More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
When a paradigm has come to provide an object of reflection, it often means that its demise is at hand.
The violence of positivity does not deprive, it saturates; it does not exclude, it exhausts. That is why it proves inaccessible to unmediated perception.
Disciplinary society is still governed by no. Its negativity produces madmen and criminals. In contrast, achievement society creates depressives and losers.
It is not the imperative only to belong to oneself, but the pressure to achieve that causes exhaustive depression. Seen in this light, burnout syndrome does not express the exhausted self so much as the exhausted, burnt-out soul.
depression is creative fatigue and exhausted ability
Culture presumes an environment in which deep attention is possible. Increasingly, such immersive reflection is being displaced by an entirely different form of attention: hyperattention.
The reaction to a life that has become bare and radically fleeting occurs as hyperactivity, hysterical work, and production.
Learning to see means “getting your eyes used to calm, to patience, to letting things come to you”—that is, making yourself capable of deep and contemplative attention, casting a long and slow gaze.
It is an illusion to believe that being more active means being freer.
Today we live in a world that is very poor in interruption; “betweens” and “between-times” are lacking. Acceleration is abolishing all intervals
The active roll as the stone rolls, in obedience to the stupidity of the laws of mechanics.”2 Different kinds of action and activity exist. Activity that follows an unthinking, mechanical course is poor in interruption. Machines cannot pause. Despite its enormous capacity for calculation, the computer is stupid insofar as it lacks the ability to delay.
If thinking [das Denken] itself were a “network of antibodies and natural immune defenses,”4 then the absence of negativity would transform it into calculation.
If one had only the power to do (something) and no power not to do, it would lead to fatal hyperactivity.
Tiredness in achievement society is solitary tiredness; it has a separating and isolating effect.
All forms are slow. Each form is a detour. The economy of efficiency and acceleration makes them disappear.
Deep tiredness loosens the strictures of identity. Things flicker, twinkle, and vibrate at the edges. They grow less determinate and more porous and lose some of their resolution. This particular in-difference lends them an aura of friendliness.
Handke’s tiredness is not “I-tiredness”; it is not the tiredness of an exhausted ego. He calls it “we-tiredness” (15). I am not tired “of you,” as he puts it, but rather I am tired “with you”
Today’s achievement-subject deems itself free when in fact it is bound like Prometheus. The eagle that consumes an ever-regrowing liver can be interpreted as the subject’s alter ego. Viewed in this way, the relation between Prometheus and the eagle represents a relation of self-exploitation.
The modal verb that determines achievement society is not the Freudian Should, but Can. This social transformation entails intrapsychic restructuring.
Freedom from the Other switches into narcissistic self-relation, which occasions many of the psychic disturbances afflicting today’s achievement-subject.
Richard Sennett has also traced the gratification crisis to a narcissistic disturbance and the absent relation to the Other: As a character disorder, narcissism is the very opposite of strong self-love. Self-absorption does not produce gratification, it produces injury to the self; erasing the line between self and other means that nothing new, nothing “other,” ever enters the self; it is devoured and transformed until one thinks one can see oneself in the other—and then it becomes meaningless. . . . The narcissist is not hungry for experiences, he is hungry for Experience. Looking always for
...more
Love of self is still determined by negativity insofar as it devalues and wards off the Other in favor of the Own. The Own sets itself against the Other. Thereby, the Other acts to preserve distance. Self-love means taking an explicit stand vis-à-vis the Other. Narcissism, in contrast, blurs the border. If one suffers from a narcissistic disorder, one sinks into oneself. When reference to the Other goes missing, no stable self-image can form.
The socially conditioned impossibility of objectively valid, definitive forms of closure drives the subject into narcissistic self-repetition; consequently, it fails to achieve gestalt, stable self-image, or character. Thus, it is not a matter of intentionally “avoiding” the achievement of goals in order to heighten the feeling of self. Instead, the feeling of having achieved a goal never occurs. It is not that the narcissistic subject does not want to achieve closure. Rather, it is incapable of getting there.
Hysteria is a typical psychic malady of the disciplinary society that witnessed the founding of psychoanalysis. It presumes the negativity of repression, prohibition, and negation, which lead to the formation of the unconscious.
In positive terms, such a human being without character is flexible, able to assume any form, play any role, or perform any function. This shapelessness—or, alternately, flexibility—creates a high degree of economic efficiency.
they indicate an excess of positivity, that is, not negation so much as the inability to say no; they do not point to not-being-allowed-to-do-anything [Nicht-Dürfen], but to being-able-to-do-everything [Alles-Können].
Depression—which often culminates in burnout—follows from overexcited, overdriven, excessive self-reference that has assumed destructive traits. The exhausted, depressive achievement-subject grinds itself down, so to speak. It is tired, exhausted by itself, and at war with itself. Entirely incapable of stepping outward, of standing outside itself, of relying on the Other, on the world, it locks its jaws on itself; paradoxically, this leads the self to hollow and empty out. It wears out in a rat race it runs against itself.
Mourning differs from depression above all through its strong libidinal attachment to an object. In contrast, depression is objectless and therefore undirected. It is important to distinguish depression from melancholy. Melancholy is preceded by the experience of loss. Therefore it still stands in a relation—namely, negative relation—to the absent thing or party. In contrast, depression is cut off from all relation and attachment. It utterly lacks gravity [Schwerkraft].
One who mourns is entirely with the beloved Other. The late-modern ego devotes the majority of libidinal energy to itself. The remaining libido is distributed and scattered among continually multiplying contacts and fleeting relationships. It proves quite easy to withdraw the weakened libido from the Other and to use it to cathect new objects.
In social networks, the function of “friends” is primarily to heighten narcissism by granting attention, as consumers, to the ego exhibited as a commodity.
In contrast to the repressive superego, the ego ideal seduces. The achievement-subject projects itself [entwirft sich] onto the ego ideal, whereas the obedience-subject subjects itself [sich unterwift] to the superego.
The negativity of the superego restricts the freedom of the ego. Projecting oneself into the ego ideal is interpreted as an act of freedom. But when the ego gets caught in an unattainable ego ideal, it gets crushed altogether. The gap between the real ego and the ego ideal then brings forth auto-aggression.
Starting at a certain level of production, auto-exploitation is significantly more efficient and brings much greater returns [leistungsstärker] than allo-exploitation, because the feeling of freedom attends it. Achievement society is the society of self-exploitation. The achievement-subject exploits itself until it burns out. In the process, it develops auto-aggression that often enough escalates into the violence of self-destruction. The project turns out to be a projectile that the achievement-subject is aiming at itself.
The society of positivity, which thinks itself free of all foreign constraints, becomes entangled in destructive self-constraints.
Sovereignty’s originary achievement is to have produced the bare life of homo sacer. This life is bare because it stands outside the legal order and therefore can be destroyed at any time.
Auto-exploitation is more efficient than allo-exploitation because a deceptive feeling of freedom accompanies it. The exploiter is simultaneously the exploited. Exploitation now occurs without domination. That is what makes self-exploitation so efficient. The capitalist system is switching from allo-exploitation to auto-exploitation in order to accelerate.
Concern about living the good life yields to the hysteria of surviving.
Given the atomization of society and the erosion of the social, all that remains is the body of the ego, which is to be kept healthy at any cost.
