Abstract

INCERTI, Fabiano. A brief reflection on the right to laziness. Conjectura: filos. e Educ. [online]. 2020, vol.25, e020034. ISSN 2178-4612.  https://doi.org/10.18226/21784612.v25.e020034.

Based on the thoughts of two critical French intellectuals of the twentieth century, in this article, we intend to ask about the place of laziness, when everyone has been charged for their high performance. Foucault shows us at different moments of his thinking that from both, a moral point of view and concerning economic processes, laziness was disapproved, watched, controlled. We see this, for example, in his course The Punitive Society (1972-1973), in which the 17th and 18th centuries classic laziness, seen as indolent and unproductive addiction and fought by the police force, changes from the 19th century to a sophisticated type of illegalism, which compromises the maximization of production and profit and is contained with intense and continuous work and with moral vigilance over the worker. As seen in Discipline and Punish (1975), it is the disciplinary and vigilant society that, acting on bodies, must eliminate all kinds of laziness to extract the highest possible use from them. In the course entitled The Birth of Biopolitics (1978-1979), he helps us realize that the neoliberal model should ban laziness, since what is sought in the market economy is maximum efficiency. Concomitant to Foucault’s courses, dedicated to the issues of liberalism and neoliberalism, Roland Barthes, in an interview entitled Let us dare to be lazy, from December 16, 1979, to Le Monde, makes us think that there was in the Western society a loss of the “institution laziness” due mainly to a specific obligation to diversify time. For us, “doing nothing” is intolerable. Thus, it is always necessary to insert something into life.

Keywords : Laziness; Time; Michel Foucault; Roland Barthes.

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