Rancière and Vallès: Musings on the Time In-Between

Abstract

It is surprising that despite its impassioned lobbying against the debilitating capital-driven purposefulness of time, Marx's work remains singularly resistant to the concept of pure leisure, to the idea of recreation for its own sake. When leisure does surface in Marx's discussion of alienated labour, it is frequently as a detail in a far grander plan, telling us little about the personal impact it had on its practitioners. Prevailing upon the radical forms and practices of leisure advocated, archived, and theorized by Paul Lafargue and Jacques Rancière, this essay proposes a reading of Jules Vallès's novel L'Enfant (1878) that sees in it a prolegomenon for a politics of idleness that both outstrips the restricted economy this notion takes on in Marx and offers a powerful, indisciplinary indictment of a world without ‘free time’. As with Lafargue and Rancière, Vallès leaves us scrutinizing the root radicality of those intermittent moments where things cease to happen, where idleness becomes, for the eponymous child of the novel's title, a transformative, emancipatory practice of the self in which time, space, and relations to others (and to the self) are reappropriated as sensuous, sociable ends-unto-themselves.