Self-exploiting subject makes Hegel’s slave-master dialectic collapse

Evidence

Although the achievement-subject deems itself free, in reality it is a slave. In so far as it willingly exploits itself without a master, it is an absolute slave. There is no master forcing the achievement-subject to work. Yet all the same, it is absolutizing bare life and labour. … But counter to what Hegel assumed, labouring does not make the slave free. The slave remains enslaved to labour. Now, the slave is forcing the master to work too. Today’s dialectic of master and slave means the totalization of labour. — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, 14

Categorization

• XREF: Direct inversion of Hegel’s lordship-and-bondage from the Phenomenology; pairs with the Frankfurt School’s interrogation of whether labor emancipates. — connects to: Both sovereign and disciplinary power pursue the exploitation of others through obedience; The neoliberal regime reappropriated Foucault’s ethics of the self into a self-exploitation device — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 68; Self-domination destroys the very subject self-preservation aims to save — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 62 (+1 more)

Related

• The willing self-exploiter is an absolute slave without a master (similarity 0.91)
• Exploitation now occurs without domination, making freedom and compulsion coincide. (similarity 0.81)
• Self-domination destroys the very subject self-preservation aims to save (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Self-domination destroys the very subject self-preservation aims to save #corroborates (0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 62