Cats (and Creditors) Do Not Exist

And the grocer, thumping his accounts book with his fist, would reply, Don't come to me with that old story, I have heard it before, the summer comes and goes, and the dog will still be barking, because debts are like dogs, what a funny idea, I wonder who first thought of it. …¹

Literature is an unclosed transaction in the sense that one party, the reader, considers the work a gift outright and not a loan, that is, a provisional displacement of property which must one day be replaced.² For this reason, literary debts are understood as chimerical obligations that need not be repaid. Plagiarism is theorized away as imitatio; successful creative performances redeem larceny. "Toute l'histoire des arts pourrait être envisagée sous l'aspect d'un jeu d'emprunts et de prêts--qui font moins problème que leur restitution--, un échange à distance où l'oubli ne joue pas moins son rôle que la mémoire et la vraie ou fausse reconnaissance."³

Every debt, including the everyday monetary debt, becomes a literary debt as soon as it is understood as an unfinished transaction. The creditor wants to know one thing: when will the transaction be closed? Whereas the debtor may prefer to ask another question: does it really need to be closed?

In literary terms: the writer/creditor wants to know: when and how will you acknowledge that the text I wrote changed the way you think and write? And the reader/debtor says, in line with Freud's "kettle logic": I learned nothing from you, there was nothing new in your text, anyway it is too late, your text has merged with my own thoughts and there is no way to reverse the flow, and moreover the work I am writing now will be much better than yours.

Literary debts remain unpaid because the reader unilaterally decides to opt out of the transaction. The social institution of monetary debt, however, depends on both parties agreeing that the debtor's careless attitude is impertinent and that only the creditor's question—when does the debt get paid?—is meaningful. Today, however, the literary debtor's question—do I need really need to pay this?—is emerging from its hiding place in the innermost recesses of the despairing monetary debtor's heart and reappearing in objectified form in public life: in the debates about student debt, for example, or national debts. Increasingly one hears that creditors also in the real world are wishful thinkers, inhabitants of a self-constructed fantasy, exploiting the superegos of the debtors who have acquiesced in a Protestant-driven internalization, and ethicization, of abstract social goals. The polemics of the anthropologist David Graeber and the sociologist Maurizio Lazzarato are exemplary of this tendency. For Lazzarato, the modern person's very capacity for memory, his sense of his own extension through time, has been structured by the institution of debt: "Debt is not only an economic mechanism, it is also a security-state technique of government aimed at reducing the uncertainty of the behavior of the governed. By training the governed to 'promise' (to honor their debt), the state exercises 'control over the future,' since debt obligations allow one to foresee, calculate, measure, and establish equivalences between current and future behavior."⁴

In 1919, Germany, since the start of the war no longer on the gold standard, was obliged to pay 226 billion gold marks in reparations, the equivalent of more than 800 billion dollars today. The debt depleted the country's gold reserves and Germany was never able to return to the gold standard. A few years later, the government produced huge quantities of new currency not backed by wealth and the country spiraled into hyperinflation. The mistake was not repeated: in 1953 Germany's war debts, including 16 billion marks left over from the First World War, were restructured in terms favorable to Germany. The last payment of 70 million euros was made in 2010.

The creditor is "the one who believes," in German the Gläubiger. The creditor has chosen to believe in the...