Labour and capitalism from the perspective of Giorgio Agamben’s inoperativity

Abstract

In this article, Ramond Geuss’s theory of work is presented as a productionist model, which, as Honneth critiques, reduces labour to wage and product, thereby reducing the person, through capitalist logic, to an instrument who is disconnected from being and activity. In response, some scholars have drawn on Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of inoperativity (désœuvrement) and being-with (être-avec), which challenges the means-to-an-end logic of capitalism by insisting that community is defined by productivity and the completion of a task. Work does not represent the community or person; therefore, the inoperative community unworks teleological modes of being. However, Nancy’s view, while ontologically rich and opening a space for community beyond a task-oriented mode, requires a more explicit biopolitical perspective. Giorgio Agamben offers such a more radical and politically potent concept of inoperativity (inoperosità). For Agamben, all work (as ergon or opera) is bound to a dualistic teleological structure – activity and inactivity for the sake of an end. Inoperativity suspends this structure, not to negate work or non-work, but to render the duality inoperative, opening it to new uses and freeing human activity from the constraints of market-driven productivity by imploding the ontology and history of control and resistance. This is not a withdrawal from work, but a transformation of its meaning in which life and labour become forms of life, being, and activity that subvert economic utility. From this perspective, inoperativity is transformative because its resistance is not framed in terms of debt or guilt, but as a potentiality that opens the possibility for happiness and freedom beyond obligation. Agamben’s broader critique of biopolitics situates inoperativity as both ontological and political, moving beyond Nancy’s being-with beyond function to a form of life that resists through potentiality, not through productivity.