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Barthes's Laziness
- The Yale Journal of Criticism
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 14, Number 2, Fall 2001
- pp. 519-526
- 10.1353/yale.2001.0035
- Article
- Additional Information
The Yale Journal of Criticism 14.2 (2001) 519-526
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Barthes's Laziness
Pierre Saint-Amand
Translated from the French by Jennifer Curtiss Gage
In Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, Barthes confesses his passion for dialectic, for binary play: in Barthes's view, this demon of contradiction is the beginning of meaning, of writing as "deporting." 1 In the constellation of dialectical terms that cut across his work, I would like to explore the opposition between work and leisure, which fuels Barthes's discourse and his imaginary. The junction of leisure and work undergoes an interesting development about which I would like to make some observations. This opposition is also at the heart of a "technique of the self" (in the Foucauldian sense), of an emancipation of the Barthesian body. Laziness is one of those neglected modes of existence that Barthes seeks to plumb. He paints it as a contradictory dimension of life, a paradoxical encounter with time.
It might be said that work is Barthes's hysteria. He evinces an unhealthy obsession with activity (compulsion, obligation, work agenda). But in his autobiographical works, he constantly envisions his deliverance from these various constraints. Indeed, Barthes dreams of laziness. For him it constitutes resistance to the regimes that subjugate the body and coerce the individual, that normalize the subject through his participation in productive life, through his accommodation of the world of necessity. It is no accident that, in Barthes's thoughts of laziness, school is the embodiment par excellence of compulsion, the very structure of constraint, the site of repression. In the course of an interview with Le Monde, he offers the following commandment, at once provocation and philosophical invitation: "Dare to be lazy." 2 Barthes confides that he harbors a radical laziness, a "glorious" form of "doing nothing." 3 His resistance is in fact more a reflex of procrastination, of diversion: it consists of constantly deferring, of putting off until tomorrow what is to be done. How are we to understand this shirking of submission to duty? Barthes's form of procrastination closely resembles the sense attributed to the notion by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who suggests that procrastination arises out of an [End Page 519] active attitude, an attempt to impose one's own control over life's string of events by disrupting their programmed sequence. As Bauman writes, procrastination makes possible the "delay of gratification" that characterizes modern existence. 4 Barthes himself might say "delay of jouissance." Procrastination is an intervention in time as con-sequence. Laziness, by contrast, interrupts time, breaking it into a series of "diversions," moments of diversification. Time is rendered heterogeneous, unforeseeable. What Barthes succeeds in doing is to subject work to a dialectic. He ushers it into a mode of living that constantly bends it, "deports" it. The compulsion to work is worked over by an art of living, a search for freedom.
In Barthes, the imaginary of laziness is also an imaginary of the writer. He alludes to Flaubert's fiddling about, as well as to Rousseau who, in a transgression late in life, took up needle-point. And of course, this imaginary is even more suggestive of Proust, whose laziness, Barthes writes, is the very condition of involuntary memory. Laziness allows "the rising to the surface of memories and sensations" in "free-flowing remembrance." 5 Or rather, the state of laziness is one of the subject's disintegration through memory, of progressive liquefaction. The lazy subject willingly cuts himself off from will; he is in-disposed. 6 In fact, this is a process of regaining the work that is not being accomplished. Here success is measured through its opposite: the work of art that is never finished. We know that for Barthes, the work is fundamentally uncompleted, yet to come: it returns forever to writing, which never comes to an end.
Barthes develops a metaphysics of laziness that entails another experience of subjectivity. There is no investment in laziness, except that of a body seeking gratuitous, disinterested, minimal activity, detached from commercial production. The subject, delivered from constraining activity...