After Exhaustion

We repeat what we cannot change. We repeat because we cannot change. The essence of humanity is to repeat its anger and dispossession; it is always too late.

– Catherine Malabou⁰¹

Over the past decade, working as a director or artistic director at three different institutions in my country, I often felt like I was falling out of touch. Within institutions where inexplicable situations kept recurring, I encountered realities I could not comprehend – and perhaps could not accept. I believed I could change what I faced; I was wrong, or at least not entirely right. Even when something did shift, I found myself unable to remain in my role. The pattern repeated – leaving, beginning again, leaving again – and only later did I recognise in this, as Catherine Malabou writes, the structure of repetition born from the impossibility of change: we repeat because we cannot change. My international colleagues at the time seemed to regard this as a personal failing. Now, with the passage of years, I have come to read these experiences differently. What I encountered in public institutions during a period that escalated to the extent that a blacklist was created – a government-led censorship campaign against artists and cultural workers – may not have been exceptional at all, but rather an early symptom of the authoritarian backlash and institutional regression now becoming visible across the West.

Each time the texture differed. Dismissal. Interference. Friction. I am wary of cataloguing them. What repeated was the structure: something would shift, I would find myself unable to remain, and I would leave. Eventually, repetition abandoned the scene of events and inscribed itself elsewhere. Headaches became constant. My hormonal system destabilised in ways I could see.

Such a past resists easy comprehension or forgetting. Over the following decade, diffuse pains took hold – sensations I could not locate or explain. During the many hours I spent tethered to my bed, time began to lose its linearity. Days stretched or compressed; at certain moments, time seemed not to advance but to vibrate in place. Nothing could be done, nothing progressed. For a time, no new project seemed possible, no new possibility visible. At some point I recognised this condition for what it was: what Gilles Deleuze calls ‘the exhausted’.

For Deleuze, exhaustion differs from tiredness. The tired person abandons realisation but leaves possibility intact. The exhausted person, by contrast, depletes the totality of the possible. Not only is there nothing left to realise; the realisable itself has run dry. Within the that condition, I came to know this definition bodily. Yet a question simultaneously arose: even after exhaustion, the body had not entirely stopped. Time continued to pass, and sensation persisted – however non-linearly. If exhaustion is the depletion of all possibility, is truly nothing possible afterward?

The Centre That Never Occurs

In ‘The Exhausted’, Gilles Deleuze analyses Samuel Beckett’s television work Quad, demonstrating spatially how exhaustion differs from fatigue.⁰² Quad is a piece without words or voices. A square exists, and four figures traverse it ceaselessly. The figures are neuter, clad in long hooded gowns. What individuates them is solely that each departs from one corner of the square – as if from a cardinal point. They may be distinguished by light, colour, or the sound of their footsteps, yet these serve merely as means of recognition. In themselves, they are defined only spatially, determined by nothing but sequence and position.

The movement is rigorously regular. Four possible solos, six duets, four trios and one quartet repeat according to a fixed order. This system admits no chance, no variation; the movements grow increasingly automatic. The drag of slippers across the floor repeats like music, locomotion continuing as purposeless execution. Yet what is essential to Quad lies not in repetition itself, but in what that repetition eliminates.

The centre of the square is the sole point where the paths of the four figures could intersect – the one site where the potentiality for an event still subsists. Yet each time a figure approaches the centre, it immediately swerves aside. A slight rotation of the hips, a brief hop, an abrupt deflection: this gesture is no accident but absolute law. The figures avoid one another while simultaneously avoiding the centre itself. Through such repetitive evasion, the space gradually transforms into a condition that no longer permits encounter. For Deleuze, this constitutes the exhaustion of space. This is not physical exhaustion – the space remains, the bodies keep moving – but the exhaustion of what the space could produce: encounter, event, change. Not a state reached after all possible paths have been traversed, but one in which the sole meaningful event is perpetually forestalled, so that potentiality itself is depleted.

The viewer’s body, watching Quad in the exhibition space, is likewise captured by this rhythm of exhaustion. Movement persists, yet nothing occurs. Bodies are in constant motion, yet no contact takes place. The space functions, but it no longer produces events. Repetition continues, yet it ceases to generate change. The point at which repetition no longer operates as repetition – here is where Quad discloses the form of exhaustion.

