paperback, 72 pages
Published Aug. 12, 2015 by Stanford Briefs.
Our competitive, service-oriented societies are taking a toll on the late-modern individual. Rather than improving life, multitasking, "user-friendly" technology, and the culture of convenience are producing disorders that range from depression to attention deficit disorder to borderline personality disorder. Byung-Chul Han interprets the spreading malaise as an inability to manage negative experiences in an age characterized by excessive positivity and the universal availability of people and goods. Stress and exhaustion are not just personal experiences, but social and historical phenomena as well. Denouncing a world in which every against-the-grain response can lead to further disempowerment, he draws on literature, philosophy, and the social and natural sciences to explore the stakes of sacrificing intermittent intellectual reflection for constant neural connection.
from goodreads
Why do we all feel so depressed? Why do we burnout when we work less than we did 100 years ago? Han has a great analysis on the problems of modern subjectivity, or as he would say, projectivity. Would recommend.
Han argues that our "achievement society" pushes an excess of positivity, a constant desire for more, that is driving many of the mental health epidemics society is currently struggling with.
In some cases it feels like he's making odd medical judgments from a philosophical perspective, but for the most part his arguments are consistent, intriguing, and match experiences I commonly see in the world. He is able to effectively argue that the burnout pandemic plaguing modern society is a cultural problem with solutions we have abandoned in the past.
My main problem is just the language, which may be a translation issue: Burnout Society has a lot of language which isn't entirely clear, and sometimes opts for overly complex wording that obscures the subject to an unnecessary extent. It also made me annoyed with Freud, as a whole page discussing ego and super-ego becomes word salad when "ego" pops up …
Brilliant, deeply insightful, book. It talks about a few ideas, rather than just burnout (the translated English title is not very good).
The author says that depression is a result of excess of positivity, in contrast to existence of negativity. He also talks about a transition from the disciplinary society to the achievement society. Also, about profound boredom and vita contemplativa in contrast to vita activa.
I was convinced of the ingeniousness behind it, and probably didn't understand it completely.
“Mourning occurs when an object with a strong libidinal cathexis goes missing. One who mourns is entirely with the beloved Other. The late-modern ego devotes the majority of libidinal energy to itself. The remaining libido is distributed and scattered among continually multiplying contacts and fleeting relationships.”
Even though this book can be glibly summed up as “late-stage capitalism is bad,” I found the discussion valuable, especially Han’s arguments for boredom and the vita contempliva.
Full review → chadkohalyk.com/2017/07/31/infliction-of-self/
