Indebting and Guilting as Apparatuses of Temporalization: A Response to Elettra Stimilli’s Debt and Guilt

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.