5

The psychic life of debt

The guilt of being in debt

The establishment on a global scale of an economic-administrative

institutional form, of which Christianity is genealogically “the
inventor,” along with the extension of the entrepreneurial rationality
to all public and private spheres, to the political and social dominion,
as well as to the strictly economic field, have brought about profound
changes in society. This transformation not only affected the
economy and its institutions, but it was also at the origin of a proper
“anthropological mutation.”
An unprecedented investment in life has involved individual
existence in the construction of a global enterprise, of which
the financial markets are only the epitome. The entrepreneur of
oneself is the model for this phenomenon:  active subjects, who are
completely devoted to their business, and have abolished any distance
between themselves and the enterprise in which they are involved.
A  continuous need for transformation and constant improvement
characterizes the process of enhancement in which everyone
participates in an attempt to always perfect their performances. Work
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and consumption, appropriation and gift, exchange and debt, as well

as state and enterprise are co-involved in this phenomenon and give
shape to a complex structure in which the individual lives participate
not simply because of their organic needs, the satisfaction of primary
functions, or because of the need for appropriation or domination,
and not even because of the need to establish a political or symbolic
order that transcends individual existences and is definable within
precise boundaries. It is rather an enterprise that involves the
realization of individual lives in a wider sense, connected to an ethical
space of existence, which implies the involvement of the desires of the
individuals.
Following the process of the financialization of the markets at
the origin of the economic crisis, this phenomenon has become
particularly evident in recent times. In the last thirty years, finance
has been linked to the production of goods and services, and therefore
to the world of labor in the classical sense, transforming its internal
structure. But, above all, through the massive relocation of domestic
savings toward equity securities, there has been a total involvement of
individual lives in the financial world. This is what made it possible for
new forms of indebtedness to become the engine of global economy.
This phenomenon began in the United States, but it soon spread,
triggering the world economic crisis we have witnessed.
At the basis of this process is the idea that the realization of profits
is fundamentally dependent on consumption patterns arising from
financial income, in their turn resulting from increasingly complex
forms of debt. The creation of additional demand developed by
new forms of private debt, and fueled by the same confidence in the
financial market, is the prerequisite for a development that, despite
 THE PSYCHIC LIFE OF DEBT 127

its obviously devastating effects, continues its course in parallel to the

austerity policies that have been introduced in most countries. From
this perspective, the repeated attempts to relaunch the economy,
rather than offer a remedy, appear to be the symptom of a perverse
process, the ultimate purpose of which seems to be the production of
a virtual wealth that favors consumption even in the absence of real
liquidity.
At the root of this phenomenon is the enormous change undergone
by the capitalist modes of production of recent years:  flexibility,
precariousness, and new forms of labor are the most obvious
manifestations of a development in which the valorization no longer
depends on the amount of time necessary to perform a particular
job, but depend on the specific qualities of the person employed. If,
in this regard, the expression “profits becoming rent” has been used
(see Marazzi 2010: 34), it can also be said that in the process of the
financialization of the economy, life itself, along with the forms of life,
becomes rent, transformed into enterprises (in which to invest) or
into deposits (to administer).
When life enters finance, debt always finds new forms of
investment, which reveals its implicit inexhaustibility and the need for
its continuous reproduction. The new modes of accumulating value
discover in debt, which cannot and must not be extinguished, the
privileged mechanism of its own reproduction. A global indebtedness
is at the basis of the machine of global economy and of a new form
of power.
In short, if this was the panorama in which the global economic
crisis developed, since the beginning of 2012, however, this course has
changed. Since Europe found itself directly involved in the economic
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disruption, the problem of “public debt”—particularly that of some

EU member states, such as Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Italy—has
become topical and has attracted the attention of public opinion,
which was previously focused on the exponential increase in private
debt in the United States following the real estate bubble that triggered
the crisis.
It was at this stage that debt began to be publicly and explicitly
presented as “guilt.” The question of public debt emerged as a specific
problem for some European nations that could be considered guilty
of bad management of the state. The apparently harmless semantic
shift of this type of analysis, however, has brought about a significant
change, full of consequences (see Macho 2014).
According to the “German model,” which promotes the idea that
there is guilt in the public debt contracted by some of the EU states, this
situation is the result of a bad national economic management, easy
to attribute and to punish. The guilt associated with the contracted
debt is that of having spent too much. The need to repay what is due
therefore arises from reasons that are seemingly only economical.
What remains unexplained, however, is the apparently legitimate use
of legal, religious, and ethical categories—such as “guilt”—to interpret
a problem whose solution is instead offered solely in technical terms.
What is at stake in this move? Does considering debt as guilt
mean—as some would propose—to place the state of indebtedness
within the sphere of what can be emended, in the sphere of damages
done, of transgressed rules, of not respected agreements that, however,
is possible to repay through “sacrifice”?
I think that to answer such questions, we must first take into
account the fact that in many languages, both ancient and modern,
 THE PSYCHIC LIFE OF DEBT 129

the same word is used to indicate both “debt” and “guilt.” For example,
as we have seen, not only in Sanskrit, Hebrew, and Aramaic, but also
in modern German, the same word encompasses the two different
meanings. One might wonder if all these could simply be cases
of homonymy. If so, it would be a coincidence that two different
meanings are conveyed by the same word. But, even considering what
we have said, it seems that in this case we should rather speak about
polysemy. Indeed, in all the mentioned languages, the correlation
between the two semantic fields is clearly perceived in the context
in which the term is used. The point is then to understand what lies
behind the fact that an economic debt may be associated with guilt.
In the semantic context that links the two concepts in some ancient
and modern cultures, both debt and guilt refer to a lack or a deficit, a
condition that involves everyone. From an individual and collective
point of view, it is a situation that is difficult to emend, in that, on
the one hand, one aspires toward redemption, even through sacrifice,
while on the other hand, it represents the bond to which one must
submit as member of a community. The specificity of Christianity,
from my point of view, is precisely that it was able to transform debt
into an investment, into an impetus for spiritual and material growth.
“Debt is guilt, Schuld, a single word,” argued Paul De Grauwe—
economist of the International Monetary Fund, the European
Commission and the European Central Bank, and now director of
the European Institute at the London School of Economics—in an
interview about Germany’s role in the EU. “Germany,” he continues,
“is like an enterprise . . .; but a healthy society that wants to grow has
to invest and investments are covered by either self-financing or debt.”
In this respect, from the point of view of the economist, “Germany’s
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attitude is inexplicable and somewhat surreal. The fundamentalism

