What We Owe to Retroactivity: The Origin and Future of Debt

Graeber’s First 5,000 Years of Debt

In his much-acclaimed book Debt: the First 5,000 Years, published three years into the recent global economic crisis, David Graeber identifies two “origin stories” that largely dominate commonplace understandings concerning the invention of money and the onset of debt. The first is the myth of barter. According to an idealized view of archaic human communities, before money systems developed, barter predominated as the exchange-form characteristic of basic social relations. People simply swapped goods and services to the benefit of their own interests and, by extension, to the benefit of the community as a whole. However, the barter system had its limits. From the outset, it depended on a double coincidence of wants: I have what you want and vice versa. As societies became more complex, barter required increasingly sophisticated and often cumbersome multilateral transactions and valuations to ensure the desired distribution of a larger number of goods. Thus, the story goes, some consensual medium of exchange was required to simplify the process—hence the birth of money. Graeber shows how this “origin story” of barter is founded on hypothetical language (“suppose you want eggs for your breakfast, and have only bread…”), and argues that ethnographers have yet to find any example, past or present, of a barter economy pure and simple. Rather, he points to the credit-based nature of most basic human economies as the more accurate and prevalent historical context for the development of money systems, anthropologically speaking. Here, barter is merely an epiphenomenon in the story of money—a by-product of money systems, employed by people who for some reason or other cannot use currency and are unprepared to operate within the trust-based world of credit (for instance, whilst trading with strangers or enemies during times of conflict).
 
Why then is the “origin story” of barter so widely accepted and so little questioned? How did it acquire currency? Graeber suggests that the myth was crucially important to the founding of economics as a discipline, and indeed to “the very idea that there was something called the ‘economy,’ which operated by its own rules, separate from moral or political life, that economists could take as their field of study” (27). From this perspective, money-based economies arose from the more basic situation of barter, which rested in turn upon the idea of the “objective” calculability of the value of goods—and thus the rational basis of the marketplace—outside of and prior to cultural influences or political pressures. Thus, the three (abstract) functions of money identified by classical economics—store of value, unit of account, and medium of exchange—simply built on the two most salient features of barter by adding a third element designed to enhance rather than detract from its essential workings. Graeber tells us that Adam Smith, who “effectively brought the discipline of economics into being,” had particular reasons for upholding the interpretation of money which arises from this “origin story”:
 

Above all, he objected to the notion that money was the creation of government. In this, Smith was the intellectual heir of the Liberal tradition of philosophers like John Locke, who had argued that government begins in the need to protect private property and operated best when it tried to limit itself to that function. Smith expanded on the argument, insisting that property, money and markets not only existed before political institutions but were the very foundation of human society. It followed that insofar as government should play any role in monetary affairs, it should limit itself to guaranteeing the soundness of the currency. (24)

 
The story of barter makes possible this elemental image of a world where things are primarily the possessions of individuals, where each “thing” as a form of property may be assigned an innate and rationally transactable value, and where money is less an agent than a neutral medium of exchange, made up of merely abstract units of measurement and designed to serve the entirely felicitous interests of the marketplace. On this view, far from being an expression or function of power, the advent of money is a pure effect of the market in its “free” form, from which it follows that state interference in the economy, if any, should restrict itself to upholding the currency’s essential integrity as an apt medium of exchange. (The paradox, of course, is that within this laissez-faire model, in which the government is merely an honest broker, such threats to the “soundness” of money could only come from unregulated or rogue behavior of just the kind that the free market is supposed to encourage.) For Graeber, then, the attempt to found economics as a scientific discipline on a par with Newtonian physics was not simply a matter of attaining academic credibility; even more crucially, it encouraged an analogy with the physical machinery of a Newtonian universe able to function by its own laws without ongoing divine interference, and relied on the idea of a free market operating spontaneously and effectively (that is, naturally and in everyone’s best interests) outside of state intervention.[1] The difficulty of resisting Smith’s legacy, Graeber tells us, is that by very dint of its pretensions to scientificity, the founding myth of economics offers a single, unified view of the origins and development of money that is hard to dislodge with a more nuanced and differentiated picture drawn largely from anthropological inquiry, which outlines a whole variety of “economic” habits and practices that, historically, often include “mixed-mode” rather than discrete forms of exchange.  (For Graeber, such anthropological attention-to-detail is the best defense against retroactive historical interpretation.)
 
The second story of origins singled out by Graeber in his re-telling of the history of debt is expounded by proponents of the theory of primordial debt. This comes close to the Nietzschean idea found in the second essay of the Genealogy of Morals (to which we will return), whereby the ongoing prosperity of the community promotes an increasing sense of indebtedness to one’s forebears that intensifies over time, until at last one’s ancestors are elevated to the status of gods. Here, forms of sacrifice within human communities are interpreted in terms of the repayment of debts. Nevertheless, such “gifts,” construed as a kind of payment, paradoxically lead to a heightened rather than reduced sense of debt, becoming ever more lavish in order to acknowledge (and thus reinforce) the very extent of the obligation. Primordial-debt theory suggests that, as history moved forward, governments were able to tax populations because they were able to appropriate the role of guardianship of universal debt. Once more, however, Graeber argues that there is insufficient anthropological evidence to support primordial-debt theory, and that it is itself a backward projection based on a notion of debt that is “only made possible with the advent of the modern nation-state,” the modern conception of society and of societal “duty,” and so on (69).[2] Thus, turning to the Genealogy of Morals, Graeber reads Nietzsche as dabbling in primordial-debt theory not so much to embark upon an historical exposé of the origins of debt, but rather to see what happens when one starts out from “ordinary bourgeois assumptions”—namely, that the basis of human existence is “economic,” and that “man” on earth is indebted man—in order to drive them “to a place where they can only shock a bourgeois audience.” “It’s a worthy game,” says Graeber, but one “played entirely within the confines of bourgeois thought” (79). Whether Graeber’s reading does justice to Nietzsche’s capacity to open history otherwise, his overall argument is that our conception of the origins of debt and money functions retroactively. That is to say, the “origin” is generated retrospectively in order to address or promote the concerns of the present, rather than to uncover and understand the “truth” of the past. In fact, Graeber suggests that these two myths of origin intersect more closely than one might imagine; it is only “once we can imagine human life as a series of commercial transactions that we’re capable of seeing our relation to the universe in terms of debt” (75); certainly in terms of “bourgeois thought,” historically one would have little trouble connecting beliefs about the “economic” basis of life, on the one hand, and the religious sense of “debt” on the other.
 
