EMMANUEL BOUJU: I will present
a very short introduction
to this Narratives
of Debt Program that
brings us together today.
And also-- is it too loud?
And, also, have a few words on
Europe and its own narrative.
So you have here a
photograph taken in Lisbon
in [INAUDIBLE] factory.
As you very well know, there
are many good stories of debt,
including some very
famous ones beginning
with the story of this
man who's long been away
for obscure
professional reasons,
and who realizes when he's back
home that so-called pretenders,
debtors actually, have
tried to seduce his wife,
chased out his son,
bother his dog,
and above all to
waste his worth.
So he takes revenge
by slaughtering them.
That's something they
used to do at that time.
But it gets him into debt
with all the big purchase
familiars of the city so
he has to leave again.
There is also the story
of that other man, who
being sure of his impunity never
stops taking out debt, playing
language tricks, and contracting
mock marriages until he faces
the fact that he's in debt.
Not only with women and
all the genre humain,
but also with a
transcendent authority.
An archaic deus ex
machina commander father
he refused to believe in.
But my favorite story is
the one that this gifted guy
who frees some community of its
rat scourge with a simple pipe.
But, then, as no
one would pay him
back he takes his toll by
leading all the children,
except one, to the sweet
hereafter of a promised land
where all debts are settled.
Have pity on the lame who could
not dance the whole of the way,
says Robert Browning and
his Pied Piper of Hamlin.
Stuck in the real
world we can't hope
for a better future,
as Russell banks put it
in the massacre of the
children, a beautiful lecture
on the false promises
of capitalism.
I had the privilege to
attend at Harvard Divinity
School four years ago.
So literature is an
immense collection
of narratives of debts, as
are mythology and philosophy.
To be or not to be in debt
is an alternative address
since antiquity.
And we may remember that
Rabelais did so in Le Tiers
Livre, where Pantagurel
asked Panurge, when will you
be out of debt?
God forbid that I should ever
be out of debt, answers Panurge.
And according to
David Gregor, quote,
"Panurge serves as a fitting
prophet for the world that
was just beginning to
emerge" end of quote.
All of Shakespeare's
plays, including
the to be or not to be somber
story of insolvent debts
and blood usury on
the fringe of Europe.
This 18th century
[SPEAKING FRENCH] Florence
[INAUDIBLE] will tell us about,
the whole Comedie Humaine
by Balzac are rife with
narratives of debt,
which may still
be accurate today,
as Thomas Piketty argues in
Le Capital au XXIle Siécle,
or may not if we consider that
credit crisis fiction can be
as realistic as it used to be.
So why is this debt
narrative so essential?
According to the French
theory of primordial debt--
Michel Aglietta, André
Orléans, Bruno Théret--
quote, "It's not
that we owe society.
Society is our debt."
Narratives of debt will be the
way society tells its tale.
Debt narrative is at least
one of the primordial modes
of causal representation
of society,
and moreover, of textual
or syntactical embodiment
of morality, as Michel
de Certeau put it
in The Practice
of Everyday Life.
Or as in the key formula
of Graeber's tome on debt,
who really owes what to whom?
It's true that the
debt narrative strictly
articulates, as everyday
life, the power of authority,
the empire of calculation,
and the practice of violence.
Ever since Titus Livius,
when the debt slave shows
the injuries on
his body in order
for them to amount to
repayment, the body
itself becomes a debt
narrative and a plea
for its cancellation.
And as such, the
debt narrative is not
a simple figure of speech,
literature, or thought.
It acts powerfully in the real
world as brute material force,
as says Annie McClanahan
in Dead Pledges--
Debt, Crisis, and
Twenty-First Century Culture.
The golden legend
of the conquista--
it is the mythical flipside
of another narrative, that
of a genocidal adventurer
led by indebted soldiers
to erase their
debts and to provide
infinite wealth to even
more heavily indebted
European kingdoms.
Many wars can be narrated as
debt exports; colonization
as systemic debt slavery.
I guess Anthony Bogues
will tell about it.
And revolutions?
