This essay sketches a phenomenology of existential exhaustion as the experience of a total loss or “exhaustion” of existential meaning. Putting Gilles Deleuze’s late essay “The Exhausted” into conversation with readings of Martin Heidegger’s account of death and anxiety as “existential world collapse,” this essay argues that Deleuze’s cryptic conception of exhaustion may be understood as a phenomenological construal of the extreme experience of losing all of one’s existential possibilities in life, such that everyday life no longer affords one with meaning and purpose. This essay examines the similarities as well as differences between Deleuze’s account of exhaustion and Heidegger’s analysis of death and anxiety. It shows how Deleuze’s notion of exhaustion may be regarded as a radicalized version of phenomenological reduction that reveals fundamental conditions of human experience which are even more basic than Heidegger’s analysis of the basic structures of human existence and self-understanding.
King‐Ho Leung (Tue,) studied this question.