The Debt of the Living

Although the background of our topic is to be found in the concrete and urgent economic, social and political crisis that Europe and the United States are undergoing, and although the immediate causes of this crisis are by no means shrouded in mystery, I will take a somewhat more philosophical approach to the question of debt, and to the question from which it cannot be separated—that of credit. A crisis as severe as this one, despite or because of the suffering it produces, should be the occasion for rethinking engrained attitudes, behaviors and practices, as well as the notions that inform them. Such a rethinking is one of few positive opportunities offered by the current crisis, even if the reflections it provokes remain unable to provide for its positive resolution. In any case, to the extent that this crisis involves systemic issues, any potential solution will require an understanding not just of immediate causes, but also of longer-range contributing factors. It is in this direction that the following remarks seek to move, albeit in a preliminary and tentative manner.
 
Since I will be discussing texts and attitudes not usually associated with economics or politics, let me begin by stating my conviction that modern economic policies, attitudes and behaviors are decisively informed by factors that derive from the Judeo-Christian theological tradition—and that this holds true for an age that prides itself on being secular. I will argue that discussions of debt, and of the present crisis to which it contributes, can benefit from taking into account a dimension of the problem that is usually ignored or minimized, and that could be designated “economic theology”—a term meant to call attention to its relation to the notion of political theology, dating from the eighteenth century but today largely associated with the writings of Carl Schmitt. I do not present either of these perspectives as definitive or exhaustive, but I do want to suggest that they can provide insights into an economic and political situation that seems ever more irrational and dysfunctional—possibly even suicidal—with every passing day. It is a situation in which members of “democratic” societies—not just policy-makers and representatives but also substantial segments of those victimized by these designated “decision-makers”—continue to endorse the parties, policies and institutions directly and indirectly responsible for the deterioration of their living conditions. My hope is that by contributing to our understanding of how such behavior can persist in the face of what should be the dissuasive effect of the policies it endorses, an economic-theological analysis of political behavior and attitudes can perhaps prepare the way for modifying these dominant tendencies—although I harbor no illusions about the power of discursive analyses to translate directly into critical transformative action.
 
Since what I am calling an economic-theological perspective is foreign to most approaches to the question of debt today, let me begin by briefly reviewing a text that convinced me of its relevance. In a fragmentary essay, written around 1921 and never published in his lifetime, Walter Benjamin argued that capitalism should be considered not just the product of Christianity, as Max Weber elaborated in his classic study, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), but as its direct successor and heir. In other words, capitalism is to be considered not only as a socio-economic system but as a religion. The basis for this assertion is to be found in the fact that capitalism “serves essentially to allay the same cares, torments, and troubles previously addressed by the so-called religions” (Benjamin, Selected Writings 1: 288, trans. modified). I will not go into Benjamin’s significant qualification of such religions as “so-called”, since that would lead us too far afield from our present concerns. By “so-called religions” we can safely assume that Benjamin meant most established, institutionalized religions – in short religion as it has been known and practiced. With this caveat in mind, Benjamin goes on to argue that the essence of capitalism is that it is “a purely cultic religion”, i.e. in one that consists less in dogmatic tenets or beliefs than in ritual practices. What distinguishes this new religion from its predecessors, he continues, is that it is “probably the first instance of a cult that creates guilt, not atonement” (288)—indeed that produces, extends and universalizes (today we might say globalizes) guilt. The word that Benjamin uses in German to describe what he takes to be the essential effect of capitalism as a religion is Schuld—more exactly, verschuldend: culpabilizing. As is well known since Nietzsche wrote his Genealogy of Morals, Schuld can mean not just “guilt” in the moral, religious and legal sense, but also debt or obligation. If Nietzsche sought the origins of the moral-religious-legal sense of the word in what he took to be the inborn tendency of thinking to seek out or produce equivalences (e.g. GM 2.20); Benjamin in this fragment is content to emphasize “the demonic ambiguity of this word,” which he sees epitomized in the works of Freud, Marx and, above all, Nietzsche (SW 1: 289). This “demonic ambiguity”—bringing together a concept that is primarily economic, debt, with one used in religious, moral and legal discourses, guilt—is symptomatic of the relevance of economic theology. However contingent such a fact of linguistic usage may seem, the convergence of economic, moral, religious and legal significances in a single word, other examples of which can be found in many languages, demands our attention. Precisely because no one individual or institution decides about the meaning of words, such “spontaneous” verbal usage should be seen as reflecting experiences, conflicts and problems that official agencies have not successfully censored and are often even reluctant to acknowledge.
 
