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Diderot’s Neveu de Rameau features a philosophical character, Rameau, who represents materialist philosophy. Rameau develops a critique of work alongside an emancipatory art of laziness. He is characterized more as a lazy common man than as an idle aristocrat and what he refuses to do is to invest in any productive activity. To resist imposed labour he sets forth an art of laziness at work, that is to say reducing the task in hand to its simple contours, to its outward appearance. Laziness at work is for Rameau a strategy for survival to resist alienation; but it is also a social and political praxis which aims at a creating a formal or aesthetic type of dissonance, that would open the door to political dissonance and rebellion.