The discourse of work and action reduces the human to a laboring animal.

Evidence

In other words, and these are Paul’s words, in contemporary theory, we are given the works, ta erga. And it becomes possible to consider that the lexicon of action, the “syntax of doing,” as Avital Ronell calls it, “subjected” as it is “to procedures of legitimation” is, like work, evocative of a “reduction of the human figure” that renders “the human equal to the laboring animal.” As Ronell puts it further, “servile by nature and affecting docility, work, at the core of the modern experience of alienation, is inhumane and antisocial.” — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 118

Categorization

• QUESTION: Is this a genuinely critical-deconstructive claim about work as alienation, or an idiosyncratic gloss that strains toward the theological reading of Paul vs. works?
• XREF: Echoes Agamben and the broader Italian-biopolitics revival of Paul (Badiou, Žižek) that Anidjar seems to be running parallel to and against. — connects to: Treating language as a self-running nature reduces humans to pilots of inert forces. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1217; Factory division of labor reduces workers to fragments of persons — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 634; Scientific quantification of nature parallels society’s reduction of humans to abstract labor power. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 583
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the…, 118