To what degree is Debt: the First 5,000 Years able to resist the retroactive interpretation of debt that it is devoted to overturning? Throughout the book, Graeber wishes to counteract its insidious logic; by turning “human sociality itself” into quantifiable obligations that demand repayment, debt inevitably recasts all human relations in terms of fault, sin, and crime, redeemable “only by some great cosmic transaction that will annihilate everything” (387). He endeavors to resist this logic by drawing a distinction between what he terms “commercial” and “human” economies. In human economies, which appear in a variety of historical settings, money acts “primarily as a social currency, to create, maintain or sever relations between people rather than to purchase things” (158). Interestingly, such economies are often founded on historic systems of credit rather than barter, because the former implies “trust-based interactions” and some degree of communal solidarity and mutual aid. In human economies, however, what we owe is not reduced to a quantifiable debt requiring an exact remittance. Instead, in such communities, sociality itself is precisely the incalculable sum of debts which members share, debts to one another that they could not, nor would not wish to, fully repay. Here debt is neither sinful nor criminal, but is instead an apt expression of the bonds of human sociality. Commercial economies, meanwhile, are based on the brutality of the market, the construal of goods as property, the idea of the individual (or, put differently, the severing of people from the context of their human economies), and the abstract logic of equivalence in which even human beings become objects of exchange. As Graeber observes, in commercial economies, the reduction of human life to its market value becomes inevitable as soon as we accept that the exchange value of the object as a commodity is not inherent but merely an expression of its possible functions within the nexus of (property-based) human relations, which are really what is being bought and sold. By dint of a somewhat circular or self-reinforcing logic, then, the economic marketization of human relations breeds an impersonality which fuels “war, conquest and slavery,” and these in turn play “a central role in converting human economies into market ones” (385). Commercial economies, whether in the Axial Age of Greece, India, and China or in the Age of Great Capitalist Empires (to use Graeber’s own headings), are thus characterized by “impersonal markets, born of war, in which it was possible to treat even neighbors as if they were strangers,” thereby allowing “human life to seem like it could be reduced to a matter of means-to-end calculation” (238). Here, the criminalization of unrepaid debt amounts to nothing less than “the criminalization of the very basis of society” as exemplified by human economies (334).
 
But how exactly does “human” economy give way to the market, if not by a circular process through which the violence inherent theoretically in the logic of the market creates its own historical conditions of possibility? Looking back over his enormous survey, Graeber describes “how all this can begin to break down: how humans can become objects of exchange: first, perhaps, women given in marriage; ultimately, slaves captured in war” (208). Surely, though, the matrimonial exchange of women is a near-universal characteristic of human societies, whether “commercial” or “human”? (Graeber’s own anthropological range offers little against this truism.) And if this is so, it points to something more fundamental about so-called human communities: that they contain in themselves the basis for more or less violent forms of exchange. Such dealings are here restricted to the “origin story” of the trading of women, but surely such exchange depends on the prior existence of some broader sense of market “value,” which Graeber says arises principally with the collapse of human economies and the onset of commercial ones. Graeber’s transition from the trafficking or dealing of “women” to the creation of “slaves” implies an intensifying or worsening onset of market conditions that would only be convincing as an historical narrative if the exchange of women in matrimony were not already fundamentally a type of “slavery.” (What makes this moment all the more odd, and indeed telling, is that throughout his survey Graeber is extremely sensitive to the historic plight of women.) And this fundamental truth disturbs and disrupts the narrative of historical transition from “human” to “market” economy that Graeber wants to offer in place of the “origin stories” of barter or primordial debt.
 

The fundamental issue here is that two competing conceptions of money vie for primacy throughout Graeber’s book. On the one hand, and more theoretically, money is construed as the product of an abstract conception of equivalence introduced into notions of obligation and worth. This is the source of its violence—a violence born of deep impersonality. On the other hand, and more historically, it is viewed (contra Adam Smith) as a far from neutral medium of exchange produced by market conditions outside of state interference. Instead, in example after example, money is portrayed as nothing less than an instrument of power. (In particular, Graeber shows how the politics of taxation serve in modern times to indebt populations to their governments, destroying locally-based credit-systems and at the same time funding the war machines of the powerful: what he terms a “military-coinage-slavery complex.”) This is where its violence—a motivated violence —comes from. In the one account, then, the violence that accompanies money systems occurs as the expression of particular interests; in the other, the violence that money unleashes happens precisely because it is, to the contrary, unmotivated as such.
 
