Unpayable debt

uma crítica feminista, racial e anticolonial do capitalismo

Abstract

In The Unpayable Debt, Denise Ferreira da Silva presents a critique of modern capitalism, articulating a feminist, racial and anticolonial perspective. The author dismantles the logic of Western modernity, revealing how raciality is a structural and permanent element of the capitalist system, not an exception or historical accident. The work consists of four essays that expose the epistemological violence of modernity, criticizing its fundamental principles (separability, determinability, and sequentiality) that sustain practices of racial domination, such as slavery and colonialism. Denise uses the concept of the "wounded captive body" to illustrate the paradoxical condition of racialized bodies, which are simultaneously treated as commodities and human beings. Inspired by the narrative of Octavia Butler's novel Kindred, the author explains the idea of the unpayable debt as a historical and ethical obligation that falls on current generations, even if they did not create this debt. This debt is impossible to repay within the parameters of modern justice, which is based on categories of value and property incompatible with the Black experience. Beyond philosophical critique, Denise Ferreira da Silva proposes Black feminist poetics as a method to imagine other forms of existence and justice that break with the logic of appropriation and capital. Her work is an essential read to understand the intersections between capitalism, racism and coloniality.