Why this book?
- To understand burnout and depression in relation to social structures, rather than merely individual psychology.
- To explore Han’s critique of the culture of productivity, success, and self-exploitation.
- To examine the relationship between transparency, digital technology, and the expansion of surveillance.
- To gain a concise introduction to two central concepts in Byung-Chul Han’s thought.
- To reflect on the human costs of a society that constantly demands greater performance and visibility.
About the book
The Burnout Society; The Transparency Society is the Persian translation of two separate works by Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society and The Transparency Society. Read together, they offer a concise picture of Han’s critique of contemporary society: a society that, on the one hand, drives individuals toward ever greater work, performance, and self-optimization and, on the other, increasingly subjects life to display, data processing, and surveillance.
In The Burnout Society, Han argues that the characteristic illnesses of our age cannot simply be reduced to individual factors. In his analysis, depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and burnout syndrome are connected to a social order that constantly urges individuals to achieve, advance, and perform more. In such an order, external pressure largely gives way to internal pressure, and individuals become their own exploiters.
Han contrasts this condition with a society organized around prohibition, discipline, and the distinction between self and other. In his view, contemporary society is defined less by “negativity” and an external enemy than by an excess of positivity, production, communication, and performance. This paradigm shift, he argues, provides the conditions for some of the psychological and social pathologies of the present.
The Transparency Society develops another dimension of the same critique. Han challenges the widespread assumption that transparency is always and unconditionally a virtue. He shows how the constant demand for disclosure, display, and accessibility can weaken trust, privacy, secrecy, and distance, transforming a transparent society into a society of surveillance.
These two essays are representative works from a phase of Han’s thought centered on the critique of late capitalism, digital culture, and new forms of power. The book is particularly suited to readers interested in social philosophy, cultural criticism, social psychology, media, and the relationship between technology and everyday life, as well as those who wish to think philosophically about burnout, self-exploitation, transparency, and surveillance.
Every age has its characteristic afflictions. In the same way, there was a bacterial age that eventually came to an end with the discovery of antibiotics. Despite the widespread fear of an influenza pandemic, we do not live in a viral age either. Thanks to immunological technology, we have left such an age behind. From a pathological perspective, it is not bacteria or viruses but neurons that are the defining feature of the twenty-first century, which has only just begun. Neurological ailments such as depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, borderline personality disorder, and burnout syndrome are the characteristic health disorders of the early twenty-first century. They are not infections but infarctions; they do not result from the negativity produced by things foreign to the body's immune system, but from an excess of positivity. For this reason, they escape all those techniques and technologies designed to combat what is foreign.The Burnout Society