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At the end of the last chapter of this book, Pothier and Devlin’s critique of the ideology of productivity and efficiency points to the possibility of unshackling labor from the yoke of sovereignty. This labor, or rather the many labors expressing human creativity and praxis, human activities, can enter a completely new dimension, take on a new form, and be, not sovereign in turn, but free of the schema of sovereignty. To put it in a succinct and paradoxical form, the sovereignty of labor is labor without sovereignty. We have seen how the concept of sovereignty is a problem at various levels of human political life. Interestingly, it might still serve some purpose when, in a world of sovereign states, a people is denied sovereignty. However, this should not lead one to justify sovereignty as such, but rather to see that there are other possible configurations for the world than that dictated by the paradigm of sovereignty. If another world is indeed possible, it must be one in which the notion of a relation of a superior to an inferior, that is, the notion of sovereignty, is eliminated. Difference and diversity do not necessarily entail sovereignty. When sovereignty is associated with productivity, as is particularly the case under the regime of capital, it takes on a more dangerous character than it might have in the sphere of state politics. Indeed, such association determines people’s everydayness more than state politics does—and the latter, as Peter Bratsis (2006) shows, is really a result, rather than a presupposition, of the former. It does so by serving as the structural moment of relations such Conclusion: Labor without Sovereignty 158 CONCLUSION as the productive/unproductive labor distinction, or the division of labor itself . Typically, the fact that some forms of human activity are seen as unproductive , and undervalued on that account, speaks clearly enough of the injustice inherent in the hierarchical constitution of these relations. By being unproductive, they are considered lower than the productive ones. Obviously , everybody knows that they are not. Everybody knows that without those forms of labor dubbed unproductive, human life would be impossible, certainly it would not even approach the possibility of aiming at the good life, but stay solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. However, even for Hobbes, whose work I have not treated in this book, it is not the sovereign who alone ensures the possibility of a better life. The sovereign only inspires the fear necessary for the observance of the covenant. For Hobbes, the covenant is not between the united people and the sovereign , but rather among the united people under the sovereign, who choose the sovereign as a guarantor. Yet, it is still the same idea of sovereignty that keeps people from wrongdoing, the fear that that power inspires—as if caring would necessitate fear as a precondition. True care, the labor of care is that which is performed not because of the fear that in not performing it one could be found guilty of wrongdoing. Rather, true care is motivated by one’s attitude in relation to the dignity of individuation, by one’s experience of the plenitude of each singularity, and of oneself as plenitude. In this book I have proposed the labor of care as an alternative to productive labor and as an adequate expression of the notion of labor without sovereignty. A caring mode of production is not one in which nothing but affection is produced. Rather, it is the mode that allows labor to return to its original disposition of producing the necessary and useful for the good life, not of this or that group of people, but of the plenitude full of plenitudes. ...

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