The Burnout Society

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The Burnout Society

Author : Byung-Chul Han
Publisher : Stanford University Press
Page : 72 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2015-08-12
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780804797504

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The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han Pdf

Our competitive, service-oriented societies are taking a toll on the late-modern individual. Rather than improving life, multitasking, "user-friendly" technology, and the culture of convenience are producing disorders that range from depression to attention deficit disorder to borderline personality disorder. Byung-Chul Han interprets the spreading malaise as an inability to manage negative experiences in an age characterized by excessive positivity and the universal availability of people and goods. Stress and exhaustion are not just personal experiences, but social and historical phenomena as well. Denouncing a world in which every against-the-grain response can lead to further disempowerment, he draws on literature, philosophy, and the social and natural sciences to explore the stakes of sacrificing intermittent intellectual reflection for constant neural connection.

The Scent of Time

Author : Byung-Chul Han
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 120 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2017-09-25
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781509516087

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The Scent of Time by Byung-Chul Han Pdf

In his philosophical reflections on the art of lingering, acclaimed cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han argues that the value we attach today to the vita activa is producing a crisis in our sense of time. Our attachment to the vita activa creates an imperative to work which degrades the human being into a labouring animal, an animal laborans. At the same time, the hyperactivity which characterizes our daily routines robs human beings of the capacity to linger and the faculty of contemplation. It therefore becomes impossible to experience time as fulfilling. Drawing on a range of thinkers including Heidegger, Nietzsche and Arendt, Han argues that we can overcome this temporal crisis only by revitalizing the vita contemplativa and relearning the art of lingering. For what distinguishes humans from other animals is the capacity for reflection and contemplation, and when life regains this capacity, this art of lingering, it gains in time and space, in duration and vastness.

In the Swarm

Author : Byung-Chul Han
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 99 pages
File Size : 45,7 Mb
Release : 2017-04-07
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780262533362

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In the Swarm by Byung-Chul Han Pdf

A prominent German thinker argues that—contrary to “Twitter Revolution” cheerleading—digital communication is destroying political discourse and political action. The shitstorm represents an authentic phenomenon of digital communication. —from In the Swarm Digital communication and social media have taken over our lives. In this contrarian reflection on digitized life, Byung-Chul Han counters the cheerleaders for Twitter revolutions and Facebook activism by arguing that digital communication is in fact responsible for the disintegration of community and public space and is slowly eroding any possibility for real political action and meaningful political discourse. In the predigital, analog era, by the time an angry letter to the editor had been composed, mailed, and received, the immediate agitation had passed. Today, digital communication enables instantaneous, impulsive reaction, meant to express and stir up outrage on the spot. “The shitstorm,” writes Han, ”represents an authentic phenomenon of digital communication.” Meanwhile, the public, the senders and receivers of these communications have become a digital swarm—not a mass, or a crowd, or Negri and Hardt's antiquated notion of a “multitude,” but a set of isolated individuals incapable of forming a “we,” incapable of calling dominant power relations into question, incapable of formulating a future because of an obsession with the present. The digital swarm is a fragmented entity that can focus on individual persons only in order to make them an object of scandal. Han, one of the most widely read philosophers in Europe today, describes a society in which information has overrun thought, in which the same algorithms are employed by Facebook, the stock market, and the intelligence services. Democracy is under threat because digital communication has made freedom and control indistinguishable. Big Brother has been succeeded by Big Data.

Capitalism and the Death Drive

Author : Byung-Chul Han
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 135 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2021-05-18
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781509545025

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Capitalism and the Death Drive by Byung-Chul Han Pdf

What we call growth today is in fact a tumorous growth, a cancerous proliferation which is disrupting the social organism. These tumours endlessly metastasize and grow with an inexplicable, deadly vitality. At a certain point this growth is no longer productive, but rather destructive. Capitalism passed this point long ago. Its destructive forces cause not only ecological and social catastrophes but also mental collapse. The destructive compulsion to perform combines self-affirmation and self-destruction in one. We optimize ourselves to death. Brutal competition ends in destruction. It produces an emotional coldness and indifference towards others as well as towards one’s own self. The devastating consequences of capitalism suggest that a death drive is at work. Freud initially introduced the death drive hesitantly, but later admitted that he ‘couldn’t think beyond it’ as the idea of the death drive became increasingly central to his thought. Today, it is impossible to think about capitalism without considering the death drive.

