Fatigue as the unconscious refusal of the demands of late capitalism

This paper explores fatigue in today’s society by drawing on popular culture and interviews conducted as part of a doctoral research study of nine people suffering from chronic fatigue. With a focus on the ideology of late capitalism, it examines how the emergence of fatigue might be one way of unconsciously refusing the demand for constant activity and presence found therein. To this end, the paper relies on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, drawing on the concepts of anorexia (as a refusal of a demand and an embodied disappearance), the drive, desire and mourning to show how the subject’s refusal emerges at the intersection between the body and the social.