Labour and life
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, December 24, 2024
One often hears praise of the Constitution of Italy because it put labour at its own foundation. Yet not only the etymology of the term (in Latin, labor denotes a harrowing punishment and suffering), but also its adoption as a sign of concentration camps (“Work sets you free” was written over the gate of Auschwitz) should have warned against such an incautiously positive meaning. From the pages of Genesis, which present labour as a punishment for Adam’s sin, to the often-cited passage from The German Ideology in which Marx announced that in the 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, citicise after dinner, just as I have a mind”, a sound distrust of labour is an integral part of our cultural tradition.
There is, however, a more serious and profound reason, which should advise not to put labour at the foundation of a society. It comes from science, and in particular from physics, which defines labour through the force that must be applied to a body to move it. Thus defined, labour is necessarily subjected to the second law of thermodynamics. According to this law, which is perhaps the supreme expression of the sublime pessimism to which true science comes, energy inevitably tends to degrade and entropy, which expresses the disorder of an energetic system, equally inevitably to increase. The more we produce labour, the more disorder and entropy will irreversibly grow in the universe.
Therefore, to found a society on labour, means to devote it ultimately not to order and life, but to disorder and death. A sound society should rather reflect not only on the ways in which men work and produce entropy, but also on the way in which they are idle and contemplate, producing that negentropy, without which life wouldn’t be possible.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, December 24, 2024
One often hears praise of the Constitution of Italy because it put labour at its own foundation. Yet not only the etymology of the term (in Latin, labor denotes a harrowing punishment and suffering), but also its adoption as a sign of concentration camps (“Work sets you free” was written over the gate of Auschwitz) should have warned against such an incautiously positive meaning. From the pages of Genesis, which present labour as a punishment for Adam’s sin, to the often-cited passage from The German Ideology in which Marx announced that in the 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, citicise after dinner, just as I have a mind”, a sound distrust of labour is an integral part of our cultural tradition.
There is, however, a more serious and profound reason, which should advise not to put labour at the foundation of a society. It comes from science, and in particular from physics, which defines labour through the force that must be applied to a body to move it. Thus defined, labour is necessarily subjected to the second law of thermodynamics. According to this law, which is perhaps the supreme expression of the sublime pessimism to which true science comes, energy inevitably tends to degrade and entropy, which expresses the disorder of an energetic system, equally inevitably to increase. The more we produce labour, the more disorder and entropy will irreversibly grow in the universe.
Therefore, to found a society on labour, means to devote it ultimately not to order and life, but to disorder and death. A sound society should rather reflect not only on the ways in which men work and produce entropy, but also on the way in which they are idle and contemplate, producing that negentropy, without which life wouldn’t be possible.
(English translation by I, Robot)
John William Godward, Idleness, 1900. Courtesy of WikiArt.
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