Byung-Chul Han – författare

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.

Byung-Chul Han, a star of German philosophy, continues his passionate critique of neoliberalism, trenchantly describing a regime of technological domination that, in contrast to Foucault's biopower, has discovered the productive force of the psyche. In the course of discussing all the facets of neoliberal psychopolitics fueling our contemporary crisis of freedom, Han elaborates an analytical framework that provides an original theory of Big Data and a lucid phenomenology of emotion. But this provocative essay proposes counter models too, presenting a wealth of ideas and surprising alternatives at every turn.

Our competitive, service-oriented societies are taking a toll on the late-modern individual. Rather than improving life, multitasking, "user-friendly" technology, and the culture of convenience are producing disorders that range from depression to attention deficit disorder to borderline personality disorder. Byung-Chul Han interprets the spreading malaise as an inability to manage negative experiences in an age characterized by excessive positivity and the universal availability of people and goods. Stress and exhaustion are not just personal experiences, but social and historical phenomena as well. Denouncing a world in which every against-the-grain response can lead to further disempowerment, he draws on literature, philosophy, and the social and natural sciences to explore the stakes of sacrificing intermittent intellectual reflection for constant neural connection.

In a lecture given in 2023, Byung-Chul Han likened his thinking to music: like the Goldberg Variations, his books present variations on themes, though in his case the variations are articulated in the form of fundamental concepts. He also explained that his thinking is rooted in German Romanticism and Far Eastern thought: 'If I may compare my thinking with a fruit, then its skin and flesh are deeply romantic. The seed, in contrast, is Far Eastern.'In the three lectures that make up this book, Han invites readers into his world, discusses some of the artists and thinkers who have shaped his thinking, and explores some of the central preoccupations of his work. 'If asked to summarize my philosophical thoughts in one sentence, I would say: The Other disappears.' The more we immerse ourselves in digital communication, the more we lose the sense of touch and the physical presence of the Other. We become entangled in our own egos and become more and more depressed. We live in a society that is becoming increasingly narcissistic, in which individuals are turned in on themselves, incapable of relating to the Other in the way that Eros, as distinct from sex, requires.Wide ranging in scope and conversational in style, these lectures are an ideal introduction to one of the most influential philosophers and cultural theorists writing today.

Narratives produce the ties that bind us. They create community, eliminate contingency and anchor us in being. And yet in our contemporary information society, where everything has become arbitrary and random, storytelling becomes storyselling and narratives lose their binding force. Whereas narratives create community, storytelling brings forth only a fleeting community – the community of consumers. No amount of storytelling could recreate the fire around which humans gather to tell each other stories. That fire has long since burnt out. It has been replaced by the digital screen, which separates people rather than bringing them together. Through storytelling, capitalism appropriates narrative: stories sell. They are no longer a medium of shared experience.The inflation of storytelling betrays a need to cope with contingency, but storytelling is unable to transform the information society back into a stable narrative community. Rather, storytelling as storyselling is a pathological phenomenon of our age. Byung-Chul Han, one of the most perceptive cultural theorists of contemporary society, dissects this crisis with exceptional insight and flair.

Western thinking has long been dominated by essence, by a preoccupation with that which dwells in itself and delimits itself from the other. By contrast, Far Eastern thought is centred not on essence but on absence. The fundamental topos of Far Eastern thinking is not being but ‘the way’ (dao), which lacks the solidity and fixedness of essence. The difference between essence and absence is the difference between being and path, between dwelling and wandering. ‘A Zen monk should be without fixed abode, like the clouds, and without fixed support, like water’, said the Japanese Zen master Dōgen.Drawing on this fundamental distinction between essence and absence, Byung-Chul Han explores the differences between Western and Far Eastern philosophy, aesthetics, architecture and art, shedding fresh light on a culture of absence that may at first sight appear strange and unfamiliar to those in the West whose ways of thinking have been shaped for centuries by the preoccupation with essence.

Transparency is the order of the day. It is a term, a slogan, that dominates public discourse about corruption and freedom of information. Considered crucial to democracy, it touches our political and economic lives as well as our private lives. Anyone can obtain information about anything. Everything—and everyone—has become transparent: unveiled or exposed by the apparatuses that exert a kind of collective control over the post-capitalist world. Yet, transparency has a dark side that, ironically, has everything to do with a lack of mystery, shadow, and nuance. Behind the apparent accessibility of knowledge lies the disappearance of privacy, homogenization, and the collapse of trust. The anxiety to accumulate ever more information does not necessarily produce more knowledge or faith. Technology creates the illusion of total containment and the constant monitoring of information, but what we lack is adequate interpretation of the information. In this manifesto, Byung-Chul Han denounces transparency as a false ideal, the strongest and most pernicious of our contemporary mythologies.

