False Economy

They have signed our I.O.U. and we can no longer not acknowledge it.  Any more than our own children.  This is what tradition is, the heritage that drives you crazy.  People have not the slightest idea of this, they have no need to know that they are paying (automatic withdrawal) nor whom they are paying …  when they do anything whatsoever, make war or love, speculate on the energy crisis, construct socialism, write novels, open concentration camps for poets or homosexuals, buy bread or hijack a plane, have themselves elected by secret ballot, bury their own, criticize the media without rhyme or reason, say absolutely anything about chador or the ayatollah, dream of a great safari, found reviews, teach, or piss against a tree…  This story, the trap of who signs an I.O.U. for the other such that the other finds himself engaged before having known a thing about it, even before having opened his eyes, this children’s story is a love story and is ours—if you still want it.  From the very first light of dawn.

-Derrida, “Envois” 10^th September 1977

(Post Card 100-101)

The Purloined Future

What then, to paraphrase Derrida in Spectres of Marx, is the state of the debt?  When in 2008 we began to speak of a credit crunch, what we really meant was a debt crisis in which repayment of substantial loans became attenuated, and banks and other financial institutions became insolvent. This complex situation is not, however, merely a case of a few large debtors defaulting on payments.  Allow me to spend a little time unpacking the aetiology of everything that has resulted from this crisis, including the bankruptcy of global financial institutions and of sovereign states.  Debt and credit are not the fortunate or unfortunate outcomes of banking practices; they are the very point of banking and indeed of capitalism itself, perhaps of all economy as such.  The classical purpose of a bank is to lend money on the basis of the deposits of its so-called customers (individuals and companies who have placed their money in the bank for what Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality might identify as security reasons).  Using depositors’ money or money borrowed at a low rate of interest from another bank, the bank lends to others at a greater rate of interest. As long as these loans are repaid on schedule, theoretically the bank will initiate an infinite chain of profit.  In so doing, banking as such both introduces credit into the economy—enabling growth, employment, and wealth creation—and initiates indebtedness, which ties individuals to the bank and the system of capital in general.  On this view, credit and debt are not merely necessary, but essential to the operation of the entire capitalist system.  Once the bank lends money to an individual or company, that money is deposited back in the bank.  The bank has thereby increased its deposits base by leveraging its capital without any actual “new” money coming into circulation.  Having increased its deposits, the bank is free to repeat this process ad infinitum within the limit of retaining the cash ratio required by law for capitalization.  In this way, banks generate large balance sheets of assets (loans and advances) and liabilities (customer accounts) from a relatively low deposit base and minimal cash ratio; at its height in 2008, the Royal Bank of Scotland had assets of £1.9 trillion (greater than the entire GDP of its sovereign guarantor of the United Kingdom, making it the largest company by asset size in the world at that time).[1]  This form of phantasmagoria makes the commodity fetish look like a concrete tower block, and calls to mind Aristotle’s distinction in the Politics between economy and chresematics: the former is the management of goods essential to the maintenance of life; the latter, as the accumulation of wealth for its own sake, is the originary ruin of the former.[2]  According to this distinction, it makes no sense to speak of economics in relation to banking; perhaps universities today should rename their Business Schools, trapped within the curriculum of orthodox economic theory, along Aristotelian lines.

The banking business model is unique within capitalism because it requires minimal equity (the difference between assets and liabilities). As a result, and despite appearances, banking is a less than secure enterprise.  In this situation banks must manage the risk of loan defaults, and one might say that the business of banks is precisely the management of risk.  Banks are placed at risk when liabilities begin to exceed equity in an unmanageable way.  In 2008, at the start of the financial crisis, Barclays had sixty times more assets (due loans) than equity.  The median leverage ratio of banks in the US in 2008 was 35 to 1, and 45 to 1 in Europe.  What this meant was that only 1/35^th of US bank assets had to go bad before the banks would be insolvent, and 1/40^th in Europe. If only 2.5% of loans were defaulted on, in other words, the European banks would collapse.  This is exactly what happened with the subprime mortgage collapse in the US housing market, when it became clear that money had systematically been loaned to those with little prospect of making their repayments.  As this market began to unravel, banks sitting on over-leveraged positions began to collapse in a domino effect—from Bear Stearns to Lehman Brothers in the US and Northern Rock to HBOS in the UK—resulting in bailouts for the system by Central Banks (i.e., the State) as the guarantor and lender of last resort.  These collapses and the so-called credit crunch in personal and company finances arose when banks quickly attempted to deleverage by contracting their assets without harming their equity ratios.  This means offering less credit and calling in as much debt as possible; because this is the exact opposite of the banking business model, the entire system came close to collapse when financial institutions stopped lending even to each other, viewing one another as risky prospects and potentially bad debtors.

