Hinge I: No Bearer

Once, the body served as action’s guarantor, the place where consequence could land and attribution settle. And action held through it. Around the body, an apparatus accreted: the seal, the personal signature, the office, the byline, juridical personhood. Each of these was a construct; together, they made the bearer-function hold.Among capitalism’s defining innovations was the decoupling of operation and attribution, which gave rise to the corporation as modernity’s preeminent synthetic bearer: a legal person capable of standing in for those whose actions it organised, allowing it to take on risks and persist beyond what any single body could bear. Limited liability, finding its present form through generations of doctrinal revision, severed accountability from the person without ever suspending action. The corporation did not solve the problem of attribution, but it contained it. Now, as that figure reaches its limits, what grows visible in its wake is that the bearer was not the…