The Critique of Work in Modern French Thought

The Critique of Work in Modern French Thought PDF Author: Alastair Hemmens
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030125866
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
What is work? Why do we do it? Since time immemorial the answer to these questions, from both the left and the right, has been that work is both a natural necessity and, barring exploitation, a social good. One might criticise its management, its compensation and who benefits from it the most, but never work itself, never work as such. In this book, Alastair Hemmens seeks to challenge these received ideas. Drawing on the new ‘critique-of-value’ school of Marxian critical theory, Hemmens demonstrates that capitalism and its final crisis cannot be properly understood except in terms of the historically specific and socially destructive character of labour. It is from this radical perspective that Hemmens turns to an innovative critical analysis of the rich history of radical French thinkers who, over the past two centuries, have challenged the labour form head on: from the utopian-socialist Charles Fourier, who called for the abolition of the separation between work and play, and Marx’s wayward son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, who demanded The Right to Laziness (1880), to the father of Surrealism, André Breton, who inaugurated a ‘war on work’, and, of course, the French Situationist, Guy Debord, author of the famous graffito, ‘never work’. Ultimately, Hemmens considers normative changes in attitudes to work since the 1960s and the future of anti-capitalist social movements today. This book will be a crucial point of reference for contemporary debates about labour and the anti-work tradition in France.

Work

Work PDF Author: Steven Vallas
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745680704
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
This book provides a critical overview of the myriad literatures on “work,” viewed not only as a product of the marketplace but also as a social and political construct. Drawing on theoretical and empirical contributions from sociology, history, economics, and organizational studies, the book brings together perspectives that too often remain balkanized, using each to explore the nature of work today. Outlining the fundamental principles that unite social science thinking about work, Vallas offers an original discussion of the major theoretical perspectives that inform workplace analysis, including Marxist, interactionist, feminist, and institutionalist schools of thought. Chapters are devoted to the labor process, to workplace flexibility, to gender and racial inequalities at work, and to the link between globalization and the structure of work and authority today. Major topics include the relation between work and identity; the relation between workplace culture and managerial control; and the performance of emotional labor within service occupations. This concise book will be invaluable to students at all levels as it explores a range of insights to make sense of pressing issues that drive the social scientific study of work today.

The Problem with Work

The Problem with Work PDF Author: Kathi Weeks
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822351129
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
The Problem with Work develops a Marxist feminist critique of the structures and ethics of work, as well as a perspective for imagining a life no longer subordinated to them.

Undoing Work, Rethinking Community

Undoing Work, Rethinking Community PDF Author: James A. Chamberlain
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501714872
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
This revolutionary book presents a new conception of community and the struggle against capitalism. In Undoing Work, Rethinking Community, James A. Chamberlain argues that paid work and the civic duty to perform it substantially undermines freedom and justice. Chamberlain believes that to seize back our time and transform our society, we must abandon the deep-seated view that community is constructed by work, whether paid or not. Chamberlain focuses on the regimes of flexibility and the unconditional basic income, arguing that while both offer prospects for greater freedom and justice, they also incur the risk of shoring up the work society rather than challenging it. To transform the work society, he shows that we must also reconfigure the place of paid work in our lives and rethink the meaning of community at a deeper level. Throughout, he speaks to a broad readership, and his focus on freedom and social justice will interest scholars and activists alike. Chamberlain offers a range of strategies that will allow us to uncouple our deepest human values from the notion that worth is generated only through labor.

The Limits of Critique

The Limits of Critique PDF Author: Rita Felski
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022629403X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
Why do critics feel impelled to unmask and demystify the works that they read? What is the rationale for their conviction that language is always withholding some important truth, that the critic's task is to unearth what is unsaid, naturalized, or repressed? These are the features of critique, a mode of thought that thoroughly dominates academic criticism. In this book, Rita Felski brilliantly exposes critique's more troubling qualities and proposes alternatives to it. Critique, she argues, is not just a method but also a sensibility--one best captured by Paul Ricoeur's phrase "the hermeneutics of suspicion." As the characteristic affect of critique, suspicion, Felski shows, helps us understand critique's seductions and limitations. The questions that Felski poses about critique have implications well beyond intramural debates among literary scholars. Literary studies, says Felski, is facing a legitimation crisis thanks to a sadly depleted language of value that leaves the field struggling to find reasons why students should care about Beowulf or Baudelaire. Why is literature worth bothering with? For Felski, the tendencies to make literary texts the object of suspicious reading or, conversely, impute to them qualities of critique, forecloses too many other possibilities. Felski offers an alternative model that she calls "postcritical reading." Rather than looking behind the text for its hidden causes, conditions, and motives, she suggests that literary scholars place themselves in front of a text, reflecting on what it calls forth and makes possible. Here Felski enlists the work of Bruno Latour to rethink reading as a co-production between actors, rather than an unraveling of manifest meaning, a form of making rather than unmaking. As a scholar with an abiding respect for theory who has long deployed elements of critique in her own work, Felski is able to provide an insider's account of critique's limits and alternatives that will resonate widely in the humanities.

