Quodlibet

September 28, 2022

By Giorgio Agamben

“Hope Dies Last”, Athens, Greece. Artist: WD (Wild Drawing)

The prayer par excellence – the one that Jesus himself dictated to us (“pray like this”) – contains a passage that our time strives to contradict at all costs and which it will therefore be good to remember, precisely today that everything seems to be reduced to the one fierce double-sided law: credit/debit. Dimitte nobis debita nostra… «forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors». The Greek original is even more peremptory: aphes emin ta opheilemata emon, «let go, remove our debts from us». Reflecting on these words in 1941, in the middle of the world war, a great Italian jurist, Francesco Carnelutti, observed that, if it is a truth of the physical world that what has happened cannot be erased, the same cannot be said for the moral world. which is defined precisely through the possibility of forgiveness and forgiveness.

First of all, it is necessary to dispel the prejudice that debt is a genuinely economic law. Even leaving aside the problem of what is meant when one speaks of an economic “law”, a summary genealogical investigation shows that the origin of the concept of debt is not economic, but juridical and religious – two dimensions that the more one goes back towards prehistory the more they tend to get confused. If, as Carl Schmitt has shown, the notion of Schuld , which in German means both debt and fault, is at the basis of the law edifice, no less convincing is the intuition of a great historian of religions, David Flüsser. While one day he was reflecting in a square in Athens on the meaning of the word pistis, which is the term that in the Gospels means “faith”, he saw in front of him the inscription trapeza tes pisteos in large letters . It didn’t take him long to realize that he was standing in front of a bank sign ( Banco di credito) and at the same time he understood that the meaning of the word he had been reflecting on for years had to do with credit – the credit we enjoy with God and which God enjoys with us, from the moment we believe in him. For these Paul can say in a famous definition that “faith is the substance of things hoped for”: it is what gives reality to what does not yet exist, but in which we believe and trust, in which we have staked our credit and our word. Something like a credit exists only to the extent that our faith manages to give it substance.

The world we live in today has appropriated this juridical and religious concept and transformed it into a lethal and implacable device, before which every human need must bow. This device, in which all our pistis, all our faith has been captured, is money, understood as the very form of credit/debit. The Bank – with its gray officials and experts – has taken the place of the Church and its priests and, governing credit, manipulates and manages the faith – the scarce, uncertain trust – that our time still has in itself. And it does so in the most irresponsible and unscrupulous way, trying to make money from the trust and hopes of human beings, establishing the credit that everyone can enjoy and the price he must pay for it (even the credit of states, who have meekly abdicated their sovereignty). In this way, by governing credit, it governs not only the world, but also the future of men, a future that the emergency wants ever shorter and with a maturity. And if today politics no longer seems possible, this is because the financial power has de facto confiscated all faith and all the future, all time and all expectations.

The so-called emergency we are going through – but what is called an emergency, this is by now clear, is just the normal way in which capitalism works today – began with an ill-advised series of credit operations, on credits that were discounted and resold dozens of times before they could be made. This means, in other words, that financial capitalism – and the banks which are its main organ – works by playing on credit – that is, on the faith – of men.

If today a government – in Italy as elsewhere – really wants to move in a different direction from the one that is being sought everywhere to impose, it is above all the money/credit/debt system that it must resolutely question as a system of government. Only in this way will a policy become possible again – a policy that does not accept being strangled by the false dogma – pseudo-religious and not economic – of the universal and irrevocable debt and restores to men the memory and faith in the words they so often recited as children : «forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors».