The Use of Humans: Aristotle, Marx, and the Specters of Indeterminate Utility

Bradshaw, Tristan

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-vqeb-3a54

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The Use of Humans: Aristotle, Marx, and the Specters of Indeterminate Utility

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This dissertation reorients political theory to the concepts of use and utility for a more critical and emancipatory perspective on contemporary communal life. The reorientation entails a recovery of Aristotle’s and Marx’s overlapping approaches to use, whose contemporary reception indexes the surprising alignment of critical political theory with economics. That alignment has come by treating utility in terms of the solipsistic use of objects, which distracts from the social fact, and political problem, of human use that concerned Aristotle and Marx. By refocusing theoretical attention on the use of humans, this dissertation divides the politics of use and utility into two broad types. The first is the “politics of determinate utility” where human use and utility are delimited because instrumentalized for the sake of a determinate end. Wherever people are denied the right to determine that end, a split between them and the power to coordinate the use of humans occurs, a split that erodes the human singularity and collectivity that sustain democratic politics. With Aristotle and Marx, the dissertation conjures a second more empowering and emancipatory type, which is the spectral “politics of indeterminate utility.” This account of use centers on an ongoing process whereby singular individuals question and value human use as they work out common purpose within an expanded view of life. Here use is open, egalitarian, agonistic, androgynous, and quotidian and finds expression in a Marxian conception of free time—the time of indeterminate human use. By placing human usefulness back at the heart of political thinking, the dissertation makes a salient contribution to ongoing debates about democratic community and political action, the relationship between politics and economics, and critical theory and the contemporary value of ancient texts.

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