They always took the form of
pleas for debt cancellation,
says Graeber, the freeing of
those in bondage, and usually
a more just reallocation
of the land and of goods.
Since Solon-- Solon--
how do you say this, Solon--
Solon the first step
of democracy in Europe
is debt cancellation.
And 18th century French and
American revolutionaries
thought that debts
of one generation
should not have to be a burden
for the next generation.
Jennifer Baker could certainly
say more on this matter.
So let's say that
the debt narrative is
a sort of Rosetta Stone.
If we recall that the Rosetta
Stone allowed Champollion
to decipher hieroglyphics
by comparing
three different versions
of a single text,
the first one written
in hieroglyphics--
God's language-- the second
one in Demotic Egyptian--
documents language--
and the third one in Greek--
communications language.
Three versions of a
decree that settled
the account of credits
and debts of the Ptolemaic
priests in Memphis.
So quite like the Rosetta
Stone, the debt narrative
is a way for us to decipher the
articulations between the three
languages of economy,
politics, and ethics.
At the very core of
this Rosetta narrative
lies the principle of the
acknowledgment of debts--
the famous IOU.
Well, I like that.
The English is great.
You can't have such
things in French.
You say [SPEAKING FRENCH].
It's not at all the same thing.
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
IOU.
So the debt narrative
is an IOU narrative.
That's why literature
likes it so much.
It recalls the fiduciary
interaction between the author
and the reader.
Write through the
diegetic credit and debt
plot or its failure.
See Alexander Kluge and
Joseph Vogl's dialogue
in Credit and Debit
on the causal model
and its possible
post-crash topicality.
IOU is the debt narrative
active principle
of any good causal story.
Well, I couldn't help using
another way of using letters.
But does it imply the
necessity of repayment?
Not necessarily,
at least according
to Graeber since
Henry II invented
the first successful
modern central bank,
the Bank of England, by making
his IOU operate as money.
Only as long as Henry never pays
his debt, says Graeber Becoming
a debt money narrative
at that time,
the IOU ceased to
imply a full repayment.
The general axiology of this
unnecessity of repayment
is a complicated issue
ever since Socrates,
who argued on this matter
in The Republic Book I
against Cephalus
and Polemarchus,
and concluded that justice can't
simply be repaying one's debts.
Let's think about the
odd morality of repayment
that prevails in the Sicilian
or Neapolitan vendetta till
today as an inheritance of
the ancient blood money,
just like in Gomorrah
by Roberto Saviano.
To repay one's debts can be
a strict guarantee of justice
and the necessary end
of all debt narratives,
because they depend not only
on guilt, responsibility,
and authority, but also
on violence, sexuality,
and domination.
As Annie McClanahan puts
it, quote, "The imperative
to repay our debts produced
not the balance and closure
of justice, but the ceaseless
excess of retribution
from paying back to pay
back," end of quote.
It's about the revenge plot in
[INAUDIBLE] age horror movies.
And it's true.
If you know Game of Thrones.
It's useful if you
know Game of Thrones.
If you don't know--
it's true even now.
And here.
So instead of being
honored to be in debt,
we should rather
say to repay or not
to repay debts, that
is the question,
as in the beginning of Ulysses.
This is obvious in
philosophical debates,
especially in the
post-Nietzschean critique
of the infinite debt.
And I won't so much,
because I think
Peter, Eric Santner, Catherine
Malabou will be back to it.
Of course, from the
reader's given time,
one counterfeits money,
challenging the essay
on The Gift by Marcel Mauss.
See the critic of this
position at the very beginning
of The Ghost in the Financial
Machine by Arjun Appadurai--
Chapter 12 of The
Future as Cultural Fact.
From Derrida to
Maurizio Lazzarato,
La Fabrique de L'homme Endetté--
Essai sur la
Condition Néolibérale,
whose Indebted Man-- maybe
it's not a good translation--
theory powerfully echoes
in The Living Indebted coda
of Annie McClanahan's
book after she
criticized its untimely
subjectivation of debt
in her Chapter 2,
because, quote,
"It misses much of the new
forms of impersonal structural
violence that operate on the
debtor's body," end of quote.
