all of the being, all of the time

“It is at the soft center of capitalism, in the temperate zones of the bourgeoisie, that the colony becomes intimate and private, interior to each person: it is there that the flow of the investment of desire, which travels from the familial stimulus to the social organization (or disorganization), is as it were covered over by a reflux that flattens the social investment onto the familial investment serving as a pseudo organizer” (269).

Within the capitalist machine, the family becomes an effect of social economic reproduction, rather than vice-versa (262). Everybody is born equal, as a unit of capital first, and then as a variable intensity of whatever kind(s). The family then becomes a microcosm of the social field—“father, mother, and child…become the simulacrum of the images of capital (“Mister Capital, Madame Earth,” and their child the Worker) (264)—representing a private sphere that does not exist independently but is, rather, a second-order effect of the social field. In other words, mommy-daddy-me is always a performance of what a family is supposed to be under capital. First comes the commercial depicting the happy family, then comes the happy family.

Section 10 begins with a lot of material going over what D&G are definitely not talking about. They attend to the linguistic turn, characterizing it as a belated attempt to recuperate sign systems within a mode of production that was effective doing away with them, at least in a structuralist sense. In the capitalist machine, the signifier is in flux, which means that it’s a constantly variable quantity with no stable qualitative content ( this is also a good definition of how they will be using “flux” throughout the rest of the section). In any case, I think that we all get the gist of what poststructuralists think of sign systems, so moving right along…

D&G ask: if the capitalist machine loves decoding so much, why does it hate the schizo, who is the ultimate decoder?

To again address this question in a roundabout way, we return to the idea that capitalism spreads without limit by creating limits that it then cannibalizes. In section 4.9, we saw how, in critical discourse, we come to use the terms “deterritorialization” and “reterritorialization” quite literally to refer to a bourgeois capitalist center physically expanding to overwrite the territories of pre-capitalist peripheries (sweatshops in Cambodia, Monsanto in India, diamond mines on First Nations land in northern Canada, etc.). So part of capitalism’s tendency to infinite expansion plays out in the sense of this real, material and geographic process. However, D&G don’t want us to get stuck thinking that once capitalism is universalized it reaches some kind of limit. Rather, there is always more to be added to the growth of capital, and there is always something being left out. What gets added is new codes to be decoded, so all desiring-production, in terms of ideas, concepts, bodies, connections, all the flows and break-flows, produce space in which capitalism can continue to bloat. What is being left out, on the other hand, is the decoding production of the schizophrenic (and think, here, of the schizophrenic both as a body that gets hospitalized and as a non-subject-dependent intensity that threatens the capitalist machine), which is both without value, “not salable” (245) and also basically lawless, which is the real problem.

This is where we get into a real consideration of the difference between a code and an axiom. If a code represents a flow produced by desiring-production (and this can be, for example, god, or a particular hairstyle), then to decode is first to show that the code is a construct, and second, to say that the socius can have it anyway, as a commodity. Conversely, an axiom is a rule that the socius has to live by whether we like it or not, and even if we see through it (as we all do) and are cynical about it (as we all are). Capitalism has, as D&G make clear, an infinite capacity to absorb new axioms, which is why there is no limit to its ability to expand out and grow in. Everything is acceptable under capital, except codes, which lead to people having principles that might conflict with the addition of new axioms. So, for example, right wing religions have only a place in society as a decoded entity because gay marriage is good for business (and but only becomes who really cares, right?).

D&G don’t celebrate this decoding as any kind of betterment of society in some sort of objective sense because it has nothing to do with the realization of desiring-production, but rather only with the continued successful expansion of the market. There is no enjoyment here, they say, in the sense that one might achieve libidinal satisfaction from militant nationalism or class warfare (for a good look at enjoyment, see Zizek, Slavoj, “Enjoy Your Nation As Yourself!” Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology, Durham: Duke UP, 1993. 230-237). Rather, instead of codes that actually code anything, there is only the mounting of “pseudo codes” or “neoarchaisms” that reterritorialize what has been deterritorialized (257). So, for example, Americans all get really into FIFA because beer commercials and provincial anxieties over not being Euro-cosmopolitan enough tell them to, and then American football lovers get defensive about FIFA bandwagon-jumpers, and then #blacklivesmatter hashtaggers criticize their asshole countrymen and the media for drawing attention away from what’s really important, and then Google tries to figure out how best to conscientiously monetize AdSense in relation to these controversies by sending their corporate execs to a retreat where they find their spirit animals and howl at the moon in the woods behind a Cherokee reservation casino while secretly worrying that the double IPA they are microbrewing in their basement is fermenting longer than the Yelp! reviews they read advise and all this is, D&G say, “an unprecedented subjugation: there are no longer even any masters, but only slaves commanding other slaves” (254).

