Enduring hopelessness: Governance without horizon in pandemic times

This chapter explores the relationship between fatigue and hope during the Covid-19 pandemic. It suggests that the World Health Organization’s governmental engagement with pandemic fatigue constitutes an attempt to come to terms with the pandemic suspension of futurity. Hope occupies an ambiguous space at the centre of this engagement, constituting a precondition for endurance and a threat to it, as a conservative hope for normality encouraging problematic and risk-taking behaviour. Fatigue thus serves to problematise the affective underpinnings of hope; it is this loss of affect that constitutes the major focus of this chapter. As such, hope takes a place of central importance, its potential loss thereby indicating the limits of a liberal, horizon-oriented, imaginary of governance and the associated notion of an aspirational subjectivity. Hope becomes a testing ground for governmentalising the horizonlessness of the Anthropocene.