Alan's Reviews > The Burnout Society

Once again, Chris Via (from the YouTube channel Leaf by Leaf) tosses an important work into my lap. I didn’t even click on the video (I will do so after I read a bunch of these), but I merely saw the thumbnail and it was enough for me to pick this up and read it. I then went ahead and highlighted 60 or so pages so much that the act of highlighting lost its purpose. It reminded me of the farcical map drawn up by the folks in Borges’ On Exactitude in Science, where a map of a one-to-one scale of the locality was drawn up, completely rendering a “map” irrelevant.

This will take 2, 3, 4 readings. It will also continue pushing me toward ultimate sittings with Hegel and Heidegger, but not now. For now, more and more and more Byung-Chul Han. I have an obsessive and completionist temperament with my reading this year, so why not lean into it.

Here are a few things I highlighted, and I have had to cut that down to make this manageable as well:

– “The violence of positivity does not presume or require hostility. It unfolds specifically in a permissive and pacified society. Consequently, it proves more invisible than viral violence. It inhabits the negativity-free space of the Same, where no polarization between inside and outside, or proper and foreign, takes place.”

– “Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society [Leistungsgesellschaft].”

– “To heighten productivity, the paradigm of disciplination is replaced by the paradigm of achievement, or, in other words, by the positive scheme of Can; after a certain level of productivity obtains, the negativity of prohibition impedes further expansion. The positivity of Can is much more efficient than the negativity of Should. Therefore, the social unconscious switches from Should to Can.”

– “It is not the imperative only to belong to oneself, but the pressure to achieve that causes exhaustive depression. Seen in this light, burnout syndrome does not express the exhausted self so much as the exhausted, burnt-out soul.”

I’ll spare you and myself from typing out all the rest. That would be a borderline copyright violation, because of how much there is. We move.