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Byung-Chul Han (born 1959) is a South Korean-born philosopher and cultural theorist living in Germany.[1] He was a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts and still occasionally gives courses there. His work largely centers around a critique of neoliberalism and its impact on society and the individual. Although he writes in German, his books have been best received in the Hispanosphere.[2]
Han is the author of more than thirty books, the most well known are treatises on what he terms a "society of tiredness" (Müdigkeitsgesellschaft) and a "society of transparency" (Transparenzgesellschaft). He also wrote about the concept of shanzhai (山寨), a style of imitative variation, which pre-exist practices known in Western philosophy as deconstructive.[6]
Han's current work focuses on transparency as a cultural norm created by neoliberal market forces, which he understands as the insatiable drive toward voluntary disclosure bordering on the pornographic. According to Han, the dictates of transparency enforce a totalitarian system of openness at the expense of other social values such as shame, secrecy, and trust.[7]
Personal life
Through his career, Han has refused to give radio and television interviews and rarely divulges any biographical or personal details, including his date of birth, in public.[8] He is a Catholic.[9]
Thought
Much of Han's writing is characterised by an underlying concern with the situation encountered by human subjects in the fast-paced, technologically-driven state of late capitalism. The situation is explored in its various facets through his books: sexuality, mental health (particularly burnout, depression, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), violence, freedom, technology, and popular culture.[10]
In The Burnout Society (original German title: Müdigkeitsgesellschaft), Han characterizes today's society as a pathological landscape of neuronal disorders such as depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, borderline personality and burnout. He claims that they are not "infections" but "infarcts", which are not caused by the negativity of people's immunology, but by an excess of positivity.[11] According to Han, driven by the demand to persevere and not to fail, as well as by the ambition of efficiency, we become committers and sacrificers at the same time and enter a swirl of demarcation, self-exploitation and collapse. "When production is immaterial, everyone already owns the means of production, him- or herself. The neoliberal system is no longer a class system in the proper sense. It does not consist of classes that display mutual antagonism. This is what accounts for the system's stability."[12]
Han argues that subjects become self-exploiters: "Today, everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise. People are now master and slave in one. Even class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself."[12] The individual has become what Han calls "the achievement-subject"; the individual does not believe they are subjugated "subjects" but rather "projects: Always refashioning and reinventing ourselves" which "amounts to a form of compulsion and constraint—indeed, to a "more efficient kind of subjectivation and subjugation." As a project deeming itself free of external and alien limitations, the "I" subjugates itself to internal limitations and self-constraints, which are taking the form of compulsive achievement and optimization.[13]
In Agonie des Eros ('Agony of the Eros') Han carries forward thoughts developed in his earlier books The Burnout Society (Müdigkeitsgesellschaft) and Transparency Society (Transparenzgesellschaft). Beginning with an analysis of the "Other" Han develops an interrogation of desire and love between human beings. Partly based on Lars von Trier's film Melancholia, where Han sees depression and overcoming depicted, Han further develops his thesis of a contemporary society that is increasingly dominated by narcissism and self-reference. Han's diagnosis extends even to the point of the loss of desire, the disappearance of the ability to devote to the "Other", the stranger, the non-self. At this point, subjects come to revolve exclusively around themselves, unable to build relationships. Even love and sexuality are permeated by this social change: sex and pornography, exhibition/voyeurism and re/presentation, are displacing love, eroticism, and desire from the public eye. The abundance of positivity and self-reference leads to a loss of confrontation. Thinking, Han states, is based on the "untreaded", on the desire for something that one does not yet understand. It is connected to a high degree with Eros, so the "agony of the Eros" is also an "agony of thought". Not everything must be understood and "liked", not everything must be made available.[14]
In Topologie der Gewalt ('Topology of Violence'), Han continues his analysis of a society on the edge of collapse that he started with The Burnout Society. Focusing on the relation between violence and individuality, he shows that, against the widespread thesis about its disappearance, violence has only changed its form of appearance and now operates more subtly. The material form of violence gives way to a more anonymous, desubjectified, systemic one, that does not reveal itself, as it is merging with its antagonist – freedom. This theme is further explored in "Psychopolitics", where through Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Richard Sennett, René Girard, Giorgio Agamben, Deleuze/Guattari, Michel Foucault, Michel Serres, Pierre Bourdieu and Martin Heidegger, Han develops an original conception of violence. Central to Han's thesis is the idea that violence finds expression in 'negative' and 'positive' forms (note: these are not normative judgements about the expressions themselves): negative violence is an overtly physical manifestation of violence, finding expression in war, torture, terrorism, etc; positive violence "manifests itself as over-achievement, over-production, over-communication, hyper-attention, and hyperactivity." The violence of positivity, Han warns, could be even more disastrous than that of negativity. "Infection, invasion, and infiltration have given way to infarction."[15]
The Burnout Society has been translated into over 35 languages.[16] Several South Korean newspapers voted it the most important book in 2012.[17] It sold over a hundred thousand copies across Latin America, Korea, and Spain.[18]The Guardian wrote a positive review of his 2017 book Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power,[19] while the Hong Kong Review of Books praised his writing as "concise almost to the point of being aphoristic, Han's writing style manages to distill complex ideas into highly readable and persuasive prose" while noting that "on other occasions, Han veers uncomfortably close to billboard-sized statements ("Neoliberalism is the 'capitalism of' Like), which highlights the fine line between cleverness and self-indulgent sloganeering."[20] The Los Angeles Review of Books described him as "as good a candidate as any for philosopher of the moment."[21]
Der Freitag writer Steffen Kraft criticized him for drawing on anti-democratic and anti-technology philosopher Carl Schmitt, and alleged that he "confuses cause and effect: it is not the hope for more transparency that has turned democracy into technocracy, but the refusal of even progressives to consider the consequences of information technology on the political process." (original quote in German: "Ursache und Wirkung: Nicht die Hoffnung auf mehr Transparenz hat die Demokratie zur Technokratie gemacht, sondern die Weigerung selbst Progressiver, die Folgen der Informationstechnik auf den politischen Prozess zu bedenken.")[22]
Works in English
The Burnout Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015) ISBN9780804795098.
The Transparency Society (Stanford: Stanford Briefs, 2015) ISBN080479460X
The Agony of Eros (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2017) ISBN0262533375
In the Swarm: Digital Prospects (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2017), ISBN0262533367
Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power (London & New York: Verso Books, 2017) ISBN9781784785772
Good Entertainment: A Deconstruction of the Western Passion Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2019) ISBN0262537508
The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020) ISBN1509542760
Capitalism and the Death Drive (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021) ISBN9781509545018
The Palliative Society: Pain Today (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021) ISBN9781509547258
Hyperculture: Culture and Globalisation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022) ISBN9781509546183
Infocracy: Digitization and the Crisis of Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022) ISBN9781509552986
Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022) ISBN9781509551705
The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022) ISBN9781509545100
Absence: On the Culture and Philosophy of the Far East (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2023) ISBN9781509546206
Vita contemplativa: In praise of inactivity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2023)ISBN9781509558018
The Crisis of Narration (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2024) ISBN9781509560431
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↑ Han, Byung-Chul (2017) [2012 in German]. The Agony of Eros. Translated by Butler, Erik. Foreword by Alain Badiou. London: MIT Press. ISBN9780262533379. LCCN2016031913.
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