The title of this essay refers not, as one might have imagined, to that moment in the spring of 2020 near the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic when tens of millions of people across the world were suddenly laid off or furloughed or told to work from home and a worldwide economic slowdown began. Despite the echoes of this most recent crisis, my title refers instead to all the discourses regarding the “end of work” that have cropped up periodically since the end of the nineteenth century and that drew widespread public attention back in the 1990s, due in large part to Jeremy Rifkin's book The End of Work.1 In that now classic work of 1995, Rifkin, the well-known economic and social theorist, predicted the end of work as we know it, as more and more jobs once performed by human beings in the agricultural, manufacturing, and even the service sector become automated and taken over by machines, robots, and computers. Rifkin suggested at the time that “massive unemployment of a kind never before experienced” would be “all but inevitable in the coming decades” (Rifkin 1995, 5) as we enter into “a new phase in world history,” “one in which fewer and fewer workers [would] be needed to produce the goods and services for the global population” (Rifkin 1995, xvi).A quarter of a century later, it might appear either that Rifkin's dire prognostications were woefully misguided, since unemployment in the United States before the unexpected coronavirus outbreak was well below 4%, despite the continuing automation of so many industries, or that those predictions of increasing unemployment or underemployment and greater and greater income inequality as a result of automation were in fact beginning to be realized before the pandemic and have actually been borne out in some rather stark and unexpected ways by the pandemic (even if, as of this writing, unemployment in the United States has once again fallen below 4%).2 For there is no doubt that the current pandemic will have demonstrated just how many of the basic needs of global populations can be satisfied, at least in many parts of the developed world, with only a fraction of the workforce fully employed, and it has led even more industries (from entertainment to education) to recognize that they can best survive by automating more and more of their services or by replacing full-time workers with low-paid or part-time workers. In this second scenario, the 2019–2022 pandemic will have simply highlighted or provided a final impetus to the movement of greater and greater globalization, job loss, and massive income inequality that Rifkin predicted would transform the way we think about the nature of work itself in the twenty-first century. Indeed, as we have all come to see firsthand over the past two years, almost nothing about what we call our “workaday world” has gone unchallenged by the current crisis, not the notion of world, for which the divisions have become at once less fixed due to the flexibility offered by telework and more strictly policed by nation-states responding to the pandemic, not the notion of the day, with the postwar, Monday through Friday, 9-to-5 workday being replaced by everything from part-time or irregular gig work to the 24/7 model of work that has blurred the boundary between leisure and work and transformed living spaces into workplaces, and not, therefore, the notion of work, which is undergoing dramatic transformation as a result of the current crisis and the more structural and systemic forces related to automation.Now, as a philosopher rather than an economist, I am woefully unqualified to enter into the economic debates concerning the accuracy of Rifkin's predictions. What I propose to do in what follows is to analyze instead the philosophical underpinnings, as well as the rhetoric and argumentative strategies, of Rifkin's work both on their own terms and through the works of Jacques Derrida. For Derrida himself took up in some detail Rifkin's 1995The End of Work during a seminar of 1998–1999, given under the title Le parjure et le pardon 2, Perjury and Pardon 2, which has only recently been published in French and in English translation.3 In that seminar, Derrida does not himself contest the rather bleak picture that Rifkin paints in The End of Work of the world economic crisis we are heading toward if drastic changes are not made to our economy and to the way we live. What he does do is pose critical questions about what he understands to be the essentially Judeo-Christian rhetoric regarding the “end of work” that frames and informs Rifkin's theses and analyses. For in addition to sounding the alarm regarding the global crisis on the horizon, Rifkin in the conclusion to his work suggests, in what Derrida calls a “euphoric” and even “apocalyptic” tone, the possibility of an end of work that would lead to a “rebirth of the human spirit” and a truly “fraternal” global community. What Derrida thus