The Labor of Job: The Biblical Text As a Parable of Human Labor (New Slant) - Softcover

Negri, Antonio

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822346346 ISBN 13: 9780822346340

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

In The Labor of Job

, the renowned Marxist political philosopher Antonio Negri develops an unorthodox interpretation of the Old Testament book of Job, a canonical text of Judeo-Christian thought. In the biblical narrative, the pious Job is made to suffer for no apparent reason. The story revolves around his quest to understand why he must bear, and why God would allow, such misery. Conventional readings explain the tale as an affirmation of divine transcendence. When God finally speaks to Job, it is to assert his sovereignty and establish that it is not Job’s place to question what God allows. In Negri’s materialist reading, Job does not recognize God’s transcendence. He denies it, and in so doing becomes a co-creator of himself and the world.

The Labor of Job was first published in Italy in 1990. Negri began writing it in the early 1980s, while he was a political prisoner in Italy, and it was the first book he completed during his exile in France (1983–97). As he writes in the preface, understanding suffering was for him in the early 1980s “an essential element of resistance. . . . It was the problem of liberation, in prison and in exile, from within the absoluteness of Power.” Negri presents a Marxist interpretation of Job’s story. He describes it as a parable of human labor, one that illustrates the impossibility of systems of measure, whether of divine justice (in Job’s case) or the value of labor (in the case of late-twentieth-century Marxism). In the foreword, Michael Hardt elaborates on this interpretation. In his commentary, Roland Boer considers Negri’s reading of the book of Job in relation to the Bible and biblical exegesis. The Labor of Job provides an intriguing and accessible entry into the thought of one of today’s most important political philosophers.

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Antonio Negri was formerly professor of political science at the universities of Padua and Paris VIII. He is the author of many books. Those available in English include Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State and The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics. Matteo Mandarini is a lecturer in the School of Business and Management at Queen Mary University of London. He has translated books and essays by Negri including Time for Revolution. Michael Hardt is Professor of Literature and Italian at Duke University. He and Negri are the authors of Multitude and Empire. Roland Boer is Research Professor at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He is the author of Political Myth: On the Use and Abuse of Biblical Themes, also published by Duke University Press.

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"The book of Job is the first (and, in many ways, still unsurpassed) exemplary case of the critique of ideology, teaching us how to resist legitimizing our misfortunes with any kind of 'deeper meaning'--and who is more suitable to actualize this book for our times as Antoni Negri? In his hands, The book of Job turns into a revolutionary text, into a true manual of resistance."--Slavoj Zižek

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The Labor of Job

The Biblical Text as a Parable of Human Labor

By Antonio Negri, Matteo Mandarini

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2002 Bayard
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-4634-0

Contents

Foreword: Creation Beyond Measure, 
Preface to the 2002 Edition, 
Introduction, 
One: The Difference of Job, 
Two: Of the Absoluteness of the Contingent, 
Three: The Adversary and the Avenger, 
Four: The Chaos of Being, 
Five: The Dispositif of the Messiah, 
Six: The Constitution of Power, 
Seven: Ethics as Creation, 
Commentary: Negri, Job, and the Bible, 
Bibliographical Appendix, 