Banks are equally keen to obviate risk within the banking system, and financial markets have developed sophisticated financial products to do just this.  The trade in derivative products (options and futures) exceeds tenfold the total value of the world’s economic output.  Derivatives are designed to hedge risk and take out insurance against uncertainty by fixing prices in the future. Like the leveraging of a bank’s capital, however, trade in derivatives generates financial transactions based on the original asset price, but far in excess of it; when those transactions begin to unfurl, derivatives have the opposite effect of magnifying risk rather than hedging it.  For this reason, in 1989 J. P. Morgan pioneered the Credit Default Swap that allows one to both leverage capital and hedge it against risk.  Swapping positions in the market is a relatively recent method of alleviating potential uncertainty by mitigating exposure to risk. This makes it much more likely that you will be able to repay the money borrowed from the bank for your business activity, making you a sounder debtor and so able to borrow more money.  Credit Default Swaps (CDS) allow banks to lend money and insure themselves against default by making someone else take on the risk associated with the debt.  Suitably insured, the bank can relax about holding onto enough capital reserves, and so can continue to lend again and again based on its assets register (which, we recall, is really the outstanding loans owed to it).  Regulators accepted the argument for CDS because they were thought to spread risk throughout the financial system rather than concentrate it in one place, thus making individual banks safer prospects.  However, the first difficulty with CDS is that they are designed to produce an economic impossibility, i.e., to make lending risk free. But the profit derived from an investment is unfortunately directly related to the risk involved.  The second difficulty is precisely that CDS spread risk throughout the system in undetectable and unmanageable ways; this risk is multiplied by the practice of securitization, in which bundles of debt are sold to off-shore shell companies, which take on the bank’s risk, break it up, re-engineer it, and sell it again to investors, with each re-sale deliberately designed to disguise the debt’s riskier aspects.  The shell company enables the bank to remove the loan from its balance sheet and thereby appear to decrease its asset to equity ratio, making the bank look less leveraged and more credit worthy, and allowing it to lend further money (that again will be risk-free through further CDS).  As Derrida says in Given Time, “the counterfeiter will have figured out how to indebt himself infinitely, and will have given himself the chance of escaping in this way from the mastery of reappropriation.  He will have figured out how to break indefinitely the circle or the symmetry” (150). In other words, the producer of counterfeit money can never lose; counterfeit money is risk free money.  The practice of repeatedly packing and securitizing debt makes it practically impossible to keep track of the quality of that debt.  AIG collapsed and was bailed out by the US Treasury at the cost of $173 billion because it underwrote the insurance for the majority of the world trade in CDS.  If AIG had not been bailed out by the Federal Reserve, a long and distinguished list of companies faced astronomical loses, including Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, Barclays, BNP Paribas, and Société Générale.  The market capitalization of AIG was only $2 billion dollars, meaning that it cost eighty-five times its value to bail out (Lancaster 62). When governments (or Central Banks) bail out commercial banks, they do so not by transferring capital from their own reserves, but by selling their own debt, or, more strictly speaking, by selling their own capacity to repay debt in the form of bonds.  The more secure the nation and the higher its credit rating, the lower the interest paid on bonds and the safer the investment for bond buyers.  The more stretched the nation-state, the more it will cost in interest payments to attract bond investors.  When the bond market stops believing in a nation’s capacity to repay the debt, that country quickly runs into trouble. Unable to borrow money in the form of bond issues, it is forced to seek its own bailout to meet its obligations, notably its guarantee to underwrite the debts of its own banks.  As a condition of the bailout, international lenders—such as the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank—insist on the nation-state making itself more credit-worthy by spending less on public services in order to be better able to repay their international debt.  This is the situation experienced across Europe, where the citizens whose borrowed deposits in banks made the entire system possible now face austerity measures to prevent the collapse of the system.  They are paying the price of someone else having borrowed their money.