hears in this end of the millennium discourse is an age-old Judeo-Christian rhetoric that characterizes work as penance or expiation for our sins and the end of such work as a final remission of those sins and the heralding of a new, redeemed world here on Earth. Derrida thus spends three seminar sessions tracing the origins of Rifkin's rhetoric back to Immanuel Kant's Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone and, especially, Augustine's The City of God, where work is understood as expiation or as punishment for the fall, and the end of work as redemption from that fall.4In what follows, then, I wish to consider Derrida's readings of Augustine, Kant, and, especially, Rifkin around these questions of work in that seminar of 1998–1999 in order to demonstrate, first, how these readings are perfectly in line with Derrida's critique or “deconstruction” of the Judeo-Christian or Abrahamic origins of so many of our supposedly secular concepts, beginning with work. I then wish to supplement Derrida's reading and interpretation of Rifkin with a more complete account of Rifkin's own analyses, especially the chapter of The End of Work titled “Visions of Techno-Paradise,” where Rifkin himself looks at the religious origins of the uniquely American rhetoric surrounding work and the end of work. For Derrida himself does not underscore in his reading of Rifkin the uniquely American orientation Rifkin gives to both the problems and the promises of automation in the twenty-first century. As we will see, these aspects of Rifkin's work at once help justify Rifkin's religious language and so exempt him to some extent from Derrida's criticism and expose him even more fully to that criticism, inasmuch as Rifkin himself uncritically reinscribes Judeo-Christian notions of work and world into an American context that he clearly wishes to become a global model for the future. I conclude by using Rifkin and Derrida in order to pose just a few critical questions about what is happening today to the concept of work and to the discourses surrounding it as a result of automation and, of course, the current pandemic, which is helping to transform even further both the way we work and the way we think about work.From the early 1990s right up through his death in 2004, Derrida devoted much of his work to a thoroughgoing analysis or critique (what he called a “deconstruction”) of the Judeo-Christian or, as he sometimes preferred to call them, “Abrahamic” origins of so many putatively secular concepts of the West, everything from Enlightenment and political sovereignty to literature, human rights, cosmopolitanism, globalization, world, even concepts such as secularism or religious tolerance that would appear to have little to do with, or would even seem to run contrary to, religious notions and doctrines.5 In his 1998–1999 seminar Perjury and Pardon 2, Derrida adds to the list not only pardon or forgiveness, motivated by the worldwide emphasis at the time on public confessions and processes of reconciliation and forgiveness, but the notion of work, including the work week, the sabbath as the end of work, and so on. Derrida will say, for example, in an aside during the sixth session (on February 17, 1999) of the seminar, as he is reading Kant on forgiveness, sin, and work: “This is our question: given the Abrahamic heritage of forgiveness, what is happening in globalization, in a globalization that, in appearance, no longer refers to this message, to this inheritance, to this Abrahamic testament? This is the limit that interests us.” (Derrida 2021, xxx/179n6) To be clear, what Derrida finds problematic about these concepts is not that they are Judeo-Christian or Abrahamic per se but that these very particular, historically and theologically determined concepts are usually passed off in the post-Enlightenment discourses he is reading as secular, global, universal, and thus exemplary and inevitable.Interested in demonstrating a certain structural relation between these various Abrahamic notions, Derrida argues that there is often a close connection between globalization, or, in French, mondialisation—a term Derrida prefers because of its explicit reference to world (le monde)—and the end of work. Derrida's hypothesis is that discourses on globalization or mondialisation bear certain affinities with discourses regarding the end of work and the beginning of a new world, affinities that all point back to a similar Judeo-Christian or Abrahamic heritage. It is a thesis that Derrida will develop both in this seminar of 1998–1999 and in his April 1999 lecture “The University Without Condition,” where Derrida throws out the rather elliptical and enigmatic phrase, “as if the end of work were at the beginning of the world,” a phrase that can really only be understood in light of the seminar Derrida was giving in Paris at exactly the same time (see Derrida 2021, xxx/112). For in that seminar Derrida attempts to