Catherine Osborne’s very decent addition to the A Very Short Introduction series focusing on presocratic philosophy. The book briefly explores the key texts (or what is left of them—in the first chapter, Osborne discusses the incompleteness of these ancient texts and the process required to salvage them) and main ideas of a few of the major presocratic philosophers, like Empedocles, Parmenides, Zenos, and Pythagoras.
 
Osborne orders the book alongside her contention with the general scholarship of presocratic philosophy. She criticizes the scholarship for forcing these various philosophers into conversation with one another. This makes for a neat and clean narrative about philosophical progression, but ends up obfuscating and sometimes, suppressing, elements of each philosophy. Osborne’s approach to the subject is to take each philosopher and their ideas in their own context.
 
With this approach, Osborne exposes the readers to a wide variety of thinking among the presocratic philosophers, like Parmenides’ focus on being and becoming and appearance and truth, Zenos’ reality-questioning paradoxes, Heraclitus on identity and change, Pythagoras and his mysticism, and finally, the sophists. Osborne leaves us with a section for further reading materials for those that are interested in learning more about each philosopher. 

​In the Swarm: Digital Prospects marks one of Han’s earlier attempts to grapple with the implications of digital technology and social media. Han tends to re-examine some of the same topics in multiple iterations using different theoretical lens in his books. What is most novel in In the Swarm is the investigation of social media and digital technology on politics.
 
Han disagrees with some of the other writings discussing the effects of social media on politics (e.g., studies on the Arab Spring). (Admittedly, Han’s treatment on the topic, when compared with writings on the topic coming from the social sciences, almost lack a common language and framework.) For Han, the public space is constituted by distance, a gap, and respect, whereas digital communication is gapless, anonymous, indiscreet, and power relations are flattened to a horizontal symmetricity (Han later talks about this as the expulsion of “negativity”—he seems not to have articulated it in such terms yet). In these horizontal spaces without hierarchy to control communication, everyone is simultaneously a sender and a recipient of communication. The result is the “shitstorm,” which, for Han, “represents an authentic phenomenon of digital communication” (p. 3). Our society is now an “outrage society” (p. 7), composed of acephalous, amorphous “smart mobs,” unable to engage in proper civil discourse.
 
At this point, Han seems to be conservative and nostalgic for a pre-digital era and uncomfortable with the democratized and horizontal forces of digital media, which has empowered the rabble—through Carl Schmitt he redefines sovereignty as “being able to produce absolute quiet.” However, Han’s real contention is the implication for democracy and politics. In his comparison between the crowd and the digital swarm, he writes of the former that “it takes a soul, a common spirit, to fuse people into a crowd,” but “the digital swarm lacks the soul or spirit of the masses” (p. 10); the latter fails to develop a common consciousness and form into a solidaristic “we.” Instead of an intelligible voice, the digital swarm “is perceived as noise” (p. 10) (a shitstorm) made by “isolated, scattered hikikomori sitting alone in front of a screen” (p. 11).
 
Han takes the political implications further. Digital communication, as a de-mediatized, horizontal platform existing in the temporality of the present, marks the change from re-presentation to presence or co-presentation. Representation in the political sphere is now seen as a barrier to transparency, which he later develops in The Transparency Society.
 
The digital realm also has implications for the practice of politics. The digital is a flight from the earth, and lacking this intimate connection with the terrestrial, Han writes that there can be no generative action in the sense of creating something novel and unprecedented. We move from the generative hand (“the verb for history is to act [handeln]” (p. 31)) to the digital finger (“the word digital points to the finger [digitus]” (p. 35), and from “spirit, action, thinking, and truth” to “operation, [which] takes place without any decision” (p. 52). In the place of politics is the impotent “like” (p. 69), which for Han, is a sign that citizens have devolved into passive consumers, and politics into consumption. 

Romain Gary’s slightly exaggerated (according to some news articles I read about him, anyways) autobiography.
 
