Daniel Reid Smyth

This paper argues for a distinctly political form of fatigue. Taking up Kaja Jenssen Rathe’s case of Ahmed Fawad Ashraf, a second-generation Norwegian journalist who publicly declares that he is tired of trying to prove his identity, the paper proceeds in five steps. First, it proposes a critical neo-phenomenological stance to problematise certain socially produced affects. Second, it follows a view of acute fatigue as consisting in antagonistic, acquiescent and hesitative affective forms. Third, it argues that Ashraf’s fatigue can be understood as a specific form of antagonistic fatigue, which is characterised by an active contestation of the impulse to quit rather than an extreme tiredness or apathetic form of fatigue that slides toward exhaustion. Fourth, it situates the present analysis against Alain Ehrenberg’s socio-historical reduction of fatigue to entropy, drawing on Georges Vigarello’s work to recover fatigue’s historical function as a site of political conflict. Finally, it argues that such antagonistic fatigue has its own norms of justification. In particular, it can satisfy Szanto and Tietjen’s fourfold criteria of appropriateness for political emotions, so long as we recognise its collective subject as a subject-in-the-making, and that we understand political antagonistic fatigue as indignation rather than merely a fatigue of indignation.

This article argues that acute fatigue resists classification within standard phenomenological affective categories (emotion, mood, existential feeling, vital feeling, atmosphere, and bodily stirring). Although categorization attempts initially distinguish acute fatigue from chronic fatigue and exhaustion, the diverse cases within acute fatigue do not easily unify under a single affective type. To go beyond this limit, the article describes how acute fatigue manifests in three structurally distinct affective forms: antagonistic fatigue, in which one finds oneself counteracting a felt sense of inability; acquiescent fatigue, in which felt inability aligns with and confirms one’s evaluative orientation; and hesitative fatigue, an internally divided form that renders transitions between the other two intelligible. It closes by examining how the social world both exacerbates and partially counteracts the negative affectivity of acute fatigue.

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.

Hermann Schmitz offers one of the most extensive descriptions available of embodied space, characterizing it as pre-sensorial, indivisible, and surfaceless yet capable of disclosing absolute locations. Schmitz nevertheless anchors the felt body’s absolute location in temporal irruption rather than in the ability for lived space to ground itself in rest. This article argues that embodied space tacitly involves trans-perceptual conditions of stability and tolerability that Schmitz’s account opens up but does not fully develop. I introduce the concept of existential surface to name this dimension, with the ground underfoot as its paradigmatic case. Acute fatigue serves as the principal test case: it discloses both the felt body’s dependence on a body-bearing world and an autochthonous self-grounding limit of the felt body. I analyze the latter in terms of a recessive boundary that resists further movement and reorganizes practical initiative around what I call being-toward-rest.

This review examines how the Phenomenology of Broken Habits (Routledge, 2025) organizes its diverse contributions around a central thesis — that habits become especially knowable through their breakdown. This review argues that many of the volume’s most valuable chapters in fact elide this frame, analyzing instead habits in their formation, rigidification, transformation, and unbreakability. The result is characterized here as unintended yet productive, as the volume collectively testifies to the epistemic relevance of habit well beyond breakdown. This emerges from a detailed engagement with the individual contributions of Wehrle, Čapek, Hewig, Crossley, Munch-Jurisic, Brincker, and Cavallaro. The review concludes by endorsing how such internal tensions within the volume promote a reading experience that is itself a transformative philosophical habit: namely of appreciating conceptual overdetermination without collapsing into reductive systematicity.

Athletes often report that training and competition, especially under acute fatigue, cease to feel like play and begin to resemble work. Yet discussions in the philosophy of sport have rarely examined how fatigue transforms gameplay from the player’s own perspective. This paper offers a phenomenological account of fatigue’s normative significance for play. Drawing on Bernard Suits and C. Thi Nguyen, the author argues that gameplay depends on what he calls a readiness-to-play: a horizon of immediate possibilities that organizes autotelic action. Acute fatigue, he argues, progressively contracts this horizon through the negative actuality of non-actuality and the constrained anticipation of the dichotomous alternatives of continuing or stopping. Ultimately, fatigue reveals how gameplay may persist formally even as the experiential conditions of play recede.