In a lecture, Deleuze says:

"Capitalism is constituted on the failure of all the pre-existent codes and social territorialities. If we admit this, what does this represent: the capitalist machine, it is literally demented. A social machine that functions on the basis of decoded, deterritorialized flows, once again, it is not that societies did not have any idea of this; they had the idea in the form of panic, they acted to prevent this—it was the overturning of all the social codes known up to that point.”

“Incest with the sister and incest with the mother are very different things. The sister is not a substitute for the mother: the one belongs to the connective category of alliance, the other to the disjunctive category of filiation. Incest with the sister is prohibited insofar as the conditions of territorial coding require that alliance not be confounded with filiation; and incest with the mother, insofar as descent within filiation must not be allowed to interfere with ascending lines. That is why the despot's incest is twofold, by virtue of the new alliance and direct filiation. He begins by marrying the sister. But he enters into this forbidden endogamous marriage outside the tribe, inasmuch as he is himself outside his tribe, on the outside or at the outer limits of the territory” (200).

D&G explain that the process of becoming a despot necessitates a dual incest.  The sojourn of the despot in the wilderness (again, e.g. Moses in the desert) allows him to appear to be creating a new alliance with the socius (marrying the sister) while the direct filiation with the deity and the placing of the despot between the deity and the socius (marrying the mother) allows the despot to lay claim to meaning and to begin the process of creating infinite debts and the graphic representation that supports said debts (201-202). There is also something about transformation of incest from displaced representation to repressing representation.  I didn’t understand how that worked.

Now that D&G have discussed the ways in which despots come to power in the Urstaat and how that relates to incest, they begin a lengthy discussion of graphic representation and the relationship of the signifier and the signified to the despot and to the repressed.  My reading in Saussure and Derrida is lacking, but what I understood was the following:

Direct filiation between the despot and the deity gives the despot privileged access to the process of interpretation.  The despot situates himself so as to be the only person with access to the Signified (the deity, Meaning, whatever). This has a number of effects.  It directs language and limits the number of Signifieds.  It forces people to look for meaning through the despot, because debts and alliances are no longer recorded on bodies and lateral alliances have been subsumed.  It directs production into the production of graphic representations (stone tablets, laws, money) that facilitate infinite debt flowing to the apex of the pyramid.  Finally, graphic representation and the despot’s control over interpretation allows for overcoding and creation of symbolic/spiritual debt in the vein of Christianity, so that debt need no longer have material limits and thus becomes impossible to remit.

D&G begin this section by weighing in on a debate that is very spicy amongst Marxist historians, on and off, regarding how societies transition from feudalism to capitalism, how long it takes, why it happens differently in different places, and whether the transition is indeed revolutionary and based in class struggle, or the result of gradually changing economic and technological development (see The Brenner Debate, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985; Wood, Ellen Meiksins, The Origin of Capitalism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999). Of course, this is not really a debate for D&G, because their model allows them to reconcile the two sides of the debate by disavowing dialectical materialism in favor of “the contingent nature of this encounter, this conjunction” of flows (224). So, on the one hand, they say, we get the flow of the deterritorialized worker: labor becomes a thing that is no longer tied to specific land or allegiance to a specific ruler; labor also becomes something that is abstracted from the individual worker, so it no longer ‘matters’ who works where. On the other hand, we have the flow of decoded money-capital: cash money (the economy) and capital (technology, labor, industry, etc.) become a constant and abstracted flow of debt and credit; in this case, we also get the same double move that happens in the case of the deterritorialized worker. There are no codes governing who ‘ought’ to control capital anymore, and it no longer ‘matters’ how capital flows, just so long as it flows. These two flows, D&G assert, might have run parallel to each other forever, that is, they do not come together necessarily, but in the history of capitalism, that’s what happens: the conjunction of these deterritorialized and decoded flows creates the capitalist machine.

