Finished reading: The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han 📚

I waited too long after ready to fully remember my thoughts on this book, nor can I credibly claim to have definitely understood the entire argument. But I remember being glad I read it.

A certain flatness of modern life coupled with an ever-present mirror of self lead us to focus on achievement. Waging battles of our own creation and we their only casualties.

its inhabitants are no longer “obedience-subjects” but “achievement-subjects.” They are entrepreneurs of themselves.

Unlimited Can is the positive modal verb of achievement society.

Rage has a characteristic temporality incompatible with generalized acceleration and hyperactivity, which admit no breadth of time. The future shortens into a protracted present. It lacks all negativity, which would permit one to look at the Other. In contrast, rage puts the present as a whole into question. It presupposes an interrupting pause in the present.

The computer calculates more quickly than the human brain and takes on inordinate quantities of data without difficulty because it is free of Otherness. It is a machine of positivity.

One might also say that overexcited efforts to maximize performance are abolishing negativity because it slows down the process of acceleration.

for positive potency, the preponderance of positivity, only permits anticipation and thinking ahead.

Walls and partitions, the elements of disciplinary architecture, traverse the entire narrative.

“On errands of life, these letters speed to death”; this is the central message of the tale. All effort to live lead to death.

Less I means more world

As a character disorder, narcissism is the very opposite of strong self-love. Self-absorption does not produce gratification, it produces injury to the self; erasing the line between self and other means that nothing new, nothing “other,” ever enters the self; it is devoured and transformed until one thinks one can see oneself in the other-and then it becomes meaningless….The narcissist is not hungry for experiences, he is hungry for Experience. Looking always for an expression or reflection of [onself]….one drowns in self.

The real is a stay in the double meaning of the word. It not only offers interruption and resistance, but also affords stopping and support.

Deficit filled, apathy stimulated, impulses regulated, compulsion tamed—all of this has made dependency he flipside of depression. With the gospel of personal development on the one hand and the cult of performance on the other, conflict does not disappear; however, it loses its obvious quality and can no longer be counted on to guide us.

Now, the totality of capital, which seems to be absorbing everything, represents consensual violence.

Achievement society is the society of self-exploitation. The achievement-subject exploits itself until it burns out. In the process, it develops auto-aggression that often enough escalates into the violence of self-destruction. The project turns out to be a projectile that the achievement-subject is aiming at itself.
In view of the ego ideal, the real ego appears as a loser buried in self-reproach. The ego wages war with itself. The society of positivity, which thinks itself free of all foreign constraints, becomes entangled in destructive self-constraints. Psychic maladies of the twenty-first century, all display auto-aggressive traits. Exogenous violence is replaced by self-generated violence, which is more fatal than its counterpart inasmuch as the victim of such violence considers itself free.

Today violence issues more readily from the conformism of consensus than from the antagonism of dissent. In this sense—contra Habermas—one might speak of the violence of consensus.

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 inner logic of achievement society dictates its evolution into a doping society. Life reduced to bare, vital functioning is life to be kept healthy unconditionally. Health is the new goddess. That is why bare life is holy.