bring this Judeo-Christian or Abrahamic heritage into relief by analyzing two contemporary phenomena: first, the multiplication of public scenes of apology or repentance on the world stage, indeed, the globalization of these scenes of apology or asking for forgiveness in the mid to late 1990s, in everything from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, whose work was delivered to President Mandela on October 29, 1998, that is, just weeks before Derrida's seminar began in Paris, to President Bill Clinton's public apology for the Monica Lewinsky affair just a few months later, in February 1999, that is, right in the middle of the seminar, and second, the proliferation of discourses, often “apocalyptic” discourses, on the end of work, the most prominent being that of Jeremy Rifkin.Now such a focus on work, on travail, is initially a bit unexpected in a seminar on forgiveness, even if the theme of work itself is hardly absent from Derrida's earlier seminars and previously published work. Indeed questions of “work” were an ongoing preoccupation of Derrida's from his 1976–1977 seminar Theory and Practice through his 1993 Specters of Marx, where the very first of what Derrida identifies as the ten plagues of global capital is the worldwide crisis of unemployment or underemployment.6 But it is not initially obvious why Derrida would turn to the concept of work in the middle of a seminar on forgiveness, not at all clear what work has to do with forgiveness. Though the word “work,” travail, appears frequently in the early sessions of the seminar, it is usually employed in the context of the “work of reparations,” the “work of healing,” or the “work of mourning,” in short, a certain “working through” that, it is often assumed, must take place for any true forgiveness, pardoning, or amnesty to be granted. It is thus only in the course of Derrida's explicit focus on the question of work, beginning in the fourth session of the seminar, that all the lines are drawn and connections made between (1) the proliferation of scenes of apology and forgiveness throughout the world, that is, the globalization of these scenes of forgiveness, (2) the concomitant proliferation of discourses regarding an end of work due to this same globalization, (3) the theme of a new, emancipated, or redeemed world that is supposedly made possible by this globalization, and (4) the theological discourse that represents the end of work as forgiveness or as the final remission of sins in this new, redeemed, and finally globalized world. To think forgiveness, Derrida leads us to see, we must take into account the relationship between world, globalization, and work.It is thus in the midst of the fourth session of this second of two full years on the theme of forgiveness, the session of January 20, 1999, that Derrida begins a long interrogation of work, the nature of work, the Judeo-Christian origins of our concept of work, and the ways in which work appeared to be changing on the threshold of the twenty-first century. This interrogation will take up the better part of three sessions, with the fifth session, that of January 27, 1999, actually beginning with the question: “What is work? [Qu'est-ce que le travail?]” (Derrida 2021, xxx/134). Among the texts at the center of this interrogation will thus be, before Rifkin's The End of Work, select passages from Kant's Religion at the Limits of Reason Alone and the final chapters of Augustine's The City of God, texts that Derrida will try to read both on their own terms and through the structural and rhetorical affinities he finds between them.7 In other words, he will wish to underscore a certain “theology of work” informing them all, one that is, as Derrida will say in “The University Without Condition,” “no doubt not dead today.” It is thus with the aim of bringing to light the Judeo-Christian or Abrahamic origins of the concepts of work and world, concepts that could easily appear to be thoroughly secular, that Derrida will read Augustine, Kant, and Rifkin.8It is only with Derrida's turn to Augustine's The City of God that the connection between forgiveness and work becomes fully apparent, forgiveness and, more precisely, the end of work. Derrida begins: In this city of God to come, when deliverance, expiation, redemption will have erased all sins [fautes], Augustine also sees the heralding of the end of work, absolute repose, modern themes if ever there were any.And Derrida then continues, making it clear that he will be reading Augustine (and eventually Kant) already with Rifkin in view, the three of them, it seems, working with and through a similar notion of work: One often associates, as you know, the process of globalization [mondialisation] with the end of work, with tele-work that marks the end of work as labor, suffering, the assignation of the body, of the sweat of the brow, the becoming-virtual of work lightening the weightiness and the taking place of work (I refer you to works that are in the process of becoming classics, such as the book by Jeremy Rifkin on The End of Work). (Derrida 2021, xxx/117)Among the things that Augustine and Rifkin thus share, according to Derrida, is a reference to work as that particular form of doing or acting that allows one to live, precisely, “by the sweat of one's brow,” in other words, a painful, dolorous, expiatory work, a notion of work that has its origins in Judeo-Christian theology in mankind's expulsion from the Garden of Eden. As we read in Genesis, in a passage that Derrida will cite and that Augustine will comment on and develop in The City of God: To the woman [God] said, “I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children. . . . To Adam he said, “. . . Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. . . . By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.” (Genesis 3:16–19)9What was in the Garden of Eden more or less effortless activity, an acting or a doing without work, thus became, for both men and women after the fall, genuine toil and labor, travail, travails, dolorous and burdensome and, therefore, expiatory work. The end of work would thus promise a deliverance from everything with which work will have been associated since Genesis, not only pain and suffering but sin and death.10 The end of work would signal the final forgiveness of sins and the redemption of the world itself. That is the connection between the explicit theme of Derrida's seminar, namely, forgiveness, and the notions of world and work. Derrida writes: The end of the city of God, the end of the book titled The City of God, which in fact describes the world to come, the world finally reconciled with its redeemer, is also a long description of rest, of eternal rest in a world redeemed through the expiation and suffering of Christ. . . . a world that becomes what it should have been, a kingdom that will be in the end without end, in the rest of the Sabbath. (Derrida 2021, xxx/119)The coming of the celestial city or the City of God will signal the restoration, as it were, of that original state, and it will bring about not one Sabbath among others at the end of the work week but the “great Sabbath” that will have no end, “no evening,” as Augustine puts it. Derrida cites The City of God: Certainly that city shall have no greater joy than the celebration of the grace of Christ, who redeemed us by his blood. . . . There shall be the great Sabbath which has no evening, which God celebrated among His first works, as it is written, “And God rested on the seventh day from all His works which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it . . . ” (Genesis 2: 2) . . . For it is said of the Sabbath, “Ye shall do no servile work in it.” (Augustine, City of God, Book XXII, Chapter 30, 715–716; cited at Derrida 2021, xxx/120–121)11Augustine's City of God thus corresponds to the end of work or labor as expiation and punishment and the coming of an eternal rest, a Sabbath that has no end, “no evening.”12 It is through this end of work that the earthly realm becomes a heavenly kingdom without end, a world that has been redeemed by God's grace, a world freed from servility, a world without work, without sin, and, finally, without death. Such a world at the end of the world is, therefore, as Derrida parses it, a sort of “Christian globalization,” as if the very notions of world and globalization as they are conceived today owe their provenance to the kind of “theology of work” we see in Augustine.In Kant too, as Derrida will go on to argue (in the sixth session, of February 17, 1999), the history of work must be thought in conjunction with sin, beginning in Genesis (Derrida 2021, xxx/173). Focusing his analysis on a passage—a footnote, as it turns out—from Book Two of Kant's Religion book, titled “Concerning the Conflict of the Good with the Evil Principle for Sovereignty over Man,” Derrida concludes, after quickly working through the notion of radical evil in this text, that for Kant as well as Augustine work is understood as “punishment or expiation.” This is not, Derrida emphasizes, a concession on Kant's part to “a theodicy or to a sacerdotal religion . . . to a revealed or positive religion.” Rather, “it answers,” for Kant, “a need of human reason, the reason that obliges us to link ‘the course of nature with the laws of morality’: and so ‘we are to seek to become better men before we can expect to be freed from the ills of life’” (Derrida 2021, xxx/174–175). For Kant, then, “this idea of punishment for a prior sin in the service of progress is rational.” It is in fact, says Derrida with a certain irony, a sign of “Kant's progressivism” (Derrida 2021, xxx/179).13 Derrida quotes Kant: “Hence . . . the first man is represented (vorgestellt) [parentheses again] (in Holy Scripture [in der heiligen Schrift]), as condemned to work [zur Arbeit verdammt vorgestellt: condemned, damned, cursed, con-damned