Marx, Capital Ch. 6 The Sale and Purchase of Labour-Power

Questions 

1. Necessary requirements to satisfy the worker depends on the degree of civilization. Can we explain this (especially in relation to the picture in EPM)? (p. 275)

2. Relations of equality in the market and law (p. 271) and the critique of liberal equality (p. 280). Is equality the necessary condition of labor-capitalist relation or an ideological expression of the means of production?

3. What are the historical and especially the moral elements in the valuation of the worker as a commodity? (p. 275)

4. Is the mode of production a synonym for an economic formation of society? Are there different modes of production in succession or is there a co-existence of modes of production? (p. 273)

5. Why does natural history play no role in historical development of capitalist mode of production? (p. 273)

6. In relation to the "second essential condition," how is the compulsion to sell one's labour-power an essential condition for the existence of the market? (p. 272)

Discussion 

• Difference between "equality" as a legitimate condition or as obfuscation (Q2)
• It is first presented as a necessary condition to the capitalist mode of production: 
• "He and the owner of money meet in the market, and enter into relations with each other on a footing of equality as owners of commodities, with the sole difference that one is a buyer, the other a seller ; both are therefore equal in the eyes of the law." (p. 271)
• But the reference to equality later appears sarcastically: 
• "It is the exclusive realm of Freedom, Equaiity, Property and Bentham. Freedom, be cause both buyer and seller of a commodity, let us say of labour power, are determined only by their own free will. They contract as free persons, who are equal before the law. Their contract is the final result in which their joint will finds a common legal expression. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to his own advantage." (p. 280)
• Is the original formulation an assumption? Is there actually a condition of legal equality in Marx? 
• Some might criticize him for dispensing with legal/moral equality
• Operative illusion; it is actually producing something 
• But then legal equality is not a necessary condition? 
• BUT worker is not a slave; so they do freely sell their labor power 
• The worker has a right to take an employer to court for failure to provide wages
• The worker is seen as a partner in an exchange and can freely sell labour for the highest price/wage (Freedom)
• "He must constantly treat his labour-power as his own property, his own commodity, and he can do this only by placing it at the disposal of the buyer, i .e . handing it over to the buyer for him to consume, for a definite period of time, temporarily." (p. 271)
• Is it actually inequality or is it demonstrating a limitation to the legitimate concept of equality?
• Separate sphere of circulation from sphere of production (p. 271)
• Marx separates circulation (the market) from production such that he is not being ironic
• So, there actually is legal equality in the sphere of circulation but that excludes the underlying inequality in production

• Is the compulsion to sell labour-power an essential condition for the market? (Q6)
• Assumption that if you are a worker, you only have your labour-power to sell 
• Are the categories too neat? 
• Is there really a sharp distinction between those who sell their own labour-power and those who do not? 
• What about lumpenproletariat? 
• Marx agrees with the notion that markets exist before capitalism
• The wage form as a distinct component of the market
• The rise of the middle-class complicates this need to sell labour-power. Does the worker need to sell their labour-power? Or is it the fact of selling? 
• Why do this middle-class people still sell their labour-power? 
• More like "middle-income proletariat" 
• BUT what about the changing necessary requirements for the worker (p. 275/Q1)

• Moral element in the valuation of the worker (Q3) + Changing necessary requirement (Q1)
• So, middle-class works because there is this additional moral element at play 
• Social coercion 
• But is this what the moral element is on p. 275
• Only labour-power as a commodity has a historical and moral element; not the existence of other commodities
• If value is the social average necessary labour-time; labour-power demands more than just mere subsistence 
• Moral element is tied to habits/custom - drinking, eating, leisure, etc. 
• Description of the ethical (leniency in habit/custom)
• Historical (time) and moral (space/culture) differences in valuation 
• Ex. Air conditioning in Florida homes; not in Alaska

• But it can't just be subsistence for the criticism to work (?) 
• It can't just be about coercion; it's about extraction 
• The fundamental logic is not about coercion 
• Is labour part of our species-being? - if so, that explains why the middle-class continues to work
• Greater freedom in ability to sell labour; more contingency than the critic thinks
• Is "alienation" the same concept as in the EPM of 1844?

