ABSTRACT
In financialization, debt becomes a source of profit generation, primarily through accumulation by dispossession. Debt appears to be both financialization's double and its spectral helpmate. Debt has historically worked to sustain large-scale social and political investments of all sorts, from infrastructure to the various apparatuses of the welfare state, to public works projects. If finance represents the spectral economy at its most mercurial, creating and annihilating at the speed of light, then debt becomes its sluggish and potentially abject double: like fixed capital, it appears to be the opposite of the financial transaction in its immobility, intractability, and fixedness. Sensuality seems to be the opposite of responsibility, an anxious injunction to consume, produce, and acquire without end. Invoking sensuality and the sensual abundance of the material world becomes one way to challenge the ascetic logics of debt and austerity. The chapter explores more on material goods and services in all sorts of disavowed ways.
