Symposium on Elettra Stimilli’s Debt and Guilt: A Political Philosophy – Introduction

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