While there are moments in the book where Graeber attempts to resolve these difficulties, there are also instances that suggest the problem persists. For instance, in order to clarify his thesis, Graeber writes:
 

The story of the origins of capitalism, then, is not the story of the gradual destruction of traditional communities by the impersonal power of the market. It is, rather, the story of how an economy of credit was converted into an economy of interest; of the gradual transformation of moral networks by the intrusion of the impersonal—and often vindictive—power of the state. (332)

 
This “gradual destruction” transforms the “very essence of sociality” into the grounds for “a war of all against all” (335). Here, Graeber underscores his point that “human economies” do, precisely, operate in terms of economic rather than non-economic practices. As he repeatedly asserts, credit operates as the very basis of their social systems. Thus, he is able to suggest that the “commercial” economics of interest and of the market arise on the strength of a certain mutation or perversion of that which grounds human “society” or community in the first place. From this, it seems possible to align the fundamental logic that gives rise to money with the historical emergence of modern forms of power. Nevertheless, just a few pages later, Graeber proposes the following thesis concerning the specificity of capitalism itself:
 

This would seem to mark the difference. In the Axial Age, money was a tool of empire…. [M]oney always remained a political instrument. This is why when empires collapsed and armies were demobilized, the whole apparatus could simply melt away. Under the newly emerging capitalist order, the logic of money was granted autonomy; political and military power were then gradually reorganized around it. True, this was a financial logic that could never have existed without states and armies behind it in the first place. (320-21)

 
Something about this assertion seems counter-intuitive. We might expect to be told  that forms and practices of power shaped themselves around money from the very beginning, because there is something originary or fundamental about the “internal” or intrinsic logic of money. (Even if money as defined by the structural element of abstract equivalence developed subsequently to systems of credit, the latter contained the germ of what money is, namely an I.O.U.) But Graeber tells the story the other way around. Where money was in its more rudimentary form a sheer political instrument, only with the onset of capitalism “proper” does money’s own logic come to the fore, remaking the political world around it in its own image. No doubt Graeber has good anthropological reasons to make this case.  But the contention also smacks of the desire to resist what he sees as the foundational idea of disciplinary economics: the creation of a spontaneous free market prior to political or state intervention. For Graeber, it is almost as if power comes first, and money second as an epiphenomenon of power: “True, this was a financial logic that could never have existed without states and armies behind it in the first place.” But such a suggestion threatens to undermine what would otherwise seem the highly plausible headline claim of the book: namely, that credit—as the very basis of human sociality—holds the key to explaining how modern forms of politics and power arise (albeit by means of terrible mutation). One cannot help but wonder whether Graeber’s double and divided narrative of historical origins and development is just as retroactive as the “origin stories” he wishes to oppose; its tensions and contradictions reveal  unresolved theoretical questions in his own thesis, even as he invokes historical or anthropological complexities in order to wriggle free from the supposed demands of the reductively “simple” or “single” story  told by disciplinary economics.

Lazzarato’s Indebted Man

How can we account for this seemingly intractable retroactive impulse where the question of debt is concerned? And what are the risks of thinking, too hastily, that this impulse can be overcome? Let’s turn to another of the many recent writings on the debt crisis currently receiving a great deal of interest: Maurizio Lazzarato’s The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition.[3] Lazzarato shows how, since the energy crisis of the late 1970s, the financial transformation of national expenditure on welfare has resulted in continually rising deficits. For Lazzarato, far from an unwanted or unforeseen consequence of neoliberal policies, such indebtedness has been their ultimate aim. The intensifying privatization of national debt—linked to the ever-increasing dependency of governments on market finance and securitized credit (debt repackaged and resold in terms of tradable securities)—leads not so much to managed or manageable obligations as to a state of permanent and worsening indebtedness.  From Lazzarato’s point of view, debt is the very engine of the politics of neoliberalism. Far from having a simple economic rationale, neoliberalism is fundamentally about power: specifically, the radical polarization of creditors and debtors on a vast scale, such that the principle of asymmetry rather than the economic idea of exchange or equivalence dominates neoliberal social and political relations. Today, “debt is a universal power relation, since everyone is included within it,” even—and perhaps especially—those around the world who are too poor to afford credit or receive welfare (32).
 
The granting of so-called independence to central banks, which in effect guarantees an ever-deepening recourse to private creditors, means it is now virtually impossible to address public debt through monetary mechanisms. This in turn strengthens the reliance of the state upon the market, to the extent that we have consistently seen governments not only opening themselves to financial institutions, but playing a key role in “establishing the organizations and structures needed for them to thrive” (26). They do so both by ensuring financial deregulation in general, and by contributing in particular to developing the range and volume of public-sector securities made attractive to private investors. Against this background, recent austerity measures are in fact double-edged: on the one hand, they seem to be about restricting welfare expenditure in the interests of debt-reduction on the part of the state; on the other, by extending the privatization of welfare services as an ostensible cost-cutting exercise, they position welfare provision as part of the very same “sell-off” that produced the situation that austerity measures are supposed to address and resolve.  Thus the austerity politics associated with the sovereign debt crisis are not so much a defiant response to the global debt economy, but are themselves a feature of it. Equally, to the extent that bail-outs underwritten by the resources of nation-states draw on funds that circulate or arise in precisely the same financialized structure based on securitized, tradable debt, they do not signify a reassertion of state power over transnational capital, but rather indicate a further technique for syphoning off public money to support a largely privatized system of interests. At such a point, where all money is nothing but debt, monetary sovereignty means very little, and has in any case been greatly eroded over the past few decades by the newly forged neoliberal alliance between the state and private interests, and by the policies this demands.[4]
 
Recalling Nietzsche’s reminder of the etymological interplay of debts (Schulden) and guilt (Schuld), Lazzarato argues that the subsequent moralization of debt further allows guilt to be more or less violently attributed to the debtor rather than the creditor, whether the unemployed, students, the Greeks, or whomever. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Lazzarato insists that the current debt economy necessitates a theory of money as, first of all, debt-money. According to such a view, money itself arises neither on the strength of the exchange relations required by the circulation of the commodity, nor as an expression of the surplus value extracted from labor. Instead, money is to be understood first of all as a sign of the radical asymmetry of power. (As noted, a similar position is present in Graeber’s work, but remains equivocal.) Lazzarato writes:
 

Money is first of all debt-money, created ex nihilo, which has no material equivalent other than its power to destroy/create social relations and, in particular, modes of subjectivation. (35)

 
A key feature of the asymmetrical force from which debt-money derives is “a power to prescribe and impose modes of future exploitation, domination, and subjection” (34–35). In other words, debt-money determines, delimits, commands and controls the future as much as the present. This allows control not only of the debtor’s present, but of all their time to come, establishing an “economy of time” in which the future is reduced to the expression and experience of “a society without time, without possibility” (47).
 
