Forgive us our debts
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, September 28, 2022
The prayer par excellence — the one that Jesus himself dictated to us (“pray like this”) — contains a passage that our time strives at all costs to contradict and which therefore will be good to keep in mind, especially today that everything seems to be reduced to the only ferocious two-sided law: credit/debit. Dimitte nobis debita nostra... “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors”. The original Greek is even more peremptory: aphes emin ta opheilemata emon, “let it go, dismiss our debts from us”. Reflecting on these words in 1941, in full world war, a great Italian jurist, Francesco Carnelutti, observed that, if the assumption that what has happened cannot be canceled is a truth of the physical world, the same cannot be said for the moral world, which defines itself precisely through the possibility of remitting and forgiving.
First of all, we have to dispel the prejudice that a genuinely economic law is in question in the debt. Even leaving aside the problem of what is meant when we speak of an economic “law”, a brief 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 to 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 edifice of law, no less convincing is the intuition of a great historian of religions, David Flüsser. One day, while he was reflecting in an Athenian square on the meaning of the word pistis, which is the term that in the Gospels means “faith”, he saw written in large letters before him: trapeza tes pisteos. It did not take him long to realise that he was standing in front of a bank sign (Credit Bank) and at the same instant he understood that the meaning of the word about which he had been thinking for years had to do with credit — the credit that we enjoy with God and that God enjoys with us — once we believe. This is why, in a famous definition, Paul can say 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 have faith, in which we put at stake our credit and our word. Something like a credit exists only insofar as our faith can 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 to which any human needs must bow. This device, in which all our pistis, all our faith was caught, is money, meant as the very form of credit/debit. The Bank — with its gray officials and experts — took the place of the Church and its priests and, by governing credit, it manipulates and manages the faith — the scarce, uncertain trust — which 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, by establishing the credit that everyone can afford, and at what price (even the credit of the States, which meekly abdicated their sovereignty). In this way, by governing credit, it governs not only the world, but also the future of mankind, a future that emergency wants ever shorter and expiring. And if politics no longer seems possible today, this is because financial power has in fact kidnapped all faith and all future, all time and all hopes.
The so-called emergency we are going through — but it is now clear that what we call emergency is just the normal way capitalism of our time works — began with an inconsiderate series of credit operations, on credits that got discounted and resold tens of times before they could be realised. This means, in other words, that financial capitalism — and banks which are its main organ — works by playing on credit — that is, on the faith — of mankind.
If today, a government — in Italy as elsewhere — really wants to move in a different direction from that which is being imposed everywhere, it has first of all to resolutely question the money/credit/debit device as a system of governance. Only in this way a politics will become possible again — a politics that does not accept being strangled by the false dogma — pseudo-religious and non-economic — of universal and irrevocabile debt and restores to mankind the memory and faith in the words that they have so often recited as children: “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors”.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, September 28, 2022
The prayer par excellence — the one that Jesus himself dictated to us (“pray like this”) — contains a passage that our time strives at all costs to contradict and which therefore will be good to keep in mind, especially today that everything seems to be reduced to the only ferocious two-sided law: credit/debit. Dimitte nobis debita nostra... “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors”. The original Greek is even more peremptory: aphes emin ta opheilemata emon, “let it go, dismiss our debts from us”. Reflecting on these words in 1941, in full world war, a great Italian jurist, Francesco Carnelutti, observed that, if the assumption that what has happened cannot be canceled is a truth of the physical world, the same cannot be said for the moral world, which defines itself precisely through the possibility of remitting and forgiving.
First of all, we have to dispel the prejudice that a genuinely economic law is in question in the debt. Even leaving aside the problem of what is meant when we speak of an economic “law”, a brief 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 to 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 edifice of law, no less convincing is the intuition of a great historian of religions, David Flüsser. One day, while he was reflecting in an Athenian square on the meaning of the word pistis, which is the term that in the Gospels means “faith”, he saw written in large letters before him: trapeza tes pisteos. It did not take him long to realise that he was standing in front of a bank sign (Credit Bank) and at the same instant he understood that the meaning of the word about which he had been thinking for years had to do with credit — the credit that we enjoy with God and that God enjoys with us — once we believe. This is why, in a famous definition, Paul can say 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 have faith, in which we put at stake our credit and our word. Something like a credit exists only insofar as our faith can 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 to which any human needs must bow. This device, in which all our pistis, all our faith was caught, is money, meant as the very form of credit/debit. The Bank — with its gray officials and experts — took the place of the Church and its priests and, by governing credit, it manipulates and manages the faith — the scarce, uncertain trust — which 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, by establishing the credit that everyone can afford, and at what price (even the credit of the States, which meekly abdicated their sovereignty). In this way, by governing credit, it governs not only the world, but also the future of mankind, a future that emergency wants ever shorter and expiring. And if politics no longer seems possible today, this is because financial power has in fact kidnapped all faith and all future, all time and all hopes.
The so-called emergency we are going through — but it is now clear that what we call emergency is just the normal way capitalism of our time works — began with an inconsiderate series of credit operations, on credits that got discounted and resold tens of times before they could be realised. This means, in other words, that financial capitalism — and banks which are its main organ — works by playing on credit — that is, on the faith — of mankind.
If today, a government — in Italy as elsewhere — really wants to move in a different direction from that which is being imposed everywhere, it has first of all to resolutely question the money/credit/debit device as a system of governance. Only in this way a politics will become possible again — a politics that does not accept being strangled by the false dogma — pseudo-religious and non-economic — of universal and irrevocabile debt and restores to mankind the memory and faith in the words that they have so often recited as children: “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors”.
(English translation by I, Robot)
Stanley Spencer, Christ Overturning the Money Charger’s Table, 1921. Courtesy of WikiArt. |
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