Knowledge Bank

The primary question which animates this inquiry is: How should we understand the role of contingency in contemporary theoretical schematizations of subjectivity and indebtedness? To clarify the question and to arrive at some possible answers, I make use of the phrase “debt-as-ground” in order to coax out the above question from the writings of both David Graeber and Maurizio Lazzarato, two scholars whose writings have enjoyed much attention in the arena of contemporary debt scholarship. In my rhetorical utilization of the term, which I borrow from Tamara Caraus, “debt-as-ground” acts as a label for any theory which claims that debt serves to fundamentally characterize human life socially, economically, and politically. As the phrase is meant to suggest, the arguments to which this label is attached are ones which are guilty of essentializing the social as though having necessary and fundamental grounds, ostensibly in indebtedness. Caraus contends that Graeber and Lazzarato, perhaps against their better wishes, each fall into such a trap. Against this interpretation, I argue that their projects are better understood as debt-centric analyses which highlight the ubiquity, but not the necessity of debt. Rather than adhering to such a view of debt-as-ground in the final analysis, Graeber and Lazzarato each experiment with such a mode of thinking in order to reveal key insights about debt confined to market logics. However, they always do so in a manner compatible with the assumed contingency of debt relations. To argue for such a conclusion, I trace the reception of Nietzsche in both Graeber’s and Lazzarato’s accounts. I claim that Nietzsche’s argument in the second essay in On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), which is perhaps the earliest example of a theory of debt-as-ground, far from being emblematic of Graeber’s or Lazzarato’s thought (or even his own), rather serves to articulate a view common to all three: namely that it is the flagrant logic of market economies which seeks a totalizing account of the social, but that such an account need not be assumed as natural, originary, or fixed. I argue that we must accept the utterly contingent nature of social relations of indebtedness, and I conclude with a call to reexamine what alternatives and escape routes might exist for the prevailing debtor subject.