Precarity of Work, Precarity of Moral Dispositions: Concern for Others in the Era of “Emotional” Capitalism
Résumé
Theodor W. Adorno invited us to conceive of the ever-present threat of a sociopolitical neutralization of the conditions for morality. This paper investigates what remains of his diagnosis of “bourgeois coldness” in the era of precarious labor. I argue that the current widespread thesis of an emotional phase of capitalism is false, for two reasons. First, because it describes robust moral dispositions that are diverted toward improper objects, thus neglecting the plurality of mechanisms of moral subjectivation that are at work; and second, because it erases the logic of gender that continues to undergird the distribution of these dispositions.