From an Agambenian perspective, the question of whether social threefolding (Steiner’s differentiation of cultural-spiritual, political-legal, and economic spheres) would permit new forms of life or act as an obstacle depends on how we interpret Agamben’s critique of mediation and separations.

A few key points:

1. Forms of life and inseparability

   • For Agamben, a form of life is precisely one in which life and its form, being and its rule, cannot be separated. It resists the divisions (bios/zoē, law/life, means/end) that biopolitics depends on.

   • Social threefolding is built on separation: distinguishing and balancing spheres. In this sense, it institutionalizes difference rather than dissolves it. Agamben would likely see that as maintaining the very kind of separability that obstructs genuine forms of life.

2. Law and apparatus

   • Agamben views the legal order, rights, and institutions as apparatuses that capture life in forms of governance. Steiner’s model preserves a legal-political sphere with its own autonomous logic. That sphere would still reproduce the problem of life being mediated through law.

3. Economy and oikonomia

   • Agamben traces the genealogy of “economy” to oikonomia (the management of life). Even a “freed” economic sphere in Steiner’s model would be seen as a continuation of economic rationality as an apparatus, dividing life into spheres of management rather than dissolving governance over life.

4. Potential compatibility?

   • One could argue that Steiner’s threefolding attempts to prevent the total subsumption of all life under one apparatus (e.g., economy or state). In that sense, it could function as a buffer against totalizing domination, leaving room for less-governed spaces where new forms of life might appear.

   • But from Agamben’s stricter perspective, so long as life is structured into spheres and managed as such, this remains an obstacle to a politics of inoperativity—where life lives without relation to a particular task, function, or separation.

So:

• For Steiner, threefolding is a way to balance life’s domains.

• For Agamben, any such balancing is still a form of governance that obstructs the experiment of living beyond separations.

If pressed, I think Agamben would say threefolding is a refinement of the problem, not a solution. It protects against certain concentrations of power but still fails to open the space of a form of life in his sense.

Would you like me to sketch how Steiner’s vision of “associative economic life” could be contrasted directly with Agamben’s “inoperative community,” so you can see exactly where the two diverge?

You said:

Yes

ChatGPT said:

Great — let’s put them side by side in a way that shows the contrast clearly. I’ll take Steiner’s associative economics within social threefolding and Agamben’s inoperative community/forms of life, and show where they meet and where they diverge.

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1. Foundation

• Steiner (associative economics):
  The economy should be guided by cooperation rather than competition. Producers, distributors, and consumers form associations to regulate supply, demand, and prices in a way that serves human needs rather than profit.
  → Still assumes the “economic sphere” as a distinct domain of life, with its own rules.

• Agamben (forms of life/inoperative community):
  Life is not divided into spheres; it is inseparable from its form. Any division into tasks (economy, law, culture) is already a capture of life by apparatuses.
  → He wants life lived without external assignments, without being ordered toward production, governance, or cultural ends.

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2. Relation to Governance

• Steiner:
  Threefolding is a safeguard: by differentiating spheres, no single sphere (e.g. the state or the market) dominates. Each governs itself but stays in dialogue with the others.
  → Governance is preserved, just pluralized.

• Agamben:
  Governance as such is the problem. He critiques oikonomia (the management of life), arguing that all governance reduces life to administrable matter.
  → True politics would mean the suspension of governance, the exposure of life in its shared, unassignable being.

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3. Human Purpose

• Steiner:
  Economic activity is always oriented toward meeting human needs, and spiritual/cultural life develops freely when unshackled from state or economic control. Life is structured but liberated by proper balancing.

• Agamben:
  Human life does not need a function or telos to be fulfilled. Inoperative community is precisely when life no longer has to be productive, governable, or ordered toward ends.
  → A form of life is not “for” anything.

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4. Risk of Capture

• Steiner:
  The danger is concentration of power — the state dominating culture, or the economy dominating politics. Threefolding is a technique to prevent such capture.

• Agamben:
  The danger is not just capture, but the very division that makes capture possible. By splitting life into spheres, you already accept the logic of separability. The problem precedes domination.

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5. Possibility of Novelty

• Steiner:
  Associative economics and threefolding could allow new cultural and spiritual creativity to flourish because each sphere protects the autonomy of the others. Novel forms of community can arise within the framework.

• Agamben:
  Novel forms of life only arise when the framework itself becomes inoperative. They emerge in the interruption or suspension of governance, not in its rebalancing.

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Synthesis

• Steiner offers a model of reformist differentiation: spheres balanced so that no one dominates.

• Agamben seeks destituent potential: dissolving separations and letting life show itself beyond all governance.

So: Steiner’s associative economy is about functional integration, while Agamben’s inoperative community is about non-functional being-together.

Here’s a short dialogue between Steiner and Agamben. I’ll let Steiner speak first, outlining his vision, then Agamben replies with his critique.

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Steiner:
“The human organism, like the social organism, suffers when its members do not fulfill their proper functions. Just as the body needs the heart, lungs, and nerves to work in harmony, society needs three spheres: the cultural-spiritual, the legal-political, and the economic. When one sphere dominates the others, pathology results. But when each is free and balanced, human creativity and dignity can flourish. In the economy, this means associations of producers, distributors, and consumers working together cooperatively to meet needs, not exploit them. Only then can culture and spirit be truly free.”

Agamben:
“You speak of harmony through separation, but I see only governance. Life divided into spheres is life already captured. You imagine society like a body, but it is precisely this metaphor—the organism—that hides the violence of assignment. Heart, lung, nerves: each bound to its function. And so too man, bound to economy, to law, to culture.

You think you have freed the economy from greed, but you have not freed life from economy. You think you have freed culture from the state, but you have not freed life from law. Threefolding still governs, still manages, still divides. It distributes chains more evenly, perhaps, but does not break them.

A form of life cannot be fitted into your schema. It is not one part of a balanced whole, nor the product of cooperation. It is life that escapes assignment, escapes function—inoperative life. The task is not to balance spheres, but to render them destitute, to open a space where life and its form are inseparable, beyond governance, beyond economy, beyond law.”

Steiner:
“Without differentiation, all is confusion. The state colonizes spirit, or capital corrupts law. Threefolding is not chains—it is protection against chains.”

Agamben:
“Protection is still imprisonment. You protect culture from politics, but only by enclosing it as a sphere. The gesture of separation is itself the prison. You would save life by organizing it; I would free life by suspending the need for organization. Where you see confusion, I see possibility. Where you see balance, I see capture. Forms of life do not need protection. They need the end of separation.”