to work] if he would eat, his wife [condemned] to bear children in pain, and both [are condemned] to die, all on account of their transgressions (Übertretung). (Derrida 2021, xxx/180–181; see footnote on 68 of Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone)14In Kant as well as Augustine, then, work is related to sin and expiation, to man's condemnation to punishment, to his being able to die, to a certain end of the world, or to an end of one world and the beginning of another.But then we come to Jeremy Rifkin. If Derrida had been reading and thinking about Augustine and Kant (not to mention Hegel, who also figures prominently in the seminar) for decades by the time of the seminar Perjury and Pardon, Rifkin would seem to have been a newly acquired interest, the French translation of The End of Work, the one Derrida appears to be using throughout, coming out just a year before the beginning of the seminar.15 In an article titled “My Sunday ‘Humanities,’” dated by Derrida “Sunday, February 22, 1999,” and subsequently published in L'Humanité on March 4, 1999, that is, right in the middle of the seminar Perjury and Pardon that we have been following, Derrida speaks of wanting to treat “the great question of ‘work’” by bringing together a reading of Augustine's City of God with Rifkin's book, which, says Derrida, points out “some virtually indisputable facts” related to the new technological revolution that is replacing on a massive scale human labor by computers and robots—in a word, by automation. Rifkin's book points to these facts and raises no doubt essential questions about what is happening to work as a result, but it does so, Derrida goes on to say, “without, unfortunately, changing the language,” that is, it seems, the language of Augustine, Kant, and others in the Abrahamic heritage that implicitly informs his discourse.16In his seminar Perjury and Pardon, Derrida seems to accept Rifkin's thesis regarding a “third technological revolution,” that is, “after that of steam, coal, steel, and textiles (in the nineteenth century), then that of technology, oil, and the automobile (in the twentieth century), two revolutions that opened up each in turn a sector where the machine had not yet penetrated and where human work, not machine work . . . was still available,” a third revolution, that of automation, microcomputing, and robotics, where, unlike the other two revolutions, “there is no fourth zone to put the unemployed to work” (Derrida 2021, xxx/118; see Derrida 2002, 226). But while Derrida appears to accept the basic premises and conclusions of Rifkin's thesis, he goes on to raise critical questions regarding the rhetoric, precisely, of “globalization” and the “end of work” with which Rifkin frames his thesis. Derrida will hear in Rifkin echoes of the very same Judeo-Christian or Abrahamic rhetoric that he will have highlighted in Augustine and Kant. Hence Derrida will affirm, along with Rifkin, that something has happened this century to work, to the reality and to the concept of work, something that has to do with technics [la technique] and a certain tendency toward the asymptotic reduction in the duration of work and of work in real and localized time, in the same place as the body of the worker, to work, therefore, under all the classical forms that we have inherited. . . . something is indeed happening in the experience of the boundaries, the virtual communication, the speed and the reach of information, something that goes in the direction of a certain globalization. (Derrida 2021, xxx/118)All that, say Derrida, is “hardly contestable,” but, he continues, between, on the one hand, these phenomenal indications, themselves partial, heterogeneous, and unequal in their development, and which call for careful analysis and no doubt new concepts, between that, on the one hand, and, on the other, the doxical use, others would say the ideological inflation, the overblown and wooly-minded rhetoric with which one gives in to phrases like “the end of work” and “globalization,” there is a gap. (Derrida 2021, xxx/118)Derrida's hypothesis, we can already predict, is that the language and rhetoric informing the writings of Augustine and Kant can still be heard animating late-twentieth-century discourses such as Rifkin's. Derrida will thus speak in the same sentence of the end of work “in Sabbatical rest (as described in [Augustine's] The City of God) or in the at once euphoric and apocalyptic portrait of the era of the end of work [in Rifkin]” (Derrida 2021, xxx/136). He writes later in a similar vein: “There is an eschatology or an apocalypse of work in all these discourses on globalization as the end of work, and on the end of work as the end without end of the world” (Derrida 2021, xxx/154). Indeed, Derrida is quite explicit about his strategy of reading Rifkin as a “digression” undertaken with a view to underscoring the continuity between Augustine, Kant, and more contemporary