DIFFICULT FUN
Endurance and the Hardening of Experience
Felipe Duque

What happens to experience when endurance becomes a stable, admired, and repeatable form? How are pleasure, meaning, and freedom reorganised once exposure to exhaustion, risk, and duration is no longer exceptional but expected? And how does a practice that presents itself as escape, adventure, or authenticity nonetheless reproduce forms of discipline, administration, and adaptation that closely resemble those of professional and political life?

This book reads endurance culture as a contemporary form through which experience is stabilised, organised, and rendered meaningful. Drawing primarily on the critical traditions of Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, while engaging figures such as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Axel Honneth, Mark Fisher, and Christopher Lasch, it analyses how practices such as ultra-distance cycling and bikepacking transform exposure to fatigue, risk, and duration into legible forms of identity, value, and recognition.

The central claim is that endurance does not suppress experience but formats it. What begins as exposure—an encounter with limit prior to interpretation—is progressively converted into performance, narrative, and social validation. Through repetition, what once unsettled becomes expected; what once resisted meaning becomes proof. In this process, the interval in which experience might remain indeterminate contracts. Experience persists, but its capacity to interrupt structure diminishes.

The book unfolds across four movements. First, it traces the hardening of experience, showing how exposure becomes competence and identity through repetition. Second, it traces the exhaustion of experience, where duration no longer guarantees transformation and intense moments arrive already pre-interpreted. Third, it turns to language, analysing how vocabularies of authenticity, resilience, and belonging absorb contradiction and present adaptation as meaningful achievement. Finally, it considers the social form of endurance, where recognition, circulation, and institutionalisation stabilise participation and render experience comparable and exchangeable. Interwoven throughout the text are fictional discussions between a theorist, a rider, and an organiser, through which the contradictions of endurance culture reappear at the level of experience, justification, and participation.

Across these levels, recognition emerges as a central mechanism. It no longer functions primarily as moral acknowledgement, but as a social form through which endurance becomes visible, comparable, and circulable. What counts as meaningful experience is determined in advance by the structures that make it legible.

The book concludes by identifying only fleeting interruptions to this stabilisation. Drawing on Benjamin’s notion of Jetztzeit, it suggests that moments of non-coincidence persist but do not endure. They appear
as brief suspensions in which experience escapes its formatting, yet they are quickly reabsorbed into the structures that sustain endurance as cultural form.

Rather than opposing endurance or denying its pleasures, the book follows its internal logic. It asks what endurance makes possible—and what it makes more difficult to experience—once exposure, recognition, and form converge.

About the author
Felipe Duque is a cultural theorist living in Vienna, Austria. Editor-in-chief of entkunstung, curator of ofhundred.com, participant in ultra-distance bikepacking races.

Publisher
difficult fun

Difficult Fun is a publishing and curatorial project for cultures of endurance, effort, and wandering. It makes books, objects, and situations where movement becomes form.

Design & Production
bothand.studio

Special Support
Cicli Bonanno

Distribution
entkunstung

Softcover
152 Pages
110 x 160 mm
116g

First edition 2026
500 copies

"ENTKUNSTUNG is an independent publication with a bold reflective attitude toward the contemporary art scene. With contributions in English and German, it is more of an artists forum of ideas in the form of a yearbook."
—do you read me?! (Berlin)

"[...] Now that there’s so much more art it makes sense that people would have the sensation of being awash in empty art. That is a good thing! This means that not only white men from Europe and America get to make art and that art is being made by everybody, everywhere and more people are getting to see it. Best of all of it is us who get to sort out what matters, what doesn’t, what is empty, what might be full, what has use [...]."
—JERRY SALTZ, VANITAS EST NOBIS

It also features studio visits and interviews, among them ALICJA KWADE, JASON GRINGLER, JEFF MILLS and JERRY SALTZ.

Limited Edition of 500 copies
2019
304 pages
14.8 × 22.5 cm

"History, as many philosophers and historians have said, is a problem that is conjugated in the present tense, and that makes use of the imperative form. Understanding the contemporary world and finding out as much as possible about its raison d‘être and the phenomena that characterise it is an obligation in times where there are fewer excuses for being passive, permissive, and indifferent. Instead of merely wondering at the complexity of our world, we must strengthen our ability to interpret it and criticise it. This is what the artists and authors present in this book are fostering with their envisions of life: creating possible worlds that are contributing to shaping a more thoughtful and collective present.

We hope you can see this book as we do: as an extension of memory; interpretations of our time that aspire to reinvent the world anew, "as a whole to be imagined".
—FELIPE DUQUE & MAXIMILIAN MAURACHER

Limited Edition of 500 copies
2018
304 pages
14.8 × 22.5 cm

Restoration to a Better Past is a photography book by Jorma Mueller.

In Jorma Mueller's photography there is margin for a biographical hypothesis and glimpses of something that has been lost. A vision of the present as ebb and flow is almost inevitable in the experience of his work. 
 
