Pub Date : 2022-11-17DOI: 10.1080/1462317X.2022.2143141
Riccardo Baldissone
We should be grateful to Elettra Stimilli for having painstakingly harvested the most relevant fruits of the European reflection on debt: her book Debt and Guilt offers readers a wealth of gathered material, which is arranged in a series of coherent historical narrations. Yet the book is not only an enlightening collation, because Stimilli composes her theoretical mosaic “to try to confront the opacity that characterizes our age”: as she underscores, such a task invites us to overcome known categories and “to find new ones in view of an understanding as adequate as possible to the degree of complexity with which we must deal.” In this response to her book, I gladly accept Stimilli’s invitation by suggesting that her successful effort to trace the interdependence of debt and guilt may be taken further: the joint paths of debt and guilt may be retraced in the light of a shift of theoretical focus. My proposed shift follows in the steps of Simondon and Foucault, who changed the focus of their inquiries from entities to processes by replacing the individual with individuation and the subject with subjectivation, respectively. In a similar way, the relation between debt and guilt may be reconsidered from the vantage point of the processes of indebtment and construction of guilt. This shift of focus entails a corresponding shift of emphasis between theoretical tools: in this case, conceptual analysis is to give way to the narration of processes, which can better illustrate the practices of inscription of debt and guilt qua locus of their reciprocal interaction. Such practices also include the elaboration and the definition of the notions of debt and guilt: hence, Stimilli’s book is already an (encouraging) example of narration of the process of textual inscription of debt and guilt as theoretical categories.
我们应该感谢埃莉特拉·斯蒂米利(Elettra Stimilli)，她辛苦地收获了欧洲人对债务反思的最相关成果:她的《债务与内疚》(debt and Guilt)一书为读者提供了大量收集到的材料，这些材料被安排在一系列连贯的历史叙述中。然而，这本书不仅是一本具有启启性的整理，因为斯蒂米利将她的理论拼合“试图面对我们这个时代的不透明特征”:正如她所强调的，这样的任务要求我们克服已知的类别，并“在对我们必须处理的复杂性的理解尽可能充分的情况下找到新的类别”。在对她的书的回应中，我很高兴地接受Stimilli的邀请，建议她在追踪债务和内疚的相互依存关系方面的成功努力可以进一步发展:根据理论焦点的转移，债务和内疚的联合路径可以重新追溯。我提出的转变遵循西蒙东和福柯的步骤，他们将他们的研究重点从实体转向过程，分别用个性化取代个人，用主体化取代主体。同样地，债务和罪恶感的关系也可以从负债过程和罪恶感构建的有利角度来重新考虑。这种焦点的转移需要在理论工具之间进行相应的重点转移:在这种情况下，概念分析将让位给过程的叙述，这可以更好地说明债务和内疚的铭文实践，作为它们相互作用的轨迹。这些实践还包括对债务和罪责概念的阐述和定义:因此，斯蒂米利的书已经是一个(令人鼓舞的)例子，叙述了作为理论范畴的债务和罪责的文本铭文过程。
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Pub Date : 2022-11-11DOI: 10.1080/1462317X.2022.2143139
Elettra Stimilli
The issues raised by Mitchell Dean are fundamental and come from his important work on common research themes. This makes the discussion all the more stimulating. As Dean points out, Debt and Guilt was written at a time when the European Union found itself directly involved in the global financial crisis. The question of debt has therefore become a specific problem for some European nations, which were considered responsible for poor management of the state. In this sense, it was a guilt that was easily attributable and equally easy to position in the context of what could be done to make amends, in the sense of damages that had been caused, a broken rule or a breached agreement, which, however, could be compensated for through making sacrifices. The point for me then was to understand what fueled the supposedly linear logic behind austerity policies. More than an economic issue in the technical sense, the debt problem emerged as a powerful political problem. With the affirmation of neoliberal policies, the market became the dominant political institution. This phenomenon produced a radical transformation in terms of normative production. The function of guilt, linked to the economy of debt, changed with the shifting conditions that produced it. The categories at the heart of this transformation are no longer only those of a juridical nature, which control nation-states. From the moment the market became the dominant political institution, the economic categories connected to the field