Working Through Working

Hamacher, Werner; Hartman, Matthew T.

doi:10.1353/mod.1996.0005

Cited by 11 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…1 in the postwar years, as Werner Hamacher quips, work was not "worked-through," but merely "worked-off." 2 in this scenario of modern life as a vita activa governed by work, non-work does not seem to have a place. non-work is incompatible with the ideology of labor, the intensifying historical tendency of erasing the labor/leisure division, as well as with the current trend of functionalizing leisure and activating the recreants.…”

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confidence: 87%

Exhausted Literature: Work, Action, and the Dilemmas of Literary Commitment

Just¹

2013

phl

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This article examines Jean-Paul sartre's concept of committed literature as a manifestation of the tendency in Western modernity of conceiving literature as a form of praxis anchored in work. Discussing an alternative idea of engagement formulated by maurice Blanchot, roland Barthes, and albert camus, the essay develops a notion of exhausted literature that questions the prioritization of work and action in predominant models of commitment. Exhaustion is proposed as a politically and ethically motivated literary strategy of suspending the group-forming morality which, as a product of modern valorization of work and action, has accompanied literature of verisimilitude, activity, and oriented time.

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confidence: 87%

Exhausted Literature: Work, Action, and the Dilemmas of Literary Commitment

Just¹

2013

phl

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“…Wells, African American educator, journalist, and civil rights leader, or Grace Lee Boggs, Chinese-American social activist and feminist, or Kenyan environmental activist Wangari Maathai, or the multitudes of Indigenous people and their allies that protested at Standing Rock against oil pipelines? Perhaps social work educators must join Saidiya Hartman (2020), who has said: “I work a lot with scraps of the archive. I work a lot with unknown persons, nameless figures, ensembles, collectives, multitudes, the chorus.…”

Section: Podcasts As Emerging Archives: the Social Work Routes Podcas...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Reimagining Social Work Ancestry: Toward Epistemic Decolonization

Clarke

2021

Affilia

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Contextualizing disciplinary histories through the personal stories of forerunners creates compelling narratives of the craft of evolving professions. By looking to our intellectual and practitioner ancestors, we participate in a dialogue with a history that shapes our contemporary professional identities and aspirations for the future. Grounded in a decolonizing approach to social work, this article examines how the discipline shapes its professional identity and ways of knowing by centering the role of canonical founders in the social work curriculum. The global social work origin story in the curriculum often centers on Anglo-American ancestors that illustrate the development of the disciplinary boundaries of the international profession. One method of decolonizing social work epistemology at the intersection of ancestors and professional lineage could be to look to public history as a pedagogical tool in the curriculum. The article concludes by examining the use of podcasts as having the potential to decolonize the process of collecting, analyzing, and disseminating local knowledge of ancestors thus challenging the top-down approach to expert-driven epistemologies.

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“…72 The ego, as Theweleit demonstrates, is a 'muscle-physique' stabilised against collapse through work, or, rather, as Werner Hamacher argues, through a particular and pervasive conception of work intent on exterminating 'the nonhomogeneous, the nonassimilable, […] the formless'. 73 Hamacher shows that as long as the 'endogamous fascism' of such an interpretation of work keeps evading analysis, it behaves as one of the many ideological, social and political continuances of the Nazi regime, a system that 'defines itself as the rejection of what is foreign to work and the foreignness of work "itself" through murder.' 74 What he means is this: work is form, and formalization; it corresponds to the imposition of form and the elimination of the formless, that which is coded as other, can't be gathered into form, might be form-resistant, has the propensity to deform.…”

Section: Typusmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…73 Hamacher shows that as long as the 'endogamous fascism' of such an interpretation of work keeps evading analysis, it behaves as one of the many ideological, social and political continuances of the Nazi regime, a system that 'defines itself as the rejection of what is foreign to work and the foreignness of work "itself" through murder.' 74 What he means is this: work is form, and formalization; it corresponds to the imposition of form and the elimination of the formless, that which is coded as other, can't be gathered into form, might be form-resistant, has the propensity to deform. Work, in this sense, is anti 'anti-form,' never mind that the formless makes form possible.…”

Section: Typusmentioning

confidence: 99%