Gilles
Deleuze’s essay ‘The Exhausted’ (from ‘Essays
Critical and Clinical’) offers a distinction between two similar conditions:
being tired and being exhausted. According to the text, being tired has to do
with disjunctions of the possible: it is our difficulty to choose from various
either/or(s) of life that makes us tired. An exhausted person, on the other
hand, has transcended these divisions and has gained the clarity of mind to see
through and above them. In spite of such clarity, however, being exhausted
means that one is not in the position to act anymore (the exhausted pertains to
nothingness). The possibility to act remains with the tired. But as tired one
lacks clarity to act. (A cyclical dead-end.)
Responding to thoughts inspired from Deleuze’s
essay, this video navigates between the borders of the tired and the exhausted.
The camera eye stares at a ceiling where two imaginary dots move closer and
further apart. There is a passiveness that anticipates the exhausted, but clarity
has not come forward yet. The gray colours of the video, the background noise,
and the insignificance of the “vision,” point to the dynamic relation of the
two conditions and to the feelings of nothingness which generated them.
