Debt and Guilt

Elettra Stimilli is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. She is the author of Jacob Taubes (2004) and The Debt of the Living (2017) and the editor of Italian Critical Thought (2018).Stefania Porcelli is Associate Professor in Comparative Literature, CUNY, USA

• IntroductionChapter One: Debt: Between Appropriation, Exchange, and Gift1. The Problematic Context2. Appropriation3. Exchange4. GiftChapter Two: An Open Question1. The Neoliberal Turn2. The Society of Generalized Debt 3. The Paradigm of Man in DebtChapter Three: Between Political Theology and Economic Theology1. Beyond the Boundaries of Economic Science2. Religion, Politics, and Economics3. “Faith” in the Era of the Predominance of Finance4. Debt and Sacrifice5. Guilt and Violence: At the Origin of Juridical PowerChapter Four: The Religion of Debt1. Bare Life and the Law2. Capitalism: A Cult with no Theology3. Economy and Regulatory Experimentation4. The Invention of Oikonomia5. Debt as InvestmentChapter Five: The Psychic Life of Debt1. The Guilt of Being in Debt2. Establishing the Rule: Psychic Dimension and Social Sphere3. Feminism and Neoliberalism4. The Mystery of Guilt and the Psychic Life of Power5. Envisioning New Ways of Assuming PowerConclusionsBibliographyIndex

Elettra Stimilli’s new book offers a deeply-informed, succinct and far-ranging account of the debates around our contemporary condition of “universal indebtedness.” By asking fundamental questions and putting major figures into dialogue, she has rebooted and redrawn a whole field of political thinking. Her book deserves to be widely read by those—both in and out of academia—who believe that the present regime of debt and guilt cannot have the last word.