The Debt of the Living

Elettra Stimilli, Arianna Bove

Description

Max Weber's account of the rise of capitalism focused on his concept of a Protestant ethic, valuing diligence in earning and saving money but restraint in spending it. However, such individual restraint is foreign to contemporary understandings of finance, which treat ever-increasing consumption and debt as natural, almost essential, for maintaining the economic cycle of buying and selling.

In The Debt of the Living, Elettra Stimilli returns to this idea of restraint as ascesis, by analyzing theological and philosophical understandings of debt drawn from a range of figures, including Saint Paul, Schmitt and Agamben, Benjamin and Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, and Foucault. Central to this analysis is the logic of "profit for profit's sake"—an aspect of Weber's work that Stimilli believes has been given insufficient attention. Following Foucault, she identifies this as the original mechanism of a capitalist dispositif that feeds not on a goal-directed rationality, but on the self-determining character of human agency. Ascesis is fundamental not because it is characterized by renunciation, but because the self-discipline it imposes converts the properly human quality of action without a predetermined goal into a lack, a fault, or a state of guilt: a debt that cannot be settled. Stimilli argues that this lack, which is impossible to fill, should be seen as the basis of the economy of hedonism and consumption that has governed global economies in recent years and as the premise of the current economy of debt.
Foreword to the English Translation
Preface to the English Translation
Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. The End in Itself of the Economic Enterprise

2. Oikonomía and Asceticism

3. The Theological Construction of the Government of the World

4. Voluntary Poverty on the Market

5. Capitalism as Religion

6. A Philosophical Critique of Asceticism

7. The Spirit of Capitalism and Forms of Life

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie politique
• Religion
• Christianisme
• Theology
• Christianity

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 20 décembre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438464169
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Debt of the Living
SUNY series in Contemporary Italian Philosophy
Silvia Benso and Brian Schroeder, editors
The Debt of the Living

Ascesis and Capitalism
Elettra Stimilli
Translated by Arianna Bove
Foreword by Roberto Esposito
Original Italian edition: Il debito del vivente. Ascesi e capitalismo (Quodlibet, 2011)
The translation of this work has been funded
by SEPS
S EGRETARIATO E UROPEO PER LE P UBBLICAZIONI S CIENTIFICHE

Via Val d’Aposa 7 - 40123 Bologna - Italy
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by “Scuola Normale Superiore” and “Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca Italiano”
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2017 State University of New York
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Printed in the United States of America
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For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
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Production, Jenn Bennett
Marketing, Fran Keneston
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Stimilli, Elettra, author.
Title: The debt of the living : ascesis and capitalism / by Elettra Stimilli ; translated by Arianna Bove.
Other titles: Debito del vivente. English
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2017] | Series: SUNY series in contemporary Italian philosophy | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016031442 (print) | LCCN 2016046321 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438464152 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN: 9781438464145 (pbk) | ISBN 9781438464169 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Capitalism—Religious aspects. | Religion and sociology. | Asceticism.
Classification: LCC HB501 .S915513 2017 (print) | LCC HB501 (ebook) | DDC 330.12/2—-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016031442
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents

Foreword to the English Translation
Preface to the English Translation
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The End in Itself of the Economic Enterprise
2. Oikonomía and Asceticism
3. The Theological Construction of the Government of the World
4. Voluntary Poverty on the Market
5. Capitalism as Religion
6. A Philosophical Critique of Asceticism
7. The Spirit of Capitalism and Forms of Life
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Foreword to the English Translation

