“the society of achievement and activeness is generating excessive tiredness and exhaustion. These psychic conditions characterize a world that is poor in negativity and in turn dominated by excess positivity.”

Tiredness in achievement society is solitary tiredness; it has a separating and isolating effect. Peter Handke, in “essay on Tiredness” calls it “divisive tiredness”: already the two…were irresistibly recoiling, each into .. private tiredness, not ours, but mine over here and yours over there”. This divisive tiredness strikes on “mute and blind”.

Never in all the world could i have said to her: “i’m tired of you” - i could never have uttered the simple word “tired” (which, if we had both shouted it at once, might have set us free from our individual hells). Such tiredness destroyed our power to speak, our souls. –Peter Handke

Tiredness of this kind proves violent because it destroys all that is common or shared, all proximity, and even language itself: “Doomed to remain speechless, that sort of tiredness drove us to violence. A violence that may hav expressed itself on in our manner of seeing, which distorted the other”

handke sets reconciliatory tiredness in opposition to speechless, sightless, divisive tiredness.

As “more or less of me, [we]-tiredness opens the between by loosening the strictures of the ego. I do not just see the other; rather, I also am the Other, and “the Other becomes I”. The between is a space of friendliness-as-indifference, where “no one and nothing dominates or commands”. As the I grows smaller, the gravity of being shifts from the ego to the world. it is “tiredness that trusts in the world”, whereas I-tiredness —”solitary tiredness”— is worldless, world-destroying tiredness.

The trusting tiredness “opens” the I and “makes room” for the world. It reestablishes the “duality “ that solitary tiredness destroys utterly. One sees, and one is seen. One touches, an one is touched: “tiredness as a becoming-accessible, as the possibility of being touched and being able to touch in turn.

Such “fundamental tiredness” brings together all the forms of existence and coexistence that vanishing the course of absolutized activity. It hardly amounts to a state of exhaustion in which one proves unable to do anything. Instead, it represent a singular capacity. “fundamental tiredness” inspires. It allows spirit/intellect [Geist] to emerge. Thereby, the “inspiration of tiredness” involves not-doing.

For Handke, deep tiredness rises to become a form of salvation, a form of rejuvenation. It brings back a sense of wonder into the world: “the tired Odysseus won the love of Nausicaä. Tiredness makes you younger than you have ever been.. everything becomes extraordinary in the tranquility of tiredness”

“I watched the growing tiredness of many small children.. no more greed, no grabbing hold of things, only playfulness”.

Deep tiredness loosens the strictures of identity. Tings flicker, twinkle, and vibrate at the edges. they grow less determinate and more porous and lose some of their resolution. This particular indifference lends them an aura of friendliness.

“in such fundamental tiredness, the thing is never manifested alone but always in conjunction with other things, and even if there are not very many, they will al be together in the end”. This tiredness founds a deep friendship and makes it possible to conceive of a community that requires neither belonging nor relation.

Handke’s tiredness is not “I-tiredness”; it is not the tiredness of an exhausted ego. He calls it “we-tiredness” (15). I am not tired “of you,” as he puts it, but rather I am tired “with you”.: “thus we sat —in my recollection always out of doors in the afternoon sun—- savoring our common tiredness whether or not we were talking.. a cloud of tiredness, an ethereal tiredness, held us together then” (15).

“Deep tiredness loosens the strictures of identity. Tings flicker, twinkle, and vibrate at the edges. they grow less determinate and more porous and lose some of their resolution. This particular indifference lends them an aura of friendliness.

I do not just see the other; rather, I also am the Other, and “the Other becomes I”. The between is a space of friendliness as-indifference, where “no one and nothing dominates or commands”. As the I grows smaller, the gravity of being shifts from the ego to the world. it is “tiredness that trusts in the world”.

The trusting tiredness “opens” the I and “makes room” for the world. It reestablishes the “duality “ that solitary tiredness destroys utterly. One sees, and one is seen. One touches, an one is touched: “tiredness as a becoming-accessible, as the possibility of being touched and being able to touch in turn.

fundamental tiredness, the thing is never manifested alone but always in conjunction with other things. it.. is not “I-tiredness”; it is not the tiredness of an exhausted ego. He [Peter Handke] calls it “we-tiredness” (15). I am not tired “of you,” as he puts it, but rather I am tired “with you”. This tiredness founds a deep friendship and makes it possible to conceive of a community that requires neither belonging nor relation.”

from my 2022 hermit archives, inspired by this passage from “Burnout Society” by Byul-chung Han

// artwork by via Midjourney

// passage from Burnout Society by Byul-Chung Han

#visualpeacemaker #tiredsociety #aiartwork #midjourneyart #byulchunghan #burnoutsociety