Indebted Man
Indebted Man
Definition
The indebted man is Maurizio Lazzarato's figure of the neoliberal subject: the individual bound to finance through debt, whose apparent "freedom" to own is in fact the "right to buy" as the "right to be indebted." Neoliberalism is "a huge mechanism for managing private and public debt," an "asymmetrical relationship of power" working through credit and mortgage rather than through direct state coercion. Bismarck extends this to architecture: the architectural object — the self-referential, privatizing building form — is "the fundamental apparatus for the making of the indebted man," converting housing from a social right into an eternal debt instrument. The rhetoric of "home ownership as the dream of the middle class" functioned as a political apparatus to dismantle public housing and to bind life to finance: "the financialization of the city thus corresponds to the financialization of the form of life of the neoliberal subject" (Bismarck). The indebted man is the complement to Foucault's entrepreneur of self — the active, self-investing subject — revealing neoliberalism's other face: passive subjection through debt.
Key Thinkers
- Pedro Levi Bismarck — extends Lazzarato's figure into architecture, arguing the architectural object is the apparatus that produces the indebted man.
- (Related, not yet paged: Maurizio Lazzarato — The Making of the Indebted Man (2011); Carlo Vercellone — "profits become rent.")
Related Concepts
- Architectural Object — the "machine-à-privatizer" that converts housing into debt; the built apparatus of the indebted man.
- Entrepreneur of Self — the complementary neoliberal subject: the active self-investor vs. the passive indebted subject.
- Neoliberal Metropolis — the financialized city that produces and houses the indebted man.
- The Commons — the counter-concept: the demand that the city and housing be re-embedded in social use rather than debt extraction.
Source Support
Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:
Open Questions
- Is the indebted man a universal figure of neoliberal subjectivity, or does debt operate differently across class, race, and geography — creating multiple indebted subjects rather than one?
- How does the indebted man relate to the "entrepreneur of self" — are these two distinct subjectivities, or two phases of the same neoliberal subject-form? And what role does architecture play in converting one into the other?