el animal sabático, dixit agamben

Retrato de Agamben como una criatura de muchos brazos.

Human life is inoperative and without purpose, but precisely this argia and this absence of aim make the incomparable operativity of the human species possible. Man has dedicated himself to production and labor [lavoro], because in his essence he is completely devoid of work [opera], because he is the Sabbatical animal par excellence...This inoperativity is the political substance of the Occident, the glorious nutrient of all power. For this reason festival and idleness return ceaselessly in the dreams and political utopias of the Occident and are equally incessantly shipwrecked there. They are the enigmatic relics that the economic-theological machine abandons on the water’s edge of civilization and that each time men question anew, nostalgically and in vain. Nostalgically because they appear to contain something that belongs to the human essence, but in vain because really they are nothing but the waste products of the immaterial and glorious fuel burnt by the motor of the machine as it turns, and that cannot be stopped.

Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory