Burnout by Hannah Proctor (Verso, 2024)
Hannah Proctor visits the concept of burnout not only as the sense of exhaustion and apathy that we commonly associate with it, but as the experience of political defeat—the disappointment, despair, and grief that emerges when one becomes aware that the political project they have committed themselves to may not succeed. This version of burnout can’t be entirely resolved by rest or self-care that limits itself to the personal, but requires attention and consideration of public and communal practices, movements, and militancies. That is, recovery from political defeat is itself a political process. She argues for anti-adaptive healing—not healing that adapts the wounded to a broken world, but healing that transforms both the injured and the injurer, that looks to the possibility of a different world amidst the ruins of the present one.
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