Idle Forms

The naturalist novel is celebrated for its depictions of labor. Yet the grim determinism of this genre, with its plots of inexorable decline, suggests that one is doomed no matter how hard one works. Under such conditions, idleness offers to naturalism’s working-class characters a reprieve, a weapon of the weak, a rational response to an unjust regime. Drawing on eight of Zola’s novels and focusing on The Ladies’ Paradise (Au Bonheur des Dames, 1883), this essay argues that naturalism rescues, rather than rejects, the ground of idleness and aesthetic surrender. One implication of this argument is that naturalism and aestheticism are closer in character than is often understood.

Religious thought is often deeply concerned with work — what it is, how we should feel about it, why we must do it, and when we should stop. In this article, ideas about work from two different religious traditions are explored and compared. One tradition, stemming from the Talmud and early Rabbinic Judaism, thinks of work as the opposite of rest, and sees work and rest as, ideally, part of a divine cycle, alienation from which is painful. The other, a branch of Hinduism known as Shaivism, thinks of work as the opposite of play, and yet similarly thinks of play as a divine dynamic in which we are encouraged to participate. In both traditions, the relation between the isolated individual and the community is the key to understanding participation in divinity as well as what holds us back from that. This relationship between the individual and the community is understood differently in each tradition because the self as such is understood differently in each tradition. But both traditions, despite their religiosity, find deep parallels in modern, secular, political thought in ways that help us better understand the foundations of our own assumptions about community, work, and political flourishing.

“Enough” is a slippery signifier — it is never clear enough, or else it always means too much. In this inquiry, we investigate the social and psychic work that “enough” performs. We do so by following an associative series of narrative instantiations that demonstrate how enoughness holds the paradoxical capacity to signal both sufficiency and excess simultaneously. By close reading polyvocal, genre-hybrid texts (from Hélène Cixous reading Sigmund Freud and Clarice Lispector to Maggie Nelson reading Eve Sedgwick), we examine the capacity of enoughness to produce and reproduce psychic violence in the same stroke as it opens up a horizon of recuperative potentiality. As we pan across these intertextual dialogues, Donald Winnicott provides a metaphoric figure for the relative and relational nature of enoughness; from the “good enough mother,” we probe the relational prospects of “a good enough language” and its embodied effects and affects. As a threshold and as a speech act, as a gesture and an imaginary, “enough,” we argue, operates against the capitalist imperative “to have,” while setting and transgressing limits between subjects. Ultimately, the dialectic between sufficiency and excess enables “enough” to express both a boundary and the lack thereof, a finite form and its indefinite expanse. “Enough,” as it were, isn’t enough to anticipate or determine the reach of its own relational effects.

The article discusses the role of idleness in late neoliberal times in light of the glaring crisis that the institution of work is today going through. It suggests that today, as work becomes more and more problematic, and as the contradictions of neoliberal capitalism become more apparent and catastrophic, idleness becomes a viable existential and political option. In reading works of contemporary Israeli literature which are concerned with idleness and non-work, it shows the different potentials for resistance that are encapsulated in different forms of idleness and how they gain prevalence today. Leaning on thinkers such as David Graeber, Nancy Fraser, and Byung-Chul Han, the article first explains the manners in which work under neoliberalism brings about burnout and depression. Afterward, it moves on to reading contemporary Israeli literature by Michal Ben-Naftali, Noga Albalach, and Tahel Frosh. Reading these works through Giorgio Agamben’s concept of inoperativity, the article discusses various forms of political idleness — idle labor, asceticism, and strike — while framing them facing the potential political imagination of a post-capitalist society.