The first question that Benjamin’s argument implies, but does not explicitly address, has to do with those “cares, torments and troubles” that capitalism qua (so-called) religion allays. On the basis of this 1921 text, as well as his study of The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, written only a few years later—I want to suggest that these cares, anxieties and troubles are the result not just of general aspects of human existence, but rather are historically and culturally specific. They have to do with a crisis in what can be called the Christian Salvational narrative, one which becomes particularly acute as a consequence of the Protestant Reformation and subsequent Wars of Religion. The Christian Good News, its message of possible grace that would overcome the finitude of what Benjamin calls die Lebenden or die Lebendigen—“the living”— becomes increasingly problematic in the aftermath of this internal crisis. The “cares, torments and troubles” mentioned at the outset of Benjamin’s fragment are thus historically marked by the crisis of a culture that sees itself faced with a religious problem for which it cannot find a religious solution (Origin 79).
 
Like Max Weber before him, Benjamin distinguishes sharply between Luther’s extreme antinomianism, which questions the salvational potential of all human action—“good works”— and Calvin’s more moderate position, which allows worldly success to be interpreted as a sign of election. The Lutherian “storming of the work,” as Benjamin puts it in the 1924 version of the text, attacks the redemptive potential of good works—epitomized by, but not limited to, the sacraments administered by the Church (Gesammelte Schriften 1.1: 317). This critique of good works can also be seen as operative in the cult-religion of capitalism, since according to Benjamin the celebration of the cult no longer seeks atonement, but rather the globalization of guilt and debt. Indeed, the capitalist cult drives this tendency so that not even the Divine Creator is spared:
 

A monstrous guilty conscience that does not know how to expiate, seizes upon the cult, not in order to atone for this guilt but to universalize it … and finally and above all to include God Himself in this guilt. (GS 6: 101, my trans.)

It is of the essence of the religious movement that is capitalism that it endure to the end, to the final and complete culpabilization of God in a world of consummate despair, which is precisely hoped for. Therein resides what is historically unheard-of in Capitalism: that religion no longer seeks to reform being but rather to reduce it to ruins. (SW 1: 288-89, trans. modified)

 
If you recall that the German word I have translated as “culpabilization”—Verschuldung—also means “being or becoming indebted,” you will begin to see that what today has become known as the “sovereign debt” crisis of nation-states, was already at the heart of Benjamin’s discussion, written in 1921, i.e. in the immediate aftermath of the reparations payments imposed on Germany and its allies by the victorious powers at the end of World War I. For Benjamin’s argument it is not insignificant that the justification of such reparations, which plunged Germany into debt for years to come, resided in the so-called “Kriegsschuld” (War-Guilt) theory, ensconced in Article 231 of the Versailles Peace Treaty theory, ascribing sole responsibility for the War and its destruction to Germany and its allies.
 
Benjamin, to be sure, seems to want to see in the globalization of debt and guilt through capitalism a kind of nihilistic—or Apocalyptic—preface to what might be a radically new, perhaps revolutionary world. Although I will not dwell on this aspect of his text, I note in passing that it bears comparison with Derrida’s fascination in his later writings with the concept of “auto-immunity”—that is, the tendency of organizations to turn their protective mechanisms, initially directed against everything foreign, against themselves, potentially and paradoxically reopening access to hitherto excluded alien factors and thus introducing the possibility of a deconstructive self-transformation.
 
