Description
In much contemporary critical theory, Hegel is cast as the central figure against which thought must constantly strain. Paradoxically, however, we can speak to or against Hegel in terms that nonetheless remain deeply Hegelian. In this vein, this paper recuperates Hegel’s reading of the antinomies of work and labor, at once economic and ethical, individual and social, to examine the limits and possibilities of the Hegelian resolution of these antimonies in an ‘age of precarity. ’ Mediated principally by the modalities of recognition, work and labor enable the constitution of subjectivity and social relationality for the liberal subject whose sovereign being- for-self is always and necessarily, on a Hegelian account, being-for-another. The transformation of work and labor indexed under the name of precarity (namely the move from relatively secure to insecure, contingent, flexible work), however, registers the unravelling of the regulative ideals of self-mastery and sovereignty central to liberal accounts of the sovereign subject, and with it, the grammar of recognition that binds the two. Mobilizing readings of sections of Phenomenology of Mind and The Philosophy of Right, specifically Hegel’s account of the master-slave distinction and its overcoming, the paper develops an account of precarity in terms of the master/slave indistinction and the diremption of work and labor from the social grammar of recognition.
