Sputnik, politics and contemporary art: Agamben, Arendt’s reader

Abstract

In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt explores the three dimensions in which the vita activa was given to man on Earth and thus analyzes the three ways in which human activity could be segmented: labor, work and action. From this research, the author allocates her concept of work of art in the field of work, a sphere in which, through the action of homo faber, the artifacts that guarantee the permanence of human beings in the world are produced. Moreover, Arendt's concept of politics, that is, the manner in which men step into the polis, would belong to the space of action. In this way, I intend to follow the reading of Giorgio Agamben, an author whose thought is tributary to the German philosopher, according to which the work of art does not have to do with a kind of fabrication, a way of interpreting bequeathed by a conventional perspective, but with an ethical and political activity. In crossing the thinking of these two authors, I intend to defend the thesis that Hannah Arendt's concept of politics in The Human Condition is perfectly consonant with the way Agamben interprets art in contemporaneity, that is, not as something related to a process productive that meets the sensitivity of the spectator -– notion inherited from modern Aesthetics – and closer to the exercise of an action.