The autobiography begins with Romain Gary in a postlapsarian state (note: Romain does not want to make a universal statement through his story), lying down on the beach at the Big Sur surrounded kindred creatures. He then starts his story, moving backwards in time to recount his childhood, his adolescence, his time in the military… all of the stages that have led him to his fall.
 
Episodic stories often lack a connective tissue that keep the story whole. In the case of La Promesse de l’aube, the story is united by Romain Gary’s relationship with his single mother. His mother—eccentric, loud and brazen, entrepreneurial, inexplicably Francophile, endowed with an inhuman resilience, motivated by a fierce love of her son, never without a cigarette between her lips—has an unquestioning faith that the young Romain is destined for greatness, and to please her, the young Romain strives to become someone. Despite her tireless efforts to keep her and Romain afloat, she is never too spent to share with Romain her bottomless maternal love. From her and his experiences, Romain Gary develops his strong sense of justice, his solidarity with the downtrodden and powerless.
 
“Ce fut seulement aux abords de la quarantaine que je commençai à comprendre. Il n’est pas bon d’être tellement aimé, si jeune, si tôt. Ça vous donne de mauvaises habitudes. On crois que c’est arrivé. On crois que ça existe ailleurs, que ça peut se retrouver. On compte là-dessus. On regarde, on espère, on attend. Avec l’amour maternel, la vie vous fait à l’aube une promesse qu’elle ne tient jamais. On est oblige ensuite de manger froid jusqu’à la fin de ses jours. Après cela, chaque fois qu’une femme vous prend dans ses bras et vous serre sur son cœur, ce ne sont plus que des condoléances. On revient toujours gueuler sur la tombe de sa mère comme un chien abandonné…” (p. 43).
 
Romain Gary achieves all that he has promised to achieve and more: he is designated a Companion of the Liberation for his accomplishments in WWII, becomes a recognized and successful writer, is posted in Los Angeles as France’s consul general… but without his mother to share in any of his accomplishments. Romain Gary ends his story back on the beach at the Big Sur, surrounded by kindred creatures… his fall is complete.
 

A short manifest that presents an alternative vision for society centred on “universal care,” which is “the ideal of a society in which care is front and centre at every scale of life” (p. 26) and in which we are all responsible for care. The definition of care, in this context, is not only hands-on physical and emotional care, but also “a social capacity and activity involving the nurturing of all that is necessary for the welfare and flourishing of life” (p. 5). By putting care at the centre, the Care Collective puts themselves diametrically opposite of our current neo-liberal political-economic system, which focuses on the care-less pursuit of maximizing economic growth. The manifesto demonstrates how care could be at the centre of multiple levels of our society.
 
On the level of the family, the dominant model of the family is the patriarchal nuclear family form, where care providers are gendered and care recipients are confined to family members. Drawing on alternative models of kinship—African American communities, LGBT movements—and the ethics of care of groups like military medics, the Care Collective advances the concept of “promiscuous care” (p. 33). In their words, promiscuous care “is an ethics that proliferates outwards to redefine caring relations from the most intimate to the most distant” that is “extensive and experimental” and “indiscriminate” (p. 41). It recognizes that care can be provided by and for people of varying kinship relations, and, speaking to the climate crisis, recognizes that non-human entities are also deserving subjects of care.
 
On the wider level of the community, the Care Collective suggests that there are four core characteristics of caring communities. The first characteristic is mutual support, which refers to the localized and neighbourly forms of mutual care. The second characteristic calls for reclaiming public spaces and combatting neo-liberal privatization. The third characteristic is resource-sharing and offers the idea of a “library of things.” The last characteristic states that caring communities are democratic communities; specifically, the Care Community calls for support for local co-operatives, municipalism, and in-sourcing (as opposed to out-sourcing) of critical functions.
 
