Abstract

MARTINEZ POSADA, Jorge Eliécer; VIVIRESCAS MOLINA, Lina María  and  PUENTES RODRIGUEZ, Catalina. The biopolitics of debt: creditor-debtor relationship. rev.latinoam.bioet. [online]. 2018, vol.18, n.1, pp.87-103. ISSN 1657-4702.  https://doi.org/10.18359/rlbi.2872.

This article proposes an analysis of the biopolitical devices that are behind the figure of credit or debt in the higher education field, based on a historical reading of the debt and the creditor-debtor relationship, explained as a relationship of power.

From the understanding of the debt as a biopolitical constitutive device of control of the neoliberal apparatus, it is transferred to the field of education through the figure of educational credit, which is available to the entire population and facilitates access to higher education. And thus feeds an idea of long-term investment with the infinite promise of the conquest of a subject "entrepreneur of himself," who finds himself in a permanent pursuit of resources that allow him to maintain the investment in himself as a productive apparatus.

Therefore, this analysis manages to pose the idea of the apparently independent subject, who immerses himself in the debt as a mechanism of access to resources that bring him closer to the goal of being "his own boss", as the essence of one of the main gears in modes of subjection of behavior, typical of neoliberalism, and its mechanism of debt, applied to the field of education. On this basis, there is a "debt pedagogy" in which the university and higher education emerge as indispensable elements in the manufacture of said subject.

Keywords : biopolitics; creditor-debtor; debt pedagogy; subjectivity.

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