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3.75 AVERAGE
3.75 AVERAGE
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
medium-paced
I connected with Han’s take on depression and the idea of self-inflicted pressure without external dominance. The link between burnout and neoliberal acceleration, where people efficiently exploit themselves, really resonated.
Where I disagree is with the idea of active refusal as resistance. It’s a clear stance, but feels too static. I’m more interested in how we adapt and move forward. The book also generalizes a lot, mostly reflecting Western, first-world experience.
I’d recommend reading it instead of listening — the audiobook is hard to follow with its dense language and heavy content.
informative
reflective
medium-paced
informative
reflective
medium-paced
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
challenging
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
Best distilled in it's aphorism "One exploits oneself." Han writes scathingly against neoliberalism, against the achievement society which has inherited and internalised the repressive chains of punitive society and brought an excess of positivism and hence neuroticism, hyperattention, and burnout. I feel like I lack aspects of the psychoanalytic background necessary to engage fully with Burnout Society, and I found Han's writing difficult to penetrate at points, particularly in the search for grander narratives and through lines in the microessays or chapters that form the work. I particularly enjoyed the brief discussion on virtuality and narcissism, and on depression as complete unattachment and refutation of the principles of achievement society. Further, Han's points on the tiredness of self-sovereignty, the homines sacri status of citizens, on health and the body as something to be relentlessly optimised without concern for anything beyond biological processes, are ones that prompted a fair amount of thought in me, and I hope they evolve in to some productive discourse. Overall, this was a strong philosophical work in that illuminates and explicates a truth that is lived and felt, and in an age of 'cans', of immense personal freedom, this book is a good source of 'shoulds', or perhaps more accurately, a return to negative potency and a source of 'should nots'.
"La economía capitalista absolutiza la supervivencia. Se nutre de la ilusión de que más capital genera más vida, mayor capacidad de vivir. La rígida y rigurosa separación entre vida y muerte recubre la propia vida de una rigidez fantasmagórica. La preocupación por la vida buena deja paso a la histeria por la supervivencia."
"A partir de un determinado nivel de producción, la autoexplotación se vuelve esencialmente más eficaz y de mucho mayor rendimiento que la explotación a cargo de otros porque viene acompañada de la sensación de libertad. La sociedad del rendimiento es una sociedad de la autoexplotación. El sujeto obligado a aportar rendimientos se explota a sí mismo hasta quemarse del todo."
Byung-Chul Han
"A partir de un determinado nivel de producción, la autoexplotación se vuelve esencialmente más eficaz y de mucho mayor rendimiento que la explotación a cargo de otros porque viene acompañada de la sensación de libertad. La sociedad del rendimiento es una sociedad de la autoexplotación. El sujeto obligado a aportar rendimientos se explota a sí mismo hasta quemarse del todo."
Byung-Chul Han
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced