β
This is why, from this point on, no debt will be paid off. It can at best be bought back at a knock-down price and put back on to a debt market β the public sector borrowing requirement, the national debt, th e world deb t β having once again become an exchange value. It is unlikely the debt will ever be called in, and this is what gives it its incalculable value. For, suspended as it is in this way, it is our only insurance against time. Unlike the countdown, whic h signifies th e exhaustion of time, the indefinitely deferred debt is our guarantee that time itself is inexhaustible. Now, we very much need assuring about time in this way at the very poin t whe n the future itself is tendin g to be wholly consume d in real time . Clearing the debt, balancing up the books, writing off Third World debt β these are things not even to be contemplated. It is only the disequilibrium of the debt, its proliferation, its promise of infinity, which keeps us going. The global, planetary debt clearly has no meaning in traditional terms of obligation and credit. On the other hand, it is our true collective claim on each other β a symbolic claim, by whic h persons, companies and nations find themselves bound to one another through lack.
Each is bound to the other (even the banks) by their virtual bankruptcy , as accomplices are bound by their crime. All assured of existing for each other in the shade of a debt which cannot be settled or written off, since the repayment of the accumulated world debt would take far more than the funds available. The only sense of it, then, is to bind all civilized human beings into the same destiny as creditors.
Just as nuclear weapons, stockpiled across the world to a point of considerable planetary overkill, have no other meaning than to bind all human beings into a single destiny of threat and deterrence.
β
β