Tired of trying to belong: On affective justice and fatigue

Abstract

In this article, I offer a critical phenomenological exploration of the affective dimension of the experience of indebtedness that many people racially construed as ‘immigrants’ describe being faced with. I have done so, more specifically, by turning the philosophical spotlight on the experience of fatigue resulting from the affective labor of having to constantly prove one’s belonging and loyalty to the nation. In particular, I discuss two questions: How can Shilol Whitney’s theory of ‘affective by-products’ and ‘affective injustice’ help us understand why fatigue functions a mark of injustice in accounts of marginalized lived experience? And what characterizes the internal dynamic of fatigue itself, as lived experience? I defend the subversive power of staying with fatigue in order to interrogate its meaning and power, and challenge the ‘passivist’ view of what it means to yield to fatigue. More generally, I argue that a critical phenomenology of fatigue offers a valuable contribution to contemporary philosophical debates concerning the often unacknowledged, affective labors of marginalized social groups.

I Immigrant indebtedness and the question of fatigue

In Norway, the year 2021 marked the 50th anniversary of the first ‘wave’ of Pakistani immigrants’ arrival in Norway. Since the early 1970s, Pakistani immigrants and their families have been an important immigration group in the Norwegian context. In recent years, many children of Pakistani immigrants – so-called second generation immigrants – have come forward to describe their lived experience as two- or multi-cultural children of immigrants or so-called ‘hyphen-Norwegians’. A recurrent topic has been the way in which they find their ‘Norwegianness’ always questioned, always in suspense, and how despite decades of effort, many Norwegian-Pakistanis as well as their children are faced with the experience of never being ‘Norwegian enough’ to be fully accepted and included in their own homeland. I have previously analysed this dynamic of conditional belonging as a specific relation of debt, which I have called ‘immigrant indebtedness’. ¹ Briefly put, immigrant indebtedness concerns the way in which people who are racially construed as ‘immigrants’, independently of one’s legal status, find themselves entangled in a perpetual debt of gratitude with their country, state or co-citizens. This debt-relation is conditioned by, but also consolidates their status as ‘forever foreigners’, rendering their actual belonging unattainable. More specifically, the relation of immigrant indebtedness creates the need to perform a never-ending kind of labor, namely the labor of constantly having to prove one’s belonging in one’s own country, despite the fact that – or precisely because – this belonging is always already out of reach.

In January 2022, the public debate about immigrants, inclusion and belonging in the Norwegian context took a new turn when Ahmed Fawad Ashraf, a newspaper editor and Norwegian-born son of Pakistani immigrants, published an opinion piece where he stated that he is no longer interested in spending time and energy defending his Norwegian identity. ² Tired of constantly having to prove his belonging in the country where he was born, Ashraf describes how he no longer feels the desire to fight for his Norwegianness as before. Therefore, he explains, he has recently made a choice: when faced with the question of where he is from, rather than insisting that he ‘is Norwegian’, he now prefers simply saying that he is ‘born here’. Rather than presenting himself to international colleagues as a ‘Norwegian journalist’, he prefers saying that he ‘works for a Norwegian newspaper’. In short, he has relinquished his Norwegian social identity. This strategy, he emphasizes, has been a deliberate choice to ‘turn down the noise’. The choice to stop actively fighting for his Norwegianness has felt emancipating, he writes, because it liberates him from ‘fighting to fit in in a society on other people’s premises’. It has been a way for Ashraf to take back control over all those situations where people question his Norwegian identity.

Ashraf’s piece launched a fierce public debate in the media that lasted for weeks, crowned with a televised debate on the national state channel NRK. As the debate played out, two main camps emerged: On one side was Ashraf and those supporting him, defending his right to ‘refuse to be Norwegian’. On the other side were those who insisted that this decision represents a moving away from a shared sense of a social Norwegian identity which risks undermining the social cohesion deemed essential to Norwegian society. Many argued that this shared sense of Norwegian social identity and the cohesion it fosters constitute essential conditions for the functioning of the Norwegian social-democratic welfare state, which both immigrants and non-immigrants benefit from. Moreover, many pointed out, Ashraf’s refusal of Norwegian identity undermines several generations of immigrants’ and children of immigrants’ anti-racist struggle for belonging – a struggle whose aim has been precisely to expand the very meaning of what it means to ‘be Norwegian’ so that it can include also people of color and other minorities. ³

In this debate, however, a key element of Ashraf’s decision somehow got lost, namely, how fighting for one’s Norwegian identity as a minority person at some point can feel so tiring that it is not experienced as worth it anymore, despite how important it used to be, both personally and politically. This was, I believe, Ashraf’s central insight. Until recently, he was proud of his Norwegian identity, and it was an important part of what it meant for him to belong in Norway. Moreover, he identified with the political, anti-racist struggle to expand the category of who counts as Norwegian to include people with minority backgrounds. However, at some point, the cost of this perpetual fight to belong simply became too much. Ashraf’s decision to opt out of Norwegian identity cannot be discussed separately from this experience of fatigue, resulting from the never-ending labor of belonging he constantly has to perform. What the Ashraf case shows, then, is that the experience of fatigue can be so overwhelming that other motives lose their priority and urgency. By showing this, it brings to light a real phenomenological question, namely, the question of the power and meaning of fatigue, and of the consequences fatigue and exhaustion can have upon our chosen projects, motives for action and meaning-making.

Ashraf’s labor of belonging and the exhaustion that results from it are obviously not unique to his case. Fatigue, tiredness, weariness and exhaustion are indeed common references in accounts of racialized and marginalized lived experience more generally, often in connection with the unacknowledged and disproportional forms of labor associated with it, whether we’re talking about sexuality, gender or disability, just to mention a few. As I claim below, references to fatigue even tend to function as a mark of injustice and harm in such accounts. However, the experience of fatigue itself – how fatigue functions, operates or influences lived experience – is not usually taken up or theorized. The meaning and power of the experience of fatigue as a mark of exploitation and injustice indeed often seems to be taken for granted.

Whereas I have previously focused on the temporal aspect of immigrant indebtedness and the constant labor of belonging it requires from people construed as forever foreigners, interrogating the meaning and power of fatigue is a way of shifting focus toward the affective dimensions of this dynamic. I will talk more about affects below, but I can already here say that by ‘affective’ I refer to the fact that fatigue is first and foremost something that is felt: I feel tired; I feel exhausted. Affect, writes Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, ‘is the name we give to those forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing . . . that can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension’. ⁴ More specifically, by analysing how fatigue constitutes an essential aspect of immigrant indebted existence, I show how the labor of belonging that ‘forever foreigners’ have to perform is not only itself affective, but also has important affective consequences on the subject performing it, including fatigue.

