Müdigkeit : Allzumenschliches in Anthropologie, Philosophie und Literatur des 17. und 18. Jahrhundert

Tiredness is a topic in philosophical, economic, mechanical, physiological, but above all (as Fatigue) in psychiatric contexts. In research, tiredness has traditionally been associated with a critique of biopolitics and meritocracy since industrialisation, but it was already preoccupying the 17th and 18th centuries. At the meantime, however, tiredness is also a place of letting go, a very special art of taking time out. The relationship of tiredness to time and work, the mind and the body, the artistic ground and the mental abyss is decisively questioned in my contribution with regard to the cultural-historical dimensions in discourses of anthropology, philosophy and literature of the 18th century and heir prehistory in the 17th century, whereby literature is repeatedly brought into view. For it is precisely tiredness, according to the thesis I present here, that forms a specifically aisthetic site that harbours the potential and creative condition of possibility for an aesthetics of its very own.