are in an asymmetric position over those who are punished: In the same way that sacrificial victims must in principle meet the approval of the divinity before being offered as a sacrifice, the judicial system appeals to a theology as a guarantee of justice. Even when this theology disappears, as has happened in our culture, the transcendental quality of the system remains intact. Centuries can

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pass before men realize that there is no real difference between their principle of justice and the concept of revenge. Only the transcendental quality of the system, acknowledged by all, can assure the prevention or cure of violence. This is the case no matter what the consecrating institution may be. Only by opting for a sanctified, legitimate form of violence and preventing it from becoming an object of disputes and recriminations can the system save itself from the vicious circle of revenge. (23–4) From this point of view, it is not surprising that Orléan’s thesis on the origins of money draws from Girard’s mimetic theory. For Girard, sovereign juridical power is the modern substitute for sacrifice as it has the monopoly of violence, which retains its transcendent character. Similarly, for Orléans, in order for money to exist, the problem of mutual violence needs to have been solved; in other words, the sovereignty of a founding violence must have been established. In this sense, the sacrificial and theological-political character of the juridical power outlined by Girard is entirely consistent with the establishment of money as a transcendent field for defining the criteria and rules for the evaluation of exchanges. Not only is “the debt of life”—on which, according to the School of Regulation, the “monetary fact” is based—translated into “the debt of the members of the society toward the sovereignty which has granted the preservation and the development of life under certain collective conditions” (Aglietta and Orléan 1998: 23); but it is also linked to “guilt,” which, for Girard, is coessential to the juridical power, the substitute for sacrifice. Between juridical power and economic power—or, we might say with Agamben and Esposito, albeit from completely different points

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of view, between political theology and economic theology—there is in this sense a contiguity that ends up prevailing on the identifiable aspects of discontinuity. In the new process triggered by the hegemony of global finance, the economists of the School of Regulation wish, therefore, for the return to a sovereign authority able to control the predominance of financial markets. It is still to be understood, however, whether and to what extent the link between “guilt” and “debt” at the heart of this trajectory can be identified in light of this continuity between the two dispositifs. The phenomenon of generalized indebtedness predominant today in many ways appears to be the expression of the paradigm of victimism that has prevailed in the most common interpretations (see Giglioli 2014): we are all debtors, we are all guilty of having spent too much, but we are all at the same time also innocent victims of the financial system and the predominance of the banks. A  condition of indiscernibility between guilt and innocence recalls the figure of homo sacer investigated by Agamben in a book that inaugurated the series bearing the same title (see Agamben 1998). Homo sacer, who can be killed but not sacrificed, and is banned from any legal order is, for Agamben, originally connected to the establishment of a sovereign state, which is based on the decision to proclaim the state of exception. At a time when, with the spread of debt on a global scale, the crisis of the nationstate becomes apparent against the dominance of economic power, the “intersection between the juridico-institutional and the biopolitical models of power” (Agamben 1998: 6), from which Agamben’s studies on the subject begin, seems to be evident more than ever before. New authoritative, identitarian, and nationalist issues arise today and are associated with the new wave of populism spread in many

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democratic countries. A shapeless, easy to influence mass, formerly devoted to enjoyment and consumption, seems now to have become an indebted “bare life,” at the same time innocent and guilty, a tool of economic powers and subjected to them. One of the most obvious institutional remedies against the new anti-democratic trends of recent years has been the direct turn from “populist” to “technical” governments that are seemingly able to deal with economic issues with competence and rigor. But the austerity policies dictated by the agendas of the technicians have only strengthened the advancement of the so-called populist drift, one example being the elections for the European Parliament in May 2014. On the other hand, the continuous calls for the reactivation of the growth and economic development on the part of politicians ostensibly hostile to austerity simply seem to be a way to make this progress opaquer, without suggesting any real alternatives. In 2013, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Pier Carlo Padoan—former Deputy Secretary General of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and since 2014 Minister of Economy in the Italian Governments led by Matteo Renzi and Paolo Gentiloni, officially among the European promoters of the relaunching of the economy against austerity policies—confirming the effectiveness of the policy adopted by the so-called troika (European Commission, European Central Bank, International Monetary Fund)—stated: “Tax consolidation is producing results, the pain is producing results.” The “sacrifices” required from the “guilty” countries—guilty because “in debt”—from a “technical” point of view, were considered good and effective for the desired recovery. However, not only did this “pain” fail to actually produce the hoped-for results,

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but it also revealed the inadequacy of a technical approach that clearly resorts to non-economical categories to analyze the crisis. In many ways, the link between “guilt” and “debt” seems to fall within the above-noted theological-economic-political dispositif. However, a profound and complex change is taking place, which questions the possibility of tracing parallels between what is happening and what we have known so far. It is therefore worthwhile to further investigate this course, which is still difficult to assess, but whose outlines have already begun to be apparent for some time now. ❖ The supremacy of economy in all political and social spheres has created an unprecedented relationship between individual lives and global economic management. This phenomenon has emerged in all of its evidence following the hegemony of financial markets. A  peculiar form of faith fuels the world’s economic power and the underlying valorization mechanism of the financial community, to which individuals have adhered in unprecedented ways. It is not simply a false belief or an illusion, but the real functioning of a dispositif—intimately related to that of faith in religious experience— which once again encourages reflection on the links between religion, politics, and economics. “Secularization,” “political theology,” and “economic theology” are the categories used today in some relevant analyses of the phenomenon that highlight the logic that unites the current forms of economic power and the juridical forms established in the modern period as well as their differences. A  further investigation conducted in light of the issue of debt seeks here to point out, above all, the elements of

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discontinuity useful perhaps to understand the huge transformations now in progress. The problem of generalized debt is in many ways the expression of a coercive power, in which the juridico-theological dispositif of “guilt” identifies with the economic dispositif of “debt.” However, we are witnessing a profound change that requires new analyses that can explore more in depth what has already begun to show its contours.

4 The religion of debt

Bare life and the law In the early 1920s, Walter Benjamin was working on a project on politics that he never completed. What remains of this work, however, can show us how we can try to make sense of the epochal shift we are experiencing. Evidence of the project exists in the correspondence with Gershom Scholem (cf. Benjamin 1994), which contains indirect references to the writings of this period, particularly to the essays “Critique of Violence” (see Benjamin 1996:  236–52) and “Fate and Character” (see Benjamin 1996: 201–6), as well as to the “TheologicalPolitical Fragment” (see Benjamin 1986:  312–14). These writings share, even at a first glance, the problematic constellation of “political theology,” to the extent that one can assume that the project Benjamin was working on was somehow focused on the “structural” link between religion and politics also investigated by Schmitt during this time (see Schmitt 2005). The intellectual relationship between the two posed no insignificant problems in the postwar German culture, given Schmitt’s adhesion to National Socialism (see at least Taubes 2013). Many believed that Benjamin drew from Schmitt though overturned

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his approach. However, after a more careful reading it is evident that Benjamin wrote these texts before the publication of Schmitt’s work. It can therefore reasonably be suggested that Schmitt was the one to move toward Benjamin and not the other way around (see Agamben 2005: 52–3). In any case, what interests us for our discourse is mainly the fact that Benjamin’s project also involved a fragment, which was neglected for a long time but recently rediscovered, entitled “Capitalism as Religion” (in Benjamin 1996:  288–91), in which Benjamin clearly highlights the mechanism of indebtedness that lies behind capitalist economy. The link between “debt” and “guilt,” implicit in the German word Schuld/Schulden, which encompasses both meanings, is central to his reasoning: Capitalism is the celebration of a cult . . . the cult makes guilt pervasive. Capitalism is probably the first instance of a cult that creates guilt, not atonement. In this respect, this religious system is caught up in the headlong rush of a larger movement. A vast sense of guilt that is unable to find relief seizes on the cult, not to atone for this guilt but to make it universal, to hammer it into the conscious mind, so as once and for all to include God in the system of guilt and thereby awaken in Him an interest in the process of atonement. This atonement cannot then be expected from the cult itself, or from the reformation of this religion (which would need to be able to have recourse to some stable element in it), or even from the complete renouncement of this religion. The nature of the religious movement which is capitalism entails endurance right to the end, to the point where God, too, finally

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takes on the entire burden of guilt, to the point where the universe has been taken over by that despair which is actually its secret hope. (288–9) The issue of guilt is crucial in this text, but also emerges as a specific object of investigation in other writings related to Benjamin’s project on politics. It is relevant, for example, in “Fate and Character” and “Critique of Violence,” two essays contemporary to the fragment on capitalism. In these texts, Benjamin critiques the juridical experience of guilt. The cause of the “control of the law on the living” is here “bare natural life” itself, since it is naturally guilty before the law. Benjamin finds the implicit assumption of this control in the “myth” of a totally autonomous sovereignty, formally legitimized to judge and exercise violently its power, so as to distinguish within the living human being the part that “carries” guilt. Violence is its origin, or rather that particular form of violence that he calls “mythical,” because it is a-historic, not transformative, intimately linked to fate and, as in the German word Gewalt used by Benjamin in this respect, rooted in a form of punitive power. In this sense, the juridical order is, in his view, always repressive, even when it is the expression of a form of rationalization of violence, since it is used exclusively as a means to achieve certain goals. Its repression is not aimed at the atonement of guilt, but at its eternal repetition in the violent circularity of myth. In these texts, Benjamin in some ways anticipates what, as we have seen, also emerges in Girard’s perspective, in which the law as a substitute for sacrifice deflects violence by absorbing it within itself. But above all, he provides the most relevant materials for the recent debate on political theology, which essentially tries to find a link

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between the juridical forms that power has taken in modern times and contemporary biopolitics. It is in fact from Benjamin’s concept of “bare life” that Agamben begins his discourse on biopolitics as sovereign power over mere human life exposed by law to the violence of the law itself. In his perspective, “the inclusion of bare life in the political realm” not only “constitutes the original—if concealed—nucleus of sovereign power” in the sense of Schmitt, but also acquires new light through an interpretation in biopolitical terms, which takes to the extreme consequences Schmitt’s assumptions. This is one of the best-known results of Agamben’s study aimed at finding the “hidden point of intersection between the juridical-institutional model and the biopolitical model” (Agamben 1998: 6). Esposito also refers to Benjamin’s ambivalent notion of Gewalt when he reflects on the law and its role of immunization of community from the threat of violence: “instead of being eliminated, violence is [here] incorporated into the apparatus it is intended to repress—once again violently.” “Law” for Esposito “is located at the point of indistinction between the preservation and exclusion of life” (2011: 10). The activity of “exclusionary inclusion of its subaltern part,” (2015: 81) which he identified at the basis of the “machine of political theology,” thus finds its main fuel in the juridical realm, which is one of the privileged fields of Esposito’s genealogical research. Agamben, following in the footsteps of Benjamin, claims that “the cipher of [the] capture of life in law is not sanction . . . but guilt (not in the technical sense that this concept has in penal law but in the originary sense that indicates a being-in-debt:  in culpa esse)”

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(1998: 26). This is a relationship that includes through an exclusion, as one cannot fully assume the state of guilt that connects life to the law. Agamben writes: Guilt refers not to transgression, that is, to the determination of the licit and the illicit, but to the pure force of the law, to the law’s simple reference to something. This is the ultimate ground of the juridical maxim . . . according to which ignorance of the rule does not eliminate guilt. In this impossibility of deciding if it is guilt that grounds the rule or the rule that posits guilt, what comes clearly to light is the indistinction between outside and inside and between life and law that characterizes the sovereign decision on the exception . . . Life, which is thus obliged, can in the last instance be implicated in the sphere of law only through the presupposition of its inclusive exclusion, only in an exceptio. (27) The mythical-fatalistic conception of the law highlighted by Benjamin, and recovered by Agamben, is also analyzed by Esposito for its value in terms of immunization. If the purpose of the law is to preserve life, then “life can be preserved only if held in the fold of an inexorable anticipation that judges life to be guilty even before any of its acts can be judged” (2011: 32–3). This not only “requires . . . a preventive condemnation of what it seeks to save,” but, above all, “by being condemned, life is reduced to pure material, it is subtracted from any form of right life or shared life.” Esposito defines this mechanism as “sacrificial” because “its immune system consists in perpetuating life through the sacrifice of the living” (33). To reproduce simple survival, a sacrifice is required, which denies only a part of life, allowing it to continue to exist.

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The capture of life in law implies, in this sense, the definition of an area of “separation of bare life from the many forms of concrete life” (Agamben 1998: 182), in which the living are guilty precisely because they exist within the limits of the juridical order, where the law exists in the form of a state of exception. Hence Agamben’s and Esposito’s radical confrontation with the deadly dispositifs of Nazism as the key to understanding the meaning of contemporary biopolitics in an era in which “emergency has become the rule.” From the profound crisis that involved the institution of nationstates there has emerged a need for a renewed investigation of the mechanisms that caused their internal implosion. But today, when juridical power seems to have been completely overwhelmed and transformed by economic power, it is perhaps worth thinking again about the relationship between the two domains to assess the transformation at work. An inquiry that takes into account the link between economy and religion may perhaps make a further contribution in this direction.