of budget balance, the religious aversion to debt, leads it to do
everything to avoid growth and to foment recession.” “For Germany,”
according to De Grauwe, “this is a cultural matter. It is not enough to
evoke, to explain it, Weimar’s ghosts and hyperinflation: it is in their
DNA. There is no way to bring change, while austerity devastates the
Eurozone” (La Repubblica, August 26, 2014).
The position of Nobel Prize economist Paul Krugman is similar;
he speaks of “the absurd moralism against debt cancellation imposed
by austerity,” even arguing, with somewhat inflamed tones, that it was
“the revenge of those who were not forgiven” and “an excess of justice,”
because “any kind of debt cancellation represents, from this point of
view, a bad moral example” (La Repubblica, October 14, 2014).
It is notable that some of the most important economists
promoting the relaunching of the economy in interviews with
major international media, are careful to emphasize the implicit
link between guilt and debt in the German word Schuld/Schulden
as if this were their recent discovery. But an in-depth investigation
about this semantic area rightly evoked here cannot ignore the
well-known analysis carried out by Nietzsche in the On the
Genealogy of Morals (see Nietzsche 1996), by Marx in Capital (see
Marx 1977: 919), or by Benjamin, in the fragment analyzed above
(Benjamin 1996:  288–91). All these authors—on whom I  already
had the opportunity to reflect (see Stimilli 2017)—highlighted a
deep connection, although in various ways, between the religious
and moral experience of guilt and the economic condition of debt.
At stake is a peculiar form of power, also superficially noted in the
interviews quoted above. Taking a closer look, however, this form
 THE PSYCHIC LIFE OF DEBT 131

of power involves both the austerity policies and those policies that
promote economic growth, supported by the economists quoted
above, who criticize austerity.
Hence the difficulties encountered by the Tsipras government in
trying to change the course of European policies, both in terms of the
austerity plans regarding the negotiation of public debt, and in terms
of the reforms, which are the real “commodity exchange” passively
accepted by the European governments of other indebted countries,
such as Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland. Indeed, at stake here is not
so much, or simply, the full payment of the contracted debt, but the
neoliberal policies that are the real condition for its reduction and
that directly affect the individual lives within those countries.
For the first time since austerity policies became the seemingly
uncontested model in Europe, the fact that a government tried not
only to discuss debt negotiation, but also to question the resulting
neoliberal reforms, is certainly an important first step in a long and
difficult journey. In one of his first interviews given as Greek minister
of economy, Yanis Varoufakis, while underlining the link between
debt and guilt implicit in the German word Schuld and recalling the
debt Germany Nazi contracted with Greece, tried to put the issue in
different terms:

We should just sit around a table . . . without any kind of question
that asks . . . “is it guilt or sin?” I know that the two concepts—guilt
and debt—in German are expressed with the same word, Schuld,
the antonym of credit. [But we] should limit ourselves to this
simple question: how to return to making Greece’s social economy
sustainable by reducing the costs of the Greek crisis to a minimum for
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the average German and European? (see http://popoffquotidiano.

it/2015/01/29/yanis-varoufakis-e-il-concetto-di-schuld/)

Although proposed here as “simple,” the question is in fact very

problematic, as the minister knows and has experienced since the
first negotiations with the “troika” (which, after Varoufakis, is simply
referred to with the word “institutions”). We have here a viscous
power, whose outlines are just beginning to emerge with greater
clarity.
Borrowing an expression from Judith Butler (cf. 1997), one
could perhaps speak of a “psychic life” of debt, in which “guilt” has
a much more elusive sense than what emerges in the most popular
discourses against the austerity policies. I  wonder then if the link
between debt and guilt, which has recently surfaced in public
language, can illuminate an opaque relationship between power
and life, which is therefore even more dangerous than the merely
punitive relation highlighted in the critique of austerity. I think this
perspective can be particularly useful in reflecting on the hypothesis
of an “anthropological mutation,” the results of which today—when
individual lives and economic-financial power are interconnected
in new ways—are still difficult to identify, and on which it is worth
continuing to investigate.

Establishing the rule: Psychic

dimension and social sphere

The idea that there is a “psychic life of power,” that is, the fact that
there exists an intimate interconnection between the individual’s
 THE PSYCHIC LIFE OF DEBT 133

psychic dimension and the political and social one, is at the center of
a heated debate today—a debate which was, however, inaugurated by
Sigmund Freud in the early 1930s with Civilization and Its Discontents
(see Freud 1962). Freud discussed a modern paradigm, in which
civilization required the sacrifice of instincts in exchange for the
security ensured by the state through the establishment of rules of
law. The general program of civilization implemented in modernity
implied a progressive control of instincts and their increasing
submission to a dominant control, which necessitates the “sacrifice”
of instincts as a way toward stability and regulation. This is often,
however, also a cause of unhappiness and discomfort.
The classic Freudian framework of the psychic identity, defined
as a split between the unitary and normative scope of the Ego and
the instinctual trends of the Id, corresponds to a social structure
characterized by a similar organization:  on the one hand, by the
juridical institution of the state and, on the other hand, by the
divergent drives of the individuals. Stability, for Freud, is the result of
a regulatory exercise able to mobilize at the same time the psychic and
social spheres. The dispositif underlying both spheres is “guilt,” both a
psychological and a juridical concept.
As early as Totem and Taboo, in which he reflects on the archaic
past of the human species, Freud hypothesized that human instincts,
unlike those of other species, tend to be violent, resulting in the act
of the original patricide on which the sense of guilt is founded.
In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud continues to follow this
trajectory from the point of view of the process of civilization and
asks: “what means does civilization employ in order to inhibit the
aggressiveness which opposes it, to make it harmless, to get rid of
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it, perhaps?” (1962:  70). In response to his own question, Freud

writes:

Aggressiveness is introjected, internalized; it is, in point of fact,

sent back to where it came from, that is, it is directed against his
own ego. There it is taken over by a portion of the ego, which sets
itself over against the rest of the ego as super-ego, and which now,
in the form of “conscience,” is ready to put into action against the
ego the same harsh aggressiveness that the ego would have liked
to satisfy upon other, extraneous individuals. The tension between
the harsh super-ego and the ego that is subjected to it, is called by
us the sense of guilt; it expresses itself as a need for punishment.
Civilization therefore obtains mastery over the individuals
dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it
and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a
garrison in a conquered city. (70)