On the other side of
Mauss-inspired anthropology,
Phillipe Rospabé's
La Dette de Vie--
Aux Origines de la Monnaie
Sauvage argues that, quote,
"Primitive money
is not originally
a way to pay debts of any sort.
It's a way of recognizing the
existence of debts that cannot
possibly be paid," end of
quote, like the bride wealth.
And these debates also
exist on the verge of law,
as in the formal
doctrine of odious debt,
according to which,
as Odette Lienau
puts it in Rethinking
Sovereign Debt,
"A fallen regime's debt needs
not to be repaid if it was not
authorized by and
did not benefit
the underlying
population," end of quote,
as in the case of the reputation
of the Tsarist debt after 1917.
In other words,
says Odette Lienau,
"Debt should not be continuous
in some cases," end of quote.
So it seems to me that we could
consider two different IOU
narrative possibilities,
two different ways
for cultural forms to connect
consumer debt experiences
to social personhood
and global economies,
and to articulate
[SPEAKING GREEK]
domestic, political,
and moral economies.
On one side, to repay
depths is an obligation
in the sense of a necessity.
It's the teleological story
of debt as [INAUDIBLE],,
the soteriology of repayment
as an ethical reparation,
the telos of responsibility with
its two intertwined versions--
the spiritual or
religious one, relying
on the model of
the last judgment
with its overbearing
narrative posterity,
till the apocalyptical
sci-fi current stories.
The other being
secular and Bourgeois,
what Alexander Kluge and
Joseph Vogl in Credit and Debit
perfectly call,
quote, "a morality
of double-entry bookkeeping,
a [INAUDIBLE] morality
as in the Poseidon
short story by Kafka,
according to Kluge and Vogl.
On the other side, we
could say not repaid--
I'm not sure of this formula--
not repaid debts,
non-repaying debts,
create an obligation in
the etymological sense
of a literal bond,
either bad or good.
And it implies other
ways of representing time
and redistributing future,
as Frederick Tygstrup
will tell very soon with his
Topologies of Contemporary
Debt.
It means either valuing and
securitizing risks, theft
trafficking, and insurance,
scoring credits, as in what we
could call the derivative
Big Short stories of finance
heroism and their
masculinist urban legends;
or facing, at best, the
spirit of uncertainty.
Arjun Appadurai argued in
favor of a spirit, an ethos,
or an imaginary of
uncertainty, which is,
according to me,
the very principle
of any true literary engagement.
Though I have to say
there is a big mistake
in the French translation of the
"imaginary," the "uncertainty
imaginary."
It's translated in French
by the [SPEAKING FRENCH],,
the "uncertain imaginary."
It's a very big mistake
in the French translation.
I could [INAUDIBLE] also.
No, it's not for you to--
SPEAKER 2: [INAUDIBLE]
EMMANUEL BOUJU: It's not
for you to be worried,
but I have to tell for
the future publications.
Because it's the
[SPEAKING FRENCH]..
It's not at all the same thing.
So this may be the way debt
narratives of our times
do embody the anthropology
of global condition.
And in the credit crisis fiction
or the post-credit crisis
fiction, it may be inventing
the poetics of insolvency.
And Adi should
elaborate on that,
but maybe I'll be back to
it during the discussion.
And also, Raphaelle Guidée
will give us examples of it,
and maybe Bonnie Honig
too, in other way,
with the Sabbatical
Politics of Refusal.
So it may be inventing
a poetics of insolvency.
And if we assume that no
author never gives back
to the reader what was
initially promised,
and that it is the specific
profit of narrative credit
to be recognized indeed,
and as a counterfeit money,
or to be liquidated with
floating interests one will
never be able to probobalize,
it may be inventing a poetics
as insolvency.
Then a word on Europe.
This is the ghost in the
financial machine of Europe--
an aging ghost.
The question I would like to--
this very short introduction,
if you give me credit for it--
if you give me
"cred" for it is--
what happens today
with the debt narrative
and its Big Short stories in
this Europe of hard Brexit
times, or maybe
soon, but I hope not,
Grexit, Italexit, Hungarexit,
Frexit, what-else-it times.