Psychopolitics

Author : Byung-Chul Han
Publisher : Verso Books
Page : 96 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 2017-12-05
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781784785772

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Psychopolitics by Byung-Chul Han Pdf

Exploring how neoliberalism has discovered the productive force of the psyche Byung-Chul Han, a star of German philosophy, continues his passionate critique of neoliberalism, trenchantly describing a regime of technological domination that, in contrast to Foucault’s biopower, has discovered the productive force of the psyche. In the course of discussing all the facets of neoliberal psychopolitics fueling our contemporary crisis of freedom, Han elaborates an analytical framework that provides an original theory of Big Data and a lucid phenomenology of emotion. But this provocative essay proposes counter models too, presenting a wealth of ideas and surprising alternatives at every turn.

Non-things

Author : Byung-Chul Han
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 110 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2022-05-10
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781509551712

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Non-things by Byung-Chul Han Pdf

We no longer inhabit earth and dwell under the sky: these are being replaced by Google Earth and the Cloud. The terrestrial order is giving way to a digital order, the world of things is being replaced by a world of non-things – a constantly expanding ‘infosphere’ of information and communication which displaces objects and obliterates any stillness and calmness in our lives. Byung-Chul Han’s critique of the infosphere highlights the price we are paying for our growing preoccupation with information and communication. Today we search for more information without gaining any real knowledge. We communicate constantly without participating in a community. We save masses of data without keeping track of our memories. We accumulate friends and followers without encountering other people. This is how information develops a form of life that has no stability or duration. And as we become increasingly absorbed in the infosphere, we lose touch with the magic of things which provide a stable environment for dwelling and give continuity to human life. The infosphere may seem to grant us new freedoms but it creates new forms of control too, and it cuts us off from the kind of freedom that is tied to acting in the world. This new book by one of the most creative cultural theorists writing today will be of interest to a wide readership.

What is Power?

Author : Byung-Chul Han
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 120 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2018-12-28
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781509516117

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What is Power? by Byung-Chul Han Pdf

Power is a pervasive phenomenon yet there is little consensus on what it is and how it should be understood. In this book the cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han develops a fresh and original perspective on the nature of power, shedding new light on this key feature of social and political life. Power is commonly defined as a causal relation: an individual’s power is the cause that produces a change of behaviour in someone else against the latter’s will. Han rejects this view, arguing that power is better understood as a mediation between ego and alter which creates a complex array of reciprocal interdependencies. Power can also be exercised not only against the other but also within and through the other, and this involves a much higher degree of mediation. This perspective enables us to see that power and freedom are not opposed to one another but are manifestations of the same power, differing only in the degree of mediation. This highly original account of power will be of great interest to students and scholars of philosophy and of social, political and cultural theory, as well as to anyone seeking to understand the many ways in which power shapes our lives today.

The Expulsion of the Other

Author : Byung-Chul Han
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 100 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 2018-01-08
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781509523092

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The Expulsion of the Other by Byung-Chul Han Pdf

The days of the Other are over in this age of excessive communication, information and consumption. What used to be the Other, be it as friend, as Eros or as hell, is now indistinguishable from the self in our narcissistic desire to assimilate everything and everyone until there are no boundaries left. The result is a 'terror of the Same', lives in which we no longer pursue knowledge, insight and experience but are instead reduced to the echo chambers and illusory encounters offered by social media. In extreme cases, this feeling of disorientation and senselessness is compensated through self-harm, or even harming others through acts of terrorism. Byung-Chul Han argues that our times are characterized not by external repression but by an internal depression, whereby the destructive pressure comes not from the Other but from the self. It is only by returning to a society of listeners and lovers, by acknowledging and desiring the Other, that we can seek to overcome the isolation and suffering caused by this crushing process of total assimilation.

