Debt and Guilt

A Political Philosophy

Elettra Stimilli, Stefania Porcelli

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781350063433
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350063402
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

The issue of debt and how it affects our lives is becoming more and more urgent. The "Austerity" model has been the prevalent European economic policies of recent years led by the "German model". Elettra Stimilli draws upon contemporary philosophy, psychology and theology to argue that austerity is built on the idea that we somehow deserve to be punished and need to experience guilt in order to take full account of our economic sins. Following thinkers such as Max Weber, Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault, Debt and Guilt provides a startling examination of the relationship between contemporary politics and economics and how we structure our inner lives.

The first English translation of Debito e Colpa, this book provokes new ways of thinking about how we experience both debt and guilt in contemporary society.

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 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 low-income people were no longer directly related to the income based 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” 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 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.

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.

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.

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 its...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• CONTENTS
• Introduction
• 1 Debt: Between appropriation, exchange, and gift
• 2 An open question
• 3 Between political theology and economic theology
• 4 The religion of debt
• 5 The psychic life of debt
• Conclusions
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX
• Copyright Page