In Defense of Indefensible Expressions
On the Pure Complaint of Chronic Fatigue
Rouzbeh Shadpey
“I now no longer use the better words.” — Ilse Aichinger, “Bad Words” (1976)
I’m tired—I loathe this expression. I say it often; I say it to everyone. On a given day, I may say it over a hundred times. Silently or out loud, to company or to furniture, I say: I’m tired. I tell J. when he asks me how I’m doing; I’ll tell my mother when she inquires about my health come morning. I tell my idiot doctor during our useless routine checkups; I tell my ex whom I suspect is relieved to no longer have to listen to my complaint as often as he did when we were together. If I had a psychoanalyst, I would tell her too: I’m tired. In fact, I would invent a game where the challenge is to repeat this phrase as many times as possible in the span of a single session. Conversely, I would need to find a non-Lacanian analyst and my ambivalent attachment to this pathetic specimen of speech—I’m tired—might go unanalyzed. For while I loathe this expression, I also appear to need it. I need it to know that there is such a thing called fatigue and that I possess it. Or rather, that this thing called fatigue possesses me, ventriloquizes me. For the truth of the matter is this: only when I am voicing my lament—I’m tired—and not a second before or after, can I truly know that I am, indeed, tired. This may sound absurd. Has my life’s work and pleasure not been radically upended by a merciless weariness for years now? And have I not, as a consequence, dedicated myself to the study of this fatigue, its nature? Nevertheless, despite—or perhaps because of—this intense familiarity, it remains the case that the second this utterance—I’m tired—has rolled off my tongue, it evaporates into thin air along with my certainty in its message. Like an ME/CFS Descartes, I am only tired while I am saying I’m tired.[1] The certainty of fatigue—my certainty in fatigue—appears only so long as I repeat it.
According to Lacan, “Certainty, for Descartes, is not a moment that one may regard as acquired, once it has been crossed. Each time and by each person it has to be repeated. It is an ascesis.” Lacan’s discussion of the philosopher’s desire in his eleventh seminar draws attention to the latter’s voice, which is also that of the Cartesian subject. The seamless transition from thinking to being is here troubled by the moment of voicing, rendered by Lacan in what would become the paper “Science and Truth” as a pair of quotation marks: I am thinking, therefore I am becomes I am thinking: “therefore I am.”[2] The monumentality of the cogito is dissolved to a punctual utterance; Descartes is only so long as he reminds us—and himself—of his existence.
Chronic fatigue, as I have come to understand it, is also an ascetic practice. Its difficult orientation demands great discipline, that one commit wholeheartedly to its repetition, the rehearsal of its lament. Like other “invisible” disabilities, chronic fatigue syndrome must don a masquerade to be socially legible. This may consist of a posture, a prosthetic, or a badge from the state. Or, more simply, an utterance: since its early figuration as neurasthenia, critical and clinical description have highlighted the prolixity of voice and narrative that oft accompany unbounded fatigue, as if compensating for the instability of its signifier. A cacophony of complaints, the neurasthenic—a syndrome rumored to have been modeled by Father Proust along the symptomatic lines of his literary son—expiates his lack of organic evidence through descriptive mania, symptomatic litanies, and shopping lists of ailments. “[T]he endless complaints of these exhausted souls,” as Anson Rabinbach describes it, even inspired Jean-Martin Charcot’s sympathy for his American colleague and father of neurasthenia, George Beard, in the form of his own lament (“Poor Beard!!”). Yet crucially, the weary plaintiff's performance does not exist solely for the Other. Unlike terminal states, like exhaustion, or irrefutable states, like pain, the problem of fatigue’s witness is not limited to its outside.[3] It applies to the weary subject as well—a subject who must, in the words of Jean-Louis Chrétien, account for “that which [they] are not present yet still attest to.” Fatigue undoes the subjectivity required for its experience. Phenomenologically fraught and empirically frail, it leans on language like a crutch, enacting itself via poetic performativity. For the certainty in its radical uncertainty lasts only the duration of its fleeting utterance. As its song fades, so does itself, and I along with it. Fatigue is, in other words, inseparable from its complaint, which renders the subject of chronic fatigue the kvetch par excellence.
