Saint-Amand, The Pursuit of Laziness

Saint-Amand, Pierre. The Pursuit of Laziness: An Idle Interpretation of the Enlightenment. Trans. Jennifer Gage. Princeton: University Press, 2011.

In a thought-provoking original piece of work, Pierre Saint-Amand has successfully incorporated a postcolonial theoretical use of the “subaltern” to represent the delinquency of laziness within the dominate notions of productivity within eighteenth century France. Laziness is a contradiction of bourgeois modernization thus is depicted as a crime against industrialized society. Furthermore, the Enlightenment requires mental labor – the very Kantian rallying cry being “Sapere Aude” – and laziness becomes more than just a despicable vice but moral corruption. Nevertheless, The Pursuit of Laziness sees the conscious decision towards laziness as serving, “to open up an other vision of the eighteenth century,” and detaches from the Enlightenment as “an ideology of totalization, as the only path of rationality” (15). In this way, laziness is a protest against the bourgeois consensus and an original and individualistic conquest of freedom over social constraints of industrialization and the Enlightenment.

Saint-Amand uses French literature and art to illustrate the observations of eighteenth century intellectuals who viewed laziness as a liberating act. In the first chapter Saint-Amand analyzes the publication by Pierre Carlet de Marivaux called Le Spectateur francais who seeks to invent a new kind of writing where leisure moments, reflecting on nothing, allow for streams of consciousness to illustrate occasions of circumstance. “My intent,” Marivaux writes, “is to think neither well nor badly, but simply to capture faithfully  what comes to me from following the course of imagination laid out by things that I see or hear” (19). Idleness is this context is a style, an art of adaptability that sparks genius.

Circumstance is a guiding force behind the act of leisure and laziness and is illustrated vividly in chapter two with the art of Jean-Baptiste Chardin. By focusing on five of his works, Saint-Amand shows how Chardin is able to capture the moments of distraction, “wasted time”. Quoting Demoris, Saint-Amand writes, “This empty time, which is occupied by nothing… is not subject to the time that metes out activity: it gives the feeling of indefinite duration, showing us people simultaneously engaged in an action and detach from it” (42). It is these intermediary states he incorporates concepts of physics to dramatize the metaphysical dimension of capturing the essence of moments

Chapter three does well to show the conflict between the dominate views of the Enlightenment viewing laziess in a negative view and the alterity of laziness depicting another side of enlightened thought. At the heart of this discussion is the conflicting views of Rousseau who viewed laziness in the dominate negative discourse in his early career, but shifted his views later and most notably in work, Reveries. Written later in life (1772-78), Reveries, “illuminate his deliberate intension to bring forth another body, one that is liberated from all constraints, that escapes all relations of knowledge and power”(64). Here, Rousseau emulates the Saint-Amand’s thesis of laziness being an enterprise that untethered the individual from various sites of power and all forms of relation. In Dialogues, Rousseau, writing in an autobiographical manner states, “The moment when he got rid of his watch, renouncing all thought of becoming rich in order to live from day to day, was one of the sweetest days of his life” (67). For the famous Rousseau pulled in every direction, idleness became truly a pursuit of happiness.

<span style="line-height: 115%; font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif"; font-size: 11.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA;"><span style="line-height: 115%; font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif"; font-size: 11.5pt;">Saint-Amand ends his work with the salient figure of Georges-Jacques Danton showing the incompatibility of laziness in the wake of late eighteenth-century French politics. “Next to the moving and shakers who championed the spirit of Voltaire,” Saint Amand writes, “…the lazy cut a rather pathetic figure” (119). Danton epitomizes this pathetic protagonist championing laziness and was no match for the efficient political machine of Robespierre and Jacobin Terror. Nevertheless, his laziness was more than just a mental breakdown but a protest to the aftermath of the revolution claiming, “I would rather be guillotined than guillotine others. I’ve had enough, what’s the point of us humans fighting each other? We should sit down together and be thoroughly at peace” (123). The constructs of political, social, and intellectual machines of the Enlightenment seem to break down with the suspension of work from the act of laziness, but with laziness arise circumstances “that spurns activity as the sole destiny of man and civilization” (123). For Saint-Amand, the heroes of his book are all figures of resistanc and produce a new ethic of freedom that runs counter to the demands of the bourgeois capitalist order.