Taking the modern state as a model, Freud considers political

institutions as an advantage for the collective life, despite the prices
they require to pay. “Order,” Freud writes, “is a kind of compulsion
to repeat which, when a regulation has been laid down once and for
all, decides when, where and how a thing shall be done, so that in
every similar circumstance one is spared hesitation and indecision.
The benefits of order are incontestable” (40). The “final outcome” of
the process of civilization should therefore be “a rule of law to which
all  . . . have contributed by a sacrifice of their instincts, and which
leaves no one . . . at the mercy of brute force” (42).
And yet, there are no signs of an internal dysfunction in this
development. The sense of guilt at the origin of the mechanism of
 THE PSYCHIC LIFE OF DEBT 135

neurosis, to which Freud gave so much attention in his studies, is the

proof of what threatens from the inside “to undermine the modicum
of happiness enjoyed by civilized men” (34).
On this premise, it is worth wondering whether it is possible to
inscribe the link between debt and guilt in a dimension of power
where the institution of the rule is exclusively based on discipline,
repression, and consequent sense of guilt that in the past affected
the consciousness of countless generations in the pathological
form of neurosis or hysteria, the latter being its feminine iteration
studied by Freud. The fact that “sacrifices” are presented as a way to
repay the contracted debt suggests the collocation of the semantic
ambivalence between the two in the context of an exclusively punitive
and repressive form of power—a power that takes the form of
institutions capable of containing the chaotic and aggressive attitude
that characterizes human instincts. In this case, similar to the state,
the market itself would also be one of those institutions whose
rules tyrannize individual and collective lives through disciplinary
coercion. The existence of a form of repression cannot be doubted.
This, however, should not lead to a simplification of the complexity
of the phenomenon. The enormous transformation that has taken
place over the past thirty or thirty-five years in the capitalist modes
of production, requires a broader reflection that takes into account
changes of the forms of power when politics began to adapt to changes
that occurred in the economic sphere.
In contemporary societies dominated by the global market, the
establishment of the rule is a complex phenomenon, which is no longer
simply founded, as was in the past, on the experience of repression
and the sense of guilt following the breaking of a rule. Today, the rule
136 DEBT AND GUILT: A POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

is rather combined with the ability to initiate—with the autonomy

in decision-making and action, with practices of administration—
investment, care, and relationship aimed at satisfying desires rather
than just at their repression. It is for this reason that neoliberal
discourse emerged from the idea that the “free market” implies the
creation of an institution that simultaneously presents itself as a
public sphere and a practical sphere of individual autonomy.
Consequently, the forms of discontent have also changed. In one
of the most insightful studies on the subject in recent years, Alain
Ehrenberg argues that the prevalence of depression over neurosis
since the early 1980s is the effect of an altered relationship with rules
and institutions, and a reaction to the emergence of the figure of the
entrepreneur as a “collective model”:

Depression began its ascent when the disciplinary model for

behaviours, the rules of authority and observance of taboos that
gave social classes as well as both sexes a specific destiny, broke
against norms that invited us to undertake personal initiative by
enjoining us to be ourselves. These new norms brought with them
a sense that the responsibility for our existence lies not only within
us but also within the collective between-us. (2010: 4)

Depression thus appears as “the workshop of societal ambivalences”

(9) in a society characterized by a new type of sovereignty and a new
type of a regulatory institution. According to Ehrenberg:

Depression teaches us about our current experience as an

individual because it is the pathology of a society whose norm is
no longer based on guilt and discipline but on responsibility and
 THE PSYCHIC LIFE OF DEBT 137

initiative  . . . . The individual is confronted with a pathology of

inadequacy more than with a pathology of the mistake, with the
universe of dysfunction more than with the universe of law. (9)

The categories underlying this transformation are no longer “the

allowed and the forbidden,” but “the possible and the impossible”
(8). As Freud reminds us, this implies “the decline of conflict as a
reference point upon which the nineteenth-century notion of the self
was founded” (10).
From the political sphere to the individual sphere, conflict as a
dispositif of inclusion that excludes is the “normative center” (ibid.)
of modernity, as we have already seen in relation to the theological-
political paradigm. Depression, for Ehrenberg, is then “the historical
mediator that forces conflictual humanity to retreat, threatened by
neurosis, to the benefit of fusional humanity, searching for sensations
to overcome an endless lack of tranquility” (205). But, he adds, “with
the gospel of personal development on the one hand and the cult of
performance on the other, conflict does not disappear; however, it
loses its obvious quality” (205–6).
Drawing on such an analysis, Massimo De Carolis participated in
a discussion on Nuovi disagi della civiltà, hypothesizing the transition
from a “society of guilt” to a “society of shame” (Borrelli, De Carolis,
Napolitano and Recalcati 2013: 32), in an attempt to identify the change
that is currently taking place, both within the individual psyche and
in the broader dynamics of the community. I  am not sure—unlike
De Carolis—that the “society of guilt” is experiencing its decline.
Among other things, the renewed use of this category in reference to
the phenomenon of public indebtedness seems to disprove this claim.
138 DEBT AND GUILT: A POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

I believe, rather, that the function of guilt has profoundly changed as

the conditions that produced it have changed.
However, as is well known, it is not easy to define what is still
happening: “we cannot draw closed the net in which we are caught,”
writes Benjamin in a 1921 fragment (1996:  288), which seems to
prophetically describe the present situation. But if capitalism
continues to appear as “a cult that creates guilt, not atonement”
(288), and if, as De Carolis claims, every age creates “what we might
call anthropogenic machines that produce the kind of man that a
specific society needs” (Borrelli, De Carolis, Napolitano and Recalcati
2013:  7), then it seems legitimate to speak today of “a tendency to
produce a different kind of man than what modern societies wanted”
(33). This model doesn’t seek to suppress aggressive instincts through
juridical dispositifs of exclusionary inclusion that produce guilt, but
is ready to confront the possibility of new regulative institutions able
to administer the libidinal economy at the foundation of human life
through the multiplication of conditions that continually reproduce a
situation of debt. Although “we will not miss the social use of guilt”
(ibid.), and I would add its juridical use, this phenomenon, however,
will lead us to confront new mechanisms of power, in which known
components still exist, but are at the same time also transformed and
inserted into a profoundly changed process.