Capitalism: A cult with no theology When Benjamin directly defines capitalism as religion in the 1921 fragment mentioned above, he intends to consider a link between the two domains that does not concern the historical development of secularization, but, rather, a structural link that is in many ways similar to the link recognized by Schmitt between theology and politics. However, Benjamin’s intention is not to “demonstrate” the “religious structure of capitalism” as Schmitt does, in a sense, with regard to

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state sovereignty since this, he argues, “would still lead . . . to the folly of an endless universal polemic” (1996:  297). In this case, it is not so much a matter of “demonstrating” the structural analogy between religion and economy, or even of delineating the historical process through which it would become visible should the dysfunctions of capitalist economy be unmasked. At stake for Benjamin is rather the very operation of a historically determined mechanism that seems infallible. The lapidary nature of Benjamin’s incipit and the perspective that he outlines, which is prophetic for many reasons, has in recent years attracted a strong interest in this text, which has been commented upon at length on several occasions: for example, by Samuel Weber during the conference on “Debt” organized by the London Graduate School Event in 2013 (see Weber S. 2013), in which Etienne Balibar, among others, took part (see Balibar 2013). I don’t intend to propose here a general reading of the fragment, already analyzed elsewhere (see Stimilli 2017: 113–17). An accurate interpretation and an updated bibliography are in the collection of essays written for the 2012–13 Seminar of the Associazione Italiana Walter Benjamin (cf. Gentili, Ponzi and Stimilli 2014). In these pages, I would instead like to focus on the link between “guilt” and “debt” that emerges in the fragment, in an attempt to shed new light on the current situation. Yet, it is worthwhile to dwell for a moment on the fact that instead of “demonstrating” the “religious structure of capitalism,” Benjamin focuses on the modes that make it possible for capitalist economy to function as a religion. A structural demonstration of the phenomenon would, in fact, require a “general view” that he did not have, since he lived in the very historically determined “net” from which he wanted

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to disentangle himself. From his point of view, which is internal to the object of his analysis, he recognizes only a few “traits,” which he tries to outline. In particular, regarding the first of the three traits listed in the fragment he states: “In the first place, capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed. In capitalism, things have a meaning only in their relationship to the cult; capitalism has no specific body of dogma, no theology” (1996: 297). For Benjamin, it is the “structure” of capitalism itself to possess a religious configuration. But, most importantly, this structure does not belong to the domain of dogma and theology. It has nothing to do with the truth of a state of affairs to which it has to adapt, recognizing or legitimizing an authority; rather, it fulfills merely practical tasks. It is a praxis that does not need a theoretical apparatus; although it decides over the state of exception, it does not presuppose a transcendental order that legitimizes its work, as is in the case of state sovereignty determined in theological-political terms. It is indicative, in this regard, that in defining capitalism as an essentially religious phenomenon, Benjamin refers from the very beginning to Max Weber and to his well-known thesis on the origin of capitalist economy from Protestant inner-worldly asceticism (see Weber M.  2002). The reference to Weber is articulated here as a criticism. According to Benjamin, capitalism is not simply “a formation conditioned by religion,” as one might think using the category of secularization employed by Weber to explain the origin of the capitalist economy. Protestant religiosity in its most extreme forms, such as Calvinism and Puritanism, according to Weber, made the process of “disenchantment” of the world possible, which constitutes the premise of modern rationality and the consequent

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development of capitalist economy. However, Weber’s discourse will appear more complex if one considers that he does not define the religious conditioning of economic power over capitalism from a theological point of view, but rather defines it starting from the very “ascetic” conduct of life consistent with the development of capitalist economy. The fulcrum of capitalist dominion, its “spirit” in Weber’s terms, is thus identified in those conducts which—as in the case of inner-worldly asceticism—are “elected” to adapt to the modes of capitalist production. In this sense, in the fragment under scrutiny, it may be said that Benjamin, while criticizing Weber, does not actually do anything else than radicalize Weber’s approach: what is crucial in the development of capitalism as a religion is not, in his opinion, the elaboration of a theological dispositif, but the effectiveness of the very religious practices that operate in it. In Weber’s perspective, the dominance of capitalist economy is based on the intimate bond that economic power establishes with individual forms of life. The “systematization” of existence implicit in the methodical control of inner-worldly ascetic practice makes “the sanctification of life . . . almost assume the character of a business arrangement” (Weber M.  2002:  85), whose success is by itself a sign of election. The same mechanism, according to him, is at the basis of the capitalist enterprise, which—importantly for our discourse—is the main object of Weber’s analysis. Weber was, indeed, one of the first to emphasize the centrality of the enterprise and the figure of the entrepreneur in the dominion of capitalist economy, anticipating in a sense the developments that have been witnessed in recent years with the hegemony of the figure of the “entrepreneur of oneself.”

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Despite Foucault’s criticism of Weber’s approach and the few explicit references to this author, I  believe that Weber had in this sense a decisive influence even on Foucault’s recent studies, in which the biopolitical perspective is functional to an approach to economy that essentially seeks to find a form of power that is different from that form of power linked to the juridical institution of the nation-state. Here emerges a power linked to the capitalist forms of production that exceeds the strictly economistic perspective in which the most well-known critical literature had relegated it. In this regard, Foucault speaks of “governmental power” in order to emphasize the intimate connection between the “technologies of government,” which characterize economic power, and the practices of “self-government” at the basis of the techniques of production of subjects. These subjects are not so much linked to governmental power by a relationship of subjugation—as in the case of the juridical institution or, in other respects, in the Marxian sense of labor exploitation—but rather seek to manage and capitalize individual resources within the structures of governmental power. In this perspective, his research on pagan asceticism and Christian asceticism (see at least Foucault 2005 and 2017) runs parallel to his studies on modern political economy and on neoliberal governmental techniques (see Foucault 2008 and 2009). In many ways, this work recalls Max Weber’s work on the origin of capitalism or owes much to Weber’s studies on asceticism as a rationalizing conduct of self-government and as a technique of power (see Foucault 1988: 17). However, all of Foucault’s analysis is ultimately designed to understand the peculiar form of government underlying the new neoliberal policies. In this horizon, he finds in “Christian pastoral

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power” (2009: 166) the prototype of economic-governmental power of which neoliberalism is the ultimate expression. This aspect of his work is particularly relevant to our discussion, as it aims to define the centrality of Christianity for an understanding of the economic mechanisms that fuel governmental power beyond the strictly scientific dimension often attributed to economy. In this sense, what he considers important in Christianity is not so much the established forms of its earthly domain, or its relation to political power, or even its theological elaborations, but above all the fact that it has been able to govern men omnes et singulatim (see Foucault 1981). That is, it’s exercising a global power that can individualize itself in the most intimate and quotidian life of each person (see Chevallier 2011 and 2013). The point for Foucault is then to shed light, in Christianity, on the ability to invent this new technique of power—governmental power, to be precise—based on a peculiar form of obedience he calls “pure obedience” (2009:  174), as it originates not so much from a subjugation to the law but from a bond established on the basis of a free and governed “conduct of the self.” This power is not designed to oblige individuals to carry out certain actions, but rather seeks to determine their relationship with themselves. In his lectures at the Collège de France in 1978, although recalling the intersection between pastoral power and state power, Foucault also emphasizes the specificity of these two types of government, which he sees as a “typical feature of the Christian West” (2009: 155). His analysis of the pastorate seeks to identify a governmental technique radically distinct from sovereign power and, in this sense, heterogeneous from its theological-political logic. In this direction, the Foucauldian genealogy of modern governmentality—the analysis

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of Christian pastorate—appears as a radical deconstruction of political theology that tends to emphasize the discontinuity between the latter and the economic-governmental power (see Senellart 2013), more than the continuity between the two domains. I think it is necessary to continue to reflect upon this point, not only because it problematizes the link between political theology and economic theology highlighted above, in order to find an intersection between the juridical-institutional model and the biopolitical model; but above all because Foucault here points to a particularly delicate knot, somehow already foreseen by Benjamin. There is a passage in the 1921 fragment in which Benjamin implicitly radicalizes Weber’s thesis on the origin of capitalism. In light of Foucault’s discussion on pastoral power, these words gain an even more important meaning:  “Capitalism has developed as a parasite of Christianity in the West (this must be shown not just in the case of Calvinism, but in the other orthodox Christian churches), until it reached the point where Christianity’s history is essentially that of its parasite —that is to say, of capitalism” (Benjamin 1996:  289). In this passage, Benjamin seems to reflect on the role played by Christianity in Weber’s thesis on the origin of capitalism and identifies between the two a directly “parasitic” derivation that somewhat amplifies the historical dimension outlined by Weber himself. Benjamin’s perspective, therefore, is profoundly similar to that outlined by Foucault. In line with his genealogical method—which aims to highlight discontinuity in history rather than elements of continuity (see Revel 2010)—Foucault tends to radicalize the existing heterogeneity between Christian pastoral power and the theologicalpolitical logic of modern state power. In this way, he also establishes a

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link between economic-governmental power and Christianity, which is not limited to identifying in Christianity a chronologically anterior fact that founded governmental power. In this sense, the relationship between the two concerns rather the mechanism underlying both and not the historical evolution of one from the other. What matters in their link is, from his point of view, the directly “parasitic” derivation, to echo Benjamin, and not their continuous development. If the definition of the role of Christianity in relation to capitalism is crucial to determining the potentialities and the limits of its dominance, the centrality of the West that ultimately results from such a perspective—as Weber’s thesis first shows—appears, however, problematic, at least for an analysis of the present age, when, for example, forces coming from totally different cultures—such as China or India—began to prevail, challenging the primacy of the Western world. Rather than outlining the historical evolution from one phenomenon to the other, a study that goes in this direction should be interested in the mechanisms, technologies, and practices at work in this form of power.

Economy and regulatory experimentation To follow the trajectory that leads from Weber to Foucault through Benjamin—or rather, one that beginning with Foucault returns to Benjamin and thus to Weber—does not mean to outline an evolutionary link between Christianity and Western economic discourse; nor does it emphasize, in Weber’s terms, the economic-capitalist discourse’s exclusively Western roots. By comparing this topic as it appears in the Christianity and in other world religions, it is certainly possible to

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identify an influence, for example, of Confucianism or Hinduism on economically emerging countries such as China or India; or to assess the influence of Islam on the recent expansion of the Islamic banking system, which has led to an unprecedented union between financial and religious power. The fact that Christianity appears quite clearly to have played a central role in the development of capitalism, for obvious historically and geographically contingent reasons, is not of relevance here. From this point, it is indeed possible to argue for an adaptation of capitalism to different religious forms as, for example, famous studies on Toyotism (Ohno 1988) or some analyses of Islamic finance (Ayub 2008) have attempted to demonstrate. In this way, the influence of religion on economy would simply be reduced to the superstructure in the Marxian sense, on which capitalist power shapes itself to achieve its goals. On the contrary, based on the trajectory outlined above, I  think that we should focus on how some important features of capitalism essentially derive from the experience of Christian life, in particular from the experience of “guilt” as “debt.” At a first glance, this thesis seems to be contradicted by the current spread of capitalism in Asian countries such as China and India, or even earlier in Japan, demonstrating that it is rather economic logic that determines the essence and the historical development of every single social formation characterized by the spread of capitalist economy. In this sense, as in the orthodox Marxist tradition, all noneconomic dispositifs should be relegated to the subordinate role of “ideology.” However, one of the most important teachings of Foucault’s lectures devoted to governmental power is the ability to focus on the enormous transformation that took place with neoliberalism,

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which elaborated and made explicit a premise implied in capitalism since its origins:  the fact, that is, of being a complex “economicinstitutional” system (Foucault 2008: 165). This means that instead of deriving from an “ideological superstructure” that hinders or fosters the economic sphere, the institutional field is an integral part of the economic one, so much so that it shapes it from the inside through a process that, at a closer look, reproduces the same mechanism of power originally at work in the experience of Christian life. In this sense, capitalism is, rather than just a single mode of economic production whose development follows a “natural law,” an economicinstitutional ensemble that welcomes a multiplicity of different and peculiar figures, different elaborations of an institutional dispositif of power. It seems possible to assert, with Foucault, that there are several capitalisms and not a single capitalism (cf. Foucault 2008). In this regard, it can be argued that the complex economicinstitutional system that gave rise to capitalism in its various forms is not even attributable to the univocal process of rationalization that, according to Weber (and, later, also according to some members of the Frankfurt School), have characterized the Western world exclusively. The spread of a single worldwide market, usually referred to as “globalization,” is also to be reconsidered (see Marramao 2012). Analyzing this phenomenon in light of a univocal process of rationalization typical of the West would induce us to identify the limits of capitalism simply as a setback to the irrational. According to Foucault, this perspective tends to “set out to take on board the Marxist analyses of the contradictions of capital, treating these contradictions as part and parcel of the irrational rationality of capitalist society” (1991: 78). From his point of view, the major problem of this approach is

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to refer to rationality as an “anthropological invariant” and to attribute an “absolute value” to reason instead of “examining how forms of rationality inscribe themselves in practices or systems of practices, and what role they play within them.” Even with regard to capitalism, the point for Foucault is “to see how men govern (themselves and others) by the production of truth.” This does not mean “the production of true utterances, but the establishment of domains in which the practice of true and false can be made at once ordered and pertinent” (79). This is the production of regulatory domains established beginning with specific governmental practices and not as adaptation to presupposed and pre-legitimated codifications. In this sense, it seems possible to state that there is a gap that is difficult to bridge between governmental, normative, institution, and state juridical structure. The anthropological planes involved seem to be different, as are the practices from which they derive. Governmental power involves power relations different from those of the juridical, which vary according to the very processes of subjectification from which governmental power derives, and do not follow a unitary scheme of subject, history, or power. In this sense, it can be said with Foucault that governmental power can exist only in act, as it is the execution of a technique that is basically a technique of the self on the self. It is a power whose existence does not manifest in passive consensus; its dominion does not end in the exercise of violence on a life bereft of strength and quality; its nature does not consist in renouncing freedom or transferring it to a law that safeguards it, even within the limits “exceptionally” defined by the law itself; and the bond it produces does not even come from the debt toward an authority that should guarantee for it.

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Foucault’s interest, rather, is to identify the modes of power “exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free” (1982:  790), and which produces a dynamic between freedom and power that does not exhausts itself in a relation of inclusive exclusion, as in the case of law, but in a more complex play in which freedom appears to be power’s very condition of existence. It is then clear how Foucault’s studies on the technologies of the self, to which he dedicated the last years of his life, not only analyze the various practices of freedom, but are also complementary to the research on liberal governmentality, whose main objective is to identify what is really at stake in neoliberal politics, the strength and enormous danger of which he had already understood in the late 1970s. According to Foucault, the fulcrum around which neoliberalism turns is an unprecedented demand for freedom in which a nonconstrictive, but more capillary and efficient, mode of domination can be identified. By granting each person maximum freedom in the form of self-control and investment in individual abilities and attitudes, neoliberal governmentality is based on a dominance that ensures the greatest effectiveness with the least possible constraints. The extension of power over life does not operate here only to define the legitimate limits of such power—which is indefinable since this domination is derived from exceptions and not from rules—to the point that legitimate power can be confused with the same “bare life” that it intended to dominate. The relation between the two domains is rather built upon the development of ways through which the exercise of power and the free ability of each person to shape their own lives and to invest in their own skills are intertwined to the point that they almost identify, as is the case in the most ferocious neoliberal policies.

