12/6/22 The Making of Indebted Man by Maurizio Lazzarato

We discussed Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics and its relation to Lazzarato’s argument about debt as a new paradigm for governance and the subject

Shared our direct experiences with debt as a way of subjectification

Conflicts within ourselves about how closely the text relates to our lives, and our involvement with the very systems that Lazzarato criticizes.

The entrepreneur of the self is what we’re all embroiled in, along with the precarity and the work on the self this requires

We discussed the “ethical” dimensions of debt, and how it produces subjectivities by construction of memory, “bad conscience” and guilt

The relation between guilt, debt and finance and the ways these invade all aspects of a person’s life; reference to the unemployment situation, in which behavior is monitored and controlled

We produce ourselves and willingly engage in systems of debt and servitude that make coercion look like consent

–Tony Iantosca

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