Feminism and neoliberalism

In recent years, the neoliberal policies and the new regulatory

practices of neoliberalism have been challenged by feminist thought
and practices. These have revealed themselves to be even more fertile
 THE PSYCHIC LIFE OF DEBT 139

thanks to their self-critical ability that, in addition to bearing witness

to the difficulty we find ourselves in, also attest to the need to abandon
sterile static positions.
It was the feminist thought of the 1960s and 1970s that marked
a definitive discontinuity with the modern, patriarchal order that
created guilt, and proposed the issue of the “repressed in the social
pact” and of the “subject excluded from the primary scene that
according to both the Freudian narrative . . . and the philosophical
narrative of the modern social contract is the fundamental act of
the political community and prescribes its violent and sacrificial
fate” (Dominijanni 2012:  31). This break has taken shape through
theoretical speculations, but above all thanks to practices that have
set in motion new measures for coexistence.
As it was rightly recalled in some of the recent contributions on the
topic “Feminism and Neoliberalism,” these claims did not concern
only “a part of the social organization, but its order in its entirety”
(Giardini 2014: 126); they were not a “contribution to the emancipatory
project of the modern, but . . . a break from it” (Dominijanni 2014: 52).
This was not so much “the female question,” “a matter of updating the
techniques of representation in political institutions—voting rights,
quotas in assigning positions, etc.—but an ontological question
. . . at the boundary between what is in turn posed as human and
non-human” (Giardini 2014:  126):  “a properly ontological-political
question” (52).
It is not possible to account for the complex and articulated
international discussion that feminist thought and practices have
produced, even through important internal diversifications:  from
the thought of difference to gender theory, queer or LGBT. I am now
140 DEBT AND GUILT: A POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

interested in pointing out the intersection of the feminist movements

with the innovative form of neoliberal power and the rethinking that
this intersection has recently brought about within the debate on
feminism—a reflection that can point the way to other equally fertile
thoughts.
With the emergence of the economic crisis and debt economy,
feminist thought—promoting political struggle and rejecting any
attempt at absorbing differences in the logic of modern patriarchal
repressive power—has been able to perform a fruitful self-criticism.
As has been rightly observed, “the crisis obviously contributes to
reactivating the ‘economic’ level of the discourse” (Bazzicalupo
2014: 36). However, it is important to understand whether it is in fact
necessary to recognize that “those differences and anarchy” claimed
by feminism “actually refer to a change of subjectivity” (36) so radical
that it also implies the profound change in forms of power that is at
the origin of neoliberal policies.
Particularly relevant is the recent feminist reflection on new forms
of labor. I  am thinking above all about the debate on the topic of
women’s labor in the post-Fordist era, of the resulting intertwining
of precariousness and flexibility, which opened the discussion toward
a new view of the ongoing processes (Nannicini 2002, 2006; Burchi
and Di Martino 2013). The term “feminization of labor” (Morini
2010), used to define these transformations, besides indicating the
massive entrance of women into the labor market, highlights how
conditions that have historically characterized female labor of care
and administration, the reproductive and domestic labor, today affect
the whole sphere of production. The overlapping of work and life
schedules, the involvement of the affective, cognitive, and relational
 THE PSYCHIC LIFE OF DEBT 141

resources and the individualization of the labor experience, which

used to mark the “invisible” labor of women, are today topical in
the world of labor as a whole:  “Unlike in the past,” writes Cristina
Morini, “today women’s disempowerment does not occur only
through repression (confinement, exclusion, removal from the public,
even economic space) but also and above all through the gradual
feminization of society” (2010: 126).
In the literature on the subject, the new capitalist modes of
production are also interpreted as a system that allowed a great
number of women into the labor market, thus expediting or, for some,
even causing an erosion of gender inequality. Rejecting this idea,
Cristina Morini argues that in the transformation carried out by the
new capitalist modes of production, the so-called female difference
was exploited for new forms of labor and contractual performances.
A controversial article on this subject written by critical theorist
and feminist Nancy Fraser appeared in The Guardian in 2013. Through
a critical analysis of feminism, Fraser argued that “Second-wave
feminism emerged as a critique of [the state-managed capitalism of
the postwar era] but has become the handmaiden of [a new form of
capitalism].” Prior to this article, which introduced her argument to
the general public, Fraser had presented her position in more extensive
works (Fraser 2009, 2011). In 2013, she also published a book in which
she addresses the question more broadly (Fraser 2013a). Although
criticized within the feminist movement (in Italy, cf. at least the essays
mentioned above by Bazzicalupo and Dominijanni), her argument
has found much support (see Eisenstein 2009; Walby 2011).
Although questionable in many respects, Fraser’s thesis attests to
a change that one cannot fail to acknowledge. In a context in which
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life itself is part of production and of the new modes of valorization

of capital, with all its affects, knowledge, relationships, subjugation
no longer occurs only in the forms of repression, by which, as Freud
proposed, guilt and inclusive exclusion are created.
The investment in the same capability for initiative and care,
which have always characterized domestic female labor, creates
new modes of submission that are no longer directly coercive, but
nevertheless oppressive. A  gradual introduction of women into the
labor market is thus accompanied by a concomitant and widespread
disempowerment of individual roles. The practice of infinite self-
valorization functional to the logic of capitalism has totally emptied
individual lives, increasingly subject to the impossibility of expressing
actual value. The inclusion of the emotional, affective, and subjective
dimension in the world of production has meant the inclusion of
desires into production and, at the same time, the transformation of
consumption into an activity that produces value.
The undeniable increase in the number of women in the labor
market has not coincided with adequate valorization. Women with
precarious positions are still the majority and female unemployment
remains far greater than that of men.
Not only, then, have gender inequalities and gender injustices not
yet come to an end, but above all, through the phenomenon defined
as the “feminization of labor,” a perverse process of the involvement
of women is underway. This is based on the overall extension of modes
of submission not explicitly coercive, but also no less oppressive
and frustrating that largely involve investment in the same care and
valorization skills of individual life that used to characterize domestic
labor. The housewife, the showgirl, the immigrant domestic worker,
 THE PSYCHIC LIFE OF DEBT 143

or the knowledge worker are thus united by the same aptitude to

valorize subjective, affective, and emotional components. In their
book Lo schermo del potere, Alessandra Gribaldo and Giovanna
Zapperi write:  “The showgirl and the spokesmodel are in a sense
the spectacular embodiment of this body-machine in which people
invest their ambitions and desires. Here the investment is to be
understood as a financial operation capable of producing income”
(2012: 52).
The valorization of life, which must correspond to the immediate
economic valorization of capital, transforms individual capacities,
which are potentially open, into a condition that remains incomplete.
Like indebtedness, it must not be filled, but constantly reproduced
in order to be managed. Debt as a political operator presupposes the
empty reproduction of ghostly desires which, as Beatriz Preciado
brilliantly shows in her work, is totally embedded in the binary
logic between frustration and consumption (see Preciado 2013). But
it also implies “the critique of welfare-state paternalism” which, as
Fraser argues, is internal to feminism. Significant is the example of
“microcredits,” namely, “the programme of small bank loans to poor
women in the global south” (Fraser 2013b):

Cast as an empowering, bottom-up alternative to the top-down,

bureaucratic red tape of state projects, microcredit is touted as the
feminist antidote for women’s poverty and subjection. What has
been missed, however, is a disturbing coincidence: microcredit has
burgeoned just as states have abandoned macro-structural efforts
to fight poverty, efforts that small-scale lending cannot possibly
replace. In this case too, then, a feminist idea has been recuperated
144 DEBT AND GUILT: A POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

by neoliberalism. A perspective aimed originally at democratising

state power in order to empower citizens is now used to legitimise
marketisation and state retrenchment. (ibid.)