• What about the lack of the role of natural history in historical development? (Q5)
• "One thing, however, is cl ear : nature does not produce on the one hand owners of money or commodities, and on the other hand men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no basis in natural history, nor does it have a social basis common to all periods of human history, It is clearly the result of a past historical development, the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whol e series of older formations of social production" (p. 273)
• More Darwinian and less Hegelian (?) 
• Not an unfolding of biological necessity, but more anthropological 
• Maybe history goes all the way down 
• But maybe the Darwinian framework is better than dialectics
• More in-line with English political economy than German idealism
• Place of naturalism in Marx's philosophy

• Commodity production before capitalist mode of production (Q4)
• "The production and circulation of commodities can still take place even though the great mass of the objects produced are intended for the immediate requirements of their producers, and are not turned into commodities, so that the process of social production is as yet by no means dominated in its length and breadth by exchange-value." (p. 273)
• So is there overlap between modes of production? 
• Some commodities within an otherwise non-capitalist society; capitalism overtakes other kinds of relations - feudal/serf relations remade into capitalist relations
• Ex. Sharecroppers or chattel slavery's relation to capitalism
• Ex. Prison labour
• World-systems critique: Capitalist systems require non-capitalist periphery
• "The appearance of products as commodities requires a level of development of the division of labour within society such that the separation of use-value from exchange;. value, a separation which first begins with barter, has already been completed. But such a degree of development is common to many economic formations of society with the most diverse historical characteristics." (p. 273)

Marx, Capital Intro. and Ch. 1, Sections 1 and 2

 Discussion Questions

1. What is the power of abstraction? What work is Marx's 'cell-form' metaphor doing?

2. Why begin with the commodity as the matter of concern?

3. Breakdown of Marx's critique of Hegel's dialectical method? (M/E, pp. 301-302)

4. What is the relationship between scarcity and labor time? E.g., the diamond example (C1, p. 130)

5. What is the relationship between utility, value, and labor? (C1, p. 131)

6. Does Marx distinguish between use-values and usefulness (useful things)? (C1, p. 126)

(Concerning #1) Well, this metaphor is helpful for thinking about what he means by 'laws.' He uses a lot of organic metaphors: society as an organism. Perhaps his conception of economic laws (i.e., laws of capitalist production) are akin to biological laws. The commodity is a cell, not an atom. 

Marx's seems to also rely on an appearance/reality distinction. We need to uncover or disclose something and not limit ourselves to the analysis of surface practices and institutions. 

What is the cell relative to the body? What is this metaphor tracking? Well, atomistic metaphor implies something like bundles, whereas organic biological metaphors elicit a sense of systematicity, circularity, etc. More plasticity. 

Marx also uses physical metaphors to talk about constructing an ideal model of capitalist laws. England as the model of capitalism which other countries are approaching. 

(Concerning #2) I was thinking of Foucault's archaeological method of stripping away everything we hold constant in history. So, for Marx, why does he start with the commodity? If we follow the phenomenological reading, the commodity is the first 'appearance' of capitalism. But this seems analogous to Heidegger's starting point of Being/beings?

Well, the commodity seems like the universal category of the capitalist mode of production; it's present in any capitalist society. Well, I took the commodity as criterial for capitalism, so it's not so much a 'starting point,' and more as an analytic observation. Not just the commodity, but the 'immense' collection of commodities is criterial. 

What does Marx mean by 'appearance' for Marx mean? Kantian? Hegelian? Proto-Heideggerian?

(Concerning #5). Use-values are a necessary condition for the commodities. What does Marx mean by use-values presuppose 'definite quantities.' Maybe in the sense of the amount of useful things you want or possess?

It's interesting that Marx treats use-value as both a potentiality and an actuality. Use-values are, in some sense, transhistorical because as humans we always appropriate nature for our own uses. For Marx, labor in the abstract sense is a nature-imposed necessity, independent of all social forms (see p. 133). Marx has two senses of labor: abstract labor (capitalism) vs. concrete labor (human nature). 

Exchange-value is the commensurable value between two use-values. Two exchange-values are made equal by virtue of a 'third thing'? The socially average necessary labor-time it takes to produce a commodity assuming all things hold equal. 

(Concerning #4). Something that is useless cannot be commodity, but we can derive usefulness from things that are not commodity. Scarcity would be factored in the sense that it typically takes more socially average labor time to extract rare minerals like diamonds, whereas the same amount of time can extract more common minerals, like coal. 

Selections from Marx's Gründrisse

 Questions

1. What is the difference between fixed and circulating capital? (280). Can we provide an example of what is new (or is being introduced) by fixed capital?

