On Inoperation and Glory

The coda surveys contemporary reverberations of the ideas examined throughout the book. In interpreting an interview with Jenny Odell, which focuses on the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's affirmative art collecting practices, the author takes up questions posed by philosopher Giorgio Agamben and poet Paul Celan about creating aesthetic afterlives or considering aesthetics a realm devoid of fascism. The coda pushes against liberal notions that affirm more art as more goods and looks instead to figures who politicized the act of poetry and the act of art as pivotal to the development of a political tradition. The coda links these ideas to the historical and contemporary moments in which the artist identified with and against the worker as an opening for more rigorous thinking about the artificial and hierarchical divisions between aesthetic and labor categories.