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Debito e colpa
La questione del debito è sempre più di scottante attualità. "Austerità" è stata la parola d'ordine che ha prevalso nelle politiche economiche europeedegli ultimi tempi guidati dal modello tedesco, per molti promotore di una visione colpevolizzante dei paesi indebitati. Di qui il nesso tra debito e colpa da cui muove il volume. L'intento principale del libro è quello di mettere a nudo i nodi teorici contenuti in questa redazione semantica, attraverso un confronto con i più recenti studi sul debito.
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Published January 1, 2015
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
November 19, 2016
Buon libro della signora Stimilli: ottima ricercatrice, un pò meno come professoressa (ha una voce da meeting di Rimini), ha stoffa per diventare prima o poi filosofa. Manca nel testo l'esempio della parabola dei talenti: esempio fulgido di debito e di come il neoliberismo vampirizza tutta la cultura precedente.Questo anche e soprattutto per il cristianesimo: restituendo la parabola, ruminata, alla folla, con un significato totalmente diverso da quello voluto da Gesù Cristo.
January 13, 2025
Readable in one sitting (if you are home sick and have nothing to do besides read perhaps, but still possible), Stimilli's Debt and Guilt does not really live up to the promise of its title or description, unfortunately, but it gets closer than the Debt of the Living, which directly precedes this.
I was personally hoping for a text that historicized and developed Benjamin's claim that capitalism is a religious cult that generates guilt and tied this to the financial crises of the 21st century. At best, this book prepares the ground for the beginning of that type of research. I use that awkward phrasing intentionally. Something that I find deeply unsatisfying, and at this point kind of unacceptable, is this weird insistence from contemporary philosophers entrenched in the works of Foucault and Agamben that every intellectual effort is an "opening" or a "prolegomena" into the "future horizon of politics". That was all well and good when I was 15, but in my 30s, I think this posture is ultimately a deflection and an intentionally mystifying gesture. One can be specific, assertive, or offer strategic insight without being prescriptive. Part of the issue is that Foucault's concepts seems to have given many the idea that they have license to announce new forms of governance all the time. Don't get me wrong, I've learned a lot from Foucault and turn to some of his works frequently, but it feels undeniable that his influence on philosophy has been ambiguous at best. I don't see the point in coining new names for stages or forms of statecraft or capitalist exploitation. They seem to usually, as they are here, be based in taking a phenomenon happening in one place (say the rise of people working for Uber in, let's be real, Paris or Berlin or Rome) and then declaring that this is a new paradigm and a new era (like 'the "precariat" has now supplanted the proletariat' or something to that effect or "debtor/creditor is more primordial than proletariat/capitalist and has now overtaken it again"). Seemingly every time, these generalizations don't actually apply in the universal way they speak about them.
It's been a while since I've dove into contemporary critical theory indebted to Agamben, but I've been reading more of it lately. I find it increasingly difficult to understand what I saw in his works. Not to say there isn't some great thinking that's come out of it, but I think Stimilli shares with him the unfortunate tendency to make broad, sweeping comments about social and economic phenomena they don't understand very well at a practical level. There's precious little in this book on how debt manifests in everyday life, but plenty of summaries of the "meaning" of debt or an abstract debtor/creditor scenario in a handful of European intellectuals or curious etymologies connecting debt to guilt. How is that not an issue? But it's hard to say what Stimilli's personal position even is, because, not unlike others in the continental tradition, she seems more interested in broadly reproducing others' arguments, which themselves are so often reproductions of others'.
This is neither a close reading of authors on debt, nor an empirical account of it economically, nor a sufficiently broad overview of the general literature (since it focuses largely on the "political theology" current running from Benjamin through Schmitt to Bataille and Agamben and a handful of anthropologists but doesn't engage with economic thinkers much at all), nor a deep dive into political theology. Instead, it's a tiny bit of all of that without ever committing to something for long enough to develop a strong political proposition. It has a few moments of insight, but otherwise, I found it very lacking.
I was personally hoping for a text that historicized and developed Benjamin's claim that capitalism is a religious cult that generates guilt and tied this to the financial crises of the 21st century. At best, this book prepares the ground for the beginning of that type of research. I use that awkward phrasing intentionally. Something that I find deeply unsatisfying, and at this point kind of unacceptable, is this weird insistence from contemporary philosophers entrenched in the works of Foucault and Agamben that every intellectual effort is an "opening" or a "prolegomena" into the "future horizon of politics". That was all well and good when I was 15, but in my 30s, I think this posture is ultimately a deflection and an intentionally mystifying gesture. One can be specific, assertive, or offer strategic insight without being prescriptive. Part of the issue is that Foucault's concepts seems to have given many the idea that they have license to announce new forms of governance all the time. Don't get me wrong, I've learned a lot from Foucault and turn to some of his works frequently, but it feels undeniable that his influence on philosophy has been ambiguous at best. I don't see the point in coining new names for stages or forms of statecraft or capitalist exploitation. They seem to usually, as they are here, be based in taking a phenomenon happening in one place (say the rise of people working for Uber in, let's be real, Paris or Berlin or Rome) and then declaring that this is a new paradigm and a new era (like 'the "precariat" has now supplanted the proletariat' or something to that effect or "debtor/creditor is more primordial than proletariat/capitalist and has now overtaken it again"). Seemingly every time, these generalizations don't actually apply in the universal way they speak about them.
It's been a while since I've dove into contemporary critical theory indebted to Agamben, but I've been reading more of it lately. I find it increasingly difficult to understand what I saw in his works. Not to say there isn't some great thinking that's come out of it, but I think Stimilli shares with him the unfortunate tendency to make broad, sweeping comments about social and economic phenomena they don't understand very well at a practical level. There's precious little in this book on how debt manifests in everyday life, but plenty of summaries of the "meaning" of debt or an abstract debtor/creditor scenario in a handful of European intellectuals or curious etymologies connecting debt to guilt. How is that not an issue? But it's hard to say what Stimilli's personal position even is, because, not unlike others in the continental tradition, she seems more interested in broadly reproducing others' arguments, which themselves are so often reproductions of others'.
This is neither a close reading of authors on debt, nor an empirical account of it economically, nor a sufficiently broad overview of the general literature (since it focuses largely on the "political theology" current running from Benjamin through Schmitt to Bataille and Agamben and a handful of anthropologists but doesn't engage with economic thinkers much at all), nor a deep dive into political theology. Instead, it's a tiny bit of all of that without ever committing to something for long enough to develop a strong political proposition. It has a few moments of insight, but otherwise, I found it very lacking.
November 15, 2019
When the taxpayer is paying for a good life, your only concern is how to please your bosses, and for many seems to be the only qualification they get in life.
May 5, 2021
Excellent
April 13, 2023
forse io ed il pensiero critico semplicemente siamo due rette parallele, mai destinate ad incontrarci
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews