The Economic Theology of Debt

Abstract

The past decade has witnessed the formation of a paradigm that has been called, not without controversy, economic theology. It is found not only in continental political philosophy, but also in critical theory, sociology, history and cultural studies. It returns to and reanimates key sources in different disciplines, with particular reference to the achievement of the human sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and defines a field of oscillation with political theology, itself named almost exactly a century ago by Carl Schmitt, who borrowed the term from Bakunin. Political theology was concerned with the foundation and deep legitimation in monotheistic traditions of the concepts of the modern state. Economic theology, by contrast, would focus on the sources of another and perhaps today more pervasive form of political metaphysics, one that would seek to neutralize such a state in the name of the freedom of the subject and the operations of the market, and its concomitant imagery of the system, of the network, and of economy itself. In this respect, economic theology would neither seek to overcome political theology nor to displace it, but to delineate a field together with it that would enable an understanding of the relations between economic practices and political power, the multiple forms of governing and the unities of law, state and sovereignty, and the shaping of the autonomous subject and forms of domination and legitimation. In so far as it would draw on the Christian tradition, economic theology would find keys in the genealogy of notions of oikonomia, providence and order, and within the redemptive narrative of the Church founded on the Trinity. If we adopt the language of contemporary critical theory, economic theology promises then to grasp the mutually constitutive but radically heterogeneous poles that define the operations of power within our contemporary societies: an economic-managerial one of government, sometimes extended to the biopolitical governance of life, and the juridicalinstitutional one of sovereignty, focused on law, the state and its legitimation. If both liberalism and post-structural critique sought to displace the latter pole of a transcendent and supreme authority, with immanent and multiple relations of power, the strength of economic theology was that it promised to make their interaction intelligible. And if French was the language of the immanentist turn against political philosophy and the language of sovereignty in the 1970s, which thus both prefigured and participated in the rise of the metaphysics of the network and self-management, the emergence of economic theology has definitely been written in Italian. In the Anglophone world, we