Subjectivity is melancholic, and that melancholy contains the evocation that restores the legacy for which others risked their fate. A physical, vital, experiential link with the world has eroded between the time of those anachronistic soldiers and that of the men and women of a taciturn river.
 
Restoration to a Better Past, and its set of mirrors, is the continuation of that aesthetic and personal search visible in Jorma’s previous works. However, the pieces that make up this book are not always imaginary refraction but an oblique truth that supports reality. 
 
In the construction of a narrative several texts can remain without any connection to each other until a new one turns them into something different from what they were before. The drift of time, memory, nostalgia for that world that could have been and that at the same time was, are the axis on which this publication rests.
 
With Restoration to a Better Past, Jorma Mueller proves that nostalgia is aere perennius—and fragile and eternal as time.

Limited Edition of 300 numbered copies
2022 
28 x 36 cm
Folder with printed matter in various formats (nine parts)

AGAINST NATURE is a reader with texts by Swantje Martach, Alexander W. Schindler and Felipe Duque as well as artworks by Herwig Scherabon and includes an AR artwork created in collaboration with Refrakt Studio. The reader was released on the occasion of Scherabon's first solo exhibition in Berlin in July 2021.

Limited Edition of 500 copies
2021
56 pages
18.6 x 29.7 cm

Line Death Dance is a monographic book by Melanie Maar.

As a way to commemorate transitions through performance making, Melanie Maar has composed Line Death Dance: a multi-phased ceremony of performances at the old and new Chocolate Factory Theaters in Queens, NY.

The book looks at the poetry of the 'live' and the potent relationship between deceptively simple compositional tools: bodies, time, space, light, and sound.

Line Death Dance
Texts by Melanie Maar
Photography by Laura Bartczak
Co-edited by Laurel Atwell & Melanie Maar
Designed & Published by masse studio

Limited Edition of 200
2021
48 pages
21.5 x 25.7 cm

US Orders

ENT005 ADORNO - FUN IST EIN STAHLBAD (Booklet only)

With this 16-pages booklet you can listen to the ENT005 album without having a record player. Download the iOS app ENT005 and scan the pages to start a unique listening experience with audioreactive visuals by Herwig Scherabon. You will also get the album as digital download on request.

ADORNO – FUN IST EIN STAHLBAD
“Fine dreamy Ambient / Drone / Downwards leaning Techno album”.—Hardwax

Limited Edition Double Transparent 12" Vinyl including streaming AR (Augmented Reality) application (only for iOS) and a 16 pages booklet.

Celebrating the release of ENTKUNSTUNG's firth record, the AR app brings the vinyl’s booklet to life and showcases interactive visuals by Berlin-based artist Herwig Scherabon. It creates a unique listening experience of the eight-track album "Fun ist ein Stahlbad" which deliberately oscillates between Ambient and Techno.

Tracklist:
UNTITLED I
UNTITLED II
UNTITLED III
UNTITLED IV
UNTITLED V
UNTITLED VI
UNTITLED VII
UNTITLED VIII

Written & Produced by Felipe Duque
Mastered by Cem Oral at Jammin Masters - Berlin
Art Direction by Maximilian Mauracher
Design by Maximilian Mauracher & David Rindlisbacher
AR Animation and Images by Herwig Scherabon
App Development by Refrakt
Berlin 2020/21

Limited Edition of 300 copies | 45rpm
2021
30 x 30 cm

MALICE – DESIRE CAUGHT BY THE TAIL
"Relentlessly driving Techno weapon."—Hardwax

Tracklist:
A Your Body
B She Used My Head Like a Revolver

Written & Produced by Felipe Duque
Additional production on Your Body by Daniel Hartl
Mastering by Tim Xavier at Manmade Mastering, Berlin
Artwork by Max Mauracher
Vienna, 2018

Limited Edition of 300 copies | 33rpm
2018
30 x 30 cm

WITTGENSTEIN – FICTIONS
"Flawless driving Techno missiles."—Hardwax

Tracklist:
1.1 The South
1.11 Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
1.2 The Immortal | Sedvs Reified Version
1.21 Funes
2 The Immortal

Written & Produced by Felipe Duque
Additional production by Daniel Hartl (Except on The Immortal)
The Immortal (Sedvs Reified Version) by Daniel Hartl
Mastered by Cem Oral at Jammin Masters, Berlin
Artwork by Maximilian Mauracher
Vienna 2018

Limited Edition of 300 copies | 45rpm
2018
30 x 30 cm

ADORNO – DARSTELLUNG
"Dreamy Ambient & Driving Techno EP".—Hardwax

Tracklist:
1.1 Verklärte Nacht
1.11 Die Welt von Gestern
1.2 Sehnsucht | Nach MF01121979
1.21 Phantasmagorie

All tracks written and produced by Felipe Duque
Mastered at Manmade Mastering Berlin by Tim Xavier
Artwork by Maximilian Mauracher
Vienna, 2017

Limited Edition of 300 copies | 45rpm
2017
30 x 30 cm