We discussed Chapter 2 of Maurizio Lazzarato’s The Making of the Indebted Man, “The Genealogy of Debt and the Debtor.”

We spoke about the subjective economy, euphemistically called Credit economy, but really a Debt (and Death) economy. We also spoke about the new emerging figure of the entrepreneur of the self, the individual left to total precarity and contingency. We reviewed Marx’s important general formula of capital: M-M’, which is the basis for surplus value and thus profit: how money becomes more money, or money as money becomes money as capital. We saw how that formula already contains the ideas of interest, finance, and the financialization of daily life.

We saw, following Nietzsche, the sinister link between debt and guilt. We spoke about the absurdity of so many people being in extremely dire conditions of debt to the point that many, from Indian peasants to New York yellow cab drivers, have taken their life, unable to cope with this tragic and unbearable situation. We also spoke about the use Lazzarato makes of William James’ philosophy of contingency and indeterminacy. How the future must remain open, but is instead taken away by the violent and stifling logic of debt (and death).

-Bruno Gulli

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