As the radical asymmetry of power finds its echo and confirmation in infinite and irredeemable debt—one that simultaneously must and cannot be repaid—“indebted man” comes to the fore as both a universal and individual figure. Once again, the relation of religion (specifically, Christianity) to the capitalist debt economy is carefully traced; following Nietzsche, Lazzarato suggests that such a “man” is the one who first of all must promise or vouch for himself in the future—although he restricts the meaning of such promising (which he acknowledges is the “promise of future value”) to an avowed obligation to repay. In other words, the man who “is able to stand guarantor for himself” is simply the one who is “capable of honoring his debt” (39–40). This formulation reduces the rather more complicated story Nietzsche tells about the rise of the “sovereign individual” in the complex interstices of reactive slavish morality and active life. Be that as it may, Lazzarato draws upon Nietzschean thought (specifically, the second essay of the Genealogy of Morals, which Graeber dismisses as merely a period-bound spoof) principally to aid his argument that “[m]odern-day capitalism seems to have discovered on its own the technique described by Nietzsche of constructing a person capable of promising” (42) and thus of owing. For Lazzarato, because such debt should be understood at its source as fundamentally non-economic—that is, based on the irreducible asymmetry of power rather than the transactional equivalences of exchange—promising entails a liability that no future could ever redeem, but which will if anything only intensify in times to come. Put differently, as Lazzarato writes a little later on (according to an argument which is forcefully repeated on several occasions):
 

Finance is a formidable instrument for controlling the temporality of action, neutralizing possibilities, the “moving present,” “quivering uncertainty” and “the line where past and future meet.” It locks up possibilities within an established framework while at the same time projecting them into the future. For finance, then, the future is a mere forecast of current domination and exploitation. (71)

 
I want to suggest that Lazzarato’s argument—stridently reasserted as it is—is somewhat complicit with the “force” or “power” it seeks to critique, in that it leaves untouched two questions with which Nietzsche’s own text struggles (questions that, in his rush to identify the text as merely of its time, Graeber sorely neglects): first, the theoretical question of origins, poorly served and tellingly neglected when Lazzarato intimates the more or less accidental discovery by “modern-day capitalism” of the “technique” of debt; and, second and relatedly, the question of the conditions of the future, which is constructed throughout The Making of the Indebted Man merely as the self-identical possibility of mastery projecting itself along an infinite horizon, without difference or remainder. This is a future altogether divested of temporal flux or uncertainty. For Lazzarato, this is the true aim of neoliberalism, but I want to suggest that such a “truth” is far from incontestable.
 
These questions are strongly interrelated, of course, not just in the obvious sense that both the past and the future imply temporality, or in the banal sense that all causal or teleological thought (including some varieties of Marxism) typically assumes one to depend upon the other. More specifically, they are interrelated because the text on which Lazzarato bases the conceptual elements of his argument—the second essay of the Genealogy—is itself shot through with the uncertain question of retroactivity. For Nietzsche, this concerns the error of mixing up and muddling the “origin” with the “aim” of something, when, as he puts it:
 

there is a world of difference between the reason for something coming into existence in the first place and the ultimate use to which it is put … anything which exists, once it has somehow come into being, can be reinterpreted in the service of new intentions, repossessed, repeatedly modified to a new use by a power superior to it… all overpowering and mastering is a reinterpretation, a manipulation in the course of which the previous “meaning” and “aim” must necessarily be obscured or effaced. (58)

 
As we will see, it can be argued that the question of retroactivity is absolutely inseparable from the problem of debt with which Nietzsche struggles. This reveals certain weaknesses or omissions in Lazzarato’s treatment of debt. In particular, his analysis only pays scant critical or philosophical attention to the question of the future and the past, the “aim” and the “origin,” instead viewing them largely as extended forms of the present (which may be more or less projected from the “now”); and he fails to think them according to the highly complicated and perhaps irresolvable structure of retroactivity that makes possible the very horizon or appearance of debt, as Nietzsche’s text implies.  If granting credit opens one up to future “uncertainty,” as he puts it, Lazzarato nevertheless insists rather emphatically that the “system of debt” must “neutralize time”: “that is the risk inherent to it” (45). Money as capital thus “pre-empts the future” (74), such that to talk of a present crisis is misleading because it suggests some hope of resolution or escape, whereas in all likelihood, he suggests, we are in the midst of an irreversible and permanent catastrophe (151). But if, as Nietzsche suggests (sometimes in spite of himself), debt exists for us or appears to us as part of time’s “uncertainty”—indeed, if it takes the very form of time’s uncertainty – one wonders how it could ever secure and extend itself unproblematically beyond time, simply appropriating or objectivizing time according to its own needs. How debt could survive without remainder is a problem that is arguably intrinsic to its make-up, and which in fact only redoubles throughout debt’s perhaps inescapably retroactive interpretation. From this perspective, it appears that the question of the future is pre-empted by Lazzarato himself as much as it is by “money as capital.”
 
