The Temporality of Debt During the Great Recession in the novel On the Edge (En la orilla, 2013) by Rafael Chirbes.

Abstract

This essay offers an interdisciplinary analysis of Rafael Chirbes’ novel En la orilla (2013), recognized as the paradigmatic work of the Great Recession of 2008 in Spain. The article examines how the Valencian writer denaturalizes the forms of violence adjacent to the credit-driven economy fostered during the real estate bubble cycle in southeastern Spain. In line with the arguments of David Graeber, Walter Benjamin, and Maurizio Lazzarato on the history and philosophy of debt, En la orilla [On the Edge] portrays the intimacy of social malaise in contemporary neoliberal capitalism, unveiling the violence that has historically accompanied debt and credit in their interrelation with the moral sphere of guilt and sin. The literary analysis shows how the novel depicts the discursive mechanisms of subjectivity production in indebted individuals, resulting from a theological-sacrificial temporal experience. Specifically, three literary devices that render visible the constrained temporality of the indebted–predetermined by a delimited future–are identified: a non-theological composition, the heterogeneity of narrative voices, and a narrative tone described as obscene. This interpretation of En la orilla also draws on Corinne Maier's and Jean-Luc Nancy's reflections on alterity and mortality to examine the forms of violence that emerge when workers, bound by the temporality of debt, are alienated from the possibility of experiencing their social and finite condition. Ultimately, this study demonstrates that the novel’s value is not only literary but also political, as it offers an aesthetic experience of resistance to the theological temporality imposed by debt.