“Fatigue undoes the subjectivity required for its experience. Phenomenologically fraught and empirically frail, it leans on language like a crutch, enacting itself via poetic performativity.”
To complain of weariness as a subject of chronic fatigue evinces something of the essence of complaint itself. Writing about that undertheorized genre of discourse known as the complaint—as well as its sister concepts: lamentation, reproof, grief, protest, reprobation—Aaron Schuster turns to an unlikely source. He identifies Gilles Deleuze as a prime thinker of the kvetch, albeit not in the usual understanding of this concept. Adducing the philosopher’s discussion of the complaint in the Abécédaire (under the heading “J for Joy” no less), Schuster argues that what drives Deleuze is not the litany of common complaints plaguing everyday life, but the search for what the philosopher deems the “pure complaint,” the Complaint-without-Organs. Distilled to its pure and empty form, such a complaint is no longer about atomized problems—petty grievances or particular reproofs—but nothing. This is complaint as the surplus of living; what’s wrong when nothing’s wrong (and something’s still wrong). In Schuster’s words, “What complaining ultimately aims at is not this or that wrong but the very framework in which wrongs may appear.” Reduced to its elementary formula, all complaint, no matter the nature of its grievance, registers for Deleuze a single message: that “what is happening is too much for me.” “When I complain,” Schuster concludes, “I register my objection to some state of affairs that fails to meet my desire.”
The irony, of course, is that complaining itself is a source of pleasure, a discursive machine that turns dissatisfaction into satisfaction. As such, it mirrors the endless movement of desire itself, exemplified for Schuster by the fictional Yiddish rendition of that Rolling Stones song, “(I Love to Keep Telling You that I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction (Because Telling You I’m Not Satisfied Is All that Can Satisfy Me).” Writing in Deleuze’s wake, Schuster’s attempt to trace what he terms a critique of pure complaint seeks to break the discursive genre from “clichéd litanies and reinject complaining with some of its pitilessness.” For this, however, he must turn to a new muse and focus his theoretical lens upon a new archetypal complainer. Ditching the petty neurotic, and the lingering ghost of his dead father, Schuster redirects his devotion to the pleureuse of bodily disasters: Deleuze’s saintly hypochondriac.
“When psychoanalysis is no longer subject to the neurotic regime of demand, but instead the regime of the psychosomatic complaint,” Deleuze writes, “[…] the whole field undergoes a transformation.” Deleuze is drawn to the hypochondriac’s lament; it indexes for the philosopher a hypersensitivity to the kaleidoscopic drives that constitute the body. “The intensity of their complaint,” he says, “is beautiful, sublime.” Instead of orienting herself towards the Other’s enigmatic desire, the Deleuzian hypochondriac touches upon something like, as Schuster puts it, “the raw stuff of experience.” She feels it all. Pitted against the Symbolic–Imaginary overwhelm of the neurotic’s symptom, the psychosomatic complaint then betrays something more immediate, more real. One cannot help but notice a striking resonance here with current Lacanian understandings of modern somatic symptoms, exemplified by Paul Verhaeghe’s theory of actualpathology. Basing it on Freud’s early, lesser discussed concept of actual neuroses—which encompassed anxiety neurosis; neurasthenia; and later, hypochondria—Verhaeghe attributes somatization, along with other medically unexplained symptoms (MUSs), to a tension borne of the body and condemned to remain within it, having been barred entry into the symbolic realm by way of the Other’s failure of response. Void of symbolism, a reflection without its mirror, the somaticized symptom is as dumb as the flesh it espouses.
Perhaps nowhere does this symbolic desertion present itself more acutely than in the case of chronic fatigue syndrome. Consider the following thought experiment put forth by Roland Barthes: you want to cancel a lecture or an obligation, draw a list of credible excuses—“beyond suspicion, beyond reply”—that will be successfully met by your employer. “Weariness? Surely not. Flu? Bad, banal. A surgical operation? Better, but watch out for the vengeance of fate!” Now say you go to the doctor because you’ve been so tired for the past three months that you’ve had to quit your job, abandon your studies, move back in with your parents, and live out of bed. Having anxiously awaited your appointment with the biomedical Other, what will you reply upon receiving that fateful question:
—So what brings you here?