Money Worries

This is exactly what Derrida proposes in Given Time: that any economic exchange involves the production of a certain reciprocity of debt. This is especially the case with the gift.  Any gift, however freely given, indebts the recipient to the giver and so initiates further exchanges, whether of material goods or of more abstract considerations like gratitude and clienthood.  The giver is involved not in an excessive generosity without reserve but in a relation of sacrifice, in which there is always the return and the expectation of return of a certain credit to the giver.  The question of sacrifice in the gift is significant in his 1977-78 seminar; sacrifice later becomes the predicate through which Derrida begins his sustained deconstruction of sovereignty in his analysis of the death sentence and the animal.[3]  The business of sacrifice is always the business of the sovereign—the one who is allowed to put to death without legal consequence—whether the sovereign who commutes the death sentence, or the sovereign human subject who sacrifices animal life in order to sustain human development.  In thinking capital punishment and the continuum of planetary life, Derrida attempts to think an economy without sacrifice in which no other is subordinated to the utility of any other.[4]  The seminar on the gift is therefore an important nascent step in the development of Derrida’s thought on sovereignty.  Here he distinguishes the “pure gift (if there is any)” from sacrifice:
 

The sacrifice proposes an offering but only in the form of a destruction against which it exchanges, hopes for, or counts on a benefit, namely, a surplus-value or at least an amortization, a protection, and a security. (Given 137)

 
The purity of the gift itself is always a matter of compromise, but what interests me in the context of systemic debt is the idea that securitization disarticulates sacrifice; namely, it turns a sacrifice from a gift into an offering that expects a return.  In the case of CDS, we have a sacrifice (the lending of money) that is immunized against risk and already deconstructs its own sacrificial status.  In the case of student loans, for example, the ideological trick is to appear to be making a sacrifice, even offering a gift, by paying the loan up-front for the student, but already to have calculated the return in the form of future interest payments, the indebtedness of citizens, the capacity to sell further debt, and the credit for having reduced the sovereign deficit, even if in fact it is accelerating sovereign debt.

Rather than the gift itself as the main focus of Given Time, I would like to turn to the Baudelaire text that informs the second half of Derrida’s seminar, to worry through certain philosophical problems. (I mean “worry” here in the philosophical sense that one worries a knotty topic rather than worry in the sense that one lies awake at night worrying about the mortgage.)  I want to consider the fictional nature of debt, given that, as Derrida says, “the symbolic opens and constitutes the order of exchange and of debt” (Given 13). Were it a product of the novelistic imagination, the banking business model described in the first half of this essay would surely be condemned as an improbable fiction.  The relation between accounting and recounting is one of the important subtexts of Derrida’s book, and I think there are two important strands to follow, given the debt crisis.  The first is the question of counterfeit money versus “real” money:
 

We can no longer avoid the question of what money is: true money or counterfeit money, which can only be what it is, false or counterfeit, to the extent to which no one knows it is false, that is, to the extent to which it circulates, appears, functions as good and true money. (Given 59)

Derrida here is thinking of Baudelaire’s La fausse monnaie, which tells the story of two friends who meet a beggar in the street, one of whom gives him a substantial gift only to reveal to his friend (the narrator) that it is a counterfeit coin.  The narrator wonders at his friend’s motives and imagines that he has offered the coin in order to create an event in the otherwise desperate life of the beggar, speculating about what may result in the circulation of and speculation on this counterfeit money to the benefit or possible detriment of the beggar.  The narrator is horrified to discover that in fact his friend is motivated to do the beggar good (and earn the moral credit of alms to the poor) by offering him a large donation, while resting secure in the knowledge that he has not given away any of his own real money. The question that imposes itself today, however, is whether a financial product derived from leveraged or packaged debt constitutes real money or counterfeit money, that is, the simulacrum of money.  When CDS are spread throughout the global financial system, how far can we say that this system is based on real money or not?  Might we say that the whole of banking depends upon the fictional structure of money, every bit as fictional as Baudelaire’s text?  The business of what is real and what is virtual in the financial system has surely brought us quite quickly to the border of the gift and the economy of sacrifice.  The future is a fiction invented by those who have lived in the past.  The circulation of student loans, for instance, is a perfect example of counterfeit money become true capital:
 

Is not the truth of capital, then, inasmuch as it produces interest without labour, by working all by itself as we say, counterfeit money?  Is there a real difference here between real and counterfeit once there is capital?  And credit?  Everything depends on the act of faith… This text by Baudelaire deals, in effect, with the relations among fiction in general, literary fiction and capitalism, such as they might be photographed acting out a scene in the heart of the modern capital. (Given 124)

The untested and risky assumption concerning the borrowing and repayment of tuition loans, say, is precisely the equivalent of the fausse-amie who throws a counterfeit coin in the beggar’s bowl: it will create an event but not for the reasons lenders think, justify to themselves, or hope for return on.

