ABSTRACT. This paper provides a Nietzschean-inspired account of “biopolitical economies of debt” as a basis for analyzing the sovereign debt crises experienced by many countries in the last few decades, focusing on Greece. The paper argues that the sovereign debt crises are themselves only a reflection of even greater changes in the nature of capitalism that fall under the description of finance capitalism and financialization. In this regard the paper briefly examines and alludes to the work of Maurizio Lazzarato’s The Making of the Indebted Man (2012) and, more recently, Governing by Debt (2015) before examining debt as a cultural universal and the so-called “educational economy of debt.” pp. 7–19

Keywords: debt; Nietzsche; biopolitics; finance capitalism; Lazzarato; educational economy of debt

How to cite: Peters, Michael A. (2016), “Biopolitical Economies of Debt,” Analysis and Metaphysics 15: 7–19.

Received 24 September 2015 • Received in revised form 11 November 2015
Accepted 11 November 2015 • Available online 19 November 2015