ABSTRACT

This collection of essays, by some of the most distinguished public intellectuals and cultural critics in America explores various dimensions of what it means to live in the age of debt. They ask, what is the debt age? For that matter, what is debt? Is its meaning transhistorical or transcultural? Or is it imbued in ideology and thus historically contingent? What is the relationship between debt and theory? Whose debt is acknowledged and whose is ignored? Who is the paradigmatic subject of debt? How has debt affected contemporary academic culture? Their responses to these and other aspects of debt are sure to become required reading for anyone who wants to understand what it means to live in the debt age.

part 1|70 pages

Theory and History

chapter 1|16 pages

The Rights to Debt

chapter 2|15 pages

Kant at the Federal Reserve

On the Aesthetics of Quantitative Easing

chapter 3|13 pages

Debt and Sensuality

chapter 4|25 pages

The Indebted Man’s Cognitive Mapping

Boundaries and Biohorror in the Neoliberal Debt Economy

part 2|75 pages

Living in the Debt Age

chapter 5|16 pages

The Debt Experience

chapter 6|17 pages

Paying Your Debt to Society

The Neoliberal State and the Logic of Quid Pro Quo

part 3|73 pages

Resisting the Debt Age

chapter 9|20 pages

On Debt Resistance

chapter 10|21 pages

Debt and Financial Literacy Education

An Ethics for Capital or the Other?

chapter 12|14 pages

Confronting the Creditor Class