My investigation is phenomenological, falling more specifically within the school of critical phenomenology. I take this approach to mean a philosophical method that starts from first-person experiences in order to interrogate the more general, philosophical meaning of those experiences, as well as their underlying, conditional structures. I understand such structures as ‘quasi-transcendental’ in the sense proposed by Lisa Guenther in her defense a critical phenomenology. Guenther indeed describes critical phenomenology as a practice of reflecting on the condition of lived experience and the lifeworld by ‘describ[ing], interrogat[ing], and ultimately transform[ing] the contingent, historical, yet quasi-transcendental structures that shape the meaning and materiality of this experience’. ⁵ At the same time, I situate the investigation within contemporary affect theory, which in some versions, it can be argued, are indeed phenomenological in nature.

In what follows, I analyse in a first part what it means to understand Ashraf’s experience of fatigue as affect, taking part in an affective economy where it is deeply connected to the ‘labor of belonging’ he is constantly called on to perform, which is itself an affective form of labor. This framework for understanding fatigue will allow me to interrogate why certain kinds of fatigue can indeed function as a ‘mark of injustice’, differently from ‘everyday’ fatigue. The question is: when or under what conditions can we say that being tired, in the sense underlying Ashraf’s decision to relinquish his Norwegianness, is a political or social problem? I connect what I think of as the injustice of Ashraf’s fatigue to Shilol Whitney’s claim that there is a unique form of injustice that is affective, not reducible to other forms of harm (e.g. economic harm). This affective harm is connected to the way in which affective labor also involves metabolizing or absorbing what Whitney calls ‘affective by-products’ – a potentially exploitive aspect of affective labor which is profoundly gendered and racialized. In the second part, I move to interrogate the question of fatigue’s internal dynamic. What distinguishes, for example, fatigue as affective by-product from the one much more present in Whitney’s analysis, through references to Audre Lorde and Frantz Fanon, namely anger? I here show that as affective by-product, fatigue itself can be analysed as having what we can call its own ‘affective temporality’. Notably, fatigue is characterized by an accumulation that may reach a tipping-point, which constitutes its affective paroxysm. Interestingly, by the time fatigue reaches this tipping-point, ‘giving in to fatigue’ is, as we will see, not necessarily a question of ‘giving up’ or somehow losing one’s agency, but can open up for new venues or strategies for action and resistance, in line with what Emmanuel Levinas calls the ‘passive-active’ dimension of fatigue. Moreover, in so far as both the labor of belonging as well as the by-productive labor of absorbing one’s fatigue in the case of immigrant indebtedness can be understood as a form of debt-payment, the related affective strategies of resistance can also be understood as practices of debt-refusal. As such, the framework of indebtedness helps us discover new dimensions of affective labor and affective resistance, and resituate the notions of affective labor and affective by-products within a debt-economic framework.

Before moving on to the analysis, I want to make some initial clarifications regarding my use of the term ‘fatigue’. First: In general, this term refers to an experience that is distinct from ‘ordinary’ tiredness, although the two terms are at the same time very much related. The nuances of the lived experience of fatigue will be discussed more in full later, but as Katherine Morris points out, it can generally be taken to mean a form of ‘extreme tiredness’. ⁶ In other words, I am here interested in Ashraf’s fatigue in so far as it seems to be something more than ‘ordinary’ or ‘everyday’ tiredness. (Whereas Morris argues that fatigue for various reasons should be considered an experience that is essentially different from that of tiredness, I have chosen to leave the question of whether tiredness and fatigue differ simply by degree or ‘by essence’ open for the purposes of this paper).

Second, it should be noted that the very meaning of tiredness is ambiguous in and by itself, and that this ambiguity seems to extend to fatigue. As Morris points out, being tired ‘can mean something like “ready for or in need of sleep” (perhaps “having a felt need for sleep”), but can also mean something like “fed up” or “bored”: “I’m tired of you droning on and on about phenomenology” (in this usage, often in the idiom “sick and tired”)’. ⁷ Conversely, ‘fatigue’ is also a potentially ambiguous term, oscillating between different meanings of what it means to be ‘extremely tired’. For example, it seems clear that Ashraf’s fatigue is different from such (for lack of better words) ‘medical’ forms of fatigue that interest Morris, namely, ‘chronic fatigue’ or ‘chronic fatigue syndrome’ (CFS). Ashraf is not tired in the sense of not being able to get out of bed, or constantly needing to sleep. Nevertheless, he seems to be experiencing what can justifiably be called a form of extreme tiredness, fatigue, or exhaustion. That is my main reason for sticking with the term ‘fatigue’ also in this case, although – as I will get back to later – the distinction between this kind of fatigue and affects such as anger, frustration, or even resentment, is not always clear and needs further clarification.

Third and last, I want to emphasize the perhaps evident point that while not ‘medical’ in the sense of chronic fatigue or CFS, Ashraf’s fatigue is nevertheless profoundly embodied. It would, in other words, be extremely misleading to think of it as ‘non-physical’ or ‘non-bodily’. While not all forms of fatigue are ‘medical’ or have a ‘physical’ origin, all forms of fatigue – and all affects, more generally – are nevertheless embodied and bodily experiences. The aforementioned ambiguity between different experiences of tiredness and fatigue – certain being experienced as more ‘physical’ than others – should therefore under no circumstance be thought of as absolute. It is always our body-minds that experience different kinds of tiredness or fatigue, the life of the body and the life of the mind being fundamentally intertwined. It is fatigue as it emerges as phenomenon within this ambiguous landscape that constitutes the object of our interrogation.

II Fatigue as mark of injustice

How is it that someone like Ashraf, who for most of his life has taken pride in defining himself as Norwegian, at some point becomes so exhausted of having to constantly fight for his Norwegian national identity that he chooses to give it up in order to ‘turn down the noise’? And what is it that makes this fatigue particularly problematic or unjust?

In his initial opinion piece, Ashraf describes how his Norwegian identity and even citizenship has always been questioned by people around him because of his background and brown skin-color, despite him being born in Norway. For example, he describes an encounter with a police officer at the airport upon returning to Norway with a friend after vacation: the officer waved his friend past the passport control, while Ashraf was held back. The officer checked his passport and questioned him. When he was done, he handed back the passport and said: ‘Well, well. Norwegian passport. Worked out for you, too’ – implying that Ashraf should feel lucky and grateful for having a Norwegian citizenship. ⁸ This episode stands out in Ashraf’s memory, but at the same time he describes it as ‘one of many’. Ashraf emphasizes that such comments, while first provoking anger, also tend to have more long-lasting effects: ‘When the anger subsides, the brain keeps grinding. It releases an inner conflict, but also larger, existential questions that many two-cultural [persons] are faced with: When is one Norwegian enough, and who sets the premises? What criteria “certify” you as Norwegian?’ ⁹

