The Time That Belongs to God: The Christian Prohibition on Usury in the 12th-13th Centuries and the Making of the Subject of Debt

This dissertation traces the meaning of the idea that usurers sell time through 12th- and 13th-century Christian debates about the ethics of usury in the intellectual milieu of the University of Paris. According to a frequently recurring argument, the problem with usury is that the usurer is a ‘thief’ because he sells time, which cannot be bought or sold. The present study reconstructs the philosophical and theological conception of time implicit in this argument.The introductory chapter treats the scope and intervention of the study, as well as its methodological orientation, while the second discusses the intellectual precedents available to medieval writers for connecting time and debt. The core study of the dissertation occupies its third, fourth, and fifth chapters. Each chapter treats one or more of the key medieval texts selected as significant turning points in the idea that usurers sell time. Additionally, each pairs its medieval Christian text with a more contemporary philosophical text treating similar themes, and uses both the medieval and the contemporary text to illuminate the core concerns and impasses of the other. The third chapter reads Peter the Chanter’s Verbum abbreviatum together with Jacques Derrida; the fourth chapter reads Giles of Lessines’ De usuris in communi alongside Gilles Deleuze; the fifth chapter examines Peter Olivi’s rejection of the traditional framing of the argument in De contractibus alongside the work of Giorgio Agamben. The idea that usury is wrong because the usurer sells time, Olivi claims, conflates two times: common time, or the time that one ‘is;’ and proper time, or the time that one ‘has.’ What is at stake turns out to be an incapacity to distinguish between selling one’s time and selling one’s life—an incapacity that can only be bridged by means of a categorical distinction between debt and slavery. Thus, the concluding chapter suggests that it is the invention of race—understood as a difference between the capacity and the incapacity to relate autonomously to one’s own time—which underpins the difference between medieval and modern accounts of time and debt.Ph.D