The second and related strand is the question of the link between the modern phenomenon of literature, the financial system, and religion, namely, “credit” or, as crédit is usually translated from the French, “faith.”  An enormous and unspoken act of collective belief is required every morning in order for the stock market to open and for banks to continue trading.  Who, other than a true believer, could possibly tolerate the use of his bank account to fund CDS?
 

Everything is [an] act of faith, phenomenon of credit or credence, of belief and conventional authority in this text which perhaps says something essential about what here links literature to belief, to credit and thus to capital, to economy and thus to politics.  Authority is constituted by accreditation, both in the sense of legitimation as effect of belief or credulity, and of bank credit, of capitalized interest. (Given 97)

Derrida is writing here in 1977, four years after the establishment of the Chicago Board Options Exchange, which institutionalised the trade in futures and options, but four years before the introduction of swaps into the financial system and twelve years before the construction of the first credit default swap (engineered by J.P. Morgan to cover Exxon’s exposure following the environmental disaster of the Exxon Valdes in Alaska). Derrida, like Marx and Mauss before him, has nevertheless correctly and presciently located the fictional nature of credit.[5]  One accepts a fiction on trust, on the basis that it is nothing other than a fiction; we take the narrator’s word. Literary fiction contains a referential system that maintains the literary aporia throughout, accounting at the same time for the truth and the falsehood of the knowledge literature conveys about itself, distinguishing rigorously between metaphorical and referential language, and delineating a difference between speech acts in books and speech acts in the real world.  The referential system of money, in contrast, would seem to be much more shaky than literature because it both requires a greater trust and fails to properly delineate the difference between money and counterfeit money, the real and the virtual.  Derrida takes this question further in an aside to the final chapter of Given Time:
 

Let us locate in passing here the space of a complex task: To study for example, in so-called modern literature, that is, contemporaneous with a capital—city, polis, metropolis—of a state and with a state of capital, the transformation of monetary forms (metallic, fiduciary—the bank note—or scriptural—the bank check), a certain rarification of payments in cash, the recourse to credit cards, the coded signature, and so forth, in short, a certain dematerialization of money, and therefore of all the scenes that depend upon it.  “Counterfeit Money” and Les Faux-monnayeurs belong to a specific period in the history of money. (Given 110)

Derrida is referring to Gide’s novel but we should note in passing that in French les faux-monnayeurs comes to stand by metonymic substitution for all fakery and all counterfeiting in general.  This might well be an example of what Derrida would call a white mythology of credit, one of the coins erased in Nietzsche’s pocket whose fictional structure we no longer recognise.  The history of banking since Derrida’s seminar has been shaped not only by the accelerated dematerialisation of money from the virtuality of credit cards and checks into the imaginary structure of CDS, but also by the eclipse of the author, if I might play on Roland Barthes for a moment.  The entire difficulty of the financial crisis since 2008 has been based upon the inability to distinguish between good and bad debt due to the anonymity of debtors and to debts being packaged, securitised, and swapped.  It simply became impossible to decide whether one was dealing with a reliable narrator or not.  In fact the story of the narrator (i.e., the debtor) had ceased to be important, and what came to matter was the mediating extra-diegetic narrative of the financial institutions that sold on the debt and the credit rating agency that confirmed the provenance of the story.  Since both were interested parties, they were by definition unreliable narrators. There is no discrimination between the narratives of debtors, banks, central banks, public expenditure, and government. Everyone will be given the benefit of the doubt; the assumption behind student loans and sovereign bailouts is that everyone is a good debtor.  This is the story that the national governments are telling themselves and the international bond market, and much will depend upon this credulity.

