How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom

by Johanna Hedva

We’ve framed care within the context of debt—where my “giving” care to you means I’m depleting my own stash, and your “taking” from me means that now you owe me—and although we’ve made debt into an index of our deficiency, we’ve also made it the only possible condition of life under capitalism. To be alive in capitalism is by definition to live in debt, and yet we’ve defined debt not as a kind of radical interdependency, as the ontological mutuality of being alive together on this planet—which it is—but as all that reveals our worst, what happens when we fail, a moral flaw that ought to be temporary and expunged. By doing this, the omnipresence of our need is framed as a kind of weird bankruptcy that happens only to the weak—which is a fucking canard. The logic of capitalism states that the person who needs support from society is a burden on that society, but this logic can only work when the premise holds that our natural state is one of surplus—and it is not.