The Work of Man

Abstract

This publication is the first translation into Russian of an article by Giorgio Agamben, originally published as “The Work of Man: A Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics” in the first issue of Forme di vita in 2004. This text builds upon and expands upon the main ideas presented in “The Potency of Thought.” The work raises the question of human capacity, which is always accompanied by inherent incapacity, in connection with the problem of defining human nature in terms of activity and inactivity. The clarification of these concepts aims to reopen the inquiry into the essence and nature of man in relation to the experience of political life. Agamben begins by asking how we can understand the experience of man’s essential inactivity if man inherently possesses a vocation. By linking the experience of human life to the experience of pure potency, Agamben hypothesizes that man’s essence is not confined to any identity or cause, thus requiring a reevaluation of notions within the Western tradition of thought rooted in the constitutive relation of man to his action (activity). By suggesting an alternative interpretation of the concepts of Aristotelian philosophy, dynamis/ energeia and zoē tis (“a certain kind of life”) and raising the question of a form-of-life that is not encompassed by the biopolitical apparatus, Agamben turns to Dante and his work Monarchy. Through Dante’s experiences, Agamben demonstrates that human thought, by its very structure, is open to the possibility of its own absence and inactivity. Consequently, this raises a question that further research aims to address: Is it possible today to conceive of a politics that corresponds to the absence of work of man without succumbing to the biopolitical imperative of assuming it?