D&G call this “the age of cynicism” (225) because codes don’t work here anymore. A displacement occurs in which capital, and its avatar, value, come to take the place of any real substantive thing that we might actually care about or imagine as having meaning. In the territorial and despotic machines, societies actually thought that things—like the earth and the king—had meaning and a transcendental value that humans couldn’t avoid or escape in any way, and that language provided a connection to these meanings that also had real, concrete value (which is why you would have, for example, “He Who Must Not Be Named”). This is what is meant by “codes”: the sun rising in the morning means x. But what happens in the capitalist machine (and this is basically explained by Marx’s famous “m-c-m” equation) is “first” (and we put “first” in scare quotes here because these things actually happen simultaneously) that labor and capital become abstract values, so that the value of anything, anything at all, can only be represented by cash money, and then “second,” that abstraction becomes concrete, so that there is no way to return to some pre-capitalist moment where anything had an intrinsic value. In the capitalist machine, it is a true fact that you need to go through cash money to get the things that you want, which is just a true fact of life standing between you and anything that might actually have meaning. So everything is, in effect, decoded. We see that the sun rises because we can afford our dream home on the coast, or that the sun rises contingent or our family’s capacity to keep its farm (alliance). We see that our boss is our boss, not because god says so or because he’s actually a better human than us, but because his value and capacity to produce value makes it so (filiation). So we’re cynics. We don’t believe in anything other than the concrete and irreducible value of capital, which doesn’t actually require belief to function, a.k.a. decoded flows.

When D&G say that within this machine, codes are replaced by flux, they mean that what now drives the machine forward is not meaning of any kind (“I must protect my tribe” or “I must love the leader!”) but rather the weird fact that capital’s surplus value grows and shrinks, constantly and simultaneously. It’s a mechanism, or what D&G call a “field of immanence” (228) that happens, to use a famous term from Marx, “behind our backs.” This is potentially a useful way of understanding the socius and desiring-production: every individual is effected by capitalism and contributes to it, but it’s also something that happens constantly without anyone really being able to control it. And so flux, or decoded flows, or whatever you want to call it, “is enough,” as D&G put it, “to ensure that the Desire of the most disadvantaged creature will invest with all its strength, irrespective of any economic understanding or lack of it, the capitalist social field as a whole” (229).  

To make this point in a roundabout way: there are plenty of reasons for flux, or variable surplus value that must necessarily grow but is always shrinking. For example, D&G make the distinction between the capital that gets paid out into wage labor and consumed, vs. the capital that gets flipped by banks and corporations and continues to grow. Because these two forms of capital are so different—incommensurable, even—capitalism itself has to admit that it is always losing some of its surplus to the laborer-consumer. However, at the same time, it loses nothing, because as soon as the worker’s “purchasing power” is expended, the worker’s capital is reabsorbed as surplus value, “a flow made truly impotent that represents the absolute impotence of the wage earner as well as the relative dependence of the industrial capitalist. This is money and the market, capitalism’s true police” (238 – 239). There is no higher law, or code, than the market, which, D&G say, is no code at all, but rather an abstraction made concrete that defines relations in a way that don’t conceal anything at all. These days, kids don’t stay at home until they’re 30 to honor sacred filial bonds; they do it ‘cause they’re broke.

Similarly—and this is where we start to see the whole 1960s post-Fordist anxiety thing enter into D&G’s analysis of capital—technology improves productivity and amplifies surplus value, but it cannot replace human labor as the value equivalent because the latter is the variable rather than the stable quantity in the whole Dy/Dx equation (232). This is to say that technological innovation, or “knowledge flow” (234) is entirely dependent on its ability to generate surplus value, and that this is always going to be very tied up in the capacity of human labor to make use of that surplus value. Hence rules of the market like the profitability of crisis and the value of anti-production (spending on war, government, etc.).

This focus on technological innovation is an interesting bit of the argument, because one of the things D&G reiterate here is that knowledge production is the production of codes, which reminds us, given that codes are the effects of desiring-production, of one of Anti-Oedipus’s overarching points: that desiring-production generates reality, or that reality is desiring-production. In these terms, objective, scientific realities are read as the result of desiring-production. We then get a great example like that of the dolphin. Science learns about how smart dolphins are, presumably because desiring-production produces dolphin connective syntheses. But in the capitalist machine, the dolphin-code (dolphin’s are smart and friendly) becomes the dolphin-flux (dolphins are variably useful as a military technology). The socius then loses interest in dolphins to the degree that they fail to be profitable war machines.

