This paper addresses the pervasiveness of contagion as a structure of feeling by putting Maurizio Lazzarato’s biopolitics of indebtedness in dialogue with Roberto Esposito’s insight that debt is the very condition of both community and its dialectical opposite, immunity. Where Esposito does not sufficiently engage the role of financialized or neoliberal capitalism within the contemporary crisis, Lazzarato develops a Marxian account of debt that complements Esposito’s “immunitarian biopolitics,” revealing it as an intrinsically capitalist one, and allows us to ground it in contemporary power structures through Marx’s figure of M-M’.
Keyword: debt
Doing What You Love in the Age of Mass Debt
This paper examines the relationship between student debt and the changing terrain of work in U.S. culture, while attending to how these shifts mark a specifically gendered, racialized phenomenon. Drawing on the AAUW’s 2017 report on student debt, this paper examines the figure of the fashion intern in order to think about how the gender and racial inequities in student debt collude with what Angela McRobbie terms ‘the feminization of work’ to effect a gendered, racialized form of indebtedness. I assert that the ‘do what you love’ ethos described by Miya Tokumitsu contributes to the proliferation of feminized work in the culture industries, such as fashion, and the perpetuation of racial exclusivity within the industry.