Giorgio Agamben: Labour and life

From Quodlibet (24/12/2024).


One often hears the Italian Constitution praised because it has made work its foundation.[1] Yet not only the etymology of the term (labour designates an agonising punishment and suffering in Latin), but also its use as a sign of the concentration camps (“Work makes you free” was written on the gate of Auschwitz) should have warned against such a recklessly positive meaning. From the pages of Genesis, which present work as a punishment for Adam’s sin, to the oft-quoted passage in The German Ideology in which Marx announced that in communist society it would be possible, instead of working, “to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind “,[2] a healthy mistrust of work is an integral part of our cultural tradition.

There is, however, a more serious and profound reason that should advise against making work the foundation of a society. It comes from science, particularly physics, which defines work through the force that must be applied to a body in order to move it. To work thus defined, the second principle of thermodynamics necessarily applies. According to this principle, which is perhaps the supreme expression of the sublime pessimism attained by true science, energy tends fatally to degrade and entropy, which expresses the disorder of an energy system, equally fatally to increase. The more we produce work, the more disorder and entropy will grow irreversibly in the universe.

To found a society on work, therefore, is to vote it ultimately not to order and life, but to disorder and death. Rather, a sound society should not only reflect on the ways in which men and women work and produce entropy, but also on the ways in which they are inoperative/workless and contemplative, producing that negentropy without which life would not be possible.


[1] “Italy is a democratic Republic founded on labour”: Article One, Fundamental Principles, Constitution of the Italian Republic, 1948.

[2] “Further, the division of labour implies the contradiction between the interest of the separate individual or the individual family and the communal interest of all individuals who have intercourse with one another. And indeed, this communal interest does not exist merely in the imagination, as the “general interest”, but first of all in reality, as the mutual interdependence of the individuals among whom the labour is divided. And finally, the division of labour offers us the first example of how, as long as man remains in natural society, that is, as long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest, as long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily, but naturally, divided, man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now.” Karl Marx, The German Ideology, 1845-46

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