2. Can we unpack the following claim: "In machinery, objectified labour confronts living labour within the labour process itself as the power which rules it; a power which, as the appropriation of living labour, is the form of capital" (Marx-Engels Reader, 279).

3. "The worker's activity, reduced to a mere abstraction of activity, is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, and not the opposite" (279). Does this entail technological determinism? Is there any autonomy or agency left for the worker?

4. Can we discuss the distinction between machine/machinery and instrument? (279)

5. "In machinery, objectified labour materially confronts living labour as a ruling power and as an active subsumption of the latter under itself, not only by appropriating it, but in the real production process itself" (280) & "Thus the quantitative extent and the effectiveness (intensity) to which capital is developed as fixed capital indicate the general degree to which capital is developed as capital, as power over living labour, and to which it has conquered the production process as such" (281). What is the power-relation of machine and labor? In Foucauldian terms is this a sovereign, a disciplinary, or other modality of power relation? Does this imply a zero-sum struggle?

6. "While machinery is the most appropriate form of the use value of fixed capital, it does not at all follow that therefore subsumption under the social relation of capital is the most appropriate and ultimate social relation of production for the application of machinery" (281). What does this mean? Does this open the door to techno-communism? What valence does this have: pessimism, optimism? Is it deterministic?

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4/22/ 2026 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Questions:

1. Vagabond/Peasant → What is the relation between the two

2. (614): “But the parody of imperialism was necessary” –What is the historiagraphical status of the appeals to necessity? Not just here, but throughout

3. (615): What does Marx mean by cause and effect in the context of Napoleon protecting material power?

4. (606): “But the revolution is thorough-going…” What does Marx mean by purgatory here, and what kind of method does Marx understand revolution to be?

5. Is “The Eighteenth Brumaire” historical materialism? How, why?

6. (597): “Society now seems to have fallen back behind its point of departure…” Again, how do passages like this instantiate a historical materialist method?

7. What relationship should the social revolutionary have to the past (597)?

Discussion:

On the social revolution drawing from the future question, maybe Marx is building on his initial reference to Hegel. The “phrase” and “content” meaning can be made visible in the Napoleanism of the past revolution, also maybe “form” distinction. 

• The proletarian revolution, as Marx envisages it, is perhaps more about the content of the revolution, rather than the form?

• So, is Marx, in saying that the content goes beyond the phrase, that there isn’t self-consciousness?

• The first french revolution conceived of itself as a Republican revolution, and thus was not aware of itself as a class revolution. For Marx, the form of this initial revolution in late 1700s was a class revolution, a revolution championed by the bourgeoisie as political dominance. 

• But, is Marx attributing full self-consciousness to the current (1848) revolutions? 

• (601) First full paragraph, seems that Marx is saying that class consciousness is stirring, but it is appropriated by bourgeois, leading to ever decreasing significance of results.

• “Bonapartism” = ideals or an ideology promulgated by the first Bonaparte (The Uncle) to exploit land.

On revolution:

• This text is interesting for many reasons, one being that revolutions cannot be “willed” or “forced” if certain conditions are not available. Revolution needs “real” ground, so this is against a “hyper-revolutionary” will to arms. Reality will impose itself, which isn’t just a question of consciousness.

• Emphasis on material conditions for revolution to take hold, otherwise there are so many partial or continuous revolutions that snowball. 

• C.P. the context of Russia that couldn’t bring about socialism in the same way that the material conditions prevented the realization of socialist possibilities 

• Okay, so what is the “scope” of “revolution,” for Marx?

• Is he just talking about the “flow of history,” or Proletarian revolution here?

• It seems that Marx is describing an “accelerationist point,” in reading the revolutions that proceed in the nineteenth century

• In another text by Marx, he describes the bourgeois dictatorship showing its ugly face in the sense of an executive power that mobilizes resistance.

• So, the preparatory work isn’t being done necessarily by a proletarian class, but instead by a determinism? (page 606) 

• Related to this historiographic question, what is the perspective of the social critic here? When Marx suggests that the content goes beyond the phrase, then how does one recognize or see it as such? 

• Marx is arguing that past revolutions understood themselves this way (as republican, etc), and there wasn’t a self-awareness of class struggle, but isn’t he just saying that the working class needs to detach from an antiquated Republic form and seize the means of production.

• But how does all that content emerge without being “phrased?”

• Now that there are social revolutions that go beyond the phrasing of political revolutions, where does the “social content come from? Is the content even articulable? It seems that Marx is setting up a temporal challenge: that this content is an epistemological problem. How do we articulate what we are trying to bring about if it has not already been brought about?