D&G insist that every formation of a new socius involves the process described above.  A new socius arises from new alliances and establishment of direct filiation: of the despot below the deity yet above the people.  Lateral alliances among the people become less important than their filial alliance to the despot, and are subsumed by the despot and the new socius.  (p 194)

In the “megamachine” of society, the State (the despot) becomes the apex of a pyramid of signification.  Primitive, territorial alliances and socii are the substructure upon which the state is built, and their surpluses flow upward. “The blocks of debt become an infinite relation in the form of the tribute. The entire surplus value of the code is an object of appropriation.” (194-95)

“…in other cases where a redistribution occurs, the cycle of credits is maintained, in the new form established by the State—money. For without question, money does not begin by serving the needs of commerce, or at least it has no autonomous mercantile model. The despotic machine holds the following in common with the primitive machine, it confirms the latter in this respect: the dread of decoded flows—flows of production, but also mercantile flows (flux marchands) of exchange and commerce that might escape the State monopoly, with its tight restrictions and its plugging of flows. (p 197)

There’s some stuff about debt and how the establishment of a State and attendant despot abolishes small debts in order to more thoroughly overcode infinite debt.  Creation of money is discussed, as is the relation between territorial alliances and State formation.  Ultimately, though, “The imperial inscription countersects all the alliances and filiations, prolongs them, makes them converge into the direct filiation of the despot with the deity, and the new alliance of the despot with the people” (199). 

3.1: The Inscribing Socius

Turns out, desiring-production was a thing from the beginning, “as soon as there is social production and reproduction” (139). The socius, (which the Stanford Encyclopedia defines as “the social body that takes credit for production”) is in the business of “coding desire” and its flows, a form of restriction. Later, we’ll see that capitalism operates on the basis of decoded flows, setting desire free to an extent, replacing former codes with the abstract quantities of capital. It makes sense to view all history in light of capitalism, but in fact that history is not determined by necessity; it is full of “great accidents and amazing encounters.” D&G preface their “universal history” by characterizing it as “contingent, singular, ironic and critical” (140).

The earth is the beginning, the basis of D&G’s series of three socii:

the great unengendered stasis, the element superior to production that conditions the common appropriation and utilization of the ground. It is the surface on which the whole process of production is inscribed, on which the forces and means of labor are recorded, and the agents and the products distributed” (141).

The earth is a body on which the first form of socius, “the territorial machine,” performs inscription and coding. Note that the territorial machine is a “social machine,” not a “technical machine.” The latter has some non-human element, but the former is composed of humans, performing much the same function as any other machine. Technical machinery only begins to become semiautonomous with the advent of capitalism, which is predicated on the dismantling of previous social machines, and on “deterritorialized flows.” Basically the territorial machine takes every natural flow and codes the shit (pun-intestined) out of it.

What does this coding look like? D&G dispute “exchangist” notions of society, and contend instead that the socius is predicated on inscription, “where the essential thing is to mark and to be marked” [and to be Mark, the basis of any great society] (142). The act of marking is what permits the circulation and exchange of objects in the first place. The primitive territorial machine works via “the collective investment of organs” carried out during initiation ceremonies and the like. Whereas our modern societies privatize these organs, decoding and making their flows abstract. Here follows some stuff about anality which I don’t fully understand, but it seems like the anus was the first organ to be privatized in this way. Probably because of its associations with order, regulation and flow. Oedipus is also thoroughly anal. Both capitalism and Oedipus haunt society in the form of anxiety about decoded flows (which means desire set free, I guess?)  

The territorial machine marks bodies, which bodies D&G call “the earth’s products,” thereby taking credit for and ownership of these products. Here are some of the ways in which this marking takes place: “tattooing, excising, incising, carving, scarifying, mutilating, encircling, and initiating” (144). Thus organs are collectivized and subsumed within the apparatus of the socius. Humans repress this biological memory, replacing it with a collective memory, a memory of words, not things. Thus we forget that history is inscribed first and foremost on the body; thus we forget the violence on which most advanced societies were built. There’s an awesome passage on cruelty at the end of this section, which I’m gonna quote in full:

Cruelty has nothing to do with some ill-defined or natural violence that might be commissioned to explain the history of mankind; cruelty is the movement of culture that is realized in bodies and inscribed on them, belaboring them. That is what cruelty means. This culture is not the movement of ideology: on the contrary, it forcibly injects production into desire, and conversely, it forcibly injects desire into social production and reproduction. For even death, punishment, and torture are desired, and are instances of production (compare the history of fatalism). It makes men or their organs into the parts and wheels of the social machine. The sign is a position of desire; but the first signs are the territorial signs that plant their flags in bodies. And if one wants to call this inscription in naked flesh “writing,” then it must be said that speech in fact presupposes writing, and that it is this cruel system of inscribed signs that renders man capable of language, and gives him a memory of the spoken word (145).