May the debt narrative still
be useful to Europe as a way
to address its foundations and
values, its active principles,
and purposes, if they do exist?
For the debt crisis is not
only an economical, political,
and ethical crisis of
value, equality, and trust,
as I mentioned, it is also--
and it's important for us--
a symbolical and
aesthetical crisis.
We all remember on that
matter that the symbolon
was precisely invented as a
token of the agreement in debt
matters, as Marc Shell said
in The Economy of Literature.
Such a symbolon could
be a ring coin--
I guess one that can
easily be broken into.
Or later, as in Henry's time,
when it served as token of debt
owed to the
government, it could be
in the shape of a tally stick,
with a stock and a stub,
of course.
So what we are facing
today in Europe
may be the political and
symbolical confrontation
between two leading
debt narratives--
the story of the
necessary repayment
of debts, and the story of
an inevitable cancellation
of some debts, with,
in both cases, a risk
of breaking apart.
This is, for instance,
Thomas Piketty's argument
since the European
Union was built
on the philosophy of a
cancellation, or a [INAUDIBLE]
postponement, of the French
and mostly German debts
after World War II.
We cannot consider debt,
especially Greek debt,
out of this fiduciary origin.
And then we all need to
face the possibility if not
of a cancellation, at least
of the largest possible
debt-pooling--
pooling of sovereign debt over
60% of each Eurozone state's
GDP is the proposition
of Piketty.
It's quite a similar
proposition that
was made in 2011
to Angela Merkel
by a council of economists
of a redemption fund.
And Piketty suggests
to sign a new treaty
for the democratization of
the Eurozone, T-Dem, which
would decide the
rhythm of repayment,
and moreover, allow it to
rely on a special European tax
system in the countries that
would agree to it for funding
higher education,
social solidarity,
and ecological transformations.
I made the promise
to my daughter,
who is handling
the T-Dem campaign,
to make you sign this petition
at the end of the conference.
So just look at it.
As for me, I'm trying to
understand what part literature
does play in this debate.
How does it fight against
the sophistic trend
of political discourse and
the neoliberal increase
of inequalities?
How can it prevent us
from the magicality
of the financial
ethos and make us
imagine what a deep democracy,
a democracy of suffering
and confidence, as
Arjun Appadurai says,
could be in Europe today?
One can see that the
pressure of debts--
of sovereign and personal debts
is quite systematically related
to a lack of credibility
of and credit
for democracy and future.
It is a crisis of
defuturization,
as Joseph Vogl put it in
The Specter of Capital,
placing the emphasis on
the way capitalism captured
the very word of future
as a financial product.
[SPEAKING FRENCH] in French.
Future is again better.
Its an agonistic conflict
between massive probability
patterns and fragile
possibility engagements
linked to the
algorithmic regulation
of personhood and everyday life.
And eventually,
it's a credit crunch
of democratic institutions
and representations,
which forbids any
reunification social symbolon.
Among the European novelistic
examples of this credit crunch,
I would quickly lay
stress on a very few--
on a very few that are
echoing the final line
of Graeber's tome on debt.
Quote, "A debt is just the
perversion of a promise.
It's a promise corrupted
by both math and violence."
My first example is the
novel by Walter Siti,
Resistance is Useless.
In Italian, so it's good that
Laura just came in for it.
It's an imaginary
biographical portrait
of a genius in international
finance, a prince
of calculation, who
is secretly working
for the Calabrian
mafia, the 'Ndrangheta,
since the day his
father had to repay
his debts by killing a traitor.
The novel studies
the frightening link
between covert mafia
power and licit wealth--
vultures and thieves, as
Odette Lienau will tell--
a link that is tightened by
accelerated calculation systems
and dematerialized finance.
And the compromising
of the author
appears to become a
desperate resistance
to this new order of
mafia-capitalist dark
cosmo-political economy.
It is not only a matter
of margin exploitation
of neocapitalism by some
covert organizations.
