Bodily awareness in acute fatigue: the corporealization of the minimal performative body

Abstract Knowing when one feels fatigued, and not just tired or expending effort, matters. When fatigue is correctly detected, physician-patient misunderstandings can be avoided (Long et al., 2022), occupational safety concerns can be addressed (Van der Linden, 2011), and injury as well as loss of well-being can be reduced in athletic contexts (Saw et al., 2016). Although existing empirical definitions of acute fatigue include feeling the need to rest and a mismatch between expended effort and actual performance (Behrens et al., 2023; Skau et al., 2021), the present article offers an applied phenomenology to enrich such operational definitions. It does so by building on Katherine Morris’s study (2019) and suggests that acute fatigue involves a disruptive layering of multiple modalities of bodily awareness. The present work introduces these modalities (the transparent, performative, lived, and material bodies) before outlining their interaction during what Thomas Fuchs calls corporealization (2002; 2005b). Corporealization during acute fatigue is then analysed as a twofold disruption, whereby what I call the minimal performative body both feels its movement as wrong and encounters the material body. Appealing to this aspect of acute fatigue’s phenomenology, I argue, helps to differentiate it from experiences of tiredness, on the one hand, and chronic fatigue and exhaustion, on the other.