Politics and Exhaustion: the Phenomenology of Action and the Horizons of Critique reconstructs the centrality of questions of political, psychic, and environmental exhaustion to debates about social transformation from the 19th century onwards. Organized around the work of Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, Frantz Fanon, Herbert Marcuse, Hannah Arendt, and Frank B. Wilderson III, the book offers a contradiction by which to understand the antinomies of progressive change: the experience of exhaustion, because of its systematic material threat, might offer a crucial basis for social transformation of basic needs and resources, animating a new subject, one who we understand to both suffer and be capable of both mobilizing and eventually abolishing the position of The Exhausted. On the other hand, if exhaustion is the call, the great dialectical symptom of what must be transformed, the 20th century has taught us that exhaustion is also an intimate part of the work, experience, and risk of transforming it on the terrain of collective action. Action, itself, exhausts. These two dimensions of exhaustion often foreclose one another in contemporary radical and realist democratic and critical theory, and yet, I argue, endurance demands that this disjuncture be traversed. On the other hand, because exhaustion threatens the dissolution of the collective subject that experiences it, the question of how and from what vantage this challenge might be registered is not only a political but also a philosophic question of the highest order. At a moment where the contemporary political humanities are turning towards the study of political action in realist terms, often from an anticolonial and antiracist perspective, the book both joins enthusiastically in this intellectual-generational event and questions it, drawing it critically into conversation with an earlier set of methods, including psychoanalytic, (Black) phenomenological, and nominally “post-structural” forms, arguing for the intimacy of exhaustion to the phenomenology of radical social change and the paradoxical role of critique, including pessimistic or otherwise seemingly negative or apolitical forms and poetics, in sustaining the texture of endurance. The manuscript is available for review.
As is true of my broader research, each book chapter centers not only a canonical contemporary theorist but also the transnational political movements in and against which their thinking emerged, torqued, and was transformed. Kant’s exhausting, generative “demandingness” is sharpened with reference to liberalism’s ambivalence about work, labor, and imperial commerce; Arendt’s postwar concerns about the exhaustion of the political engage ecosocialist debates about soil exhaustion, imperial capitalism, and racial extraction; Herbert Marcuse wrote to organizers in Black Detroit to ask how his Freudian diagnosis of the exhaustion of revolutionary desire could be unsettled with reference to antiracist and Global South struggles. In another chapter, which has been published in POLITY, I draw on the theoretical resources of Frantz Fanon’s newly translated clinical writings in the tradition of institutional psychotherapy, wherein exhaustion emerges as a symptom of and crisis for colonial psychiatry and, eventually, as a crucial aspect of the experience of revolutionary struggle. In subsequent chapters, I use Fanon’s writings to rethink Frank B. Wilderson's widely-circulated theory of “afropessimism” from the perspective of his experience as a disillusioned militant of uMkhonto we Sizwe, the military wing of the African National Congress in the South African anti-apartheid struggle, finding in Wilderson’s hardened position an unexpected lesson about the posture of pessimism in relation to revolutionary desire and its paths “after the thrill has gone.” I work archivally, across movement histories, political economy, and psychoanalytic writing, to recover the intertext and submerged indebtedness of Wilderson’s critique of “racial capitalism” to a distinct set of debates within South African Marxism (where, indeed, the term was first coined) about the political economy and fiscal policy of late-apartheid, its irrational commitment to racial antagonism and white rule beyond and even against the profit motive, and the challenges this posed for regnant visions of social transformation. On the other hand, the significance of Wilderson, for the book, is not only in these material questions of postcolonial politics but also in the questions of political subjectivity with which they are enmeshed. By re-situating Wilderson in South Africa, I offer a field of critique to hear in his thought not the traces of an exhausted political commitment that might be rectified with more enduring commitment to hope (as the political theory reception of his writings would have it), but also a crucial perspective on the historicity of revolutionary desire, struggle, and theoretical production.