EXHAUSTION A History
Anna Katharina Schaffner
Columbia University Press New York Columbia University Press Publishers Since New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schaffner, Anna Katharina. Exhaustion : a history / Anna Katharina Schaffner. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN ---- (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN ---- (e-book) . Fatigue. . Social history. I. Title.
BF.S .'—dc
Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America c
: Julia Kushnirsky : Monica Rodriques/Getty We think of our own crisis as pre-eminent, more worry- ing, more interesting than other crises. . . . It is common- place to talk about our historical situation as uniquely terrible and in a way privileged, a cardinal point in time. But can it really be so? It seems doubtful that our crisis . . . is one of the important differences between us and our predecessors. Many of them felt as we do. If the evidence looks good to us, so it did to them. Frank Kermode, %e Sense of an Ending: Studies in the History of Fiction
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction . Humors . Sin . Saturn . Sexuality . Nerves . Capitalism . Rest . 9e Death Drive . Depression . Mystery Viruses . Burnout Epilogue: 9e Future
Notes Bibliography Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the following friends and colleagues for their help in shaping this book at various stages in its development: Tim Binding, Peter Buse, Felicity Callard, Francesco Capello, Andreas Corcoran, David Corfield, Mary Cosgrove, Chris Dooks, Laurence Goldstein, Michael Greaney, Claudia Hammond, Katja Haustein, Ben Hutchinson, Annette Kern-Stähler, Jenny Laws, Gordon Lynch, Ayesha Nanthoo, Caitríona Ní Dhúill, Patricia Novillo- Corvalán, Anita O’Brien, Karla Pollmann, Ernst and Eva Schaffner, Wilmar Schaufeli, Natalia Sobrevilla Perea, Axel Stähler, Nuria Triana-Toribio, Verena Trusch, William Viney, Greta Wagner, Simon Wessely, Laura Williams, and Angela Woods. 9anks are also due to the Wellcome Trust for funding a confer- ence on exhaustion at the University of Kent. Finally, I would like to thank my editor at Columbia University Press, Jennifer Perillo, for her belief in the project and for her invalu- able feedback, as well as Shane Weller, as always, for everything.
EXHAUSTION
Introduction
On a wintry a:ernoon in February, an old man steps out onto a balcony. 9ere are no clouds in the sky, but a chilly wind is blow- ing. 9e old man shivers and wraps his garments more tightly around his frail, delicate body. His hair is as white as his robes. His face is a landscape marked by toil and sorrow, and the dark shad- ows under his watery eyes are an unhealthy shade of purple. His head is bowed so deeply that his neck almost forms a right angle with his hunched back, and his hands are trembling. He tugs at the heavy golden ornament that hangs around his neck. 9e moment he steps out onto the balcony, the chatter in the square below him dies down, to be replaced by an expectant hush. It costs the old man all his energy to perform the next task. He clears his throat and, slowly, like an ancient turtle, raises his head. He spreads his arms and blesses the crowd. 9en, in a grating, bro- ken voice, he begins to say his farewells. 9e figure is not any old man. It is Pope Benedict XVI, who announced his retirement to an astonished world on February , , in a statement composed in Latin, read at a gathering origi- nally convened to consolidate the canonization of three new Cath- olic martyrs. He reported both physical and spiritual exhaustion and offered his advanced age and deteriorating physical strength as the primary reasons for his decision to retire. He spoke of the 2 INTRODUCTION
burden of an office that had become too heavy for him; he said that the world was changing and was doing so at a pace with which he could not keep up. 9e ship of believers, he concluded, needed a helmsman stronger than he, someone capable of steering it safely through the choppy waters of our age. A few weeks later, on February , , a helicopter whisked the pope away from the Vatican to Castel Gandolfo, the palace where pontiffs traditionally rest during the summer months. Later that day, from the palace balcony, he addressed a crowd of pilgrims and well-wishers for the very last time, thanking them for their sympathy. In April , he retired to a monastery in the Vatican Gardens, where, he said, he hoped to spend his remaining days in peaceful seclusion, praying, meditating, and once again dedicating himself to his long-abandoned and much-loved piano playing. On his first day in retirement, the pope emeritus watched recordings of his own farewell ceremony on television. On only one previous occasion in the history of the Catholic Church had a pope resigned voluntarily: the year was , and the pope in question was Celestine V (formerly the hermit Pietro del Murrone), who had been in office for only five months. Like Benedict XVI so many centuries later, he cited exhaustion as the primary cause for his wish to retire: “Owing to the weakness of my body . . . , in fact the weakness of my entire person, I hereby resign from the glory and the honors of the papal office,” he declared. Yet in Celestine’s case, too, age and waning physical strength were only secondary factors; far more important was his spiritual exhaus- tion, a weariness of the soul, perhaps even a crisis of faith. Celes- tine, known to suffer from low self-esteem, was also thought to have been incapable of coping with the taxing administrative tasks that came with the papal office. Benedict XVI’s motives, in con- trast, were much more disturbing: visibly affected by the news of the many sordid sexual and financial scandals uncovered within the inner sanctums of the Catholic Church during the last years of his papacy, he confessed in one of his final papal addresses that sometimes he felt as though God were sleeping. 9ere is something decidedly unsettling about the fact that the most iconic and symbolically important spiritual figure of the INTRODUCTION 3