• Something cannot be so ontologically new that it cannot be seen as such, as what is being asked about. 

Status of the Peasantry:

• Not a class, not able to represent themselves, but in need of representation

• In need of authority 

• On the peasant/vagabond connection, seems to be a pretty sharp distinction from Foucault here on punitive society

• Nothing really changed after bourgeois revolution, but for Foucault there was massive change at the level of the microphysics of power through the figuration of the vagabond

• On Foucault’s account, the disciplinization of the vagabond IS a social revolution, so it’s telling that Marx accounts for the peasantry and lumpenproletariat in an entirely historically impotent way

• Normative versus descriptive stakes of situating the peasantry for Marxist’s account

On the Method:

• So what is the motor of this historical account? Doesn’e seem to be the will or consciousness of individual actors?

• “Men make their own history” shows that there is a sense of agency, but that historical conditions create concrete action. The problem seems to be in the crux between the two?

• (595): Marx as doing a critique and a warning, “and just when they seem engaged…” Marx is giving an account of fragments at play that would be overlooked in a history? –Possible view

• If Marx is arguing that agency is deterministically structured, then the futural conclusion can’t just help itself to an agency that doesn’t exist or has been possible in the past.

• Marx does seem to indicate a revolutionary point of departure, but we aren’t clear on what this means.

Marx, "Wage Labour and Capital"

 Questions

1. What processes are entailed by/within "the cost of reproduction"? (p. 206)

2. The universal accessibility of new means of production (p. 213): is this "universality" partial in the context of copyright laws?

3. What is included in "greater division of labor"? (pp. 212-213). What does it entail? What is its relationship to machinery/technology?

4. What does Marx mean by "totality"? (p. 207)

5. How are the laboring class and capitalist class defined? 

6. Compared to "Estranged Labor," in which Marx offers an argument about alienation, on what basis is Marx arguing here? Immiseration? 

Marx seems to anticipate Arendt's work/labor distinction on pp. 204-205: "But the exercise of labour power, labour, is the worker's own life-activity, the manifestation of his own life ..."

What does Marx mean by labor-time? Labor time is the expression of labor's exchange value, but the reality is the labor power.

Reproduction is unpaid. The worker must buy food to reproduce "him"self but, he is not necessarily the one cooking. 

The value of labor-power is the socially average cost of subsistence/reproduction it takes to (re)produce a worker.

Why is this work italicized so much.

Is "totality" an ontological or methodological claim? Mode of production = means of production + relations of production. The latter changes based on transformations in the former. 

Are the "laws" of capitalism mechanistic? sociological? economic? 

Why does Marx's explanans here shift from his earlier works? How does this better illuminate the explanandums of immiseration.

Laboring class = those who sell their labor-power in return for wages. Capital as accumulated labor? Capital as the means to exchange for labor power? 

Capital is determined in the process of production. The brute fact of having a steam engine, for example, does not make it capital until employed as such.

Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts – "Estranged Labor"

 Questions

1. What is dialectical relation between property as the product of alienation and the means by which labor alienates itself?

2. What is the relation of labor to/as life activity with Arendt's distinction of labor and work (77)?

3. Animals reproductive labor seems to be immediate. Does this mean that there is a distortion of human temporality in/through alienated labor?

4. What is species-being? How is it related to the universal?

5. What is a contradiction for Marx (79; 81)?

6. What is man's "essential nature" for Marx and what does he mean by the "objective world"?

Spring Term Readings Marx

 

WEEK	TEXT(S)	PAGES
2	“Estranged Labour” from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844  **Optional: “Wages of Labour” from the EPM	pp. 69-84 (optional: pp. 19-34)
3	“Wage Labour and Capital” (1847) in The Marx and Engels Reader	pp. 203-217
4	“The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (1852), in The Marx-Engels Reader	pp. 594-617
5	Selections from the Grundrisse (1857-1858) on the labor process and the famous “Fragments on Machines” in The Marx and Engels Reader	pp. 278-285
6	Capital, vol. 1 (1867), Preface to the First Edition & ch. 1, “The Commodity,” secs. 1-2	pp. 89-93, 125-137
7	Capital, vol. 1 (1867), ch. 6, “The Sale and Purchase of Labour-Power”	pp. 270-280
8	Capital, vol. 1 (1867), ch. 7, “The Labour Process and the Valorization Process”	pp. 283-306
9	Capital, vol. 1 (1867), ch. 10, “The Working Day,” secs. 1-4	pp. 340-366
10	Capital, vol. 1 (1867), ch. 10, “The Working Day,” secs. 5-6 **Optional: sec. 7	pp. 367-410 (optional: pp. 411-416)
11	TBD	TBD