By contrast, what is more directly relevant to Benjamin’s notion of “the demonic ambiguity” of the German word, Schuld— is an experience I had many years ago, while driving from Paris to Strasbourg on a near-deserted highway. The trip took about five hours and so to pass the time, I played several tapes I had been given of the “Messenger Lectures” held by Paul de Man at Cornell University in February-March of 1983. As I listened to one of those lectures, I was puzzled by a single word, which despite repeated attempts I found myself unable to decipher. I remained hung up then, as now, on another “demonic ambiguity” – this time not in a single word, but in the homophonic proximity of two ostensibly quite different words. I could not decide whether de Man, speaking almost perfect English but with a slight Flemish accent and intonation, was saying “debt” or “death.” I have never bothered to look up the printed versions of these lectures, since the confusion of these two words turned out to be the most important message I took away from de Man’s “Messenger Lectures.” And it remains a useful guideline for reading Benjamin as well. For the inseparability of the two words is already anticipated by “Capitalism as Religion.” If guilt and debt are inseparable in the German word, Schuld, then a possible cause of their convergence resounds in the near-homophony of “debt” and “death.”
 
Let me try to indicate where I see this configuration at work in “Capitalism as Religion.” Benjamin describes capitalism as a cult-religion that strives to attain permanente Dauer, or “permanent duration” (259). This formulation already signals how the cult “allays the cares, torments and troubles” it addresses: it does so by demonstrating its own ability to survive. Although it is difficult not to associate Benjamin’s phrase with the Marxist notion of “permanent revolution” made famous by Trotsky, Benjamin’s term is closer to Marx’s original meaning, which designates the ability of the proletariat to maintain a revolutionary position for an extended period of class struggle. Benjamin simply inverts the terms: it is not the Proletariat whose struggle is ongoing, but rather the capitalist cult. Its “permanent duration” is also exhausting and self-consumptive: it seeks to establish an interminable holiday, one that Benjamin appears to describe, using a French phrase, as “sans rêve et sans merci [without dream or mercy]” (SW 1: 288) — but which more likely is a misprint for a quite different phrase, namely “without truce [trêve] or mercy.”[1] (Marx uses almost the same phrase in the French version of Capital to describe the way in which capital extends the workday “sans trêve ni merci” [Le Capital I.X]). But whereas Marx uses the phrase to designate the tendency of the system to extend the workday, Benjamin by contrast applies it to the “holiday” – Festtag – a day that is both holy, but also supposed to constitute a respite from work. There is thus the implication that the perennialization of the capitalist cult no longer relates to work, i.e. to productive activity, but to consumption. I will return to this shortly.
 
At any rate, the phrase suggests that the practice of the capitalist cult is part of an ongoing battle, in which the worshippers exhaust themselves in the effort to survive. The impossibility of their achieving permanence, or unlimited duration, clashes with the impossibility of renouncing it. The result is a war without end, truce or mercy. One is reminded first of the current “war against terror”—by definition without end, since terror is a feeling that can never be eliminated, much less by force—and second, of the perpetual “sales” that in the United States, by contrast with Europe, have become quasi-permanent. Like the rituals that constitute the practice of a cult, each “sale” must be at once of limited duration, in order to promote a sense of the irrevocable passage of time, and at the same time endlessly repeatable. Through this convergence of temporal restriction and unlimited repetition, such a cult can create the impression of infinitizing finitude, and thereby contribute to allaying, temporarily, those “cares, torments and troubles” that arise when the path to grace (or survival) appears to be blocked. The American institution of endless “sales” gives new meaning to the notion of salvation: one “saves” by spending, by acquiring commodities, increasingly on credit—with the result that the private indebtedness of American consumers is among the highest in the world. The master-word of American advertising, “save,” says it all: only by spending on credit—only by increasing one’s indebtedness—can one save, and thereby be saved.
 
