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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