Care needs to be supported by the state. The Care Collective defines the caring state as “one in which notions of belonging are based on a recognition of our mutual interdependencies, rather than on ethno-cultural identity and racialized borders,” where “their first and ultimate responsibility should be to build and maintain their own sustainable infrastructures of care” (p. 59), which directly critiques current state formations based on identity-based forms of belonging and liberal capitalist ideology. Importantly, the caring state is also a reimaging (and not a mere return to) the Keynesian welfare state. Instead of a paternalistic state that deepens dependencies, the caring state “enables everyone to cultivate… ‘strategic autonomy and independence’” (p. 64) and create conditions for democratic participation. The caring state will also help to advance some of the other aspects of caring communities; for example, it could create the conditions of a shorter work week to further the capacity of individuals to care.
 
In terms of the economy, the Care Collective makes a clear distinction between the market logics and care logics. They argue that the two are incommensurable; commoditized care through the market distribute care unequally and the values of individual self-interest do not align with the mutuality and patience associated with the values of care. To restore care logics, the Collective calls for demarketising care infrastructures and re-regulating markets and defetishization of commodities through more localized, democratic forms of production.
 
Finally, the Care Manifesto ends with a call to care on a global scale for the non-human world through an ethics of everyday cosmopolitanism, which is “promiscuous care on a global scale” that “moves our caring imaginaries… to the furthest reaches of the ‘strangest’ parts of the planet” (p. 95) and recognizes our condition of interdependence with other human and non-human beings.  

Second reading; an odd combination of biography, personal memoir, and detective story. (Modiano works often in a similar mode and writes a lot of detective stories that investigate the past—one of his best novels is Missing Person.)
 
Modiano, writing in first person, one day reads the following in a Paris Soir that dates to December 31, 1941:
 
“Paris: We are searching for a young girl, Dora Bruder, 15 years old, 1m 55 in height, oval face, grey-brown eyes… Please report all signs to Mr. and Mrs. Bruder, on 41 Ornano boulevard, Paris.”
 
From there Modiano begins his search for the traces of Dora Bruder’s life. His search brings him into confrontation with his own past, that of his father, and into confrontation with that of France under the Vichy regime. Modiano, in his excavation of the past, reveals Paris’ shameful secret, hidden by the passing of time in its grey buildings and its unassuming streets. (Reminded me of Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog.)
 
Some other notes:
 
Does Modiano, in his patient pursuit of Dora Bruder, redeem Dora Bruder from the obscurities of history, from the excesses of tragedy? Before Modiano encountered Dora, her stories, along with the stories of millions of other victims, were swallowed up into macro-historical narratives as a data point. Through Modiano’s pen, Dora Bruder recovers herself as an individual. However, Modiano is a careful and respectful and does not strip Dora bare in front of the reading public (i.e., the last paragraph in the novel).
 
In The Utopia of Rules, David Graeber observes that “almost all great literature on the subject [of bureaucracy] takes the form of horror-comedy” due to its “mazelike, senseless form.” In Dora Bruder, there is the feeling of horror without the comedy. Modiano encounters bureaucracy everywhere throughout the novel, as he peruses state documents to recreate Dora’s life. It becomes clear to the reader that the same state apparatus that created this evidence was used for the purposes of senseless violence. Through bureaucracy, states name subjects under various categories, imparting the mark of death (i.e., Jewish badge).
 
While investigating Dora Bruder’s flight, Modiano demonstrates empathy and a constant striving to try to understand Dora, relating the circumstances of her departure to his own past, walking in empty Parisian streets to catch the echoes of Dora Bruder’s footsteps, visiting the remnants of her Paris—is this a novelist’s compassion toward people, toward their characters?

​The transparency society is, as is often the case in Han’s other books, a society of positivity—it is a society of the inferno of the same that does not admit alterity and the Other. Transparency and truth are not identical; truth is a negative force that identifies the false, while the positivity of transparency expresses itself as hyperinformation and hypercommunication.
 
