A symptom of everything, fatigue defies the differential diagnosis and exhausts its logic. To draw the map of its possible etiologies is a task befitting the Borgesian cartographer, not the medical clinician.
In this performative lecture, Rouzbeh Shadpey attempts to square the violent rationale of diagnosis with its language-giving—which is to say, life-affirming—properties for those besieged by fatigue. Repurposing techniques of medical taxonomy into an ode to fatigue, A Deferential Diagnosis of Fatigue offers a window into a transdisciplinary poetics of weariness that blurs the registers between the clinical and the critical, the organic and the psychosocial.