of valuation were at stake. In this context, guilt is not only the expression of an unmet obligation. Instead, it involves the condition that is produced at the moment when, with neoliberal policies, the way of giving value to life fully match the valorization of capital, thus making it possible for each person to become “human capital” and, therefore, to be (or not be) worthy of the investment expected, and thus finding himself, in this second case, in the condition of one who feels guilty. A profound transformation took place in the capitalist modes of production at the moment when this type of entrepreneurial rationality was extended to all work environments and across the social and political arenas until it affected the entire existences of millions of people, who as individuals became “items of capital” in whom investments could be made. This is why, as Dean argues, the experience of subjectivity occupies “the core of my analysis of the sources of debt and guilt.” Ultimately, the point for me is to understand in what sense it seems possible to say that the methods by which economic power subjugates us are intrinsically connected to the methods with which subjects
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Pub Date : 2022-11-09DOI: 10.1080/1462317X.2022.2143144
Elettra Stimilli
Antonio Cerella has raised an extremely important question, which is deeply connected with the problem of debt. In order to ask, as Antonio rightly does, what the conditions for rethinking and practicing time anew might be, it may be useful to reflect on what experience of time we have had in recent years. Until the beginning of the last global economic crisis, a certain idea of the “end of history” had somehow prevailed in the Western world. People here felt they were living in an eternally present time – the present time of consumption – in the more or less conscious belief that they had achieved an irreplaceable degree of prosperity, which could eventually be “exported” along with democracy. But a new dimension of time has emerged since 2008, when the economic crisis erupted and debt became the key issue in global politics, first in the United States and then in Europe. As Nietzsche shows in his Genealogy of the Morals, debt is at the origin of a peculiar social relationship, which is based on a temporal nexus, a “new temporalization,” as efficiently noted by Riccardo Baldissone: the time of promise, the faculty of operating on the future in advance, thus suspending the force of oblivion and activating the faculty of memory. Debt is an ambiguous dimension – an “apparatus of temporalization,” as described by Riccardo – which can turn into a social bond or coincide with a form of domination. The relationship between debtor and creditor, which, for Nietzsche, is the oldest known human relationship, originates in the activation of the possibility of promising remission of what is owed; a condition that opens the present to a complex dynamic in which both the past and the future are involved – and not simply in temporal succession. What is at stake here is something that intimately concerns the Christian experience, as argued by the Italian anthropologist Ernesto De Martino, to whom Antonio rightly refers. In his important and posthumously published work La fine del mondo (The End of the World), devoted to the theme of “cultural apocalypses” as expressions of “crisis” and “transformations of presence,” Christianity represents a very peculiar example of this experience of time. More specifically, for De Martino, the peculiarity of proto-Christianity consists in the elaboration of a community of faith in Christ, which is based on the actualization of his coming (parousia) in the anticipation of the promise of the past event of the resurrection as liberation from guilt and remission of debts. In this regard, I think it is particularly interesting to note that the Greek word
