The Oracles of Neoliberal Governance: A Critical Response to Elettra Stimilli’s Debt and Guilt

Abstract

It would be odd for me to engage in a virtual conversation on Elettra Stimilli’s brilliant new book, Debt and Guilt, without assuming for a moment a self-reflexive posture and point, from the outset, to the question of time as one critical marker defining the condition of possibility of this conversation. As the unfaltering utterance “in times of coronavirus” came to populate most academic titles since the English publication of the book, one might be tempted to ask what remains of other times, when debt, financial crisis and austerity were used as the central markers of previous iterations of this phrase. Debt and Guilt begins with the assumption that