Only the young are truly capable of exhaustion

"Gilles Deleuze, one of the few philosophical writers to have lingered on the question of fatigue, has identified in a late essay entitled 'L'Epuisé' a will to exhaustion in the work of Beckett. But even this is a characteristic overstatement. Exhaustion - or rather exhaustiveness, which of course requires a lot of energy - does not characterise Beckett's work very well, which is full of a much more pervasive, less philosophically glamorous state that one ought rather to call weariness, lethargy or, my preference, fatigue.

Exhaustion is not the defeat of the will, but the maniac, clenched persistence of the will into its very extinction. At one extreme of human existence, there is full vigour, able to launch itself energetically outwards into the 'projects' which phenomenologists hold so dear. At the other extreme there is utter exhaustion.

This is why only the young are truly capable of exhaustion, for to be young is to live catastrophically between intimately-connected extremes.

Age does not bring exhaustion. What happens in age is not that one gets dried out, used up. The loss of vigour in age means that one loses the capacity for exhaustion as one comes increasingly to occupy the middle ground between potency and exhaustion, the middle ground occupied in varying degrees by the many forms of fatigue. One dies in and dies of middle age: as you age, you do not get to the end of things, you get closer and closer to the indeterminate, chaotic silted-up middle of things.

Fatigue means the gnawing incapacity to project oneself into the world, to combat its resistances, to encounter its strangenesses. Vigour is the capacity for reach, for exertion; fatigue is the world reaching back into us. I make my fatigue my own, as I do not my exhaustion, for my exhaustion is beyond me. I take fatigue into myself, harbouring it just as I harbour my fantasies of exertion and excursion. I contain and coincide with my fatigue as I contain and coincide with my desire for expense of spirit.

For fatigue is not just the discovery that I am not up to some physical effort, it is also the intimation, as it were in the muscles themselves, of this probable incapacity. One's fatigue is always both prospective and in the background, never quite or quantifiably there, as one's weakness may be. And yet, where one can think of a weakness as a limit, to be overcome or compensated for, you are always in the midst of your fatigue, in something of the way you are always in the midst of shame (that the great writers of shame, Kafka, Beckett and Coetzee in particular, should turn out also to be the great chroniclers of fatigue seems significant to me.) Fatigue is to be lived with, lived through, rather than overcome.
To see fatigue as something other than a resistance to be overcome in the pursuit of ever greater reserves of never-expiring energy might be a useful constituent in a less expensive, less sacrificial, less immolatory and less indefatigable kind of politics. Perhaps fatigue, in its alliance with the instinct of self-limit, might form a part of a negative politics.

Exhaustion means the elimination of choice and possibility; but there is something voracious and appetitive in this elimination.

Exhaustive logic is logic that systematically goes through all the permutations of a solution to a problem in order to exclude them all.
Fatigue, by contrast, remains open, just about, to every possibility. That's why fatigue is so strong - and so tiring."




in "Some thoughts prepared for the 'Bare Life' panel" an essay by Steven Connor
in response to a keynote talk given by Alphonso Lingis
Research Symposium Civic Centre: Reclaiming the Right to Performance , London, 9-16 April 2003.
It has been published in Performance Research, 9 (2004): 54-8.