Elettra Stimilli

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Jacob Taubes (1923-87) was one of the most important Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century, but until recently there has been little academic writing about him. Here, in its first English translation, Elettra Stimilli has written the only monograph on Taubes, whose work has proved so essential to philosophical and theological studies. Stimilli’s work will hold considerable interest for those students and scholars specialising in Saint Paul’s writings. Taubes brilliantly deconstructed these texts to reveal their more subversive and heterodox implications and through his interlocutions with Carl Schmitt, identified the apostle as a heretical Jew, who decided to follow Jesus. Such original thought ushered in a new realm of political theology that has been crucial to thinkers who work with Pauline thought today, such as Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou. Stimilli’s work has grown increasingly significant and her incisive treatment of Taubes’ writings will bring him to the attention of an even wider audience.

Jacob Taubes (1923-87) was one of the most important Jewish thinkers of the 20th-century, but until recently there has been little academic writing about him. Elettra Stimilli presents the first English translation of Taubes' work, which has proved so essential to philosophical and theological studies. Stimilli’s work will hold considerable interest for students and scholars specialising in Saint Paul’s writings; Taubes brilliantly deconstructed these texts to reveal their more subversive and heterodox implications and through his interlocutions with Carl Schmitt, identified the apostle as a heretical Jew, who decided to follow Jesus. Such original thought ushered in a new realm of political theology that has been crucial to thinkers who work with Pauline thought today, such as Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou. Stimilli’s work has grown increasingly significant and her incisive treatment of Taubes’ writings will bring him to the attention of an even wider audience.

The issue of debt and how it affects our lives is becoming more and more urgent. The "Austerity" model has been the prevalent European economic policies of recent years led by the "German model". Elettra Stimilli draws upon contemporary philosophy, psychology and theology to argue that austerity is built on the idea that we somehow deserve to be punished and need to experience guilt in order to take full account of our economic sins. Following thinkers such as Max Weber, Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault, Debt and Guilt provides a startling examination of the relationship between contemporary politics and economics and how we structure our inner lives. The first English translation of Debito e Colpa, this book provokes new ways of thinking about how we experience both debt and guilt in contemporary society.

The issue of debt and how it affects our lives is becoming more and more urgent. The "Austerity" model has been the prevalent European economic policies of recent years led by the "German model". Elettra Stimilli draws upon contemporary philosophy, psychology and theology to argue that austerity is built on the idea that we somehow deserve to be punished and need to experience guilt in order to take full account of our economic sins. Following thinkers such as Max Weber, Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault, Debt and Guilt provides a startling examination of the relationship between contemporary politics and economics and how we structure our inner lives. The first English translation of Debito e Colpa, this book provokes new ways of thinking about how we experience both debt and guilt in contemporary society.

An analysis of theological and philosophical understandings of debt and its role in contemporary capitalism. Max Weber's account of the rise of capitalism focused on his concept of a Protestant ethic, valuing diligence in earning and saving money but restraint in spending it. However, such individual restraint is foreign to contemporary understandings of finance, which treat ever-increasing consumption and debt as natural, almost essential, for maintaining the economic cycle of buying and selling. In The Debt of the Living, Elettra Stimilli returns to this idea of restraint as ascesis, by analyzing theological and philosophical understandings of debt drawn from a range of figures, including Saint Paul, Schmitt and Agamben, Benjamin and Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, and Foucault. Central to this analysis is the logic of "profit for profit's sake"-an aspect of Weber's work that Stimilli believes has been given insufficient attention. Following Foucault, she identifies this as the original mechanism of a capitalist dispositif that feeds not on a goal-directed rationality, but on the self-determining character of human agency. Ascesis is fundamental not because it is characterized by renunciation, but because the self-discipline it imposes converts the properly human quality of action without a predetermined goal into a lack, a fault, or a state of guilt: a debt that cannot be settled. Stimilli argues that this lack, which is impossible to fill, should be seen as the basis of the economy of hedonism and consumption that has governed global economies in recent years and as the premise of the current economy of debt.