TODAY, INDIVIDUALS, households and states have accumulated enormous amounts of debt. Their indebtedness has significant social and political consequences. The accessibility of credit can be seen as a new indicator of social stratification and class division. In turn, highly indebted states face severe constraints on their capacity for action owing to the need to retain ‘credibility’ on financial markets. Indebtedness is a central topic of our time. The main tendency in critical debate is to see the indebted subject as a dominated and disempowered subject.

There is certainly much truth in this view. At the same time, however, this view accepts a rather narrow, economic-financial understanding of debt and, furthermore, explores only the consequences of this form of indebtedness, not the ways in which it has come about. It looks neither at the broader preconditions of a debt relation between subjects nor at the variety of ways in which a debt relation can be understood. In this brief note we want to suggest, in contrast to the dominant critical view, that the debt relation contains emancipatory and empowering possibilities for the indebted subject. To identify them, one needs to explore the broader meanings of debt and the ways in which indebtedness constitutes and sustains social relations. In particular, we suggest that it is at the point of breakage– when debt becomes unbearable, often called ‘crisis’– that we observe the rise of the subject.

We will start out from observations about the differences and asymmetries between economic and non-economic understandings of debt. In a second step, we will reflect on the reasons for the historical rise of the economic understanding of debt. Third, we extrapolate from the preceding reflections and suggest that debt can be seen as constitutive of social relations and that disputes over debt have the potential for social transformations. This will allow us, fourth, to see how an indebted subject's reaction to unbearable debt breaks up the imposed economic understanding of debt and creates the conditions for empowerment.