SOURCE: Saint-Amand, Pierre. “Barthes's Laziness.” Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 2 (fall 2001): 519-26.

[In the following essay, Saint-Amand discusses the concept of laziness as it applies to Barthes and several of his writings, noting that for Barthes it remained a form of desire that never became a reality.]

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 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 indisposed.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, is even liberated from the structure of the ego. Barthes says that he is “decentered,” “almost dispossessed of his consistency as a subject.”⁷ This perspective even leads to a sort of Taoist stance: the lazy individual who rejects will, who refuses acts of decision, is essentially aiming at annihilation. Laziness inserts the subject within the framework of the neutral (a key notion in Barthes), in the utopia of suspension and irresponsibility.⁸ The experience of laziness implies a rejection of what Barthes associates with solidity (for Barthes, of course, the stereotype is by definition the crystallization of the solid).⁹ Rest, by contrast, liquefies the subject, renders him fluid. The lazy retreat produces a generalized state of floating in the individual:

Around six in the evening, I doze on my bed. The window is wide open, the grey day has lifted now. I experience a certain floating euphoria; everything is liquid, aerated, potable (I drink in the air, the moment, the garden) … it seems to me that I'm quite close to the state Zen calls sabi; or again (since I'm also reading Blanchot) to the “fluid heaviness” he speaks of apropos of Proust.¹⁰

But most salient of all is the way Barthes eroticizes laziness. He assimilates it to “cruising,” to the ambling of desire, the futile pursuit of what he calls “incidents.”¹¹ In Roland Barthes, the author describes this passion for diversion and distraction. Along with Fourier, he calls it “La Papillonne”:

Crazy, the power of distraction a man has who is bored, intimidated, or embarrassed by his work: working in the country (at what? at rereading myself, alas!), here is the list of distractions I incur every five minutes: spray a mosquito, cut my nails, eat a plum, take a piss, check the faucet to see if the water is still muddy … go to the drugstore, walk down to the garden to see how many nectarines have ripened on the tree, look at my radio-program listings, rig up a stand to hold my papers, etc.: I am cruising.¹²

Barthes's Soirées de Paris, his posthumously published journal, charts a map of this lazy perambulation, the rambling path of desire taken by a subject who flits about. Idleness appears as a state of desire in which the subject is made available.¹³ These are incidents without any event: they are as if suspended, or in any case destined to lead nowhere. The entire journal is encapsulated in a single vignette at the beginning of the text: “At the Flore where I read Le Monde (no news) …”¹⁴ Barthes is loitering. The Soirées are a succession of wasted time. The theater of the world is constantly emptying itself before the bewildered stroller. He is constantly describing his listlessness: pointless meetings set up aimlessly with gigolos, a parade of mannequins at loose ends for the writer's eyes only, burdensome meetings with friends or intellectuals, ill-timed encounters, hopeless cruising in the sauna and the dark room of a porn cinema. He longs to avoid these encounters, to purge himself of “all these disappointing cocks.” (The phrase Barthes chooses, “toutes ces queues de ratage,” is suggestively ambiguous, as queue can signify the sexual organ as well as the concatenation of annoyances.¹⁵ The Soirées evoke a whole ambiguous, off-color world of wee hours. All these micro-narratives of futility end in the solitary, celibate bed of repose, the exhausted narrator's final relief. Then he can collapse into his nightly routine, or curl up with his true pleasure: the reading of Chateaubriand.

What the Soirées de Paris construct is a non-space. They sketch the extra-territoriality in which the narrator exhibits his melancholy. Feeling nowhere at home, he has “no real refuge.”¹⁶ He seeks the desultory “emptiness” of the evening, when he is compelled to repeat, as he says, “the sense of abandonment.”¹⁷ Overcome with ennui, the ambler of the Soirées surrounds himself with faces that mirror his own state. In contrast to Baudelaire's experience of flânerie, as presented in Walter Benjamin's analysis, the throng encountered in Barthes's Soirées contributes to the narrator's vacancy. It forms a hostile “density,” to use the term Barthes associates with the population of hustlers.¹⁸ The little world that evolves in the Soirées is squalid. The scenes in cafés, restaurants, or streets form a spectacle where there is nothing to see. Here there is nothing heroic about the flâneur: Barthes is a dreadfully solitary wanderer, sucked in by a desperate nomadism.

