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Doing nothing: Pascal and diversion 1:39 So now we'll move on to F. So you talked about it a little, Dominique. F is for farniente. Farniente literally means in Italian to do nothing. To do nothing. So the question we might ask is, is it actually possible to do nothing, strictly nothing? Doesn't that correspond to a state called death, for example? And also how do we move, I think there are two questions perhaps that haunt philosophers, how to do nothing and what to do? How can we move from doing nothing to the question of what to do? From farniente to what is to be done?
3:11 I'm never going to work. Farniente doesn't have the same value depending on whether it's stealing an hour of rest, even with a cigarette in a corner, as against the grind of shift work, or someone who has never done anything at all. Because to someone who proposes farniente as a value, like Rousseau, I could—it would be a misreading in my opinion, but I could, quite mechanically, oppose Pascal, who says that the greatest misfortune of man is not being able to remain at rest in a room. And Pascal is right. I'll grant him the same reasoning, because he's the first—this anticipates Hegel, people don't usually make this connection, but I'll tell you right away why—he's the first to explain desire, I'll come back to this, not like all the others, through a stimulus that's in front of me, through the carrot dangling in front of me, examining why it interests me so much, but not through something in front of me that is posited, positive, and that I seek out, but through something that is behind my back and that I'm fleeing. That's Pascal.
4:03 The anguish of death, of my miserable and mortal condition, as he says, which means that nothing consoles me when I look at it closely, and so I do anything at all to distract myself, and this is why kings are the happiest—not because they're wept for, but because they're constantly, we're constantly kept busy distracting them. For if they thought about it, as Pascal says, they would be unhappy, kings though they are. So there, I'm setting up this antithesis, but no, it's very profound. I've just shown with Émile a moment ago that Rousseau prescribes to Émile not farniente, but work, and even manual work. I do not want him to be an artist or a book-gilder; I want a trade that makes the hands work more than the head.
Rousseau's precious farniente on the Île Saint-Pierre 4:38 He says it very well. A very important passage to read to the working classes. It's not just some thing like that where the slightly bourgeois-bohemian mother is happy to have a son who re-canes chairs because he flunked his prep classes. It's not quite the same thing. I mean, it's not an artist's trade, it's a real activity that makes the hands work more than the head. And at the same time, he praises farniente. Well, I repeat that this is the same alternation as his relationship to nature. Sometimes nature becomes the supreme value for him when it's the last recourse left against injustice.
5:08 Likewise, laziness, farniente, is like a sovereign good when one emerges from a nightmare. This is no accident. It's on the Île Saint-Pierre that he was able to devote himself, as he says, without restraint, as he says, to that precious farniente, to use the epithet he attaches to it in the Fifth Walk. He arrives on the island at the moment when he is being hounded by the police of the three greatest powers in Europe, where he has just been stoned for the umpteenth time—well, where he has just been chased for the umpteenth time from his home, and this time, by a stoning, he nearly lost his skin at the hands of the inhabitants of Môtiers in the Swiss Jura, stirred up by the strict Protestants of the Geneva consistory.
5:42 And at the moment when his main publications had just been burned, including Émile, and of course The Social Contract, in the public square. I say this because people often say of Rousseau, oh, the talk of a paranoid, he's a paranoid—it's true, there's all the vocabulary and even the syntax of a paranoiac, especially in the late works. But after all, a paranoid in the clinical sense is someone who is prey to imaginary dangers. Here, I've just pointed out dangers that, unfortunately, are anything but imaginary. There. So all the same, farniente is the first thing to do, and that I recommend, to those who are stuck in the daily grind, under the reign, to borrow Rousseau's terms, of servitude and domination.
6:28 And even, and even, and even the one who isn't stuck—I said 'she,' you'll see why, because there have been quite a few rapes in the forests lately, of women joggers—and even the one who, instead of using her farniente, her weekends, to do nothing, wears out every muscle until exhaustion, whom you see going by all red-faced doing her jogging. I don't know why this word replaced 'footing,' which was more popular in my day. The worker did footing, the bobo does jogging. Anyway, I feel like telling her: stop, rest, I know very well you're sleeping off your whisky, your nights out, etc., and atoning for all the harm of your filthy consumption.
7:04 Rest—she needs precious farniente, there you go.
