Unemployment: from Ontological Fracture to Political Composition

Resumen

This article offers a theoretical rethinking of unemployment beyond its institutional and economistic representations. Rather than approaching unemployment solely as a lack of work or income, it examines it as a condition that challenges dominant modern-capitalist notions of dignity, productivity, identity, and social recognition. Drawing on selected ethnographic insights from employment agencies – understood not as a full-fledged ethnography but as a heuristic starting point – the article develops a critical-analytical framework that intertwines ontological and political dimensions. By engaging with debates on subjectivation, inoperativity, the common, and multispecies relationality, the article reinterprets non-work not simply as deficit or exclusion but as a potentially generative condition. In dialogue with contemporary post-structuralist and post-humanist thought, it proposes an onto-political perspective in which unemployment and inoperativity can reveal alternative forms of sociality and modes of being-together, already emerging within the ruins of late capitalism. The contribution is thus primarily theoretical: it organizes a set of conceptual tools aimed at reconfiguring the anthropological understanding of unemployment and at opening new avenues for analyzing historically and socially situated contexts.