Tadeusz Rachwał Boeken

The main concern of the book is the way in which such seemingly obvious notions as labour and production have contributed to the formation of human subject in European culture. What is offered to the reader is a reading, and a re-reading, of a number of conceptualisations of culture, of a number of such »labours of the mind» in which labour and production, either explicitly or implicitly, become principles in the evaluation of cultures as well as powerful tools for the ideological constitution and reconstruction of social space. What the book also addresses is the question of the ways culture is related to nature, and hence the question of the reality of culture which, inevitably, hinges on questioning the reality of reality itself.

The book is devoted to social and political interdependencies of life and work, the interdependencies in which the ideas of loss and deprivation are the founding incentives of the precariousness of the position and the status of the human subject. Loss of property in the economic sense, along with the loss of properties in epistemological terms have become a crucial measure of precarity through its dissociation from what Judith Butler calls “the organization and protection of bodily needs.” The book offers a proposition of multidisciplinary reading of origins and constructions of “anxiety of loss” as a constitutive trait of what may be called the “economization” (or, after Jean-Pierre Dupuy, “economystifacion”) of human condition through various discursive practices tying loss with lack, and in this way making the uncertainty of possessing certain properties into a sphere of politically controlled semi-ontological anxieties. The book also reads loss in terms of topographical disorientation and the idea of placelessness.