CHAPTER 1

The Difference of Job

1 The Immeasurableness of the World

Is Job so far from modern metaphysics and rationalism as to be related to the problematics of contemporary humanity only via ideas of the "untimely," of mystery, and of irrationality? Some interpreters think so. Guido Ceronetti, for example, poses the question of the current relevance of Job and of Spinoza. In the appendix to his translation of the book of Job, Ceronetti affirms that Spinoza considered Job as alien to metaphysics (that is, to modern rationalism) as he might have considered Ariosto to be. It is not so. Certainly, to Spinoza Job is remote and speaks a barbarous language: "Ibn Ezra asserts in his commentary that it was translated into Hebrew from another language and that this is the cause of its obscurity." But acknowledging such a remoteness is quite different from implying that Job has an alien conception of being! To begin, in Spinoza there is nothing like the profound antipathy toward Job the blasphemer that characterizes the rabbinic tradition. There is, of course, a substantial difference between the two great authors of Judaism, but not one that can be summed up in the distinction between the ancient and the modern, the mythical and the rational. This difference concerns only the form of the movement of being, not its foundation, nor its tendency, nor our destiny. Let us pursue the question of this difference then. In all probability things will become clearer. Firstly, the book of Job is a provocation against the seduction of reason, the insolence of knowledge, and the euphoria of ethics—whatever the motives underlying them. Spinoza's thought, on the other hand, is touched by this powerful surface (the enchantment of being's power, the innocence of the highest egotism, a certain quiet Prometheanism, the faith in the great passion as a good in itself—"all this smells even more of Spinoza," says Nietzsche). Secondly, Job's world does not have the same metaphysical shell as that of Spinoza—that is, a flat surface of an extremely powerful substrate that is always on the edge of overflowing but that is always held back. Job, on the other hand, is from the start subject to a violent rupture of the mythical-metaphysical surface of existence. Thirdly, whereas for Job reason and imagination stand in radical opposition, for Spinoza the one exists within the other and vice versa—operating in a constructive crescendo (as, once again, Nietzsche reminds us: "'The Meaning of Knowing—Non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere!' says Spinoza as simply and sublimely as is his wont. Yet in the last analysis, what else is this intelligere than the form in which we come to feel the other three at once?"). And yet, despite the sharpness of these differences, one feels in Job that same scansion of the ontological unity of experience that one finds in Spinoza. Neither in the one case nor in the other does difference lead to the ruination of the unity of being. On the contrary, once all idealist presumptions are destroyed, the different tensions weave themselves around the problem of an ontology of the human and the divine, of the drama of its construction and of the ethical significance of this process. Thus, the book of Job describes the path of the reconstruction of an ethical world once faith in God's justice has been deconstructed; and Spinoza's Ethics builds the salvation of humanity once all theological illusions have been removed (and revealed as the results of repugnant ignorance). They thus both work toward an ontology of the Messiah.

The Messiah, movement, and ascesis. Immensity [smisurato] then? Hegel accuses Spinoza at the very moment that he exhibits the most fetid presumption of controlling everything through the dialectical mechanism of Spirit—within its "measure." Spinoza is an exemplary case of the flight from this—exemplary par excellence: "Spinoza's mode, like the Indian principle of change, is the 'measureless.' The Greek awareness, itself still indeterminate, that everything has a measure—even Parmenides, after abstract being, introduced necessity as the ancient limit by which all things are bounded—is the beginning of a much higher conception than that contained in substance and in the difference of the mode from substance." Spinoza's world, then, is that of the "immense" [smisurato]. There could be no more profound analogy with Job's horizon! And what tragedy and how much wealth this world is able to contain! But Hegel will not admit that the world refuses to be vampirized by the system. He denounces this refusal for being the confession of metaphysical immobility, and that tragic struggle within the immeasurability of the world he makes slide into indifference—the consequence of which is annihilation. The Jewish Spinoza and the oriental Job stand in perfect continuity. That is how an irritated and impotent Hegel describes these two philosophies—with their repeated genealogy of immense [smisurato] resistance to all norms of homologation.

Thus, Hegel is right when—from his point of view—he links Spinoza and Job. And yet this commonality, whether one understands it negatively like Hegel or positively as we do, does not resolve the problem. Let us reconsider the problem in the light of the discussion so far. We have seen some superficial differences; we have also noted the same condition of ontological immeasurability and the breadth of its effects. Can we, however, on a second examination, discover any ontologically qualified subtle differences? Let us compare Job and Spinoza once again. When we put them on the same logical level and identify the same ontological foundation, the difference between them is revealed with such ethical intensity and as so epistemologically radical that it puts their similarities in the shade. The intensity of Job's question dramatizes the ethical situation more than Spinoza's and radically informs the order of its exposition. Let us adopt the basic assumptions of a materialist ethics: the project-drive of existence; the indefinite dynamic of the project of the construction of sense; the collective constitution of values; the principle of responsibility and cooperation; a radically inductive epistemology; a genealogical subjectivism in the constitution of the world and of the definition of reason.... To compare this materialist horizon with Spinoza's philosophy is merely to confirm it. In contrast, we will recognize in the superior intensity of Job's question a qualitative metaphysical leap—despite the substantial homogeneity of the problematic fields. This slight but consistent difference should be noted. Because the book of Job is not only a provocation against the seduction of reason—it is the phenomenological discovery and the metaphysical announcement of the disaster to which instrumental reason...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822346346
• ISBN 13: 9780822346340
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 138
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande