Michał Krzykawski
(Faculty of Philology, University of Silesia in Katowice)
Abstract:
In his Farewell to the Working Class, controversial and stimulating essay published in 1980, André Gorz posits that “the abolition of work will only be emancipatory if it also allows the development of autonomous activity.” Breaking with Marx’s theory of the historical role of proletariat identified with the working class, Gorz points out that the immediate interests of neo-proletarians (re)produced by technologically advanced capitalism are not consonant with a socialist rationality, their skills being in service solely to the rationality of capital. In this situation, going “beyond socialism” was meant to invent a different rationality. The whole theoretical effort of Gorz was to lay foundations for a civilization based on free time and being able to take social benefits from the technological evolution of capitalism. However, facing the new stage of proletarianization in the age of functional stupidity, as Bernard Stiegler has it in Automatic Society 1. The Future of Work, this new civilization is rather not to come. Although the liberation from labour should be seen as our near future, the free time this liberation gives us back is immediately captured by algorithms and plunge us into a kind of uber-misery. The different rationality André Gorz tried to install must be thought anew in the age of libertarian capitalism and its disruptive innovations.
Michał Krzykawski, Ph.D., assistant professor at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland and member of Internation/Geneva2020 research group founded on the initiative of Bernard Stiegler. He has written extensively on contemporary French philosophy and translated Stiegler, Descombes and Noudelmann. He is the author of two monographs: L’effet-Bataille. De la littérature d’excès à l’écriture. Un texte-lecture (Katowice, 2011) and (in Polish) The Other and the Common. Thirty-Five Years of French Philosophy (Warszawa, 2017). His book (in Polish), Desiring the Future. The Project of a General Technocritique, is forthcoming. His recently published works in English are: “The Amorous Frenzy of Things. Bataille’s Basely Material Love” (Routledge 2017) “J’accepte. On Jacques Derrida’s Cryptic Love by Unsealed Writing” (Avant 2/2017) and “Re-animalizing Animals, Re-animating Humans” (Routledge, forthcoming).