Abstract

The article addresses the question of play and imagination from the perspective of their end. It engages with the aesthetics of artistic plays that “exhaustµ their own possibilities and thereby produce their own end in a peculiar way. Paradigmatic for this aesthetics is the work of Samuel Beckett and the “exhausted repetitionµ that Gilles Deleuze described as its distinct inner mechanism. Such an aesthetics continues to operate in contemporary art, where it can be read against the backdrop of climate change and “disaster capitalismµ. Through an in-depth analysis of Beckett’s television play Quad as well as a performance by Maria Hassabi and a film by Béla Tarr, the article explores the implications of such an aesthetics for a notion of artistic play, and via a comparison with Adam McKay’s recent apocalyptic comedy it unpacks the critical force of these aesthetics of exhausted repetition in relation to urgent social issues.