In Quad, the physical condition manifests as a temporal state constituted between movement and evasion, within depleted possibility. Space no longer transforms, yet it still receives and arranges bodies. Exhausted space does not halt; it merely persists otherwise. One keeps walking, keeps moving. The structure keeps functioning. And yet nothing occurs. If this is so, then – unlike Quad, which presents repetitive movement exhausting space through the endless deferral of encounter – might a different repetition be possible? A repetition that functions not as avoidance, but as a means of reorganising time, sensation and corporeal relation?

Zarathustra teaches his soul to treat time in a non-vengeful way by reforming its relationship with repetition itself: instead of thinking of repetition as the return of the same – that “most abysmal thought” – he learns to recognize the space for difference it opens. That is, he learns to affirm what is repeated, thus transforming repetition itself. Instead of passively bearing what happens, one can desire it, plastically.

– Catherine Malabou⁰³

The pandemic: collective trauma, cancelled projects. I entered a self-imposed sabbatical – to release my furious self from the past, to part from it well. Yet that rest only projected scenes from the past ceaselessly onto the screen of my mind, and my rage made me more wretched still. Reading Malabou, I encountered the question: is Nietzsche’s Übermensch, freed from the spirit of revenge, truly attainable?⁰⁴ Fortunately, excessive sleep brought some relief to my physical suffering, but the psychic anguish that remained seemed to have fixed me at an insurmountable threshold. In that suffocating time, I happened upon the neuroplastic somatic training devised by Moshe Feldenkrais – what is known as the Feldenkrais Method.⁰⁵

When one repeats movements such as the spinal clock – moving the body with extreme slowness – dozens of times, at some point a stimulus arises at a specific locus in the brain; connectivity activates, and an electrical response begins, as though fireworks were igniting. This training aims not at strengthening muscles or correcting posture, but at recalibrating the relationship between sensation and neural circuitry through movement.⁰⁶ As I persisted, a sense emerged that something was gradually shifting. One day, guiding me through repetitive motions, the instructor said: ‘Now, very slowly – almost moving yet not moving, not moving yet moving – find that pace.’ I did not fully grasp it, yet I continued the movements at the slowest speed I could sustain. Intriguingly, the training led me beyond my fixed ideas about how to use my body, towards a different kind of coordination – one in which pursuing something other than what I thought I knew could still be, simply, all right. This shifted something in how I understood the possible paths of a life.

One midnight, after more than a month of practice, my body was heavy, sleep would not come. Lying on the bed, I repeated the spinal clock from twelve to six, from three to nine, perhaps twenty times. At some point I found my hands grasping my neck, beginning to turn it from one side to the other – without conscious decision. Very slowly. My neck resisted, would not easily turn, yet in my mind my hands were already in motion. Very slowly. Perhaps one millimetre per second. Then: a slipping. I entered somewhere deep. As though walking among people who had frozen, into another dimension of time – within the gravitational field yet defying gravity. That too-slow movement summoned me into a strange domain. Moving yet not moving; not moving yet moving. What had been repeating no longer functioned as repetition; it pried open an altogether different kind of time. The experience resembled a threshold – passage from the time of pain into another body. The instant of crossing that threshold: the moment repetition ceases to be repetition. These varied repetitive bodily movements and their neuroplastic effects, difficult to articulate, gradually transported me from the past into the present, into a state of non-repeating repetition – something like reiterative repetition, neither learning nor accumulation nor recovery.

Receiving Form and Destroying It

My neuroplastic bodily experiences often connected, asymmetrically, with the temporality of sculpture – a connection that becomes legible through the expansive reach of Malabou’s concept of plasticity. For Malabou, plasticity operates not only within heterogeneous domains – biology, neurology, metaphysics, psychoanalysis, politics – but also names the capacity for forms to migrate and transform across domains: from the biological to the symbolic, from the material to the conceptual.⁰⁷ It is not synonymous with the adaptability or recuperative capacity commonly associated with neuroplasticity.⁰⁸ It is not flexibility responding to external stimuli by preserving or restoring form, but rather a dual capacity: to receive form while also being capable of annihilating it. Malabou does not treat plasticity as an optimistic concept of life’s maintenance. She thinks directly through the possibility of irreversible transformation latent within plasticity – the condition in which, after certain events, no return to a prior state is possible.⁰⁹ Plasticity occupies the domain of irreversible formation while simultaneously encompassing its opposite: the remobilisation of form, the capacity for self-formation, the displacement of determination itself – that is, freedom.¹⁰ What Malabou foregrounds is precisely this complex, synthetic richness inherent to the notion of plasticity.

