Intimate Burdens: Addictive Debt and Productive Guilt

Abstract

In this work, Elettra Stimilli extends her inquiry into debt initiated in her first book The Debt of the Living (SUNY, 2017). Both are important works and make significant, original contributions to philosophical reflection on debt. Debt and Guilt is written in a slightly more accessible manner for a wider audience but still grapples with sophisticated and complex concepts, moving the conversation forward from the claims, insights, and interventions made in Debt of the Living. Readers who find Debt and Guilt generative will be well served by working through Debt of the Living as well. I here focus on just two of the many striking analyses and arguments made in the text. Stimilli draws our attention to the status of addictus in Roman law. She describes a fascinating set of declarations in the Twelve Tables stipulating that if a debtor fails to repay their creditor, they undergo addictio, declared by the law as bound to and at the mercy of the creditor. The addictus enters a liminal state, remaining both a free citizen and one who is enslaved and subject to their creditor, who may seize their property, sell them to reclaim what is owed, or even cut them into pieces and portion out their parts for a price. The term addictus has meanings ranging from being devoted or assigned to being handed over or betrayed, and of course is the precursor to our modern notion of addiction. We can sense something of that etymology here, with the image of the debtor being bound and attached to the creditor, in a troubling intimacy reminiscent of the attachments we have to our addictions. Addictions are a kind of obligation, a sense of indebtedness to a force that requires our attention and labor. In the history of its usage, addiction also carried a positive connotation as devotion. As the seventeenth century divine, Thomas Fuller, declared: “We sincerely addict ourselves to Almighty God.” The history of usage blurs the lines between bond, enslavement, and devotion. And while the implication here is that the debtor, as addictus, is addicted to their creditor, in reality it is reversed: the creditor is the one who needs the debtor, much as the master needs the slave, as Hegel emphasized. The creditor is the addict. The myth of Addictus tells the tale of a slave released from their debt obligation, who had become so accustomed to their chains that they did not remove them. Indebtedness