Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari: performative constitution of unpayable debt in finance capitalism

Abstract

Drawing upon the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari this essay puts forth the argument that in finance capitalism debt resolution performs as an elusive promise and an appearance that re-constitutes unpayable debt. A close elaboration on Nietzsche’s conceptual cartographies of the relation between the flows of Apollo and Dionysus and on the contextualization of this relation within capitalist frames that, as this essay demonstrates, Deleuze and Guattari explore in both Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus contributes to the argument that in finance capitalism unpayable debt is performatively constituted through illusions of debt resolution. To date little work offers a performative approach of Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualization of the differential relation between the two flows of capital that constitute unpayable debt, including the ties between these flows and Nietzsche’s grasp of the differential relation between Apollo and Dionysus. As a result the performative strategies that constitute, justify, and reproduce unpayable debt in finance capitalism remain relatively unexplored. This essay draws upon the works of Nietzsche and Deleuze and Guattari and adds a performative methodology on the ongoing discussions on debt in order to address the practices that infinitize debt under the gaze of financial capital.

Keywords

• debt performativity
• debt politics
• apollo
• dionysus
• realism