It’s been a week of mourning since I posted here. I missed it. I missed being involved. It made me think about loss, about debt as loss and how we might move to losing debt. Perhaps because of the moment in which I’m working this through, I’m coming to think of these questions as being equally ethical as political. Or we might say, as creating a new division of the sensible in which the ethical is in the same domain as the political, rather than being separated from it.

On Sunday 10 July, Strike Debt held its second Education and Debt Assembly and the first NYC Debtors Assembly. In the latter event, people spoke about their debt, how they came to be in the situations that they now find themselves in and what they’re doing as a result. One OWS stalwart, Mike Andrews, tweeted that he was surprised how many of the speakers were in middle age, not their 20s. It’s then that the debt taken out in your younger years often returns to devastating effect.

My partner’s mother, Alice, who just passed was an example. Forced to take over her husband’s automotive business after his sudden death in the 1970s, she found herself in difficulties once the Reagan-era neoliberal recession began in 1980. An unscrupulous bank required her to sign her paid-off house as security for a business loan, breaching normal ethical practice, but giving the bank a chance to recoup some of what it suspected to be a bad loan. Sure enough, the business failed and the house was lost. The bank itself went down not long afterwards. But lives were permanently damaged.

So it was that, at the age of 64, the Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida began his work on Marx and what he called “the State of the Debt” with this aphorism:

I should like to learn how to live, finally.

This is the education of education. It is, he notes “ethics itself.” It is to speak of

justice where it is not yet, not yet there, where it is no longer, let us understand where it is no longer present, and where it will never be, no more than the law, reducible to laws or rights.

Derrida says that this justice is a politics of inheritance, in the context of the state of the debt, so I think we need to open up that aphorism to read:

I should like to learn how to live without or beyond the state of the debt, finally.

I do not think this is so simple a thing to do.

What is the state of the debt? It can be said that the state is debt, the possibility of creating debt, of sustaining, issuing and guaranteeing debt. In that case,

there is something rotten in the State.

Originally of Denmark. Leading to Derrida’s mirroring of the ghost in Hamlet with the spectre of communism in Marx. Now we might write it tout court, the State is rotten. And that:

There is a spectre haunting Europe, the spectre of debt.

Behind that spectre, or its other face, is the older spectre, the spectre of communism, living beyond debt.

Let it be quite clear that this haunting has nothing to do with the Marxist-Leninist states that had just collapsed when Derrida wrote. In fact, there is no longer any point in trying to capture state power because there is none. That is not to say that there is not state violence, because that there most certainly is, and it is now the raison d’être of the state itself.

I do not set my life at a pin’s fee

says Hamlet as he confronts his father’s ghost. He acknowledges that he is

….bound to hear

Ghost: So art thou to revenge.

So while his life is not valued in monetary times, because to learn to live is finally to get beyond such accounting, this haunting is a matter of debt, something is owed. The King is the State in a monarchy, for Majesty adheres to him, whatever the weakness of the king’s own body. More precisely, Majesty never dies but is, as it were, transferred from one bearer to the next, a form of unpayable debt.

Hamlet has not inherited, that is to say, become King, despite being of age at his father’s death, because Denmark elected its monarch from within the nobility, as Hamlet acknowledges later in the play:

He that hath kill’d my king and whor’d my mother,

Popp’d in between the election and my hopes

There’s a new ambivalence here: does Claudius’s usurpation extend only to power or to Hamlet’s “hopes” in relation to his mother’s body? The state of the debt is not good. Not good at all.

For Derrida, the debt is one of the “ten plagues” that should conjure into being a “new International,” a grouping in the spirit of Marx:

The ‘New International’ is an untimely link, without status … without coordination, without party, without country, without national community, without co-citizenship, without common belonging to a class. … It is a call for them to ally themselves, in a new, concrete and real way, even if this alliance no longer takes the form of a party or a workers’ international, in the critique of the state of international law, the concepts of State and nation, and so forth: in order to renew this critique, and especially to radicalise it.

That sounds familiar now, doesn’t it? Are we, finally, in a place to learn the state of the debt? And to realize that undoing the debt is not the work of the State but of what will have to come after it, and has haunted it all along?

There would be mourning to be done, for lost dreams, lost hopes, for loss. Since the deployment of terror as justification for State expansion, the State has monopolized and militarized even mourning. To do this work of mourning against the State and against its violence, says Derrida, there will be the need for a certain language, a new way to speak of debt and loss. And that in turn will require

a certain power of transformation.

That power is not State power, the force of “power over” that would be known as poder in Spanish. It is rather the potencia, “the possibility to.” A suivre.