Notes on Inactivity

In a world structured around work, inactivity is never simply the absence of action. It is a mode of unworking: a suspension of roles, tools, identities, and the inertias that hold them in place. It interrupts the very structure of use. When so much of life is defined by work, even inactivity becomes entangled in forms of labour and production. Tracing the idea of use from the Stoic concept of oikeiosis, in which the animal becomes familiar with itself, through Franciscan radical dispossession to Heidegger’s broken tools and the anguish of care, Am Johal shows that use is never neutral. The study reveals a metaphysical choreography between hand and world, agent and patient, mastery and abandonment.