The transparency society is a society of exhibition, where objects are marked by their exhibition value (instead of use value or exchange value) instead of value inherent in the object itself. Such transparency is not “a medium of the beautiful” (p. 21), instead, Han remarks that it is pornographic. It is negativity that creates beauty and separates the erotic from the pornographic. Han explores this with Barthes’ concept of studium and punctum: studium concerns the “extended field of information” (p. 26), while punctum is a rupture in information, causing injury. Studium, like the pornographic, is smooth and unary, while punctum, like the erotic, is not transparent and is characterized by interruptions.
 
The transparency society is a society of evidence, which is hostile to play and pleasure. Ambivalence and a lack of information creates erotic tension, instead of perfect information. For Han, “transparency represents a condition of symmetry” (p. 18), which denies the generativity of power asymmetries for play and pleasure.
 
The transparency and smoothness of the society of positivity, characterized by hyperinformation, hyperactivity, and hypercommunication, leads to hyperacceleration, which is not directed at a goal, but is “pure movement” that is “obscene” because “it accelerates just for its own sake” (p. 29). Han contrasts hyperacceleration to narrative, to rituals, to processions, and ceremonies, which contain a rhythm and temporality that is un-accelerable and are a process of transition from here to there (i.e., a goal). The result of the society of transparency is a the “scattering and dissociation of temporality” and the loss of the “fragrance of time” (p. 32).
 
Subjects in the transparency society are under an injunction to authenticity, to lay the soul bare; under the ideology of intimacy, “social relations prove more real, genuine, credible, and authentic the more closely they approach the inner psychic needs of individuals” (p. 35). The ideology of intimacy is diffused and broadcasted in social media and the internet, where it dismantles the public sphere and turns it into an exhibition space. This is in contrast to the world of the eighteenth century, where the “public sphere resembled a stage” (p. 34) and, instead of intimacy, there was theatrical distance. Instead of exhibition, the public sphere was a stage for representation (“whereas the market is a site of exhibition”). Persons in the public sphere wore masks, creating distance, and allowing for play and ritual, whereas the society of intimacy is “a society of confession, laying bare, and the pornographic lack of distance” (p. 36).
 
Han examines the repercussions of the society of intimacy through Rousseau’s Confessions; for Han, Rousseau shows that the “morality of total transparency necessarily switches to tyranny” and becomes a “society of total control and surveillance” (p. 44). While Rousseau wrote about the sincerity of the heart, Han remarks that the goal of digital society is “not moral purification of the heart, but maximal profit, maximal attention” (p. 44).
 
This naturally leads Han to a discussion Bentham’s panopticon, characteristic of the disciplinary society. Contemporary transparency society is illuminated by an aperspective digital panopticon, where subjects are unaware of being under surveillance; instead of repression, there is exhibition and a liberating achievement society (see The Burnout Society). The freedom of the achievement subject to exploit itself is the basis of a society of control: “utter auto-illumination functions more efficiently than allo-illumination because it is attended by the sensation of freedom” (p. 48). As the transparency society expands and as the panopticon becomes total, individuals give themselves voluntarily to the form of control experienced as freedom.
 

​With this book, Buck operates in the much unexplored zone between apolitical techno-optimists and left-leaning critics who dismiss technology completely. She extricates the discussion of geoengineering and climate technologies away from the current techno-scientific, expert-led discourse, and pulls it into the messy realm of politics. For Buck, climate technologies can be multiple things: they are a variety of practices; a verb or process, not a noun/thing; a form of governance; an infrastructure. The left refuses to engage with climate technologies, given that such discussions could stem efforts to decarbonize; however, the development and creation of climate technologies cannot just be left to the experts—civil society engagement is required to shape these technologies in a democratic way.
 
Why climate technologies? Buck adopts the bathtub metaphor to respond to this question. Not only do we need to stop the flow of water into the bathtub (de-carbonize) but we also need to remove the water currently sitting in the bathtub (remove carbon dioxide through technologies). It is simple arithmetic: since the Industrial Revolution human beings have emitted 2,200 gigatons of CO2 and carbon dioxide equivalents, and emitting 1,000 more gigatons of CO2 will raise the temperature by 2 degrees. Since human beings emit 40 gigatons of CO2, or 50 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent per annum, we only have 20 years until the carbon budget is used up, when the water in the bathtub starts to spill out. (Note: The Sixth IPCC Assessment Report on Mitigation of Climate Change discusses carbon removal technologies in some depth as well.)
 