Western world—traditionally a beacon of unwavering faith and indefatigable service unto death—should have decided to hang up his papal mantle and to play the piano instead. Moreover, the for- mer pope’s resignation aptly illustrates the all-pervasive sway that the experience of exhaustion—both physical and spiritual—holds over our age. It certainly feels as though ours is the age of exhaus- tion, an age characterized above all by weariness, disillusionment, and burnout. A particularly virulent form of cultural pessimism, it seems, has come to dominate our discussions of politics, eco- nomics, ecology, and health care. 9e much-debated death of so- called grand narratives, and in particular the demise of political idealism that followed the collapse of the last Communist regimes in Europe, as well as the sad a:ermath of the Arab Spring, have ushered in a new wave of political apathy, fed further by the ascen- dancy of opportunist party politics that have nothing to offer but the tired old mantra of economic growth. Although there no longer appears to be a viable political alter- native, the demise of capitalism has been proclaimed repeatedly a:er a recent succession of banking crises that are unprecedented in their severity and scale—but even these apocalyptic verdicts themselves appear weary and lackluster, as though they, too, were merely another symptom of our burned-out age. In addition to the doubts about the sustainability of our current economic system, the very sustainability of our ecosystem con- tinues to be called into question, the scientific evidence becoming ever stronger. 9e land, sea, and sky are being irreparably damaged by our careless habits of consumption. 9e rain forest is being depleted; the ozone layer is shrinking at an alarming rate; the oceans are heaving with toxins and industrial waste; the ice caps and glaciers are melting; and carbon monoxide emissions are still high. Moreover, a rapidly growing world population is on course to exhaust the planet’s raw materials. It is hardly surprising, then, that these serious social, political, and environmental concerns, all of which center around the idea of exhaustion, should have an impact on the mental well-being of the individual. Major depression (which counts the symptoms of physical and mental exhaustion among its core indicators), 4 INTRODUCTION
chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), and burnout are now frequently diagnosed ailments. Depression, in particular, has reached epidemic proportions—it is thought to affect more than one in ten people in the Western world at some period in their lives. 9e World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that more than million people are affected by it globally. Seventeen million people experience CFS worldwide, and more than million people are currently diag- nosed with CFS in the United States. 9e illness thus strikes more people than multiple sclerosis, lupus, and some forms of cancer. Burnout features among the three most commonly diagnosed com- plaints in the workplace, a:er backache and stress. 9e number of popular self-help and scientific publications on burnout has grown massively in recent years, attesting further to its importance. While not synonymous with exhaustion, all these syndromes include the core symptoms of physical and mental exhaustion. 9ere is no doubt that the specter of exhaustion shapes both public debates and lived experience in the early twenty-first century, chiming eerily with our weary zeitgeist. Is not ours the most exhausted age in history? And does the current epidemic of exhaustion not threaten the very future of the human animal? 9ere are many who believe this to be the case. Yet before simply assenting to this assessment of our times, there is another ques- tion that needs to be asked: What do we really mean when we speak of exhaustion? In spite of the ubiquity and the metaphorical potency of the term, and its many applications in medical, psycho- logical, economic, and political debates, exhaustion is a slippery concept, one that borders on, and o:en overlaps with, various oth- ers. How can we define exhaustion, and how can we demarcate it from related ideas and diagnoses? Is exhaustion a state that we can quantify scientifically, or is it a wholly subjective experience? Is it primarily a physical or a mental condition? Is it predominantly an individual or a wider sociocultural experience? Is it really the bane of our age, something that is intimately bound up with moder- nity and its discontents, or have other historical periods also seen themselves as the most exhausted?