In this framework, the practice of indebtedness that today

characterizes neoliberal policies, rather than an economic problem
in a strict sense, turns out to be a powerful political operator.
The idle, infinite valorization typical of the logic of capital is the
mechanism that feeds both the process of the feminization of
labor as well as the phenomenon of generalized indebtedness. It is
a process that disempowers the very elements from which capital
produces value. However, denouncing the current situation—as
Fraser does in referring to the welfare system organized by state
and public authorities, although important for many reasons—
doesn’t seem to fully grasp the meaning of the profound change
we are witnessing that is bound to the new modes of regulation—a
transformation to which the state and the market have contributed
from the same side.
Fraser’s current position in many ways confirms her position of
1997 when, in an impassioned public dialogue with Judith Butler,
she defends the need to distinguish between the economic and the
cultural sphere (cf. Fraser 1997). Stating the need to overcome the
distinction between the two domains, in an attempt to identify what
she thought was the more complex logic at the basis of the “cultural”
genesis of power forms, Butler’s position seems to me more useful for
an interpretation of the present time. The point is to try to understand
whether this complexity also encapsulates new emancipatory attitudes
or whether it is just another net in which to remain entangled.
 THE PSYCHIC LIFE OF DEBT 145

The mystery of guilt and the psychic life of power

Neoliberalism is a form of government that is practiced with self-
government, requires administrative structures, and a political
rationality with a different “anthropogenic machine” than modern
societies. As I have attempted to show in the wake of Foucault, the
“invention” of this dispositif is to be genealogically identified in
Christianity and in the administrative institution of Ekklésia, which
was the first to disrupt the duality of activity and passivity of power,
on which the ancient societies were founded, and on which, in other
ways, the modern political pact continued to be based. There are many
differences between the “prototype” and the current implementation.
In any case, the dispositif can operate using the specific resources of
human life.
Judith Butler’s attention is focused on these resources, with a view
to an investigation of power that, beyond its modern structure, goes
back to its psychic roots. Her analysis presupposes the break with
the repressive logic of the modern patriarchal power carried out by
feminist practices and theories, while at the same time questioning the
naturalness of gender and sexual identity, as claimed by a certain kind
of feminism, favoring a research aimed at identifying their cultural
origin and their derivation from performative social practices. Since
the mid 1990s, Butler, following in Foucault’s footsteps, has conducted
a study of power as an anthropogenic machine, where processes of
subjugation are intrinsically linked to techniques of subjectification.
While Foucault appears to Butler interested in finding the materiality
of power in its institutional forms, her focus is instead on the “psychic
life of power,” as the title of the book devoted to this theme reads.
146 DEBT AND GUILT: A POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

The intermingling of the psychic and social spheres is the basis

of Butler’s analysis, which aims to keep Foucault and Freud together
in a trajectory that, from Hegel to Althusser through Nietzsche,
deconstructs the modern posture of power as dominance over given
subjects:

To be dominated by a power external to oneself is a familiar and

agonizing form power takes. To find, however, that what “one”
is, one’s very formation as a subject, is in some sense dependent
upon that very power is quite another. We are used to thinking
of power as what presses on the subject from the outside, as what
subordinates, sets underneath, and relegates to a lower order.
This is surely a fair description of part of what power does. But if,
following Foucault, we understand power as forming the subject
as well, as providing the very condition of its existence and the
trajectory of its desire, then power is not simply what we oppose
but also, in a strong sense, what we depend on for our existence
and what we harbor and preserve in the beings that we are.
(1997: 1–2)

Butler’s aim is, therefore, to question the alleged duality of an

absolutely active subject and of one that is subordinate and passive
to the exercise of power. Subject and power are rather involved as the
result of a relationship that encompasses them and produces them
both, as studies on biopolitics after Foucault have also argued. In this
sense, however, it is clear how the subject is not only the product of
power, but also unwittingly dependent on it. So much so that one can
say that a precautionary obedience is the source of freedom itself or
that the two experiences are not originally contrasted but coincidental.
 THE PSYCHIC LIFE OF DEBT 147

Here emerges the problem of the norm as psychic institution

besides its function as social institution, as well as the role that the
“sense of guilt” plays in an investigation of the “psychic life of power.”
Butler aims to show that “guilt” arises in the psychic dimension “not
in consequence of internalizing an external prohibition” (25) or of
internalizing violence that is directed toward the outside, but as a
“primary subordination” through which “a subject emerges against
itself in order, paradoxically, to be for itself ” (28); that is, it emerges
from a masochistic posture.
Freud deals with this issue in Beyond the Pleasure Principle,
published in 1920 (see Freud 1961a), where the logic of self-
preservation of the pleasure principle—through which the psychic
apparatus works—appears as insufficient to account for all the drives
that form the psyche and shape human life. Hence Freud’s need to
admit to the existence of another principle, apparently opposed to the
first, which originates from a death drive. It is a destructive principle
that, as such, is fundamentally uneconomic for the self-preservation
of the psyche.
In this text, Freud proposes the idea of an
​​ economy of the psyche
that is not exclusively linked to self-preservation, and therefore the
idea that death drives is not dualistically opposed to the life affirming
impulses deriving from the pleasure principle. In other words, for
Freud, the pleasure principle seems never to fade in human life,
but it does not coincide with the mere preservation of life. There
are specific complications that lead to different articulations of
this principle. What complicates the prevalence of the principle of
pleasure is the possible and different ways of administering it. In
this line, particularly important to our discussion is the interest with
148 DEBT AND GUILT: A POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

