The Undercommons makes a space of refuge from Black, Queer Debt that is unpayable.

In their book The Undercommons, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten propose an alternative social understanding of bad, unpayable debt. The condition for this understanding is the separation of debt and credit. These unpayable debts, which in a social sense are bad, black, queer debts, are not tied to credit; they break with both credit and the debt economy. ‘Credit is a means of privatization and debt a means of socialisation.’75 As long as debts are locked up in a house, a home, a state, or a community, debt serves only credit, which needs it to keep running efficiently. ‘But debt is social and credit is asocial. Debt is mutual. Credit runs only one way. But debt runs in every direction, scatters, escapes, seeks refuge.’76 These bad debts are endlessly distributed and dispersed debts. They are debts that for social reasons – for reasons of being with each other, rather than for economic or moral reasons – cannot be repaid. They are without obligations, without demands, and fail to balance the balance sheets.77 They are debts without a creditor – ‘the black debt, the queer debt, the criminal debt’78 – because they escape identity and do not refer back to a self. They lack autonomy but are full of affections. Practising bad debt corresponds with the ability to allow oneself to be affected by others, other people and other things; to be open, vulnerable, precarious: becoming-precarious as the ability to be affected. Only the bad debts preserve precariousness. Precarization and precarity, in contrast, serve credit and lead away from the social debts of care. Bad care debts are debts arising from ties and mutual dependencies that refuse to pass as autonomous individual and yield to its isolating bonds of time and identity. Black, queer care debts burst open the white masculinist economy of credit and the identity of creditors. These debts move in the expansion of differences and multiplicities as each and every single person owes something different.79 Taking queer social debts as the starting point leads to the fullness of social wealth, to excess in the now, not to a scarcity and lack that demands an accumulation of credit and doing things better in the future. Queer, black debtors seek mutual refuge, but not in the private, and not in a public realm differentiated from it. In the transversal fabrics of relations – the undercommons – which proliferate through time and space, a refuge is a site where precariousness is preserved, where the social, no longer separated from the political, creates ‘fugitive publics’80 that do not assign anyone a place, but allow the places to be occupied without categorizing them. Without borders or the debt of gratitude, the hospitality of radical inclusion lets debts proliferate. Seeking and granting refuge, moves, hides, and allows to begin anew. Becoming-precarious in the present, without a credit on the future, is not an individual undertaking. It is always a becoming-precarious together with others.