There are two broad categories of carbon removal technologies: 1. biological climate solutions and 2. engineered solutions. For biological climate solutions, carbon is sequestered in living things; as for engineered solutions, carbon is buried geologically. In her discussion of the various solutions under each category, Buck writes in a mode that is semi-journalistic, partly-speculative fiction, and semi-academic. She writes about her numerous travels all over the world to attend conferences, interview experts, and visit field sites, contextualizing and adding to the discussions with secondary sources. She caps off the discussion of the solutions with a short story to give readers a feel of a possible future.
 
Both biological climate solutions and engineered solutions cannot be addressed through the current political-economic status quo. Buck suggests that carbon removal is seen more productively through the frame of waste removal—a public good—it is not something that could be left to market-driven incentives. Carbon removal at a socially significant level will require a massive societal transformation. Buck spends the last third or so of her book exploring the contours of such a society.
 
(Note: I cut this review short and do not mention one of the key topics in the book, which was mentioned in the title: solar geoengineering.)

​Heart-wrenching. Written in typical Gidean fashion: the account—resembling a confession—is written by the first-person protagonist Jerome, who writes from his memories (he warns us that it may be in piece and irretrievable at parts), permitting the careful reader to read into what Jerome may be unwittingly revealing about himself.
 
With his mother and the caretaker, Jerome spends his summers as a child at the home of his uncle Bucolin in Fongueusemare, near Rouen, where there are three cousins around his age and his troublingly beautiful aunt. His aunt, a creole and an orphan, is a stranger, a (sexually) unsettling influence in his uncle’s household; she is incomprehensible by their protestant mores.
 
It is his aunt that provides the impetus for him to love his oldest cousin Alissa, when, one day, Jerome catches a glimpse through wide open doors into a monstrous scene: his aunt laying down on a sofa with his younger cousins Robert and Juliette at the foot, shrieking in laughter at an unknown young man in lieutenant’s uniform, who is screaming “Bucolin! Bucolin! If I had a sheep, I’d surely name it Bucolin.” Jerome goes upstairs to Alissa’s room, where she is praying, covered with tears. Jerome remarks that “that moment decided my life; even today I am unable to remember it without anguish… I felt intensely that this distress was too much for this small trembling soul, for this frail being shaken with tears” (p. 25). He calls on God and offers himself up to protect Alissa; it is a Christian love that he feels for Alissa, a love motivated by pity.
 
His aunt soon leaves with the young man and deserts the Bucolins. The sermon at the local chapel after her elopement addresses the event with a meditation on the words of Christ, imploring those to enter by the strait gate:
 
“Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”
 
The terrible eruption of joy, his aunt’s shrieking of laughter is for Jerome the wide gate that leads to destruction; instead, Jerome endeavours to find the strait gate that leads to life. This “austere instruction” (p. 30) towards virtue finds a ready soul in Jerome, who had been shaped from an early age with the puritan work ethic. Alissa is motivated by the same pursuit of virtue, although Gide subtly points out their paths are divergent: for Jerome, the strait gate leads to Alissa; for Alissa, the path to God can only be walked alone.
 
The two grow older; Jerome pursues his university studies in the Ecole Normale. Jerome and Alissa continue with their love through letters; through this disembodied medium their souls achieve a purity of communication. Their meetings in person, few and infrequent, are maladroit, the fleshly form is an awkward and improper vehicle to express their lofty and ideal love.
 
“Nature's first green is gold, her hardest hue to hold,” as the Robert Frost poem goes; Strait is the Gate is also a bildungsroman of sorts, a meditation on ephemeral youth. As Jerome pursues his youthful pursuit of virtue, embodied in an idealized Alissa, Alissa recognizes her postlapsarian decline.
 
