Materiality of Freedom: To Live or to Work?

In the article, labor under capitalism is understood as a dehumanizing ideology that turns a person only into a worker. This becomes possible through the alienation of man from nature and corporeality. The connection with nature is blocked through the seizure of land, through the scrapping of the usual way of life, the rejection of traditional occupations through "deprivation of shelters" (Anna Tsing) - this is how peasants turn into the proletariat, this is how compulsion to work is created. Corporeality is blocked and repressed, since man is reduced within capitalism only to their labor avatar. The life of a person outside of work turns out to be invisible, thus a person becomes a partial, incomplete subject. Emotional breakdown occurs, depressive states appear - a person, according to Franco "Bifo" Berardi, "deerotizes". This is how work eats up a part of life. According to Mark Fisher, the reason for all this turns out to be the totality of the capitalist project, the global atmosphere of "capitalist realism", blocking any other possibility of existence. Within this totality, the subject is not only exploited, but also self-exploited, since they are completely immersed in ideology and cannot overestimate oneself. Thus, labor is psychoanalytically associated with the self-sacrifice for the SuperEgo, with self-devaluation and self-splitting, with inclusion in the symbolic order. The possibility of liberation from the totality of capitalist ideology is considered in the article in the context of the texts of new materialism - these are the versions of Catherine Malabou and Jane Bennett. For example, Malabou speaks about neural liberation, where the bet is placed on the ambivalent plasticity of the brain. Bennett defends the project of vitalistic materialism, where she rehabilitates the materiality of the world, "vibrant matter". Moreover, for Bennett, it is fundamental to reject anthropocentrism, which blocks ties with nature and the world as a whole. These versions of materialism seem to be productive for the return of an ideologically devalued part of oneself to a person, for the return of their integrity and restoration of their connection with nature. So, corporeality and materiality turn out to be a resource for eliminating ideological distortion.

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