My project, A Political Theory of Exhaustion, reconstructs the centrality of the concept, specter, and experience of exhaustion to debates about social transformation in the 20th century. Engaging centrally with the work of Herbert Marcuse, Hannah Arendt, and Frantz Fanon, while also drawing on literature from social movements in South Africa, Algeria, and the United States, the project identifies exhaustion as a central feature of the phenomenology of action and its frustrations, and rethinks, from this premise, the role of critique in mediating and comprehending political disappointment. This conceptual legacy draws forward the unthought challenge of exhaustion for the project of critical theory today: To what extent are failures of social rationality in highly plural and unequal societies intelligible not only as failures of justification but failures of endurance for forms of contestation and hope that this requires (or refusals of its current regime of distribution)? What forms of social organization, discourse, and experience might bolster this kind of endurance and is this indeed desirable? How should we think about the relation between this effort and the forms of biopolitical optimization and management associated with racial capitalist social reproduction, and what critical perspective on society might be generated from its failures, limits, or alternative temporalities, even and especially when they seem to take irrational or negative forms? Drawing on decolonial and feminist thought while also locating parallel inquiries in an earlier set of genealogies, I ask, what are the modes of endurance that might bolster rather than constrain transformation today? The project builds on broader interests in continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, and legal theory, with a particular focus on South African jurisprudence. (Nica Siegel)