Hello laziness. By looking at the waves on the Basque coast, a Biarritz philosopher worthy of the name comes, through a phenomenon of mental undertow, to question the meaning of work. And such a dandy surfer couldn’t find a better place to host his thoughts than Le Dilettante, whose logo is a cat lazing on a book. Work therefore, with its terrible etymology which refers to tripalium antique of the farrier, is at the heart of this compendium. Starting from an equivalence of work/slavery, Frédéric Schiffter approaches the subject in the form of a colorful primer. After the “love dictionaries”, he invented the “disdainful dictionaries” for which this “indispensable precise” illustrated by Muzo could serve as a framework. You can kill yourself with work or become an executioner. In both cases, it is a question of violence. From absenteeism to zeal, here is the uninhibited lexicon of a despiser of work, the solitary reverie of an immobile walker who adapts his thoughts to the depth of his laziness. In his gauge, he does not spare his references, from Aristotle to Giuseppe Rensi, not forgetting Marx, Nietzsche or the essential Paul Lafargue and his Right to laziness (1880). From these solid references, it shows how muchleisure Cyrenaic is preferable to business business. He draws a definition of the employee: “a poor human being, captive of the penal colony, also called companies or boxes. » Author of around fifteen essays including On the blabla and chichi of philosophers (PUF, 2002), an autobiographical story, We don’t die of sorrow (Flammarion, 2016), and a novel, Never the same wave (Flammarion, 2020), Frédéric Schiffter, with this falsely disillusioned but always lucid air, reveals our addiction to work and to this managerial trinket colored with anglicisms like the famous « process » favoring communication over reflection. He also endorses this sentence from Albert Cossery: “I write so that someone who has just read me does not go to work the next day. » So here is an essay in which we peck and whose reading we can interrupt, overcome by the sweet torpor of inaction. And don’t tell the author that all this lacks work, he would take it as a compliment…
Frédéric Schiffter, illustrated by Muzo
Indispensable specific hatred of work
The Dilettantes
Edition: 3,000 copies.
Price: €16; 128 p.
ISBN: 9791030801460