Chung Seoyoung’s Clay Tower (2013) resonates with this inquiry. The work captures, as form, the physical instant of micro-adjustment – the repetitions involved in balancing an improvised clay tower on one’s knee and calibrating one’s posture to prevent its fall. Here the sculpture is not the clay tower itself. Within the photograph, sculptural reality comprises the latent bodily shifts in the posture that supports the tower, the relations of physical support, the equilibrium achieved through forces of movement and balance – that is, the balance between tower and knee, the minute movements and corporeal calibrations the body performs to sustain that balance, and the time in which the encounter between object and body occurs. All of this constitutes a sculptural condition. Form, in other words, is established within the coordinative relation between body and object; what completes sculptural form is not externally applied force but the temporal event of recalibrating the relation between internal cognition and external condition. Such sculptural thinking – attentive to the precise moment in which form is constituted through relation – resonates with what I encountered in Feldenkrais training: coordination as the organic, harmonious interplay of nerve, muscle and joint, responding to the brain’s signals to produce fluid, precise movement.

Lotus L. Kang’s series In Cascades (2023–24) presents a striking plenitude of corporeal irreversibility arising from humidity, temperature and site. If repetition leaves a trace, in what state does that trace persist? Kang exposes photosensitive industrial film – the kind used for commercial billboards – to varied conditions of light and environment in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto and a greenhouse in Milton, Ontario. In the exhibition space, these film sheets continue transforming within new surroundings, cascading from ceiling to floor like waterfalls. Produced without a camera, beyond the photographic apparatus, this ‘experimental photography’ unfolds coarse colour fields and unpredictable visceral eruptions. Owing to the material’s mutable properties, the work exists as a being beyond the artist’s control, ceaselessly flowing in what the artist describes as a state of ‘sustained entropy’.¹¹

For Kang, these film materials emerge as a kind of skin – recalling the etymology of pelicula, ‘little skin’. She understands this through analogy to the cell membrane: fundamental to life and differentiation, such membranes serve as sites of essential processes – filtration, diffusion, osmosis, transport. Porous and permeable, the membrane is also a threshold space, a zone where interior and exterior worlds intersect and forge connection. Each membrane, sensitively attuned to light, time and ambient environment, becomes an individual, living physical theatre

What Malabou terms ‘destructive plasticity’ names precisely this condition.¹² Not post-damage recovery, not functional readjustment, but transformation in which an event alters the very structure of body and subject – transformation that cannot be reversed. The subject who emerges afterward possesses not a ‘deficient identity’ but a new identity.¹³ Destructive plasticity does not signify recovery’s failure; it renders the category of recovery itself inoperative. In Kang’s films, repetition passes through a threshold and condenses into an irreversible surface state – oscillating between arrival and departure, caught unstably in-between, always in the midst of becoming. Like the irreversible condition of a body traversed by innumerable, inexplicable times of migration. As a second-generation Korean Canadian, Kang treats the cell membrane as a permeable boundary through which ancestral memory may infiltrate, while simultaneously figuring a body irreversibly reiterated.

Here repetition is not repetition for learning’s sake. It does not render the same image more distinct, nor constitute a gradual approach towards recovery. Rather, repetition renders return to a prior state impossible, functioning as the condition that receives form and irreversibly transforms it. This neither fixes the body in stasis like the repetition of pain, nor sustains the tension just before formal collapse as in Quad. As with the dual meaning of Malabou’s plastique, plasticity is not flexibility but the capacity to detonate form.¹⁴ The film no longer remembers, yet it still responds to light, temperature, humidity, time. The surface produces no meaning, yet it has not forfeited its affective responsiveness. Here plasticity emerges not as the capacity for recovery, but as the condition of affective responsiveness persisting after transformation.

