Capitalism’s survival absolutism strips life of narrative and produces health mania.

Evidence

The capitalist economy absolutizes survival. It is not concerned with the good life. It is sustained by the illusion that more capital produces more life, which means a greater capacity for living. The rigid, rigorous separation between life and death casts a spell of ghostly stiffness over life itself. Concern about living the good life yields to the hysteria of surviving. The reduction of life to biological, vital processes makes life itself bare and strips it of all narrativity. It takes livingness from life, which is much more complex than simple vitality and health. The mania for health emerges when life has become as flat as a coin and stripped of all narrative content, all value. 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. The loss of ideal values leaves, other than the exhibition value of the ego, only health value behind. Bare life makes all teleology vanish—every in-order-to [jedes Umzu] that would give reason to remain healthy. Health becomes self-referential and voids itself into purposiveness without purpose. — Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, 136

Categorization

• SEED: The health-mania-as-substitute-for-meaning angle is an essay worth writing: modern optimization culture as bare, purposive health.
• XREF: Health as the new goddess connects to wellness-industry critiques and to Han’s later point that bare life is holy.