#byung-chul han

[kafk-a]

Byung-Chul Han, from an interview published in ArtReview

[thirdity]

We optimize ourselves to death. Relentless self-exploitation leads to mental collapse. Brutal competition ends in destruction. It produced an emotional coldness and indifference towards others as well as towards one's own self.

Byung-chul Han, Capitalism and the Death Drive

[exhaled-spirals]

« Today, all time-consuming practices, such as trust, loyalty, commitment and responsibility, are disappearing. […] I think trust is a social practice, and today it is being replaced by transparency and information. Trust enables us to build positive relationships with others, despite lacking knowledge. In a transparency society, one immediately asks for information from others. Trust as a social practice becomes superfluous. The transparency and information society fosters a society of distrust. »

— Byung-Chul Han, “I Practise Philosophy as Art”

[1000rh]

The totalization of production leads to the total profanation of life. Rest, too, is made to serve production and is degraded into leisure and recreational time. It is no longer the beginning of a holy period of assembly. [...] The mounting pressure to perform makes even recreational pauses impossible. Thus, many people find that they fall ill during leisure time. This illness has even been given a name: leisure sickness.

– Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals (2019)

[crucifiedlovers]

For Barthes, veiling is an essential part of eroticism. The 'most erotic portion' of a body is 'where the garment gapes', that piece of skin which flashes 'between two articles of clothing...between two edges...'. What is erotic is the 'staging of an appearance-as-disappearing'. Tear, break and gap account for the erotic... The erotic can do without truth. It is semblance, a phenomenon pertaining to the veil.

Byung-Chul Han, Saving Beauty (trans. Daniel Steuer)

[fashionlandscapeblog]

Today’s society is no longer Foucault’s disciplinary world of hospitals, madhouses, prisons, barracks, and factories. It has long been replaced by another regime, namely a society of fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls, and genetic laboratories. The society of the 21st century is no longer disciplinary, but a society of the performance. Nor are its inhabitants called ‘subjects of obedience’, but ‘subjects of performance’. These subjects are entrepreneurs of themselves.

Excess work and performance escalate into auto-exploitation. This is much more effective than the exploitation by the others, because it is accompanied by a feeling of freedom. The exploiter is the same exploited. Victim and executioner can no longer differentiate. This self-referentiality generates a paradoxical freedom, which, because of the structures of obligation immanent to it, becomes violence […] In this society of obligation, each one carries with him his forced labor field.

What proves problematic is not individual competition per se, but rather its self-referentiality, which escalates into absolute competition. That is, the achievement-subject competes with itself; it succumbs to the destructive compulsion to outdo itself over and over, to jump over its own shadow. This self-constraint, which poses as freedom, has deadly results..

No-longer-being-able-to-be-able leads to destructive self-reproach and auto-aggression. The achievement-subject finds itself fighting with itself. The depressive has been wounded by internalized war. Depression is the sickness of a society that suffers from excessive positivity. It reflects a humanity waging war on itself.

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.

― Byung-Chul Han, extracts from The Burnout Society

[hyperbanal]

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.

- Byung-chul Han

[giuliavaldi]

Oggi corriamo dietro alle informazioni senz’approdare ad alcun sapere. Prendiamo nota di tutto senza imparare a conoscerlo. Viaggiamo ovunque senza fare vera esperienza. Comunichiamo ininterrottamente senza prendere parte a una comunità. Salviamo quantità immani di dati senza far risuonare i ricordi. Accumuliamo amici e follower senza mai incontrare l’Altro. Così le informazioni generano un modo di vivere privo di tenuta e di durata.

