The Burnout Society (2010) by Han Byung-Chul

​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. 

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