Laziness & Work: An Interview with Pierre Saint-Amand
Sina Najafi and Pierre Saint-Amand Jean-Siméon Chardin, Auguste-Gabriel Godefroy Watching a Top Spin, 1738. The roots of our contemporary obsession with work and productivity are usually traced to the eighteenth century, when the new social and philosophical project of the Enlightenment, founded on rationality, dovetailed with the emergence of a capitalist economic system based on maximizing efficiency and productivity. This is the century in which the secular gospel of work in its modern form was written. In its most radical articulation, this gospel proposes that freedom and work are in fact equivalent. In his book, Paresse des Lumiéres (Editions du Seuil, 2008; The Pursuit of Laziness: Idle Philosophy and the Enlightenment), Pierre Saint-Amand, professor in the departments of French studies and comparative literature at Brown University, looks to the eighteenth century paradoxically not for a critique of laziness but instead for a counter-tradition that champions it. In figures as diverse as Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jean-Siméon Chardin, and Pierre Marivaux, he finds the beginnings of a refusal to participate in a social project governed by the work ethic and of a skepticism toward the notion that productivity and industry should be our ultimate goals. Sina Najafi spoke with Saint-Amand by phone. Why did you choose the eighteenth century as the focus of a book on laziness?The discourse against laziness really starts in a coherent way in the eighteenth century, as we reach the cusp of industrial capitalism, and as the discourses on labor and economy emerge in their rationality. That is when we see the previously marginal discourse on laziness becoming more and more pointed. In many of the philosophers of the eighteenth century, one finds an equivalence between work and life itself. In Discourse on the Political Economy, for example, Rousseau acknowledges the inevitability of work; when he considers the responsibilities of the State and the well-being of its citizens, he argues that it’s imperative that work always be necessary and never useless. Voltaire champions the spirit of industry that pervades his century when he writes, “To work is to live.” And in his famous essay What Is Enlightenment?, Kant defines the project of the Enlightenment as having “the courage to use your own reason.” For him, laziness is associated with cowardice, which is the condition for remaining in what he calls a state of “tutelage.” For Kant, laziness is the primary obstacle to an autonomous life. I was interested, however, in examining a counter-discourse that valorizes laziness. This counter-discourse rejects functionality, resists the ideology of utility, and affirms forms of marginality that radically unsettle the Enlightenment project. What is especially interesting is that some of the same figures in my book who promote laziness are also the ones writing apologies for work and labor. Diderot would be one example, as would Rousseau, who begins to associate laziness with freedom in his later work, especially Reveries of the Solitary Walker. This is also the case with the painter Chardin. Many of his canvases celebrate domestic activity, but then you have the other paintings where work is suspended, and the subjects are distracted—they indulge in relaxation and even indolence. That’s basically the contradiction, the moment of dialectic, that I wanted to explore in the book. But I wanted to leave aside the question of aristocratic idleness, which is of course a given in the eighteenth century. I wanted to confront instead the particular area where laziness and idleness become figures of resistance within bourgeois economy. Is the aristocracy exempted from critiques of laziness?Not exactly. In religious treatises and in a lot of satire, you do see aristocrats being portrayed as lazy, as unproductive. And, of course, during the French Revolution the aristocrat will become the iconic figure of laziness. In 1789, for example, Emmanuel Sieyès formulated, in his influential What Is the Third Estate?, the revolutionary ideas of the nation, which he saw as bound by a common obligation to work. And aristocrats became “strangers” to this common project because they did not produce anything. But the aristocracy is not really affected by the context of the rising bourgeois economy and its values, which is what I’m concerned with. After all, the aristocracy is a class that is exempted from all forms of work. Leisure is an inherent privilege. Are people like Diderot in fact reading the emerging bourgeois theories of economics and labor?We have traces of these theories in the work of someone like Diderot, of the way the discourse of liberal economy is infiltrating the discourse of the philosopher and the encyclopedist. The historian Annie Jacob has written on the alignment between the physiocrats, who were the early economists of the eighteenth century, and the encyclopedists like Diderot. We even find in Diderot allusions to Benjamin Franklin’s writings on economy—the proto-Weberian apology for work. Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack was translated very early on into French as La Science du Bonhomme Richard. When in Rameau’s Nephew —Diderot’s imaginary dialogue between a philosopher and an idler—he portrays the nephew as a parasite, as someone who lives on the margins of the market economy, he knows exactly what he’s doing. But there is a contradiction in Diderot’s work. He certainly belongs to the category of philosophers who promote labor, who want to valorize work. But in Rameau’s Nephew, Diderot creates this unique character who is a hero of non-production—a bohemian musician who does not produce anything that lasts. Diderot shows his admiration for the genius of an artist of unfinished works, for an idler who resists economic finality and is consumed by the present, who refuses employment and subjugation. And it’s interesting that Rameau’s Nephew was written while Diderot was involved in the great busy work of his life, the Encyclopedia, for which he wrote around five thousand entries. There are also entries in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopedia that deal with laziness.There are several of them, and they establish a hierarchy; I focus on three. The articles were written by the Chevalier de Jaucourt, who contributed many entries to the encyclopedia. At the lowest level, there is fainéantise, literally “doing nothing,” which is described as the most physical negation of activity,