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This is, in fact, what allowed the figure of the entrepreneur to spread to all areas of political and social life, what promoted the conversion of states into “managerial states,” and what gradually transformed state sovereignty into global governance. The traditional view of the separation between the sphere of private interests, autonomous and self-regulated, and that of the ruling state, on which both the liberalists’ and the anti-liberalists’ ideas were based, with the consequent understanding of the ​​ market as a closed, natural, and pre-political system, revealed its fallaciousness and demonstrated the limits of the politics of a certain “modern left.” By presenting itself as an alternative to the neoliberal right through the promotion of a different approach to market economy, this kind of left, which has been successful in recent years in the major Western countries, has done nothing more than contribute to the large expansion of neoliberalism. Even the nostalgic return to a state that can regulate the market’s autonomy from the outside is no longer feasible in the face of the dangers inherent in the neoliberal governmentality itself, which have become evident with the recent financial crisis. In this process, the state has neither withdrawn from its controlling function (that function, which, according to the main exponents of the French School of Regulation, should be recovered); nor has it maintained only its repressive function, which it has in fact continued to exercise by fomenting wars that have nothing to do with the conflicts known thus far in the modern age, but which increasingly coincide with real and prolonged civil wars. However, the state now finds itself in the same conditions it helped create. The political construction of global finance is the best demonstration of this process. By emphasizing traditional state policies, praising

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the alleged “national interests,” the “security” or the “good” of the country, states have promoted austerity policies in Europe that are not only implemented with the same technical and business-like methods previously used to foster the development of the financial economy, but serve no other purpose than to perpetuate the complex “economic-institutional” system that continues to govern the world. In this system, market economy becomes itself a political institution, which, by continuously shifting its boundaries, also transforms the relationship between politics and law from the inside and promotes a radical change in regulatory production. Although such development is constitutive of the dominance of capitalist economy, it has become fully apparent following the expansion of neoliberal policies. At stake here is the detachment from modern juridical logic and from the institution of state sovereignty, as well as a new process of establishing rules that are yet to be understood. I believe this is where it seems possible to trace a genealogical link with Christian religious experience as a practical field of regulatory experimentation, and to understand capitalism’s “parasitic” derivation from Christianity identified by Weber even before Benjamin, and taken to its extreme consequences by Foucault. Thus, it can be said that what matters here is a mechanism of power that also involves areas outside of the Christian Western world, as demonstrated—according to Gerda Wielander’s recent study—by the announced thawing toward Christianity on the part of the Chinese government and its interest in Christianity as religious practice that favors social and economic development (see Wielander 2013). In this context, the Chinese government conducted specific studies in the business district of Wenzhou—where Christians represent between

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20 and 30 percent of the population—to analyze the successful stories of companies led by Christian entrepreneurs. Moreover, it seems that in 2010 the director of a factory in Wenzhou told the BBC that he preferred to hire Christian workers because “when they make a mistake they feel guilty” (see https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/02/15/ chinas-come-to-jesus-moment/ and http://www.bbc.com/news/ world-asia-pacific-10942954). The “sense of guilt” in the practice of Christian life would thus be functional to the creation of employees’ commitment that has attracted the attention of Chinese entrepreneurs as well as of the centralized state itself. To be sure, this interesting development does not only concern the social control of religion in the centralized structure of the Chinese state, but also the transformation of this state into a managerial state and the dissemination of a managerial logic in Chinese enterprises, where the condition of “guilt” acts not only as a repressive mechanism, as one might think at a first analysis, but above all as a dispositif from which to profit. At this point, therefore, we need to analyze the role of guilt in Christian religion, and how it is related to a condition that creates debt.

The invention of oikonomia When, in 2000, Egyptologist Jan Assmann returns to the paradigm of political theology, he does so not only to “reverse” Schmitt’s principle of secularization, thereby demonstrating that the “central theological concepts are theologized political concepts” (Assmann 2000: 29). He also concentrates on the cross-fertilization between the two realms

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and the performative mechanism that fuels them, whose effects are visible on the social level. Assmann identifies the archetype of this process in the Jewish “pact,” which he indicates as the prototype of the “juridical-state institutions” associated with the formation of complex societies. Significant for our discussion, according to Assmann this phenomenon runs “parallel to the development of the culture of guilt,” namely that particular culture that “assumes a concept of the law as sanctioned political norms.” In this respect, he argues that “a culture of guilt works only in public (state) juridical institutions that have foundation or religious projection in the form of divine justice and jurisdiction” (151). This is the area to examine in order to understand the new role of Christianity in the institutional sphere. If, in this context, one can say that guilt is the product of the violation of a juridical rule, one can also assume—and this has been done, as we have seen—that the constitutive process of the law produces guilt. Although it imposes a penalty for those who violate the law, the establishment of juridical norms does not mean so much that faults can be recognized and therefore removed through a process of atonement; it means, rather, the definition of an order whose existence depends on a state of subjection that generates and produces guilt in order to preserve its power. However, Assmann focuses mainly on those rules which, when complied with, carry a promise of salvation: “An example of this is the Mosaic law from the Bible, which implies not only the concept of guilt but also that of sin” (150). Salvation means a promise and a reward made available “by a supreme power to those who conform to a certain norm. By virtue of these promises, the supreme power is more closely linked to men than institutions of surveillance and punishment.”

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“The combination of norm and promise goes—therefore—further than the common combination of norms and sanctions” (151). Any political institution can establish norms and threaten punishment, but only the violation of a divine promise of salvation implies that the guilty person also becomes a sinner because it put salvation at risk. According to Assmann: This is the point where the theme enters the subject of political theology. Guilt is on the one hand a political issue because it concerns the individual’s obligations toward the community and the community’s obligations toward other communities; on the other, it is a theological issue insofar as these obligations are divinely sanctioned or are assumed with God. Only this latter case creates the condition of sin. The basis of sin is not simply the norm, but a pact, or rather the violation of a mutual commitment. (152) On the one hand, in line with Assmann, one can say that the biblical tale, as theological-political archetype of the juridical-state institutions, opens up the anthropological space marked by the obligation toward a commandment. The political community is thus characterized by its relationship to an explicit command and to the resulting obligation toward the community itself. On the other hand, the close correspondence between the law and life inaugurated by the biblical pact involves a relationship with the rule that is not exhausted in the obligation. Its consequences affect the very being of men and women who take part in it. The biblical commandment appears in the form of a control over human life that forces people to respect it. Yet, at the same time it

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contemplates its violation. The Jewish experience with the law is so radical precisely because it contains the possibility of its transgression. Transgressing the divine command causes a substantial change in the relationship with the law, which also has consequences on the nature of those who transgress. It not only changes their status, their condition, making them guilty before the law and therefore punishable with a sanction. Rather, human beings are, at the same time, naturally inclined to transgress the law, to be in conflict with it and, therefore, fundamentally dangerous, evil “sinners.” Thus, guilt against the law is the same as sin. Its peculiarity derives precisely from its relation to the divine commandment, which envisions the possibility for human beings not to do what has been ordained to them, to disregard their commitment. In this sense, one can say that human beings do not naturally obey the divine law, nor are they naturally bound to the stipulated pact. The mere fact that they are properly free to abide by their commitments, that they can follow the law, is based on the possibility of their transgression. At the center of this experience is the fact that human beings are not only able to accomplish either action in accordance with what they are ordered, that is, not only can they be faithful and respect the pacts, but they can also choose not to do so. The impossibility to naturally obey the law is at the origin of the transgressive power of human life, but it also coincides with the possibility of its freedom. Within Judaism, a profound elaboration on the relationship with the law starts from the idea of freedom as a transgressive and antinomic power of human life. Christianity has arisen from this process. Without going into the merits of the various ways in which the two religions have defined themselves over the centuries of their

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history with regard to the commandments they share, it is worth noting here that the first experience of life in Christ began with the elaboration of a peculiar antinomic form of fulfillment of the law, which was internal to Judaism and concerned the realization of the precepts itself. I am thinking of the Messianic perspective contained in the Letters by Paul of Tarsus, which are the oldest documents attributed to Christian tradition. For Paul, the new “law of Christ” fulfills the commandments and, as “grace,” at the same time provides for the establishment of justice “outside of the law (chorìs nómou)” (Rom. 3.22). At stake here is an intense reflection on the Jewish experience of the law, resulting in the invention of a new dispositif of power based precisely on freedom. It is not possible here to fully delve into this process and to assess its development in the history of Christianity. For the time being, however, it is worth pointing out that the experience of Christian life has been based on a critique of the juridical form of power represented by Jewish law, resulting in an unprecedented experimentation of governmental strategies not directly attributable to a fixed form of dominion. What cannot be ruled is not simply separated and, at the same time, reintegrated into the same mechanism from which it derives. Because it escapes a fixed form of government, it implies a different management, a new administration, which takes the form of oikonomia. If we look closely, we will see that an eminently economic vocabulary was used to express the first experience of Christian life. The early Christian texts present an economic translation of the Hebrew juridical vocabulary, in which the public domain of Ekklésia is defined by means of a lexicon that, in the ancient Greek and

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Roman world, was exclusively used for the domestic-administrative sphere, for the private domain of the “house” (oîkos). One might then say that here for the first time economy becomes politics, and politics is not limited to the confrontation or clash with the juridical domain concerning the definition of legitimate, though exceptional, boundaries within which to exercise power, nor does it presuppose a clear separation from the economic sphere. It creates, rather, a new field of legislative institution based on the administrative management of the community. A  self-defined economic mode of power is initiated here. Its criticism toward the juridical structure of the political, and the religious pact that characterizes the alliance between God and the people of Israel, is functional to the articulation in different forms of the very assumptions that belongs to both. It is clear, then, in what sense Christianity, according to Foucault, is the invention of a binding, but not extrinsically coercing power in which people are both individually and collectively involved precisely because they are free. In this way, it is possible to genealogically trace the origin of governmental power to the origin of Christianity itself. The experience of freedom from the law coincides here with a form of total loyalty to the law on the part of everyone’s life. Within the experience of life in Christ, so to speak, the more one is free and liberated from the ultimately extrinsic bond of obligation to the law, the more obedient one is on the basis of a relationship of life’s absolute adaptation to the law. If the law is in force, as already accomplished in a messianic way, there is a precise conformity between the form of life and the form of the law, between oîkos and nomos, and oikonomia becomes, in this sense, the fundamental operator of the new power.

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Agamben is therefore right when, in The Kingdom and Glory, he introduces the Christian administrative model to better explain the passage, which he finds unconvincingly explained by Foucault, “from ecclesiastical pastorate to political government” (see Agamben 2011:  112). However, in the first phase of his work, in an attempt to highlight the “operative” dimension—which is typical of his methodology  —Agamben traces the origins of governmentality to the theological elaboration of the “economy of salvation” and of the “economy” of intradivine life of the Trinity, and thereby loses sight of Foucault’s interest in the very practices through which power constitutes itself in economic terms:  the fact that, to quote Benjamin, it is a “cult” with “no specific body of dogma, no theology” (1996:  297). However, as he analyzes in depth the cultic nature of governmental power and tries to define the subjects that administer it, Agamben focuses on the function of the “office” connected to the Christian sacerdotal ministry. For Agamben, what is decisive is  the fact that “the efficacy of the ministerial action derives not from the person of the minister but from the function and the office that he carries out.” Hence “the constitutive vicariousness of office” (2013: 86), but also its essential relationship to “duty,” which makes the priest “that being whose being is immediately a carrying out and a service” (87): “a debitum, . . . a being that coincides totally with a having to be” (103). According to Agamben, in the elaboration of the debitum religionis, Christianity stated “the legal nature of the bond that unites the human being and God in religion” and “in the idea of a being that is totally dissolved into a debt, into a having to be,” as in priesthood, “law and religion necessarily coincide” (106). “Religious duty as an ‘infinite debt’ ” (102) is then the practice of the minister

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who, according to Agamben, is exemplarily capable of administering such power. However, the administrative nature of power initiated by Christianity does not seem to be limited solely to this type of practice. Its effectiveness does not depend only on the function and the office carried out independently from the one who performs it; it does not derive only from a duty—and in this sense from an “infinite debt”—which creates a legal bond. When proposing the “office” as the archetype of today’s administrative act, Agamben seems to have in mind especially the ministerial officer or the bureaucrat. But he does not perhaps quite take into account the centrality of the figure of the “entrepreneur of oneself,” a model of contemporary experience that does not admit delegates:  he carries out an act that cannot be independent from the person who performs it, and which seeks to make the most of its human capital, as Foucault was first able to demonstrate. In this light, therefore, it may be useful to further consider the Christian genealogy of governmental power, because such an analysis may perhaps also help to clarify the transition from neoliberal governmentality to the economy of debt, which is not immediately clear within the limits of Foucault’s discourse on freedom as a form of government. It seems—as Lazzarato argues, for example—that the economic crisis revealed the extent to which the techniques of governmentality “impose, prohibit, regulate, direct, command, hierarchize, and normalize,” and that governmentality, unlike what Foucault thought, is authoritarian (Lazzarato 2012: 11). On a closer look, however, at the heart of recent austerity policies there is not just a coercive power that ultimately only reproduces the juridical mark of past forms of

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politics. The complexity of this power seems to be proportional to the difficulties encountered in attempting to change its course. A further exploration of the Christian genealogy of governmental power initially undertaken by Foucault can then contribute to shed new light in this direction.

