Byung Chul Han - Blog Posts

1am, i'm reading 'hiperculturalidade', and it's so good. probably, i'll be finishing it on thursday or friday.

also, i read today 'blue horses' by mary oliver and liked it. wasn't too invested tho, but it's great.

and in the morning, i was able to read a lot of 'the idiot' by elif batuman. this book is making me so happy! her writing is amazing and just to be in selin's mind is fascinating.

be kind to yourselves 🤍🌧

oieee! i had to go to college to return some books because my classes are finished (thank god) and i'm officially on vacation.

i'm still reading 'a peste' by camus. it's good but i was too busy getting crazy with the finals.

next book i'm gonna read is another byung-chul han (i know, i'm a stan) - 'hiperculturalidade'.

hope everything is good with you all. 🤍🌧

Today’s society is no longer Foucault’s disciplinary world of hospitals, madhouses, prisons, barracks, and factories. It has long been replaced by another regime, namely a society of fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls, and genetic laboratories. The society of the 21st century is no longer disciplinary, but a society of the performance. Nor are its inhabitants called ‘subjects of obedience’, but ‘subjects of performance’. These subjects are entrepreneurs of themselves.

Excess work and performance escalate into auto-exploitation. This is much more effective than the exploitation by the others, because it is accompanied by a feeling of freedom. The exploiter is the same exploited. Victim and executioner can no longer differentiate. This self-referentiality generates a paradoxical freedom, which, because of the structures of obligation immanent to it, becomes violence […] In this society of obligation, each one carries with him his forced labor field.

What proves problematic is not individual competition per se, but rather its self-referentiality, which escalates into absolute competition. That is, the achievement-subject competes with itself; it succumbs to the destructive compulsion to outdo itself over and over, to jump over its own shadow. This self-constraint, which poses as freedom, has deadly results..

No-longer-being-able-to-be-able leads to destructive self-reproach and auto-aggression. The achievement-subject finds itself fighting with itself. The depressive has been wounded by internalized war. Depression is the sickness of a society that suffers from excessive positivity. It reflects a humanity waging war on itself.

Today, everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise. People are now master and slave in one. Even class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself.

― Byung-Chul Han, extracts from The Burnout Society