—I’m tired.
—You’re tired? Everyone’s tired!
“[W]eariness is not coded,” remarks Barthes, “is not received.” It is a “sign without referent” and, most of all, a lousy excuse should one desire a day off. Like Verhaeghe, Barthes posits weariness’s weak tether to the Symbolic–Imaginary as both a cause and consequence of the Other’s failure to receive and respond to it. For fatigue is not only a symptom of everything, as medicine likes to remind us; it is everyone’s symptom. Cemented by medical and labor sciences throughout the twentieth century, the hegemonic understanding of fatigue as a normal side-effect of capitalist conditions of labor is responsible for this sociohistorical normalization that not only collapses pathological fatigue into everyday tiredness, but renders the two increasingly indistinguishable.[4] No symptom is more prone to identification: everyone is truly exhausted, and voicing one’s weariness has become as banal as remarking upon the weather (call it phatigue—fatigue’s phatic discourse).
Whether in the workplace or the clinic, fatigue, its (chief) complaint, thus goes unmet. Echoes of Barthes’ weary friend, Maurice Blanchot, resound here: “Of what do you complain, silence without origin? Why come here to haunt a language that cannot recognize you? What draws you among us, into this space where the brazen law has forever asserted itself? Is it you, that plaint not yet heard?” Except—and herein lies Barthes’, Blanchot’s, and Verhaeghe’s crucial analytic fault—not only has the weary subject’s plaint been heard, it has also effectively been answered. For the issue here is not the failure of the Other’s response, but the nature of this response. That is to say: what is at stake is not a lack of response by the (biomedical) Other, but the very real response, implicitly or explicitly rendered, that nothing is wrong.
In her Lacanian study of the role of discourse in the formation and manifestation of fatigue in ME/CFS, Amanda Diserholt perceptively renders this distinction along with its important implications. Examining the impotence—at best, but often outright dismissiveness—of Western medical doctors in the face of chronic fatigue, Diserholt remarks that what gets construed as a lack of response from the (biomedical) Other is in fact the staunch diagnosis, “there’s nothing wrong with you.” In Lacanian parlance, this translates to the production of a lack of a lack— whereby lack is the ontological condition of subjectivity and its effacement (the lack of lack) a violence inflicted upon the subject and the preconditions of its desire. It is worth quoting Diserholt at length here:
[T]he statement ‘there’s nothing wrong with you’ (alongside the demand [for diagnosis]) constitutes a lack of a lack insofar as it comprises a complete answer which stops further speculations. That is, uncertainty and indeterminability (lack) which fuel questions and investigations in an attempt to explain […] the incomprehensible situation and bodily discomforts a subject finds him/herself in […] are foreclosed in a lack of a lack. There is no space for considering any other explanations or possibilities other than ‘nothing is wrong with you,’ which excludes subjectivity and desire as such. It involves a symbolization which stops further symbolizations (emphasis added).
The issue is not that fatigue is a symptom void of symbolism, but that it is a symptom that has been symbolized in a manner that halts symbolization. A symbol of the void mistaken for the void of symbolism; the declaration of lack construed as a lack of declaration, and, consequently, reduced to nothing (is wrong with you). The Lacanian framework is useful for thinking fatigue precisely because it gravitates around the importance of lack for subjectivity and desire. As an inevitable consequence of the body’s non-coincidence with the symbolic realm, lack generates desire when its structural absence is mistaken for loss, catalyzing the search for the missing object. This search, its drive, is fundamental for subjectivity—hence the importance of keeping its gap open, permeable and potent. When lack is closed off, covered over with an ill-fitting diagnosis as it is in ME/CFS, its subject suffocates, and eventually disappears. Lacan’s notion of anxiety proper—as opposed to castration anxiety—points at this suffering. Reversing the Freudian distinction between fear and anxiety—wherein fear is with an object and anxiety without one—Lacan suggests that anxiety is not only caused by the lost object, as in castration, but by a loss of the lost object. This is anxiety secondary to an overwhelming presence where one expects to find absence. This is anxiety caused by the lack of a lack; a closure of the void.
