The Life Process And Forgettable Living

Hannah Arendt makes no secret of her repulsion from what she calls 'the life process'--the folding of individual into species goals that she believes becomes dominant with civil society. The life process for her can only divert the individual's energy toward a reproduction with which the individual may be at odds. (1) Arendt thus reverses Marx's thesis that 'the perfected political state is, by its nature, the [Gattungsleben] of man' when that life is finally able to be taken up for its own benefit by the heretofore alienated individual. (2) In Marx, it is civil society that constricts humanity by placing private interests at the centre of its world (pp34, 43) and so preventing humanity from appearing as it could be. Under these circumstances species-life subsists only in the abstract form of the universal citizen that matches no actual person; when individuals really become universal citizens, human species-life would be actualised. While Arendt seems to agree with Marx that present society prevents the alienated individual from 'absorb[ing] into himself the abstract citizen', (3) for Arendt, it does so precisely by co-opting individuals into a life process that is itself inherently expropriative. For Marx, the alienated individual and species-life are on one side; for Arendt, species-life colludes malignantly with society. On Arendt's account, the possibilities for living are exhausted by a defensive 'humanity'--a protected circle of civilisation in which one can temporarily craft an identity--and an aggressive life process, associated with expropriative labour, that perpetuates itself through society without regard for individuals. As most readings of The Human Condition have seen it, Arendt's repulsion at the life process stems from her denigration of the labour that she associates with it, and this position in turn generates her argument that (cultural) 'work' and (political) 'action' attempt to compensate for coerced labour. Arendt's perception that the life process is not separate from society, and is expropriative, is original and valuable. Caught up in the intensity of her insight, however, she never reflects upon elements of living that are neither species-reproductive nor culturally significant. Such elements are forgettable and incessantly forgotten; Arendt dismisses them as 'meaningless', and overlooks the freedom they offer from life process and civil society alike. The Human Condition thus explores Arendt's version of a dilemma discovered by Kant, Nietzsche, and Freud in different ways--the dilemma of the misdirected organism, burdened with a drive that makes its own existence difficult. The environment she describes there bears the scars of her encounter with such a drive: it is a stark existential landscape in which feelings of shame dominate. If we suspend Arendt's rejection of 'meaninglessness', however, we may notice that The Human Condition suffers from its inability to incorporate the forgettable register of experience: it is the absence of that register that leaves the alternatives sounding so bare. Far from being unique to Arendt, the landscape of The Human Condition is one of the characteristic settings of modern thought about bios and society. In the last part of this essay I'll read passages of texts by Agamben, Adorno, and Claudia Brodsky to indicate how the Arendtian construction of a meaninglessness that is nonhuman leaves tracks in contemporary thought, often continuing to limit it. While Agamben's Remnants of Auschwitz and Homo Sacer struggle to defend against meaninglessness--a struggle plausibly inherited from Agamben's reading of Arendt--his Coming Community releases it, and suggests en route that forgettable living furnishes a better figure for freedom from the expropriative life process than Arendt's alternatives of work and action. The Coming Community, however, is the earlier work, and its promising notion of 'whatever being'--along with related strands of Agamben's thought--remains obscurely related to his elevation, elsewhere, of a subjectivity based in consciousness and shame

Epistemology · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Computer Science · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · Philosophy · Political Theology and Sovereignty · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics · Psychology

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