Reading Group 4 - Exhaustion

Quiver: New Weapons for Thought

On March 22nd, Quiver hosts a conversation about “exhaustion.”
Understanding that the unfolding crisis is a disaster long in the making, we invite participants to discussion exhaustion, stress, and burnout.
Our two readings begin with a section of “How to Make Yourself a Body Without Organs” from A Thousand Plateaus. There we learn that the BwO is not the enemy of organs but of organisms, and learn strategies to survive the three great strata of the organism, significance, and subjectification.
The second reading is the now-classic essay “We Are All Very Anxious.” As situated by its subtitle, “Six Theses on Anxiety and Why It is Effectively Preventing Militancy, and One Possible Strategy for Overcoming It,” we are interested in how ideas about feeling frayed, overwhelmed, and undone contribute to militant practice.
Other concepts and readings we suggest participants explore are:

• D&G’s use of Laing’s expression on method “breakthrough not breakdown” found in Anti-Oedipus
• the notion found across Capitalism and Schizophrenia that the decoded flows of capital are constantly repelling its own limits
• The section on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (to be contrasted with the royal “break” and nomadic war machine’s “rupture”) in the “Three Novellas” plateau.
• Deleuze's “Three Group-Related Problems” on antipsychiatric politics (or more broadly, the first Molecular Revolution book).
• Peter Pál Pelbert’s Cartography of Exhaustion
• Colectivo Situaciones, “Politicizing Sadness”