“To say one is tired, in the current era of normalized capitalist burnout, unending genocide, and planetary exhaustion, is to say nothing but the obvious: work has become living, and living has become work.”
Facing the giant mantis in a white coat, dressed in a diagnostic straight-jacket, how, then, does the subject of chronic fatigue manage to keep the void alive? He complains. For if to have chronic fatigue is to have there be nothing wrong with you, then the subject of its utterance must be considered among the pantheon of great Deleuzian complainers. Gutted of symbolic signification, his weary lament registers what’s wrong when nothing’s wrong. It is a Complaint-without-Organs in the most literal sense: a whole-body somatic complaint—“a lesion of the (total) body”[5]—that presents without organic evidence, which is to say, an organ to account for. Why else persist in voicing one’s grief in such symbolically disenfranchised terms? Why else the stubborn attachment to this plea—I’m tired—when it is common patient knowledge that absolutely any other symptom contains a greater chance of commanding medical care and attention?[6]
Precisely to keep the void alive. As Schuster remarks, the pure complaint is not about coping, nor is it about getting one’s demands met; it is about registering self-loss. “Complaining is not a plea or an entreaty, and does not seek recognition or recompense. Rather, it is the song of these overwhelming forces.” The subject of chronic fatigue knows better than anyone that fatigue is medically useless, that its expression is bad language. To say one is tired, in the current era of normalized capitalist burnout, unending genocide, and planetary exhaustion, is to say nothing but the obvious: work has become living, and living has become work. Consequently, to say one is tired when one suffers from a fatigue that has been severed from the replenishing circadian rhythms of sleep and rest—a stubborn, static, relentless fatigue, whose constant results from a simultaneously perverse and unsophisticated calculus preceding all algebraic possibility—is to say even less. In such circumstances, to say one is tired is the equivalent of saying I am not now how I want to be now, which is none other than the distilled expression of desire; to want something else, which is just to say, to want. Pure complaint—
—I’m tired, this wretched expression, is a sick person’s love letter to desire, the destruction of which is both the seed of illness and the ravage it sows. Utterly impotent and impossibly life-affirming, it is bad language, and thus wholly worth defending. A symptom of living whose symptom we are made whenever we protest our illness, whispering to the wind—I’m tired—only to bathe in its blowback. Intoxicating.
[1] ME/CFS stands for myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, the official medical diagnosis for chronic fatigue.
[2] “Which is why it is worth restating that in the test of writing I am thinking: “therefore I am,” with quotes around the second clause, it is legible that thought only grounds being by knotting itself in speech where every operation goes right to the essence of language.” Jacques Lacan, “Science and Truth,” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005), 865. As Fink puts it, “the Cartesian subject concludes that he is every time he says to himself, ‘I am thinking.’ He must repeat to himself the words ‘I am thinking’ in order to be able to convince himself that he exists.” Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 42.
[3] “The tired person can no longer realize, but the exhausted person can no longer possibilize.” On the conceptual difference between fatigue and exhaustion, see Gilles Deleuze, “The Exhausted,” in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Michael A. Greco and Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 1997), 152. On the irrefutability of pain, see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), § 246. “The truth is: it makes sense to say about other people that they doubt whether I am in pain; but not to say it about myself.”
[4] See Emily Rogers’ upcoming manuscript on ME/CFS for an in-depth discussion on this.
[5] “What is the place of a lesion of the (total) body in the (socially) recognized table of illnesses?” Barthes, The Neutral, 17.
[6] This of course is heavily modulated by racialized, and thus gendered, factors. Which symptoms register as evidence in any given clinical situation cannot be isolated from the symbolic and material forces of racialization within a given historical conjuncture—as well as those baked into, and foundational to, Western biomedicine.