The Body without Fatigue: A Nineteenth-Century Utopia

Writing in 1888, Nietzsche asked: “Where does our modern world belong—to exhaustion or ascent?” His characterization of the epoch by the metaphor of fatigue or exhaustion was, by the end of the nineteenth century, itself symptomatic. It expressed a general fear, shared by the European middle classes, and given full vent elsewhere in Nietzsche’s writings, that humanity was losing its “accumulated energy,” depleting itself, and falling into that sleep which was “only a symbol of a much deeper and longer compulsion to rest.” ¹ In the “mobile army of metaphors” which dominated the late nineteenth century, fatigue held a very high rank. Exhaustion was the constant nemesis of the idea of progress, the great fear of the “Age of Capital.” As George Steiner remarked: “For every text of Benthamite confidence, of proud meliorism, we can find a counterstatement of nervous fatigue.” ²