Exhausting the (Human) Problem

What happens when exhaustion becomes not defeat but necessity? This article explores exhaustion as both existential condition and methodological proposition—a way to sidestep the human(ist) problem of solutionism. Through the sculptural works of Berlinde De Bruyckere, where organic and synthetic matters merge in states of suspension, we witness exhaustion’s capacity to reshape relations between bodies, forms, and forces. What emerges when we stay with overwhelming complexity as less defined, less Self? Following theoretical threads from Deleuze to Barad, from crip theory to affect studies, this piece traces how exhaustion operates as both performative principle and performable potential. Its double movement—simultaneously giving in and giving out—creates possibilities for thinking and feeling otherwise. De Bruyckere’s headless forms, rendered through wax, animal hide, cloth, and metal, materialize exhaustion through specific formal choices: suspension, fragmentation, drooping, wounding. Their plastic techniques translate into corporeal masses of alternative enfleshments that resist both completion and categorization. Here exhaustion becomes a disabling condition of human morphologies and mythologies. What deformations of the human become possible in this suspense? How might “crip sustainability” transform praxis so the impossible can be reabsorbed in the real? Through close attention to matter’s micropolitical attunements—barely perceptible shifts in how things move and hold still—we learn to notice what trembles at attention’s edge. This article proposes exhaustion as radical accessibility: a way of relating otherwise that holds space for all forms of access, all modes of being and unbecoming, all ways matter finds to persist beyond prescribed understanding.