The Soirées end with an episode that sums up the entire text and absorbs its affective tonality, a wrenching episode of abandonment and rejection. The framing of this episode is itself the narrator's siesta, a moment when activity stops—the body's attempt at numbness. Forbidding himself to go to Olivier G., yet drawn by the prospect of amorous repose, Barthes suspends his desire and pleads work obligations to send his young guest away. Here, doing nothing with the other, in the paradoxical intensity of desire, is the resigned gesture of the lazy lover. He abandons himself vis-à-vis the desired person, in a sort of being-there which signifies the immobilization of any effort of will:

I asked him to come and sit beside me on the bed during my nap; he came willingly enough, sat on the edge of the bed, looked at an art book; his body was very far away—if I stretched out an arm toward him, he didn't move, uncommunicative: no obliging-ness; moreover he soon went into the other room. A sort of despair came over me, I felt like crying. How clearly I saw that I would have to give up boys, because none of them felt any desire for me … that I have a melancholy life, that, finally, I'm bored to death by it, and that I must divest my life of this interest, or this hope.¹⁹

Laziness returns the subject to his childhood, and to the body from before work, before writing. It is for these reasons that laziness is always nostalgic. The body of laziness, in Barthes, is essentially the body of the countryside, of his childhood in Bayonne. And Bayonne, the sensual land of childhood, is all memory, “the memory of lost time.”²⁰ Barthes describes it in Incidents when he speaks of the Sud-Ouest. The Sud-Ouest, weighed down by the wind from Spain, is the place that offers Barthes the experience of annihilation par excellence, the poetry of laziness. It places the subject in a state of dispossession: “Sitting on the garden bench and squinting so as to obliterate all perspective, the way children do, I see a daisy in the flowerbed, flattened against the meadow on the other side of the road.”²¹ Barthes thus describes his favorite walk through the country of his childhood: a slow path sloping towards languor and remembrance, a patient excursion of memory (the French word for lazinesss, paresse, comes from pigritia in Latin, and Barthes tells us that we notice in it piger, which means “slow”²²):

But my favorite road, which I often indulge myself by taking, is the one that follows the right bank of the Adour; this is an old towpath, passing many farms and fine houses … this is a real route, not just a functional means of communication but a sort of complex experience in which occur simultaneously a continuous spectacle … and the memory of an ancestral practice, that of walking, of the slow and rhythmic penetration of the landscape, which then assumes different proportions …²³

This intense immobilization of time is different from the commercial, artificial immobilization sought by the tourist, reproduced on postcards. Here to experience a place means to “come and stay, so that you can savor the variegation of sites, seasons, weather, and light.”²⁴ It is in the same sense, that of slowly savoring, that we must read the description of the Bayonne streetcar in Roland Barthes, where the recollection of the panorama, the landscape taken in, is pure pleasure: “There used to be a white streetcar that ran between Bayonne and Biarritz; in the summer, an open car was attached to it: the caboose. Everyone wanted to ride in that car: through a rather empty countryside, one enjoyed the view, the movement, the fresh air, all at the same time.”²⁵

Laziness is this slow path traced effortlessly back towards childhood, towards the subject's first body, towards a pleasure before words. It leads to the original ecstasy of “unproductive life,” a state belonging to the imaginary, preceding the ineffable “fissure” in the subject.²⁶

OTIUM CUM VOLUPTATE

If laziness corresponds to a form of desire, an ambling pursuit of the object, to the lover it can represent a point of extinction, of glorious abandon, of actively letting go. Barthes describes a certain metaphysical state of inactivity which decenters the subject. The amorous state that corresponds to this figure makes a calculated appearance at the end of A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, where Barthes describes that moment when the subject decides to let go of the object and accept dispossession, when he seeks to escape the grip of the phantom of the other. He calls this “decision” of the lover the “non-will-to-possess” (N.W.P.).²⁷ This decision imbues the subject with an exalted floating sensation, a suspended annihilation: “I fling myself on my bed, I mull over the situation, and I decide: from now on, I will not make any attempt to possess the other.”²⁸ As Barthes asserts elsewhere, laziness is a moment of deliverance for the lover, a suspension of passionate tension, the creation of “a little corner of sloth.”²⁹ Barthes has chosen the non-will-to-possess as the last “figure” of the Lover's Discourse: it is a release from the imaginary torment consisting of the tumult of doing, the hysteria of action. After the fatigue of desire, past the panting after the other, the subject chooses repose: the N.W.P. is the lover's peace. Of course these figures, these “scenes” of the lover are conceived as a “sport,” a considerable active “expenditure.” Barthes even says that the figure is “the lover at work.”³⁰ The N.W.P. can thus appear as the ultimate figure (in fact the anti-figure) which allows egress from the book …

In the N.W.P. we find the same clouded intermingling that is omni-present in Barthes's erotics of active and passive, possessor and possessed. But more precisely, his thoughts take an explicitly Zen turn here:

