Peter Pl Pelbart's 'Cartography of Exhaustion' Is Exhilarating | PopMatters

2/9/16, 12:49

Peter Pl Pelbart's 'Cartography of Exhaustion' Is Exhilarating

Explaining his theoretical background, Peter Pl

Pelbart writes: More than two decades ago, parallel
to my academic activities in the University in So
Paulo [Brazil] as a professor of Philosophy, I started a
clinical activity in a Psychiatric Day-Hospital. The first
time that I stepped foot in that institution, by chance,
was in the company of [Felix] Guattari himself, whose
institutional supervision I had the task of translating I
cannot deny that Guattaris theorizations regarding
schizophrenia, the machinic unconscious,
transversality in the institution, his experience at La
Borde, the way he smuggled fragments of his practice
into the philosophical and micropolitical domains has
inspired me enormously over all these years.
While this confession comes more than half-way into
the book, the influence of Guattari, as well as other
notable theorists, such as Michel Foucault, Gilles
Deleuze, Georges Bataille and Giorgio Agamben, to

Cartography of Exhaustion:
Nihilism Inside Out
Peter Pl Pelbart
(Univocal)
US: Dec 2015

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Peter Pl Pelbart's 'Cartography of Exhaustion' Is Exhilarating | PopMatters

2/9/16, 12:49

name a few, is evident much earlier on. If, as has been said, books by these thinkers
are meant to be guides to anti-fascist living, then Pelbarts book must be included in
the genre.
Written in a conversational tone and replete with numerous personal anecdotes,
Cartography of Exhaustion is probably not meant for a general audience since it
presupposes some familiarity with the thinkers listed above. Yet, his summations of
these theorists key ideas, which he will use as intellectual footholds, are so clearly
articulated that they should put even intimidated readers at ease. Indeed, working my
way through the book, I found some of the theoretical clouds that had been lingering
since graduate school start to dissipate, and give way to clear bright skies, if you will.
This is a sunny, revitalizing book, despite its ostensible focus on exhaustion and
nihilism. Anyone who has felt rejuvenated reading Nietzsche, or experienced the
excitement that accompanies new pathways being forged in their lines of thinking after
having read Anti-Oedipus or A Thousand Plateaus will have an idea of what I mean.
Unlike other recent maps of our contemporary milieu, this one gives you hope.
If for Albert Camus the question was how to live as neither victim nor executioner, for
Pelbart it is how to live collectively without falling prey to despotic socialitarianism.
How to create a structure of life that is not an apparatus of life? How to live together
and escape tyrannical gregariousness? How to reject forms of living together that
suffocate singularity? These are the same questions that his influences grappled with,
but questions that still plague us, because we are all exhausted by too much training,
too much discipline, too much stimulation. We just cannot take any more; in part,
because we have taken to imposing it all upon ourselves.
Key to understanding the modus operandi of biopolitics is the notion of bioascesis.
Bioascesis is a care of the self, but different from the ancients, whose care was
directed at the good life Our care aims at the body itself, its longevity, health, beauty,
good shape, scientific and aesthetic happiness We shall not hesitate in calling it,
even under the modulating conditions of contemporary coercion, a fascist body.
If before, we still imagined that we had spaces that were protected from the direct
interference of the powers (the body, the unconscious, subjectivity), and we had the
illusion of preserving in these areas some independence, today our life appears entirely
subsumed within those mechanisms of modulating experience. Thus even sex,
language, communication, oneiric life, even faith, none of these still preserve any
exteriority in relation to the mechanisms of control and monitoring. To summarize in a
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Peter Pl Pelbart's 'Cartography of Exhaustion' Is Exhilarating | PopMatters

2/9/16, 12:49

sentence: power is not exercised from outside, nor from above, but more as if it were
from within, steering our social vitality from head to toe.
What is especially appealing about Pelbarts book is the ease with which he transitions
from so-called high theory to concrete experience. Deleuze and Guattaris Bodywithout-Organs is fine as a conceptual means of resistance, but how might it be
reified and practiced in day-to-day life? Pelbarts chapter entitled Inhuman Polyphony
in the Theater of Madness may serve as one reply.
As the books literal and intellectual fulcrum, the chapter is the best of both worlds, like
having all of the philosophical insights of Deleuze coupled with the clinical praxis of
Guattari in a single essay that documents the power of fiction and theater to bring
about a suspension in the automatism of comprehension. Its a thrilling chapter about
the joyous explorations made possible by art, as well as a blueprint for resistance
against the exhausting tyranny of the norm.
We are the Ueinzz Theater Company, established in So Paulo, Brazil seventeen years
ago. Lunatics, therapists, performers, maids, philosophers, normopathsonce on
stage no one can tell the difference. If Artaud called for a theater of cruelty,
Pelbarts troupe creates schizophrenic situations. Their unpredictable performances
deconstruct distinctions between art and audience. Actors storm off the stage
mid-sentence, or enter upon others scenes, reinventing the script in front of the
audience. As Pelbart puts it: we witness disconnections that make so-called normality
flee, along with its linked automatic reactions; and also the evocation of other possible
bonds with the world.
What we need most today are more opportunities like these, experiences that
transform us. Now, this means that thought, without a prior Model of how to think (for
example: thinking is to seek the truth), opens up for other adventures (for example:
thinking is creating). However, these new lines of thought are rarely tolerated by
society, despite protestations to the contrary. What fuels the Standardized Testing
movement in the US and UK if not the desire for control and for the circumscription of
knowledge?
Still, if our world is overwhelming, banal, oppressive, its also true that its sociohistorical, which is to say: capable of being changed. Both nihilism and biopolitics
obey the logic of a Moebius strip, Pelbart claims, and in a reversibility that is intrinsic
to themunder certain conditions, they reveal their opposites an affirmative
element. When we are utterly exhausted, when nothing is possible, suddenly
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Peter Pl Pelbart's 'Cartography of Exhaustion' Is Exhilarating | PopMatters

2/9/16, 12:49

everything becomes possible. By whom? Of what? In which direction? We dont know.

It is a collective cartography, unfinished, moving, from the inside out of nihilism
Partly an homage to Deleuze and Guattari, partly a personal memoir, Pelbarts
Cartography of Exhaustion is above all a superb introduction to an exhilarating thinker
through the lenses of philosophy, madness, art, nihilism and exhaustion. Hopefully this
book will pave the way for future translations (John Laudenberger and Felix Rebolledo
Palazuelos have done a fine job here) of Pelbarts works.

Cartography of Exhaustion: Nihilism Inside Out

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