While this mixture of increased debt and promised redemption as a way of assuaging anxieties may be specific to the American cult of consumption, its roots go back a long way. And it is here that the perspective of economic theology proves particularly illuminating. This perspective suggests that certain recent discursive events should be taken more seriously, more symptomatically, than they have been. I am thinking of the famous or infamous statement of Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, who, in response to criticism related to the 2008 banking crisis, in a much-quoted interview with the Times of London (Nov. 7, 2009) declared that he and other bankers were “doing God’s work”. Or when Eli Wiesel, at a roundtable held at NY’s exclusive 21 Club on February 27, 2009, explained the boundless confidence he and others placed in Bernie Madoff by recalling that, “We thought he was God.” I want to suggest that these statements are neither simply verbal exaggerations nor mere jokes, as Blankfein himself later claimed, but rather symptoms of the way a tradition, whose sense of self-identity and of value remains rooted in the founding myth of monotheism, continues to inform the ways in which many people have responded to financial and political threats. If Madoff could appear as God to his clients and victims—many of whom were raised in a culture that is proud of its messianic origins—and if Blankfein could claim that bankers are doing “God’s work,” it is because a certain faith in the inseparability of debt and deification still has the power of allaying the “cares, torments and troubles” that continue to haunt people today.
 
One further point that Benjamin makes in “Capitalism as Religion” that seems relevant here is that the God who is drawn into the human network of guilt and debt is one that is unreif—“unripe” or “immature”—and who therefore can be worshipped only while hidden: “Its God must be hidden from it and may be addressed only when his guilt is at its zenith. The cult is celebrated before an unripe deity; every idea, every conception of it offends against the secret of this immaturity” (SW 1: 289).
 
It is as if the Creator himself has taken on the characteristic of a debt that has not yet arrived at “maturity.” In the age of speculative finance capitalism, profit appears to be created often through the maturing of interest-bearing debt, just as Bernie Madoff’s wealth, success and power were all based on his ability to manipulate and to conceal indebtedness—the so-called “Ponzi scheme” that some, including Paul Krugman, have suggested could be applied to many of today’s legal financial speculative activities. In this context it is illuminating to reread Blankfein’s remarks that led up to his comparison of the bankers’ mission with the “work of God.” Bankers, he argued, are vital to the life of society insofar as they “help companies to grow by helping them to raise capital. Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth. It’s a virtuous cycle” (Carney).
 
In this supply-side economic perspective, Blankfein takes up an argument that Benjamin already noted in his description of capitalism as religion: if the cult produces debt and indebtedness, it is not just for its own sake but as a way of producing “interest.” Debt, in short, produces life. But only insofar as its debt is repaid – “redeemed” — with interest. “I know that my Redeemer liveth” here translates as: I know that I will be repaid with interest.” In both cases it is a question of a profitable “return”. What is truly productive, in Blankfein’s eyes, is the movement of capital, which today generally consists in a cycle not just of lending and reimbursement, but of indebtedness calculated to produce a productive return (and of which “hedge funds” are just one more prominent institutional example). By facilitating the circulation of capital, bankers and other financial speculators claim to contribute to the “virtuous cycle” of growth and more growth; the proliferation of wealth is the major expression of this virtuous cycle. In Capital, but even more in the Grundrisse, Marx exposes this view as ultimately theological: not labor, but the circulation of capital appears to produce and reproduce life. Capital, for Blankfein, enables companies “to grow,” which “in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth.” In the German language today, the capitalist entrepreneur is almost universally designated as the “work-giver”: Arbeitgeber. He “gives” or creates work, albeit never gratis. In the same lexicon, the worker is called the Arbeitnehmer: literally the “taker of work.” The tradition that informs such discourse can be traced back to the first book of Genesis. Blankfein’s virtuous cycle of the production of wealth, labor and life itself through capital is modeled on the story of a creation that is not simply ex nihilo but rather eo ipso. It can be debated whether God created the universe out of nothing or whether something – the wind upon the waters, for instance, was already there, but the very notion of a creation of an articulated world presupposes a Creator who antedates the creation just as a subject antedates his deliberate action. The notion of creation, then, enthrones the idea of a self-identical being free of any constitutive or irreducible obligation or indebtedness. The Divine Being of the Creator thus serves as a model for property in its purest form. The being of a monotheistic Creator-God belongs to Him exclusively, since it depends on nothing outside of Himself. And if that God is considered to be a living being, the same must be said of his life: it has no antecedents, is sui generis.
 
