Ecologies of indebtedness

Abstract

In this chapter I explore the impacts of debt through the lens of ecology in order to reimagine the meaning of indebtedness for a form of globalisation defined by exhaustion. In the first part of the chapter I trace the origins of the contemporary debt society through a discussion of global socio-economic change before moving on to consider the impacts of the near collapse of this social form in the period following 2008. In the second section of the chapter I expand my exploration of these impacts through consideration of the ways in which unmanageable indebtedness destroys the future on the level of both societies, which fall into exhaustion and a kind of decrepit post-modernism, and individuals, who come to occupy a space of lack and melancholia by virtue of their inability to live up to the modern ideal of what it means to be an individual. In this respect the central point of my chapter concerns the attempt to rethink the bad, or unsustainable, ecology of financial indebtedness through the reconceptualisation of notions of default and bankruptcy in a new vision of the necessity of interdependence, where self, other, and world come together to form a primal debt complex.