3.2: The Primitive Territorial Machine

Now we get into more detail about what “territoriality” means. Much of what me might think of as territorializing is actually a form of deterritorializing, particular to later forms of socius: the despotic and the capitalist. The territorial machine is, strictly speaking, the only true territorializing socius, and this action consists in “the declension of alliance and filiation--declining the lineages on the body of the earth, before there is a State” (146). I take this to mean that the territorial machine marks bodies as a means to re-trace their connection with the land, or something.

Then D&G explain filiation and allegiance: “filiation is administrative and hierarchical, but alliance is political and economic” (146). In a primitive society, these factors are important, but they also have a necessary connection to specific localities. At this stage, the socius is akin to a nomad hunter, who has not yet fully appropriated the means of production. But even here, there is no such thing as a pure nomad who “drifts with the flows,” but “always a socius waitin to bear down, already deducting and detaching” (149). As the socius becomes fixed, a process of detachment begins to accelerate. Basically, things become more abstract, and stocks and objects are circulated in increasingly complex ways. As “surplus values of code” become engendered “at the level of the flows,” differences in status emerge. Coding proceeds on this basis.

The social machine thrives on this kind of disequilibrium, and in fact is predicated on “not function[ing] well” (151). Social machines (now clearly identical with desiring-machines) operate unevenly, in fits and starts, feeding on crisis. Capitalism has learned not to feel rupture, disharmony, or dysfunction, and has thus learned to feel secure. These things signal not the death of a system, but its health: “No one has ever died from contradictions [“Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself.] And the more it breaks down, the more it schizophrenizes, the better it works, the American way” (151). USA USA USA. The primitive territorial machine is “segmentary” in a bunch of different ways, involving both “fusion” and “scission.” Here follows lots of confusing stuff about segments. But the upshot is that all the “misfirings and failures” that result merely constitute “a system that is constantly reborn of its own disharmonies” (152).

Primitive societies try to limit the concentration of power, but the main this everyone fears is decoded flows on a “blind, deterritorialized socius” (153). There is exchange in primitive societies but it’s highly restricted, prevented from breaking the codes and becoming abstract or fictional. Turns out Oedipus is also about the fear of a decoded flow. Capitalism is “the negative of all social formations… Primitive societies are not outside history; rather, it is capitalism that is at the end of history… that results from a long history of contingencies and accidents, and that brings on this end” (153). Previous forms of socius saw this coming, and tried to prevent it. This is why we can read history retrospectively in terms of capitalism, barring a couple of caveats about specific terminology like classes etc.

3.3: The Problem of Oedipus

The earth is a body, both surface for inscription and efficient cause and a bunch of other stuff. Lots of confusing stuff here. This section so far seems devoted to explaining the extent to which an undifferentiated surface can exhibit some boundaries or distinct qualities. Here follows the marriage of A and B. Now we move on to the function and necessity of myth. Now we have a discussion of the different kinds of incest. FYI: Hamlet is not Oedipus. Distinct familial roles such as sister and mother did not exist prior to their demarcation through prohibition. Myth marks the transition point from incest’s acceptability to its unacceptability. Therefore, incest does not exist (Q.E.D.). Myth narrates and explains the emergence of new orders. Cool quotation:

It is necessary to recall once more that the law proves nothing about an original reality of desire because it essentially disfigures the desired; and that the transgression proves nothing about a functional reality of the law because, far from being a mockery of the law, it is itself derisory in relation to what the law prohibits in reality (the reason why revolutions have nothing to do with transgressions) (161).

More stuff on incest: is it “impossible” and, if so, what does this mean? The case of incest is parallel to social repression as a whole: “that is what you wanted!” (162). The developing account of incest seems to be an example of how the disjunctions or debts in primitive society (and surplus values of code) develop (plus, minus signs etc.).

