By Pierre Saint-Amand
We think about the Enlightenment as an period ruled through principles of growth, construction, and industry--not an period that preferred the lax and indolent person. yet was once the Enlightenment basically concerning the unceasing development of self and society? The Pursuit of Laziness examines ethical, political, and financial treatises of the interval, and divulges that the most important eighteenth-century texts did locate worth in idleness and nonproductivity. Fleshing out Enlightenment considering within the works of Denis Diderot, Joseph Joubert, Pierre de Marivaux, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Jean-Siméon Chardin, this booklet explores idleness in all its guises, and illustrates that laziness existed, now not as a vice of the wretched, yet as an exemplar of modernity and a resistance to ideals approximately advantage and utility.
Whether within the dawdlings of Marivaux's journalist who not on time and procrastinated or within the matters of Chardin's work who thrilled in suspended, playful time, Pierre Saint-Amand indicates how eighteenth-century works supplied a powerful argument for laziness. Rousseau deserted his past security of work to pursue reverie and botanical walks, Diderot emphasised a parasitic technique of resisting paintings on the way to free up time, and Joubert's little-known posthumous Notebooks significantly adverse the critical philosophy of the Enlightenment in a quest to infinitely delay work.
Unsettling the obdurate view of the eighteenth century as an age of frenetic industriousness and hard work, The Pursuit of Laziness plumbs the texts and photographs of the time and uncovers planned yearnings for slowness and recreation.
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