Moderns have excelled at exhausting themselves, their others, and the planet. In this seminar we will explore the disposition toward depletion as a constitutive problem of life and thought in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Why do we wear the world out and who do we become in so doing? We will examine "burnout" as a condition connecting psychic, political, aesthetic, and ecological distress in the simultaneously listless and overexcited present. Convening resources from philosophy, history, anthropology, political theory, literary studies, and contemporary art, we will consider, among other things: fossil fuels, neoliberal economic thought, enervation and nervous over-animation, stimulants, thermodynamics, empty calories, extravagant gift-giving, geological science, secular finitude, the "End of History," the loss of utopias, and deficits of attention. |