Cartography of Exhaustion

Nihilism Inside Out

2015
Author:

Peter Pál Pelbart
Translated by John Laudenberger and Felix Rebolledo Palazuelos 

Distributed for Univocal Publishing

A meditation on the possibility of fighting off the exhaustion of our contemporary age of communicative and connective excess

Peter Pál Pelbart pushes the vital question of our nihilistic 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”?

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.

Peter Pál Pelbart is a Brazilian philosopher and schizoanalyst living in São Paulo, Brazil where he is a professor of philosophy at the Pontifical Catholic University of Sao Paulo. He also coordinates the Ueinzz Theatre Company.

John Laudenberger is a writer of fiction and a translator of both Portuguese and Spanish. He has translated works of philosophy, literature, art criticism, and music theory, among others.

Felix Rebolledo Palazuelos is a PhD candidate in social psychology at UFRGS in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

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