Biopolitical economies of debt

Abstract

This paper provides a Nietzschean-inspired account of "biopolitical economies of debt" as a basis for analyzing the sovereign debt crises experienced by many countries in the last few decades, focusing on Greece. The paper argues that the sovereign debt crises are themselves only a reflection of even greater changes in the nature of capitalism that fall under the description of finance capitalism and financialization. In this regard the paper briefly examines and alludes to the work of Maurizio Lazzarato's The Making of the Indebted Man (2012) and, more recently, Governing by Debt (2015) before examining debt as a cultural universal and the so-called "educational economy of debt."