With time, the ‘grinding’ Ashraf here describes gives rise to what appears to be a deep fatigue or exhaustion, which eventually has profound effects on his choices and identity. Many people have described or at least referred to this kind of fatigue, especially in connection with what we call emotional or affective labor. Helen Ngo, for example, emphasizes how the constant managing of racism that racialized bodies must engage in, often ‘through the adoption of various gestural, postural and behavioral strategies’, constitutes a specific form of labor. ¹⁰ This, Ngo points out, explains why references to fatigue are so prevalent in descriptions of lived experience by people of color: ‘we begin to make sense of why terms such as “fatigue,” “exhaustion” and “stress” are so frequently invoked by people of color in describing their experience of anti-racist work and daily living’. ¹¹ As Ngo interestingly points out, this kind of labor is not only tiring because of its ‘mere facticity’, that is, the fact that it has to be done, contributing to ‘the overloading of one’s system in purely functional terms’, but also because it is a labor that carries with it a strong ‘affective dimension’, seemingly making the effort even more tiresome and the resulting fatigue even more all-encompassing. ¹²

In his auto-biographical book Vi puster fortsatt [We’re still breathing], another Norwegian journalist, Yohan Shanmugaratnam, describes the fatigue from longtime experiences with racism in the following way:

I am exhausted. I am not the only one saying this. After having said that they cannot breathe, after having shared their most intimate stories before the entire Norwegian people, at least those who still want to listen, after having undressed before those who have ridiculed them, after all this, these three words are the ones that remain: I am exhausted. ¹³

What Shanmugaratnam is describing, is precisely a deep exhaustion resulting from a certain kind of labor. This labor involves, as he emphasizes, talking about the discrimination and oppressive structures he experiences, as well as sharing intimate stories (in order to be believed), and being vulnerable even ‘before those who have ridiculed them’. In other words, it is a fatigue resulting from the affective labor of constantly having to deal with, negotiate and manage racism. Moreover, this fatigue in no way appears secondary to his experience, but at the heart of racialized lived experience and its injustice. This is the feeling, in the end, that remains.

Interestingly, a central function of experiencing this exhaustion is that it involves, if not a direct accusation toward anyone in particular, then at least the registration of an injustice. The reference to exhaustion suggests that a harm has been done: it is an exhaustion that shouldn’t be necessary, and moreover, it is unfairly disproportionate, reflecting how certain people’s duties and extra labor exist because of other people’s entitlements, which in turn are based on illegitimate grounds such as nationality, ethnicity and race. In accounts of affective labor, references to exhaustion or fatigue often takes on this particular function of indicating a harm. Often, it is a harm that has hitherto gone unacknowledged, and of which the experience of fatigue serves as a stubborn, still unarticulated indication. Building on Ngo’s observation, as well as Ashraf’s and Shanmugaratnam’s accounts, it is indeed my claim that fatigue is not only prevalent in accounts of racialized lived experience but tends to function as a mark of injustice and harm, especially when evoked in connection with different unacknowledged and disproportional forms of labor associated with marginalized ways of being in the world. (In other contexts, other structures such as gender, sexuality or (dis)ability can lie at the origin of the disproportionate, unacknowledged labors and resulting fatigue). But what does it mean to say that fatigue functions as a mark of injustice and/or harm? In order to understand under what conditions fatigue indicates a harm, or is itself problematic, unjust or harmful, we need to interrogate its connection to labor and, more specifically, affective labor.

Fatigue as indication of prior harm

The first way in which fatigue functions as a mark of injustice, is indirect: It indicates a prior harm located on the level of labor that fatigue is indissociable from. In Ashraf’s case, the labor in question – his constant labor of belonging – is an affective kind of labor. This leads us to the following question: what is affective labor, and when is it unjust?

Many scholars working on affects trace the notion of affective or emotional labor back to anthropologist Arlie Russell Hochschild’s 1983 work The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. ¹⁴ Here, Hochschild studied how the work of flight attendants involves a kind of labor which is emotional in nature, insofar as it involves the management and production of feelings, both in the self and others. As she pointed out, the work of the flight attendant does not only involve the physical work she is doing, but ‘something more’, namely a form of labor that ‘requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others’, namely, a ‘sense of being cared for in a convivial and safe place’. ¹⁵ This work is what Hochschild calls emotional labor. But while Hochschild has the merit of having spotted this ‘something more’ that characterizes certain kinds of labor that are (also) emotional or affective in nature, her view of affective labor as productive of certain moods and feeling in oneself and others is partially criticized by other scholars such as Shiloh Whitney. ¹⁶ Whitney draws on the tradition of feminist scholars working on emotions, who have criticized Hochschild for having left out the kind of unacknowledged emotional work that is reproductive work from her account of emotional labor, including, for example, feminized labor of care. However, Whitney goes even further and argues that affective labor is neither productive nor reproductive, but ‘by-productive labor, functioning according to a logic of amplification and transmission rather than one of use and exchange’. ¹⁷

What is at stake in talking about affective labor as not only productive or reproductive, but by-productive? Whitney follows Sara Ahmed, who in The Cultural Politics of Emotions emphasizes the circularity of emotions, that is, the way in which they circulate among people. ¹⁸ More specifically, she is interested in ‘consider[ing] the production and circulation of affect on its own terms – especially where it intersects with the racialization and gendering of this type of labor’. ¹⁹ What this means, is that affective labor should not only be understood as a form of labor that exists – albeit undervalued – as a part of certain kind of jobs. Whereas this is of course also the case, as Hochschild has shown, this is not the only – and perhaps not even the most important – sphere of affective labor. After all, as Whitney notes, we are here talking about a form of labor that is strongly racialized and gendered in ways that goes way beyond the commodification of affective labor in certain kinds of jobs:

It is noteworthy that the demand to ‘creat[e] the emotional tone of social encounters,' to smile warmly and produce an atmosphere of cheer and convivial comfort, is not only labor required of flight attendants as part of their employment; it is also labor required in different ways of women and some racialized groups as part of their position, not always as an employee but also and more broadly in a political economy of affect production and circulation that exceeds the bounds of the market and has long been part of private life. ²⁰

It is indeed on this level that we have to understand the affective labor that people such as Ashraf or Shanmaguratnam are performing: not just as a hidden part of certain jobs, but as a hidden part of life, including ‘private life’. In Ashraf’s case, his fatigue is, as both Ngo and Whitney suggest, deeply connected to a constant affective and psychological labor required by him as a racialized person. More specifically, Ashraf – even though he is born in Norway – is racialized as ‘immigrant’ or ‘forever foreigner’ in Norway, finding himself in a state of conditional inclusion where his national belonging is constantly questioned and has to be defended or justified. This labor obviously does not end when he goes home from work. In fact, it is not a part of his job at all, but something he has to deal with, constantly, ‘on the side’. Moreover, as Whitney shows, this labor is by-productive: it functions according to a logic of amplification and transmission of already circulating feelings which in turn yields certain by-products, such as fatigue. Fatigue, then, can ultimately be understood as an affective by-product resulting from a particular kind labor which is itself affective, and at the same time disclosing the harm of this very labor.

What is the problem with the affective labor Ashraf has to perform to defend and justify his Norwegian identity? As he specifies himself, Ashraf does not have a problem sharing stories about his family background – on the contrary, it is a story he is proud to share. However, it is only after he resigns from the project of ‘defending his Norwegianness’ that he finds the room for engaging in actual conversations about this. As long as he tries to defend his Norwegian identity, people seem to ask questions about his background, not because they are genuinely interested in it, but as to invoke a problem or an issue, or to point to the fact that Norwegian citizenship is something he shouldn’t have had, something that he has gotten, in some sense, as an (presumably undeserved) gift.

