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The problem is perhaps how to embrace the incommensurable, i.e., without keeping accounts.
In this light, the assertion that “communism knows no debt” shouldn’t
astonish us. It’s just outside of the
rules of exchange -- refusing to keep accounts, which in an ethnographic
context makes sense, that is, as a descriptor of behavior but not necessarily an
ideal.
Graeber has an intriguing discussion of Nietzsche’s historical
argument in Genealogy of Morals (in Debt
starting at ~page 78), in brief that N accepts and runs with Adam Smith’s
presumptions about human nature, about humans as calculating machines. Per Graeber, Nietzsche & Smith anticipate
“Levi-Strauss’s famous argument that language is the ‘exchange of words.’”
Graeber “think[s]
Nietzsche helps us... to understand the concept of
redemption. Niezsche’s account of “primeval times” might be absurd, but his
description of Christianity – of how a sense of debt is transformed into an
abiding sense of guilt, and guilt to self-loathing, and self-loathing to
self-torture – all of this does ring very true.”
Graeber has a very telling footnote where he suggests that
Deleuze was naive to accept N’s historical argument, which was really just an
“imaginative exercise.”
I think G is being way too nice to Nietzsche here, even if this
reading of N does help G’s argument. And even if G is right, the smokescreen and
cynicism of such an exercise – and the fact that it has duped generations of
readers – can’t be easily forgiven (or maybe I should say "forgotten," to avoid the redemptive). In any case, this is one of my favorite passages in Graeber's book. I find myself revisiting it.
“…for Nietzsche,
starting from Adam Smith’s assumptions about human nature means we must
necessarily end up with something very much along the lines of primordial-debt
theory. On the one hand, it is because of our feeling of debt to the ancestors
that we obey the ancestral laws: this is why we feel that the community has the
right to react “like an angry creditor” and punish us for our transgressions if
we break them.…"
"There is also every
reason to believe that Nietzsche knew the premise was insane; in fact, that
this was the entire point. What Nietzsche is doing here is starting out from
the standard, common-sense assumptions about the nature of human beings
prevalent in his day (and to a large extent, still prevalent)-that we are
rational calculating machines, that commercial self-interest comes before
society, that “society” itself is just a way of putting a kind of temporary lid
on the resulting conflict. That is, he is starting out from ordinary bourgeois
assumptions and driving them to a place where they can only shock a bourgeois
audience.
It’s a worthy game and
no one has ever played it better; but it’s a game played entirely within the
boundaries of bourgeois thought. It has nothing to say to anything that lies
beyond that. The best response to anyone who wants to take seriously
Nietzsche’s fantasies about savage hunters chopping pieces off each other’s
bodies for failure to remit are the words of an actual hunter-gatherer – an
Inuit from Greenland made famous in the Danish writer Peter Freuchen’s Book of
the Eskimo. Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an
unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition, he found one of the successful hunters
dropping off several hundred pounds of meat. He thanked him profusely. The man
objected indignantly:
“Up in our country we are human! “ said the hunter. “And since we are human we help each other. We don’t like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.”
The last line is
something of an anthropological classic, and similar statements about the
refusal to calculate credits and debits can be found through the
anthropological literature on egalitarian hunting societies. Rather than seeing
himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter
insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations,
refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise
reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began “comparing
power with power, measuring, calculating” and reducing each other to slaves or
dogs through debt.”
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