Decolonizing Debt: New Fields for Institutions – Response to Mitchell Dean, Andrea Mura and Valentina Napolitano

Abstract

The issues raised by Mitchell Dean are fundamental and come from his important work on common research themes. This makes the discussion all the more stimulating. As Dean points out, Debt and Guilt was written at a time when the European Union found itself directly involved in the global financial crisis. The question of debt has therefore become a specific problem for some European nations, which were considered responsible for poor management of the state. In this sense, it was a guilt that was easily attributable and equally easy to position in the context of what could be done to make amends, in the sense of damages that had been caused, a broken rule or a breached agreement, which, however, could be compensated for through making sacrifices. The point for me then was to understand what fueled the supposedly linear logic behind austerity policies. More than an economic issue in the technical sense, the debt problem emerged as a powerful political problem. With the affirmation of neoliberal policies, the market became the dominant political institution. This phenomenon produced a radical transformation in terms of normative production. The function of guilt, linked to the economy of debt, changed with the shifting conditions that produced it. The categories at the heart of this transformation are no longer only those of a juridical nature, which control nation-states. From the moment the market became the dominant political institution, the economic categories connected to the field of valuation were at stake. In this context, guilt is not only the expression of an unmet obligation. Instead, it involves the condition that is produced at the moment when, with neoliberal policies, the way of giving value to life fully match the valorization of capital, thus making it possible for each person to become “human capital” and, therefore, to be (or not be) worthy of the investment expected, and thus finding himself, in this second case, in the condition of one who feels guilty. A profound transformation took place in the capitalist modes of production at the moment when this type of entrepreneurial rationality was extended to all work environments and across the social and political arenas until it affected the entire existences of millions of people, who as individuals became “items of capital” in whom investments could be made. This is why, as Dean argues, the experience of subjectivity occupies “the core of my analysis of the sources of debt and guilt.” Ultimately, the point for me is to understand in what sense it seems possible to say that the methods by which economic power subjugates us are intrinsically connected to the methods with which subjects