We think of the Enlightenment as an era dominated by ideas of
progress, production, and industry--not an era that favored the lax
and indolent individual. But was the Enlightenment only about the
unceasing improvement of self and society? "The Pursuit of
Laziness" examines moral, political, and economic treatises of the
period, and reveals that crucial eighteenth-century texts did find
value in idleness and nonproductivity. Fleshing out Enlightenment
thinking in the works of Denis Diderot, Joseph Joubert, Pierre de
Marivaux, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Jean-Simeon Chardin, this book
explores idleness in all its guises, and illustrates that laziness
existed, not as a vice of the wretched, but as an exemplar of
modernity and a resistance to beliefs about virtue and utility.
Whether in the dawdlings of Marivaux's journalist who delayed
and procrastinated or in the subjects of Chardin's paintings who
delighted in suspended, playful time, Pierre Saint-Amand shows how
eighteenth-century works provided a strong argument for laziness.
Rousseau abandoned his previous defense of labor to pursue reverie
and botanical walks, Diderot emphasized a parasitic strategy of
resisting work in order to liberate time, and Joubert's
little-known posthumous Notebooks radically opposed the central
philosophy of the Enlightenment in a quest to infinitely postpone
work.
Unsettling the stubborn view of the eighteenth century as an age
of frenetic industriousness and labor, "The Pursuit of Laziness"
plumbs the texts and images of the time and uncovers deliberate
yearnings for slowness and recreation."
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