boredom has been affirmed as a source of invention. The microscopic, the private, the banal, and the apolitical have proven unexpectedly fertile.
A critique of dead time meant simultaneously a determination of “living” as desiring, creating, and enjoying. That is, politics would be desire’s programme.
Sade’s famous treatise framed by Philosophy in the Bedroom, liberty is determined as the self-annihilating submission to desire’s nightmarish imperatives
But the concepts of sex and desire have in common a certain affinity to the surrealist kind of liberty, a certain fullness of life, a certain vitalism of the unconscious, and, relatedly, a certain danger.
“Boredom is always counter-revolutionary.” He contrasts boredom to “[love’s] intensity, its here-and-nowness, its physical exaltation, its emotional fluidity, its eager acceptance of precariousness, of change: everything indicates that love will prove the key factor in recreating the world.” Such praise of resilience in emotional fluidity, such injunction to “eagerly accept precariousness,” would raise eyebrows in 2009-2011.
both impossible and unappealing. Something else is demanded. The young opposition to austerity is, therefore, “avant-garde.” So is the formlessness of occupant life, which combines precarity and care, testing a third way between the stale old “good life” and the cold new freedoms.
Sadness, like boredom, articulates onto time and work.
Comfortable precarity, whether supported by lucky sectors like tech and tutoring or by family provision, has even been extremely productive and successful. At the same time it is very conducive to depression. Generally the two responses to this depression follow the paradigms of the talking cure or of ergotherapy, depending, inter alia, on how discursively disposed the kid is.