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.