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
footnote 7
debt names something basic to the experience of social being as a dimension of historicity, even in its most eschatological form
footnote 7
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.
Walter Benjamin
the toys are recognizably like commodities, expropriated from the one who makes them and sent out to travel a long (but never infinite) chain of transactions before they can be allowed to resume their unremarkable existence as objects of use or enjoyment
on a story that Karl Marx would tell his daughter Eleanor about a toy shop