which Freud, beginning with this text, increasingly observes psychic

phenomena from an “economic” point of view.
The “topographical” model in Freud’s analysis, according to which
the psyche is spatially divided into overlapping regions (Id, Ego, and
Super-Ego), is indeed linked to a juridical-legal approach culminating
in the predominance of the Law of the Super-Ego, corresponding—as
we have seen—to the state juridical institution in the social sphere.
This vision, ultimately excessively rigid for a full understanding
of psychic dynamics, is progressively integrated by Freud with an
“economic” approach, which presupposes a dynamic management of
the psyche’s life.
To a certain extent, the dynamic management of psychic
phenomena is based on the economic logic of costs and benefits.
We should not fail to remember that during the same years that
Freud was elaborating the “economic” view as best suited for the
complexity of psychic phenomena, some of the major exponents of
the so-called Austrian marginalist school were active in Vienna. The
idea underlying the economic theories of the Austrian school—that​​
praxis can be optimized—seems to find a clear correspondence in
Freud’s economic approach, which aims to calculate the dynamic
expenditure needed for the psychic economy to achieve a healthy
balance of instincts.
For Freud, however, the optimization of psychic phenomena is
not exhausted in a linear calculation of costs and benefits, ultimately
consistent with the legal structure of the topographical point of view
aimed at self-preservation, which he was trying to put into question.
Similarly, for the marginalists, economic value does not coincide, as
in Smith’s and Ricardo’s classical approach, with the work needed to
 THE PSYCHIC LIFE OF DEBT 149

produce it. Going back to the utility attributed by the consumer, value
tends to move onto a subjective level, dismantling the metaphysical
construct of classical economy and highlighting desire as the core
of the economic dispositif of the psychic life of the subjects:  a
desire for satisfaction and balance, but also an excessive desire,
unsatisfied, always focused on itself, and therefore continually taken
in the whirlwind of the endless cycle of supply and demand based on
consumption. At a time when, with neoliberalism, even the consumer
becomes an “entrepreneur of oneself,” one’s value increases not only
in proportion to the quantity of what one consumes, but also to the
quality of the consumed products, which transform the way of being
of the consumer as “entrepreneur of oneself.” The economy of the
psyche, somewhat in line with Freud’s point of view, plays a decisive
role for the political affirmation of economy as a form of government,
as a power that relies on squander more than repression.
As for Butler, she is particularly interested in the role that the “sense
of guilt” plays for the “psychic life of power.” Interestingly, in addition
to Freud, she refers to Melanie Klein to talk about the “sense of guilt.”
In her interpretation of Freud’s work, Klein develops the hypothesis
of a “primary masochism,” which her master suggested but never fully
explored: the idea, that is, that the “economic problem of masochism”
(Freud 1961b), its “mystery” as the primary impulse of human life,
does not reside exclusively in the evolutionary interiorization of
aggression and violence, which are instinctively aimed toward the
outside and at the struggle for survival. According to Freud, “the
existence of a masochistic trend in the instinctual life of human beings
may justly be described as mysterious from the economic point of
view” (159), because it benefits from the condition of disadvantage in
150 DEBT AND GUILT: A POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

which it rises. In a paradoxical logic in which life instincts and death

drive coexist, profit, so to speak, emerges autonomously and does
not simply derive from the cost paid to obtain it. This is the mystery
of living beings who act against themselves or, rather, against their
merely conservative attitude.
Klein’s work focuses on this mystery, particularly her study of the
“sense of guilt,” aimed at tracing—within a Freudian approach—its
origin to a time prior to the Oedipal complex and the patriarchal
power connected to it; that is, prior to the emergence of guilt as a
consequence of the interiorization of aggression or as an internalized
form of rejection. Her interest is in understanding in what sense
guilt results for Freud, but also beyond his findings, “from the innate
conflict of ambivalence, from the eternal struggle between love and
the death trends” ([1952] 2002: 272).
In her studies on early infancy, Klein asserts that “the struggle
between life and death instincts already operates during birth and
accentuates the persecutory anxiety aroused by this painful experience”
(278). Accordingly, guilt originates at birth along with the anxiety
for the loss of the beloved object. With their contrasting instincts,
human beings feel responsible for such loss, but this loss is precisely
what allowed their life to begin. “Melancholy,” as described by Freud,
reconsidered by Klein, and reinterpreted by Butler, is a condition in
which this loss is not accepted: “The pain of loss is ‘credited’ to the one
who suffers it, at which point the loss is understood as a fault or injury
deserving of redress; one seeks redress for harms done to oneself, but
from no one except oneself ” (Butler 1997: 184).
All this seems to be intimately related to the abyss that is produced
at the beginning of human life:  a void in which—both from the
 THE PSYCHIC LIFE OF DEBT 151

phylogenetic and the ontogenetic point of view—one experiences loss

and abandonment at the same time. It is the way in which the human
being is given the opportunity to shape his or her life: a disorienting
enterprise. There is no center from which to begin. The foundations
available to other living species are dissolved for human beings. They
have no natural environment to live in, and do not know specific
signals that could disinhibit given receptors specifically selected
for survival. In the process of evolution, human life has produced
different modes of self-preservation.
Spaces in natural environments are filled with automatically
triggered processes, which are never suspended or deactivated. No
possibility can appear in them. In human life, instead, there exists a
chasm, which is exciting and confusing at the same time. It is a void
in which one can sink, and this fact tends to turn this life into an
overwhelming enterprise, which seems to have nothing to do with
a well-built architecture aimed at self-preservation. This explains
the suffering already mentioned by Butler, which is “the pain of
loss . . . credited to the one who suffers it, at which point the loss is
understood as a fault” (1997: 184). A deep, radical disesteem can arise
at the beginning of a life that feels open possibility as a threat or an
impoverishment.
Much of the philosophical thought of the twentieth century—
aimed at dismantling the metaphysical notion of the subject and
interested in the definition of a new anthropology—arises precisely
from a reflection on this “original disesteem” and has for the most
part ended up conceiving the extent to which human life is open as
impoverishment, lack, and negativity. It suffices to think of the great
insights of German philosophical anthropology (Gehlen, Plessner,
152 DEBT AND GUILT: A POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

etc.) or the work done by Martin Heidegger in this direction.