Choreography with Obstruction

In Nina Canell’s Mother of Dust (2023), a long, weighty infrastructure – a conveyor belt – operates without ceasing, small pearls travelling along its surface. A stationary broom, however, obstructs the flow. The sculpture exists in an ambivalent condition: appearing still yet moving, appearing to move yet also arrested. Where does the perception of movement originate, and who determines it? The trembling of the pearls – their singular movement – is generated precisely through contact with the immobile broom. Yet even the agent of stoppage cannot ultimately extinguish movement. Obstruction and arrest paradoxically produce recoil and motion: the pearls, encountering the broom, do not simply stop but generate a different wave through the very condition of that encounter – a choreography of exquisite dispersal.

‘Moving yet not moving, not moving yet moving’ – within that paradoxical condition, a sculptural state is conferred: in a time where stoppage engenders movement and movement tends towards stoppage, arising from the relation between halt and flow, from the tension between resistance and current. In Mother of Dust, the pearls caught trembling against the broom create friction with this sculptural condition, posing fresh questions. Transmission persists, yet arrival fails to occur. The system operates as designed, yet its purpose remains unfulfilled. Precisely at that juncture – where flow is blocked and arrival indefinitely deferred – a different kind of movement emerges. The pearls’ trembling becomes a wave escaping the system’s logic, propagating in unpredictable rhythms. If Quad intensified tension through repetitive movement while evading the centre, never allowing encounter to occur, Mother of Dust takes another path: encounter is triggered precisely through the slow, repeated collision with obstruction. The fragile – the pearls – caught before the blockage, exceed the system through the rhythm and freedom born of their relation to its forces.

Obstruction, here, is not failure but condition – the condition under which a different movement becomes possible. What cannot pass through does not simply stop; it trembles, disperses, finds another rhythm. A plasticity that does not restore but reconfigures – forming new relations through the very condition of collision. Not breakthrough, but the wave that exceeds the system’s logic.

Emergence After Exhaustion

‘Competition, wars, profit, and labor exploitation are all too human, rooted as they are in the vengeful instinct, the rage against transiency and the impossibility to start again, anew. Yet at the same time, humans are constantly trying to escape the spirit of revenge, to emancipate themselves.’¹⁵

In retrospect, my body – having traversed job loss and censorship, pain and exhaustion, neuroplastic experience – did not return to its former form. This was no failure of recovery. Rather, through that passage, I came to understand that the body’s very emergence into the world is already a plastic act. If exhaustion transforms not only private sensation but the conditions of appearance itself, then the question of the body cannot remain confined to interior experience.

According to Judith Butler: ‘The private body never appears as such, since it is preoccupied with the repetitive labor of reproducing the material conditions of life. The private body thus conditions the public body, and even though they are the same body, the bifurcation is crucial to maintaining the public and private distinction.’¹⁶ In invisible domains, reproducing or failing to reproduce the material conditions of existence, the body is exhausted and transformed through repetition. And it is precisely this repetition that constitutes the conditions for public appearance. Butler asks, via Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers: is not negotiating the sphere of appearance itself a biological act? Is not appearance a necessarily morphological moment that the body must endure – not merely to speak and act, but to suffer and to move, to engage other bodies, to negotiate the environment upon which it depends?¹⁷

The body after exhaustion no longer emerges into the world as it once did. Exhaustion cannot be named a withdrawal from politics. Within that very transformed condition, the body continues to negotiate with its environment, to relate to other bodies, to move while bearing pain, to advance in new directions. This is the temporality and politics of plasticity I discover alongside sculptural bodies – a condition in which form is not imposed from without, but arises and persists within the coordinative relation between body and world – sustaining vulnerability and affective responsiveness. The exhausted body, rather than advancing towards recovery, learns to inhabit the world otherwise – moving at some tempo that diverges from quotidian time, repeating so as to inscribe a reiteration beyond repetition.

What plasticity seems to offer here is not a return to a former state, but the opening of new connections – new passages through which life may, still, continue. This is the political meaning that emerges from plasticity: not a politics of return, but of forging pathways where none seemed possible. Like Malabou’s plasticité receiving form while destroying it – sculptural plasticity names a corporeal temporality, physical and relational. After exhaustion, another world begins to take shape.