CONTEMPORARY EXHAUSTION AND DISORIENTED ANTHROPOTECHNICSTHINKING BURNOUT THROUGH YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR LIFE BY PETER SLOTERDIJK

Abstract

This essay proposes an interpretation of burnout as a phenomenon characteristic of late modernity, drawing on the philosophical anthropology developed by Peter Sloterdijk in You Must Change Your Life. Although Sloterdijk does not employ the clinical concept of professional burnout syndrome, his analysis of permanent exercise, of society as a “stress commune,” and of the imperative of self-optimization offers a particularly fertile conceptual framework for understanding contemporary psychic and existential exhaustion. It is argued that burnout can be interpreted as the limit expression of a disoriented anthropotechnics, that is, of practices of self-formation detached from symbolic horizons of meaning and from the recognition of human finitude. In critical dialogue with Byung-Chul Han, the essay shows that the so-called “society of fatigue” constitutes the psychopolitical manifestation of a deeper process: the modern crisis of the practices through which human beings attempt to remain human.