As I see it, Ashraf’s labor of belonging can in fact be understood as a form of debt- or interest-payment, where what is presumed owed (and collectively collected) are culturally accepted expressions of gratitude and indebtedness – reflecting the status of being indebted that ‘forever foreigners' tend to carry with them along with that of ‘perpetual guest’. ²¹ The problem with this ongoing debt-payment is not only that it is demanding and exhausting, as Ashraf and others describe. After all, many things can be exhausting which are not necessarily unjust. The fundamental problem is rather that this entire debt-relation, it can be argued, is illegitimate to begin with, giving way to a labor which is unjustly distributed, disproportionate and never-ending. To be more specific, the labor of belonging that goes hand in hand with immigrant ‘debt of gratitude’ affects people disproportionately on illegitimate, racial grounds. It is projected onto people who are perceived as immigrants, independently of whether they have in fact immigrated to the country or are born in Norway. Affective labor of belonging is therefore not a kind of labor that everyone needs to do, at least not to the same extent. It is an ‘extra shift’ of labor befalling on people who for various reasons are marked as ‘immigrants’ or ‘foreigners’, and who because of this constantly have to justify their social belonging or status, which are constantly undermined or questioned as they go about living their everyday lives. Second, it is unclear why immigrants, even those who have indeed immigrated, should owe a special kind of gratitude to their ‘host country’ in the first place, or to whom exactly this gratitude is owed, in so far as they have the right to reside and are hence no longer ‘guests’, but residents. There is thus a mismatch between immigrants’ rights to stay and the disproportional gratitude which is expected of them. Third, a major problem with ‘immigrant debt’ and the ensuing labor of belonging is that it is in practice impossible to ‘pay back’ and be acquitted of, being thus for all practical purposes infinite. (This is also why the ensuing labor of belonging should be understood a form of perpetual interest payment, rather than actual debt-payment).

What is more, adding to the heaviness and injustice of immigrant labor of belonging, is that it is usually invisible or unacknowledged. This is something it shares with other kinds of affective labor, performed by other marginalized groups. Indeed, we find plenty of similar accounts of affective, ‘invisible labor’, not only in relation to living with racism, but also in relation to other forms of marginalized lived experience. Ngo, for example, points out how the often ‘invisible’ and unacknowledged labor of racialized embodiment, while very different in style and function, can be compared to women’s time-consuming performance of their gender role as analysed by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex. ²² In the Norwegian context, authors Camara Lundestad Joof and Jan Grue have emphasized the similarity or ‘family likeness’ between the invisible labor involved in living with racism and living with disability. Jan Grue underlines that in both cases ‘we are talking about the combination of the physical work that has to be done . . . and just as much the emotional work that must be done by the person who is in the most vulnerable position, the one who knows that they have access only at the mercy of others’. ²³

The affective injustice of fatigue

In addition to thinking about fatigue as a mark of injustice in so far as it indicates a ‘prior injustice’ at the level of affective labor, the aim of my investigation of the Ashraf case is to think about the fatigue and exhaustion resulting from this labor as an additional level of injustice, namely what Whitney calls ‘affective injustice’. According to Whitney, ‘affective injustice’ concerns the way in which affective labor becomes unjust and exploitative beyond thinking that it is the labor in itself (or its commodification) that is unjust. ²⁴ As she emphasizes, some injustices are ‘uniquely affective’ in nature. At the heart of Whitney’s concept of affective injustice lies the phenomenon affective indigestion, that is, the way in which (some) affective labor involves ‘the work of metabolizing unwanted affects and affective by-products’. ²⁵ In a reading of Encarnacion Gutiérrez-Rodríguez’ study of migrant women workers and the affective dimension of their labor, Whitney emphasizes the references to digestion that show up in these accounts: for example, the whole constant experience of inequality is something that the women have to ‘digest . . . emotionally and bodily’. ²⁶ Affects, Whitney shows, are indeed something that can not only circulate, be transmitted or amplified, they can also be absorbed, expelled, metabolized. Affective labor is not only about producing or upholding certain feelings, but also about absorbing or metabolizing excessive feelings, that is, ‘affective by-products’ or ‘waste affects’: ‘Affective labor tends to produce an unmanageable by-product: excess or waste affects whose metabolization is one of the after-hours costs of affective labor for the worker’. ²⁷

What makes affective indigestion harmful and unjust, and not just a part of everyday life, is – again – its deep connection to oppressive structures like racialization and gendering. This connection goes (at least) two ways. On the one hand, structures like race and gender condition who has to perform this kind of extra metabolic work. On the other hand, such structures are produced and consolidated precisely through affective dumping and affective exploitation, which indeed contributes to perpetuate racial and gendered structures. On this view, the injustice of Ashraf’s and Shanmaguratnam’s fatigue as fatigue, that is, as affect, is double, adding a second and third connection between fatigue and injustice in addition to the ‘indirect’ one we looked at in the last section: (2a) Fatigue is unjust in so far as it is both conditioned by and reproductive of oppressive, discriminatory racial/gendered structures. In other words, it is unjust in so far as it – just like the affective labor it reflects – is a disproportionate kind of fatigue, reflecting the various kinds of invisible labor disproportionally distributed along racial, ethnic or gender lines, or other lines of hierarchization. Fatigue is unjust when some people in privileged positions do not have to deal with it as a consequence of their privilege, whereas for others it can come to dominate one’s life to the point that it becomes almost too much to bear. (2b) Last but not the least, fatigue is also unjust as affect in so far as it often – especially along those same lines of hierarchization – remains invisible and unacknowledged, meaning it cannot easily be resolved socially. It cannot be aired, vented or released, because, as Whitney emphasizes, there is no room for it in the public space. Finding no release or expression, it thus becomes ‘indigestible’ and simply has to be swallowed: metabolized as an unwanted by-product of the already disproportionate affective labor of belonging. This not only doubles up the affective labor, but also the fatigue and the injustice in question, making the already disproportionate labor extra heavy and even harder to bear. Indeed, once Ashraf does try to bring his fatigue up on the stage, by pointing out how it has affected him to the extent that he is ready to give up his Norwegian identity, his experience of being tired – that is, the affective by-product – is quickly erased from the debate. Instead, he is being criticized for ‘giving up’ on Norwegian identity, or for ‘opting out’ of Norwegian identity, as if the fatigue in question did not matter. In other words, there is no available outlet for his fatigue – he simply has to swallow it up. This adds to the affective labor of belonging he is already performing and makes it extra heavy.

