Peer Illner: Unworking

A critique of work in all its variations, from wage labor to psychoanalysis as a working through

A notion that increasingly haunts contemporary political theory and practice as we all purposefully or pointlessly work more and more hours, unworking overturns the blind valorization of work and action and invites us to think about radical passivity and inactivity as aesthetic and political practices that question the modernist mantra of willed production and ceaseless activity.

Published in Slavoj Zizek’s Lacanian Explorations series, this volume presents essays on unworking in its various political, aesthetic and philosophical guises, exploring its potentiality as well as its dead ends and dangers. It unites a range of contemporary thinkers that embrace negation, negativity and withdrawal as political strategies, turning unworking into a paradigm of the coming politics.

Authors include: Kathrin Busch, Alexander Garcia Duttmann, Alison Hugill, Anthony Iles, Peer Illner, Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Gertrud Koch, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Jose Rosales, Marina Vishmidt and Evan Calder Williams.