It is not surprising, then, that the story of Creation as told in Genesis is designed to demonstrate that this self-referential structure has to be seen as the ideal model for all living creatures even if for various reasons, they cannot “live up” to it. All created creatures thus remain informed by and indebted to—their origin.
 
Let me highlight what I consider in this context to be the most relevant aspects of this story. On the third day of the Creation, God begins to create living beings, namely, “herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself” (King James Version, Gen. 1.11, emphasis added). This conveys an image of life that reflects the self-identical being of the Creator: life is described as self-reproducing (seed-bearing), requiring no external intervention, since it already contains the seeds of its future within itself. This conception of life as self-reproductive determines a second trait of the Creation. Every creature, vegetable, animal or human, is created “after his kind.”  This formula is repeated seven times during the Creation story (Gen. 1.1, 11, 12, 21, 24, 25). Creaturely life is thus designated as generic life, but not yet as gendered, since gender in Genesis is inseparable from division, alterity and ultimately singularity. Living creatures are created as what Feuerbach and, after him, Marx call Gattungswesen, or “species-being.” As such they can be considered exempt from the finitude of singular living beings (the possibility of species extinction has no place in this prelapsarian world, although it will return with a vengeance after the Fall).
 
In short, the creation of the living qua “kind” suggests a conception of creaturely life that is not limited by death. This does not mean that the living are not indebted, for they are. They owe their lives to their Creator—just as the debtor will owe his debt to the creditor. But the only payback demanded at first is that they reproduce themselves: that their lives grow and multiply. So doing, they continue the process of creation, not ex nihilo, but ex vivo: life, conceived as independent of death, reproduces itself with interest, just as credit conceived to create debt reproduces itself in its reimbursement with interest. Life is represented as a self-identical process of spontaneous augmentation, deriving from the self-presence of the One Divine Creator. Throughout this process, Life remains what it was, namely self-identical, defined only by its own movement of self-expansion and never by its termination.
 
With the Fall, everything changes. Everything—and nothing. One must begin by asking why there should be a Fall at all. Often interpreted as the first act of human freedom, this act does not take place in a vacuum. It is not recounted as purely spontaneous, but as the result of a dialogue with the serpent. When Eve is first approached by the serpent, she repeats the interdiction of God, not “to eat” or even “to touch” the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, “lest ye die.” The serpent responds by assuring Eve that “Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3.4-5). The serpent tempts Eve with the possibility of becoming like the gods, to be accomplished by acquiring knowledge of good and evil. But why should knowledge of Good and Evil put the knower in a position akin to that of the gods? The question is especially intriguing, since in the Garden of Eden there was only good and only one God. To know good as something different from evil, then, is to know something that exceeds the boundaries of the prelapsarian state of Creation—it is to know something radically other—or to know nothing at all. Such knowledge is reserved for a being that transcends those boundaries—in short, for God as Creator. The fact that the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is placed in the midst of the Garden of Eden can be interpreted as a sign of the internal limitation of the earth, even in its pristine state.
 
The presence of that tree refers to something that is excluded from Eden, namely Evil. In a different way, the presence of the Tree of Life alongside it refers implicitly to what is also excluded from Eden, namely, death. Without being able to develop this further, let me recall that the Biblical narrative links the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil to the Tree of Life, and both to the gendering of Man. A gendered form of life is one  that does not reproduce itself spontaneously out of purely internal causes, as with the seeds of the plant. Moreover, the details of this gendering, far from confirming Man as an autonomous, homogeneous being, suggest his incompleteness, his “loneliness,” his need for others — and hence, a heterogeneity that from the start troubles the appearance of pure homogeneity implied by the idea of a self-identical, monotheistic Creation.  If Adam names “Man” as an ostensibly unified genre or species being, Eve appears as a response to and offspring of the inadequacy of a living being to live its life alone. Eve, in Hebrew Hawwâh, means “the living one” or “source of life”, is the living demonstration that to live and reproduce, a genre cannot remain identical to itself. Thus, the notion of a gendered “self” is revealed to be constitutive divided, dependent on its indebtedness to others, and therein irreducibly distinct from the notion of an identical and homogeneous Self as the source of all Being including that of living  beings.
 
