In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Debts
• Dan-el Padilla Peralta (bio)

Only way he comin' back is through his unborns

—Lil Wayne, "Uproar" (2018)

Recently I've been spending some time in the intellectual company of longtermists, not because I find their arguments persuasive but because they seem to have stumbled upon an effective rhetorical strategy. As I understand it, their move is to direct attention away from the muddy moral universe of the present to that final frontier of the far-off future, so invitingly fraught in the glistening promise of its unknowability. And there's no denying the strategy's success: books here, media coverage there, stacks of funding everywhere. Yet the more I read the longtermists, the more they seem like twenty-first-century versions of Augustine of Hippo, their heavenly city populated by blissed-out distant generations. But I'm convinced, too, that, much like Augustine's, their fixation on the future contains an important message about the valuation of the past. It's a message about valuation and struggle.

I use the word valuation carefully. I want to think about value. The longtermists would have us assign the greatest value to the lives of future generations, indeed of future selves: vast, in fact potentially unknowably vast, in their quantity, and therefore exerting obligations on us by the sheer force of their number. But I submit that the greatest obligations we have are not to selves in the future whom (with the exception of our children, grandchildren, and, if we're lucky, great-grandchildren) we won't ever know, but to the selves of the past whom we can, at least in principle, come to know. Not in the fullness of their personal interiority, of course; even the recently dead are shadowy, and those dead for many years or decades or centuries or millennia much more so. But because they existed, we can come to know them, and cultivate relationships with them, in ways precluded by the still-not-existence of the unborn. And the mere prospect of those relationships creates ethical demands. The realization of those demands comes down, ultimately, to the business of value, and to the necessity of struggle. [End Page 64]

The field that has come to be known as Classics is all about value. That much is apparent from its very name. If we are not to disavow that name (and I think there are good reasons for doing just that), then we need to think harder about the demands and merits of struggling for value in a way that simultaneously honors our obligation to this confounded and confounding world, and to the pasts—and past people—who brought this world into being. My belief is that this struggle must be reparative: not only must it directly confront the ill-gotten gains of racial capitalism, it must actively seek to reverse and redistribute them. This struggle is unavoidably political in nature; nothing is gained by pretending that it is not.

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The trailblazer doyenne of Black Studies, Sylvia Wynter, has repeatedly singled out the "overrepresentation of Man" as a defining feature of early global modernity. By this she specifically means the elevation of the white European male as paradigm of rationality and subjecthood, as cornerstone of what counts as fully Human. This elevation moves in rhythm with the global transformation that, taking off in the centuries after the first contact of 1492, draws its fuel from settler colonialism and racial capitalism. The overrepresentation of Man is inconceivable without these two processes, which also interact with one of the signature features of the construction of the Human as a category in early modernity: the reanimation of ancient Greece and Rome in connection with Renaissance humanism. I see my work as committed, in the first instance, to confronting the legacies of that overrepresentation, which warps our ability to construct and engage responsibly with the ancient Mediterranean past and with the history of those disciplines that emerge around that past's study. But there is no effective method for ethical recovery and attentiveness to the pluralisms of the past, and to the staggering diversity of that past, that can exist independently of the struggle to redistribute the resources that...

中文翻译：

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债务

以下是内容的简短摘录，以代替摘要：

• 债务
• 丹·埃尔·帕迪拉·佩拉尔塔（简介）

他回来的唯一途径就是通过他未出生的孩子

——李尔·韦恩，《喧嚣》(2018)

最近，我花了一些时间与长期主义者的知识分子相处，不是因为我发现他们的论点有说服力，而是因为他们似乎偶然发现了一种有效的修辞策略。据我了解，他们的举动是为了将人们的注意力从当前混乱的道德世界转移到遥远未来的最后边界，那里充满了其不可知性的闪闪发光的承诺。不可否认的是，这一策略是成功的：这里有书籍，那里有媒体报道，到处都是大量的资金。然而，我读的长期主义者越多，他们就越像二十一世纪版本的河马奥古斯丁，他们的天堂之城，居住着幸福的远方几代人。但我也相信，就像奥古斯丁一样，他们对未来的执着包含着一个关于评估过去的重要信息。这是一条关于估值和斗争的信息。

我谨慎地使用估值这个词。我想思考一下价值。长期主义者会让我们把最大的价值赋予子孙后代的生活，实际上是未来的自己：他们的数量巨大，事实上潜在的巨大，因此通过他们的数量的绝对力量对我们施加义务。但我认为，我们最大的义务不是对我们永远不知道的未来的自己（除了我们的孩子、孙子，如果幸运的话，还有曾孙），而是对我们自己我们至少在原则上可以了解过去的历史。当然，这并不是指他们的个人内心的完整；而是指他们的内心世界。即使是最近去世的人也是模糊的，而那些已经去世多年、数十年、数百年或数千年的人则更是如此。但因为它们存在，我们可以认识它们，并与它们培养关系，而这些方式是尚未出生的胎儿所无法实现的。仅仅这些关系的前景就产生了道德要求。这些要求的实现最终取决于价值事业和斗争的必要性。[第 64 页完]

这个被称为经典的领域就是价值。从它的名字就可以看出这一点。如果我们不想否认这个名字（我认为这样做是有充分理由的），那么我们需要更加努力地思考为价值而奋斗的要求和优点，同时履行我们对这种混乱和令人困惑的义务。世界，以及创造这个世界的过去和过去的人们。我的信念是，这场斗争必须是修复性的：它不仅必须直接面对种族资本主义的不义之财，而且必须积极寻求扭转和重新分配它们。这场斗争本质上不可避免地具有政治性。假装事实并非如此，是没有任何好处的。

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黑人研究的先驱人物西尔维娅·温特 (Sylvia Wynter) 多次指出“人类的过度代表性”是早期全球现代性的一个决定性特征。她的意思是，将欧洲白人男性提升为理性和主体性的典范，作为完整人类的基石。这种提升与全球转型的节奏一致，全球转型在 1492 年第一次接触之后的几个世纪里开始，从定居者殖民主义和种族资本主义中汲取动力。如果没有这两个过程，人类的过度代表性是不可想象的，这也与早期现代性中人类作为一个类别的标志性特征之一相互作用：古希腊和罗马与文艺复兴时期人文主义的复兴。我认为我的工作首先致力于面对这种过度代表性的遗产，这扭曲了我们构建和负责任地参与古代地中海过去以及围绕过去研究而出现的那些学科的历史的能力。但是，没有有效的方法可以使道德恢复和关注过去的多元性以及过去的惊人多样性，而这些方法可以独立于重新分配资源的斗争而存在……