Particularly significant for our trajectory is, for example, the fact
that Heidegger, in paragraph 58 of Being and Time, speaking of the
“guilt” charged by consciousness at the time of the “authentic calling,”
defines it as “debt” and “lack” not of “something” specific, but as an
ontological-existential character of the “negativity” that has always
marked human existence. This negativity, though discussed and
problematized by Heidegger himself, has never lost the opacity that
characterizes his discourse.
In many respects, Butler does not escape this philosophical
contortion either, although she doesn’t fail to carry out a profound
reflection that takes into account the complexity of the phenomenon.
She acknowledges, for example, that prior to the operation of a
“critical agency”—the elaboration, that is, of a potentially open
linguistic praxis—“there is no question of high or low self-esteem”
(ibid.). There is, therefore, no negative qualification. It is as if
the ontological openness to different possibilities existing at the
beginning of life, in order to assume a power that belongs to it, finds
the ways of accusing itself of a fault, a lack, a debt, which in this way
becomes the only thing in which it can invest to give value to what
seems not to have any.
This issue is certainly very complex and does not find in Butler’s
work—at least not in the work examined here—a fully accomplished
articulation; nor is it possible for us to deal with it adequately now.
What is rather interesting at this point is how Butler, on the basis
of the close interconnection she identifies between the individual
psychic dimension and the collective one, insists that “the violence
of social regulation is not to be found in its unilateral action, but
 THE PSYCHIC LIFE OF DEBT 153

in the circuitous route by which the psyche accuses itself of its own
worthlessness” (ibid.). The “melancholy” (see Mazzeo 2009) at the
center of Butler’s book, along with Freud and Klein, outlines the
scenario in which the subject of power emerges, in both the active
and passive sense of “subject.” The current forms of melancholy
in the conditions of depression and discomfort that characterize
contemporary societies dominated by global market is merely one of
the “tortuous paths” of its “psychic life,” of the life of a power that
represses through freedom.

Envisioning new ways of assuming power

In the new and implicit pact between individuals and institutions

established in recent decades, individuals have agreed to participate
in production and financial apparatuses as “human resources” and
“human capital” on the grounds that they could enjoy virtually
unlimited freedom. Capitalism has increasingly permeated
social relations and subjective desires through the exaltation of
freedom, which in fact has found its greatest form of expression in
consumerism. The continuous self-production of desires, deadened
by disquieting forms of enjoyment that seemed easy to achieve, has
ended up confining pleasure to self-harming modes of consumption.
I  am thinking of the new forms of discomfort in contemporary
societies, such as anorexia, bulimia, and drug addiction; but also of
the numerous examples of consumption addictions, recently defined
with the expression—perhaps not too elegant, but in some way
effective—the “gadgetization of existence” (Recalcati 2010).
154 DEBT AND GUILT: A POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

A lecture Jacques Lacan held at the State University of Milan in

1972 has often been used to analyze this phenomenon. It is here that
Lacan develops the so-called capitalist discourse (see Lacan 1978). He
exposes the new configuration that the capitalist regime assumes in
its hypermodern phase, which is different from the modern capitalist
regime. On the one hand, capitalist discourse is the discourse of the
“turbo-consumer,” of the homo felix, of those who feel free to enjoy
what they can freely buy (see Pagliardini 2012). On the other hand,
however, it is also the discourse of a lost subjectivity (see Chicchi
2012; Mura 2015). It produces, as a matter of fact, the condition of
perverse inebriation, which is disorienting, because it comes from the
intertwining of pleasure and pain.
The studies of the forms of discomfort of hypermodern civilization
have often given primary attention to its sadistic-narcissistic
component, essentially linked to the solipsistic enjoyment by which
they appear dominated (see Recalcati 2010:  33–5; and Borrelli, De
Carolis, Napolitano and Recalcati 2013:  11–13). The main cause of
this phenomenon is found in the decline of the guiding function of
the “Law of the Father” (see Recalcati 2010). Some even seem to feel
nostalgic for it on the ethical and political level (see Godani 2014),
ignoring its patriarchal implications. In these forms of nostalgia,
however, there is also a masochistic component that, in my view,
should be studied in depth, independently from its combination with
sadistic or narcissistic elements.
In contemporary societies, the virtually limitless freedom at the
basis of the new implicit pact established between individuals and
institutions—before being a freedom of enjoyment, “ideally free of debt”
(Borrelli, De Carolis, Napolitano and Recalcati 2013:  13)—configures
 THE PSYCHIC LIFE OF DEBT 155

itself as a repeated attempt to confront oneself with the frustration of

never being up to the situation. Constant self-criticism is therefore at the
origin of a sense of guilt, which does not derive from the trespassing of
inhibiting rules, but from a lack that appears unbridgeable and therefore
creates debt, because it leads to obsessive forms of consumption to
compensate for the feeling of not being adequate.
But if power, as Butler claims, has a psychic life, and if, on the other
hand, every human life can only take shape through the complex
dynamic of power relationships from which it rises, new modes of
power are still possible starting from different modes of drawing from
the materiality of individual lives.

Assuming terms of power that one never made but to which one
is vulnerable, on which one depends in order to be, appears to be
a mundane subjection at the basis of subject formation. “Assuming”
power is no simple process, however, for power is not mechanically
reproduced when it is assumed. Instead, on being assumed, power
runs the risk of assuming another form and direction. (Butler 1997: 21)

I think that times are ripe for us to be able to take this “possibility”
seriously, even in the awareness that the subjection produced by
economic power is not just a coercive power but has its own specific
“psychic life.”

The psychic operation of the norm offers a more insidious route for
regulatory power than explicit coercion, one whose success allows
its tacit operation within the social. And yet, being psychic, the
norm does not merely reinstate social power, it becomes formative
and vulnerable in highly specific ways. (ibid.)
156 DEBT AND GUILT: A POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

If power is not only what represses the subject, what dominates it and
is opposed by it, but also what gives it life and brings it to existence,
today more than ever, modes that are not only repressive come to
the fore through the widespread use on the economic and social level
of creative faculties, whose valorization is based on a constant self-
criticism that impoverishes them by neutralizing their potentialities.
But if the subject is at times the condition and the instrument of
action, this also implies the possibility of an implicit vulnerability of
the same regulatory process, of constant criticism, able to experiment
with different forms of power, new forms of social cooperation, and
a new relationship with the world and with things. It implies, for
example, the possibility of recognizing, even with a certain degree of
irreverence (see Coccia 2014) that, in addition to the pervasive and
ubiquitous phenomenon of the economy of consumerism and debt,
there are facts supported by the possibility of a balanced search for
specific, common goods. It is therefore necessary to find new energies
for what has already been given to us in an attempt to produce a
revolution capable of unprecedented forms of assumption of power.
It is worth accepting what appears to be a challenge, even though
the journey in this direction seems long, tortuous, and particularly
complex, given the opacity of the mechanisms we aspire to activate
differently.