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 spectre is haunting us: fear. We are constantly confronted with apocalyptic scenarios: pandemics, world war, the climate catastrophe. Images of the end of the world and the end of human civilization are conjured up with ever greater urgency. Anxiously, we face a bleak future. Preoccupied with crisis management, life becomes a matter of survival.But it is precisely at such moments of fear and despair that hope arises like a phoenix from the ashes. Only hope can give us back a life that is more than mere survival. Fear isolates people and closes them off from one another; hope, by contrast, unites people and forms communities. It opens up a meaningful horizon that re-invigorates and inspires life. It nurtures fantasy and enables us to think about what is yet to come. It makes action possible because it infuses our world with purpose and meaning. Hope is the spring that liberates us from our collective despair and gives us a future.In this short essay on hope, Byung-Chul Han gives us the perfect antidote to the climate of fear that pervades our world.Also available as an audiobook

Untrammelled neoliberalism and the inexorable force of production have produced a 21st century crisis of community: a narcissistic cult of authenticity and mass turning-inward are among the pathologies engendered by it. We are individuals afloat in an atomised society, where the loss of the symbolic structures inherent in ritual behaviour has led to overdependence on the contingent to steer identity. Avoiding saccharine nostalgia for the rituals of the past, Han provides a genealogy of their disappearance as a means of diagnosing the pathologies of the present. He juxtaposes a community without communication – where the intensity of togetherness in silent recognition provides structure and meaning – to today’s communication without community, which does away with collective feelings and leaves individuals exposed to exploitation and manipulation by neoliberal psycho-politics. The community that is invoked everywhere today is an atrophied and commoditized community that lacks the symbolic power to bind people together. For Han, it is only the mutual praxis of recognition borne by the ritualistic sharing of the symbolic between members of a community which creates the footholds of objectivity allowing us to make sense of time. This new book by one of the most creative cultural theorists writing today will be of interest to a wide readership.

In our busy and hurried lives, we are losing the ability to be inactive. Human existence becomes fully absorbed by activity – even leisure, treated as a respite from work, becomes part of the same logic. Intense life today means first of all more performance or more consumption. We have forgotten that it is precisely inactivity, which does not produce anything, that represents an intense and radiant form of life.For Byung-Chul Han, inactivity constitutes the human. Without moments of pause or hesitation, acting deteriorates into blind action and reaction. When life follows the rule of stimulus–response and need–satisfaction, it atrophies into pure survival: naked biological life. If we lose the ability to be inactive, we begin to resemble machines that simply function. True life begins when concern for survival, for the exigencies of mere life, ends. The ultimate purpose of all human endeavour is inactivity.In a beautifully crafted ode to the art of being still, Han shows that the current crisis in our society calls for a very different way of life: one based on the vita contemplative. He pleads for bringing our ceaseless activities to a stop and making room for the magic that happens in between. Life receives its radiance only from inactivity.

Zen Buddhism is a form of Mahāyāna Buddhism that originated in China and is strongly focused on meditation. It is characteristically sceptical towards language and distrustful of conceptual thought, which explains why Zen Buddhist sayings are so enigmatic and succinct. But despite Zen Buddhism’s hostility towards theory and discourse, it is possible to reflect philosophically on Zen Buddhism and bring out its philosophical insights.  In this short book, Byung-Chul Han seeks to unfold the philosophical force inherent in Zen Buddhism, delving into the foundations of Far Eastern thought to which Zen Buddhism is indebted. Han does this comparatively by confronting and contrasting the insights of Zen Buddhism with the philosophies of Plato, Leibniz, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger and others, showing that Zen Buddhism and Western philosophy have very different ways of understanding religion, subjectivity, emptiness, friendliness and death.   This important work by one of the most widely read philosophers and cultural theorists of our time will be of great value to anyone interested in comparative philosophy and religion.

