on PRE-ORDER

At a time when we find ourselves repressed by conditions of atomized and isolated exploitation - not as a momentary crisis, but as the enduring condition of living under capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy, structures that fragment, extract, and exhaust both our bodies and our imaginaries - we ask: how can we think from and within exhaustion? This exhausted and exhausting mode of existence, rather than foreclosing possibilities, becomes a locus where alternative, collective, and radical futures can be imagined, dreamed and actualized. Here, exhaustion is creatively mobilized as a conceptual lens as well as a porous threshold of experience. From this collective site, where the perceived distinctions between selves are dismantled, and from the exhausted dreams of the insomniacs, new worlds begin to form.

This book approaches exhaustion not as an end, but as a method: a way of inhabiting exhaustion differently, by attending to the fractures and fissures of exhausted bodies, institutions and systems as openings towards their recompositions otherwise. Activating Gilles Deleuze’s text “The Exhausted” in relation to these porous contemporary conditions, Fuck Healing (?) The Insomniac Dreamers gathers a constellation of collective practices: creatively written contributions, zines, illustrated short stories, theoretical essays, experimental forms of storytelling, and collaborative texts. It fabricates a non-hierarchical, transversal constellation of thoughts, where ideas negotiate and recombine with one another in unpredictable proximities.

Emerging from the margins of institutional structures, this work is hosted by the Fuck Healing (?) collective: a gathering of artists, educators, and thinkers who critically interrogate ideas of 'healing' as proximate to hegemonic regimes of conformity and normative perceptions of health. From this position, the collective questions the notion of healing as the transition from a state of ‘unwellness’ to ‘well’ and ‘healthy’, and propositionally work with methods to institute ongoing practices of care beyond these reductive categories. Through collaborative organizations, the Fuck Healing (?) collective questions the merits of our wounds, the divergent momentum they present, and recognise the future modes of 'becomings' that 'breaking' may allow us. Together, we refuse the imperative to restore, to fix, to return to what was. Instead, we fabricate - from exhaustion, fractures, and woundings - the dream of a world otherwise.

Edited and introduced by the Fuck Healing (?) collective, with contributions by Hypatia Vourloumis, Patricia Pisters, Sara Giannini, Kseniia Bespalova, Ege Yılmaztürk, Rocco Enzo ter Haar, Bethany Crawford, Eric Peter, Bogna Bochinska, Chananja Clement, Dr. Rick Dolphijn, Irena Chawrilska, Toni Pape, Halbe Hessel Kuipers, Sophie Boka and Jeffrey Babcock.