安东尼奥·塞雷拉提出了一个与债务问题密切相关的极其重要的问题。正如安东尼奥正确提出的那样，为了问，重新思考和重新实践时间的条件可能是什么，反思我们近年来的时间经验可能是有用的。直到上次全球经济危机开始之前，某种“历史终结”的观念不知何故在西方世界盛行。这里的人们觉得他们生活在一个永恒的当下——一个消费的当下——他们或多或少有意识地相信，他们已经达到了一种不可替代的繁荣程度，这种繁荣最终可以与民主一起“输出”。但自2008年以来，一个新的时间维度出现了，当时经济危机爆发，债务成为全球政治的关键问题，先是在美国，然后在欧洲。正如尼采在他的《道德谱系》中所显示的那样，债务是一种特殊社会关系的起源，它基于一种时间联系，一种“新的时间化”，正如里卡多·巴尔迪松(Riccardo Baldissone)有效地指出的那样:承诺的时间，提前操作未来的能力，从而暂停遗忘的力量并激活记忆的能力。债务是一个模棱两可的维度——正如里卡多所描述的，是一种“暂时化的工具”——它可以变成一种社会纽带，也可以与一种统治形式相吻合。债务人和债权人之间的关系，对尼采来说，是已知的最古老的人类关系，起源于承诺免除债务的可能性的激活;这种状态将现在打开，进入一个复杂的动态，其中包括过去和未来——而不仅仅是时间的更替。正如意大利人类学家埃内斯托·德·马蒂诺(Ernesto De Martino)所说的那样，这里的利害攸关之处在于与基督教经历密切相关的东西，安东尼奥恰如其分地提到了他。在他死后出版的重要著作《世界末日》(La fine del mondo)中，致力于以“文化启示”为主题，表达“危机”和“存在的转变”，基督教代表了这种时间体验的一个非常特殊的例子。更具体地说，对于De Martino来说，原始基督教的特点在于对基督信仰的社区的阐述，这是基于他的到来(parousia)的实现，在对复活的过去事件的承诺的期待中，从罪恶中解放出来，免除债务。在这方面，我认为特别有趣的是希腊词
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Pub Date : 2022-11-08DOI: 10.1080/1462317X.2022.2143137
A. Mura
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
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Pub Date : 2022-11-08DOI: 10.1080/1462317X.2022.2143142
Devin Singh
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
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Pub Date : 2022-11-08DOI: 10.1080/1462317X.2022.2143136
M. Dean
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
{"title":"The Economic Theology of Debt","authors":"M. Dean","doi":"10.1080/1462317X.2022.2143136","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1462317X.2022.2143136","url":null,"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","PeriodicalId":43759,"journal":{"name":"Political Theology","volume":"24 1","pages":"405 - 409"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42115238","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-07DOI: 10.1080/1462317X.2022.2143135
Arthur Bradley
In the aftermath of more than a decade of “austerity”, we are today more indebted than ever: US public debt is estimated to rise to a level unseen sinceWorldWar II and national public debts within the Eurozone to increase by some 15-30% of GDP. To be sure, Elettra Stimilli’s Debt and Guilt: A Political Philosophy (which was first published as Debito e culpa in 2015 and now appears in Stefania Porcelli’s English translation with Bloomsbury’s Political Theologies series) predates the COVID-19 pandemic by a number of years, but its central thesis has hardly become less timely in 2022: “debt,” she writes, “is the model of contemporary existence” (7). Straddling the boundaries between political philosophy, economic theory, theology and anthropology – and negotiating between classic political theological signatures like Weber, Benjamin and Schmitt as well as more recent ones like Agamben, Lazzarato and Esposito – Stimilli’s labyrinthine book is her latest exploration of what she calls the “debt of the living [il debito del vivente]”. In returning to the ancient nexus of debt and guilt [schuld], Stimilli’s work not only reveals how debt is now built into the philosophical, psychic and religious structures of modern subjectivity but, more ambitiously, holds out the fragile possibility of the future redemption of this state of generalized indebtedness: a human Jubilee. To understand what is at stake in the recent economic history of the west – from the financial crash, through sovereign debt crises in the Eurozone, to widespread austerity programs – Stimilli’s book begins by returning to the classic anthropological relationship between the gift and exchange. By means of a brilliant re-reading of Mauss, Polanyi and Simmel, she not only argues that the gift “is at the origin of the real economic transition” (29) – which is also to say that our social relations precede our economic exchanges – but that the gift is itself the product of a certain promissory or fiduciary structure: what gives value to money is not any intrinsic value or utility it may possess but rather “an act of trust, or credit” between the two parties to the exchange (35). In uncovering what we might call the “religious” origins of money itself, Stimilli’s project thus reveals itself to be a reconstruction of Walter Benjamin’s “Capitalism as religion” project, almost exactly 100 years after the German thinker’s classic fragment. However, what Debt and Guilt really seeks to establish are the religious origins of that peculiarly modern iteration of finance capital called neoliberalism. It is neoliberalism, by extending the market paradigm to every domain of labor and life and financializing debt
