Byung-Chul Han: The Burnout Society

• The past century was an immunological age. The epoch sought to distinguish clearly between inside and outside, friend and foe, self and other.
• The talk of immunity, antibodies, grafting and rejection should not surprise anyone. In periods of scarcity, absorption and assimilation are the order of the day. In periods of abundance, rejection and expulsion are the chief concerns. Today, generalized communication and surplus information threaten to overwhelm all human defenses.
• The violence of positivity does not deprive, it saturates; it does not exclude, it exhausts. That is why it proves inaccessible to unmediated perception.
• Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society [Leistungsgesellschaft]. Also, its inhabitants are no longer “obedience-subjects” but “achievement-subjects.” They are entrepreneurs of themselves.
• Disciplinary society is still governed by no. Its negativity produces madmen and criminals. In contrast, achievement society creates depressives and losers.
• Clearly, the drive to maximize production inhabits the social unconscious. Beyond a certain point of productivity, disciplinary technology—or, alternately, the negative scheme of prohibition—hits a limit. To heighten productivity, the paradigm of disciplination is replaced by the paradigm of achievement.
• Nietzsche would say that that human type in the process of becoming reality en masse is no sovereign superman but “the last man,” who does nothing but work. The new human type, standing exposed to excessive positivity without any defense, lacks all sovereignty. The depressive human being is an animal laborans that exploits itself—and it does so voluntarily, without external constraints. It is predator and prey at once.
• The miracle . . . is the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. . . . It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their “glad tidings”: “A child has been born to us
• Not just human life, but the world in general is becoming radically fleeting. Nothing promises duration or substance [Bestand]. Given this lack of Being, nervousness and unease arise. Belonging to a species might benefit an animal that works for the sake of its kind to achieve brute Gelassenheit. However, the late-modern ego [Ich] stands utterly alone. Even religions, as thanatotechnics that would remove the fear of death and produce a feeling of duration, have run their course. The general denarrativization of the world is reinforcing the feeling of fleetingness. It makes life bare.
• Ultimately, the dialectic of master and slave does not yield a society where everyone is free and capable of leisure, too. Rather, it leads to a society of work in which the master himself has become a laboring slave. In this society of compulsion, everyone carries a work camp inside. This labor camp is defined by the fact that one is simultaneously prisoner and guard, victim and perpetrator. One exploits oneself. It means that exploitation is possible even without domination. People who suffer from depression, bipolar disorder, or burnout syndrome develop the symptoms displayed by the Muselmänner in concentration camps. Muselmänner are emaciated prisoners lacking all vigor who, like people with acute depression, have become entirely apathetic and can no longer even recognize physical cold or the orders given by guards.
• One must learn “not to react immediately to a stimulus, but instead to take control of the inhibiting, excluding instincts.” By the same token, “every characteristic absence of spirituality [Ungeistigkeit], every piece of common vulgarity, is due to an inability to resist a stimulus”1—the inability to set a no in opposition.
• Instead of surrendering the gaze to external impulses, it steers them in sovereign fashion. As a mode of saying no, sovereign action [Tun] proves more active than any and all hyperactivity, which represents a symptom of mental exhaustion.
• Rage is the capacity to interrupt a given state and make a new state begin. Today it is yielding more and more to offense or annoyance [Ärgernis], “having a beef,” which proves incapable of effecting decisive change. In consequence, one is annoyed even by the inevitable. Annoyance relates to rage as fear relates to dread [Angst]. In contrast to fear, which concerns a determinate object, dread applies to Being-as-such. It grips and shakes the whole of existence. Nor does rage concern a discrete state of affairs. It negates the whole. Therein lies its negative energy. It represents a state of exception. Increasing positivization makes the world poor in states of exception.
• The computer calculates more quickly than the human brain and takes on inordinate quantities of data without difficulty because it is free of all Otherness. It is a machine of positivity [Positivmaschine]. Because of autistic self-referentiality, because negativity is absent, an idiot savant can perform what otherwise only a calculator can do. The general positivization of the world means that both human beings and society are transforming into autistic performance-machines.
• The tiredness of exhaustion is the tiredness of positive potency. It makes one incapable of doing something. Tiredness that inspires is tiredness of negative potency, namely of not-to. The Sabbath, too—a word that originally meant stopping [aufhören]—is a day of not-to; speaking with Heidegger, it is a day free of all in-order-to, of all care. It is a matter of interval [Zwischenzeit]. After He created it, God declared the Seventh Day holy. That is, the day of in-order-to is not sacred, but rather the day of not-to, a day on which the use of the useless proves possible. It is a day of tiredness.
• The late-modern achievement-subject possesses an entirely different psyche than the obedience-subject for whom Freud conceived psychoanalysis. Freud’s psychic apparatus is dominated by negation [Verneinung], repression, and fear of transgression. The ego is a “seat of anxiety” [Angststätte].3 In contrast, the late-modern achievement-subject is poor in negation. It is a subject of affirmation. Were the unconscious necessarily connected to the negativity of negation and repression [Verdrängung], then the late-modern achievement-subject would no longer have an unconscious. It would be a post-Freudian ego. The Freudian unconscious is not a formation that exists outside of time. It is a product of the disciplinary society, dominated by the negativity of prohibitions and repression, that we have long since left behind.
• The capitalist economy absolutizes survival. It is not concerned with the good life. It is sustained by the illusion that more capital produces more life, which means a greater capacity for living. The rigid, rigorous separation between life and death casts a spell of ghostly stiffness over life itself. Concern about living the good life yields to the hysteria of surviving. The reduction of life to biological, vital processes makes life itself bare and strips it of all narrativity. It takes livingness from life, which is much more complex than simple vitality and health. The mania for health emerges when life has become as flat as a coin and stripped of all narrative content, all value. Given the atomization of society and the erosion of the social, all that remains is the body of the ego, which is to be kept healthy at any cost. The loss of ideal values leaves, other than the exhibition value of the ego, only health value behind.