Lecken_22

EXUBERANCE & EXHAUSTION

“Cultural rights of excess have always been about deliberately squandering capital. The philosophy of self-destruction was born out of the realisation that the accumulation of capital involves the exhaustion of life’s energies for a wage that was never going to be repaid in full. The rebellious response of bohemian culture was to commit to never accumulate profit, but always waste it and get wasted, consume and be consumed, to refuse to save anything or be saved by anyone.

This spirit is beautifully expressed in the Latin palindrome, in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (we wander around in the night in circles consumed by fire). Yes, there is a beauty and a dignity in gestures of expenditures." But when the material you’re using to practice refusal and dissent is your own biopsychopharmacology, the cycles of exuberance and exhaustion soon start to feel like grenades hurled against your own self, and less so against your masters.

How can we still practice a care of the self that is not another neoliberal self-care recipe for recharging the batteries of productivity? And for what purpose? Is there some horizon of motivation—beyond the exuberance of "I can" and the exhaustion of "I can’t”—that hasn’t yet been colonised by the logic of profit or locked into the solipsism of self-improvement?

That seems to be today's challenge: finding something to care enough about to counter the use-me-up drive of the exhaustion and exuberance infinity loop sustained by either capitalism or cathinones.

— based on Jan Verwoert, Exhaustion & Exuberance: Ways to Defy the Pressure to Perform

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