/lit/ - Literature

>>11215681
karatani:
>The essence of credit lies in its avoidance of the critical moment inherent in the selling position—the postponement of the present perplexity to the future. Though the balance must eventually be paid with money, with credit the settlement can be deferred for now. This postponement in time in a sense reverses capital’s M-C-M movement. The insecurity of the selling position may not surface immediately, because it is the nature of credit to make it appear as if the sale had already been made. But the danger persists; it is metamorphosed into the uncertainty of future money payment, while involving a larger and larger nexus of creditors and debtors. Under the credit system, the self-reproduction of capital occurs not because
of its desire for accumulation; it becomes compulsive because of its desperate need to infinitely postpone the final settlement. It is from the moment the credit system is set that the movement of capital surpasses the will of individual capitalists and becomes a compulsion.

>Credit enforces capital’s movement endlessly at the same time that it hastens capital’s self-reproduction and eliminates the danger involved in selling. Seen in aggregate, the movement of capital (for self-reproduction and self-valorization) must endure in order to endlessly postpone the settlement as a stopgap maneuver: If there is an end, the credit will have to collapse. To be sure, from time to time the moment of settlement comes as a surprise attack: this is the crisis that appears—only where credit is fully developed—as nothing short of a collapse of credit. Nevertheless, credit is neither a mere illusion nor an ideology, even if there is a certain truth in the assertion that the currency economy forms an illusory system. It is still
true that the real that people encounter, once this illusion collapses, is nothing natural and substantial. It is money.

>The economic process is a religio-genic-process that continues to create and expand the phantasmic domain of value. And the temporality of capitalism is similar to that of Judeo-Christianity in the sense that the end is indefinitely deferred. This analogy, however, does not intend to point out a parallelism or reciprocity between economic and religious phenomena. If religion is economic, it is so in the sense that it is rooted in the burden of debt that the living feel toward the dead, or namely, the exchange between this world and that world. One should not disdain the economic. Rather all the serious institutions of humanity: capital, state, nation, and religion should be scrutinized from the economic standpoint. Whether or not we believe in religion in the narrow sense, real capitalism places us in a structure similar to that of the religious world. What drives us in capitalism is neither the ideal nor the real (i.e., needs and desires), but the metaphysics and theology originated in exchange and commodity form.

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