In the wake of globalization, cultural forms of expression have become increasingly detached from their places of origin, circulating in a hyper-domain of culture where there is no real difference anymore between indigenous and foreign, near and far, the familiar and the exotic. Heterogeneous cultural contents are brought together side by side, like the fusion food that makes free use of all that the hypercultural pool of spices, ingredients and ways of preparing food has to offer. Culture is becoming un-bound, un-restricted, un-ravelled: a hyperculture. It is a profoundly rhizomatic culture of intense hybridization, fusion and co-appropriation. Today we have all become hypercultural tourists, even in our 'own' culture, to which we do not even belong anymore. Hypercultural tourists travel in the hyperspace of events, a space of cultural sightseeing. They experience culture as cul-tour.Drawing on thinkers from Hegel and Heidegger to Bauman and Homi Bhabha to examine the characteristics of our contemporary hyperculture, Han poses the question: should we welcome the human of the future as the hypercultural tourist, smiling serenely, or should we aspire to a different way of being in the world?

Beauty today is a paradox. The cult of beauty is ubiquitous but it has lost its transcendence and become little more than an aspect of consumerism, the aesthetic dimension of capitalism. The sublime and unsettling aspects of beauty have given way to corporeal pleasures and 'likes', resulting in a kind of 'pornography' of beauty.In this book, cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han reinvigorates aesthetic theory for our digital age. He interrogates our preoccupation with all things slick and smooth, from Jeff Koon's sculptures and the iPhone to Brazilian waxing. Reaching far deeper than our superficial reactions to viral videos and memes, Han reclaims beauty, showing how it manifests itself as truth, temptation and even disaster.This wide-ranging and profound exploration of beauty, encompassing ethical and political considerations as well as aesthetic, will appeal to all those interested in cultural and aesthetic theory, philosophy and digital media.

In his philosophical reflections on the art of lingering, acclaimed cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han argues that the value we attach today to the vita activa is producing a crisis in our sense of time. Our attachment to the vita activa creates an imperative to work which degrades the human being into a labouring animal, an animal laborans. At the same time, the hyperactivity which characterizes our daily routines robs human beings of the capacity to linger and the faculty of contemplation. It therefore becomes impossible to experience time as fulfilling.Drawing on a range of thinkers including Heidegger, Nietzsche and Arendt, Han argues that we can overcome this temporal crisis only by revitalizing the vita contemplativa and relearning the art of lingering. For what distinguishes humans from other animals is the capacity for reflection and contemplation, and when life regains this capacity, this art of lingering, it gains in time and space, in duration and vastness.Also available as an audiobook

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 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 SwarmDigital 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.

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.

Beauty today is a paradox. The cult of beauty is ubiquitous but it has lost its transcendence and become little more than an aspect of consumerism, the aesthetic dimension of capitalism. The sublime and unsettling aspects of beauty have given way to corporeal pleasures and 'likes', resulting in a kind of 'pornography' of beauty.In this book, cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han reinvigorates aesthetic theory for our digital age. He interrogates our preoccupation with all things slick and smooth, from Jeff Koon's sculptures and the iPhone to Brazilian waxing. Reaching far deeper than our superficial reactions to viral videos and memes, Han reclaims beauty, showing how it manifests itself as truth, temptation and even disaster.This wide-ranging and profound exploration of beauty, encompassing ethical and political considerations as well as aesthetic, will appeal to all those interested in cultural and aesthetic theory, philosophy and digital media.

In his philosophical reflections on the art of lingering, acclaimed cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han argues that the value we attach today to the vita activa is producing a crisis in our sense of time. Our attachment to the vita activa creates an imperative to work which degrades the human being into a labouring animal, an animal laborans. At the same time, the hyperactivity which characterizes our daily routines robs human beings of the capacity to linger and the faculty of contemplation. It therefore becomes impossible to experience time as fulfilling.Drawing on a range of thinkers including Heidegger, Nietzsche and Arendt, Han argues that we can overcome this temporal crisis only by revitalizing the vita contemplativa and relearning the art of lingering. For what distinguishes humans from other animals is the capacity for reflection and contemplation, and when life regains this capacity, this art of lingering, it gains in time and space, in duration and vastness.Also available as an audiobook

Power is a pervasive phenomenon yet there is little consensus on what it is and how it should be understood. In this book the cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han develops a fresh and original perspective on the nature of power, shedding new light on this key feature of social and political life.Power is commonly defined as a causal relation: an individual’s power is the cause that produces a change of behaviour in someone else against the latter’s will. Han rejects this view, arguing that power is better understood as a mediation between ego and alter which creates a complex array of reciprocal interdependencies. Power can also be exercised not only against the other but also within and through the other, and this involves a much higher degree of mediation. This perspective enables us to see that power and freedom are not opposed to one another but are manifestations of the same power, differing only in the degree of mediation. This highly original account of power will be of great interest to students and scholars of philosophy and of social, political and cultural theory, as well as to anyone seeking to understand the many ways in which power shapes our lives today.

