Will delay save our lives? After we assume we’re working out of time, our largest worry is having an excessive amount of. That is the paradox that highlights Hélène L’Heuillet, psychoanalyst and lecturer in philosophy on theParis-Sorbonne University, in Reward of the delay (Albin Michel, January 2020). A four-step essay for as many variations of an nervousness that haunts us and punctuates our life: being late.
The strike reveals us how busy our schedules are and has allowed us to win again one other time. She made us out there at one other time.
(Hélène L'Heuillet)
By the evaluation of the connection to work, to sleep, but in addition to unhappiness and melancholy, it invitations us to withstand pace and urgency to take the time to dwell and due to this fact exist. Delay, she writes, has particularly to do with freedom, as a result of it makes sovereign and a treatment for residing properly, inviting us to decelerate. And it’s exactly within the delay that when every part turns into ephemeral, we are able to begin to really feel the length once more. Nonetheless, we can not grasp or body the delay: whether it is built-in right into a time margin, it’s now not late.
Usually, delay is the prerogative of the highly effective. How do you take a look at the docility of the opposite? By making him wait.
(Hélène L'Heuillet)
Nonetheless, making good use of the delay, she says, doesn’t imply slowing down or returning to slowness. Neither is it about praising persistence in being late, however about haste associated to key deadlines. The obsession with delay would relaxation on a conservative conception of progress assimilated to climbing a staircase: thus Claude Lévi-Strauss does he think about it because the precept of ethnocentrism, being designated as “retarded” those that can not sustain with the tempo. Above all, the delay can’t be arrange as a system, as a result of it then loses its subversive operate. It should shock even those that are late.
The true delay is one that isn’t calculated. The one who surprises us ourselves.
(Hélène L'Heuillet)
Sound extracts:
- Alice in Wonderland (Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske, 1951)
- Kitchen and Outbuildings (Philippe Muyl, 1993)
- The sleeping machine (ORTF JT 20H 27/01/1963)
- Georges Moustaki on The precise to laziness by Paul Lafargue (“Right this moment life” / France 2/1982)
- Hartmut Rosa on “Acceleration”
