The Refusal of Debt: On Sarah Kofman's Version of Don Juan

"Neither a borrower nor a lender be," says Polonius in Hamlet. This is a good recipe for financial probity, but such probity is hardly encouraged by the current financial system, where borrowing and lending, charging interest and profiting from debt, are simply the general dynamics of wealth creation, and wealth deprivation. David Graeber¹ argues that, in fact, the experience of debt has accompanied life for the past 5000 years. Maurizio Lazzarato generalizes the matter with blunt precision: the creditor-debtor relationship, he claims, is the basis of social relations. "Debt breeds, subdues, manufactures, adapts, and shapes subjectivity" (Lazzarato 2012, 39).

Reactions to this will doubtless vary. Depending on one's point of view, this model of subjectivity is attractively trenchant, cutting through the philosophical niceties to get to the heart of the matter, or it is too reductive, given how subjectivity is structured and how we forge intersubjective relations. Taking the latter view invites a full-scale review of the various models of subjectivity currently on offer in contemporary philosophy, a review which lies beyond the remit of the present essay, however. Since the objective is to focus specifically on the way 'debt' features in our current thinking, the better philosophical starting point is arguably Nietzsche. In On the Genealogy of Morality (2017), Nietzsche claims that credit is the paradigm for social relations. But receiving credit, and thus shouldering the obligation to pay back the sum of money, requires a person who is good for his word, one who promises. Rendering a person capable of promising means creating a memory so that he or she is capable of remembering the promise, and of keeping to that promise over the time taken to fulfill it.

If we have memories at all, says Nietzsche, it is so that debtors don't forget their commitments. "Memory" is therefore not just a matter of recalling the past, but also of committing to a future. (A credit-rating agency's advert recently exclaimed, "Discover not just your credit history, but your credit future!") Memory is an expedient creation of the debt society, constructed (or invented outright) so that the fiduciary relation can weigh on the mind, on our consciences, like a guilt (Schuld, in German, means both guilt and debt). So the first order of business is ensuring that there is no chance of forgetting what was promised. Memory, for Nietzsche, is therefore seared into the flesh and soul of man: "there is nothing more terrible and strange in man's prehistory than his technique of mnemonics. 'A thing must be burnt in so that it stays in the memory: only something that continues to hurt stays in the memory'—that is a proposition from the oldest (and unfortunately the longest-lived) psychology on earth" (2017, 39). Of the debtor is demanded total recall, whence what Lazzarato describes as a "'mnemotechnics' of cruelty" (2012, 40).

Has contemporary philosophy, in the wake of the "ethical turn," forgotten this cruelty? Consider the ways in which it busily invents new ways to feel inescapably and infinitely obligated. Obligation, we are told, feels like a trauma, like being held hostage, in perpetual bondage to the Other. This ethical zealotry can often sound casually violent, or else blithely confident that ethical scenarios of obligation cannot be as cruel as those Nietzsche envisages. But it sometimes feels that ethical philosophy has reinvented (for our own Good) the indebted subject the author of On the Genealogy of Morality describes: the self seared by the impact of the Other, branded by obligation, commanded to remember and commit absolutely, without conditions. While ethical philosophy bids for a subject exposed to what Simon Critchley describes as the "infinitely demanding"² claims of the Other, alternative approaches seek to imagine a human experience unscarred by the pangs of memory invented so that we are forever mindful of our debts. For instance: if debt makes us think of economic relations, perhaps "an-economic" relations like charitable giving might liberate us from the transactional logic the debtor-creditor relation implies.

But, as we know from Derrida,³ no sooner...