Arendt, The Human Condition, sec. 42-45

5 March 2026

Questions:

1. Life/happiness—is Arendt ambivalent about these? What’s the positive account of each?
2. Is Arendt theorizing biopower? [Biopolitics (labor?) vs. anatomopolitics (work?)] If so, how might we mark/note the difference from other views of biopolitical resistance?
3. Homo faber vis-a-vis Bergson?
4. How do we respond? Art (pg. 323)? Science (pg. 324)?
5. Relations between thought vs. contemplation vs. ideas?
6. Questions of method—what’s Arendt’s methodology? How do we characterize this as history? “Not a history of ideas” (313). How does it contrast with genealogy?
7. Life vs. action: increasing concern with life as constitutive of the social corresponds to decreasing possibilities for action for Arendt.

Discussion:

• General conclusions about how Arendt ends things
• Ought we interpret Arendt in line with a quasi-Heideggerian soft determinism? Or is she more Hegelian (i.e., determinations only clear and appear necessary in retrospect)? Vita activa as Heideggerian calculative thinking vs. vita contemplativa as Heideggerian meditative thinking. Is Arendt giving an account of the emergence of these Heideggerian categories?
• The methodological question: why did upsweep in labor have to correspond to decrease in work and action? What needs to be the case in Arendt’s account, in her methodology, for these conclusions to follow?
• Who is able to choose to perform labor/work/action vs. who is consigned to them?
• What’s the motor driving the historical processes she’s tracing? Not contradiction (as in Hegel), but what is it?
• What’s the relationship between the behavior of the strands (labor, work, action)? What holds them in balance? When their balance is interrupted, in what way is this interruption a result of facts about how the behavior of each relates to that of the others?
• If this isn’t a history of ideas (pg. 313), then what is it? A history of concepts? [Concepts as indexes of forms of life, not a thin sense of “concept” here.]
• Challenge for pragmatism—how to respond? Pragmatist instrumental reasoning emerging as a result of the historical processes inhering between labor/work/action.
• We can imagine Arendt asking: can pragmatism think a conception of action that's irreducible to work?
• How central is instrumental reasoning to the critique Arendt is making? Is her primary concern the subsumption of reason into instrumental reasoning at the expense of other non-means-ends forms of rationality?

• How might constructing phenomenological examples of each (labor, work, action) help clarify in what ways they can be analytically separated?
• Action as parasitic on work and labor
• Are labor, work, and action points of view? Orientations one can or may take up? Or are some deeds just action, some deeds just work, etc.?
• What would it look like to practice action in a way that’s irreducible to an instrumentalized, "work" sense of action?

Arendt – The Human Conditions – sec. 37-41

Questions

1. What is the role/understanding of faith under Arendt? (pp. 270-271).

2. Arendt and the telescope – relationship to homo faber / making of knowledge + what this says about work/labor more broadly?

3. What is the significance of the telescope's "changing the world view;" what is the distinction between ideas/events and the introduction of the telescope as a transformative vector of modernity (p. 274).

4. What is the relationship between modern conception of reason and the detachment from the senses, and how are we to make sense of this in relationship to the telescope?

5. Notes reversal between the order of the vita activa and the vita contemplativa (p.289), but what exactly is involved in this reversal?

6. Tracking what she is doing with the Cartesian doubt (p. 282-283)... If Cartesianism is an introspection into the (structures of the) mind and its reification as process, what is the role of doubt in relation to modernity as fabrication.

7. How is the loss of contemplation, revelation of truth and—especially—wonder related to the loss of politics that is at the core of the book?

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Discussion

The loss of wonder and the loss of politics is connected to the loss of commons sense (that is world-directed) in favor of introspection and the primacy of the structures of the mind. 

Rationalism and empiricism as doing the same thing in relation to the Archimedean point of view.

What do we think of her reading of the hypothesis–experiment as a circle related to the subjectivism diagnosed as the core of the modern age?

Close to Foucault: tracking a change of perception and episteme? A different subjectivity emerging here especially when she notes that modern science "puts man back once more—and now even more forcefully—into the prison of his own mind" (288). Her focus is on natural science while Foucault is on social/human sciences...

