Arendt's Work: On the Architecture of The Human Condition

Abstract

Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition is often understood as an attempt to protect authentic politics by identifying a domain of "action" that can be kept pure of contamination by "labor" and "work." This essay shows that Arendt's conceptual triad is best understood, instead, as an uneasy joining-together of two functionally different distinctions: between labor and work (which she mainly wishes to distinguish) and between work and action (which she mainly wishes to understand in their interdependence). By attending to the neglected complexity of the concept that lies at the intersection of these two pairs—the concept of work—this essay undermines the dominant picture of Arendt as a purifying drawer of boundaries; sheds new light on the significance of the production of worldly objects, including but not only works of art, in her political thought; and explores hermeneutically important resonances between the substance and form of her own writing.