Debt as investment If debt, as we have seen, is the form of social bond par excellence in many ancient and modern cultures, and if, as “debt of life” debt makes the living dependent on sovereign powers, both worldly and spiritual, it can be supposed that Christianity radicalized the condition of indebtedness that was common to other religious experiences. Although in many ways it inscribes itself in the sacrificial paradigm described by Girard—and resumed in the economic studies of the School of Regulation previously discussed—the experience of Christian life changes its course, initiating something totally new. Girard recognizes the novelty of the Christian message in the fact that it contributed to taking “away humanity’s sacrificial crutches” (2011:  80). By associating Christianity to the “biblical” element and opposing it to the “mythical” one, he observes that “wherever the Gospels take roots, blood sacrifices disappear forever” and set in motion “the greatest cultural revolution of humanity” (87): the fact of being confronted “with our own violence” (80). To define Jesus Christ as the “scapegoat,” as the Gospels do according to Girard, is “to understand that the scapegoat, far from being guilty, is innocent and arbitrarily chosen,” it means therefore “to destroy its structuring

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power” (80–1). From this point of view, violence is exposed as the origin of the scapegoat. Guy Stroumsa, recovering Girard’s theory of the “end of sacrifice” realized by Christianity in his recent contribution to the revival of the history of religions, argues that this passage is in fact linked to a mutation within Judaism and subsequently to the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in 70 AD at the hands of Titus Flavius Vespasianus, who had become the emperor at the death of his father in 79 AD. One of the most striking consequences of this event was a form of “spiritualization of the [Jewish] liturgy” that profoundly transformed it from “rites accompanying sacrificial act” into “prayers replacing the daily sacrifices” (Stroumsa 2009:  64) that joined new practices, becoming, among the Christians of the early centuries, “the ascetic practice of the imitatio Christi” (73). From the earliest Christian texts there emerges the need to overcome the sacrificial logic, even though Christianity is inscribed in it. This overcoming, however, cannot happen only when Christ’s “sacrifice” reveals the victim’s innocence, as Girard indicated. It is, rather, a more complex mechanism that has to do with the translation of the Jewish experience of the law into economic terms, which we previously discussed. Particularly interesting in this regard is the fact that in the New Testament the word used to speak of “sin” is “debt,” as is evident from the well-known verses of the Gospel of Matthew (Mt. 6:12) that were included in the Greek version of the Lord’s prayer:  “forgive us our debts (ophēīlema) as we also have forgiven our debtors.” As noted by the New Testament scholar Raymond Brown, the term ophēīlema, which appears in the text of the Gospel, “in secular Greek . . . has

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no religious coloring.” This means that for a Greek of the time, the word used to indicate sin in the New Testament was rather unusual in this sense, having for him only an economic meaning. On the other hand, scholars have observed that this kind of economic-religious vocabulary is not exclusively a Christian innovation, but it recalls at the very least the Jewish world from which it derives. The abovementioned expressions from Matthew’s Gospel appear to make sense only if we assume that they follow Semitic formulas (Brown [1965] 2010: 311). In a relevant study on this subject, Gary Anderson argues that “in first-century Palestine, the word used in commercial contexts to identify debt became in religious contexts the most common word for sin” (2009: 7). This use, according to Anderson, has more ancient roots, dating back to the Persian domination on the Middle East (538–333 BC), when Aramaic, the particular language used for economic and institutional transactions, was adopted as the official language of the empire; the Jews spoke both this language and their own fluently. “In Aramaic the word for a debt that one owes a lender, hôbâ, is the standard term for denoting sin” (27). That term gradually entered Hebrew and transformed the same biblical idea of sin, which from “weight,” a “burden” (ãwōn) to be brought, became a “debt” (hôba) to be condoned. This was no longer connected to the rite of the “scapegoat,” intended to carry the guilt that he did not commit (22), but linked instead to the transformation of the institution of the Jubilee, from the year of the liberation from slavery for pecuniary debt to the year of forgiveness of sins (36–8). This is the context of the neo-testamentary use of the Greek word ophēīlema, which translates the Aramaic hôbâ, meaning “debt.” This

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use refers to the ancient practice of enslaving those who could not repay their debts; the same practice—as we have already seen— represented by the nexum, the archaic figure of the Roman law and the Germanic law analyzed earlier. In this scenario, it becomes easier to understand, for example, besides the famous verse of the Gospel of Matthew in the Lord’s Prayer, some Pauline expressions, such as the one contained in the seventh chapter of the Epistle to the Romans: “but I am of flesh, sold into bondage to sin” (Rom. 7.14); or the one in the second chapter of the Letter to the Colossians: “having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us” (Col 2.14). In this framework, the condition of guilt of those who adhere to the Christian faith is similar to that of a slave, and Christ’s saving act is essentially liberation by the repayment of the previously contracted debt. In the patristic tradition, the modalities of this pardoning tend to be identified with the Passion of Christ as the sacrifice of the innocent. However, in the texts of the New Testament it is by no means clear how Christ made humanity free from the debt. Additionally, the effects of the redemption from the debt of guilt on the believers in Christ are particularly complex. It is no coincidence that the peculiar relationship between “works” and “grace” outlined by Paul of Tarsus created contrasting interpretations that even originated, in the centuries of the history of Christianity, divisions as deep as the Protestant Reformation. One thing, however, can be said: in the first experience of life in Christ “grace” is the operator acting on the law’s charge transforming it. This is the most interesting point because here it is possible to identify the passage through which Christianity carries out a true

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“invention” in Foucault’s terms: “debt” is not just “guilt” to be repaid through sacrifices and expiations; nor the bond of an infinite duty; but it rather becomes itself the possibility of an investment. The Jewish experience of “guilt” as “sin,” shared by Christian life, becomes a full experience of “debt” that, through the gift of “grace,” is not simply repaid, but as such is to be administered in the faith in Christ because it is a condition in which to invest. The economic administration of faith is not in contradiction with munificent gratuity; they both share the experience of radical insolvency that is not to be amended, since it becomes profitable. To make life profitable is an investment that, according to Paul’s teaching, cannot be realized in “works”:  they cannot fulfill the commandments of the Law that fully expose human life’s condition of guilt and condemnation. Only faith in Christ makes it possible to transform the contracted debt into a “deposit” to administer. The ransom price paid by Christ is gratuitously available to the believers, inaugurating an economic management of this gift, which does not require compensation or a real expiation. Despite the tremendous difficulty that the texts handed down have in clearly explaining the assumptions shared by the first Christian community, and despite the different and often opposing variants that the history of Christianity has formulated, Christianity offers the elements of an economic practice in which debt is experienced as capital to be administered. The most ancient writings that bear witness to this, such as the Letters by Paul of Tarsus, do not envisage the obligation of the living to redeem, in their lifetime, the “debt of life” that characterizes them. They don’t have to go through a series of redemptive actions aimed at exhausting that “original debt” that,

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in other cultural traditions, “builds sovereignty and strengthens the community through works” (Aglietta and Orléan 1998:  21). Rather, one might say, they can invest in acts that create debt and which, as such, must be administered. It is then particularly interesting to examine the possible institutional implications of this reasoning. In a recent contribution to the seminar organized by the Associazione Italiana Walter Benjamin on “Capitalism as Religion,” Paolo Napoli—a scholar of Foucault and of the history of regulatory dispositifs—brilliantly undertook such a task. Looking for a historical reason for the “parasitic” derivation of capitalism from Christianity outlined by Benjamin, and through a systematic genealogical study of the first Christian texts—implicitly conducted in the light of Foucault’s investigation—Napoli focuses on the “deposit of faith,” which appears in some New Testament writings called Pastoral Epistles, and identifies in it the archetype of a new form of regulatory power, not strictly “juridical” but “administrative.” In the “deposit of faith” there is at stake a “legal institute” rooted in both the Jewish and Roman tradition, according to which “the depositor (creditor) delivers a personal property to the depositary (debtor) who commits themselves to preserve and return it at the request of the first” (Napoli 2014: 117). This is a “complex dispositif ” which, in early Christianity, “links the administrative need—the depositary is the custodian and not the owner of the object—with a diffusive tendency, that is, the transmission and therefore the permanent succession of the task of safeguarding the intangibility but also the inappropriability of faith.” According to this perspective, it is worth “considering the operational and functional characteristics

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of the deposit: an inheritance that does not allow appropriation and requests only to be safeguarded” (120). With regard to the institution whose genealogy Napoli tries to outline, it must be kept in mind that in the dispositif of the “deposit of faith” the story starts from a “gesture of delivery that implies, in the recipient, a tutelary attitude” (ibid.). This argumentation allows us to identify a “deontological invariant” that “connects the disciple Paulus to any financial adviser of our day:  receiving a deposit means to manage it” (108). “It becomes clear—then—that the initial capital, that is, the deposit, represents the engine of this enterprise that consists in transforming a faith into a church” (114). “That is why,” Napoli adds, “the metamorphosis of a faith in Ekklésia . . . is achieved under the auspices of the administrative mode. The deposit is the regulatory archetype of the emergence and functioning of an administrative institution on a global scale” (120). From this point of view, “if the deposit presupposes an economy, this is not the one of exchange, but of the managerial effectiveness of the government.” The Ekklésia is therefore the prototype of an economic and administrative institution whose regulatory space is not established on the sole basis of a coercive bond, but rather of “care.” “The care of the deposit and the deposit as care” is thus at the origin of a dispositif celebrating “administrative practice as the supreme saving reason” (ibid.). Besides shedding light on the link between “Christian pastoral power” and “governmental power” identified by Foucault and further discussed in recent years, this can also clarify the mechanism currently operative in the governance of global indebtedness. This mechanism does not seem to have contradicted Foucault’s analysis, but has rather radicalized its premise. It makes

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debt not so much, or not just, a condition to be amended—as the authoritarian injunction of the sacrifices imposed by the policies of austerity seem to indicate—or a bond that condemns to an infinite duty, but rather a condition in which to invest, through revival policies for an economy fundamentally structured on the basis of an administrative institutional logic. ❖ In its singular form, the German word Schuld means “guilt,” in the plural, Schulden, “debt.” Etymologically it derives from the ancient Gothic skulan, from which also comes the German sollen and the English shall, all verbs that indicate a material and moral obligation, a “duty.” Originally, the word indicates “something that is owed,” “a binding obligation.” Only later, in German, its use appears in contexts related to money (Grimm and Grimm 1854–1961: 15). In his Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society, Émile Benveniste observes that the Gothic skulan “translates both opheílo in the sense of ‘being a debtor’ ” and the same verb opheílo when it serves to express in the Greek of the Gospels “to have a duty, to impose a morale rule on oneself ” (Benveniste 2016: 148–9). The complex semantic context to which the German word refers has therefore an older origin, as demonstrated by the use of the word ophēīlema in the New Testament (from opheílo, recalled by Benveniste in the passage mentioned above), which in ancient Greek has the economic meaning of “debt,” but in the New Testament also acquires, at the same time, the moral meaning of “guilt” and “sin.” Schuld is also the word used by Benjamin in a now well-known fragment of 1921, in which he defines capitalism as religion, “a cult that creates guilt, not atonement.” According to Benjamin, this

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mechanism producing debt and guilt “has developed as a parasite of Christianity” to the extent that “Christianity’s history is essentially that of its parasite—that is to say, of capitalism” (1996: 289). From Weber’s thesis on the origin of capitalism and following the trajectory that from Benjamin’s fragment leads to Foucault’s analysis of the link between Christian “pastoral power” and the modern “governmental power,” this chapter has outlined the genealogical link between the current complex economic-institutional system and the Christian religious experience as a practice of regulatory experimentation. Christianity has been identified as the origin of an economic mode of power. At the heart of this process lies the full transformation, carried out by Christianity, of the juridical dispositif of “guilt,” of Jewish origin, into the economic experience of “debt” to be administered within the faith in Christ. The “deposit of faith” of Christian origin has ultimately appeared as the regulatory archetype that, celebrating the administrative practice, can shed new light on the mechanism currently at work in the governance of global indebtedness.

5 The psychic life of debt

The guilt of being in debt The establishment on a global scale of an economic-administrative institutional form, of which Christianity is genealogically “the inventor,” along with the extension of the entrepreneurial rationality to all public and private spheres, to the political and social dominion, as well as to the strictly economic field, have brought about profound changes in society. This transformation not only affected the economy and its institutions, but it was also at the origin of a proper “anthropological mutation.” An unprecedented investment in life has involved individual existence in the construction of a global enterprise, of which the financial markets are only the epitome. The entrepreneur of oneself is the model for this phenomenon:  active subjects, who are completely devoted to their business, and have abolished any distance between themselves and the enterprise in which they are involved. A  continuous need for transformation and constant improvement characterizes the process of enhancement in which everyone participates in an attempt to always perfect their performances. Work

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and consumption, appropriation and gift, exchange and debt, as well as state and enterprise are co-involved in this phenomenon and give shape to a complex structure in which the individual lives participate not simply because of their organic needs, the satisfaction of primary functions, or because of the need for appropriation or domination, and not even because of the need to establish a political or symbolic order that transcends individual existences and is definable within precise boundaries. It is rather an enterprise that involves the realization of individual lives in a wider sense, connected to an ethical space of existence, which implies the involvement of the desires of the individuals. Following the process of the financialization of the markets at the origin of the economic crisis, this phenomenon has become particularly evident in recent times. In the last thirty years, finance has been linked to the production of goods and services, and therefore to the world of labor in the classical sense, transforming its internal structure. But, above all, through the massive relocation of domestic savings toward equity securities, there has been a total involvement of individual lives in the financial world. This is what made it possible for new forms of indebtedness to become the engine of global economy. This phenomenon began in the United States, but it soon spread, triggering the world economic crisis we have witnessed. At the basis of this process is the idea that the realization of profits is fundamentally dependent on consumption patterns arising from financial income, in their turn resulting from increasingly complex forms of debt. The creation of additional demand developed by new forms of private debt, and fueled by the same confidence in the financial market, is the prerequisite for a development that, despite

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its obviously devastating effects, continues its course in parallel to the austerity policies that have been introduced in most countries. From this perspective, the repeated attempts to relaunch the economy, rather than offer a remedy, appear to be the symptom of a perverse process, the ultimate purpose of which seems to be the production of a virtual wealth that favors consumption even in the absence of real liquidity. At the root of this phenomenon is the enormous change undergone by the capitalist modes of production of recent years:  flexibility, precariousness, and new forms of labor are the most obvious manifestations of a development in which the valorization no longer depends on the amount of time necessary to perform a particular job, but depend on the specific qualities of the person employed. If, in this regard, the expression “profits becoming rent” has been used (see Marazzi 2010: 34), it can also be said that in the process of the financialization of the economy, life itself, along with the forms of life, becomes rent, transformed into enterprises (in which to invest) or into deposits (to administer). When life enters finance, debt always finds new forms of investment, which reveals its implicit inexhaustibility and the need for its continuous reproduction. The new modes of accumulating value discover in debt, which cannot and must not be extinguished, the privileged mechanism of its own reproduction. A global indebtedness is at the basis of the machine of global economy and of a new form of power. In short, if this was the panorama in which the global economic crisis developed, since the beginning of 2012, however, this course has changed. Since Europe found itself directly involved in the economic

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disruption, the problem of “public debt”—particularly that of some EU member states, such as Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Italy—has become topical and has attracted the attention of public opinion, which was previously focused on the exponential increase in private debt in the United States following the real estate bubble that triggered the crisis. It was at this stage that debt began to be publicly and explicitly presented as “guilt.” The question of public debt emerged as a specific problem for some European nations that could be considered guilty of bad management of the state. The apparently harmless semantic shift of this type of analysis, however, has brought about a significant change, full of consequences (see Macho 2014). According to the “German model,” which promotes the idea that there is guilt in the public debt contracted by some of the EU states, this situation is the result of a bad national economic management, easy to attribute and to punish. The guilt associated with the contracted debt is that of having spent too much. The need to repay what is due therefore arises from reasons that are seemingly only economical. What remains unexplained, however, is the apparently legitimate use of legal, religious, and ethical categories—such as “guilt”—to interpret a problem whose solution is instead offered solely in technical terms. What is at stake in this move? Does considering debt as guilt mean—as some would propose—to place the state of indebtedness within the sphere of what can be emended, in the sphere of damages done, of transgressed rules, of not respected agreements that, however, is possible to repay through “sacrifice”? I think that to answer such questions, we must first take into account the fact that in many languages, both ancient and modern,