It deals with the very
constitutional form
of the economy, where the
erasing, or the unreadability
of any transaction track and
the non-institutional financing
of liquidities allow the
natural insertion of mafias
in the political
texture of our societies
and the perversion of
any democratic contract.
And so is the literary
narrative a way
to enlighten and
finally reverse,
maybe, this secret perversion?
It's a very good novel.
I recommend.
I will tell you also about two
Greek writers very quickly.
Rhéa Galanaki with
The Final Humiliation,
which is a tragic comedy
of two elder women--
Nymph and Terezia, who get
lost in a monstrous and violent
protests in Athens.
Their odyssey takes them
to a burned-out theater
in a kind of an [INAUDIBLE],,
where one of them
dreams of her dead
father elaborating
on the myth of Europe.
He argues that Europe, after
being raped by Zeus, the bull,
would become a female
minotaur capable of escaping
every trick of
Ariadne and Theseus
in order to survive forever
in the labyrinth of a kingdom
and to enjoy the everlasting
tribute of Athens,
the sacrifice of its youth.
It's an example of the mythical
subtext present in many stories
of indebtedness and
post-crash societies,
such as in Karnaval by
Juan Francisco Ferré.
I don't know if you
know this author, who
may have stayed in
Providence for a while,
because he wrote a
novel called Providence
with an apocalyptical
revolution in Providence.
You have to read it.
It's awful.
[LAUGHTER]
But it's quite interesting.
And the second Greek
author I could quote
is Christos Chryssopoulos
using three different genres
to tell the crisis
in Greece, first
in The Destruction
of the Parthenon.
It is a documentary fiction of
a symbolic far leftist attack
against the Parthenon in
a proto-fascist Greece.
Or Land of Wrath, when
Achilleus' wrath becomes
the collective anger
of Athenian society
that comes out in corporations,
in the street protests,
in families, in
every relationship.
And it's more like a
neo-naturalist novel.
And A Lamp in the Mouth--
an Athenian Chronicle,
whose narrator wanders in Athens
and stands in front of a wall
where he can read that.
And he can't help
thinking, correcting
both Don Juan and
Orwell, that, quote,
"The awareness of the crisis
takes the form of an inability
to dream outside of the
official arithmetic."
This is the main difficulty.
How can we envision
any future out
of the official arithmetic
of this capitalist realism
the late Mark Fisher
described and challenged?
Out of what I could call the
algorithmic of hyperfinance,
rating agencies, systematic
calculation of behaviors,
and the consequences
on politics?
How can the future be anything
other than the black swan
of the pseudo rationality
of capitalist oikodicy?
This was for Joseph Vogl.
It seems to me it's like
black swan, but maybe not.
So I conclude very
quickly with Paul Valéry.
What has become of the narrative
of Europe in our times of debt?
A tale-- you can see I'm
a little bit frightened
by what happens now.
A tale of the
minotaur at the center
of a labyrinth of 27 nations.
The story of Fiducia eating up
her children like the commander
did with Don Juan.
And Article 50 pied
pipers pipe leading us
to the delusion of
a sweet hereafter.
What has become of the
symbol of a ring of stars
20 years exactly after
the birth of the eurozone?
There is this story in
the last Robert Menasse
novel, Die Haupstadt.
At a tattoo store
in Brussels, when
the old, progressive
German economist--
we would say
[SPEAKING FRENCH] in France.
Economist, [SPEAKING FRENCH].
Professor Errat wants
to get a 12-star circle
tattoo on his arm
around a hematoma
in the shape of Europe.
"Sorry, man.
I don't do this," says
the tattoo artist.
"It's gonna disappear."
"So no stars for a
disappearing Europe,"
the professor asks in this
tragic comedy of the EU,
which tells a
structural impossibility
of any economical, political,
or ethical debt-pooling
inside Europe.
And I don't even dare to
mention the great failure
of any refugee pooling policy.
Let us hope, at a time when the
great demagogues are in charge
almost everywhere,
including France,
that new narratives
of debts will manage
to make the symbol of Europe
be a real ring of solidarity
and not a bunch of Euro stubs
without stocks in a ghostly,
continental, IOU Providence.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
