Abstract
AbstractThis article examines how Terézia Mora's Darius‐Kopp trilogy (Der einzige Mann auf dem Kontinent (2009), Das Ungeheuer (2013), Auf dem Seil (2018)) and Iris Hanika's novel Das Eigentliche (2010) use the early Christian motif of acedia to critique contemporary capitalism. It argues that in these works acedia, the originally theological discourse on the ‘sin of sloth’, articulates a form of passive protest against the conditions of working life and life more generally in ‘fast’ capitalism. Protest takes the form of exhaustion, boredom, and cumulative overwhelming, all of which are attributes of acedia. The article also considers how both authors experiment with signification, arguing that in so doing they expose what Slavoj Žižek calls ‘the inertia of the Real’: in the contemporary context, everyday digital technologies which remediate information. These aesthetic innovations, which emphasise the materiality of signification in the creaturely world of modern acedia, point to the frailty of contemporary capitalism and its uncertain future.
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