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Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, trans. Erik Butler, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015, 72pp, ?9.99/$12.99
Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, trans. Eric Butler, London, Verso, 2017, 80pp, ?9.99/$16.99
The Korean-born German philosopher, Byung-Chul Han, writes short, essay-length books that are widely read and enthusiastically received. Han's Die Müdigkeitsgesellschaft (published by Stanford University Press as The Burnout Society in 2015) has been translated into more than ten languages; of the three books that followed - The Transparency Society (2015), In the Swarm: Digital Prospects (2017) and The Agony of Eros (2017) - two were published by MIT Press, one (The Agony of Eros) with a foreword by Alain Badiou. His 2017 book, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, appeared with Verso in its Verso Futures series - a series which describes itself as publishing 'interventions' which 'address the outer limits of political and social possibility'. On the Vferso website, Han is described as 'a star of German philosophy' whose work provides 'a passionate critique of neoliberalism'. Given the high praise, what, we might ask, are Han's specific contributions to current theoretical and political debates? What key questions (or sets of questions) do his works pivot around, and what solutions do they offer? And what, more broadly, might Han's popularity reveal both about his work and the present state of theory? My discussion here will be limited to two of the above-mentioned texts, which, I believe, provide the best introduction to the author's thinking: The Burnout Society and Psychopolitics.
In The Burnout Society, Han argues that '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 It has long been replaced by another regime, namely a society of fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls and genetic laboratories' (p8). Twenty-first century society is, Han informs us, 'no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society' (p8). With the emergence of the achievement society comes a new discursive regime: disciplinary society's negative prohibition 'May Not', linked to the imperative 'Should', gives way to the positive modal verb 'Can' (as in the affirmative 'Yes, we can'). But this apparent break turns out to be nothing more than a continuity, rhetorically serving the interests of capital's own...