After the hard work: therapies for the new millennium

Art has long called for a more fulfilling future by appealing to individual emancipation, organisational emancipation and the “coming community”. In parallel, proposals are emerging that complicate some of the strategic assumptions of such rhetoric, since they are inseparable from a given cultural logic related to the liberal subject. Proposals making the case for a fatigue that is capable of deactivating the “neuronal violence” that contemporary capitalism unleashes (Han); the political potential of “exhaustion” (Bifo); and the need to recover sleep after its attack (Crary), would become programmatic restrictions that have endorsed numerous practices and talks speculating on a future that should no longer be thought of from the perspective of forms of action linked to the insurrectional tradition. Indeed, it would not be difficult to link these speculations to a longer philosophical, aesthetic tradition that challenged the so-called vita activa as a preliminary step towards establishing a better future. This article aims to address the implications of these “escape channels” on the basis of art and literature from the point of view of their close links with an ideological and economic situation that in one way or another overdetermine the proliferation of futures, that “after the hard work” they will only be viable through resignation therapeutics.