It is precisely this dimension of life—as a process of living that cannot divest itself of its singularity and hence of its concomitant dependence on others—that makes Eve the ideal interlocutor for the serpent. What the serpent’s temptation appeals to is not simply a general desire to know but a singular anxiety of not knowing, and hence of not surviving. It is this anxiety, barely visible but nevertheless legible in the Biblical narrative, that leads to the Fall. This legibility, I want to suggest, appears in the justification given by God for the punishment he is about to inflict on the transgressive couple:
 

Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: [I send] him forth from the Garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. (Gen. 3.22-23, emphasis added)

 
God demands his due, refusing to allow the debtor to forget his debt to his Creditor. For there to be debt and credit, there must be a difference—a difference dependent on property, understood as the ground of self-presence. The monotheistic God is exclusive, jealously and zealously denying any relation to or parity with other gods (the ban against idols). All the more, He must jealously enforce the difference between the One God, who lives forever, and human beings, who—although created in his image—do not. Humans must learn the meaning of this image: they must acknowledge that it separates as well as joins. Humans must accept themselves as mere image. To want to be like God, on the contrary, is to want to dissolve the image into that which it images, to collapse the discontinuum of creation into identity. This tendency is expressed in the desire to touch and ingest—the tree and the apple—rather than remain satisfied with merely seeing them. Hence, divided man, Adam and Eve, must both must be punished. For they seek to dissolve the invisibility that separates every image from what it represents, and instead to collapse the two into self-sameness.
 
What is called the Fall is thus driven by the desire of the living to overcome their finitude through the acquisition of knowledge. This is confirmed by the final manner in which God completes the act of banishment: “And so he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life” (Gen. 3.24, emphasis added). “To keep the way of the tree of life” means above all to keep man away from that tree: to keep him at a distance from a life that seems to reproduce itself spontaneously. Having eaten from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, man is condemned to leave the Garden that such knowledge already transcends, since there is no Evil “in” the Garden of Eden, where everything is Good.
 
Man is thus condemned to return to the earth as to his origin that has now demonstrates its alterity. For the earth is now not a garden that grows on its own, as it were, but a soil to be tilled and worked, a ground of toil, trouble and torment. He is thus condemned to a world of work, which has to acknowledge the alterity and opacity of its surroundings, and as such is radically different from the world of creation. It no longer involves the spontaneous production and reproduction of life, but rather the heterogeneous deferral of death: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground” (Gen. 3.19). In the postlapsarian world, life emerges as a suspended death-sentence: as the effort to repay an unredeemable debt. Work, far from being the realization of the worker, signifies his consumption. If for Hegel, in his famous dialectic of master and servant, work involves a reactive acknowledgement of finitude that ultimately promises freedom, in the postlapsarian world of Genesis this promise is far more difficult to discern.
 
What I want to suggest by rereading this religious myth of creation is: first, that it provides a paradigmatic form in which those “cares, torments and troubles” mentioned by Benjamin are both allayed and reproduced; and second, that this paradigm retains more influence today, in our “secular” society, than might at first be apparent. It does so by defining human (and natural) life as a debt that must be repaid, but that also must remain unredeemed. It is this conundrum that gives rise to the messianic hope of a Redeemer, who by paying back the debt with his own life will render life once again livable. “I know that my Redeemer liveth”—words made famous by Händel’s “Messiah” more than by the Old and New Testament from which they are taken (Job 19: 25-26; 1 Corin. 15: 20). With the advent of Christ, this “knowledge” takes on a new reality—and also a new urgency. “For,” in the words of Paul, “since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead” (1 Corin. 15: 21). This “resurrection of the dead” implies the redemption of that Schuld that designates both culpability and indebtedness; but even more, that confirms indebtedness as culpability.
 