“It was nothing but a phantom that I cared for; the Alissa that I had loved, that I still loved, was no more. … Yes, no doubt we had grown old! This frightful depoetization which had chilled my very heart, was nothing, after all, but a return to the natural course of things… if out of her I had made myself an idol, and adorned it with all that I was enamoured of, what now remained to me as the result of my labours but my fatigue?” (p. 145)
 
Alissa’s love for Jerome holds steadfast, and takes on a self-sacrificial form—their divergent ideas about the path toward virtue re-emerge. For Alissa, the strait gate can only be passed through alone; Alissa sees herself an obstacle to Jerome’s attainment of virtue, and thus fades away to death, alone, in an unfamiliar and unadorned white-walled hotel room in Paris. (We hear Alissa’s unfiltered perspectives through her journal, which was entrusted to Jerome in her will. In an interview I read, Hong Sang-Soo said that he read Andre Gide every single day in his twenties—or something to that effect, anyways—Hong Sang-Soo also offers access to the woman’s perspective in several of his films, e.g., Oki’s Movie.)
 
To return to the words of Christ, from which the novel finds its title: “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”
 
Gide writes the story with a cruel and understated irony. Jerome’s aunt is languorous, sensual, and pursues bodily pleasure; she represents those who pass by the wide gate—she is a most un-protestant character. Meanwhile, the narrow road toward virtue—toward everlasting life—expresses itself as a complete rejection of natural, life-affirming human instincts (of the Greeks, as Nietzsche would comment); it is a complete denial of the corporeal and the flesh; in Alissa’s case, it leads to her death. (Of course, even the most forceful self-abnegation hides a will to power, as Nietzsche shows in his analysis of the ascetic in third essay of The Genealogy of Morals; Gide undoubtedly knows this.) Despite their profound love for one another, Alissa and Jerome are never able to find happiness together, so bound are they to the narrow path, to the ever-constant striving toward virtue. “A little less proud, and our love had been easy…” (p. 145)—happiness was well within their grasp.
 
Strait is the gate… is the narrow path really the road that leads to life?
 
The ending: shadows blanket the present and revivify the past, overwhelming those burdened by memory.

​Not the best collection of short stories by Guy de Maupassant—this collection might be the one I liked the least of all of his works that I read. (Or maybe Maupassant does not have the same hold on me as he once had, for whatever reason.)
 
The best short story is “Le Rosier de Madame Husson,” from which the collection of stories adopted as its title. The first-person narrator, Raoul Aubertin, comes to pass the small French village of Gisors when the train malfunctions; he takes the opportunity to visit an old friend in the town, the doctor Marambot. Life in the provinces has changed his friend, now an old, well-fed (too much so), and overweight gourmand. (Another one of Maupassant’s stories begins in a similar fashion; an urbanite visits an old schoolmate who moved to the provinces; the schoolmate was once a sensitive soul with a penchant for philosophical ideas; he finds that the provinces have transformed him into a dull and overweight glutton.)
 
The doctor Marambot graciously welcomes the stranded Raoul Aubertin into his home for an exquisite breakfast where he stuffs him to near-suffocation. After the meal, the doctor takes his visitor around for a stroll and lectures him on the great history of Gisors with its now 4,000 inhabitants. Maupassant renders the doctor’s parochialism all the more farcical with fake (according to the critical introduction to the collection) historical studies of Gisors, like Gisors, ses origins, son avenir [Gisors, its origins and its future] and Gisors, de César à nos jours [Gisors, from Caeser to today].
 
For the provincial doctor Marambot, the idea of Gisors expands in importance to the extent of Paris and France.  
 
“Une petite ville, en somme, c’est comme une grande… Quand on connaît toutes les fenêtres d’une rue, chacun d’elles vous occupe et vous intrigue davantage qu’une rue entière à Paris" (p. 53). [In short, a small village is like a big city… When one knows all of his neighbours in a street, each household occupies and intrigues you more than an entire road in Paris].
 
