The Compulsion to Achieve as a Way to Immortality: The discourse on Stress and Burnout seen in the perspective of an 'excess of positivity'

In this article, we want to take a critical view on the way current discourses on stress and burnout are embedded in what the German philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls >the excess of positivity< (Han 2010), and the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa describes as the »Culture of Acceleration« and the language of late modernity named »The Triple A«, which is a language directed towards: Availability, Accessibility and Attainability (Rosa 2017). We see some important keystones in this critic coming already from Heidegger and Foucault. What they point to, and which current critical discourse theory in our view is not sufficient aware of, is a kind of meaning-giving »negativity«, that is to be found »on the other side of the language«. From this enigmatic and ineffable space of non-linguistic presence, Heidegger and Foucault find an impulse for at care for the souls that might bring a radical new light into how we can understand and maybe also avoid the growing and widespread malaises of stress and burnout described as ›existential rootlessness‹ in late modernity.
This is the first of two articles. This one will focus solely on the critic of late modernity and how stress and burnout are described in current research with a special focus on ›existential rootlessness‹, and why current discourse theory seems to miss an important dimension about the negativity of language. In the second article (NN/NN 2024), we dwell upon the apophatic notion of the »excess of negativity« and why and how this kind of ›thinking as dwelling‹ and ›sense of wonder‹ can lead to a care of the soul described through notions such as ›existential rootedness‹ and ›ontological homecoming‹.