The question of debt is closely related to both literature and philosophy. Dickens’s Little Dorrit provides a good example of the way that debt is a considerable question for literature itself, of counting and recounting, of credit and faith, of debt and obligation, all of which would require a longer and closer reading than is possible here.  The narrative account draws upon the reserves of a debtor in the Marshalsea prison, William Dorrit, who is freed as a consequence of the intervention of Arthur Clennam.  Clennam is an ostensibly disinterested Dickensian hero who wishes to see justice done to the Dorrits without expectation of gratitude or return.  He pays the debts of Edward Dorrit, the wastrel son, and assists in the discovery of an unclaimed inheritance that enables William Dorrit to leave the Marshalsea. In turn, for this is a Dickens novel, Clennam is ruined by bad investments in a seemingly risk-free stock venture, and is imprisoned in the Marshalsea. Clennam’s mother reveals to Amy (Edward’s daughter) that she is heir to a great legacy, but Little Dorrit refuses her inheritance, and when Clennam’s business partner returns a rich man from an enterprise in Russia, he pays off Clennam’s debts.  Of course, Clennam’s previous motives do not constitute a pure gift, consciously or unconsciously: he acted out of his love for Amy and at the end of the novel they are married as debt-free equals.  Dickens’s narrative is provocative today because the narrator of the novel characterises Amy as the “child of the Marshalsea,” that is, the child born into debt and who only ever knows a life of debt, just as Barthes once characterised the subject as un bilan de faillite.[6] George Orwell criticised Dickens because he thought Dickens was unable to see a world beyond individual philanthropy, i.e., a society beyond the pure gift (“Can Socialists be Happy?”).  He was unable to see a welfare state that would take responsibility for Little Dorrit and educate her, perhaps even send her to a public university rather than leave her to achieve social mobility through, first, the inheritance of a gift and, secondly, through marriage.  Given Little Dorrit’s socio-economic origins, prior to 2012 she probably would have received state-funded bursaries to attend a London university. And although the Marshalsea was historically situated in Bermondsey, within a few miles of the Houses of Parliament and the site of the 2010 “tuition fees riots,” she probably would not have been charged with horses and beaten with batons in the pursuit of her future.

A different fate, however, is indicated by Baudelaire’s “Beat Up the Poor!” (Assommons les pauvres!),” which Derrida describes as a “symmetrical counterpoint” to “La fausse monnaie,”[7]  Derrida spends much less time on this narrative but it is worth dwelling on today. Baudelaire’s narrator recounts: “For fifteen days I had shut myself up in my room and had surrounded myself with the most popular books of the day… that treat of the art of making people happy, wise, and rich in twenty-four hours” (101).  One can readily imagine the contemporary equivalents of these books on what is now fatuously described as “well-being.”  It is enough to make one sick: “I had digested—or rather swallowed—all the lubrications of all the purveyors of public happiness—of those who advise the poor to become slaves, and of those who encourage them to believe that they are all dethroned kings” (101). Neo-liberalism now would like the professional classes of tomorrow to be indebted to the state and then to measure their “well-being” as an indicator of national success:[8] “It will be readily understood that I was in a dazed state of mind bordering on idiocy” (101).  What intrigues me here is that the narrator, the being (re)counter (as opposed to a bean counter) has been brought to the state of ideologically induced stupidity through reading, and a marathon of reading at that: fifteen days locked in a room on his own, like an academic researching the condition of well-being.  He leaves his room “with a terrible thirst” because “the passion for bad literature engenders a proportionate need for fresh air and cooling drinks” (101).  Having consumed vast quantities of idiocy, he must now wash it away, exchanging a thirst for non-knowledge with a need for the disinfectant of alcohol and oxygen.  In other words, he enters into a credit default swap in which he hedges the time spent on bankrupt ideas against his faith in fresh air.  He has earned his drink after the sacrifice of solitary reading.  As he is about to enter a bar, he comes across a beggar.  Unlike the two friends in “La fausse monnaie,” he does not give the beggar alms but, encouraged by the voices in his head, decides instead that “a man is the equal of another only if he can prove it, and to be worthy of liberty a man must fight for it” (102).[9] Accordingly he beats up the beggar, “pounding his head against the wall… sure that in this deserted suburb no policeman would disturb me for some time” (102).  While “kettling” the beggar (to borrow a culinary metaphor from London’s Metropolitan Police Force), a philosophical miracle occurs: “O bliss of the philosopher when he sees the truth of his theory verified!” The beggar proves himself the equal of the narrator by retaliating: “[he] proceeded to give me two black eyes, to knock out four of my teeth and … to beat me to a pulp” (102).  The narrator describes himself as satisfied as “one of the Porch sophists,” and declaring the beggar his equal, shares out his purse, telling him that should another beggar ask him for alms, he ought to apply the narrator’s “theory” and teach the other the same painful lesson concerning equality (102-103).  The text ends with the beggar swearing that he understands the theory and vowing to follow this advice.

