This essay asks what is “the image of unpayable debt”? I approach Ferreira da Silva’s assemblage from the angle delineated by Walter Benjamin’s concept of the “image,” a multi-layered composite of time-spaces. I include Benjamin’s weak Messianism, via the democratic debt jubilee, and the general strike reconfigured for the present as the feminist strike against debt. The “image” formed in this process is multiple and sedimented with layers of time-space, containing a caesura. This “break” is comprised of weak Messianism and blackness. The essay concludes by asking how the debt-image can be projected into the world as the general strike.
BenjaminW (1999) The Arcades Project. Cambridge MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLouglin.
3.
BenjaminWFenvesPNgJ (2021) Toward the Critique of Violence: A Critical Edition. Redwood City: Stanford University Press. DOI: 10.1515/9781503627680
4.
ButlerO (2003) Kindred. New York: Doubleday.
5.
CavalleroLG (2021) A Feminist Reading of Debt. London: Pluto.
6.
FamighettiCHamiltonD (2019) “The Great Recession, Education, Race, and Homeownership,” Working Economics Blog. Washington, DC: Economics Policy Institute (May 15, 2019) https://epi.org/168564
7.
FanonF (2004) The Wretched of the Earth, Trans. New York, Grove: Richard Philcox.
8.
FanonF (2008) Black Skin, White Masks, Trans. New York, Grove: Richard Philcox.
9.
Ferreira da SilvaD (2015) “Reading Art as Confrontation,” E-Flux Journal #65 SUPERCOMMUNITY. (May-August 2015).
Ferreira da SilvaDThe Otolith Group and Megs Morley (2021) “Liquid experiences”. Xenogenesis: The Otolith Group. Berlin: Archive Books/Irish Museum of Modern Art.
12.
Ferreira da SilvaD (2022) Unpayable Debt. London: Sternberg Press.
13.
GagoV (2020) Feminist International, or how to change everything. New York: Verso.
14.
GraeberD (2014) Debt: The First 5,000 Years. 2nd edition. New York: Melville House.
15.
HoustonWJ (2006) Contending for Justice: Ideologies and Theologies of Social Justice in the Old Testament. New York: T & T Clark.
16.
MirzoeffN (2016) “You Are Not A Loan: Debt and New Media”. New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader. New York: Routledge, 346–358.
17.
MirzoeffN (2023a) White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
18.
MirzoeffN (2023b) “To See in the Dark: The Nakba and the Landswept Way of Seeing.” Social Text41(3): 59–75.
19.
MotenFHarneyS (2013) The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. Brooklyn: Minor Compositions.
20.
The Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual (2012) The Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual. New York: PM Press (Strike Debt/Occupy Wall Street).
