Private Property, Urbanisation and the Territorialisation of Debt

Ross Exo Adams

17 March 2013 (Published in Real Estates: Life without Debt, published May, 2014, ed. Jack
Self, Bedford Press, London.)

Life and property, being and having, person and thing are pressed up together in a mutual relation
that makes of one both the content and the container of the other.1
Roberto Esposito
Private property has come both to reside at the centre of our individual lives and to spill
beyond the horizon of our political imagination. It is also the mechanism which transformed
forever the notion of debt, displacing it from its ethical form, as a bond between people, and
embedding it into a totalising mechanism of economic sovereignty.
Lazzaratos punchy exegesis on debt argues that debt is the originary apparatus of subjectivity
(creditor-debtor relation) which develops its intimate purchase on the subject from its most
ancient configurations, through capitalism, to the contemporary neo-liberal debt economy,
bearing evermore deeply into the construction of the self. Reading Marx and Nietzsche (via
Deleuze), he argues that in its capitalist form, debt exploits the ethical action constitutive of the
individual and the community2 by mobilising faith, trust and confidence toward the general goal
of capitalist expansion. However, by mapping the growth of debt economy onto the history of
capitalism, he misses a crucial transposition in the very workings of debt that coincided with the
history of capitalism without being the result of it: Debt, far from merely exploiting the ethical
sphere of the individual and community, is literally uprooted from this sphere in order to
neutralise it. In other words, the very construction of both the Hobbesian state and the liberal
nation-state was predicated on the neutralisation of the dangers of communal ethicsthe perils
of unregulated debt (munus) circulating throughout and undermining the social whole. It would
be precisely the possibility that such communities (communitas), bound together outside of any
social contract, could erupt uncontrollably, which threatened the neat homogeneity of both the
Commonwealth and Civil Society, each defined by and sustained through their status as
singularities.
Indeed, if we forgo the impetus to identify capital as both means and ends of the modern
world, we recognise that already by the seventeenth century, much more was at stake in the
formation of the modern state than the expansion of capitalism, namely the preservation of life.
This singular ambition marked not only Hobbes Commonwealth, but also Lockes prescriptions
for government, defining the central political objective of modern politics. For Hobbes, the
preservation of life came in the security and protection of a Commonwealththe Leviathan
endowed with the paranoid apparatus to violently safeguard its subjects from the state of nature.

Esposito, R., 2008, Bos: Biopolitics and Philosophy, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, p. 64.
Lazzarato, M., 2012, The Making of the Indebted Man: An essay on the neoliberal condition, Translated by
J.D. Jordan. MIT Press, p. 66. Original emphasis.
2

In opposition to Hobbes, Locke proposed that sovereignty neednt be concentrated in an

artificial agreement between a singular sovereign and his subjectsa relation of domination,
but could be prefigured by and conditioned through the natural mechanism of private property, a
far more effective mechanism, as Locke attests, to achieve the preservation of life.3
For millennia, the notion of property was a liberty strictly to be exercised by the highest
rulers of the land, whether princes, kings, feudal lords or God himself. It was an expression of
absolute political power (dominium) over all who resided within the land. While property (as
dominium) assumed many spatialities, it wasn't until the eighteenth century that an emergent
liberalism (Enlightenment), following Locke, would dedicate itself to reordering the political
landscape according to a radically new conception of property corresponding to the private
individual. From Lockes conception, propertya condition seen to extend from the natural
ownership of each and every person over his or her bodywould be leveraged in the struggle
against absolute power; against domination.
Lockes notion of property conceives of it as a natural right based on the labor one exerts in
the state of nature to appropriate objects, removing them from their common status in the world.
Kant advances this by asserting that possession over objects wrested from the common world can
only truly be owned as long as a distance can be maintained between the individual and his or her
object without threatening the integrity of this relation. The natural capacity to appropriate
objects from the common world, it seemed, required a third party juridico-political apparatus to
guarantee the privation of the common state of nature. These principles, in their rough state,
form the foundation of our contemporary juridical understanding of private property.
A certain paradox emerges here. The entire episteme of private property that emerged in the
eighteenth century is predicated not on the freedom to possess as such, but rather on the liberty
to withdraw ones self and ones possessions from the sublime angst of a world opening up to
itselfa condition brilliantly summarised by Arendt: Society, when it first entered the public
realm, assumed the disguise of an organisation of property-owners who, instead of claiming access
to the public realm because of their wealth, demanded protection from it for the accumulation of
more wealth.4 Through its generalisation as a natural right, private property extended itself to a
principle of universalityas a condition of existence for modern sovereignty. Just as the
Hobbesian state could claim control over the totality of its citizens through the universality of its
power, so too would the liberal nation-state claim a totality in the name of the universality of
private property.
Either via the transcendent sovereigns pledge to protect his subjects or in the immanence of
private property as an apparatus for protecting life, in each case, an immunisation of the social
body takes place. The result is the construction of an individuated subject as the basis of a
political body by either prohibiting (Hobbes) or making redundant (Locke) the communal debts
(munus) that formed the bonds between each member of a given community (communitas). In
turn, while also demanding a singular relation between subject and sovereign, individual and law.
Immunisation promises to preserve life by neutralising the terror of a common world, an offering

3
4

Locke, J., 1967, Two Treatises of Government, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p. 224.
Arendt, H., 1958, The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, p. 68.

which comes at the cost of the permanent possibility of violence in sacrificing the individual
(Hobbes) or in the radical alienation of a world held in collective isolation (Locke).
Through the generalisation of private property, debt has literally been restructured,
displacing it from its role as a ethical bond (munus), whose shared relation formed the basis of a
particular community (communitas), to become instead the political instrument through which
social control is maintained and through which state power is exercised. Debt, only in its modern
form, is politicised. The state, founded not on its ambitions to expand capitalism, but on the
protection of private property, at once neutralises debt as an ethics, while monopolising its
dispensation of debt in its economic form. In this transposition, debt goes from an immanent
relation between people to a transcendent relation either between subject and sovereign or
between debtor and the Universal Creditor of capital. Private property is the dominion over
which our sovereign rules. At the same time, it is the disciplinary chamber in which we
obediently endow such a sovereignty with its transcendence. In this terrain, debt is, on the one
hand, the singular relation with which we are held to sovereign account, while on the other, it is
the weapon of choice for waging perpetual, global war.
Over the course of the last two centuries, this radical transformation of debt has materialised an
equally radical new spatiality: the urban. Urbanisation, it can be argued, is the territorialisation of
private property through the deterritorialisation of debt (munus) and its subsequent
reterritorialisation as a political relation between everyone and the material world (immunitas).
The urban (as opposed to the city or any other configuration) becomes a matrix of private
property whose endless expansion across the territory simultaneously corresponds to the
immunisation of each individual dwelling within its statistical consistency. The urban is the
spatial counterpart necessary to secure this condition of an immunised totality (society),
precluding not only the possibility of the irruption of debt in the form of communitasthe improper, etc.within the social continuum, but indeed of any form of contingency that would
shudder the form of sovereignty that courses through a society of isolated debtors. The irony of a
world which relinquished its ethical obligations long ago in exchange for the safety of private
property comes in the fact that it now finds itself crushed by the very form of debt it took on to
do so.