Byung-Chul Han – författare

Från Daniel Ek och hans principer och arbetsmodell för att bygga Spotify – till Simon Kuper och Olof Lundh, som skriver varsin essä om fotboll med anledning av sommarens stora mästerskap.

Inför riksdagsvalet i höst återvänder Lena Andersson till den glödande havregynnsdebatten, Björn af Kleen skriver dagbok från ett skakat USA och så publicerar vi en novell av den irländska stjärnförfattaren Sally Rooney.

Dessutom utser vi de 25 bästa utländska fackböckerna under 2000-talet (hittills).

Sikt är bokserien som samlar smarta texter från hela världen. I fyra nummer per år skriver framstående författare, forskare, historiker, tänkare och ekonomer. Syftet är att lyfta fram nya, tänkvärda och banbrytande perspektiv.

Välkommen till det sjätte numret.

Det moderna informations- och prestationssamhället med sina oändliga lockelser och möjligheter betraktas vanligtvis som ett framsteg. Men enligt den koreanske filosofen Byung-Chul Han, som skriver på tyska och är verksam i Karlsruhe, är det snarare fråga om en tillbaka­gång. Det ständiga tvånget att veta allt och kunna allt leder till en kollektiv utmattning. I boken beskriver han detta fenomen och ett sätt att lösa problemet. 

»Trötthetssamhället« är inte ännu en självhjälpsbok, utan en filosofisk essä som rekommenderar ledans och vredens terapi. 

KRITIKERRÖSTER

»[Trötthetssamhället] analyserar vår tidsålders sjukliga prestationsmaskineri, tvånget att kunna och veta allt. Att koppla ned uppkopplingen är dock banala råd. Enligt Byung-Chul finns bara en sak som kan rädda dagens människa från själsinfarkt total tristess, rena j-a ledan! Tja, varför inte, det låter plötsligt som ett lockande alternativ.« Arbetarbladets kulturlista 

»Byung-Chuls blick för samhällsskeenden och existensens grundfrågor bevisar dessutom att filosofin angår oss, och med oss menar jag oss allihop. Filosofin är inte sig själv nog. Den pågår i den värld där varenda en av oss lever.« Maria Küchen, Sydsvenskan 

»Filosofisk pärla av koreanen Byung-Chul Han, bosatt i Berlin, som skriver kritiskt om det ständigt uppkopplade samhället. Ett måste för mobilmatta människor.« Karin Olsson, Expressen 

»Trots det lilla formatet är det en tungt vägande bok som fokuserar på det paradigmskifte som författaren menar att vi är mitt uppe i Trötthetssamhället borde vara obligatorisk helgläsning för halvgamla och vuxna. Om man har överseende med den ibland något snåriga filosofiska begreppsapparaten är det en skrift som belönar en rikligt. Koppla ner och koppla av med en stunds begrundande läsning.« Tomas Lidbeck, Ystads Allehanda 

»... det är en sådan där kort liten skrift som du kan bläddra igenom på en timme och sedan fundera över i veckor.« Björn Waller, Dagens bok

»Han mixar in Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin och Martin Heidegger i sina analyser av selfies och Snapchat, och gör tysk filosofi till ett nutida beat för tanken att dansa till.« Kristofer Ahlström, DN

Storytelling står högt i kurs i dag. Så högt att man kan få intrycket att vi återigen berättar fler historier för varandra. I själva verket innebär storytelling allt annat än berättelsens återkomst. Det handlar snarare om att instrumentalisera och kommersialisera berättelser. Det har etablerats som en effektiv kommunikationsteknik, som inte sällan tjänar manipulativa syften. Det handlar alltid om den enda frågan: »How to use storytelling?« Den som tror att produktchefer som fördjupar sig i storytelling utgör en ny berättelses avantgarde misstar sig.

»Att leva är att berätta. Människan som animal narrans skiljer sig från djuren i det att hon förverkligar nya livsformer när hon berättar. Berättelsen bär på kraften till en ny början. Varje världsförändrande handling förutsätter en berättelse. Storytelling där­emot känner bara till en enda livsform, nämligen den konsumistiska. Storytelling som storyselling är inkapabel att föreställa sig helt andra livsformer. I storytellingens värld reduceras allt till konsumtion. Därigenom blir vi blinda för andra berättelser, för andra livsformer, för andra varseblivningar och verkligheter. Detta är narrationens kris i storytellingens tidsålder.« ur Narrationens kris

An argument that love requires the courage to accept self-negation for the sake of discovering the Other.

Byung-Chul Han is one of the most widely read philosophers in Europe today, a member of the new generation of German thinkers that includes Markus Gabriel and Armen Avanessian. In The Agony of Eros, a bestseller in Germany, Han considers the threat to love and desire in today''s society. For Han, love requires the courage to accept self-negation for the sake of discovering the Other. In a world of fetishized individualism and technologically mediated social interaction, it is the Other that is eradicated, not the self. In today''s increasingly narcissistic society, we have come to look for love and desire within the “inferno of the same.”

Han offers a survey of the threats to Eros, drawing on a wide range of sources—Lars von Trier''s film Melancholia, Wagner''s Tristan und Isolde,Fifty Shades of Grey, Michel Foucault (providing a scathing critique of Foucault''s valorization of power), Martin Buber, Hegel, Baudrillard, Flaubert, Barthes, Plato, and others. Han considers the “pornographication” of society, and shows how pornography profanes eros; addresses capitalism''s leveling of essential differences; and discusses the politics of eros in today''s “burnout society.” To be dead to love, Han argues, is to be dead to thought itself.

Concise in its expression but unsparing in its insight, The Agony of Eros is an important and provocative entry in Han''s ongoing analysis of contemporary society.

