Ian, I want to ask you about a couple themes from your recent essay “Burnout and Hope.”
You wonder how to diagnose the cause of the “signature affliction of our age”. Is it, as Byung-Chul Han, the South Korean philosopher you were writing about, puts it, the result of excess positivity, coalescence, frictionlessness? Or is it, as Roberto Esposito puts it, the result of too much negativity, tension, conflict? Regardless of the details, looking for the cause of some thing itself implies accepting that that thing exists – i.e., it implies accepting Han’s central claim that there is some uniquely contemporary malady of alienation plaguing us all in the twenty-first century.
Read Full Article »