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the same word is used to indicate both “debt” and “guilt.” For example, as we have seen, not only in Sanskrit, Hebrew, and Aramaic, but also in modern German, the same word encompasses the two different meanings. One might wonder if all these could simply be cases of homonymy. If so, it would be a coincidence that two different meanings are conveyed by the same word. But, even considering what we have said, it seems that in this case we should rather speak about polysemy. Indeed, in all the mentioned languages, the correlation between the two semantic fields is clearly perceived in the context in which the term is used. The point is then to understand what lies behind the fact that an economic debt may be associated with guilt. In the semantic context that links the two concepts in some ancient and modern cultures, both debt and guilt refer to a lack or a deficit, a condition that involves everyone. From an individual and collective point of view, it is a situation that is difficult to emend, in that, on the one hand, one aspires toward redemption, even through sacrifice, while on the other hand, it represents the bond to which one must submit as member of a community. The specificity of Christianity, from my point of view, is precisely that it was able to transform debt into an investment, into an impetus for spiritual and material growth. “Debt is guilt, Schuld, a single word,” argued Paul De Grauwe— economist of the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and the European Central Bank, and now director of the European Institute at the London School of Economics—in an interview about Germany’s role in the EU. “Germany,” he continues, “is like an enterprise . . .; but a healthy society that wants to grow has to invest and investments are covered by either self-financing or debt.” In this respect, from the point of view of the economist, “Germany’s

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attitude is inexplicable and somewhat surreal. The fundamentalism of budget balance, the religious aversion to debt, leads it to do everything to avoid growth and to foment recession.” “For Germany,” according to De Grauwe, “this is a cultural matter. It is not enough to evoke, to explain it, Weimar’s ghosts and hyperinflation: it is in their DNA. There is no way to bring change, while austerity devastates the Eurozone” (La Repubblica, August 26, 2014). The position of Nobel Prize economist Paul Krugman is similar; he speaks of “the absurd moralism against debt cancellation imposed by austerity,” even arguing, with somewhat inflamed tones, that it was “the revenge of those who were not forgiven” and “an excess of justice,” because “any kind of debt cancellation represents, from this point of view, a bad moral example” (La Repubblica, October 14, 2014). It is notable that some of the most important economists promoting the relaunching of the economy in interviews with major international media, are careful to emphasize the implicit link between guilt and debt in the German word Schuld/Schulden as if this were their recent discovery. But an in-depth investigation about this semantic area rightly evoked here cannot ignore the well-known analysis carried out by Nietzsche in the On the Genealogy of Morals (see Nietzsche 1996), by Marx in Capital (see Marx 1977: 919), or by Benjamin, in the fragment analyzed above (Benjamin 1996:  288–91). All these authors—on whom I  already had the opportunity to reflect (see Stimilli 2017)—highlighted a deep connection, although in various ways, between the religious and moral experience of guilt and the economic condition of debt. At stake is a peculiar form of power, also superficially noted in the interviews quoted above. Taking a closer look, however, this form

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of power involves both the austerity policies and those policies that promote economic growth, supported by the economists quoted above, who criticize austerity. Hence the difficulties encountered by the Tsipras government in trying to change the course of European policies, both in terms of the austerity plans regarding the negotiation of public debt, and in terms of the reforms, which are the real “commodity exchange” passively accepted by the European governments of other indebted countries, such as Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland. Indeed, at stake here is not so much, or simply, the full payment of the contracted debt, but the neoliberal policies that are the real condition for its reduction and that directly affect the individual lives within those countries. For the first time since austerity policies became the seemingly uncontested model in Europe, the fact that a government tried not only to discuss debt negotiation, but also to question the resulting neoliberal reforms, is certainly an important first step in a long and difficult journey. In one of his first interviews given as Greek minister of economy, Yanis Varoufakis, while underlining the link between debt and guilt implicit in the German word Schuld and recalling the debt Germany Nazi contracted with Greece, tried to put the issue in different terms: We should just sit around a table . . . without any kind of question that asks . . . “is it guilt or sin?” I know that the two concepts—guilt and debt—in German are expressed with the same word, Schuld, the antonym of credit. [But we] should limit ourselves to this simple question: how to return to making Greece’s social economy sustainable by reducing the costs of the Greek crisis to a minimum for

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the average German and European? (see http://popoffquotidiano. it/2015/01/29/yanis-varoufakis-e-il-concetto-di-schuld/) Although proposed here as “simple,” the question is in fact very problematic, as the minister knows and has experienced since the first negotiations with the “troika” (which, after Varoufakis, is simply referred to with the word “institutions”). We have here a viscous power, whose outlines are just beginning to emerge with greater clarity. Borrowing an expression from Judith Butler (cf. 1997), one could perhaps speak of a “psychic life” of debt, in which “guilt” has a much more elusive sense than what emerges in the most popular discourses against the austerity policies. I  wonder then if the link between debt and guilt, which has recently surfaced in public language, can illuminate an opaque relationship between power and life, which is therefore even more dangerous than the merely punitive relation highlighted in the critique of austerity. I think this perspective can be particularly useful in reflecting on the hypothesis of an “anthropological mutation,” the results of which today—when individual lives and economic-financial power are interconnected in new ways—are still difficult to identify, and on which it is worth continuing to investigate.

Establishing the rule: Psychic dimension and social sphere The idea that there is a “psychic life of power,” that is, the fact that there exists an intimate interconnection between the individual’s

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psychic dimension and the political and social one, is at the center of a heated debate today—a debate which was, however, inaugurated by Sigmund Freud in the early 1930s with Civilization and Its Discontents (see Freud 1962). Freud discussed a modern paradigm, in which civilization required the sacrifice of instincts in exchange for the security ensured by the state through the establishment of rules of law. The general program of civilization implemented in modernity implied a progressive control of instincts and their increasing submission to a dominant control, which necessitates the “sacrifice” of instincts as a way toward stability and regulation. This is often, however, also a cause of unhappiness and discomfort. The classic Freudian framework of the psychic identity, defined as a split between the unitary and normative scope of the Ego and the instinctual trends of the Id, corresponds to a social structure characterized by a similar organization:  on the one hand, by the juridical institution of the state and, on the other hand, by the divergent drives of the individuals. Stability, for Freud, is the result of a regulatory exercise able to mobilize at the same time the psychic and social spheres. The dispositif underlying both spheres is “guilt,” both a psychological and a juridical concept. As early as Totem and Taboo, in which he reflects on the archaic past of the human species, Freud hypothesized that human instincts, unlike those of other species, tend to be violent, resulting in the act of the original patricide on which the sense of guilt is founded. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud continues to follow this trajectory from the point of view of the process of civilization and asks: “what means does civilization employ in order to inhibit the aggressiveness which opposes it, to make it harmless, to get rid of

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it, perhaps?” (1962:  70). In response to his own question, Freud writes: Aggressiveness is introjected, internalized; it is, in point of fact, sent back to where it came from, that is, it is directed against his own ego. There it is taken over by a portion of the ego, which sets itself over against the rest of the ego as super-ego, and which now, in the form of “conscience,” is ready to put into action against the ego the same harsh aggressiveness that the ego would have liked to satisfy upon other, extraneous individuals. The tension between the harsh super-ego and the ego that is subjected to it, is called by us the sense of guilt; it expresses itself as a need for punishment. Civilization therefore obtains mastery over the individuals dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city. (70) Taking the modern state as a model, Freud considers political institutions as an advantage for the collective life, despite the prices they require to pay. “Order,” Freud writes, “is a kind of compulsion to repeat which, when a regulation has been laid down once and for all, decides when, where and how a thing shall be done, so that in every similar circumstance one is spared hesitation and indecision. The benefits of order are incontestable” (40). The “final outcome” of the process of civilization should therefore be “a rule of law to which all  . . . have contributed by a sacrifice of their instincts, and which leaves no one . . . at the mercy of brute force” (42). And yet, there are no signs of an internal dysfunction in this development. The sense of guilt at the origin of the mechanism of

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neurosis, to which Freud gave so much attention in his studies, is the proof of what threatens from the inside “to undermine the modicum of happiness enjoyed by civilized men” (34). On this premise, it is worth wondering whether it is possible to inscribe the link between debt and guilt in a dimension of power where the institution of the rule is exclusively based on discipline, repression, and consequent sense of guilt that in the past affected the consciousness of countless generations in the pathological form of neurosis or hysteria, the latter being its feminine iteration studied by Freud. The fact that “sacrifices” are presented as a way to repay the contracted debt suggests the collocation of the semantic ambivalence between the two in the context of an exclusively punitive and repressive form of power—a power that takes the form of institutions capable of containing the chaotic and aggressive attitude that characterizes human instincts. In this case, similar to the state, the market itself would also be one of those institutions whose rules tyrannize individual and collective lives through disciplinary coercion. The existence of a form of repression cannot be doubted. This, however, should not lead to a simplification of the complexity of the phenomenon. The enormous transformation that has taken place over the past thirty or thirty-five years in the capitalist modes of production, requires a broader reflection that takes into account changes of the forms of power when politics began to adapt to changes that occurred in the economic sphere. In contemporary societies dominated by the global market, the establishment of the rule is a complex phenomenon, which is no longer simply founded, as was in the past, on the experience of repression and the sense of guilt following the breaking of a rule. Today, the rule

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is rather combined with the ability to initiate—with the autonomy in decision-making and action, with practices of administration— investment, care, and relationship aimed at satisfying desires rather than just at their repression. It is for this reason that neoliberal discourse emerged from the idea that the “free market” implies the creation of an institution that simultaneously presents itself as a public sphere and a practical sphere of individual autonomy. Consequently, the forms of discontent have also changed. In one of the most insightful studies on the subject in recent years, Alain Ehrenberg argues that the prevalence of depression over neurosis since the early 1980s is the effect of an altered relationship with rules and institutions, and a reaction to the emergence of the figure of the entrepreneur as a “collective model”: Depression began its ascent when the disciplinary model for behaviours, the rules of authority and observance of taboos that gave social classes as well as both sexes a specific destiny, broke against norms that invited us to undertake personal initiative by enjoining us to be ourselves. These new norms brought with them a sense that the responsibility for our existence lies not only within us but also within the collective between-us. (2010: 4) Depression thus appears as “the workshop of societal ambivalences” (9) in a society characterized by a new type of sovereignty and a new type of a regulatory institution. According to Ehrenberg: Depression teaches us about our current experience as an individual because it is the pathology of a society whose norm is no longer based on guilt and discipline but on responsibility and

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initiative  . . . . The individual is confronted with a pathology of inadequacy more than with a pathology of the mistake, with the universe of dysfunction more than with the universe of law. (9) The categories underlying this transformation are no longer “the allowed and the forbidden,” but “the possible and the impossible” (8). As Freud reminds us, this implies “the decline of conflict as a reference point upon which the nineteenth-century notion of the self was founded” (10). From the political sphere to the individual sphere, conflict as a dispositif of inclusion that excludes is the “normative center” (ibid.) of modernity, as we have already seen in relation to the theologicalpolitical paradigm. Depression, for Ehrenberg, is then “the historical mediator that forces conflictual humanity to retreat, threatened by neurosis, to the benefit of fusional humanity, searching for sensations to overcome an endless lack of tranquility” (205). But, he adds, “with the gospel of personal development on the one hand and the cult of performance on the other, conflict does not disappear; however, it loses its obvious quality” (205–6). Drawing on such an analysis, Massimo De Carolis participated in a discussion on Nuovi disagi della civiltà, hypothesizing the transition from a “society of guilt” to a “society of shame” (Borrelli, De Carolis, Napolitano and Recalcati 2013: 32), in an attempt to identify the change that is currently taking place, both within the individual psyche and in the broader dynamics of the community. I  am not sure—unlike De Carolis—that the “society of guilt” is experiencing its decline. Among other things, the renewed use of this category in reference to the phenomenon of public indebtedness seems to disprove this claim.

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I believe, rather, that the function of guilt has profoundly changed as the conditions that produced it have changed. However, as is well known, it is not easy to define what is still happening: “we cannot draw closed the net in which we are caught,” writes Benjamin in a 1921 fragment (1996:  288), which seems to prophetically describe the present situation. But if capitalism continues to appear as “a cult that creates guilt, not atonement” (288), and if, as De Carolis claims, every age creates “what we might call anthropogenic machines that produce the kind of man that a specific society needs” (Borrelli, De Carolis, Napolitano and Recalcati 2013:  7), then it seems legitimate to speak today of “a tendency to produce a different kind of man than what modern societies wanted” (33). This model doesn’t seek to suppress aggressive instincts through juridical dispositifs of exclusionary inclusion that produce guilt, but is ready to confront the possibility of new regulative institutions able to administer the libidinal economy at the foundation of human life through the multiplication of conditions that continually reproduce a situation of debt. Although “we will not miss the social use of guilt” (ibid.), and I would add its juridical use, this phenomenon, however, will lead us to confront new mechanisms of power, in which known components still exist, but are at the same time also transformed and inserted into a profoundly changed process.