What the framework of affective labor as by-productive helps us see, then, is ultimately how the labor of belonging that forever foreigners have to perform is not only affective, but doubly so: it not only involves producing and upholding certain affects in others in order to facilitate their acceptance or belonging (affects such as ‘love’, ‘warm feelings’ or a ‘common Norwegianness’), but also includes the additional affective labor of absorbing or metabolizing unwanted affects (like fatigue, stress or anger) resulting from having to live with this precarious belonging in the first place. More generally, we see that the relation between the affective labor of belonging and its affective by-products (like fatigue) is in fact circular: the constant labor in question creates affective by-products (fatigue, anger, stress…) which themselves yield the need for even more affective labor and management. This curious dynamic between affects and labor recalls a formulation by Levinas – one of the few phenomenologists, and indeed philosophers, who have worked on fatigue – that we will look closer at in the next section, and which describes the close connection between fatigue and effort, which according to him are inseparable: ‘Effort lurches out of fatigue and falls back into fatigue. What we call the tension of effort is made up of this duality of upsurge and fatigue’. ²⁸

Finally, in addition to the previous points, it should be noted that the injustice of fatigue is also related to how fatigue has a negative effect on one’s ability or willingness to pursue previously meaningful projects. As we saw in Ashraf’s case, his fatigue somehow pushed him to abandon not only a political strategy he had previously embraced (expanding the category of Norwegianness), but also an entire part of his identity that had longtime been very important for him, namely his Norwegianness. However, it remains unclear what this presumably negative effect of fatigue upon our chosen projects consists in, and especially it is unclear how powerful it is. Wasn’t it ultimately Ashraf’s own choice to change his strategy? Can fatigue really make or force anyone to do anything? Couldn’t Ashraf’s change of heart be understood simply as ‘giving up’ or ‘changing his mind’ about his Norwegian identity? Keeping these questions in mind, we now head into the second and more ‘existential-phenomenological’ section of this article, where we will look closer at the internal dynamic of fatigue as phenomenon or lived experience, the way it affects our chosen projects and strategies for meaning-making and the way it can be retooled as a passive-active form of resistance.

III Fatigue as passive-active resistance

Whereas we have in the previous section explored the connection between fatigue and injustice, the philosophical interrogation of fatigue certainly does not end there. In fact, the question of fatigue takes on a new and interesting turn when, at a key moment, Ashraf refuses to swallow his fatigue. He refuses to metabolize it all by himself, and instead presents it to the world. He writes his opinion piece where he openly states that as a consequence of experiencing a longtime accumulation of other people’s hatred and undermining of his identity, which he has hitherto met by insisting on his Norwegianness, he has now chosen to stop fighting for it. With Shanmaguratnam we see a similar movement happening: in writing and publishing his book, which became widely read, he finds a space for affective ‘release’. What implications do events like these have for our understanding of fatigue, as well as for the affective labor it is connected to?

Using the example of Audre Lorde, Whitney emphasizes how the metabolization of affects can be retooled. In Lorde’s case, what is retooled, more specifically, is (the metabolization of) hatred – an affect she describes being a constant recipient of. She describes how she ‘metabolizes’ hatred by transforming it into anger, which in turn functions as a (political) fuel. The metabolization of hatred thus has a potential to be turned into resistance: it ‘can be burned as fuel, can be made to nourish’. ²⁹

So what about fatigue? Can it also be retooled? Yes: the Ashraf case shows us precisely that fatigue also has a political potential. After all, retooling his fatigue is precisely what Ashraf is doing. The publication of his text, which immediately became widely read, seems to function as a form of catharsis, where by refusing to do the by-productive labor of absorbing unwanted affects, including his fatigue, by himself, he somehow manages to spread it out, at least for a short while: the accumulated fatigue and other unwanted affects are suddenly put out there, where other people will have to deal with them, some way or another. (This may explain the backlash Ashraf received when he finally did: he indeed succeeded in displacing some of the affective, by-productive labor from himself to others, which then created a reaction).

However, this ‘retooling’ is at the same time inherently ambiguous, insofar as Ashraf, by ‘succumbing to fatigue’ and changing his strategy is also in a certain sense ‘giving up’: not everything, but a particular political strategy that he used to believe in (of insisting on his Norwegianness). This ambiguity of succumbing to fatigue – a ‘giving up’ that is not necessarily a complete giving up – seems very different from the more directly confronting dynamic of anger (even though the confrontational aspect of anger can of course also be ‘turned inward’ and internalized). In order to understand the political potential of ‘retooled’ fatigue, we have to look deeper into the dynamics of fatigue itself, and particularly at the way in which fatigue can be understood as a phenomenon that is at once ‘active’ and ‘passive’ in this way.

What characterizes fatigue, not only as affective by-product, but as lived experience, differently from for example, anger? What is the specific meaning and weight it takes on in the lives of Ashraf, Shanmugaratnam and others, and how does it impact or relate to their chosen projects and actions? Importantly, the experience of fatigue it is not static. It follows its own logic or what Levinas calls its ‘internal dialectics’. ³⁰ Moreover, it has its own ‘effects’ on lived experience and the subject, effects which are proper to fatigue, and which distinguishes it from other affective by-products. In what remains, I will discuss what I see as the most important aspects of this ‘internal dialectics’, namely, (1) the way in which fatigue constitutes an ‘intentional slackening’ or lag (both between the subject and the world and within the subject itself); (2) how what we can call ‘the affective temporality’ of fatigue is characterized, notably, by accumulation toward a break or ‘tipping-point’ which causes a shift in the subject’s attitude to her own fatigue, a ‘yielding’; and (3) how this yielding to fatigue is, as Levinas emphasizes, both passive and active, opening for an understanding of ‘giving in’ to fatigue not only as capitulation, but also as a form of resistance that is different from anger in that it is more specifically a refusal.

Intentional slackening

For Ashraf, the ‘grinding’ of having to justify and prove his Norwegianness, and the fatigue it has resulted in, has had profound consequences for his identity. Despite ‘being Norwegian’ having for a long time been an important part of his identity, this has now started to change:

Even if I am born in Norway and have wished to define myself as Norwegian, the desire to fight for it is becoming weaker and weaker. Identity is not static, but changing. The increasingly visible racism strikes blindly, and the raw and evil nationalism tries to exclude people like me from Norwegian society. Similar tendencies exist far outside of Norway’s borders. When they see brown Norwegians and immigrants, they see trouble. In proportion with the increasing hatred, I feel less affiliation with the Norwegian [identity]. ³¹

We see that for Ashraf, the Norwegian identity he has hitherto identified with loses its importance with his experience of what he describes as ‘increasing hatred’. This experience resonates with what Katherine Morris describes, in phenomenological terms, as a central function of both ‘ordinary’ tiredness and fatigue, namely, how it affects the subject’s relation to the world by slackening the ‘intentional threads’ between the subject and the world. As both Ashraf and Morris show, fatigue makes the world – including one’s own projects – matter less. Fatigue makes us more indifferent; the world as well as our own projects lose their pull on us.

