Alien Mediations: Critical Remarks on The Making of the Indebted Man

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Toscano, Alberto. 2014. Alien Mediations: Critical Remarks on The Making of the Indebted Man. The New Reader(1), [Article]

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Official URL: http://thenewreader.org/Issues/1/AlienMediations

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Those rooting around for a bleak allegory for our subprime present could do worse than the dystopian denizens of exurban spaces in K.W. Jeter’s novel Noir, the fittingly named indeadted. Artificially kept alive until they repay outstanding debts, they stalk the landscape of commodity refuse, scavenging, salvaging, recycling to shave off infinitesimal portions of their liabilities, living-dead labour both unproductive and profitable. Telescoping hi-tech financial expropriation and the lo-tech labour in the breakers yards of global capital, the indeadted embody a moment in which subjection to capitalist imperatives subsumes life to the point that it trespasses into death, a hyperbolic echo of the quotidian horror of phenomena like ‘dead peasant insurance’, whose benefits are reaped by corporations with the demise of their unwitting employees...

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