discourses. Such a hypothesis appears wholly justified by the conclusion of The End of Work, which, “in its final and apocalyptic moment,” as Derrida characterizes it, and as a way of indicating the way to salvation, resorts to the Christian language of a “‘fraternity’ among men” (Derrida 2021, xxx/159). Once again, Derrida calls Rifkin's discourse “apocalyptic,” using a term he had himself once followed in Kant, and he flags Rifkin's reference in the closing pages of The End of Work to “fraternity,” a term that Derrida had scrutinized and criticized just a few years before in a two-year seminar devoted to philosophical and literary discourses on friendship, which almost always begin with relations between men, between brothers, friends of the same family, as it were.17 His antenna already up and attuned from those earlier readings, Derrida is going to show that Rifkin's apocalyptic trajectory goes from a diagnosis of the present situation to dire predictions about the future to hopes about a new or renewed world that will be born out of the current crisis. After summarizing some of the premises of Rifkin's argument in the preface to The End of Work, Derrida cites Rifkin directly: The Third Industrial Revolution is a powerful force for good and evil. The new information and telecommunication technologies have the potential to both liberate and destabilize civilization in the coming century. Whether the new technologies free us for a life of increasing leisure or result in massive unemployment and a potential global depression will depend in large part on how each nation addresses the question of productivity advances. In the final section, “The Dawn of the Post-Market Era,” we will explore several practical steps for coping with productivity advances in an effort to mitigate the effects of mass technological displacement while reaping the rewards of the high-technology revolution. (Rifkin 1995, xviii/16; quoted at Derrida 2021, xxx/159–160)It is, it seems—and this is hardly illegitimate; indeed, it is the power or the force of Derrida's reading strategy—Rifkin's reference to “good and evil,” with its echoes of Genesis, Augustine, and Kant, among others, that elicits Derrida's suspicion and that orients his entire reading. (Derrida introduces the quote by saying that Rifkin “poses rather bluntly [crûment] the question of good and evil.”) Having thus cited at some length the Introduction to The End of Work, Derrida skips more or less right to the conclusion, where Rifkin provides his own solutions to the coming crisis he will have just spent some two hundred pages detailing. I pick up Derrida in the seminar as he moves from Rifkin's preface to his conclusion: Now when, in conclusion, after an itinerary that is well worth following, and that you should read without me, he comes back in conclusion to the responsibilities to be taken, well, in order to name what exceeds both the machine and the market, that which indicates the way of salvation, he rediscovers the Christian language of fraternity, of the virtue of fraternity and of the rebirth of the human spirit that, alone, will give us non-machine solutions. In the passage that I am going to read, you are going to see reappear, in a non-fortuitous way, the language of a post-machinic and post-market [that is, adds Derrida during the session, aneconomic] fraternity, the value of the “rebirth of the human spirit,” even the word “resurrection,” indeed even {in the French translation of Rifkin} the phrase “sonner le glas” {as in the phrase, “The end of work could spell a death sentence [sonner le glas] for civilization as we have come to know it”} with its connotation of apocalypse. (Derrida 2021, xxx/160; see Rifkin 1995, 292–93/378–79)Derrida then reads aloud in his seminar most of the final two pages, in French translation, of Rifkin's The End of Work (Rifkin 1995, 291–93/French 378–79; quoted at Derrida 2021, xxx/161).Derrida focuses on the beginning and end of The End of Work because he wishes to demonstrate how the “ethicopolitical, indeed metaphysico-ideological discourse that frames the so very interesting and necessary analyses of Rifkin remains dependent upon [tributaire], inheritors of, the Christian tradition” (Derrida 2021, xxx/171). In other words, as Derrida comments extemporaneously during the seminar, he wishes to “mark the sometimes barely visible continuity of a hegemonic Christian tradition (mondialatinisiation/globalatinization),” to underscore here, as he had elsewhere, the essentially Judeo-Christian rhetoric that typically attends discourses about globalization and its effects, a Judeo-Christian rhetoric about globalization that so often passes itself off as what it is not, namely, a genuinely global, universal discourse—a discourse that, when left uncriticized or unscrutinized, can in fact impose itself as global and universal. As Derrida argues, “My hypothesis is that we cannot separate the politico-economic