Coping with Work Stress

Coping with Work Stress PDF Author: Philip J. Dewe
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 9780470711705
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Coping with Work Stress: A Review and Critique highlights current research relating to the coping strategies of individuals and organizations, and provides best practice techniques for dealing with the growing epidemic of stress and lack of overall well-being at work. Reviews and critiques the most current research focusing on workplace stress Provides 'best practice' techniques for dealing with stress at the workplace Extends beyond stress to cover broader issues of well-being at work

The Function of Criticism at the Present Time

The Function of Criticism at the Present Time PDF Author: Matthew Arnold
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description


The Critique of Work in Modern French Thought

The Critique of Work in Modern French Thought PDF Author: Alastair Hemmens
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030125866
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Get Book Here

Book Description
What is work? Why do we do it? Since time immemorial the answer to these questions, from both the left and the right, has been that work is both a natural necessity and, barring exploitation, a social good. One might criticise its management, its compensation and who benefits from it the most, but never work itself, never work as such. In this book, Alastair Hemmens seeks to challenge these received ideas. Drawing on the new ‘critique-of-value’ school of Marxian critical theory, Hemmens demonstrates that capitalism and its final crisis cannot be properly understood except in terms of the historically specific and socially destructive character of labour. It is from this radical perspective that Hemmens turns to an innovative critical analysis of the rich history of radical French thinkers who, over the past two centuries, have challenged the labour form head on: from the utopian-socialist Charles Fourier, who called for the abolition of the separation between work and play, and Marx’s wayward son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, who demanded The Right to Laziness (1880), to the father of Surrealism, André Breton, who inaugurated a ‘war on work’, and, of course, the French Situationist, Guy Debord, author of the famous graffito, ‘never work’. Ultimately, Hemmens considers normative changes in attitudes to work since the 1960s and the future of anti-capitalist social movements today. This book will be a crucial point of reference for contemporary debates about labour and the anti-work tradition in France.

Terms of Work for Composition

Terms of Work for Composition PDF Author: Bruce Horner
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791492656
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Winner of the 2001 W. Ross Winterowd Award Best book in composition theory presented by JAC and the Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition In this book, Bruce Horner provides a cultural materialist critique of discourse on work in composition. Each chapter traces the ways in which one of the defining terms of composition—work, students, politics, academic, traditional, and writing—operates as a site for competing constructions of composition's identity.

The Word on College Reading and Writing

The Word on College Reading and Writing PDF Author: Carol Burnell
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781636350288
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
An interactive, multimedia text that introduces students to reading and writing at the college level.

Crisis Under Critique

Crisis Under Critique PDF Author: Didier Fassin
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231555482
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 711

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Book Description
The word “crisis” denotes a break, a discontinuity, a rupture—a moment after which the normal order can continue no longer. Yet our political vocabulary today is suffused with the rhetoric of crisis, to the point that supposed abnormalities have been normalized. How can the notion of crisis be rethought in order to take stock of—and challenge—our understanding of the many predicaments in which we find ourselves? Instead of diagnosing emergencies, Didier Fassin, Axel Honneth, and an assembly of leading thinkers examine how people experience, interpret, and contribute to the making of and the response to critical situations. Contributors inquire into the social production of crisis, evaluating a wide range of cases on five continents through the lenses of philosophy, sociology, anthropology, political science, history, and economics. Considering social movements, intellectual engagements, affected communities, and reflexive perspectives, the book foregrounds the perspectives of those most closely involved, bringing out the immediacy of crisis. Featuring analysis from below as well as above, from the inside as well as the outside, Crisis Under Critique is a singular intervention that utterly recasts one of today’s most crucial—yet most ambiguous—concepts.