Politics & Public Administration Seminar Series: Ranier Abengada “Temporal domination in the work society: when does withdrawal become political?”

Department of Politics and Public Administration Autumn 2026 Seminar Series with Guest Lecturer Ranier Abengada (UCD), presenting “Temporal domination in the work society: when does withdrawal become political?” 

Practices of withdrawal from work society are often read as private symptoms of exhaustion, burnout, laziness, or individual failure: an inability to articulate grievances through recognised channels of workplace contestation.  Ranier Abengada asks what becomes visible if such practices are instead approached as temporal refusals. These forms of withdrawal—such as non-availability, slowdown, absenteeism, boundary-setting, and disengagement, among others—do not, by themselves, amount to transformative social change; yet they may nevertheless disclose the contradictions of a social order that organises life through time. 

Work society does not simply take up time; it teaches us how time ought to count. Its authority is felt in the pressure to hold oneself accountable in advance to a socially sanctioned economy of usefulness. I develop this argument in three steps. 

First, I reconstruct work society as a temporal regime to show that work’s domination lies not only in the extraction of labour-time, but in the organisation of time as such: how it is measured, what remains, at what pace it must be lived, and how temporal freedom is distributed. Second, I turn to Hartmut Rosa’s theory of resonance to ask whether non-responsiveness should be understood merely as alienation, or also as an interruption of compulsory answerability. Third, I examine when such interruptions become politically significant rather than merely private. I argue that withdrawal becomes political when privatised fatigue is translated into a shared temporal conflict. 

Hence, I put forward the idea that withdrawal may be treated as a form of negative prefiguration: an interruption through which work’s authority over time becomes contestable, and glimpses of aborted post-work futures become perceptible in fragments.