Claudia Wilde

“The neoliberal imperative of self-optimization serves only to promote perfect functioning within the system. Inhibitions, points of weakness and mistakes are to be therapeutically eliminated in order to enhance efficiency and performance. In turn, everything is made comparable and measurable and subjected to the logic of the market. It is not concern for the good life that drives self-optimization. Rather, self-optimization follows from systemic constraints - from the logic of quantifying success on the market.”
― Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power

“Today, we do not deem ourselves subjugated subjects, but rather projects·, always refashioning and reinventing ourselves. A sense of freedom attends passing from the state of subject to that of project. All the same, this projection amounts to a form of compulsion and constraint - indeed, to a more efficient kind of subjeçtivation and subjugation. As a project deeming itself free of external and alien limitations, the I is now subjugating itself to internal limitations and self-constraints, which are taking the form of compulsive achievement and optimization.”
― Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power

“People who fail in the neoliberal archievement-society see themselves as responsible for their lot and feel shame instead of questioning society or the system.”
― Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power

“The idiot is a modern-day heretic. Etymologically, heresy means ‘choice’. Thus, the heretic is one who commands free choice·, the courage to deviate from orthodoxy. As a heretic, the idiot represents a figure of resistance opposing the violence of consensus. The idiot preserves the magic of the outsider. Today, in fight of increasingly coercive conformism, it is more urgent than ever to heighten heretical consciousness.”
― Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power