The Making of the Indebted Man
2020
Disneyland Paris
Photo: Jordan Halsall
“What is credit/debt in its most elementary sense? A promise of payment. What is a financial asset, a share, or bond? The promise of future value. For Nietzsche, the ‘oldest and most personal relationship there is’ is that between creditor and debtor, a relationship wherein ‘person met person for the first time, and measured himself person against person.’ Consequently, the task of a community or society has first of all been to engender a person capable of promising, someone able to stand guarantor for himself in the creditor-debtor relationship, that is, capable of honoring his debt. Making a person capable of keeping a promise means constructing a memory for him, endowing him with interiority, a conscience, which provide a bulwark against forgetting. It is within the domain of debt obligations that memory, subjectivity, and conscience begin to be produced.
…
Debt therefore implies subjectivation, what Nietzsche calls the ‘labor of man on himself,’ a ‘self-torture.’ This labor produces the individual subject, a subject answerable and indebted to his creditor. Debt as economic relation, for it to take effect, has thus the peculiarity of demanding ethicopolitical labor constitutive of the subject. Modern-day capitalism seems to have discovered on its own the technique described by Nietzsche of constructing a person capable of promising: labor goes hand in hand with work on the self, with self-torture, with self-directed action. Debt involves a process of subjectivation that marks at once ‘body’ and ‘spirit.’”
Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of The Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition, Semiotexte/Smart Art, 2012, 39 - 42.
The Making of the Indebted Man I
2020
Nike Air Max 90 infants trainer, iPhone packaging.
14.5 x 8 x 17 cm
The Making of the Indebted Man II
2020
Nike Shox TL infants trainer, iPhone packaging.
13 x 6 x 15.5 cm
The Making of the Indebted Man III
2020
Nike Free Run 5.0 infants trainer, iPhone packaging.
13 x 6 x 15.5 cm
The Making of the Indebted Man IV
2020
Nike Free Run 5.0 infants trainer, iPhone packaging.
14.5 x 8 x 17 cm