Saturday 11 April 2015

Michael J. Thate: Getting Carthage Back to Work: Augustine, Work, and the Politics of Order

Augustine begins De opere monachorum (400CE) by stating that accepting the "inspired" (inspirans) request of Aurelius to address the controversy surrounding the cessation of labor within the monastery of Carthage was both "fitting" (oportuit) and a service of "fruitful labor" (fructuosi laboris) (1.1). That Augustine would consider his treatise on the cessation of manual labor as both labor and opus is surely significant. But what is intriguing to consider is what Augustine might have meant in referring to his personal sense of "fit" and "calling" with the undertaking. Augustine's family status in Thasgate suggests that he himself most likely never had to work with his hands. So why would he feel such an affinity with a topic on the manual labor of monks? Labor was a necessary bond through which to order social relations. And the inoperative monks introduced a significant threat to that order by their appeal to an altogether different series of valuations in their cessation from manual work. Reading Augustine's De opere monachorum as part of an experimental social theory on expressions of form-of-life, and as a tiny Republica amidst the fallen societies of human wills, therefore proves an intriguing analog through which to read current post-Marxist critiques of affective economies (a la Berardi, Lordon, etc.).  The aim of this essay is therefore to situate this notion of "fit" and "calling" which Augustine says he feels toward the crisis of the inoperative monks in Carthage by placing it within his wider social and literary context, while also extending and appropriating this "context" into contemporary post-Marxist critiques of the desire and ordering of current affective economies.

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