Lydia Salveir. “Laziness, like work, are the last creations”

The wind is rising against born “job indulgents” like him An undeniable test of success, About her interest in the world around us, Lidi Salveire, Prix Goncourt 2014, confirms: “He questions me, he challenges me, he surprises and terrifies me, I am sensitive to his weaknesses, his failures, his pains, his pains. opacity and I love sending him emails.

Madame Figaro . – What prompted you to write this praise of laziness?
Lydia Salveir. – Since the health crisis, many have begun to reconsider their work: does it make them happy, does it fulfill them, does it give them time to live? Or, on the contrary, it exhausted them, depressed them, deprived them of all desires, all meaning, all creative abilities. I looked at these questions to understand that laziness, like work as we think of it today, are recent creations because they are contemporary with the industrial revolution. Work activity used to be a means of satisfying needs. In commercial societies, work aims to create needs in a frenzied race for abundance and profit. This is what Bertrand Russell calls his praise of idleness, that one category of work consists in transforming matter, the other in having others do it. The first is painful and poorly paid, the second is less painful and better paid. The third category is represented by the big industrial leaders who take advantage of everyone, defend, wholeheartedly defend the moral value of work, and condemn with great severity the laziness that plunges the workers into alcoholism and depravity.

Is this opposition to the performance society?
All those who praised or praised laziness, poets (Sally Prudhomme, Théophile Gautier, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, etc.), writers (Herman Melville and his BartlebyGoncharov and his OblomovBeckett and his Murphy), philosophers and a number of researchers in the social sciences and humanities define it precisely as not responding to the dictates of utility, performance, and profit in our commercial world. Laziness, therefore, to “choose a day,” to cultivate a garden, to sit within oneself and gather oneself, to contemplate the world and contemplate its splendor, to devote oneself to reading, to devote time to love, to open one’s mind… In short, everything; unprofitable things given our productive societies.

Why did you introduce yourself as “Friend of Salvair?”
I had fun bringing into the story a certain Salvair, whose bad taste, irreverence and sweeping statements I criticize, and who thinks he is a writer. I said that there are several writers in one: the lyricist, the witness writer, the romantic writer, the literate writer, the poetic writer, the laughing writer, the philosopher in his hours, the satirist… have the feeling that the latter has been gaining more and more ground for some time. in me So, I dream that the writer of romantic novels wakes up and asserts himself by force.