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The Burnout Society is a translation by Gilda Lopes Encarnação of the German book Müdigkeitsgesellschaft by Byung-Chul Han. The monograph is covered by the disparity, inspired by Hegel, between negativity and positivity, that is, the opposition between a relation based on otherness and a relation based on the permissiveness of the identical. By means of this distinction, Han criticizes the implications of the cultural and communicational transformations of our time, namely the new configurations of labor, attention and mental illness. The hypercommunication, which is addressed by Han as a modality of violence of positive society (in opposition to the negative society), is linked to several excesses, particularly to an overload of productivity and media stimuli. Today's experience takes place in a space covered by overflowing egos, in a space of permissiveness of the identical, the antagonistic figure of otherness. For the first time presented in Portuguese through the translation of this book, Han's work involves a critical view of the sociability of the century, allowing to think the cultural, existential and social consequences of hyperactivity and current hypermobility.We are dealing with a very short text, which nevertheless does a very elaborated use of the few words that compose it. Although Korean, Han is a philosopher of German orientation, a walker on the routes of fundamental ontology. Han was born in Seoul, South Korea, in 1959. He began to study metallurgy and in the 1980s he headed to Germany in order to study literature. He studied German Literature and Theology at the University of Munich but, given the language difficulties, Philosophy was the field in which he received his doctorate in 1994 with a thesis on Martin Heidegger at the University of Freiburg. Since 2012, Han is professor of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Berlin, where he heads a General Studies program.It is from the very first chapter of The Burnout Society that Han poses the possibility of periodization through pathologies. This practice of analysis will be named "pathological reading" in the sixth chapter (p. 45). By means of such practice, Han distinguishes the succession of several periods: a bacterial, a viral, an immunological and, finally, a neuronal one. The contrast is mostly done through the transition between the immunological period and the neuronal one. For Han, the twentieth century was an immunological epoch, whose terminology was dominated by the idea of attack and defense of the Cold War. The fundamental principle of negativity is its dialectical character. It is in the fact that the immunological other is a negative denying the self after introducing therein. The immunological way of subject has an interiority that defends him from the exclusion of the other. The object of the immunological defense is, thus, the otherness.

This article seeks to capture variations and tensions in the relationships between the health–illness–medicine complex and society. It presents several theoretical reconstructions, established theses and arguments are reassessed and criticized, known perspectives are realigned according to a new theorizing narrative, and some new notions are proposed. In the first part, we argue that relations between the medical complex and society are neither formal–abstract nor historically necessary. In the second part, we take the concept of medicalization and the development of medicalization critique as an important example of the difficult coalescence between health and society, but also as an alternative to guide the treatment of these relationships. Returning to the medicalization studies, we suggest a new synthesis, reconceptualizing it as a set of modalities, including medical imperialism. In the third part, we endorse replacing a profession-based approach to medicalization with a knowledge-based approach. However, we argue that such an approach should include varieties of sociological knowledge. In this context, we propose an enlarged knowledge-based orientation for standardizing the relationships between the health–illness–medicine complex and society.

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