Precarity and Loss ― On Certain and Uncertain Properties of Life and Work

The book is devoted, generally, 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 human subject. The anthropological idea of homo faber, of man the artificer, which existentially links man with work has been complicated by the rendition of the effects of work as properties which, in what Hannah Arendt calls “the rise of the social”, have become inherently uncertain and perishable. Loss of property in the economic sense, along with the loss of properties in epistemological terms have thus become a crucial measure of precarity and dissociated it from what Judith Butler calls “the organization and protection of bodily needs”. The book offers a proposition of multidisciplinary reading of the origins and constructions of “fear of loss” as a constitutive trait of what may be called the “economization” of human condition, of our positioning of “life” away from its biological, or bodily, demands, of ascribing to it certain properties whose factual uncertainty. The book will consists of an “Introduction” clarifying the senses in which the categories of precarity and loss are treated and discussed in different contexts. Its main body will consist of five chapters approaching the questions of precarity and loss from the perspective of a number of categories facilitating a better understanding and readability of the complex networks within which some certainty, frequently illusory, is projected upon otherwise fluid and uncertain flows of the real.

Dr. Tadeusz Rachwal is professor at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw, Poland.