We find fatigue described in a similar language by Levinas. In his work Existence and Existents, first published in 1947, Levinas devotes an entire chapter to the two phenomena fatigue and indolence. Here, he describes the experience of fatigue as characterized by ‘a stiffening, a numbness, a way of curling up into oneself’. ³² He goes on to describe this numbness as

an impossibility of following through, a constant and increasing lag between being and what it remains attached to, like a hand little by little letting slip what it is trying to hold on to, letting go even while it tightens its grip. Fatigue is not just the cause of this letting go, it is the slackening itself. ³³

We see that for Levinas, fatigue involves a lag or gap in the subject, which he also describes as a lag ‘between a being and itself’. ³⁴ In fatigue, this lag slowly increases in what also he describes as a ‘slackening’, namely, the slackening involved in how we – or the hand – let go of our projects, ‘what we are trying to hold on to’. For Levinas, moreover, this lag points to a duality or ‘internal dialectic’ of fatigue. Central to this dialectic of fatigue is the fact, emphasized by Levinas, that the slackening of the grip that constitutes fatigue happens while the hand tries to hold on. This means that there is a strong connection between fatigue and effort (or labor). Indeed, writes Levinas, ‘[fatigue] does not occur simply in a hand that is letting slip the weight it finds tiring to lift, but in one that is holding on to what it is letting slip, even when it has let it drop but remains taut with the effort. For there is fatigue only in effort and labor’. ³⁵ More specifically, fatigue exists in the event of slackening that takes place within effort – not in the decision to (eventually) let go.

It is true that Ashraf’s experience can be described as feeling ‘out of sync’ with both the world and with himself. There is indeed a ‘slippage’ or dyssynchronization in Ashraf’s description of feeling ‘less affiliation with the Norwegian [identity]’, while at the same time having for years wished to define himself as Norwegian. ³⁶ This ‘intentional slackening’ and ‘internal lag’ constitute one essential dimension of fatigue’s internal dialectics.

How is this different from anger, the affective by-product that Lorde and Whitney are most interested in? As Lorde herself points out, anger is, essentially, a ‘passion of displeasure’. ³⁷ As such, it is not as ambiguous or tension-filled as fatigue, in so far as the phenomenon itself does not involve an internal tension or gap. Interestingly, Lorde emphasizes that while anger ‘can be excessive or misplaced’, it is ‘not necessarily harmful'. ³⁸ Crucially, she differentiates anger from hatred, which is ‘an emotional habit or attitude of mind in which aversion is coupled with ill will’. ³⁹ Whereas hatred, when used, destroys, anger can be used without destruction. ⁴⁰ Lorde also underlines that ‘[a]nger is a grief of distortion between pairs, and its object is change’, whereas ‘[h]atred’ is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction’. ⁴¹ Sara Ahmed points to something similar when she cites Aristotle, who in the Rhetoric observes that ‘anger is customarily felt towards individuals only, whereas hatred may be felt toward whole classes of people’. ⁴² As Ahmed specifies, hatred, even when responding to the particular, ‘tends to do so by aligning the particular with the general; ‘I hate you because you are this or that,' where the ‘this' or ‘that' evokes a group that the individual comes to stand for or stand in for’. ⁴³ Anger, on the other hand, remains at the level of the particular.

What is the relation between hate and anger? Importantly, hatred fosters anger: ‘To grow up metabolizing hatred like daily bread means that eventually every human interaction becomes tainted with the negative passion and intensity of its by-products – anger and cruelty’. ⁴⁴ As a by-product of received, metabolized hate, anger can be suppressed, yet it does not disappear. Lorde writes: ‘That anger lay like a pool of acid deep inside me, and whenever I felt deeply, I felt it, attaching itself in the strangest places. Upon those as powerless as I. My first friend asking, “Why do you go around hitting all the time? Is that the only way you know how to be friends?”’ ⁴⁵ However, this ‘pool of anger’ also has the potential to be useful, according to Lorde, precisely because it can be used ‘against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being’. ⁴⁶ This is why Lorde’s aim is to refocus her anger: ‘Focused with precision [anger] can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change’. ⁴⁷ This is what it means to retool the hatred that she receives: it is transformed into a ‘new' kind of anger that is focused and more constructive than the ‘pool of anger’ that goes around ‘attaching itself in the strangest places’. Anger becomes useful when it is directed towards the personal and institutional oppressions that are its source. As such, it can be turned into a form of resistance.

Fatigue is different from anger. First of all, for Ashraf at least, it seems to be a result of the kind of grinding that comes after anger: ‘When the anger subsides, the grinding continues…’ Moreover, whereas fatigue can also, as Whitney points out, be understood as an ‘affective by-product’, its dynamic is very different from anger, which is closer to that of a direct, active confrontation, less ambiguous and precisely not characterized by the ‘intentional slackening’ of fatigue. If anywhere, the ‘contradiction’ in anger which makes it potentially harmful lies in the way it is often felt, without being expressed, which results in it being turned inwards or ‘pooling up’, like Lorde describes – with unpredictable outcomes. The tension does not lay ‘within’ the phenomenon itself, which essentially, like Lorde points out, is a passion of displeasure, rather unequivocally.

Fatigue’s ‘affective temporality’: Accumulation and tipping-point

To the previous point we can add that fatigue is characterized by a specific ‘affective temporality’, namely, the fact that this slackening increases to the point where it reaches a ‘cutoff-point’, which seems to force a significant shift in the subject’s relation, both to the world, and to their own affect. We can also think of this as fatigue’s accumulation, until it reaches a tipping-point. As mentioned, the tipping-point constitutes the affective paroxysm of fatigue.

In Ashraf’s case, what makes him hit a tipping-point seems to be a very specific set of circumstances: He describes how he, during a longer period of time spent in London, he experienced over time not having to constantly justify his Norwegian identity, simply because the people he met there did not question his Norwegianness. However, the questioning and undermining of his Norwegian identity immediately started up again after he returned to Norway. It seems as though, after an affective ‘pause’ in London, the burden of having to start justifying his national identity again suddenly started to feel heavier than before, even if it was the same labor of belonging that he had been doing all along. We can say, with Katherine Morris, that it is as if at this tipping-point, Ashraf’s tiredness moves resolutely from the background to the foreground of his experience, and with that comes an increased sensation of effort. In other words, the interruption of the labor of belonging, followed by its starting up again, leads to an increased awareness of the experience of fatigue.

