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Abstract. This article examines Jean-Paul Sartre's concept of committed literature as a manifestation of the tendency in Western modernity of conceiving literature as a form of praxis anchored in work. Discussing an alternative idea of engagement formulated by Maurice Blanchot, Roland Barthes, and Albert Camus, the essay develops a notion of exhausted literature that questions the prioritization of work and action in predominant models of commitment. Exhaustion is proposed as a politically and ethically motivated literary strategy of suspending the group-forming morality which, as a product of modern valorization of work and action, has accompanied literature of verisimilitude, activity, and oriented time.
WORK IN WESTERN MODERNITY is production of more than is needed, and regardless of whether the surplus is regulated by the state or reinvested by individual entrepreneurs, the social space that modern work brings to being is inseparable from alienated labor. Paradoxically, work has been also the preferred means for curing alienation. A crucial component of political ideologies, work has played a central role in various totalitarianisms, their social ideas, and political organizations. Fascism, for example, posited work as the essence of man, and with the vision of community in fusion, implemented work as a tool of self-appropriation, collective strength, and expulsion of otherness.
Work retained its systemic significance after World War II as well. Although not a vehicle of collective defense against finitude anymore, work was still the trusted answer to alienation. And not only in the Eastern bloc, where the doctrinal status of work was crucial in the project of building socialism. Work also remained the fundamental cultural value and principle of social life in the West. Key to the plan of postwar reconstruction, work was adopted as a shield against both fascism and communism, as a catalyst of progress, and as a means of overcoming the past and moving to the future. As Adorno suggests, work became an ideological device and instrument of self-imposed amnesia, which, however, led not to an overcoming of the past, but to its permanence and a systemic continuity of fascism in late capitalist societies.1 In the postwar years, as Werner Hamacher quips, work was not "worked-through," but merely "worked-off."2
In this scenario of modern life as a vita activa governed by work, non-work does...
