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4 books match the query 'Exhaustion'

cover of Cartography of Exhaustion: Nihilism Inside Out

Cartography of Exhaustion

Nihilism Inside Out

Peter Pál Pelbart

University of Minnesota Press, 2015

In our current landscape of communicative and connective excess, a very novel contemporary exhaustion exacerbated by our relation to the postdigital terrain is ever present. The Brazilian philosopher and schizoanalyst Peter Pál Pelbart pushes the vital question of our nihililstic age to the limits: how can one learn to be left alone, live alone, and perhaps, by way of a Deleuzian “absolute solitude,” conjure a vitality for living again and, indeed, finding something truly “worthy of saying”? Through various poetic meanderings and meditations and building on the works of Blanchot, Musil, Guattari, and Delingy, among others, Pelbart reestablishes the possibility of fighting off the exhaustion of our current state of affairs. For Pelbart, we must chart the cartography of exhaustion as if it were a sort of molecular symptomology.


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cover of Euphoria and Exhaustion: Modern Sport in Soviet Culture and Society

Euphoria and Exhaustion

Modern Sport in Soviet Culture and Society

Edited by Nikolaus Katzer, Sandra Budy, Alexandra Köhring, and Manfred Zeller

Campus Verlag, 2010

The architects of the Soviet Union intended not merely to remake their society—they also had an ambitious plan to remake the citizenry physically, with the goal of perfecting the socialist ideal of man. As Euphoria and Exhaustionshows, the Soviet leadership used sport as one of the primary arenas in which to deploy and test their efforts to mechanize and perfect the human body, drawing on knowledge from physiology, biology, medicine, and hygiene. At the same time, however, such efforts, like any form of social control, could easily lead to discontent—and thus, the editors show, a study of changes in public attitude towards sport can offer insight into overall levels of integration, dissatisfaction, and social exhaustion in the Soviet Union.

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cover of Sick Work: Exhaustion, Labor, and Invisible Illness

Sick Work

Exhaustion, Labor, and Invisible Illness

Emily Lim Rogers

Duke University Press, 2026

In Sick Work, Emily Lim Rogers shows the unpaid labor it takes to be recognized as sick in the United States. Through a historical and ethnographic account of myalgic encephalomyelitis / chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS)—a disease defined by disproportionate exhaustion after any form of exertion, which has no cure or treatment—she reveals how changing formations of labor decide what counts as disability and what does not. Sickness, she writes, is not work’s opposite. Rather, the frequent dismissal of their disease leaves people with ME/CFS to do their own labor of disease advocacy, or “sick work,” even as their symptoms prevent many from working paid jobs. Rogers presents a history of the discursive construction of chronic fatigue and demonstrates its development alongside capitalism since the dawn of industrial management science in the late nineteenth century. These histories, she argues, echo through to the present day, shaping the denial of me/cfs and the stigma that surrounds it. Examining the everyday lives of people with ME/CFS and their activist movements, Sick Work describes how they swim upstream against strong tides of disbelief and demands a radical transformation of how work is defined and valued.
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cover of The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies

The Exhaustion of Difference

The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies

Alberto Moreiras

Duke University Press, 2001

The conditions for thinking about Latin America as a regional unit in transnational academic discourse have shifted over the past decades. In The Exhaustion of Difference Alberto Moreiras ponders the ramifications of this shift and draws on deconstruction, Marxian theory, philosophy, political economy, subaltern studies, literary criticism, and postcolonial studies to interrogate the minimal conditions for an effective critique of knowledge given the recent transformations of the contemporary world.

What, asks Moreiras, is the function of critical reason in the present moment? What is regionalistic knowledge in the face of globalization? Can regionalistic knowledge be an effective tool for a critique of contemporary reason? What is the specificity of Latin Americanist reflection and how is it situated to deal with these questions? Through examinations of critical regionalism, restitutional excess, the historical genealogy of Latin American subalternism, testimonio literature, and the cultural politics of magical realism, Moreiras argues that while cultural studies is increasingly institutionalized and in danger of reproducing the dominant ideologies of late capitalism, it is also ripe for giving way to projects of theoretical reformulation. Ultimately, he claims, critical reason must abandon its allegiance to aesthetic-historicist projects and the destructive binaries upon which all cultural theories of modernity have been constructed.

The Exhaustion of Difference makes a significant contribution to the rethinking of Latin American cultural studies.
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