Interestingly, this interruption and resulting heightened awareness of fatigue also seems to lead to a change in Ashraf’s relation to his own fatigue. Ashraf finds himself at a point where he simply can’t move on as before. Phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty aptly describes this particular moment when one’s fatigue becomes intolerable: ‘We all know that moment when we decide to give up tolerating the pain or the fatigue and when, instantaneously, they become actually intolerable’. ⁴⁸ What Merleau-Ponty here gets at, is how the experience of giving in to fatigue, may on one level be something that we strictly speaking decide, but at the same time experienced as something that we cannot help. In other words, Ashraf’s critics are in a certain sense right to point out that there is an element of choice in how we deal with fatigue, and in whether one chooses to ‘give in’ and give up one’s project or not. It is true that Ashraf’s fatigue does not force him to give up his fight for his Norwegian social identity. Yet, by insisting on this ‘empty truth’, they seem to be entirely missing the point: as Merleau-Ponty points out against Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous analysis of the tired hiker in Being and Nothingness, whom according to Sartre always remains free to choose how to relate to his experience of fatigue, the question of succumbing to fatigue at a given point cannot be reduced entirely to a question of free choice. ⁴⁹ In that case, one bypasses the phenomenon of fatigue entirely. The sedimentation of labor over time and the fatigue that this labor is indissociable from have real and concrete effects on the body-mind that should not be ignored if one as a phenomenologist is to consider human experience in its concreteness. The experience of fatigue’s connection to labor is thus profoundly ambiguous: while Ashraf’s tiring labor has not really changed from one day to another, his experience of fatigue seems to have. Interestingly, this ambiguity and the tipping-point of fatigue reveals something fundamental about what it means to give in to fatigue after an extended time of accumulation, namely that the shift in attitude that this moment represents has both an active and a passive dimension. We do in some respect choose to let go, but at the same time it is not a choice in the ordinary sense of the word: it is, in a certain sense, a choice that we succumb to.

Fatigue as passive-active debt-refusal

The passive-active dimension of fatigue is highlighted also by Levinas, who explicitly talks about fatigue as a passive-active form of revolt, or ‘impotent nonacceptance’. ⁵⁰ As we have seen, fatigue is – both for Levinas and in the concrete cases we have analysed above – indissociable from labor. However, this relation between labor and fatigue is not one of monodirectional causality: it is not simply that labor causes fatigue. Indeed, for Levinas, the connection between effort and labor is much more fundamental, with consequences for how we can understand the essence both of fatigue and labor itself. First, effort cannot be understood as something entirely active, as opposed to passivity. On the contrary, as Levinas points out, ‘effort as it were lunges forward out of fatigue and falls back upon it’. ⁵¹ Conversely, fatigue itself cannot be understood as something entirely ‘passive’, as the opposite or limit of ‘active’ labor. The unintentional reference her to ‘active labor’, that is, ‘giving birth’, is actually very telling for this reconceptualization between activity/labor and passivity/fatigue: what is the event of giving birth if not precisely an active-passive phenomenon in this sense? That is, a labor not effectuated by a pure ‘subject’ on the world of matter, but a labor which is always already fatigue, and which ‘lunges out’ of the bodily condition that precedes it. In giving birth, there is both deep activity and deep passivity, and the two are inseparable to the point where they are no longer opposites, but rather, as Merleau-Ponty shows in Institution and Passivity, two sides of the same coin. In fatigue, in so far as it is always deeply connected to a certain labor, the relation between activity and passivity is the same. ⁵² Levinas thereby resists a ‘passivist’ understanding of fatigue according to which it is a merely passive phenomenon, essentially opposed to action. Fatigue is not only a passive ‘limit’ of action, but in fact carries within itself a dimension of resistance. Following Levinas, we can say that this resistance is not as much a ‘mental state’ as an embodied event: already in his pre-reflective experience of fatigue, Ashraf is implicitly, within the Levinasian framework for thinking about fatigue, ‘refusing’ the continuous labor of belonging he is subject to, simply by being tired. This event is passive-active: while he does not choose the affective accumulation of fatigue, his attitude towards it is nevertheless very much his own.

However, at the ‘tipping-point’ things change. The refusal which was before ‘latent’ – or, in Levinas’ words, ‘impotent’ – now becomes more explicit, in so far as the fatigue comes to the forefront of our experience and thereby forces us to take a more conscious stance toward our fatigue: We cannot go on as before. We ‘give in’ to fatigue. We must emphasize here that this ‘giving in’, in Ashraf’s case, is less about ‘giving up’ or ‘capitulating’ than about changing his political strategy. Again, this event is passive-active, but now it has a more articulated sense of ‘activity’ than the ‘mere’ experience of fatigue before the tipping-point. Indeed, for Ashraf, giving in to fatigue is not only ‘impotent nonacceptance’, but has, at the tipping-point, the momentum to institute something new. ⁵³ It opens up for new venues or strategies for action and resistance which are, indeed, potent. The force of the ensuing debate testifies to this potency: his refusal hit a cultural nerve, namely the question of the value of Norwegian national identity as a social ‘glue’.

What’s at stake with this resistance, with Ashraf’s ‘succumbing to fatigue’ and change of strategy, politically speaking? As Sara Ahmed shows, the labor of belonging or ‘labor of love’ toward the nation that Ashraf has been performing is one of assimilation – not inclusion. Speaking from a British context, she emphasizes how ‘migrants must pass as British to pass into the community, a form of “assimilation” that is reimagined as the conditions for love’. ⁵⁴ As we have seen, it is a labor that consists in explaining and justifying one’s presence in the country, and in proving, incessantly, a belonging always already out of reach. This labor has a profoundly affective dimension because it consists in navigating and managing other people’s attitudes towards you. But it also has a different affective dimension which is more ‘productive’ of affects in the sense originally captivated by Hochschild: it’s a labor of producing or upholding a certain hope in oneself; a hope that dialogue will eventually work or have a positive impact; of remaining hopeful even in the face of adversity. Ashraf has been doing this labor for a long time. So have his contemporaries who criticize him for ‘stepping down’ from this work. Ashraf, however, and differently from them, has reached a tipping-point where it seems like he is no longer able to recreate that hope which is, perhaps, the most fundamental condition for continuing to do this labor as before. At the tipping-point, the hope seems to disappear, or at least goes dormant.

Shanmaguratnam describes well how it feels like to start to lose hope in the middle of fatigue. He compares his feeling of exhaustion to the one resulting from running a relay race, in other words a shared, not individual effort: pushing yourself to your limits, you keep running despite your exhaustion because you are waiting to pass the baton on to your team-members. Understood in this way, the fatigue resulting from the labor of belonging might seem acceptable, even meaningful, because it serves a function of upholding a collective hope of progress (or even victory). However, it soon becomes clear that the analogy is more ambiguous, leaving room for doubt: what if the effort is no longer worth it? What if the hope is disappearing? Talking to his children, to whom his book is dedicated, he writes:

You have run a relay race at school, haven’t you? You know, when you have soon finished your part, have pushed yourself to your limit and feel the lactic acid in your legs and the taste of blood in your mouth, you’re nauseous, but see the person to whom you will pass the baton over there, and push yourself even a little more. That kind of exhaustion. You have said everything, shared, talked and written. You have been praised, harassed, felt that you have screwed up and taken up too much space. You have been asked by others if what you talk about is really real, or just something you made up in your head, and you have started to ask yourself the same question. Still you choose to put all of that in that baton that you hope someone will take over, to keep running, keep talking and perhaps say ‘what do we do with this?' and ‘maybe we are doing something wrong?' You pass on the baton and feel relieved. But when you stop running, you feel only emptiness, because you know in your heart that your team is losing. ⁵⁵

While Shanmaguratnam is perhaps starting to feel a certain emptiness or fear that his ‘team is losing’ – something which might affect his hope and ability to continue performing his ‘labor of belonging’, but which has hitherto not done so – Ahmed has already reached a tipping-point. He has chosen to resign from the relay competition. This does not mean that he resigns ‘completely’ from performing any labor of belonging. What he refuses to do is to keep performing one on terms he can no longer accept: justifying his very presence by continuing to explain and prove himself as Norwegian, when he knows that it will never give him actual acceptance. His action of refusal is pragmatic, it is about getting more freedom; a strategy of self-emancipation and self-care. He puts his own fatigue ‘up on the stage’ in the hope that this change of strategy will work better – for him, at least, but perhaps also politically. He does this by reinventing himself a someone who is no longer dependent on ‘feeling Norwegian’ in order to claim his belonging in society.