Irony: it is the instruments that makes this worldview and it is not reason who produces it (even if it reaches the conclusions earlier).

The telescope is a creation of "non-practical search for useless knowledge" (289), so it is not a creation of contemplation but is its destruction. The doing of the telescope is not practical, so here action gets detached from practice (vs a pragmatist view). Here there might be a connection with Hans Blumenberg's reading of curiosity as a driving force of modernity in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age.

The problem seems ot be the hierarchy of vita contemplativa and vita activa and therefore the reversal but not the distinction because she does not think there should be a vindication of one over the other.

The Life of the Mind could be useful here as a place with Arendt thinks of thinking as a legitimate and separate sphere but without domination and recognizing the loss of the world. This is taken up by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's biography Hannah Arendt, For the Love of the World.

Preservation and the autonomy of the spheres and not only about relation between them. Very worried about the merging of spheres.

Connection here with her debate with Carl Schmitt: there is a validity to the desire of recovering the autonomy and legitimacy of the political but without such operation leading to domination, dictatorship, sovereign decision but to a plurality, common world and sense.

Descartes: detachment of practical concern and the world and into introspection. He erases the possibility (and experience) of the eternal as it was for the vita contemplativa and turns to immortality. Interesting here to refer how she reads Kierkegaard as bringing the Cartesian doubt into the heart of religion and therefore debasing religion by modernizing it from within.

Collapse into narcissism and solipsism but in this case Narcissus does not recognize that the image is himself. Science does not know that it only discovers itself, but has lost the world. 

Resonance to what Foucault does: when 2+2=4 becomes the paradigm of knowledge, then our common sense is deeply impoverished, thinned-out, suffocated. We, again, have lost the world by absorbing it into consciousness—we loss the uniqueness of the object, its sensible specificity (similar to Adorno)—and as the Archimedean point moves into the subject itself (p. 284).

When this happens and labor is elevated over work and everything has its expiration date (nothing lasts) there is no disorientation, no fixity of things.. This has been seen as the conservative element in her thought: tradition as providing the stability, a reference point, something that allows us to be part of the common human world. 

Wonder also connection to an individual, to the brand-new, and unique and that cannot be repeated: that which is born.

Interesting that when introspection is talked about without the senses, this sounds like a really good model to understand AI. Of course it "thinks" but that is a thought devoid from the world and the human condition. 

She describes Descartes as the natural consequence of the telescope. How are we to understand this? Is there a Heideggerean technological determinism here?

Another shift: speculum. It also helps us see what we could not before and that is, in some sense, perception. And there is an activation of perception; as she says, it is also the intervention into appearance. It is a way to de-alienate this distance...

Telescope seems to give us a great power but it also makes you so very small – inside to the cosmos – so its a reaction formation to then say: what matters is the mind of man (Descartes). It also opens up all the doubts of our senses that leads the to the radicality of never-ending doubt... 

Arendt, The Human Condition, Sections 31, 31, (33 and 34), 35 and 36

 Arendt, The Human Condition, Sections 31, 31, (33 and 34), 35 and 36

Questions:

1. How or why are faculties of forgiving and promising contingent upon or tied to plurality? Why is forgiving (or promising?) unpredictable? (p.g 237)

2. Sect. 31→ Ruling others and ruling oneself, how or in what ways can the care of the self, governmentality, and pastoral power in Foucault be connected to Arendt’s discussion of ruling or action as “rule”? Especially in her reading of “ruling” as making in Plato?

3. Relation of ruling to fabrication (of city-state)?

4. Critique of idea theory in politics, what is the relation to the critique of the mathematization of science?

5. What is the relationship between mathematization critique and Arendt's concern with worldlessness, or alienation? Are these two separate points? Concern with modern science and earth alienation? 

6. Section 31→ The substitution of acting for making: How should we understand Arendt’s critique of Aristotle and her celebration of the polis as the exemplary of the realm of action? Contradiction or no?

7. Tracking the decoupling of ruling and beginning in “archein,” what is this?

8. (256): Is there something we can say in regard to a transition from sovereign to biopower in Arendt’s account of the stages of alienation (family/ home to society and state)

• Do we want to invite the pragmatist discussion?

