We’re all exhausted. Let’s face it – not just our bodies but our imagination. You might well ask, how can we think from and within exhaustion? As it happens, Fuck Healing (?) The Insomniac Dreamers argues that this exhausted and exhausting mode of existence, rather than foreclosing possibilities, becomes a locus where alternative, collective, and radical futures can be imagined, dreamed, actualised and even creatively mobilised as a conceptual lens that enables new worlds begin to form.
This book approaches exhaustion not as an end, but as a method: a way of inhabiting exhaustion differently, by attending to the fractures and fissures of exhausted bodies, institutions and systems as openings towards their recompositions otherwise. Activating Gilles Deleuze’s text 'The Exhausted' in relation to these porous contemporary conditions, Fuck Healing (?) The Insomniac Dreamers gathers a constellation of collective practices: creatively written contributions, zines, illustrated short stories, theoretical essays, experimental forms of storytelling and collaborative texts. It fabricates a non-hierarchical, transversal constellation of thoughts, where ideas negotiate and recombine with one another in unpredictable proximities.
The Fuck Healing (?) collective is a gathering of artists, educators and thinkers who critically interrogate ideas of 'healing' as proximate to hegemonic regimes of conformity and normative perceptions of health. From this position, the collective questions the notion of healing as the transition from a state of ‘unwellness’ to ‘well’ and ‘healthy’, and propositionally work with methods to institute ongoing practices of care beyond these reductive categories. Through collaborative organisations, the Fuck Healing (?) collective questions the merits of our wounds, the divergent momentum they present, and recognise the future modes of 'becomings' that 'breaking' may allow us. Together, they refuse the imperative to restore, to fix, to return to what was – 'Instead, we fabricate - from exhaustion, fractures, and woundings - the dream of a world otherwise'.
Set Margins', 292pp, 12cm x 20cm, illustrated paperback, 2026
