Title

Specters of Exhaustion: The Phenomenology of Action and the Horizon of Critique

Date of Award

Fall 10-1-2021

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Political Science

First Advisor

Benhabib, Seyla

Abstract

In 1986, tracking the erosion of the Welfare State project, Jürgen Habermas wroteof “the exhaustion of utopian energies.” Emerging in the first instance from a waning- Cold War account of the disappointing afterlives of the European left, the claim of his essay was just as equally about the capacity of critique to renew its own project. Although the institutional priorities emerging from Habermas’s diagnosis have been influential for political theory, the challenge of exhaustion has yet to be answered, or even properly problematized. Now, some forty years after Cold War claims to the “end of history,” confronted with specters of economic, political, environmental and racial crisis, exhaustion is once again central to the atmosphere of contemporary democratic politics—but its politics remain elusive. Pushing against an encroaching sentiment of nofuturism, my research turns to the history of political thought to ask: what kind of a problem is exhaustion today and what can its ubiquity illuminate about the relation between critique and political life? In fact, contestation over exhaustion in relation to the project of socialtransformation has been a major theme in the writings of 20th century thinkers. Engaging centrally with the work of Herbert Marcuse, Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, and Frank B. Wilderson III, my project offers the first full-length study of this conceptual legacy. I identify two horizons in which exhaustion emerges to trouble political thought—first, as an often disavowed aspect of the experience of democratic action over time and second, as a challenge for the re-forging of the critique of totality under capitalism. In reconsidering their relation, I tell a new story about the relation between historical and ontological positions of critique, arguing for the intimacy of pessimism, disappointment, and refusal to the project of revolution and proposing a new method for democratic theory that takes exhaustion as an index for resources of endurance that might be brought to bear on the present.In 1986, tracking the erosion of the Welfare State project, Jürgen Habermas wrote of “the exhaustion of utopian energies.” Emerging in the first instance from a waning- Cold War account of the disappointing afterlives of the European left, the claim of his essay was just as equally about the capacity of critique to renew its own project. Although the institutional priorities emerging from Habermas’s diagnosis have been influential for political theory, the challenge of exhaustion has yet to be answered, or even properly problematized. Now, some forty years after Cold War claims to the “end of history,” confronted with specters of economic, political, environmental and racial crisis, exhaustion is once again central to the atmosphere of contemporary democratic politics—but its politics remain elusive. Pushing against an encroaching sentiment of nofuturism, my research turns to the history of political thought to ask: what kind of a problem is exhaustion today and what can its ubiquity illuminate about the relation between critique and political life? In fact, contestation over exhaustion in relation to the project of social transformation has been a major theme in the writings of 20th century thinkers. Engaging centrally with the work of Herbert Marcuse, Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, and Frank B. Wilderson III, my project offers the first full-length study of this conceptual legacy. I identify two horizons in which exhaustion emerges to trouble political thought—first, as an often disavowed aspect of the experience of democratic action over time and second, as a challenge for the re-forging of the critique of totality under capitalism. In reconsidering their relation, I tell a new story about the relation between historical and ontological positions of critique, arguing for the intimacy of pessimism, disappointment, and refusal to the project of revolution and proposing a new method for democratic theory that takes exhaustion as an index for resources of endurance that might be brought to bear on the present.

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