Roberto Esposito
It might be said that much of contemporary Italian theory situates itself in the gap of what Michel Foucault has not said, a research building site that his great oeuvre opened but left interrupted. This space is filled and redeveloped primarily with reference to some other author who provides an interpretative framework destined to retroact on Foucauldian categories and point them into different directions. The first author in this role of theoretical intersection was Carl Schmitt, used in a manner that articulates the biopolitical regime jointly with that of sovereignty, which Foucault had actually very sharply distinguished it from. In another influential interpretation, Schmitt’s place is taken up by Gilles Deleuze, and this results in conferring to biopolitics an affirmative force that was not always discernible as such in Foucault’s texts. A further vector of discourse proposed an approach of Foucault and Martin Heidegger on the basis of a symmetrical relation between the concept of dispositif and that of “Gestell,” which led to a new definition of political theology as a machine that reduces two to one.
In the Debt of the Living: Ascesis and Capitalism , Elettra Stimilli embarks on an original and fruitful path of research without the aid of any of these authors. Instead, associated to Foucault is the work of Max Weber, keeping the Walter Benjamin’s fragment on “Capitalism as Religion” in sight. Read in conjunction with Weber’s essay on the spirit of capitalism, this work provides definitive support to the thesis that was later developed by Foucault on the connection between pastoral power and the dispositif of governmentality. Stimilli puts forward an acute interpretation of the asceticism discussed by Weber that reads it not merely as a premise, but as the content of capitalist productivity. Beyond the sacrificial paradigm that subjects the accumulation of commodities to renunciation and defers their immediate enjoyment, the productive praxis of production we are confronted with today contains, in itself, its own end: a purposiveness without purpose, ultimately coinciding with the flow of life that contemporary modes of production have been able to put to work. What this means is that the figure of being in debt, now the very condition of our existence, cannot be seen as a mere contingent outcome of the current crisis, but needs to be rethought as the form that human life takes on thanks to the close intertwining of the economy and politics that for a long time has turned the former into both a presupposition and an outcome of the latter.
From this perspective, which Stimilli manages to activate effectively by way of a rich series of anthropological and textual references, both of the paradigms that lay at the center of the current debate, political theology, and biopolitics, take an epistemological leap.
Political theology is pushed beyond Schmitt’s definition, where it was linked to the category of sovereignty, and made to encounter what might be named “economic theology,” as found in Benjamin’s Fragment as well as Patristic texts. The economy of neoliberal societies is a realm where the early Christian life form develops according to an increasingly close juxtaposition of guilt and debt, one that had already been observed by Friedrich Nietzsche in “On the Genealogy of Morality” and that would later be turned upside down by the logic of what Jacques Lacan called the “capitalist discourse.” Enjoyment, rather than being repressed or deferred, is now the sole purpose of economic praxis; but it is also an effected mode of political control that is one and the same as the government of the living. In this sense, the antinomy at the core of the dialectics Foucault theorized between subjectivation and subjection becomes manifest. Caught in the economic-political dispositif of governmentality, human beings become as separate from what unites them as they are made subservient to what liberates them.
In this framework, even the paradigm of biopolitics leaps forward with respect to the current debate. Biopolitics is intended neither as the sovereign power over a life stripped of its form, nor as an immunizing procedure that tries to preserve life by imbuing it with a fragment of the evil from which it seeks to defend it. Rather, it is an internal dispositif that operates on the actual ability of human beings to valorize their own life according to a purposiveness without purpose. In this sense, biopower does not merely work toward the politicization of private life or even of naked and bare living matter, but rather responds to the need of a subjectivity separated from itself and put to work in a theological-political and theological-economic mechanism that both precedes and determines it.
Stimilli evinces two indications from this reconstruction, enriched by her new book Debt and Guilt (Rome, 2015): first, that confronting the crisis simply by opposing policies of growth to policies of austerity does not make sense because both are part of the same dispositif. Debt is not a contingent technical datum, but a political operator of global governance that releases life from its obedience to a transcendent norm and welds it to its productive impulse. Inside this mechanism, as the product of our investment and as that which we reproduce in a sort of paradoxical dialectic with credit, debt cannot be settled. Like the trust that feeds it, debt became infinite the moment capital started becoming one and the same as the existence of each one of us. Naturally, this comes at a high price, its most external symptom being contemporary psychopathologies. How is it possible to exit this mechanism? How does one leave behind an economic theology that is also a political theology, the metaphysical structure of our time? The desire to turn from a financial economy back to a real one is inadequate because still internal to the “general economy” George Bataille spoke of in his time. The suggestion that the law of this regime could be made inactive by means of a sort of destituent power also seems internal to the same language it tries to dismantle.
Instead, the author suggests, one ought to reactivate the purposiveness without purpose that feeds debt and disentangle it from the dispositif it is currently captured by. But is it possible to separate something from its very life force, freeing it from the potentiality it contains? Is it possible to dislocate the power of the act without flattening it onto the apolitical space of a pure testimony? Or is it necessary to place back in the field the category of conflict that, like that of power, lays at the heart of Italian theory, and make them interact? I believe this is the question to be asked today, and that Elettra Stimilli’s work places it right at the center of the contemporary debate.
Preface to the English Translation

Elettra Stimilli
This work is primarily concerned with a reflection on the unknown relationship between individual lives and the management of the global economy as it has emerged over the past thirty years and seen its most recent manifestation in widespread indebtedness, for example, in the United States with the subprime mortgage crisis between 2006 and 2008, and with the sheer amount of debt accumulated by the American students to enroll in university degrees, which exceede