A lot more can be said concerning Ashraf’s shift of strategy, the role and value of national identity, and the question of what it means – and to what extent it is possible – to fight for belonging on different terms or premises. In this article, I have wanted to stay with fatigue, so those questions have to be left aside for another time. I want to end the discussion, however, by emphasizing a very last point, namely that the resistance of fatigue can also be seen as a form of debt-refusal, that is, as a refusal to pay one’s (illegitimate) debt. We saw in the first section that Ashraf’s labor is connected to his status as forever foreigner and the condition of immigrant indebtedness. Indeed, the by-productive affective labor he is performing, including the labor of ‘absorbing’ fatigue, can be understood as a labor of debt- or interested-payment, conditioned by his status as ‘indebted’ following the presumed ‘gifting’ of his Norwegian citizenship and status. Interestingly, Ashraf’s fatigue, and later his explicit way of putting his fatigue up on the public stage, becomes – following this logic – a way of refusing to pay his presumed ‘immigrant debt’ to Norwegian society. In many ways, Ashraf's debt refusal mirrors contemporary debt cancellation movements. As the debtors’ union Debt Collective argue in their book Can’t Pay Won’t Pay, when masses of people are entrenched in illegitimate debt, in the sense that it functions as ‘an intensifier of pre-existing inequalities’ or ‘is one that people are forced into in order to meet a basic need’, ⁵⁶ it is time for collective organizing for economic disobedience or debt refusal. More specifically, their position is that ‘[w]e must stop paying illegitimate debts imposed on us from above and honor the real debts we owe . . . one another’. ⁵⁷ Organizing this kind of debt refusal is a collective enterprise, however, and requires both collective organization, as well as resisting the dominant ‘debt morality’ that tends to posit that all debts must be paid, no matter what – however unfairly they were created.

Whereas Debt Collective advocates for an economic kind of collective debt-refusal, Ashraf’s refusal to embrace Norwegian identity and his choice to yield to his fatigue and stop doing the ‘labor of belonging’ he has been doing for so long, can nevertheless be seen as precisely a kind of debt-refusal, in so far as by making this decision, he refuses the illegitimate obligations that immigrant indebtedness has put upon him, even though this refusal goes against dominant expectations of what is required of him as an alleged ‘immigrant’ to prove his belonging in society. The same can in fact be said for Lorde’s anger. Both Lorde and Ashraf are indeed refusing to pay a debt that has been placed on them. She, in her retooling of hatred to anger, refuses to pay someone else’s debt, namely, the debt of educating people about the structures that make her oppression possible. He, in his fatigue, refuses to pay a debt that is assigned to him on the basis of his (social/racial) status as immigrant, namely, the debt of gratitude which translates into a ‘labor of love’ and continued identification with Norwegian social identity – at whatever personal cost. As with Lorde’s anger, refusing this debt also comes with a cost, but in succumbing to fatigue, Ashraf nevertheless has freedom to gain.

Interestingly, just as we in the first section saw that there are two levels to the injustice of fatigue – one indirect, indicating a prior harm, and one more direct, constituting the affective injustice of fatigue itself – there are also two sides of Ashraf’s debt refusal. First, he refuses the affective labor of belonging itself as well as the debt structure it reflects. This is evident in his refusal to continue to try to belong. This refusal is ambivalent in the sense that it is passive-active: when refusing to do this work, he gives in to his fatigue (passive), yet on the other hand chooses not to continue his labor (active). Importantly, this level of refusal takes place without there being a very clear alternative course of action available, at least as of yet. Ashraf knows more clearly what he does not want, than what he actually wants in terms of his national identity. As such, this refusal is different from the kind of ‘resistance’ that Lorde’s anger represents, which is more unambiguously confrontational, although it of course also carries with it a protest. In terms of resistance, the distinction between anger and fatigue can indeed be articulated in these terms: anger, when properly metabolized/re-tooled, precipitates resistance, which is very active and in line therefore with anger’s ‘outward’ quality; fatigue in contrast precipitates refusal, which is different from resistance in that it is both active (rejection) and passive (giving up), and in line with fatigue’s more ‘inward’ quality.

Second, Ashraf refuses the second-order by-productive labor of swallowing his fatigue, which is indigestible. Instead, his altered strategy consists in putting his fatigue out there for everyone to see. Instead of continuing to swallow his fatigue, he ‘throws it up’ back into the world so that people can see the invisible, disproportional affective labor he has been doing and see that the fatigue that labor creates is in fact indigestible. He refuses to continue to try to (invisibly) digest the indigestible and demands that others acknowledge that labor as a kind of injustice by presenting it in the open. ⁵⁸

IV Conclusion

In this article, I have explored the affective dimension of the experience of indebtedness toward the nation that many people racially construed as ‘immigrants’ describe being faced with. I have done so, more specifically, by turning the philosophical spotlight on fatigue. The experience of fatigue appears, in this context, as an indissociable aspect of the never-ending labor of belonging that immigrant indebtedness gives rise to. While often referred to in accounts of marginalized existence and affective labor in general, the experience and phenomenon of fatigue remains undertheorized as such. I have situated the experience of fatigue within existing accounts of affective labor and affective injustice, and claimed that it functions as a mark of injustice in two main ways: first, as a stubborn, yet ‘unarticulated’ indication of the sedimentation of prior harms which are themselves unjust, and which in Ashraf’s specific case has to do with the never-ending, yet compounding affective labor of belonging he constantly has to perform to justify his (never fully achieved) place and belonging in society. Second, I have shown that as ‘affective by-product’, fatigue also and more directly constitutes an affective kind of injustice, both because as affect it is disproportionate and unjustly distributed, and also because the lack of space to express this kind of fatigue doubles the injustice by adding on to it the burden of ‘affective indigestion’.

In the second part of this paper, I have contributed to the existing scholarly discussion on affective labor and affective by-products by offering a more phenomenologically oriented analysis of fatigue in connection with the specific labor of belonging performed by ‘forever foreigners’. Taking first-person accounts of immigrant indebted existence as my point of departure has allowed me venture into a deeper investigation of the affective-temporal dynamic of the by-productive experience of fatigue, and the way in which ‘giving in to fatigue’ is not only a passive form of recapitulation, but carries with it the potential for political resistance, different from anger, which can ultimately be understood as a form of debt-refusal.