在经历了十多年的“紧缩”之后，我们今天的负债比以往任何时候都要高:据估计，美国的公共债务将升至二战以来前所未见的水平，欧元区国家的公共债务将增长约占GDP的15%至30%。诚然，埃莱特拉·斯蒂米利的《债务与罪责:一种政治哲学》(2015年首次以Debito e culpa的名字出版，现在出现在斯蒂法尼亚·波尔切利与布卢姆斯伯里政治神学系列的英文译本中)比COVID-19大流行早了好几年，但其中心论点在2022年几乎没有变得不及时:“债务，”她写道，“是当代存在的模式”(7)。跨越政治哲学、经济理论、神学和人类学之间的界限，在经典的政治神学签名之间进行沟通，如韦伯、本杰明和施密特，以及最近的像阿甘本、拉扎拉托和埃斯波西托——斯蒂米莉这本错综复杂的书是她对她所谓的“活着的债务”的最新探索。在回归到债务和内疚的古老联系中，Stimilli的作品不仅揭示了债务现在是如何被构建到现代主体性的哲学、精神和宗教结构中，而且更雄心勃勃地提出了未来救赎这种普遍债务状态的脆弱可能性:人类的禧年。为了理解西方近代经济史——从金融危机，到欧元区主权债务危机，再到广泛的紧缩计划——的利害关系，斯蒂米里的书首先回到了礼物与交换之间的经典人类学关系。通过一位才华横溢的重读,比如波拉尼齐美尔和,她不仅认为礼物”是在真正的经济转型”的起源(29)——这也是说我们的社会关系先于经济交流——但这礼物本身就是某种约定的或信托的产品结构:是什么让钱不是任何内在价值或效用价值可能拥有,而是“信任的行为,或信贷”双方交换(35)。在揭示我们可能称之为货币本身的“宗教”起源的过程中，施蒂米利的计划因此揭示了自己是对瓦尔特·本雅明(Walter Benjamin)的“资本主义作为宗教”计划的重建，在这位德国思想家的经典片段几乎整整100年后。然而，《债务与罪责》真正想要确立的，是被称为新自由主义的金融资本的特殊现代迭代的宗教起源。它是新自由主义，将市场范式扩展到劳动和生活的各个领域，并将债务金融化
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Pub Date : 2022-11-07DOI: 10.1080/1462317X.2022.2143140
Antonio Cerella
Debt and Guilt is a work of rare depth and texture, which marks, in the wake of Max Weber ’ s magisterial Protestant Ethic , a decisive step forward in the study of the relationship between religious conceptions and economic practices. Elettra Stimilli masterfully articulates the long and tortuous genealogical path traced by these categories in Western thought, showing their relationship with mechanisms of power and modes of domination. The linear structure of the book cracks open, almost imperceptibly, in a passage, which I would like to examine here
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Pub Date : 2022-10-31DOI: 10.1080/1462317X.2022.2133804
V. Napolitano
ABSTRACT In the aftermath of the UK loss in the 2020 Euro Football Cup, I analyze a theopolitical force of contemporary black football players, as a sovereignty from below epitomized by the figure of Marcus Rashford. Given his meteoric rise in British culture and his prominent social activism against child hunger, Rashford, among the other targets of racial abuse, is a particularly apt exemplar. By integrating anthropological ideas on theopolitics, totemism, charisma, and the sacrality of substance, this paper asks how the iconography, life histories, and social media interventions of young, kingly, Black (mainly Christian) athletes, effect a theopolitical force as an elastic movement of self-referentiality and sovereignty from below that is agonistic rather than antagonistic to the state. Specifically, it explores how these black footballers enliven an exemplar of theopolitical sovereignty that does not decide on letting live or making it die, but on doing a work of undoing injustice.
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Pub Date : 2022-10-31DOI: 10.1080/1462317X.2022.2139227
S. Edwards
ABSTRACT Frantz Fanon’s call to clear the “rot” of mental imperialism takes on even greater importance in light of emerging neuroscientific research regarding intergenerational trauma. Read through a decolonial theological lens, epigenetic trauma reveals that basic assumptions regarding the independent human person occlude foundational truths. Individuals are fundamentally connected to others in a way that can create ground for a thicker description of “shared humanity” and for liberatory practices of memory. Political theology provides a necessary space to forge theoretical and practical connections between the personal and political natures of race, trauma, and god-talk that are essential to move toward justice. Exploring multiple aspects of being – biological, decolonial, theological, future – I suggest that building communities of Christian enfleshed counter-memory is one potential path toward decolonizing theology and addressing the wounds of colonization through social transformation.
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