Table Of ContentThe Debt of the Living
SUNY series in Contemporary Italian Philosophy
Silvia Benso and Brian Schroeder, editors
The Debt of the Living
Ascesis and Capitalism
Elettra Stimilli
Translated by Arianna Bove
Foreword by Roberto Esposito
SUNY
P R E S S
Original Italian edition: Il debito del vivente. Ascesi e capitalismo (Quodlibet, 2011)
The translation of this work has been funded
by SEPS
Segretariato Europeo per le Pubblicazioni Scientifiche
Via Val d’Aposa 7 - 40123 Bologna - Italy
Contents
Foreword to the English Translation vii
Preface to the English Translation xi
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction 1
1. Te End in Itself of the Economic Enterprise 15
2. Oikonomía and Asceticism 49
3. T e Teological Construction
of the Government of the World 83
4. Voluntary Poverty on the Market 101
5. Capitalism as Religion 113
6. A Philosophical Critique of Asceticism 135
7. Te Spirit of Capitalism and Forms of Life 165
Notes 183
Bibliography 187
Index 197
Foreword to the English Translation
Roberto Esposito
It might be said that much of contemporary Italian theory situates itself
in the gap of what Michel Foucault has not said, a research building site
that his great oeuvre opened but left interrupted. Tis space is filled and
redeveloped primarily with reference to some other author who provides
an interpretative framework destined to retroact on Foucauldian categories
and point them into different directions. Te first author in this role of
theoretical intersection was Carl Schmitt, used in a manner that articulates
the biopolitical regime jointly with that of sovereignty, which Foucault had
actually very sharply distinguished it from. In another influential interpre-
tation, Schmitt’s place is taken up by Gilles Deleuze, and this results in con-
ferring to biopolitics an affirmative force that was not always discernible as
such in Foucault’s texts. A further vector of discourse proposed an approach
of Foucault and Martin Heidegger on the basis of a symmetrical relation
between the concept of dispositif and that of “Gestell,” which led to a new
definition of political theology as a machine that reduces two to one.
In the Debt of the Living: Ascesis and Capitalism, Elettra Stimilli embarks
on an original and fruitful path of research without the aid of any of these
authors. Instead, associated to Foucault is the work of Max Weber, keeping
the Walter Benjamin’s fragment on “Capitalism as Religion” in sight. Read
in conjunction with Weber’s essay on the spirit of capitalism, this work pro-
vides definitive support to the thesis that was later developed by Foucault
on the connection between pastoral power and the dispositif of govern-
mentality. Stimilli puts forward an acute interpretation of the asceticism
discussed by Weber that reads it not merely as a premise, but as the content
of capitalist productivity. Beyond the sacrificial paradigm that subjects the
accumulation of commodities to renunciation and defers their immediate
enjoyment, the productive praxis of production we are confronted with
viii Foreword to the English Translation
today contains, in itself, its own end: a purposiveness without purpose,
ultimately coinciding with the flow of life that contemporary modes of pro-
duction have been able to put to work. What this means is that the figure
of being in debt, now the very condition of our existence, cannot be seen as
a mere contingent outcome of the current crisis, but needs to be rethought
as the form that human life takes on thanks to the close intertwining of the
economy and politics that for a long time has turned the former into both
a presupposition and an outcome of the latter.
From this perspective, which Stimilli manages to activate effectively by
way of a rich series of anthropological and textual references, both of the
paradigms that lay at the center of the current debate, political theology,
and biopolitics, take an epistemological leap.
Political theology is pushed beyond Schmitt’s definition, where it was
linked to the category of sovereignty, and made to encounter what might
be named “economic theology,” as found in Benjamin’s Fragment as well
as Patristic texts. Te economy of neoliberal societies is a realm where the
early Christian life form develops according to an increasingly close juxta-
position of guilt and debt, one that had already been observed by Fried-
rich Nietzsche in “On the Genealogy of Morality” and that would later be
turned upside down by the logic of what Jacques Lacan called the “capitalist
discourse.” Enjoyment, rather than being repressed or deferred, is now the
sole purpose of economic praxis; but it is also an effected mode of political
control that is one and the same as the government of the living. In this
sense, the antinomy at the core of the dialectics Foucault theorized between
subjectivation and subjection becomes manifest. Caught in the economic-
political dispositif of governmentality, human beings become as separate
from what unites them as they are made subservient to what liberates them.
In this framework, even the paradigm of biopolitics leaps forward with
respect to the current debate. Biopolitics is intended neither as the sover-
eign power over a life stripped of its form, nor as an immunizing procedure
that tries to preserve life by imbuing it with a fragment of the evil from
which it seeks to defend it. Rather, it is an internal dispositif that operates
on the actual ability of human beings to valorize their own life accord-
ing to a purposiveness without purpose. In this sense, biopower does not
merely work toward the politicization of private life or even of naked and
bare living matter, but rather responds to the need of a subjectivity sepa-
rated from itself and put to work in a theological-p olitical and theological-
economic mechanism that both precedes and determines it.
Foreword to the English Translation ix
Stimilli evinces two indications from this reconstruction, enriched by
her new book Debt and Guilt (Rome, 2015): first, that confronting the
crisis simply by opposing policies of growth to policies of austerity does
not make sense because both are part of the same dispositif. Debt is not a
contingent technical datum, but a political operator of global governance
that releases life from its obedience to a transcendent norm and welds it
to its productive impulse. Inside this mechanism, as the product of our
investment and as that which we reproduce in a sort of paradoxical dia-
lectic with credit, debt cannot be settled. Like the trust that feeds it, debt
became infinite the moment capital started becoming one and the same
as the existence of each one of us. Naturally, this comes at a high price, its
most external symptom being contemporary psychopathologies. How is it
possible to exit this mechanism? How does one leave behind an economic
theology that is also a political theology, the metaphysical structure of our
time? Te desire to turn from a financial economy back to a real one is
inadequate because still internal to the “general economy” George Bataille
spoke of in his time. Te suggestion that the law of this regime could be
made inactive by means of a sort of destituent power also seems internal to
the same language it tries to dismantle.
Instead, the author suggests, one ought to reactivate the purposiveness
without purpose that feeds debt and disentangle it from the dispositif it is
currently captured by. But is it possible to separate something from its very
life force, freeing it from the potentiality it contains? Is it possible to dislo-
cate the power of the act without flattening it onto the apolitical space of
a pure testimony? Or is it necessary to place back in the field the category
of conflict that, like that of power, lays at the heart of Italian theory, and
make them interact? I believe this is the question to be asked today, and
that Elettra Stimilli’s work places it right at the center of the contemporary
debate.