"L’esprit de clocher, mon ami, n’est pas autre chose que le patriotisme naturel. J’aime ma maison, ma ville et ma province par extension…" (p. 56). [Parochialism, my friend, it is nothing other than a natural patriotism. I love my home, my village, and my province by extension…].
 
Doctor Marambot’s aggrandizing eulogy of Gisors is interrupted by a teetering-tottering drunkard, to whom he exclaims “voila, le rosier de Madame Husson.” The rosier de Madame Husson, doctor Marambot explains, is a local signifier for drunkards. He recounts the tale of Madame Husson.
​
Madame Husson was an old virtuous lady who once lived in Gisors. She was involved in doing good deeds and, frustrated by extra-marital pregnancies, sought to find a method to protect the good virtue of Gisors. Taking the example of towns nearby Paris, where they coronated virtuous young women as rosières of the village, she decided to hold a similar contest in the village. Unable to find a single virtuous young maiden (speaking to the looseness of village morals), she finds a male rosier instead of a female rosière to be coronated.
 
The male rosier is the chaste Isidore, the 20-year-old son of the fruit-seller, who is large and maladroit, fearful, slow. He wins 500 francs as the rosier; a procession commences and Isidore is accompanied by the whole town. A splendid dinner follows, full of yellow cider, red wine, and plates upon plates of food. Isidore stuffs himself as he has never done before. He disappears the next day. He returns after eight days of drinking in Paris and stays an irremediable drunk.
 
The pride of Gisors—Isidore the virtuous and chaste rosier—ends up a drunk. The honourable title—le rosier de Madame Husson—ends up signifying the local drunks. Maupassant, with his delicious sense of irony, fashions a mirror to reflect the doctor Marambot’s boastful lectures on Gisors.

​One of Han’s most well-known essays. Han positions contemporary society in the post-immunological paradigm, where the Other and the foreign has disappeared (see his other essay, The Expulsion of the Other), leaving only the positivity of the Same. Unlike an immunological paradigm, where the viral violence of a foreign Other is fought off by the Self, violence in a post-immunological paradigm is immanent to the system and expresses itself as psychic infarctions.
 
Han contrasts Foucault’s disciplinary society with the achievement society of the 21st century. We move from “prohibitions, commandments, and the law… [and] madmen and criminals” to “projects, initiatives, and motivation… [and] depressives and losers” (p. 9). Instead of the negativity of the disciplinary modal verb Should, we have the positivity of achievement society’s Can. The disciplinary subjects of the past are turned into the achievement subjects—the go-getting entrepreneurs—of today. Without external domination, the achievement subject experiences a paradoxical liberty, which Han calls “compulsive freedom—that is, to the free constraint of maximizing achievement” (p. 11): the achievement subject freely engages in auto-exploitation.
 
Han compares the achievement subject and animal laborans, the beast of burden. Without external domination, the achievement subject is master of itself, but it expresses itself as Nietzsche’s Last Man, not one who is sovereign. The achievement subject lacks the negative ability of making pause, which is crucial for the vita contemplativa; instead, it surrenders itself to the ocean of distractions and external stimuli in contemporary society, to the unthinking, gapless, restlessness of mere activity, mere labour.
 
The psyche of the achievement subject is different from the psyche of the disciplinary subject; old psychoanalytic theories must be revised accordingly. For Han, “Freud’s psychic apparatus is a repressive apparatus with commandments and prohibitions that subjugate and repress” (p. 36)—he calls for a post-Freudian conception of the ego. Without negativity, which gives form and definition—or “character”—to an individual, the individual is left flexible and undefined, and able to perform and play any function. Han remarks that this “shapelessness… creates a high degree of economic efficiency” (p. 4). The disciplinary society’s superego is transformed into the achievement society’s ego ideal, which, instead of repressing, seduces and liberates. The gap between the ego and the unachievable ego ideal leads to auto-aggression, self-destruction, and finally, the burnout society.