❖ Since Europe was directly involved in the world economic turmoil,

it has begun to publicly speak of “debt” as “guilt.” The “German model”
might have promoted a view of public debt contracted by some EU
countries as guilt. According to this interpretation, the situation
 THE PSYCHIC LIFE OF DEBT 157

in which some of the southern European states found themselves,

resulted from poor national economic management, which is easy to
assess and to punish. It is worth asking ourselves what is at stake in this
passage. We need, in other words, to understand whether considering
debt as guilt does in fact mean to situate the current widespread
condition of debt within the scope of what can be fixed, like a damage
or a transgressed rule, an agreement that hasn’t been respected, but
which is nevertheless possible to repay through “sacrifice,” as claimed
by the policies of the “troika.”
More than an economic question in the technical sense, the
problem of debt turns out to be a powerful political operator that
radicalizes a new dimension of power in which the institution of the
rule is not exclusively based on discipline, repression and guilt, as in
the modern paradigm. Today, there are not only juridical dispositifs
that create guilt, but also new forms of regulatory institutions capable
of administering the libidinal economy at the foundation of human
life. They do so not in repressive ways, but through the continuous
reproduction of conditions that create debt. The political function of
guilt, therefore, has changed along with the changing of the conditions
that produced it.
A “psychic life of power” is here called into question. According
to Judith Butler, this condition offers a more insidious pattern than
explicit coercion. This opens a space to rethink—even in light of the
feminist critique of neoliberalism—the limits and potentialities of
power. On the one hand, this power implies less repressive modes,
that nevertheless neutralize creative capabilities—often depreciated
and impoverished together with the material conditions. On the other
158 DEBT AND GUILT: A POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

hand, it brings to light the need for a new critical action that is capable
of assuming power differently, beyond world economic domination,
but also beyond the most well-known forms of antagonism linked
to the modern, patriarchal order-creating guilt, which are in many
respects similar and opposed to the modern order.
 Conclusions

In many ancient and modern cultures, debt, like guilt, implies a bond,
an obligation. At the origin of such a bond is a juridical relationship,
like the religious one between man and God. This relationship
establishes the dependence of the living on the sovereign powers and
their obligation to redeem, throughout life, the vital energy given to
them. The most ancient form of redemption to repay the deity for the
debt of life is sacrifice. The power associated with the sacrificial cult
focuses on the victim: the germs of dissent that exist in the common
life are deflected from the community and directed toward the victim.
As a constraint, debt is the expression of a social bond, whose break
implies the guilt of nonobservance. This bond is therefore also and
essentially a potent dispositif of power. Thus, it is clear in what sense
the expression “being in debt” does not simply mean having “debt.”
It indicates something that cannot be possessed, but which possesses
and subjugates individual lives: literally, in this sense, “being in debt”
indicates a “debt of life,” which is not possible to overcome.
Today, more than ever, “being in debt” does not indicate a state
in which one enters at any given moment in life, but is the original
state in which everyone is born, be they poor or wealthy. Even those
160 DEBT AND GUILT: A POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

who have never voluntarily contracted debt are born indebted,

because states transmit their debt to those who are part of it even
before they are born. Of course, the role and extent of debt changes
depending on the geographical, political, and social context, and
on whether a specific state offers some degree of protection to its
citizens. For example, migrants landing in one piece on the Italian
coasts are obliged to pay the contracted debt to their transporters for
many years. American students, long before they begin to work, find
themselves indebted to banks who have paid their college tuition, and
already know that for a certain number of years they should allocate
some of their potential earnings to repay their debt. Nowadays, more
than ever, debt comes before life itself, in the sense that it not only
precedes it but also determines it, even exposing it to the risk of death,
as evidenced by the high rate of debt-related suicides registered in
recent years (cf. Simone 2014).
However, “debt” has been explicitly linked to “guilt,” especially with
the EU’s direct involvement in the global economic crisis. The issue
of debt emerged as a specific problem for some European nations
that were considered to be guilty of mismanaging the state. A  fault
is easy to attribute and place among the things to be amended, such
as damage done, a rule transgressed, or an agreement not respected
that, however, is possible to repay through “sacrifice.” Recent policies
of economic revival and stimulus, critical of the system promoting
a regime of austerity, explicitly opposed the rigid paradigm that
creates guilt and positioned themselves as an alternative. However,
as suggested in this book, more than a real alternative, this line of
economic development has emerged as an opaque sign that still needs
to be investigated, and the center of a wider problem that requires
 CONCLUSIONS 161

further analysis. To be sure, the current dominating dispositif of debt

seems to be an even more complex mechanism than the juridical one,
to which, in many respects, it belongs.
Debt today is not so much, or merely, a condition to be corrected—
as the austerity policies’ authoritarian imposition of sacrifice seems
to indicate—nor simply the latest and empty expression of the
juridical bond that, in absorbing life in the sphere of the law, cannot
be acknowledged in its totality. Indebtedness is rather a condition that
is continually produced and nourished, because, as the recent policies
of economic stimulus show, it is that in which it is possible to invest.
A radical change is under way in the regulatory production of the
market economy that, starting from the neoliberal turn, constitutes
itself as a political institution. Hence the genealogical link with the
Christian religious experience that I  have outlined as a practical
field of regulatory experimentation beginning precisely from the
elaboration of a juridical relationship that, in the Jewish religion,
unites man to God.
The function of guilt related to the economy of debt therefore
changed when the conditions that produced it changed. The
categories underlying this change are no longer merely juridical, but
are linked to the economic practice of valuation. Guilt, here, is not
just the expression of a bond that condemns a priori to be culpable.
It is the condition produced when the ways of attributing value to life
with neoliberal policies fully correspond to the valorization of capital,
making it possible for each individual to become “human capital.”
Individual faculties, which are potentially open to possibilities, are
thus transformed by the frustration of never feeling adequate to the
situation. A  constant self-criticism is the source of a sense of guilt,
162 DEBT AND GUILT: A POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

the fundamental characteristic of which is not so much that it comes

from a juridical bond, but that it derives from an economic valuation
model, which immediately results in investment opportunities into
what is lacking. An infinite debt is thus reproduced, which materially
derives from obsessive forms of consumption aimed at compensating
for the belief that one is not up to expectations.
Therefore, we should try to reconsider what currently appears as a
lack in order to change what seems to be an entangled net. If it is true
that every society can produce the kind of man it needs, I believe that
in order to move in this direction it might be very fertile to further
expose the mechanisms of the “anthropogenic machine” of neoliberal
societies. This machine is in many ways different from the juridical
one that many ancient and modern societies have tried to perfect.
Our most difficult task is to find a way to reactivate the machine in a
new way, different from the senseless path tried so far.