A further question concerns the relation of debt and sovereignty, particularly in regard to the proposition of a calculable future. Such a logic of calculability reduces the subject’s “contractual” relation to the state, and so is not simply of the order of the “economic,” but evinces a power in force. The pervasive figure of “indebted man” who foolishly tries to economize with a debt attests only to his subjection to that power. But even if we grant this logic a non- or aneconomic “origin,” one wonders if such calculation is truly becoming for the master. In Nietzschean terms, does the apprehensive need to control the future genuinely testify to the absolute self-will, the proud aggressivity and war-like venturing of the sovereign? Or does it tie him, instead, to the seemingly unbreakable structure of creditor and debtor? Put another way, on the basis of the intellectual grounds or resources of his own argument, we might ask whether Lazzarato’s God-like figure of the ultimate Creditor presiding over universal debt throughout the catastrophic time of a future-without-future is philosophically tenable.[5] There may instead be a divisible or non-self-identical core to the very structure and temporality of debt, one that could prove useful in thinking about its limits and the possibility of resistance (more so than Lazzarato’s rather poorly theorized allusions to capitalism’s contradictions or to a Nietzschean “second innocence.”)

Nietzschean debts

In the second essay of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, the principle of ressentiment that characterizes the profound break with aristocratic values through the slave revolt in morality operates on the basis of retroactivity. As such, the values derived through ressentiment are retrospectively posited as original. For Nietzsche, of course, slavish nature opts for vengefulness towards noble and higher life to compensate for its own weakness and impotence. Whereas the noble spirit places plenitude and self-reliance at the heart of aristocratic values, slavishness can do no more than found its moral system on the resentful rejection of higher life, reducing its capacity for action to the purely reactive. The image of the powerful man as the origin of evil justifies the wholly reactive moral schema of slavish life. For instance, through its account of ressentiment, the Genealogy questions the historical origins of justice as grounded in a sanctified notion of revenge, as if justice were simply a mechanism for righting wrongs or an apt expression of reactive feeling. For Nietzsche, justice develops not from the vengefulness that always supplements a concern for fairness or rights, but from what is most active in the noble spirit: “the really active feelings, such as the desire to dominate, to possess, and the like” (55). Justice, then, originates in nothing more than “the good will that prevails among those of roughly equal power to come to terms with each other”—that is, their “really active feelings”—through forms of economic and military settlement, bringing war to an end in circumstances of evenly matched force or capacity (and in the process, imposing their settlement on all those less powerful). In fact, Nietzsche suggests that “the active and aggressive forces” compel a settlement in this manner—that is, as an instance of good will among the powerful, rather than an abstractly conceived leveling in the interests of fairness or right—“in part to contain and moderate the extravagance of reactive pathos,” and to stop the spread of its “senseless raging.” Indeed, law itself is established to oppose the resentful interpretation of justice, which seeks redress for an injured party (an interpretation derived retroactively on behalf of injured parties). However, from this point of view, the justice meted out by law is neither a matter of intrinsic right, nor a case of “right and wrong as such.” Instead, “legal conditions” put into historic operation “exceptional states of emergency, partial restrictions which the will to life in its quest for power provisionally imposes on itself in order to serve its overall goal: the creation of larger units of power” fundamentally unchecked by reactive feeling (56–57).
 
This line of argument chimes well with Lazzarato’s in its emphasis on the constitutive character of power, but it is nevertheless important to recognize at its center a clear connection between reactive morality (debt) and retroactivity. Reactive life is served by the retroactive explanation of origins, in a way not dissimilar to the retroactivity of the traumatic origin with which Freud struggles in “The Wolf-Man” (the idea that the origin may be generated retrospectively by the neurotic’s phantasmatic desire). Perhaps most importantly, retroactivity is not merely one means among others to develop the interests of slavish life. Instead, through its own complicated structure of guilt-debt, retroactivity is the very form that reactive feeling takes.  As Nietzsche writes, the attempt to “sanctify revenge under the name of justice… as if justice were merely an extension of the feeling of injury” posits revenge as the basis for bringing “all the reactive feelings retroactively to a position of honour” (54). To the extent that its devotion to revenge is unremitting, unrelenting, and pitiless, the retroactive honoring of reactive feelings upholds and expresses the morality of the slave (bondage to debt or vengeful reactive/economistic thought); more fundamentally, it seems indissociable from the character of reactive feeling itself.
 
By its very title, of course, Nietzsche’s essay concerns itself with “guilt,” “bad conscience” and “related matters.”  He begins by noting that active forgetfulness is a particular strength of the man of noble spirit, and contributes to his “robust health”—in contrast to those who, like dyspeptics, are “never through with anything.” Nonetheless, a “counter-faculty” now adds itself to this “strength”: a form of memory that wills the suspension of active forgetting. This form of memory is allied to the “promising” that, from the outset, seems to draw “man” into his own definition. Someone who makes a promise, Nietzsche tells us, does so in order “that finally he would be able to vouch for himself as future” (40).  In the sense that the promiser assigns his name to a promise to open a line of credit to the future, in his own mind “man” has made himself “calculable, regular, necessary.” The “memory of the will” is, it seems, as much a feature of this calculability as the effort to “dispose of the future in advance,” which promising seeks to affirm (as Lazzarato emphasizes). Indeed, Nietzsche opens the second section of the essay by describing the interaction he has just suggested between memory and promise in terms of “the long history of responsibility” (40).  Here, he adds that the calculability of “man” as the subject of responsibility depends not only upon the uniformity or consistency of the past, present and future in the “life” of an individual, but also upon a regularity or uniformity among men, so that each is “an equal among equals.” If this implies the very seeds of slavish morality and reactive feeling (“the morality of custom and the social strait-jacket”), Nietzsche points us “by way of contrast” towards “the other end of this enormous process”: the very possibility of the “sovereign individual” no longer constrained by custom. Through “special consciousness of power and freedom,” such a man grasps his own self-sufficiency more genuinely. He can truly vouch for himself, and on this basis is entitled to promise.  Thus, as previously suggested, the “man” who promises emerges in the more complex interstices of active and slavish life. However, the type of equality demanded by reactive feeling is eschewed to the extent that this sovereign individual “respects those who are like him” only insofar as they, too, are capable of imposing their superiority upon lesser, more contemptible beings – in particular those “dogs” and “liars” who abuse their promises.
 
