Marcel Hénaff: Cosmic, Symbolic, and Financial Debts

Debts – symbolical and financial – are tied to a specific date on which they have to be settled: Equilibrium must be restored, the lost energy replenished, the endangered life must recuperate.

What impact do these human debts have on the global scale, such as the management of energy reserves? Is there a metaphysical vision? A religious one? And is there a debt of life? Such questions strike at the very heart of the current economies and determine the fate of our societies.

Marcel Hénaff, philosopher and ethnologist, is Professor for French Literature, Philosophy and Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. In the tradition von Marcel Mauss he localizes the source of the social in the elementary reciprocal exchange of gifts.