On the one hand, then, the Good News announced by Christianity to all of mankind enables it, in Benjamin’s words, to present itself as a possible solution to the “cares, torments and troubles”—the anxieties and terrors—that plague human existence. The fact that God appears on earth in the form of a singular human being is in this perspective indispensable, since it is at the level of the singular living being that those “cares, torments and troubles” must now be addressed. The appearance of this divine individual nourishes the hope that the debt can and will be repaid. But first, the guilt must be amortized, through sacrifice, which is partial payback and investment in the future. This process takes time. Meanwhile, it allows the profitable circulation of credit and debt to appear as the anticipation of a final redemption. The ultimate repayment of the debt of the living can only come with the apocalyptic end of the world, its “death” serving as punishment for its sins and as transcendence of a fallen Creation. For the Creation remains constitutively indebted to its Creator insofar as the latter’s mode of Being—pure self-identity and property—can never be attained by His creatures, while it nonetheless provides the ideal against which they are measured.
 
The notions of “soul” and, in more secular terms, of “self” mark this impossible measure. Whether as soul or as self, the effort to name that in human being which corresponds to the mono-theological paradigm of self-identity founders on the irreducible difference between the heterogeneous singularity of living beings and the homogeneous model of identity to which they are required to measure up.
 
This is why Benjamin’s version of the globalization of debt and guilt—Schuld—through the cultic religion of capitalism rings so true today. According to Benjamin’s remarks in “Capitalism as Religion,” capitalism retains the perspective of an apocalyptic end, providing the theological underpinning of what Naomi Klein has recently described as “Shock” Capitalism—which, while insisting on finitude, also seeks to control and exploit it. It seeks to impose itself as a kind of second nature that would transcend the finitude of natural beings through what appears to be an endless cycle of credit, debt, and repayment with interest—the secular correlative of an interminable spiritual process of guilt and redemption. What Benjamin, writing in the early 1920s, does not sufficiently emphasize is that this perpetual production of guilt and debt is not just endlessly destructive—reducing the world to ruins—but also enormously profitable. To be sure, the profit it produces—as the speculation of recent finance capital demonstrates anew every day—is entirely compatible with the large-scale destruction of the material, social and environmental bases of existence, whether of humans or of things. Profitable speculation can converge with physical destruction since its form of existence has become increasingly virtual: that is, “profit” is never identical with its actualization—no more than “value” in Marxian analysis is simply identical with empirically observable “price,” or “surplus value” with observable “profit.” The surplus is something that can be “realized” only by being put back into circulation, and this ultimately means back into the cycle of credit and debt: surplus-value cannot be “hoarded” as Marx’s reference to the Balzacian figure of the miser and usurer, Gobseck, emphasizes (Capital 1.24). The maximization of profit, which is never an absolute quantity insofar as it always entails a temporal relation, requires a continuous process of “investment” in which the cycle of credit and debt plays an essential role. The contemporary speculative practice of leveraged buyouts is just one of the most conspicuous mechanisms of this process: profitable for creditors and stockholders but often destructive of the enterprises thus bought out, including their employees.
 
For all of the acuity of his insight into the religious dimension of capitalism, Benjamin’s nihilistic hope that the destruction of being through capitalist universalization of debt as guilt, could somehow make way for a world that would be entirely different appears today not just overly optimistic, but also as a part of the apocalyptic perspective that also informs the cultic practices of the capitalist religion. The notion of an apocalyptic transformation of the world reflects the gnostic dimension of this religious tradition, which, although forced underground by the dominant official dogma, remains all the more active ‘underground’. The redemption of the world, sinful, guilty and indebted, can in this perspective only arrive through its total destruction. The political shift from the Cold War, based on national and super-national conflicts, to a universal “war against terror” is just the most recent symptom of this tendency to globalize the destruction it then seeks to ascribe to “terrorists” as their exclusive and spontaneous product. It should not be forgotten that the War Against Terror was first introduced by George W. Bush in his 2002 State of the Union Address as a War against the Axis of Evil, and that Bush had to be reminded by Christian theologians that on this earth, at least, such a war was never entirely winnable (which may have been precisely its function). From this perspective it is only with the final judgment that all debts will be fully redeemed and all property fully restored. The monotheological tradition reinforces the belief in the priority of the Proper and of the Property-Owner with respect to the relational network both nonetheless require to exist. The belief in this priority dominates economic thinking and political policies today, perhaps even more than it did when Benjamin first identified capitalism as a religion, so-called—at a time when the Bolshevik Revolution still seemed to hold out the possibility of an alternative to the age-old priority of the proper and of private property. This tradition can still dominate today in part at least because it continues to inform notions of identity, personal and collective, even in a secular world where the “self” has largely replaced the “soul,” conserving its theological essence all the while: which is to say, conserving the notion of an autonomy that can stay the same over time and space. It is a Self that feels compelled to adhere to the words with which God responded to Moses when asked for his name: “I am who I am,” (English Standard Version Exod. 3:14); or, in earlier translations, “I will be who I will be” (Cronin). It is this that allows for the “manufacturing” of consent even against the interests of those who espouse it.
 