Nietzsche traces within this history of responsibility the origin of conscience. The point at which this word occurs—in the transition from the second to the third section of the essay—also returns to the theme that willful memory is indispensable to the self-affirmation Nietzsche wishes to celebrate. If, in order to forge memories for himself, man learnt that “the most powerful aid to memory was pain,” nonetheless Nietzsche also laments the enduring nature of that “psychology” which, conceiving of remembrances as “branded” upon the mind, equates recollection with the persistence of a certain hurt (43). While the origins of asceticism are to be found in this doctrine of painful memory, Nietzsche implies it is also the founding myth of, for instance, Germanicism itself. As such, it is backed by a litany of cruel punishments designed for those who forget their Germanness among or indeed by dint of their various crimes. By the fourth section of the essay, however, Nietzsche finds firmer footing in the question of “bad conscience” or guilt. Here, “our genealogists of morals” are of no use because they think retroactively, imputing origins in terms of derived values and showing themselves incapable of comprehending a past that does not reflect their own moral schemas. As such, they lack the “second sight,” as Nietzsche puts it, which would allow them to trace the moral idea of guilt (Schuld) back to its more material origins in the concept of debt (schulden).  Consequently, Nietzsche insists that punishment as a form of repayment developed prior to and outside of the attribution of blame, which only imposed itself much later. Before this, he argues, punishment was not meted out soberly to repay guilt, but occurred as an apt expression of anger—one that, rather than overflowing itself in wholly gratuitous cruelty and running to the very limit of its power, was instead “held in check and modified” by an equivalence between transgressive damage and the retributive pain which the punisher imputed to the punishment itself.
 
Punishment, then, took its meaning and definition—its specific form as punishment rather than mere violence—not from guilt, but from anger. And yet the very need to constitute punishment as punishment, leading as it did to the “idea of an equivalence between damage and pain,” gives force to the contractual form punishment takes as an expression of the sort of exchange-relationship one finds between creditor and debtor. Lazzarato, of course, disputes precisely this contractual or exchange form of debt, pointing instead to the more original context of those power relations which, as Nietzsche himself suggests, make “anger” possible. Yet, at this point in Nietzsche’s argument, one may well ask whether contract or exchange establishes itself as the necessary context for a sense of injury, or—vice versa—whether the experience of harm provides the explanation for the emergence of economic or contractual forms and practices of all kinds. Is it that “to repay” is first of all to repay harm done, as Nietzsche himself suggests, so that forms of exchange arise from the prior or more original experience of pain (as perhaps foremost a consequence of power)? Or, alternatively, is the very experience of pain, harm, or damage even possible outside of the very concept of injury that, Nietzsche tells us, stokes reactive feeling? (The latter, of course, is funded by a strongly economistic sense of fairness and equality.) If debts to the past are remembered only upon risk or threat of pain, or if the pledge to repay is from ancient times underwritten by the possibility of harsh bodily sacrifice, is it that pain makes possible the sense of debt and indebtedness? (Is debt indebted to pain?) Or, conversely, does the very possibility of pain emerge only on the strength of a certain set of economic relations? This persistent conundrum raises once more the problem of retroactive thinking: is it the case that Nietzschean thought leaves this matter unresolved as a way to free itself from the retroactive impulse, and thus to rejoice in a time before slavish reactivity (which may in fact serve Nietzsche’s own “retroactive” needs)? Or is it that Nietzsche falters before and thus remains embroiled in the snares of reactive-retroactive thinking?  On this basis, one might speculate about whether the Genealogy remains painfully caught in—and thus cruelly indebted to—precisely that form of thought it seeks to critique or surpass. Is it therefore impossible to approach the question of debt outside of retroactivity’s trap?
 
In the fifth section of his essay, Nietzsche draws attention to the loosening of a strict equivalence between unrestituted debt and the commensurate bodily sacrifice. This is, for him, the welcome consequence of a “more Roman conception of law” (46).[6] Thus, the “logic of this whole form of exchange” undergoes a certain shift: instead of calculating the sum to be repaid by the stringent measure of actual flesh, recompense is to be calculated in terms of the amount of pleasure extracted from the other’s suffering. The extent of the gratification may intensify depending on the relative social rankings of debtor and creditor—the lower the creditor and the higher the debtor, the greater the delight in inflicting “punishment”—so that the precise value of the pleasure in another’s distress varied according to class position. Nevertheless, in as much as it entailed what Nietzsche terms “the entitlement and right to cruelty,” this departure from a more strictly reactive system of compensation introduced the distinct possibility of a (perhaps more original) uneconomic or aneconomic element into the economy of credit and debt. For surely cruelty distinguishes itself from revenge in that it includes a gratuitous supplement – even if in the Spinozist formulation of “disinterested malice”– that would seem to better serve the sovereign aggressivity of noble life, rather than purely reactive slavish morals.  As Nietzsche observes, “the creditor partakes of a privilege of the masters” by means of a “punishment” based on the extraction of pleasure; regardless of the specific identity of creditor or debtor, this system serves the noble spirit rather than slavish life (46–47). Here again the main tenor of Lazzarato’s emphasis on power  echoes Nietzsche’s own direction of thought. If “man” is indeed the “measuring animal,” if he is developed within and by means of systems of exchange, value, and price, nevertheless this is not the whole story, or at any rate the story is far from simple. For while such apparent economism determines the very possibility of man’s self-estimation and astuteness—his “thinking as such,” Nietzsche ventures to say—nevertheless the principle of mastery that impels such economistic thinking and practice implies the extraction of a surplus that cannot simply be reassimilated to the narrow world of economic values (though, for all that, it remains a crucial part of it): “man’s feeling of superiority” (51). This is because—as the example of a law that is “more Roman” implies—the sense of masterful privilege or sovereign aggressivity extracts its supplement of “superiority” precisely by resisting the more purely economistic attitude of reactive feeling. Somewhat paradoxically, then, this “noble” surplus is able to assert its value in and over a social world defined by economic exchange, by dint of the very fact that it cannot be wholly determined by it. It is perhaps the fact that one cannot easily economize with this paradox that reinforces the enigmatic power of the master.
 