Now let’s talk about “territorial representation” in the primitive socius. The representation of desire is also the equivalent of its non-codability, its non-representability, its negative. Thus the socius represents its own limits: “the repression of this limit is possible only to the extent that the representative itself undergoes a repression” (164). Oedipus represents the limit of the socius. At the end of this section, we get the three kinds of territorial representation: “the repressed representative, the repressing representation, and the displaced represented” (166). Well, that clears that up.

3.4: Psychoanalysis and Ethnology

Slow down, folks! Oedipus isn’t on the scene quite yet. We’ll have to wait for the frameworks of familialism established by psychoanalysis. At the primitive stage, social and familial relations are simply far too fluid and complex for such a rigid structure as Oedipus. It is false to equate primitive cures with psychoanalysis. In fact, such cures actually constitute “schizoanalysis in action” (167). Victor Turner gives us a great example of this. D&G show how the story of K, which seems Oedipal to us at first, is anything but. Oedipus is analyzed in a colonial context here, regulating reproduction for the empire. However, for D&G, the colonized represent a “typical example of resistance to Oedipus” (169). Cool quote:

Oedipus is something like euthanasia with ethnocide. The more social reproduction escapes the members of the group, in nature and in extension, the more it falls back on them, or reduces them to a restricted and neuroticized familial reproduction whose agent is Oedipus (169).

People often try to find Oedipus in these colonial contexts, but the examples are always spurious. Another cool quote:

Oedipus is always colonization pursued by other means, it is the interior colony, and we shall see that even here at home, where we Europeans are concerned, it is our intimate colonial education (170).

Psychoanalysts try to divest the colonized of their traditional norms, but couldn’t it be said that Oedipus is merely our own traditional norm? Again, Oedipus presupposes the prohibition of incest; Oedipus does not result from this prohibition. Let’s talk about whether Oedipus is universal. The answer: maybe: “In reality, [Oedipus] is universal because it is the displacement of the limit that haunts all societies, the displaced represented that disfigures what all societies dread absolutely as their most profound negative: namely, the decoded flows of desire” (177). 

Deleuze and Guattari use this section to explore the ways in which representation enables repression and identify a triangular relationship central to representation/repression. The triangle’s constituent parts are: repressed representative, repressing representation, and displaced represented.  

“We see no reason for believing in the universality of one and the same apparatus of sociocultural repression (refoulement).  One can speak instead of a coefficient of affinity that varies in degree between social machines and desiring-machines, according to whether their respective regimes are more or less similar; according to whether the desiring-machines have a greater or lesser chance of causing their connections and interactions to pass into the regime of the social machines; according to whether the social machines execute more or less of a movement of detachment (decollement) in relation to the desiring-machines; and whether the death-carrying elements remain caught in the machinery of desire, encasted in the social machine, or on the contrary join together to form a death instinct that extends throughout the social machine, crushing desire.” (p 184)

As in previous sections, the approach in this section will look at ethnologies of the “primitive socius” in order to demonstrate the principles evinced.  D&G use the writings of Mauss, Levi-Strauss, and Nietzsche for their terminology and examples.  Their main point in this section is that the regime of debt has origins in the “primitive socius” and that debt is not exchangist, but rather inscribes debts as alliances and creates signs (of debts/alliances) while generating a surplus of pain.  They discuss inscription as a literal ritual, wherein marriage involves tracing figures onto the body of the would-be bride in order to allow her to be read as an ally of the family she will marry into ; or a rite of passage into adulthood involves cutting along the back of a young man with a sharp stone that will cause him just the right amount of pain.    (pp 188-90)

D&G look to Nietzsche to trace the connections between the primitive socius and society with a commodity economy.  By moving away from bargaining and into commodity exchange, the debts one can accrue multiply exponentially and preclude any notion of repayment.  (Greece’s fate? Thomas Piketty wrote recently in Die Zeit about how Germany, France, and the UK have never repaid any national debts, yet Germany wants to hold Greece to impossible repayment standards.)

“All that constituted the essential element of the primitive inscription machine—the blocks of mobile, open, finite debts, "the parcels of destiny"—finds itself taken into an immense machinery that renders the debt infinite and no longer forms anything but one and the same crushing fate: "the aim now is to preclude pessimistically, once and for all, the prospect of a final discharge…” (p 192)