Endurance, exhaustion and the lure of redemption

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the lure of redemption in contemporary academic and accounts of exhaustion, endurance, and biopolitical life. Drawing on, and contributing to recent work on negativity in cultural geography, the paper analyses how optimism and redemption find their way in to academic writing on the contemporary condition. It interrogates the optimism in these literatures, paying attention to the genealogical roots of the propensity to redeem accounts of slow and attritional violence and biopolitical subjectivity. In particular, the paper charts the implicit politics and ethics at play in the invocation of the Deleuzian ‘otherwise’ which haunts many accounts of the transformatory potential of exhaustion, and the remnants of dialectical historicism and Christian morality at the heart of redemption narratives in accounts of endurance. The paper ends by questioning the motives behind such hopeful readings, and asks what it might entail to refuse to redeem tales of violence with optimistic glimmers of an as-yet unspecified world.