The Agony of Eros

Author : Byung-Chul Han
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 88 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2017-03-31
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780262339254

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The Agony of Eros by Byung-Chul Han Pdf

An argument that love requires the courage to accept self-negation for the sake of discovering the Other. Byung-Chul Han is one of the most widely read philosophers in Europe today, a member of the new generation of German thinkers that includes Markus Gabriel and Armen Avanessian. In The Agony of Eros, a bestseller in Germany, Han considers the threat to love and desire in today's society. For Han, love requires the courage to accept self-negation for the sake of discovering the Other. In a world of fetishized individualism and technologically mediated social interaction, it is the Other that is eradicated, not the self. In today's increasingly narcissistic society, we have come to look for love and desire within the “inferno of the same.” Han offers a survey of the threats to Eros, drawing on a wide range of sources—Lars von Trier's film Melancholia, Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, Fifty Shades of Grey, Michel Foucault (providing a scathing critique of Foucault's valorization of power), Martin Buber, Hegel, Baudrillard, Flaubert, Barthes, Plato, and others. Han considers the “pornographication” of society, and shows how pornography profanes eros; addresses capitalism's leveling of essential differences; and discusses the politics of eros in today's “burnout society.” To be dead to love, Han argues, is to be dead to thought itself. Concise in its expression but unsparing in its insight, The Agony of Eros is an important and provocative entry in Han's ongoing analysis of contemporary society. This remarkable essay, an intellectual experience of the first order, affords one of the best ways to gain full awareness of and join in one of the most pressing struggles of the day: the defense, that is to say—as Rimbaud desired it—the “reinvention” of love. —from the foreword by Alain Badiou

Can't Even

Author : Anne Helen Petersen
Publisher : Mariner Books
Page : 321 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2021-05-04
Category : History
ISBN : 9780358561842

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Can't Even by Anne Helen Petersen Pdf

An incendiary examination of burnout in millennials--the cultural shifts that got us here, the pressures that sustain it, and the need for drastic change

The Transparency Society

Author : Byung-Chul Han
Publisher : Stanford University Press
Page : 72 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2015-08-19
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780804797511

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The Transparency Society by Byung-Chul Han Pdf

Transparency is the order of the day. It is a term, a slogan, that dominates public discourse about corruption and freedom of information. Considered crucial to democracy, it touches our political and economic lives as well as our private lives. Anyone can obtain information about anything. Everything—and everyone—has become transparent: unveiled or exposed by the apparatuses that exert a kind of collective control over the post-capitalist world. Yet, transparency has a dark side that, ironically, has everything to do with a lack of mystery, shadow, and nuance. Behind the apparent accessibility of knowledge lies the disappearance of privacy, homogenization, and the collapse of trust. The anxiety to accumulate ever more information does not necessarily produce more knowledge or faith. Technology creates the illusion of total containment and the constant monitoring of information, but what we lack is adequate interpretation of the information. In this manifesto, Byung-Chul Han denounces transparency as a false ideal, the strongest and most pernicious of our contemporary mythologies.

The End of Burnout

Author : Jonathan Malesic
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 285 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2022-11-29
Category : Burn out (Psychology).
ISBN : 9780520391529

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The End of Burnout by Jonathan Malesic Pdf

Going beyond the how and why of burnout, a former tenured professor combines academic methods and first-person experience to propose new ways for resisting our cultural obsession with work and transforming our vision of human flourishing. Burnout has become our go-to term for talking about the pressure and dissatisfaction we experience at work. But in the absence of understanding what burnout means, the discourse often does little to help workers who suffer from exhaustion and despair. Jonathan Malesic was a burned out worker who escaped by quitting his job as a tenured professor. In The End of Burnout, he dives into the history and psychology of burnout, traces the origin of the high ideals we bring to our jobs, and profiles the individuals and communities who are already resisting our cultural commitment to constant work. In The End of Burnout, Malesic traces his own history as someone who burned out of a tenured job to frame this rigorous investigation of how and why so many of us feel worn out, alienated, and useless in our work. Through research on the science, culture, and philosophy of burnout, Malesic explores the gap between our vocation and our jobs, and between the ideals we have for work and the reality of what we have to do. He eschews the usual prevailing wisdom in confronting burnout ("Learn to say no!" "Practice mindfulness!") to examine how our jobs have been constructed as a symbol of our value and our total identity. Beyond looking at what drives burnout--unfairness, a lack of autonomy, a breakdown of community, mismatches of values--this book spotlights groups that are addressing these failures of ethics. We can look to communities of monks, employees of a Dallas nonprofit, intense hobbyists, and artists with disabilities to see the possibilities for resisting a "total work" environment and the paths to recognizing the dignity of workers and nonworkers alike. In this critical yet deeply humane book, Malesic offers the vocabulary we need to recognize burnout, overcome burnout culture, and acknowledge the dignity of workers and nonworkers alike.

