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Whatever the polemical virtues of this account—and it sounds as true as anything Baudrillard ever said about the simulations of the capitalist code—it remains firmly within Hegelian coordinates.

the most absolute kind of debt, original sin, appears as the most foolproof way to give meaning, proleptically, to one’s death, an act that thus becomes a way to ensure that one’s debts will never be paid except by the God who granted them

debt names something basic to the experience of social being as a dimension of historicity, even in its most eschatological form

To assemble a full definition of debt, one would need to address philosophies of morality and justice and anthropologies of sacrifice and potlatch

Note that the German word for “debt” and “guilt” is the same: die Schuld. Not only Nietzsche but also Benjamin probed this polysemy on several occasions.