Feminism and neoliberalism In recent years, the neoliberal policies and the new regulatory practices of neoliberalism have been challenged by feminist thought and practices. These have revealed themselves to be even more fertile

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thanks to their self-critical ability that, in addition to bearing witness to the difficulty we find ourselves in, also attest to the need to abandon sterile static positions. It was the feminist thought of the 1960s and 1970s that marked a definitive discontinuity with the modern, patriarchal order that created guilt, and proposed the issue of the “repressed in the social pact” and of the “subject excluded from the primary scene that according to both the Freudian narrative . . . and the philosophical narrative of the modern social contract is the fundamental act of the political community and prescribes its violent and sacrificial fate” (Dominijanni 2012:  31). This break has taken shape through theoretical speculations, but above all thanks to practices that have set in motion new measures for coexistence. As it was rightly recalled in some of the recent contributions on the topic “Feminism and Neoliberalism,” these claims did not concern only “a part of the social organization, but its order in its entirety” (Giardini 2014: 126); they were not a “contribution to the emancipatory project of the modern, but . . . a break from it” (Dominijanni 2014: 52). This was not so much “the female question,” “a matter of updating the techniques of representation in political institutions—voting rights, quotas in assigning positions, etc.—but an ontological question . . . at the boundary between what is in turn posed as human and non-human” (Giardini 2014:  126):  “a properly ontological-political question” (52). It is not possible to account for the complex and articulated international discussion that feminist thought and practices have produced, even through important internal diversifications:  from the thought of difference to gender theory, queer or LGBT. I am now

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interested in pointing out the intersection of the feminist movements with the innovative form of neoliberal power and the rethinking that this intersection has recently brought about within the debate on feminism—a reflection that can point the way to other equally fertile thoughts. With the emergence of the economic crisis and debt economy, feminist thought—promoting political struggle and rejecting any attempt at absorbing differences in the logic of modern patriarchal repressive power—has been able to perform a fruitful self-criticism. As has been rightly observed, “the crisis obviously contributes to reactivating the ‘economic’ level of the discourse” (Bazzicalupo 2014: 36). However, it is important to understand whether it is in fact necessary to recognize that “those differences and anarchy” claimed by feminism “actually refer to a change of subjectivity” (36) so radical that it also implies the profound change in forms of power that is at the origin of neoliberal policies. Particularly relevant is the recent feminist reflection on new forms of labor. I  am thinking above all about the debate on the topic of women’s labor in the post-Fordist era, of the resulting intertwining of precariousness and flexibility, which opened the discussion toward a new view of the ongoing processes (Nannicini 2002, 2006; Burchi and Di Martino 2013). The term “feminization of labor” (Morini 2010), used to define these transformations, besides indicating the massive entrance of women into the labor market, highlights how conditions that have historically characterized female labor of care and administration, the reproductive and domestic labor, today affect the whole sphere of production. The overlapping of work and life schedules, the involvement of the affective, cognitive, and relational

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resources and the individualization of the labor experience, which used to mark the “invisible” labor of women, are today topical in the world of labor as a whole:  “Unlike in the past,” writes Cristina Morini, “today women’s disempowerment does not occur only through repression (confinement, exclusion, removal from the public, even economic space) but also and above all through the gradual feminization of society” (2010: 126). In the literature on the subject, the new capitalist modes of production are also interpreted as a system that allowed a great number of women into the labor market, thus expediting or, for some, even causing an erosion of gender inequality. Rejecting this idea, Cristina Morini argues that in the transformation carried out by the new capitalist modes of production, the so-called female difference was exploited for new forms of labor and contractual performances. A controversial article on this subject written by critical theorist and feminist Nancy Fraser appeared in The Guardian in 2013. Through a critical analysis of feminism, Fraser argued that “Second-wave feminism emerged as a critique of [the state-managed capitalism of the postwar era] but has become the handmaiden of [a new form of capitalism].” Prior to this article, which introduced her argument to the general public, Fraser had presented her position in more extensive works (Fraser 2009, 2011). In 2013, she also published a book in which she addresses the question more broadly (Fraser 2013a). Although criticized within the feminist movement (in Italy, cf. at least the essays mentioned above by Bazzicalupo and Dominijanni), her argument has found much support (see Eisenstein 2009; Walby 2011). Although questionable in many respects, Fraser’s thesis attests to a change that one cannot fail to acknowledge. In a context in which

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life itself is part of production and of the new modes of valorization of capital, with all its affects, knowledge, relationships, subjugation no longer occurs only in the forms of repression, by which, as Freud proposed, guilt and inclusive exclusion are created. The investment in the same capability for initiative and care, which have always characterized domestic female labor, creates new modes of submission that are no longer directly coercive, but nevertheless oppressive. A  gradual introduction of women into the labor market is thus accompanied by a concomitant and widespread disempowerment of individual roles. The practice of infinite selfvalorization functional to the logic of capitalism has totally emptied individual lives, increasingly subject to the impossibility of expressing actual value. The inclusion of the emotional, affective, and subjective dimension in the world of production has meant the inclusion of desires into production and, at the same time, the transformation of consumption into an activity that produces value. The undeniable increase in the number of women in the labor market has not coincided with adequate valorization. Women with precarious positions are still the majority and female unemployment remains far greater than that of men. Not only, then, have gender inequalities and gender injustices not yet come to an end, but above all, through the phenomenon defined as the “feminization of labor,” a perverse process of the involvement of women is underway. This is based on the overall extension of modes of submission not explicitly coercive, but also no less oppressive and frustrating that largely involve investment in the same care and valorization skills of individual life that used to characterize domestic labor. The housewife, the showgirl, the immigrant domestic worker,

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or the knowledge worker are thus united by the same aptitude to valorize subjective, affective, and emotional components. In their book Lo schermo del potere, Alessandra Gribaldo and Giovanna Zapperi write:  “The showgirl and the spokesmodel are in a sense the spectacular embodiment of this body-machine in which people invest their ambitions and desires. Here the investment is to be understood as a financial operation capable of producing income” (2012: 52). The valorization of life, which must correspond to the immediate economic valorization of capital, transforms individual capacities, which are potentially open, into a condition that remains incomplete. Like indebtedness, it must not be filled, but constantly reproduced in order to be managed. Debt as a political operator presupposes the empty reproduction of ghostly desires which, as Beatriz Preciado brilliantly shows in her work, is totally embedded in the binary logic between frustration and consumption (see Preciado 2013). But it also implies “the critique of welfare-state paternalism” which, as Fraser argues, is internal to feminism. Significant is the example of “microcredits,” namely, “the programme of small bank loans to poor women in the global south” (Fraser 2013b): Cast as an empowering, bottom-up alternative to the top-down, bureaucratic red tape of state projects, microcredit is touted as the feminist antidote for women’s poverty and subjection. What has been missed, however, is a disturbing coincidence: microcredit has burgeoned just as states have abandoned macro-structural efforts to fight poverty, efforts that small-scale lending cannot possibly replace. In this case too, then, a feminist idea has been recuperated

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by neoliberalism. A perspective aimed originally at democratising state power in order to empower citizens is now used to legitimise marketisation and state retrenchment. (ibid.) In this framework, the practice of indebtedness that today characterizes neoliberal policies, rather than an economic problem in a strict sense, turns out to be a powerful political operator. The idle, infinite valorization typical of the logic of capital is the mechanism that feeds both the process of the feminization of labor as well as the phenomenon of generalized indebtedness. It is a process that disempowers the very elements from which capital produces value. However, denouncing the current situation—as Fraser does in referring to the welfare system organized by state and public authorities, although important for many reasons— doesn’t seem to fully grasp the meaning of the profound change we are witnessing that is bound to the new modes of regulation—a transformation to which the state and the market have contributed from the same side. Fraser’s current position in many ways confirms her position of 1997 when, in an impassioned public dialogue with Judith Butler, she defends the need to distinguish between the economic and the cultural sphere (cf. Fraser 1997). Stating the need to overcome the distinction between the two domains, in an attempt to identify what she thought was the more complex logic at the basis of the “cultural” genesis of power forms, Butler’s position seems to me more useful for an interpretation of the present time. The point is to try to understand whether this complexity also encapsulates new emancipatory attitudes or whether it is just another net in which to remain entangled.

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The mystery of guilt and the psychic life of power Neoliberalism is a form of government that is practiced with selfgovernment, requires administrative structures, and a political rationality with a different “anthropogenic machine” than modern societies. As I have attempted to show in the wake of Foucault, the “invention” of this dispositif is to be genealogically identified in Christianity and in the administrative institution of Ekklésia, which was the first to disrupt the duality of activity and passivity of power, on which the ancient societies were founded, and on which, in other ways, the modern political pact continued to be based. There are many differences between the “prototype” and the current implementation. In any case, the dispositif can operate using the specific resources of human life. Judith Butler’s attention is focused on these resources, with a view to an investigation of power that, beyond its modern structure, goes back to its psychic roots. Her analysis presupposes the break with the repressive logic of the modern patriarchal power carried out by feminist practices and theories, while at the same time questioning the naturalness of gender and sexual identity, as claimed by a certain kind of feminism, favoring a research aimed at identifying their cultural origin and their derivation from performative social practices. Since the mid 1990s, Butler, following in Foucault’s footsteps, has conducted a study of power as an anthropogenic machine, where processes of subjugation are intrinsically linked to techniques of subjectification. While Foucault appears to Butler interested in finding the materiality of power in its institutional forms, her focus is instead on the “psychic life of power,” as the title of the book devoted to this theme reads.

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The intermingling of the psychic and social spheres is the basis of Butler’s analysis, which aims to keep Foucault and Freud together in a trajectory that, from Hegel to Althusser through Nietzsche, deconstructs the modern posture of power as dominance over given subjects: To be dominated by a power external to oneself is a familiar and agonizing form power takes. To find, however, that what “one” is, one’s very formation as a subject, is in some sense dependent upon that very power is quite another. We are used to thinking of power as what presses on the subject from the outside, as what subordinates, sets underneath, and relegates to a lower order. This is surely a fair description of part of what power does. But if, following Foucault, we understand power as forming the subject as well, as providing the very condition of its existence and the trajectory of its desire, then power is not simply what we oppose but also, in a strong sense, what we depend on for our existence and what we harbor and preserve in the beings that we are. (1997: 1–2) Butler’s aim is, therefore, to question the alleged duality of an absolutely active subject and of one that is subordinate and passive to the exercise of power. Subject and power are rather involved as the result of a relationship that encompasses them and produces them both, as studies on biopolitics after Foucault have also argued. In this sense, however, it is clear how the subject is not only the product of power, but also unwittingly dependent on it. So much so that one can say that a precautionary obedience is the source of freedom itself or that the two experiences are not originally contrasted but coincidental.

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Here emerges the problem of the norm as psychic institution besides its function as social institution, as well as the role that the “sense of guilt” plays in an investigation of the “psychic life of power.” Butler aims to show that “guilt” arises in the psychic dimension “not in consequence of internalizing an external prohibition” (25) or of internalizing violence that is directed toward the outside, but as a “primary subordination” through which “a subject emerges against itself in order, paradoxically, to be for itself ” (28); that is, it emerges from a masochistic posture. Freud deals with this issue in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, published in 1920 (see Freud 1961a), where the logic of selfpreservation of the pleasure principle—through which the psychic apparatus works—appears as insufficient to account for all the drives that form the psyche and shape human life. Hence Freud’s need to admit to the existence of another principle, apparently opposed to the first, which originates from a death drive. It is a destructive principle that, as such, is fundamentally uneconomic for the self-preservation of the psyche. In this text, Freud proposes the idea of an ​​ economy of the psyche that is not exclusively linked to self-preservation, and therefore the idea that death drives is not dualistically opposed to the life affirming impulses deriving from the pleasure principle. In other words, for Freud, the pleasure principle seems never to fade in human life, but it does not coincide with the mere preservation of life. There are specific complications that lead to different articulations of this principle. What complicates the prevalence of the principle of pleasure is the possible and different ways of administering it. In this line, particularly important to our discussion is the interest with

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which Freud, beginning with this text, increasingly observes psychic phenomena from an “economic” point of view. The “topographical” model in Freud’s analysis, according to which the psyche is spatially divided into overlapping regions (Id, Ego, and Super-Ego), is indeed linked to a juridical-legal approach culminating in the predominance of the Law of the Super-Ego, corresponding—as we have seen—to the state juridical institution in the social sphere. This vision, ultimately excessively rigid for a full understanding of psychic dynamics, is progressively integrated by Freud with an “economic” approach, which presupposes a dynamic management of the psyche’s life. To a certain extent, the dynamic management of psychic phenomena is based on the economic logic of costs and benefits. We should not fail to remember that during the same years that Freud was elaborating the “economic” view as best suited for the complexity of psychic phenomena, some of the major exponents of the so-called Austrian marginalist school were active in Vienna. The idea underlying the economic theories of the Austrian school—that​​ praxis can be optimized—seems to find a clear correspondence in Freud’s economic approach, which aims to calculate the dynamic expenditure needed for the psychic economy to achieve a healthy balance of instincts. For Freud, however, the optimization of psychic phenomena is not exhausted in a linear calculation of costs and benefits, ultimately consistent with the legal structure of the topographical point of view aimed at self-preservation, which he was trying to put into question. Similarly, for the marginalists, economic value does not coincide, as in Smith’s and Ricardo’s classical approach, with the work needed to

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produce it. Going back to the utility attributed by the consumer, value tends to move onto a subjective level, dismantling the metaphysical construct of classical economy and highlighting desire as the core of the economic dispositif of the psychic life of the subjects:  a desire for satisfaction and balance, but also an excessive desire, unsatisfied, always focused on itself, and therefore continually taken in the whirlwind of the endless cycle of supply and demand based on consumption. At a time when, with neoliberalism, even the consumer becomes an “entrepreneur of oneself,” one’s value increases not only in proportion to the quantity of what one consumes, but also to the quality of the consumed products, which transform the way of being of the consumer as “entrepreneur of oneself.” The economy of the psyche, somewhat in line with Freud’s point of view, plays a decisive role for the political affirmation of economy as a form of government, as a power that relies on squander more than repression. As for Butler, she is particularly interested in the role that the “sense of guilt” plays for the “psychic life of power.” Interestingly, in addition to Freud, she refers to Melanie Klein to talk about the “sense of guilt.” In her interpretation of Freud’s work, Klein develops the hypothesis of a “primary masochism,” which her master suggested but never fully explored: the idea, that is, that the “economic problem of masochism” (Freud 1961b), its “mystery” as the primary impulse of human life, does not reside exclusively in the evolutionary interiorization of aggression and violence, which are instinctively aimed toward the outside and at the struggle for survival. According to Freud, “the existence of a masochistic trend in the instinctual life of human beings may justly be described as mysterious from the economic point of view” (159), because it benefits from the condition of disadvantage in

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which it rises. In a paradoxical logic in which life instincts and death drive coexist, profit, so to speak, emerges autonomously and does not simply derive from the cost paid to obtain it. This is the mystery of living beings who act against themselves or, rather, against their merely conservative attitude. Klein’s work focuses on this mystery, particularly her study of the “sense of guilt,” aimed at tracing—within a Freudian approach—its origin to a time prior to the Oedipal complex and the patriarchal power connected to it; that is, prior to the emergence of guilt as a consequence of the interiorization of aggression or as an internalized form of rejection. Her interest is in understanding in what sense guilt results for Freud, but also beyond his findings, “from the innate conflict of ambivalence, from the eternal struggle between love and the death trends” ([1952] 2002: 272). In her studies on early infancy, Klein asserts that “the struggle between life and death instincts already operates during birth and accentuates the persecutory anxiety aroused by this painful experience” (278). Accordingly, guilt originates at birth along with the anxiety for the loss of the beloved object. With their contrasting instincts, human beings feel responsible for such loss, but this loss is precisely what allowed their life to begin. “Melancholy,” as described by Freud, reconsidered by Klein, and reinterpreted by Butler, is a condition in which this loss is not accepted: “The pain of loss is ‘credited’ to the one who suffers it, at which point the loss is understood as a fault or injury deserving of redress; one seeks redress for harms done to oneself, but from no one except oneself ” (Butler 1997: 184). All this seems to be intimately related to the abyss that is produced at the beginning of human life:  a void in which—both from the