Power is a pervasive phenomenon yet there is little consensus on what it is and how it should be understood. In this book the cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han develops a fresh and original perspective on the nature of power, shedding new light on this key feature of social and political life.Power is commonly defined as a causal relation: an individual’s power is the cause that produces a change of behaviour in someone else against the latter’s will. Han rejects this view, arguing that power is better understood as a mediation between ego and alter which creates a complex array of reciprocal interdependencies. Power can also be exercised not only against the other but also within and through the other, and this involves a much higher degree of mediation. This perspective enables us to see that power and freedom are not opposed to one another but are manifestations of the same power, differing only in the degree of mediation. This highly original account of power will be of great interest to students and scholars of philosophy and of social, political and cultural theory, as well as to anyone seeking to understand the many ways in which power shapes our lives today.

The days of the Other are over in this age of excessive communication, information and consumption. What used to be the Other, be it as friend, as Eros or as hell, is now indistinguishable from the self in our narcissistic desire to assimilate everything and everyone until there are no boundaries left. The result is a 'terror of the Same', lives in which we no longer pursue knowledge, insight and experience but are instead reduced to the echo chambers and illusory encounters offered by social media. In extreme cases, this feeling of disorientation and senselessness is compensated through self-harm, or even harming others through acts of terrorism. Byung-Chul Han argues that our times are characterized not by external repression but by an internal depression, whereby the destructive pressure comes not from the Other but from the self. It is only by returning to a society of listeners and lovers, by acknowledging and desiring the Other, that we can seek to overcome the isolation and suffering caused by this crushing process of total assimilation.

The days of the Other are over in this age of excessive communication, information and consumption. What used to be the Other, be it as friend, as Eros or as hell, is now indistinguishable from the self in our narcissistic desire to assimilate everything and everyone until there are no boundaries left. The result is a 'terror of the Same', lives in which we no longer pursue knowledge, insight and experience but are instead reduced to the echo chambers and illusory encounters offered by social media. In extreme cases, this feeling of disorientation and senselessness is compensated through self-harm, or even harming others through acts of terrorism. Byung-Chul Han argues that our times are characterized not by external repression but by an internal depression, whereby the destructive pressure comes not from the Other but from the self. It is only by returning to a society of listeners and lovers, by acknowledging and desiring the Other, that we can seek to overcome the isolation and suffering caused by this crushing process of total assimilation.

Untrammelled neoliberalism and the inexorable force of production have produced a 21st century crisis of community: a narcissistic cult of authenticity and mass turning-inward are among the pathologies engendered by it. We are individuals afloat in an atomised society, where the loss of the symbolic structures inherent in ritual behaviour has led to overdependence on the contingent to steer identity. Avoiding saccharine nostalgia for the rituals of the past, Han provides a genealogy of their disappearance as a means of diagnosing the pathologies of the present. He juxtaposes a community without communication – where the intensity of togetherness in silent recognition provides structure and meaning – to today’s communication without community, which does away with collective feelings and leaves individuals exposed to exploitation and manipulation by neoliberal psycho-politics. The community that is invoked everywhere today is an atrophied and commoditized community that lacks the symbolic power to bind people together. For Han, it is only the mutual praxis of recognition borne by the ritualistic sharing of the symbolic between members of a community which creates the footholds of objectivity allowing us to make sense of time. This new book by one of the most creative cultural theorists writing today will be of interest to a wide readership.

What we call growth today is in fact a tumorous growth, a cancerous proliferation which is disrupting the social organism. These tumours endlessly metastasize and grow with an inexplicable, deadly vitality. At a certain point this growth is no longer productive, but rather destructive. Capitalism passed this point long ago. Its destructive forces cause not only ecological and social catastrophes but also mental collapse. The destructive compulsion to perform combines self-affirmation and self-destruction in one. We optimize ourselves to death. Brutal competition ends in destruction. It produces an emotional coldness and indifference towards others as well as towards one’s own self.The devastating consequences of capitalism suggest that a death drive is at work. Freud initially introduced the death drive hesitantly, but later admitted that he ‘couldn’t think beyond it’ as the idea of the death drive became increasingly central to his thought. Today, it is impossible to think about capitalism without considering the death drive.