Endurance, exhaustion and the lure of redemption

Bibliographic Data

ID2406705
AuthorsLeila Dawney (0000-0001-9432-7095, University of Exeter, corresponding author), Thomas Jellis (0000-0001-5094-4307, University of Bristol)
Year2024
Volume31
Issue2
Pages153-166
Publication date2024-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueCultural Geographies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1474-4740 • E-ISSN: 1477-0881
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/14744740231191535
OpenAlexW4386330165
LanguageEN
Citations received19
References cited37

This paper is concerned with the lure of redemption in contemporary academic and accounts of exhaustion, endurance, and biopolitical life. Drawing on, and contributing to recent work on negativity in cultural geography, the paper analyses how optimism and redemption find their way in to academic writing on the contemporary condition. It interrogates the optimism in these literatures, paying attention to the genealogical roots of the propensity to redeem accounts of slow and attritional violence and biopolitical subjectivity. In particular, the paper charts the implicit politics and ethics at play in the invocation of the Deleuzian 'otherwise' which haunts many accounts of the transformatory potential of exhaustion, and the remnants of dialectical historicism and Christian morality at the heart of redemption narratives in accounts of endurance. The paper ends by questioning the motives behind such hopeful readings, and asks what it might entail to refuse to redeem tales of violence with optimistic glimmers of an as-yet unspecified world

Aesthetics · Art · Dialectic · Epistemology · Literature · Morality · Narrative · Optimism · Political science · Politics · Posthumanism · Sociology · Subjectivity · Gender Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Philosophy · Political and Economic history of UK and US · Psychology · Social Psychology · Urban Planning and Governance

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