Saving Beauty

Author : Byung-Chul Han
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 120 pages
File Size : 45,7 Mb
Release : 2017-10-27
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781509515134

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Saving Beauty by Byung-Chul Han Pdf

Beauty today is a paradox. The cult of beauty is ubiquitous but it has lost its transcendence and become little more than an aspect of consumerism, the aesthetic dimension of capitalism. The sublime and unsettling aspects of beauty have given way to corporeal pleasures and 'likes', resulting in a kind of 'pornography' of beauty. In this book, cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han reinvigorates aesthetic theory for our digital age. He interrogates our preoccupation with all things slick and smooth, from Jeff Koon's sculptures and the iPhone to Brazilian waxing. Reaching far deeper than our superficial reactions to viral videos and memes, Han reclaims beauty, showing how it manifests itself as truth, temptation and even disaster. This wide-ranging and profound exploration of beauty, encompassing ethical and political considerations as well as aesthetic, will appeal to all those interested in cultural and aesthetic theory, philosophy and digital media.

Hyperculture

Author : Byung-Chul Han
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 81 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2022-01-10
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781509546183

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Hyperculture by Byung-Chul Han Pdf

In the wake of globalization, cultural forms of expression have become increasingly detached from their places of origin, circulating in a hyper-domain of culture where there is no real difference anymore between indigenous and foreign, near and far, the familiar and the exotic. Heterogeneous cultural contents are brought together side by side, like the fusion food that makes free use of all that the hypercultural pool of spices, ingredients and ways of preparing food has to offer. Culture is becoming un-bound, un-restricted, un-ravelled: a hyperculture. It is a profoundly rhizomatic culture of intense hybridization, fusion and co-appropriation. Today we have all become hypercultural tourists, even in our ‘own’ culture, to which we do not even belong anymore. Hypercultural tourists travel in the hyperspace of events, a space of cultural sightseeing. They experience culture as cul-tour. Drawing on thinkers from Hegel and Heidegger to Bauman and Homi Bhabha to examine the characteristics of our contemporary hyperculture, Han poses the question: should we welcome the human of the future as the hypercultural tourist, smiling serenely, or should we aspire to a different way of being in the world?

The Underachiever's Manifesto

Author : Ray Bennett
Publisher : Chronicle Books
Page : 102 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2020-04-07
Category : Self-Help
ISBN : 9781797206646

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The Underachiever's Manifesto by Ray Bennett Pdf

The Underachiever's Manifesto is the playfully persuasive pocket guide to living life to the least and loving it. This isn't your average handbook—this is a funny self-help book for our ongoing modern age of overachievement. The book makes the case for just the right amount of effort—a lot less than we've been led to believe—and reveals how mediocrity is the key to happiness at work, in relationships, dieting, exercise, investment, and more. • Contains easy-to-follow advice with gentle humor and genuine wisdom • Addresses issues such as social media stress, FOMO, and the life-draining tragedy of tidying up • Author Ray Bennett is a medical specialist in Seattle and a recovering overachiever This welcome new edition—revised just enough but not going overboard—brings its needed-now-more-than-ever perspective to our new era of fitness tracking, app overload, and tidying up. Turn it down a notch. Don't you feel better already? • Humorous but actually helpful—a rarity for self-help books • Perfect for overachievers, underachievers, anyone looking for a funny, friendly way to take things down a notch • Great for those who loved The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson, Unfu*k Yourself: Get Out of Your Head and into Your Life by Gary John Bishop, and How to Be an Imperfectionist: The New Way to Self-Acceptance, Fearless Living, and Freedom from Perfectionism by Stephen Guise