Fellow of the DFG-Centre for Advanced Studies 2767: "Imaginaria of Force" about: Tiredness. On the Cultural History of Perseverance

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Description

Tiredness is persistent. The resistance of its aneconomy is a historically and currently virulent topic in philosophical, economic, mechanical, physiological and psychiatric contexts. Tiredness is regarded as resistance, but also as potential energy, as a kind of active passivity (Seel 2014). Tiredness can therefore be linked to a critical observation: as the resilience of persistence and inertia, it confronts biopolitics and meritocracy with capitalist-critical concepts of negative potentiality (Agamben 1998). Against this backdrop, tiredness can be described as a phenomenon of insistent ‚letting be‘, which is situated in the discourse field of related phenomena such as exhaustion, fatigue, melancholy, but also laziness, boredom, uselessness, etc. (Schäfer 2016; Carduff/Felten 2013; Felten/Pankow 2015), in which tiredness has not yet been explicitly extrapolated as a form of resistance. Tiredness, according to my further thesis, also releases a specifically poetic potential as a dual phenomenon of fatigatio and lassitudo. With its characteristics of potentiality and ephemerality, tiredness also appears in the aesthetic field as an aneconomic figure whose poetic and philosophical dimensions interest me. This is already recognizable in the 17th century (moral philosophy: acedia) and 18th century (French materialism), became virulent in the long 19th century due to the massive changes in working and production conditions brought about by industrialization (Rabinbach 1992), shaped psychiatric discourse in the 20th century, and is reappearing today on social and ethical levels. Based on the literature, the project focuses on the political, ethical and medical implications and the specific correlations between tiredness, aesthetics and anthropology.