The Laboring Body
The laboring body is a curious thing: in the modern sense of homo faber, it connotes the psycho-physical activity through which human beings produce their modes of life, and in doing so, produce themselves as substantial sensuous, value producing beings. If, in Western thought, the capacity for mindful work sets humankind apart as distinctive species, the endless need to generate their subsistence ensures that laboring bodies are incessantly immersed in a wider universe, both of living and of inanimate forms. For they must act upon this environment to sustain themselves, thereby making nature into their own “inorganic body,” to cite Marx’s suggestive phrase (Butler 2019:5). The more alienated human beings become from their own labor, the more reciprocally damaging is their mutual interdependence, and the more unstable appears the margin between them.
The laboring body is a curious thing: in the modern sense of homo faber,
it connotes the psycho-physical activity through which human beings produce
their modes of life, and in doing so, produce themselves as substantial,
sensuous, value producing beings. If, in Western thought, the capacity for
mindful work sets humankind apart as distinctive species, the endless need to
generate their subsistence ensures that laboring bodies are incessantly
immersed in a wider universe, both of living and of inanimate forms. For they
must act upon this environment to sustain themselves, thereby making nature
into their own “inorganic body,” to cite Marx’s suggestive phrase (Butler
2019:5). The more alienated human beings become from their own labor, the
more reciprocally damaging is their mutual interdependence, and the more