This remarkable essay, an intellectual experience of the first order, affords one of the best ways to gain full awareness of and join in one of the most pressing struggles of the day: the defense, that is to say—as Rimbaud desired it—the “reinvention” of love.—from the foreword by Alain Badiou

A prominent German thinker argues that—contrary to “Twitter Revolution” cheerleading—digital communication is destroying political discourse and political action.

The shitstorm represents an authentic phenomenon of digital communication.—from In the Swarm

Digital communication and social media have taken over our lives. In this contrarian reflection on digitized life, Byung-Chul Han counters the cheerleaders for Twitter revolutions and Facebook activism by arguing that digital communication is in fact responsible for the disintegration of community and public space and is slowly eroding any possibility for real political action and meaningful political discourse. In the predigital, analog era, by the time an angry letter to the editor had been composed, mailed, and received, the immediate agitation had passed. Today, digital communication enables instantaneous, impulsive reaction, meant to express and stir up outrage on the spot. “The shitstorm,” writes Han, ”represents an authentic phenomenon of digital communication.”

Meanwhile, the public, the senders and receivers of these communications have become a digital swarm—not a mass, or a crowd, or Negri and Hardt''s antiquated notion of a “multitude,” but a set of isolated individuals incapable of forming a “we,” incapable of calling dominant power relations into question, incapable of formulating a future because of an obsession with the present. The digital swarm is a fragmented entity that can focus on individual persons only in order to make them an object of scandal.

Han, one of the most widely read philosophers in Europe today, describes a society in which information has overrun thought, in which the same algorithms are employed by Facebook, the stock market, and the intelligence services. Democracy is under threat because digital communication has made freedom and control indistinguishable. Big Brother has been succeeded by Big Data.

Tracing the thread of “decreation” in Chinese thought, from constantly changing classical masterpieces to fake cell phones that are better than the original.

Shanzhai is a Chinese neologism that means “fake,” originally coined to describe knock-off cell phones marketed under such names as Nokir and Samsing. These cell phones were not crude forgeries but multifunctional, stylish, and as good as or better than the originals. Shanzhai has since spread into other parts of Chinese life, with shanzhai books, shanzhai politicians, shanzhai stars. There is a shanzhai Harry Potter: Harry Potter and the Porcelain Doll, in which Harry takes on his nemesis Yandomort. In the West, this would be seen as piracy, or even desecration, but in Chinese culture, originals are continually transformed—deconstructed. In this volume in the Untimely Meditations series, Byung-Chul Han traces the thread of deconstruction, or “decreation,” in Chinese thought, from ancient masterpieces that invite inscription and transcription to Maoism—“a kind a shanzhai Marxism,” Han writes.

Han discusses the Chinese concepts of quan, or law, which literally means the weight that slides back and forth on a scale, radically different from Western notions of absoluteness; zhen ji, or original, determined not by an act of creation but by unending process; xian zhan, or seals of leisure, affixed by collectors and part of the picture''s composition; fuzhi, or copy, a replica of equal value to the original; and shanzhai. The Far East, Han writes, is not familiar with such “pre-deconstructive” factors as original or identity. Far Eastern thought begins with deconstruction.

One of today''s most widely read philosophers considers the shift in violence from visible to invisible, from negativity to excess of positivity.

Some things never disappear—violence, for example. Violence is ubiquitous and incessant but protean, varying its outward form according to the social constellation at hand. In Topology of Violence, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han considers the shift in violence from the visible to the invisible, from the frontal to the viral to the self-inflicted, from brute force to mediated force, from the real to the virtual. Violence, Han tells us, has gone from the negative—explosive, massive, and martial—to the positive, wielded without enmity or domination. This, he says, creates the false impression that violence has disappeared. Anonymized, desubjectified, systemic, violence conceals itself because it has become one with society.

Han first investigates the macro-physical manifestations of violence, which take the form of negativity—developing from the tension between self and other, interior and exterior, friend and enemy. These manifestations include the archaic violence of sacrifice and blood, the mythical violence of jealous and vengeful gods, the deadly violence of the sovereign, the merciless violence of torture, the bloodless violence of the gas chamber, the viral violence of terrorism, and the verbal violence of hurtful language. He then examines the violence of positivity—the expression of an excess of positivity—which 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.

A philosopher considers entertainment, in all its totalizing variety—infotainment, edutainment, servotainment—and traces the notion through Kant, Zen Buddhism, Heidegger, Kafka, and Rauschenberg.

In Good Entertainment, Byung-Chul Han examines the notion of entertainment—its contemporary ubiquity, and its philosophical genealogy. Entertainment today, in all its totalizing variety, has an apparently infinite capacity for incorporation: infotainment, edutainment, servotainment, confrontainment. Entertainment is held up as a new paradigm, even a new credo for being—and yet, in the West, it has had inescapably negative connotations. Han traces Western ideas of entertainment, considering, among other things, the scandal that arose from the first performance of Bach''s Saint Matthew''s Passion (deemed too beautiful, not serious enough); Kant''s idea of morality as duty and the entertainment value of moralistic literature; Heidegger''s idea of the thinker as a man of pain; Kafka''s hunger artist and the art of negativity, which takes pleasure in annihilation; and Robert Rauschenberg''s refusal of the transcendent.

The history of the West, Han tells us, is a passion narrative, and passion appears as a killjoy. Achievement is the new formula for passion, and play is subordinated to production, gamified. And yet, he argues, at their core, passion and entertainment are not entirely different. The pure meaninglessness of entertainment is adjacent to the pure meaning of passion. The fool''s smile resembles the pain-racked visage of Homo doloris. In Good Entertainment, Han explores this paradox.