Aaron Bady - David Graeber’s Debt: My First 5,000 Words | The New Inquiry
It is in this sense that Graeber’s book is actually not a “big book” at all. It isn’t a history of human civilization or even a manifesto about economics, but rather a deconstruction of the terms through which we have learned to think about what human civilization, history, and society are and are supposed to be (which is to say, the language we use to make claims upon it). But his central “claim” is a disclaim, the argument that the force of obligation history has always seemed to have imposed upon us — to behave a particular way, for example, because it is “natural” to do so – is in fact a fiction backed up by nothing more than force and repetition, that what we take to be “normal” is exactly the problem. It is, in this sense, a negation without demands. Much like, one might observe, Occupy Wall Street itself?
As such, this is actually a book that becomes more and more inadequate the more and more successfully it accomplishes its goals; rather than making a “claim” for what is, or for what should be, or what has been, the real work of the book seems to me to have been to undercut the grounds on which we might make such claims, attempting to show the kinds of assumptions that might make those claims irrelevent, absent of force. As a result, at the end of reading it, I feel like Graeber has marched me through a hallway filled with doors I never even realized were closed, giving me a quick peek into each one, and then moved on to the next one. And now I want to go back and take another look.
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