For the notion of N.W.P. to be able to break with the system of the Image-repertoire, I must manage (by the determination of what obscure exhaustion?) to let myself drop somewhere outside of language, into the inert, and in a sense, quite simply, to sit down (“As I sit calmly, without doing anything, spring comes and the grass grows of its own accord”). And again the Orient: not to try to possess the non-will-to-possess; to let come (from the other) what comes, to let pass (from the other) what goes; to possess nothing, to repel nothing: to receive, not to keep, to produce without appropriating, etc. Or again: “The perfect Tao offers no difficulty, except that it avoids choosing.”³¹

The lover's non-will-to-possess is an annihilation disguised as freedom, a silence that produces an utterance, truly a floating retention, a suspension, a paradoxical holding back of the subject, a retreat (in the tactical sense as well). Barthes quotes Rilke: “Weil ich niemals dich anhielt, halt ich dich fest” (“Because I never possessed you, I hold you fast”).³² The non-will-to-possess thus enters into the Barthesian reign of delicacy.

Likewise, all of Barthes's writing tends towards an abandonment of work, an exit from the world of labor, towards freedom: for Barthes, this form of solemn dispossession of writing is at the heart of literature. He finds, again, in Proust, an image of this magnificent process of suspended relaxation, in “the Japanese paper flowers, tightly folded, that blossom and develop in water. That would be idleness: a moment of writing, a moment of the work.”³³ This end of laborious work is always the beginning of the literary work, when writing finally becomes the sole object of desire. When Barthes dreams of the book to come—the future novel, Vita Nova, that he envisions after his many writings, at the threshold of death with its inexorable finality—what he envisions is none other than the end of labor in its Sisyphean aspect of repetition: “And then a time also comes (the same time) when what you have done, worked, written, appears doomed to repetition: What! Until my death, to be writing articles, giving courses, lectures …”³⁴

A day will come, however, that will remove the writer from what he calls “this gradual silting up of work,” the entombment of all acts of writing, and that will set him down before a more liberating form of time.³⁵ Here, in The Rustle of Language—a text in which he once again considers Proust—Barthes describes this “new life,” this future of the work, the afterlife of writing. One of the missions of this Vita Nova is a new practice of writing, a new art of doing, a practice that is detached from the object: “The world no longer comes to me as an object, but as a writing.”³⁶ “Idleness” was one of the final sections projected in the posthumous pages of Vita Nova. The philosophical farniente he spoke of earlier belongs here. The obverse of this idleness is fundamentally “the ungrateful world of causes and allegiances.”³⁷ Barthes refers to a text by Heidegger:

The unnoticeable law of the earth preserves the earth in the sufficiency of the emerging and perishing of all things in the allotted sphere of the possible which everything follows, and yet nothing knows. The birch tree never oversteps its possibility. The colony of bees dwells in its possibility. It is first the will which arranges itself everywhere in technology that devours the earth in the exhaustion and consumption and change of what is artificial. Technology drives the earth beyond the developed sphere of its possibility into such things which are no longer a possibility and are thus the impossible.³⁸

“This,” Barthes writes,”is a good description of the battle between Writing (Will, great exertions, wear and tear, variations, caprices, artifices: in short, the Impossible) and Idleness (Nature, development—‘sensitivity’—within the Circle of the Possible).”³⁹

The Vita Nova opens the way to the vita otiosa. It was to be the experience of the novel as romanesque, as the notation of life. Throughout his writing, Barthes sought this rare retreat. His otium is not like its classical forerunner, in which time was lost in contemplation; Barthes's version does not demand such an investment, such discipline, such intellectual effort. It is rather the sovereign time of affect, like a utopia of the word: literature. But idleness is also essentially the work of non-production. The work of idleness is haunted by the impossible. Of course Barthes's Vita Nova was not to come to fruition: it was to remain a plan, a dream, fragments, the sketch of a liberated writing, an adventure of jouissance.

Notes

1. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 58. Barthes writes of “deporting the object.”

2. Roland Barthes, The Grain of the Voice, trans. Linda Coverdale (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), 338-345.

3. Ibid., 339.

4. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 157.

5. The Grain, 343.

6. See Roland Barthes, 122.

7. The Grain, 342.

8. See Roland Barthes, “Les corps qui passent—Passing bodies,” 141.

9. See Roland Barthes, 58: “in Greek, stereos means solid.”

10. Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), 365. The original reads: Vers six heures du soir, je m'endors à moitié sur mon lit. La fenêtre est grande ouverte sur la fin plus claire d'une journée grise. J'éprouve alors une euphorie de flottement; tout est liquide, aéré, buvable (je bois l'air, le temps, le jardin) … il me semble que c'est assez proche de l'état que le Zen appelle sabi; ou encore (puisque je lis aussi Blanchot) de la “fluide lourdeur” dont il parle à propos de Proust. (Le Bruissement de la langue [Paris: Seuil, 1984], 406.)

