23/24---Agamben
No choice, no leisure, life itself
Work and life
We often hear the Italian Constitution praised for having placed work at its foundation. Yet not only the etymology of the term ( in Latin labor designates an agonizing pain and suffering), but also its adoption as a sign of concentration camps («Work makes you free» was written on the gate of Auschwitz) should have warned against such an incautiously positive meaning. From the pages of Genesis , which present work as a punishment for Adam's sin, to the often-cited passage from The German Ideology in which Marx announced that in communist society it would be possible, instead of working, «to do this thing today, that thing tomorrow, to go hunting in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, to raise cattle in the evening, to criticize after lunch, just as one feels like it», a healthy distrust of work is an integral part of our cultural tradition.
There is, however, a more serious and profound reason, which should advise against placing work at the foundation of a society. It comes from science, and in particular from physics, which defines work by the force that must be applied to a body to move it. The second law of thermodynamics necessarily applies to work thus defined. According to this principle, which is perhaps the supreme expression of the sublime pessimism that true science reaches, energy tends inevitably to degrade and entropy, which expresses the disorder of an energy system, equally inevitably to increase. The more we produce work, the more disorder and entropy will irreversibly grow in the universe.
To found a society on work therefore means ultimately devoting it not to order and life, but to disorder and death. A healthy society should instead reflect not only on the ways in which men work and produce entropy, but also on the ways in which they are inactive and contemplate, producing that negentropy, without which life would not be possible.
December 24, 2024
The Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben's conclusion that the camp has replaced the city as the biopolitical paradigm of the West is as difficult to digest as it is easy to see how it responds to contemporary political tendencies in the world today. In this introduction to this theme issue on Giorgio Agamben and the spatialities of the camp, a detailed exposition, emulating the structure of Agamben's seminal book Homo Sacer, is conducted, tracing the genealogies of Agamben's ideas and commenting on his swiftly enhanced importance in the social sciences and humanities. The introduction concludes by outlining some possible research fields in human geogrphy where much insight could be gained if Agamben's work is given more detailed consideration.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.0435-3684.2006.00228.x
In the first part of this article (Olivier, 2022c), the current ‘pandemic’ is approached from the perspective of (mainly) the concept of Homo sacer, elaborated on by Giorgio Agamben (1998).
Drawing on the role played by the principle of Homo sacer in antiquity, Agamben demonstrates the alarming extent to which this principle has become generalised in contemporary societies. In antiquity, the principle of ‘sacred man/human’ functioned where someone was exempted from ritual sacrifice, but simultaneously reduced to ‘bare life’ and therefore seen as fit for execution. Agamben argues that the sphere of ‘sacred life’ has grown enormously since ancient times, as perceptible in modern state practices, which claim biopolitical power over ‘bare life’ in a manner analogous to ancient customs. He sees the concentration camp as the contemporary paradigm of this phenomenon. I further argue that today we witness a further exacerbation of the treatment of humans as ‘bare life’, and employ Agamben’s conceptual apparatus as a heuristic for uncovering some current practices—namely the ‘origin of the virus’ and ‘lethal vaccines’—in the context of the COVID-19 ‘pandemic’ as exemplifying ‘bare life’ practices. Here, I pursue this path further by focusing on other current manifestations of constituting contemporary humans as Homo sacer, fit to be executed or ‘culled’.
May I smile https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericmack/2018/06/14/elon-musk-really-is-god-at-least-in-the-minds-eye-of-christian-believers/
Work: Intentional effort for gain. Most learning is work, if it is not play. Work is the art of the perfectible.
Information physics finds an exception to the second law of thermodynamics which rules the physical world. The search for ever greater order and clarity enhances energy and finds
neg-entropy. A source of perfect order and clarity pulls us up towards it.
That scene from It's a Wonderful Life, after the bank run, where Jimmy Stewart holds up the single dollar and celebrates that the bank is still 'viable'. That is the reward for so much work, that is the system operating true to form; all but bankrupt in fact.