Byung-Chul Han


Byung-Chul Han is a South Korean-born German philosopher and cultural theorist. He was professor at the Berlin University of the Arts and still occasionally gives courses there.

Life and work

Byung-Chul Han studied metallurgy at Korea University in Seoul before he moved to Germany in the 1980s to study philosophy, German literature and Catholic theology in Freiburg im Breisgau and Munich. He received his doctoral degree at Freiburg with a dissertation on Martin Heidegger in 1994.
In 2000, he joined the Department of Philosophy at the University of Basel, where he completed his habilitation. In 2010 he became a faculty member at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, where his areas of interest were philosophy of the 18th, 19th and 20th century, ethics, social philosophy, phenomenology, cultural theory, aesthetics, religion, media theory, and intercultural philosophy. Since 2012 he has taught philosophy and cultural studies at the Universität der Künste Berlin, where he directs the newly established Studium Generale general-studies program.
Han is the author of sixteen books, the most recent of which are treatises on what he terms a "society of tiredness", a "society of transparency", and on his neologist concept of shanzhai, which seeks to identify modes of deconstruction in contemporary practices of Chinese capitalism.
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.
Until recently, he refused to give radio and television interviews and rarely divulges any biographical or personal details, including his date of birth, in public.

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, violence, freedom, technology, and popular culture.
In The Burnout Society, 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. 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." 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." 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.
Agonie des Eros carries forward Han's thoughts, which he developed in his earlier books The Burnout Society and Transparency Society, and synthesises the two earlier works into an interrogation of desire and love between humans. Based on an analysis of the characters in Lars von Trier's film "Melancholia", in which Han sees depicted depression and overcoming, he develops the image of a 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.
In Topologie der Gewalt, 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 : 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."

Themes

Han has written on topics such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, borderline personality disorder, burnout, depression, exhaustion, internet, love, pop culture, power, rationality, religion, social media, subjectivity, tiredness, transparency and violence.

Reception

Müdigkeitsgesellschaft will soon be available in 11 languages. Several South Korean newspapers voted it to be the most important book in 2012. The Guardian wrote a positive review of his 2017 book Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, 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, which highlights the fine line between cleverness and self-indulgent sloganeering." The Los Angeles Review of Books described him as "as good a candidate as any for philosopher of the moment."

Works in English