Dividuation partitions, quantifies, and rebundles subjects like financial derivatives, dissolving the whole individual.

Evidence

More insidiously, however, strategies that seek to refute or deny debt can be ineffective because, as has been adeptly argued by Arjun Appadurai (2016) “their architecture poses the moral force of the individual against a process of dividualization that they neither understand nor endorse” (145). Appadurai here takes inspiration from Gilles Deleuze’s notion of dividuation, which he uses to describe the dynamic relationship between capital and social control. Instead of a singular identity that is articulated through the process of “individuation,” Deleuze saw a separation of the underlying individual and its various attributes analogous to a financial derivative. Dividuation, therefore, is a predatory process by which speculative finance partitions, quantifies, rates, and profiles individual subjects’ behaviors and then rebundles them in order to exploit new risks and profit opportunities. Such partitions have become so entrenched that they have rendered irrelevant the idea of the classical “whole” individual. As a consequence, Appadurai argues, any attempt to restore the ideal of the individual as a bedrock of resistance to financial indebtment is doomed to fail, as long as it primarily relies on categories and “stable associations” such as class, race, ethnicities, identities, and parties. The moral battleground of debt politics can feel like quicksand when we fight from within the perimeter of such categories. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 312

Categorization

• DEFINE: Precise definition of ‘dividuation’ via Deleuze and Appadurai, directly serving the reader’s homo speculans task.