Yet such an aneconomic remainder of economy finds its mirror image in the power not simply to forgive transgressions rather than punish them, but to overlook them altogether. Such power is perhaps closely allied to the ability to decide exemptions or exceptions to the law—the very same law that, as we’ve already seen, is in any case nothing but an “exceptional state” designed to restrict sovereign will only to furnish its ultimate ambitions more effectively, not least by mediating and thus lessening the “reactive” resentments of injured parties. Despite the seemingly inexorable pattern of credit and debt which determines social relations tout court, therefore, Nietzsche observes that the developed power of the community attests to itself insofar as it no longer needs to punish its debtors—those who, according to a variety of misdeeds, transgress against the community by breaking or by failing to acknowledge their contractual obligation to it. Put differently, sovereign power is in fact the power to eschew debt, to decide against the (reactive) logic that “everything must be paid off.”
 
This feature of Nietzsche’s argument is insufficiently acknowledged by Lazzarato, even though it fits with his insistence on the non-economic origin of debt. To overlook debt—to ignore the transgressor’s “default” or their un-repaid indebtedness—is to demonstrate that one is powerful enough to survive the “loss” without needing recompense in the (economic) form of a substitution: punishment for debt. It is to assert that one is powerful enough to transcend the exchange-form of life. Indeed, on this basis great strength is affirmed, not threatened, by an ever-increasing amount of unpaid debt. Once again, the “noble” supplement extracted by the master in this state of affairs is in one sense a part or feature of and yet irreducible to the “economy” that is a principal instrument of power (albeit a power that is asymmetric and thus aneconomic in originary terms). Once more, one might contend, this very same paradox lies at the heart of the enigma of sovereignty. Yet such a paradox keeps open the question of whether recourse to the debt economy—immersion in debtor-creditor relations, whether partial or not—enhances or jeopardizes the creditor as a figure of mastery or sovereignty. Perhaps it does both at the same time.
 
The folly of retroactive thinking is made most explicit in section twelve of the essay, where Nietzsche warns against the error of confusing or conflating the “origin” with the “aim” of punishment. As we have seen, he writes that:
 

there is a world of difference between the reason for something coming into existence in the first place and the ultimate use to which it is put … anything which exists, once it has somehow come into being, can be reinterpreted in the service of new intentions, repossessed, repeatedly modified to a new use by a power superior to it… all overpowering and mastering is a reinterpretation, a manipulation in the course of which the previous “meaning” and “aim” must necessarily be obscured or effaced. (58)

 
From the perspective of the will to power, history is not the story of causal development or progression, but one of a succession of more or less violent overturnings; the most rigorous and astute analysis of the usage of a thing, or of its “aims” in the present, is therefore poorly served by the tendency to impute an “origin” based upon the (extended) terms of this same analysis—although, of course, the distortion this implies is never just a weakness, in the sense that such misrepresentation is also part of the project of “overpowering” and “mastering” that such “reinterpretation” itself serves. If this looks to be a case of taking from one hand to give to another (i.e., strengthening and weakening oneself in equal measure), nevertheless it is not quite the same as robbing Peter to pay Paul, because what is involved is not a zero-sum game. Instead, there is a definite interest at stake. If the reactive morality of the slave implies a near interminable debt, retroactive thinking extracts a surplus in precisely this form of interest, making the debt work to its credit. The use of the word “repossessed” is telling here. In English, the term suggests the legally-settled restitution of goods or property to the original owner. The German is somewhat more colloquial and violent; Neu in Beschlag genommen suggests being taken over anew, although Beschlag is constructed from the verb to strike (schlagen). The overall meaning is not so much that of “repossession” in the English sense, but of forever being violently overpowered, mastered, “struck,” albeit struck or forced into service rather than being physically accosted more directly. Still, to the extent that it implies at once an inability to repay debts and a refusal to overlook or write them off, “repossession” has some kinship with retroactivity. Retroactive reappropriation of the meaning of an “origin” at once denies that “origin” by more or less violently transforming its meaning “in the service of new intentions,” yet acknowledges it in the form of the reactive feeling which repeatedly encounters or confronts the “origin” as an almost interminable source of injury, and thus a constant source of debit or debt. Indeed, to deny (indebtedness to) the “origin” by reinterpreting it, while reinterpreting it as the basis for a pervasive sense of liability, debit, or debt—a debt from which, nevertheless, untold credit or interest may be extracted—suggests the highly complex debt economy of retroactive thinking/reactive life.
 
