On the Infinity of Debt

A striking aspect of current debt is that it seems characterized by limitlessness in space and time. Benjamin’s account of capitalism as a permanent cult gives a clue to its peculiar infinity. Debt shows the traits of a messianic time. More precisely, it partakes in the increasingly dominative temporality of preemption, where a catastrophic future is endlessly postponed by a homeopathic kathecon which in its action remoulds also the past. Disentangling from this logic through its intensification can hardly be successful, if anything because the capitalist engine is running idle at faster and faster speed. Alternatively, one should look for an interruption, a disengagement from the thrust to infinite valorization, in the direction of inoperosity, as a possibility that messianic time also discloses. To redeem our enslavement to debt, however, we have not to look at our relation with money, but at our relation with the world.