Byung-Chul Han, Le non cose. Come abbiamo smesso di vivere il reale

[yr-bed]

Rituals are architectures of time, structuring and stabilising life, and they are on the wane. The pandemic has accelerated the disappearance of rituals. Work also has ritual aspects. We go to work at set times. Work takes place in a community. In the home office, the ritual of work is completely lost. The day loses its rhythm and structure. This somehow makes us tired and depressed. In The Little Prince [1943], by [Antoine de] Saint-Exupéry, the little prince asks the fox to always visit at the exact same time, so that the visit becomes a ritual. The little prince explains to the fox what a ritual is. Rituals are to time as rooms are to an apartment. They make time accessible like a house. They organise time, arrange it. In this way you make time appear meaningful. Time today lacks a solid structure. It is not a house, but a capricious river. The disappearance of rituals does not simply mean that we have more freedom. The total flexibilisation of life brings loss, too. Rituals may restrict freedom, but they structure and stabilise life. They anchor values and symbolic systems in the body, reinforcing community. In rituals we experience community, communal closeness, physically. Digitalisation strips away the physicality of the world. Then comes the pandemic. It aggravates the loss of the physical experience of community. You’re asking: can’t we do this by ourselves? Today we reject all rituals as something external, formal and therefore inauthentic. Neoliberalism produces a culture of authenticity, which places the ego at its centre. The culture of authenticity develops a suspicion of ritualised forms of interaction. Only spontaneous emotions, subjective states, are authentic. Modelled behaviour, for example courtesy, is written off as inauthentic or superficial. The narcissistic cult of authenticity is partly responsible for the increasing brutality of society.

Byung-Chul Han

[apesoformythoughts]

“We owe true happiness to the useless and purposeless, to what is intentionally convoluted, what is unproductive, indirect, exuberant, superfluous, to beautiful forms and gestures that have no use and serve no purpose. Unlike walking to a destination, running somewhere or marching, taking a leisurely stroll is a luxury. Ceremonious inactivity means: we do something, but to no end. This 'to-no-end', this freedom from purpose and usefulness, is the essential core of inactivity. It is the basic formula for happiness.”

— Byung-Chul Han: Vita Contemplativa

[389]

This constant self-flagellation is tiring and depressing. The work itself, no matter how hard it may be, does not lead to profound tiredness. Even though we can be tired after work, it is not the same as a destructive tiredness. Work at some point comes to an end. The pressure to perform that we apply to ourselves, on the other hand outlasts the working hours. It torments us in our sleep and frequently leads to sleepless nights. It is possible to recover from work. But it is impossible to recover from the pressure to perform.

Byung-Chul Han: “I Practise Philosophy as Art”

[thirdity]

The society of laboring and achievement is not a free society. It generates new constraints. Ultimately, the dialectic of master and slave does not yield a society where everyone is free and capable of leisure, too. Rather, it leads to a society of work in which the master himself has become a laboring slave. In this society of compulsion, everyone carries a work camp inside. This labor camp is defined by the fact that one is simultaneously prisoner and guard, victim and perpetrator. One exploits oneself. It means that exploitation is possible even without domination.

Byung-chul Han, The Burnout Society

[exhaled-spirals]

« Over three years I established a winter-flowering garden. I also wrote a book about it with the title Praise to the Earth [2018]. My understanding from being a gardener is: Earth is magic. Whoever claims otherwise is blind. Earth is not a resource, not a mere means to achieve human ends. Our relationship to nature today is not determined by astonished observation, but solely by instrumental action. […] It is not enough that we now have to be more careful with Earth as a resource. Rather, we need a completely different relationship with Earth. We should give it back its magic, its dignity. We should learn to marvel at it again. […] We should rediscover the capacity for inaction. »

— Byung-Chul Han, “I Practise Philosophy as Art”

[thoughtportal]

The agony of Eros

Byung-Chul Han

[crucifiedlovers]

As opposed to beauty, the sublime does not cause an immediate feeling of pleasure. As in Burke, the initial sensation in reaction to the sublime is pain or displeasure. The sublime is too enormous, too huge for the imagination, which cannot capture it and is unable to condense it into a picture. Thus, the subject is shocked and overwhelmed by it. This is what constitutes the negativity of the sublime. When looking at vast natural phenomena, the subject initially feels powerless. But it regains its composure through that 'self-preservation of quite another kind'. It takes refuse in the inwardness of reason and its idea of infinity compared to which 'everything in nature is small'.

Byung-Chul Han, Saving Beauty (trans. Daniel Steuer)

[ross-nekochan]

Neoliberalism represents a highly efficient, indeed an intelligent, system for exploiting freedom.

Byung-Chul Han - Psychopolitic (Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power)