Exhausted Geographies

Exhausted Geographies are those that cannot sustain the claims they have been mobilised for - territorial, national, regional, ethnic, cultural, economic, ideological. In particular I am interested in how geography in crisis, whether political, economic or climatic can or cannot sustain its identity. And so I have been thinking of exhaustion in relation to political conflict, not a mode of opting out and withdrawing, but as one of recognising the limits of a logic that has dominated that conflict for most of its duration. I suspect that this exhaustion takes the form of an act of treason - for in the realm of living out long term political conflict, treason and exhaustion are not unrelated to one another. Treason, in Deleuze's sense of treachery, as the refusal to support and sustain that which demands it of you because it claims to support and sustain you. The exhausted geographies of which I speak are the material manifestations of what I am trying to describe, territorialities and territorial claims that cannot sustain themselves. It is of great interest to bring this form of largely political exhaustion into contact with the geographical limit lines enacted by extreme climate change, as foregrounded in this conference.