The Nietzschean economy of debt is further complicated and reinforced by what we might term its diachronic axis, whereby the indebtedness of the present generation to its forefathers increases as the community prospers. For Nietzsche, as the community has more and more to be thankful for, its debts become almost irredeemable. Once more, the debt-form of social life reaches a certain zenith only at the point of near insolvency: that stage at which, in order to be settled, debts could perhaps only ever be written off. While Nietzsche suggests that those of truly noble quality repay their forefathers with interest (the obvious paradox here hardly needs remarking) (70), nevertheless it is difficult in this context not to think the contrary (a la Lazzarato): namely, that the effort to repay only deepens the debt, even and perhaps especially if it is massive. Nietzsche writes of periodic “large lump” repayments (cruel sacrifices and the like), which foreground the extent of the debt and powerfully underline “the fear of the forefather and his power” (until he is, famously, “transfigured into a god”); these payments serve not to lessen or ameliorate but to inflate the debt further, raising the stakes of the entire situation. Yet this spiraling debt does not paralyze the community; on the contrary, it is merely a sign of its prosperity and strength, becoming “ever-more victorious, independent, respected, feared” (69).
 
The desire to redeem what is owed, and sometimes even to mimic the gods, surely persists so as to complicate the credit-debt structure of the community. In addition, as Nietzsche speculates (perhaps naively), the dramatic rise of atheism may come to liberate mankind from a sense of indebtedness. Nevertheless, that “the sense of guilt towards the divinity has continued to grow for several thousands of years” testifies to the long-standing and near intractable debt structure of modern society. In fact, within the space of a few lines, Nietzsche seems to backtrack on his dream of a “second innocence” born of aesthetic feeling, lamenting that “the real situation is fearfully different.”  Indeed, despite the millennial tone of the essay’s last section, which dreams of the redeeming-godless “man of the future,” Nietzsche is still to be found saying that, in the current circumstances, “an attempt at reversal would in itself be impossible.” In a line all the more striking for its contemporary resonance, he asserts: “The goal now is the pessimistic one of closing off once and for all the prospect of a definitive repayment.” An “iron possibility” takes hold through the ever-more intransigent imposition of an undischargeable duty, a remorseless guilt, “eating its way in, spreading down and out like a polyp.” No penance would be enough to atone, no repayment enough to compensate (71–75).
 
All of this would seem to be grist to Lazzarato’s mill.  However, in an ironic final twist of expropriation, even the creditor—the master, the god—is at last swept into this nightmarish scenario of total debt. As Nietzsche enigmatically hints, the forefather becomes Adam, divine banishment incarnate. This does not result in the prospect of revolutionary change but instead ushers in a godless afterlife, “essentially devoid of value,” in which the story of the gods’ fall from grace—as pure expediency—is retold in terms of Christ’s sacrifice: God becomes man and takes man’s place, so that if he succumbs to (indebted) man’s plight at all, it is only to redeem his guilt and all guilt (72). By such means, however, God himself seeks redress, seeks to redeem or re-place himself, to restore his credit. In other words, as Nietzsche puts it, he is to be found “paying himself off.” Perhaps only a God can so blithely write off debt, even his own, but one wonders whether this leaves him purely “in the black.”  Through the enigma of God’s self-torture on the cross (a self-torture which, perhaps by ironic reversal, seems to mimic the torments of slavish life), does such a death cancel all debts to the absolute credit of the divine? Or does it signal, too, just this fall into a whole world of debt, into a world that is so debt-ridden it is by now almost beyond debt, one which survives therefore only as “nihilistic renunciation,” “essentially devoid of value”? Nietzsche does not exactly tell the story this way, preferring instead to concentrate on man’s slavish torments before a God to whom all is owed (cruelly felt as “real,” “incarnate”). But the possibility that this debt—in all its impossible cruelty—is premised on the spectrality of an ultimate Creditor lingers, ghost-like, in his text. In view of this phantasmatic scene, the debate into which Nietzsche enters in the last section of the essay—whether or not his writing sets up anew or forever breaks into pieces “the shrine” of an ideal—seems a little beside the point. For Nietzsche’s text suggests that to bring down or to set up a new God may be part of the same picture. What would such an insight do to the dream or vision of a “conqueror of God and of nothingness” yet to come, with which the text concludes?
 
On the basis of this reading of Nietzsche, two objections arise to Lazzarato’s thesis. First, his idea of a catastrophic future-without-future of permanent debt depends on the analysis of an ever-intensifying asymmetry of power that elevates the creditor to near-Godlike status. While this suggestion clearly derives from a certain strand of thought in Nietzsche’s Genealogy, a debt so pervasive that it leaves no creditor intact can more radically suggest ways to think about the non-self-identical or divisible limits of sovereignty and sovereign debt. Second, and relatedly (because it implies a question of the future that Lazzarato says sovereign debt has cancelled entirely), the idea that the retroactivity so central to the possibility of debt itself is based on a false continuity between past and present, “origin” and “aim,” suggests in turn that debt itself (in the form of reactivity-retroactivity) aggresses against temporal continuity in general. If this is true, then debt’s supposed commitment to the unstinting continuity and continuation of the present for all future time to come (as an unbreakable expression of power) itself becomes questionable and resistible, not just as an idea but in terms of the practical possibilities suggested by the limit or deficit between what debt wants and what it is: in other words, its retroactivity. Once more, such a possibility arises despite some of the more dominant flourishes of Nietzsche’s remarks. Taken together, these objections to the oversimplified conceptions of sovereignty and temporality in Lazzarato’s book point towards other possibilities, other scenarios in neoliberalism’s future, than the ones he is prepared to admit. Thinking both of Graeber and Lazzarato, we might arrive at the following conclusion: Where the question of debt is concerned, taking retroactivity seriously rather than dismissing or rejecting it may prove surprisingly productive for the times to come.