11. The Grain, 344.

12. Roland Barthes, 71-72. The original reads: C'est fou, le pouvoir de diversion d'un homme que son travail ennuie, intimide ou embarrasse: travaillant à la campagne (à quoi? à me relire, hélas!), voici la liste des diversions que je suscite toutes les cinq minutes: vaporiser une mouche, me couper les ongles, manger une prune, aller pisser, vérifier si l'eau du robinet est toujours boueuse … aller chez le pharmacien, descendre au jardin voir combien de brugnons ont mûri sur l'arbre, regarder le journal de radio, bricoler un dispositif pour tenir mes paperolles, etc.: je drague (Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, [Paris: Seuil, 1975], 76).

13. In The Rustle of Language, Roland Barthes writes that the experience of film induces a suspended state: “vacancy, want of occupation, lethargy” (345). This idleness places the body in an exceptional situation of freedom.

14. Roland Barthes, Incidents, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 51.

15. Roland Barthes, Incidents (Paris: Seuil, 1987), 94.

16. Incidents, 60.

17. Ibid., 163, 68.

18. Ibid, 55.

19. Ibid, 73. The original reads: Je lui ai demandé de venir à côté de moi sur le lit pendant ma sieste; il est venu très gentiment, s'est assis sur le bord, a lu un livre d'images; son corps était très loin, si j'étendais le bras vers lui, il ne bougeait pas, renfermé: aucune complaisance; il est d'ailleurs vite parti dans l'autre pièce. Une sorte de désespoir m'a pris, j'avais envie de pleurer. Je voyais dans l'évidence qu'il me fallait renoncer aux garçons, parce qu'il n'y avait pas de désir d'eux à moi …, que j'ai une vie triste, que, finalement, je m'ennuie, et qu'il me faut sortir cet intérêt, ou cet espoir, de ma vie (115-16).

20. Incidents, 7.

21. Ibid., 3.

22. Le Grain de la voix, 314.

23. Incidents, 6. The original reads: la route que je préfère et dont je me donne souvent le plaisir, c'est celle qui suit la rive droite de l'Adour; c'est un ancien chemin de halage, jalonné de fermes et de belles maisons. […] c'est encore une vraie route, non une voie fonctionnelle de communication, mais quelque chose comme une expérience complexe, où prennent place en même temps un spectacle continu … et le souvenir d'une pratique ancestrale, celle de la marche, de la pénétration lente et comme rythmée du paysage, qui prend dès lors d'autres proportions … (17).

24. Incidents, 6.

25. Roland Barthes, 49-50. The orginal reads: “Autrefois un tramway blanc faisait le service de Bayonne à Biarritz; l'été, on y attelait un wagon tout ouvert, sans coupé: la baladeuse. Grande joie, tout le monde voulait y monter: le long d'un paysage peu chargé, on jouissait à la fois du panorama, du mouvement, de l'air” (Roland Barthes, 54).

26. Roland Barthes, 3.

27. Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978), 232.

28. A Lover's Discourse, 232.

29. Ibid., 64.

30. Ibid., 4.

31. Ibid., 233-234. The original reads: Pour que la pensée du N.V.S. puisse rompre avec le système de l'Imaginaire, il faut que je parvienne (par la détermination de quelle fatigue obscure?) à me laisser tomber quelque part hors du langage, dans l'inerte, et, d'une certaine manière, tout simplement: m'asseoir (“Assis paisiblement sans rien faire, le printemps vient et l'herbe croît d'elle-même”). [This is the same poem that Barthes quotes elsewhere as the poetic definition of laziness: the allegory of desubjectification—see The Grain of the Voice, 341.] Et de nouveau l'Orient: ne pas vouloir saisir le non-vouloir-saisir, ne repousser rien: recevoir, ne pas conserver, produire sans s'approprier, etc. Ou encore: “Le Tao parfait n'offre pas de difficulté, sauf qu'il évite de choisir” (Fragments d'un discours amoureux [Paris: Seuil, 1977], 277).

32. A Lover's Discourse, 233.

33. The Grain, 343.

34. The Rustle of Language, 285.

35. Ibid., 285.

36. Ibid., 289.

37. Ibid., 299.

38. Martin Heidegger, “Overcoming Metaphysics,” The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1973).

39. Roland Barthes, Vita Nova in Œuvres complètes, ed. Éric Marty, 3 vols. (Paris: Seuil, 1993-1995), III.1307.