Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Book in excellent unread/unused condition. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> To begin with a reckless generalization: practically everything that one might call art or politics or thought-everything to adapt the Aristotelian figure that goes beyond mere living and reaches toward living well-has for too long been understood in terms of a fatal conjunction of work and the gift. These two present themselves as the most familiar practices of everyday life and as the most vexed of theoretical questions. In either guise they confront one an other in a pattern of convergence and contradiction each one figuring the other’s aspiration and limit. In this book the first of these two central terms designates an imaginary spectrum of ideas and practices whose two poles will be called werk and the Work. On the one side the daily exertions that are always done and never done the labors by which one lives or as it is said makes a living. On the other side the project or the poem the opus the cesure or the Book: those achieved or imagined totalities in which as Maurice Blanchot puts it. “all combinations of forms words and letters are rolled up in volumes” and that remain “still to be read still to be written always already written always al- ready paralyzed by reading” (Station Hill Reader 471). There will never be an absolute distinction between the two sides of this opposition for to consider work in any sense is of course also to rebegin the Work of (theorizing) work: the unfinished labor of thinking its value its necessity its purpose or its end(s). (LL)