Reading in the burnout society

Abstract

This article examines, drawing on Byung-Chul Han's The Burnout Society, how the 
shift from disciplinary society to the achievement society transformed the contemporary 
relationship with reading. It shows how self-exploitation, sustained by the promise of 
personal fulfillment, turned the book into just another commodity and reading into a 
quantifiable activity, measured on platforms such as Goodreads and accelerated through 
summaries or audiobooks. The article analyzes the achievement-subject's inability to tolerate 
non-productive time, which explains both the rejection of rereading and the guilt associated 
with literary enjoyment. Drawing on the notion of attentional dispersion, it argues that 
multitasking in the digital environment constitutes a regression toward a primitive form of 
attention, incompatible with sustained reading. In response, the article recovers the concept 
of profound boredom, which Han takes from Walter Benjamin, to propose slow reading as 
an exercise of resistance against the idea of performance that permeates contemporary life.