• Nope

• Status of forgiveness as disclosive and possible for Arendt: interesting that Arendt says that no one can forgive himself, and the dependency of others as ontological (plurality) for the possibility of action

• Comparing to Nietzsche and promising

• Moving to a discussion of freedom: (237), Arendt sees forgiveness as essential for freedom, how?

• Domination and freedom, domination becomes ubiquitous in the modern age, wherein the wanting to overcome plurality and action result in arbitrary domination of all others.

• (259): Return of the notion of the idea, Arendt seems to have an issue with “idea” as distinct from event, which are never unprecedented. Why is that?

• Having an idea is never unprecedented? 

• Very hard to get a grasp on this, especially because what Arendt means by “idea” may or may not be what she is attributing to Plato’s sense of “idea,” but again, how would we agree to this premise that ideas are never unprecedented?

• Maybe it’s not that deep… Maybe idea means something that “comes and goes” but isn’t acted upon, doesn’t enter the realm of objectivity until it is instantiated in an event or deed.

• Comparing and contrasting Arendt and Foucault. Arendt seems so interested in redemption given the mourning or nostalgia for a political action that has been foreclosed, so this book could not be written today.

• How did this become our present?

• Both Foucault and Arendt as tracking how deep and layered our present has become. 

• If Arendt is trying to uncover the piles of sediment to see what has been lost, then Foucault is looking is looking at the cloth that was doing the covering.

• Wondering if we can still have principles and rules, and still have indeterminacy for Arendt, or unpredictability (essential for action, or tantamount to it).

Arendt - The Human Condition §§ 24, 25, 29, 30

 Questions: 

1) Connection between meaning and commonsense / common world? 

2) Consequences of making speech the paradigm of humanity? Relationship to disability and assumption of abled speaking human subject.

3) Arendt's views of the labor movement and what this examples does for her broader argument? (216)

4) Distinctions between force, power, strength, and their relationship to tyranny (202)

5) What is speech in relation to action or deed? (178)

Discussion: 

• Recap - how do the pragmatists feel about Arendt's critique of instrumental rationality? 
• Are pragmatists really utilitarians? 
• Anthropocentric utilitarianism is its greatest in Kant (155)
• The Problem is the inability to distinguish between means and ends
• Pragmatists have a more pluralistic notion of use - not just desire-satisfaction
• She is right to recognize that modern philosophers have an issue with instrumentalism 
• Speech versus sign-language - "action seems a not very efficient substitute for violence, just as speech, from the viewpoint of sheer utility, seems an awkward substitute for sign language" (179)
• At the very least, non-verbal conceptual acts need to be disclosure
• "A life without speech and without action [...] it has ceased to be a human life because it is no longer lived among men" (176).
• Why are labor and work not a part of the public realm, while speech and action are? 
• Does this show the problems inherent in speech/action?
• For the labor movement, she criticizes the conflation as well 
• But this might be important - they didn't have the capacity to act in this deeper sens
•  Action and speech are not just necessary for politics, but also for existential life - for getting to the who/subject not the what/object - dependent upon a conception of disclosure
• Lots of uses of words which are not speech 
• "mere talk" 
• See "mere appearance" (219) of the slaves in public compared to her earlier notion of slaves as instrumentum vocale (121) - so mere appearance and mere words are not speech/action
• Non-verbal conceptual disclosures are action - can one act and not speak? 
• Power - as opposed to force/violence - relates to speech/action 
• "Power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds have not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities ..." (200)
• Power as more than "potentiality in being together" (201) - disperses when no longer together
• Violence is not action
• Power is persuasive - it gives reasons (?)
• Violence cannot reproduce power  (202) 
• Once can exert it against power but it collapses the being together of speech/action
• Relation to Arendt's criticism of the French Revolution
• Isolation - cannot act and speak together
• Should we view speech/action as justification? 
• Probably not (the pragmatists are reading too much Sellars into this). 
• But speech/action as a rupture; intangible; novelty 
• Uncontrollability and boundlessness of action (191) 
• Strength is indivisible; located in individual (201)
• Power is NOT Foucauldian - it is an emergent property that can disperse and vanish
• Strength connects to individuals - copes with violence but not power
• "Power corrupts when weak band together in order to ruin the strong" (201)
• Courage - risk, rupture, novelty, mimesis 
• Significance of action is retrospective - only when we generate myths and lore
• Poetry is a move from remembrance to memory 
• New happens against certainty - appears in the guise of a miracle
• Do we ignore the underlying labor when you look to great moments of history?
• Need to recover the polis without going back