The Bonds of Debt: Borrowing Against the Common Good

Description

The credit crisis has pushed the whole world so far into the red that the gigantic sums involved defy understanding. On a human level, what does such an enormous degree of debt and insolvency mean? In this timely book, cultural critic Richard Dienst considers the financial crisis, global poverty, media politics and radical theory to parse the various implications of a world where man is born free but everywhere is in debt. Written with humor and verve, Bonds of Debt ranges across subjects-such as Obama's national security strategy, the architecture of Prada stores, press photos of Bono, and a fairy tale told by Karl Marx-to capture a modern condition that is founded on fiscal imprudence.

Richard Dienst is the author of Still Life in Real Time: Theory after Television and a co-editor of Reading the Shape of the World. He teaches in the Department of English at Rutgers University.

* "[An] astute portrait of the recession ... on one rich canvas." * National * * "[A] smart and easily understood book ... Dienst has a new and thrilling idea ... debt is exactly what bonds us and makes our kind of sociality possible." -- Charles Mudede * Stranger * "The most original thing about Dienst's reading of debt, a reading that is very close to the truth, is that it locates it at the very center of human sociality." * Slog * * "Dienst throws new light on what it means for humanity to be tied up inthe golden skeins of debt: we're only now realizing what a huge change to human life, psychology and the fabric of everyday experience is involved in the creation of a financialized economy." -- Paul Mason, author of PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future * "Richard Dienst's most radical proposition in this wonderfully clear and provocative little book is that we are burdened not by too much debt but by too little. Yes, we must discover ways to refuse and escape the regime of debt to the figures of power and institutions that rule over us, but we must also, andperhaps more importantly, recognize indebtedness as a basic human condition and create social ties that at once bind us to each other and free us. The combination of these two tasks is an exciting, even revolutionary, project." -- Michael Hardt, co-author of Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth * "I spend my life studying the financial markets and I often wonder whatit all 'means.' Dienst takes up that question in a thoroughly admirable way in this book. And as a bonus, it also includes a wonderful takedown of the odious Bono." -- Doug Henwood * Left Business Observer * * "Holds up debt as a hopeful idiom of identification through which we might build a new radical politics...an eminently readable collection of essays deserving of a large audience." -- Mark Kear * Society and Space *