Katabasis Marginalia πŸ“–

[en] The Burnout Society, by Byung-Chul Han

This read took a little longer than I would have liked, but it's completely understandable. The text isn't easy, and my lack of mastery of the subject made it clear to me that I would need to read it more than once, which is exactly what I did. I read it a first time just to understand what the book was about, and the second time, I took almost three times as long doing: drafts, textual selections, research (both to understand the meaning of words and of other works by the authors mentioned).

The Burnout Society is an essay written by Byung-Chul Han, a German philosopher of Korean origin, who discusses themes such as: depression, burnout, social media, exhaustion, transparency, among others. The book's main theme addresses the lack of negativity in today's world and how excess positivity is the greatest detractor today in the psychic illnesses afflicting the population in the 21st century. And it's very interesting to see how he approaches this topic and begins to build his argument. At first, he makes a comparison with the body's immune system. A system which doesn't differentiate right from wrong, but looks from a spectrum of strangeness.

[…] through defense, everything that is strange is pushed away. The object of immunological defense is strangeness as such.

And to have this strangeness, negativity is the fundamental piece. Because in a positive world, there is no presupposition of enmity, of strangeness. I can do everything, because everything suits me. And "can," in the sense of the verb, is the key here. By thinking that there is the possibility or capacity to accomplish something, we believe in it. And the author addresses this theme as a new form of violence.

[…] The positivization of the world gives rise to new forms of violence.

[…] The violence of positivity presupposes no enmity. It develops precisely in a permissive and pacified society. That's why it is more visible than viral violence.

[…] The violence of positivity is not privative, but saturating; not exclusionary, but exhaustive. That's why it is inaccessible to direct perception.

Further along in the book, he makes a comparison that is already somewhat more oriented toward sociology, saying that 21st-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather a society of performance. In other words, we have stopped being "subjects of obedience" and have become "subjects of production."

[…] Disciplinary society is dominated by no. Its negativity produces madmen and delinquents. The society of performance, on the contrary, produces the depressed and the failed.

And for me, this chapter is one of the best parts of the book, because it reaffirms the idea that we are only depressed because we believe that nothing is impossible. Besides that, he strongly criticizes capitalism and neoliberalism, still bringing up the problem of excess positivity. Today, the worker lives a self-exploitation. This manages to be more efficient than an exploitation by another (which was what happened in disciplinary society), because this self-exploitation goes hand in hand with the feeling of freedom.

[…] The exploiter is at the same time the exploited.

The book also touches on other themes, and the author himself criticizes and brings counterpoints to statements by other authors, after all, it's an essay. Since it's a somewhat tedious read and, to a certain extent, difficult, I don't know if I can recommend it. But for me, it became a worthwhile read all the same.