Such inherited notions of identity, coupled with their reinforcement through audiovisual media, help create the conditions under which bankers such as Lloyd Blankfein can defend their activities as “God’s work,” as the creation of nothing less than the conditions of life itself. The role of creator today is assigned to the masters of debt and credit, who no longer appear to be nation-states but rather multinational private financial institutions. In recent testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, US Attorney General Eric Holder admitted that, “some of these institutions [have] become so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them” (“Transcript”). The notion of “too big to fail” thus becomes too big to be called to account by the most powerful government in the world.
 
Unfortunately, I have no consoling statement with which to conclude this analysis—and indeed, no conclusion at all, if not one of those “curious conclusions” advocated by Laurence Sterne in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1.20). Let me therefore draw at least one such conclusion from the previous remarks.
 
If Capitalism is able to assuage, however provisionally, “cares, torments and troubles” even while producing or exacerbating them, the mechanism by which it accomplishes this is through channeling anxiety into aggression. Anxiety, Freud insisted in his later work, was inseparable from the I (Ego), that part of the psyche charged with integrating the divisive tendencies of It (Id) and superego (heir to traditional values and ideals). To understand the success of capitalist politics today in channeling anxieties into aggression—into a “war against terror” that is also ultimately a war against the other (the foreigner, stranger, alien)—one must better understand the genealogy of those ideals which inform the I in its integrative efforts. If anxiety, as Freud suggests, is the reaction of the I to a danger, the system whose operation is menaced by that danger is inseparable from the self-perception of the I. What I have been suggesting is that the self-perception of this I, far from being simply universal, is informed by a distinctively monotheological – and in particular, Judeo-Christian tradition, which, from the start—in its story of creation—places the I in a double-bind, which was perhaps best formulated by Henry James in his novella, “The Figure in the Carpet.” There the patriarchal hero and renowned author, Hugh Vereker, tells his young admirer and budding critic, “I do it in my way…Go you and don’t do it in yours” (234)—a variation on the response of God to Moses: “I am who I am,” and the attendant implication that Moses and his people should go become who they are not. Perhaps a more adequate formulation of the demand that this heritage conveys might be: “Be like me, be yourself!”
 
This is also part of the message conveyed by the notion of a human being created “in the image” of a creator that can have no (graven) image because he is both singularly inimitable and universal. This universalizing of singularity creates the problem to which most “so-called religions,” including capitalism, have responded by upping the ante of sin, guilt, debt and redemption. The problem consists in the premise that any true identity, whether of God, the soul or the self, must be considered to be prior to all indebtedness to others—therefore implying that all debt can and must be quantified, even monetarized, and thus made redeemable. It is only when this widely held sense of Self as an autonomous, homogeneous property-owner, along with its correlative, a sense of life as spontaneous and self-contained, come to be sufficiently questioned so as to make room for the heterogeneity of life-in-the-singular, that anxiety may cease to be a cause for terror, and instead become a first step toward acknowledging that there are debts that cannot and should not be repaid. Only then will the sin of singularity be overcome.
 

[1] See Kautzer’s translation note in “Capitalism as Religion” (262) and my discussion in Benjamin’s -abilities (255-257).