By any reckoning this is a remarkable text; how shall we read it?  On the one hand, we might take it as a neo-liberal allegory of tough-love for the poor, who must not be satisfied by handouts but should learn to stand on their own two feet and take on board the lessons of a sacrificial economy in which equal status is attained through beating the other to a pulp.  On the other hand, and in contrast to “La fausse monnaie,” the moral of this story might be that awakening from the torpor of idiocy-inducing ideology, the narrator has the revelation that not only must he give to the beggar but also—as Derrida says in his brief reading of this text—he must give well (“il faut bien payer”) (Given 139). The narrator gives a gift to the poor that does not merely offer money in return for indebtedness or spiritual advancement but goes beyond the material benefit of the gift to give added value in the form of a theory of giving.  This would be the excessive violence of the pure gift or a gift without conditions that taught the poor a lesson.  In this sense it is the perfect allegory for school children, university applicants, and student protesters whose futures have been mortgaged before their education has even begun and who are for their troubles beaten up by the state that is offering the gift of a student loan.  Perhaps, rather than suffering like Dickens’s children of the Marshalsea, they will prove themselves equal to their creditors by being worthy enough of liberty to fight for it.

Let me conclude by way of reference to the epigraph from The Post Card that has overseen this paper from the very beginning.  Here Derrida has in mind the Platonic tradition to which we are all indebted in every aspect of our daily lives.  I think the striking sentence in this paragraph is the first one: “They have signed our I.O.U. and we can no longer not acknowledge it.”  It is not that we have signed an IOU for the debt that we owe to Socrates and Plato but that they in advance of us have mortgaged our future, signed “our I.O.U.” for us before we have even begun to live and think in the world.  Derrida specifically names this structure as a fiction, “a story, the trap of who signs an I.O.U. for the other such that the other finds himself engaged before having known a thing about it.”  In this way we are all infinitely indebted to the philosophical tradition before we have even begun to read or started to take up our place of study.[10]  Derrida calls this a “children’s story” and a “love story.”  It is certainly the story of our children today, who have had their IOU signed in advance by a generation of politicians who have thrown them into debt before they have even begun to read.  As we saw above, inhabiting capitalism is never a question of “paying off the debt”; it is always a case of having had the IOU signed for us in advance of our entry into capital.  The task then is not to refuse debt but to affirm another register of debt, an infinite and un-payable debt: our debts to the western tradition, to philosophy, and to the university.  One cannot live without faith or debt.  Today we need to articulate a counter-faith: a belief in the public realm, publicly funded institutions, the idea of the university, and a belief in the necessity of critical thought.  This would be a catechism so simple that it would be worthy of the phrase “a child’s story.”  If the IOU is also a love story, it is a tale of how we do not fall in love but of how love instead falls upon us, smothering us with its dialectic of our infinite debt to the one we love in advance of any engagement with him, her, or it.  In this sense it is also the story of university managers and higher education policy leaders who are indebted to the very idea of the institution they serve prior to any understanding of what the institution might mean.  They have had their IOU signed for them in advance of their entrance into the Principal’s Office, and in this way their debts and duties are infinite.  These Chancellors, Vice-Chancellors and Presidents have a choice today, to accept the credit default swap that passes the debt of the university from state to student, or, to affirm the gift of higher education by refusing this sacrificial economy.  They may well predominately choose the former and so, like Baudelaire’s narrator, beat up the poor, but they will not do so from the same theoretical motivation.  Rather, they will be like the somnambulant friend in “La fausse monnaie,” thinking they are doing good by offering counterfeit money and seeking advancement while hedging themselves and their institutions against loss.  They, like Baudelaire’s false alms giver, deserve our contempt: “I will never forgive him the ineptitude of his calculation… The most irreparable of vices is to do evil out of stupidity” (qtd. in Given 164).