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phylogenetic and the ontogenetic point of view—one experiences loss and abandonment at the same time. It is the way in which the human being is given the opportunity to shape his or her life: a disorienting enterprise. There is no center from which to begin. The foundations available to other living species are dissolved for human beings. They have no natural environment to live in, and do not know specific signals that could disinhibit given receptors specifically selected for survival. In the process of evolution, human life has produced different modes of self-preservation. Spaces in natural environments are filled with automatically triggered processes, which are never suspended or deactivated. No possibility can appear in them. In human life, instead, there exists a chasm, which is exciting and confusing at the same time. It is a void in which one can sink, and this fact tends to turn this life into an overwhelming enterprise, which seems to have nothing to do with a well-built architecture aimed at self-preservation. This explains the suffering already mentioned by Butler, which is “the pain of loss . . . credited to the one who suffers it, at which point the loss is understood as a fault” (1997: 184). A deep, radical disesteem can arise at the beginning of a life that feels open possibility as a threat or an impoverishment. Much of the philosophical thought of the twentieth century— aimed at dismantling the metaphysical notion of the subject and interested in the definition of a new anthropology—arises precisely from a reflection on this “original disesteem” and has for the most part ended up conceiving the extent to which human life is open as impoverishment, lack, and negativity. It suffices to think of the great insights of German philosophical anthropology (Gehlen, Plessner,

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etc.) or the work done by Martin Heidegger in this direction. Particularly significant for our trajectory is, for example, the fact that Heidegger, in paragraph 58 of Being and Time, speaking of the “guilt” charged by consciousness at the time of the “authentic calling,” defines it as “debt” and “lack” not of “something” specific, but as an ontological-existential character of the “negativity” that has always marked human existence. This negativity, though discussed and problematized by Heidegger himself, has never lost the opacity that characterizes his discourse. In many respects, Butler does not escape this philosophical contortion either, although she doesn’t fail to carry out a profound reflection that takes into account the complexity of the phenomenon. She acknowledges, for example, that prior to the operation of a “critical agency”—the elaboration, that is, of a potentially open linguistic praxis—“there is no question of high or low self-esteem” (ibid.). There is, therefore, no negative qualification. It is as if the ontological openness to different possibilities existing at the beginning of life, in order to assume a power that belongs to it, finds the ways of accusing itself of a fault, a lack, a debt, which in this way becomes the only thing in which it can invest to give value to what seems not to have any. This issue is certainly very complex and does not find in Butler’s work—at least not in the work examined here—a fully accomplished articulation; nor is it possible for us to deal with it adequately now. What is rather interesting at this point is how Butler, on the basis of the close interconnection she identifies between the individual psychic dimension and the collective one, insists that “the violence of social regulation is not to be found in its unilateral action, but

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in the circuitous route by which the psyche accuses itself of its own worthlessness” (ibid.). The “melancholy” (see Mazzeo 2009) at the center of Butler’s book, along with Freud and Klein, outlines the scenario in which the subject of power emerges, in both the active and passive sense of “subject.” The current forms of melancholy in the conditions of depression and discomfort that characterize contemporary societies dominated by global market is merely one of the “tortuous paths” of its “psychic life,” of the life of a power that represses through freedom.

Envisioning new ways of assuming power In the new and implicit pact between individuals and institutions established in recent decades, individuals have agreed to participate in production and financial apparatuses as “human resources” and “human capital” on the grounds that they could enjoy virtually unlimited

freedom.

Capitalism

has

increasingly

permeated

social relations and subjective desires through the exaltation of freedom, which in fact has found its greatest form of expression in consumerism. The continuous self-production of desires, deadened by disquieting forms of enjoyment that seemed easy to achieve, has ended up confining pleasure to self-harming modes of consumption. I  am thinking of the new forms of discomfort in contemporary societies, such as anorexia, bulimia, and drug addiction; but also of the numerous examples of consumption addictions, recently defined with the expression—perhaps not too elegant, but in some way effective—the “gadgetization of existence” (Recalcati 2010).

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A lecture Jacques Lacan held at the State University of Milan in 1972 has often been used to analyze this phenomenon. It is here that Lacan develops the so-called capitalist discourse (see Lacan 1978). He exposes the new configuration that the capitalist regime assumes in its hypermodern phase, which is different from the modern capitalist regime. On the one hand, capitalist discourse is the discourse of the “turbo-consumer,” of the homo felix, of those who feel free to enjoy what they can freely buy (see Pagliardini 2012). On the other hand, however, it is also the discourse of a lost subjectivity (see Chicchi 2012; Mura 2015). It produces, as a matter of fact, the condition of perverse inebriation, which is disorienting, because it comes from the intertwining of pleasure and pain. The studies of the forms of discomfort of hypermodern civilization have often given primary attention to its sadistic-narcissistic component, essentially linked to the solipsistic enjoyment by which they appear dominated (see Recalcati 2010:  33–5; and Borrelli, De Carolis, Napolitano and Recalcati 2013:  11–13). The main cause of this phenomenon is found in the decline of the guiding function of the “Law of the Father” (see Recalcati 2010). Some even seem to feel nostalgic for it on the ethical and political level (see Godani 2014), ignoring its patriarchal implications. In these forms of nostalgia, however, there is also a masochistic component that, in my view, should be studied in depth, independently from its combination with sadistic or narcissistic elements. In contemporary societies, the virtually limitless freedom at the basis of the new implicit pact established between individuals and institutions—before being a freedom of enjoyment, “ideally free of debt” (Borrelli, De Carolis, Napolitano and Recalcati 2013:  13)—configures

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itself as a repeated attempt to confront oneself with the frustration of never being up to the situation. Constant self-criticism is therefore at the origin of a sense of guilt, which does not derive from the trespassing of inhibiting rules, but from a lack that appears unbridgeable and therefore creates debt, because it leads to obsessive forms of consumption to compensate for the feeling of not being adequate. But if power, as Butler claims, has a psychic life, and if, on the other hand, every human life can only take shape through the complex dynamic of power relationships from which it rises, new modes of power are still possible starting from different modes of drawing from the materiality of individual lives. Assuming terms of power that one never made but to which one is vulnerable, on which one depends in order to be, appears to be a mundane subjection at the basis of subject formation. “Assuming” power is no simple process, however, for power is not mechanically reproduced when it is assumed. Instead, on being assumed, power runs the risk of assuming another form and direction. (Butler 1997: 21) I think that times are ripe for us to be able to take this “possibility” seriously, even in the awareness that the subjection produced by economic power is not just a coercive power but has its own specific “psychic life.” The psychic operation of the norm offers a more insidious route for regulatory power than explicit coercion, one whose success allows its tacit operation within the social. And yet, being psychic, the norm does not merely reinstate social power, it becomes formative and vulnerable in highly specific ways. (ibid.)

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If power is not only what represses the subject, what dominates it and is opposed by it, but also what gives it life and brings it to existence, today more than ever, modes that are not only repressive come to the fore through the widespread use on the economic and social level of creative faculties, whose valorization is based on a constant selfcriticism that impoverishes them by neutralizing their potentialities. But if the subject is at times the condition and the instrument of action, this also implies the possibility of an implicit vulnerability of the same regulatory process, of constant criticism, able to experiment with different forms of power, new forms of social cooperation, and a new relationship with the world and with things. It implies, for example, the possibility of recognizing, even with a certain degree of irreverence (see Coccia 2014) that, in addition to the pervasive and ubiquitous phenomenon of the economy of consumerism and debt, there are facts supported by the possibility of a balanced search for specific, common goods. It is therefore necessary to find new energies for what has already been given to us in an attempt to produce a revolution capable of unprecedented forms of assumption of power. It is worth accepting what appears to be a challenge, even though the journey in this direction seems long, tortuous, and particularly complex, given the opacity of the mechanisms we aspire to activate differently. ❖ Since Europe was directly involved in the world economic turmoil, it has begun to publicly speak of “debt” as “guilt.” The “German model” might have promoted a view of public debt contracted by some EU countries as guilt. According to this interpretation, the situation

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in which some of the southern European states found themselves, resulted from poor national economic management, which is easy to assess and to punish. It is worth asking ourselves what is at stake in this passage. We need, in other words, to understand whether considering debt as guilt does in fact mean to situate the current widespread condition of debt within the scope of what can be fixed, like a damage or a transgressed rule, an agreement that hasn’t been respected, but which is nevertheless possible to repay through “sacrifice,” as claimed by the policies of the “troika.” More than an economic question in the technical sense, the problem of debt turns out to be a powerful political operator that radicalizes a new dimension of power in which the institution of the rule is not exclusively based on discipline, repression and guilt, as in the modern paradigm. Today, there are not only juridical dispositifs that create guilt, but also new forms of regulatory institutions capable of administering the libidinal economy at the foundation of human life. They do so not in repressive ways, but through the continuous reproduction of conditions that create debt. The political function of guilt, therefore, has changed along with the changing of the conditions that produced it. A “psychic life of power” is here called into question. According to Judith Butler, this condition offers a more insidious pattern than explicit coercion. This opens a space to rethink—even in light of the feminist critique of neoliberalism—the limits and potentialities of power. On the one hand, this power implies less repressive modes, that nevertheless neutralize creative capabilities—often depreciated and impoverished together with the material conditions. On the other

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hand, it brings to light the need for a new critical action that is capable of assuming power differently, beyond world economic domination, but also beyond the most well-known forms of antagonism linked to the modern, patriarchal order-creating guilt, which are in many respects similar and opposed to the modern order.

Conclusions

In many ancient and modern cultures, debt, like guilt, implies a bond, an obligation. At the origin of such a bond is a juridical relationship, like the religious one between man and God. This relationship establishes the dependence of the living on the sovereign powers and their obligation to redeem, throughout life, the vital energy given to them. The most ancient form of redemption to repay the deity for the debt of life is sacrifice. The power associated with the sacrificial cult focuses on the victim: the germs of dissent that exist in the common life are deflected from the community and directed toward the victim. As a constraint, debt is the expression of a social bond, whose break implies the guilt of nonobservance. This bond is therefore also and essentially a potent dispositif of power. Thus, it is clear in what sense the expression “being in debt” does not simply mean having “debt.” It indicates something that cannot be possessed, but which possesses and subjugates individual lives: literally, in this sense, “being in debt” indicates a “debt of life,” which is not possible to overcome. Today, more than ever, “being in debt” does not indicate a state in which one enters at any given moment in life, but is the original state in which everyone is born, be they poor or wealthy. Even those

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who have never voluntarily contracted debt are born indebted, because states transmit their debt to those who are part of it even before they are born. Of course, the role and extent of debt changes depending on the geographical, political, and social context, and on whether a specific state offers some degree of protection to its citizens. For example, migrants landing in one piece on the Italian coasts are obliged to pay the contracted debt to their transporters for many years. American students, long before they begin to work, find themselves indebted to banks who have paid their college tuition, and already know that for a certain number of years they should allocate some of their potential earnings to repay their debt. Nowadays, more than ever, debt comes before life itself, in the sense that it not only precedes it but also determines it, even exposing it to the risk of death, as evidenced by the high rate of debt-related suicides registered in recent years (cf. Simone 2014). However, “debt” has been explicitly linked to “guilt,” especially with the EU’s direct involvement in the global economic crisis. The issue of debt emerged as a specific problem for some European nations that were considered to be guilty of mismanaging the state. A  fault is easy to attribute and place among the things to be amended, such as damage done, a rule transgressed, or an agreement not respected that, however, is possible to repay through “sacrifice.” Recent policies of economic revival and stimulus, critical of the system promoting a regime of austerity, explicitly opposed the rigid paradigm that creates guilt and positioned themselves as an alternative. However, as suggested in this book, more than a real alternative, this line of economic development has emerged as an opaque sign that still needs to be investigated, and the center of a wider problem that requires

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further analysis. To be sure, the current dominating dispositif of debt seems to be an even more complex mechanism than the juridical one, to which, in many respects, it belongs. Debt today is not so much, or merely, a condition to be corrected— as the austerity policies’ authoritarian imposition of sacrifice seems to indicate—nor simply the latest and empty expression of the juridical bond that, in absorbing life in the sphere of the law, cannot be acknowledged in its totality. Indebtedness is rather a condition that is continually produced and nourished, because, as the recent policies of economic stimulus show, it is that in which it is possible to invest. A radical change is under way in the regulatory production of the market economy that, starting from the neoliberal turn, constitutes itself as a political institution. Hence the genealogical link with the Christian religious experience that I  have outlined as a practical field of regulatory experimentation beginning precisely from the elaboration of a juridical relationship that, in the Jewish religion, unites man to God. The function of guilt related to the economy of debt therefore changed when the conditions that produced it changed. The categories underlying this change are no longer merely juridical, but are linked to the economic practice of valuation. Guilt, here, is not just the expression of a bond that condemns a priori to be culpable. It is the condition produced when the ways of attributing value to life with neoliberal policies fully correspond to the valorization of capital, making it possible for each individual to become “human capital.” Individual faculties, which are potentially open to possibilities, are thus transformed by the frustration of never feeling adequate to the situation. A  constant self-criticism is the source of a sense of guilt,

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the fundamental characteristic of which is not so much that it comes from a juridical bond, but that it derives from an economic valuation model, which immediately results in investment opportunities into what is lacking. An infinite debt is thus reproduced, which materially derives from obsessive forms of consumption aimed at compensating for the belief that one is not up to expectations. Therefore, we should try to reconsider what currently appears as a lack in order to change what seems to be an entangled net. If it is true that every society can produce the kind of man it needs, I believe that in order to move in this direction it might be very fertile to further expose the mechanisms of the “anthropogenic machine” of neoliberal societies. This machine is in many ways different from the juridical one that many ancient and modern societies have tried to perfect. Our most difficult task is to find a way to reactivate the machine in a new way, different from the senseless path tried so far.

