There Is No Economy but Only the Debt to the Center: Money, Capital and the Tributary — Anthropoetics XXVIII, no. 2 Spring 2023

We hypothesize swapping the anthropological vocabulary derivative of central banking (with concepts like “self-interested individuals” and “market forces”) with a new minimal vocabulary derivative of the center. We are indebted to Eric Gans’ Originary Hypothesis and its discovery of the center: the paradoxical locus of attention that constitutes every social scene. Thinking through the center, and the transactions humans have with the center, reveals the “economy” as nothing more than an ideological representation of our more primary debt relationship with the center. This new vocabulary enables us to trace this originary indebtedness to the center through its various manifestations in money, banking, derivatives, succession, and sovereignty. Keywords: Ritual, Money, Sovereignty, Debt, Originary Hypothesis, Center * * * “What is new is that the commercial transaction is no longer an extension of the originary scene but a minimal model of it.” (Eric Gans, “On Firstness,” in The Originar

We hypothesize swapping the anthropological vocabulary derivative of central banking (with concepts like “self-interested individuals” and “market forces”) with a new minimal vocabulary derivative of the center. We are indebted to Eric Gans’ Originary Hypothesis and its discovery of the center: the paradoxical locus of attention that constitutes every social scene. Thinking through the center, and the transactions humans have with the center, reveals the “economy” as nothing more than an ideological representation of our more primary debt relationship with the center. This new vocabulary enabl