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INDEX

accumulation 8, 42, 56, 57 administration, administrative 9, 16, 17, 20, 112, 120, 136, 140 Agamben, Giorgio 4, 68–9, 71, 83–4, 90, 92–4, 114–15 Aglietta, Michael 49, 72, 76–7, 83, 121 Althusser, Louis 146 Anderson, Gary 118 appropriation 10–19, 22–3, 26, 28, 31–3, 38, 58, 75, 122, 126 Aristotle 20–2, 23, 40 asceticism 96–8 Assmann, Jan 108–10 Atwood, Margaret 33 austerity 1–2, 10, 58, 85, 107, 115, 123, 127, 130–2, 160–1 Ayub, Muhammad 102 Balibar, Etienne 95 barter 21, 23, 25, 29–30, 33–4, 47–50, 77 Bazzicalupo, Laura 43, 140, 141 Benjamin, Walter 2, 89–97, 100–1, 107, 114, 121, 124, 130, 138 Benveniste, Émile 123 Berger, Peter L. 66, 67 biopolitics 43, 55, 69, 92, 94, 146 biopolitical power 56, 84 biopolitical model 92, 100 Bonney, Richard 66 Borrelli, Francesca 137, 138, 154 Brown, Raymond 117–18 Burchi, Sandra 140 Butler, Judith 67, 132, 144–7, 149–53, 155, 157

Cacciari, Massimo 70 capital 8, 19, 28, 41, 42, 56, 57, 62, 74, 103, 120, 122, 142–3, 144, 161 human capital 41, 43, 63, 115, 153, 161 capitalism 57, 62, 91, 94–8, 100–4, 107, 121, 124, 138, 141–2, 153–4 capitalist economy 14, 19–20, 23, 57, 61, 90, 97, 102, 107 capitalist enterprise 62, 76 capitalist modes of production 11, 19, 40, 98, 127, 135, 141 care 122, 136, 142 labor of care 140 Chevallier, Philippe 99 Chicchi, Federico 154 Christianity, Christian 68, 69, 98–103, 107–19, 111–22, 124–5, 129, 145, 161 civilization 33, 52, 133–4, 154 classical 19, 34, 39–42, 55, 77, 126 economic theory 10, 14, 22–3, 31, 35, 38, 40, 148–9 Coccia, Emanuele 156 communication 24–5, 32, 35 consumerism 153, 156 Cooper, Melinda 7–8 credit, micro credit 8, 33–6, 48, 52, 55, 64, 65, 131, 143 creditor 33–4, 36, 37, 48, 50, 53–5, 74, 121 crisis 1–2, 9, 18, 39, 44, 65, 73, 84, 86, 94, 131 debt crisis 57 economic crisis 7–8, 18, 39, 46, 57, 76, 115, 126–8, 140, 160 financial crisis 1, 56, 59, 106

172

INDEX

Dardot, Pierre 40, 45 De Carolis, Massimo 4, 137–8, 154 De Grauwe, Paul 129–30 debt, indebtness 1–2, 7–10, 19, 28, 32– 4, 36–8, 40, 46–57, 59, 65, 70–3, 75–80, 83–7, 89–90, 95, 102, 104, 108, 114–24, 126–32, 138, 143–4, 152, 154–7, 159–62 be in debt 7, 92, 125, 159 debt of life 78–9, 83, 116 generalized 71, 144 primordial 49–50, 78–9 private 128 psychology of 9 public 45, 75, 128 society of 54 sovereign 9, 44, 46, 53, 75 debtor 33–4, 36–7, 48–50, 53–5, 84, 117, 121, 123 Deleuze, Gilles 54 deposit 43, 120–2, 124, 127 depression 136–7, 153 desire 27, 41, 44, 80–1, 126, 134, 136, 142–3, 146, 149, 153 Di Martino, Teresa 140 Dienst, Richard 18 distribution 13, 15–18 Dodd, Nigel 35 Dominijanni, Ida 139, 141 economy 2, 8, 9, 14, 16, 17, 18, 20–3, 27–31, 38, 40, 45, 48, 55, 57, 61–6, 69, 71–4, 76–7, 85–6, 94–5, 98–9, 101–2, 107, 113–15, 122–3, 125, 127, 130–1, 138, 149, 156–7 capitalist (see capitalism) debt economy 2, 56, 140, 161 global 9, 10, 18, 32, 126–7 market economy 26, 30–2, 42, 106–7, 161 political economy 14, 19, 27, 69, 98

of the psyche 147–8 Ehrenberg, Alain 136–7 enterprise, entrepreneur 41–2, 45, 62–3, 76, 97, 108, 122, 125–7, 129, 151 Esposito, Roberto 4, 52–4, 70–1, 83, 92–4 ethical 41, 126, 128, 154 exchange 10, 19–36, 38, 42, 47–9, 54–5, 77–8, 83, 122, 126, 131 exclusion 13, 52, 59, 71, 92–3, 105, 141–2 faith 35, 63–6, 72, 75, 79, 86, 119–22, 124 feminism, feminist 3, 138–41, 143, 145, 157 feminization (of labor) 142, 144 finance, financial 1, 8–10, 40, 45, 53, 56, 58–9, 62–3, 72–7, 80, 84, 86, 102, 106–7, 122, 125–7, 132, 143, 153 financialization (of the economy) 52, 61–2, 65, 72–3, 126–7 Fordism, Fordist, post-Fordism, post-Fordist 39, 72, 140 Foucault, Michel 2, 27–8, 43–4, 55–7, 68, 98–105, 107, 113–16, 120–2, 124, 145–6 Fraser, Nancy 141, 143–4 freedom 20, 28, 31, 37, 51, 56–9, 104–5, 111–13, 115, 146, 153–4 Freud, Sigmund 133–5, 137, 139, 142, 146–50, 153 Fukuyama, Francis 15 Fumagalli, Andrea 73 Galli, Carlo 66, 70 Gallino, Luciano 45, 62 Gentili, Dario 4, 95 Gentiloni, Paolo 85

INDEX

Giardini, Federica 139 gift 7, 10, 22, 28–34, 36–8, 47, 54, 78, 120, 126 Giglioli, Daniele 84 Giorda, Maria Chiara 65 Girard, René 80–1, 83, 91, 116–17 globalization 15, 18, 40, 44, 103 governance 44, 59, 68–70, 106, 122, 124 government, governmental 16, 27–8, 38, 43–5, 47, 50, 54, 63, 68–9, 75, 80, 85, 98–102, 104, 107, 112–16, 122, 124, 131, 145, 149 governmentality 55, 68, 99, 105–6, 114–15 Graeber, David 46–55, 59 Gribaldo, Alessandra 143 Grimm, Jacob Ludwig Karl 123 Grimm, Wilhelm Karl 123 Guattari, Pierre-Félix 54 guilt, sense of guilt, guilty 1, 49, 59, 80–1, 83–7, 90–5, 102, 108–11, 116, 118–20, 123–4, 128–39, 142, 147, 149–50, 152, 155–61 Habermas, Jürgen 66–7 Hardt, Michael 11 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 146 Heidegger, Martin 152 Hudson, Michael 9, 49 Huntington, Samuel P. 66 inclusion 13, 52, 59, 71, 92, 137–8 indebted 1, 10, 53–4, 56–7, 59, 75, 85, 131, 160 Inglehart, Ronald 67 instinct, instinctive 133–5, 138, 148–50 institution, institutional 11–16, 19–20, 22–4, 26–8, 31, 35, 45, 50–2, 57, 68, 72, 74–6, 80, 83–5, 92, 94, 98, 100, 103–4, 107, 109–10, 113, 118,

173

121–5, 132–6, 138–9, 145, 147–8, 153–4, 157, 161 interest (economic, private) 8, 20, 24–6, 28, 30–4, 47, 50, 73, 106–7 investment 32, 42, 62, 74, 105, 116, 120, 125, 127, 129, 136, 142–3, 162 Jesus Christ 112–13, 115–16, 119–20, 124 Joas, Hans 67 judicial, juridical 12–14, 16, 19, 26, 57, 70–2, 77, 80–3, 86, 91–4, 98, 100, 104, 107, 109–10, 112–13, 115, 121, 124, 133, 138, 148, 157, 159, 161, 162 juridico-theological 87 Klein, Melanie 149–50, 153 Klein, Naomi 45 Kojève, Alexandre 15–18 Krugman, Paul 130 Kurtz, Lester R. 66 labor (work) 11, 13, 19–20, 21–3, 32, 35, 40–3, 55–8, 61, 98, 125–7, 140–2, 144, 148 Lacan, Jacques 154 Lafargue, Paul 63 Laval, Christian 40, 45 law 11–13, 29, 36–7, 57, 81, 89–94, 99, 103–5, 107, 109–14, 117, 119–20, 133–4, 137, 148, 154, 161 Lazzarato, Maurizio 3, 54–9, 115 liberalism 14, 39, 42 Lucarelli, Stefano 73 Macho, Thomas 128 Malinowsky, Bronislav 23 management, managerial 18, 44–5, 61, 76, 86, 106, 108, 112–13, 120, 128, 148, 157 Marazzi, Christian 35, 42, 127 Marella, Maria Rosaria 11

174

INDEX

Marginalism, marginalist 148 market 8, 13, 15–16, 18–20, 22–32, 36– 7, 39–42, 44–7, 49–52, 55, 59, 63, 69, 73–7, 80, 84, 86, 103, 106–7, 125–6, 135–6, 140–2, 144, 153, 161 Marramao, Giacomo 67, 103 Marx, Karl, Marxian 11, 14–15, 17, 19, 23, 26–8, 42, 54, 57, 63, 98, 102–3, 130 masochism, masochist 147, 149, 154 Mattei, Ugo 11 Matthew (Apostle) 117–19 MAUSS 32 Mauss, Marcel 29–34, 36, 47 Mazzeo, Marco 153 melancholy 150, 153 Mezzadra, Sandro 19 mimetism, mimetic 83 money 9, 32, 34–6, 46, 48–51, 54, 64–5, 76–7, 79–80, 83, 123 Morini, Cristina 140–1 Mura, Andrea 154 Nannicini, Adriana 140 Napoli, Paolo 4, 121–2 Napolitano, Francesco 137–8, 154 Negri, Toni 11 Neilson, Brett 19 neoclassical (economic theory) 22–3, 26, 31, 35, 42, 72 neoliberalism 3, 39, 41–3, 46, 55, 58, 99, 102, 105–6, 138–9, 144–5, 149, 157 Nietzsche, Friedrich 48, 54, 130, 146 nomos 12–13, 16, 113 norm (rule) 12–13, 26–7, 29, 43, 45, 83, 93–4, 105, 107, 109–10, 123, 128, 132–6, 147, 155, 157, 160 normative (regulatory) 27, 74–5, 101, 104, 107, 121, 122, 124, 133, 136–8, 155–7, 161 Norris, Pippa 67

Obama, Hussein Barack 9 obligation 31, 36, 78, 110, 113, 120, 123, 159 Ohno, Taiichi 102 Oikonomia 20, 68–9, 108, 112–13 Orléan, André 35–6, 49, 72–7, 80, 83, 121 Padoan, Pier Carlo 85 Pagliardini, Alex 154 pardoning 119 Paul of Tarsus (Apostle) 112, 120, 122 Pinto, Valeria 42 Polanyi, Karl 29–30, 32 politics, political 3, 10–23, 27–8, 35, 38–40, 43–6, 52, 55–6, 58–9, 61– 2, 65–72, 75, 78, 83–6, 89, 91–2, 94, 96, 99–100, 105–10, 113–14, 116, 125–6, 133–5, 137, 139–40, 143–5, 149, 154, 157, 160–1 Pollack, Detlef 67 potlatch 31, 36 power 7, 16–17, 22, 24, 35–7, 41, 43, 45, 52–4, 56–9, 62, 64–5, 68–71, 78–9, 82, 84, 87, 91–2, 98, 101–3, 105, 107, 109, 111–17, 121, 124, 127, 130–2, 135, 138, 140, 144–7, 149–50, 152–3, 155–9 economic 27, 44, 63, 65, 67, 72, 83–6, 94, 97–8 governmental 44, 98, 99–102, 104, 113–15, 122, 124 juridical 26, 80, 82–3, 92, 94 pastoral 99–100, 122, 124 political 35, 43, 99 Preciado, Beatrix 143 production 7–8, 10, 13–14, 16, 25–7, 40, 43, 55–6, 74, 126–7, 140, 142 forms/modes of 16, 23, 32, 41, 44, 97–8, 103, 127, 135, 141 process 11, 13, 22

INDEX

productive system 38, 72 structure 39 psychic 125, 132–3, 145–9, 152–3, 155, 157 rationality 25, 27–8, 40, 43, 58, 96, 103–4, 125, 145 rationalization 80, 91, 103 Reagan, Ronald 39 Recalcati, Massimo 137–8, 153–4 Regulation (School of) 72–3, 75–6, 80, 83–4, 106, 116 regulatory (see normative) religion 46, 49, 63, 65–7, 72, 76, 78, 81, 86, 89–90, 94–7, 101–2, 108, 111, 114, 117, 121, 124, 161 rent 127 Renzi Matteo 85 Revel, Judith 100 Revenge 81–3, 130 Ricardo, David 148 right 13 of property/ownership 15, 19 Rodotà, Stefano 11 rule (see norm) sacrifice, sacrificial 2, 41, 50, 58, 76, 78–85, 91, 93, 116–17, 119, 120, 123, 128–9, 133–5, 139, 157, 159–61 sanction 36, 92, 109–11 Schmitt, Carl 11–18, 68, 89–90, 92, 94, 108 Scholem, Gershom 89 Schuld/Schulden 1, 90, 123–4, 129–32 Secularization 67–8, 70, 86, 94, 96, 108 Senellart, Michel 100 Simmel, Georg 35, 64 Simone, Anna 160 sin, sinner 109–11, 117–20, 131 Smith, Adam 21–2, 24–6, 47, 69, 148 state 13, 15–16, 18–19, 26, 39, 44, 49–53, 56–7, 59, 68, 70–3, 75–6, 82, 84,

175

95–6, 99–100, 104, 106–10, 126, 128, 133–5, 141, 143–4, 148, 160 national state, nation-state 14, 16, 44–6, 58, 68, 79, 84, 98 Stiglitz, Joseph 9 Stimilli, Elettra 2, 95, 130 Stroumsa, Guy 117 structure, superstructure, structural 12, 14, 16, 24, 31, 33–4, 39, 42, 56–7, 68, 72, 80–1, 89, 94–6, 98, 102–4, 108, 113, 126, 133, 143, 145, 148 Sunder Rajan, Kaushik 43 surplus value 8, 11, 14, 19 Taubes, Jacob 89 Taylor, Charles 67 Thatcher, Margaret 39 theological 68–70, 87, 97, 99, 108, 110, 114 theological-political 68, 70–1, 83, 86, 96, 99–100, 110, 137 theology 61, 82, 94, 96, 114 economic 61, 68–9, 86, 100 political 67–71, 86, 89, 91–2, 100, 108, 110 Thurnwald, Richard 29–30 Titus Flavius Vespasianus 117 transgression 93, 111 trust (confidence) 35–6, 49, 63–4 Turri, Maria Grazia 65 valorization (of life), self-valorization 8, 42, 44, 63, 77, 86, 127, 142–4, 156, 161 valuation 22–3, 26–7, 35, 73, 75, 161–2 value 8, 19–20, 22–4, 27, 34–6, 42–4, 47, 49, 61, 62–4, 73, 77, 93, 104, 127, 142, 144, 148–9, 152, 161

176

INDEX

victim, victimism 79, 81–2, 84, 117, 159 violence 37, 46, 51–3, 59, 79–83, 91–2, 104, 116–17, 147, 149, 152 Virno, Paolo 4, 35, 43 wage 55 Walby, Sylvia 141

Walras, Léon 23 Weber, Max 2, 65, 96–8, 100–1, 103, 107, 124 Weber, Samuel 95 Wielander, Gerda 107 Zapperi, Giovanna 143