GetWiki

{{Short description|German philosopher of South Korean origin}}{{family name hatnote|Han||lang=Korean}}

factoids

| birth_place = Seoul, South Korea| death_date = | death_place = | death_cause =| origin =20th-century philosophy>20th- / 21st-century philosophy| region = Western philosophy| religion = | school_tradition = Continental philosophy, Post-structuralism, DeconstructionBurnout (psychology)>Depression (clinical)>InternetLove>Political TheoryPower (social and political)>PowerReligion>Social MediaTransparency (behavior)>Transparency|Violence}}| books =| alma_mater = University of FreiburgUniversity of Basel| institutions = Shanzhai#Han>Shanzhai as "Deconstruction in Chinese"| influences = Sigmund Freud{{·}}Walter Benjamin{{·}}Jean Baudrillard{{·}}Carl Schmitt{{·}}Richard Sennett{{·}}René Girard{{·}}Giorgio Agamben{{·}}Gilles Deleuze{{·}}Félix Guattari{{·}}Michel Foucault{{·}}Michel Serres{{·}}Pierre Bourdieu{{·}}Martin Heidegger| influenced = | awards = | signature = | signature_alt = | signature_size = | website =



factoids



}}Byung-Chul Han (born 1959) is a South Korean-born philosopher and cultural theorist living in Germany.NEWS, Han, Byung-Chul, Optimismus der Fremden: Wer ist Flüchtling?, de, FAZ.NET,weblink 2022-03-18, 0174-4909, He was a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts and still occasionally gives courses there.

Biography

Byung-Chul Han studied metallurgy at Korea University in SeoulNEWS,weblink [책과 지식] 『피로사회』 저자 한병철, 도올 김용옥 만나다, (Books and knowledge) 'Society of Tiredness' author Han Byung-Chul and Do-ol Kim Young-oak meet, JoongAng Ilbo, 24 March 2013, 30 May 2018, before he moved to Germany in the 1980s to study philosophy, German literature and Catholic theology in Freiburg im Breisgau and Munich. In 1994 he received his doctoral degree at Freiburg with a dissertation on Stimmung, or mood, in Martin Heidegger.WEB, 2017-09-14, Los Angeles Review of Books,weblink 2023-02-11, Los Angeles Review of Books, en, 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. From 2012 to 2017 he taught philosophy and cultural studies at the Universität der Künste Berlin (UdK), where he directed the newly established Studium Generale general-studies program.WEB, Studium Generale,weblink Han is the author of more than twenty books, the most well known are treatises on what he terms a "society of tiredness" ({{italic correction|Müdigkeitsgesellschaft}}), a "society of transparency" ({{italic correction|Transparenzgesellschaft}}), and the concept of shanzhai (山寨), a style of imitative variation, whose roots are, he argues, intrinsic to Chinese culture, undermine the distinction often drawn between original and fake, and pre-exist practices which in Western philosophy are called deconstructive.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.{{Additional citation needed|date=January 2023}}

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.WEB, Play more and work less: A visit with Byung-Chul Han in Karlsruhe,weblink Sign and Sight, 2011-07-25, 2012-06-09, He is a Catholic.MAGAZINE,weblink The Tiredness Virus, The Nation (magazine), The Nation, 12 April 2021, Han, Byung-Chul,

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.{{cn|date=July 2023}}In The Burnout Society (original German title: {{italic correction|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.NEWS, '새 대통령에게 선물하고 싶은 책' 1위 철학자 한병철의 '피로사회',weblink Kyunghyang Shinmun, 2012-11-29, 2013-12-09,weblink" title="web.archive.org/web/20131203214315weblink">weblink 2013-12-03, dead, 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, "Psychopolitics" (2017), p. 13 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.Han, "Psychopolitics" (2017), p. 21In Agonie des Eros ('Agony of the Eros') Han carries forward thoughts developed in his earlier books The Burnout Society ({{italic correction|}}) and Transparency Society ({{italic correction|}}). 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.BOOK, Han, Byung-Chul, The Agony of Eros, MIT Press, Foreword by Alain Badiou, 2017, 9780262533379, London, Butler, Erik, 2016031913, 2012 in German, 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."WEB,weblink Topology of Violence, The MIT Press, en, 2019-01-09,

Themes

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

Reception

File:Prix Bristol des Lumières 2015 (23440854459).jpg|thumb|Han being awarded the {{ill|Prix Bristol des Lumières|fr|Prix Bristol des Lumières}} alongside Jacques Attali, Christophe Barbier, Philippe-Joseph SalazarPhilippe-Joseph SalazarThe Burnout Society will soon be available in 19 languages.WEB, Translations,weblink Several South Korean newspapers voted it the most important book in 2012.WEB, 2012년 미디어 선정 올해의 책, 2012 Media Picks for Book of the Year,weblink Aladin Books, 30 May 2018, It sold over a hundred thousand copies across Latin America, Korea, and Spain.NEWS, Elola, Joseba, Byung-Chul Han, the philosopher who lives life backwards: ‘We believe we’re free, but we’re the sexual organs of capital’,weblink 19 April 2024, EL PAÍS English, 8 October 2023, es, The Guardian wrote a positive review of his 2017 book Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power,NEWS,weblink Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power by Byung-Chul Han – review, Jeffries, Stuart, 2017-12-30, The Guardian, 2019-01-09, en-GB, 0261-3077, 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."WEB,weblink Psychopolitics, Hamilton, 2018-05-16, HONG KONG REVIEW OF BOOKS 香港書評, en, 2019-01-09, The Los Angeles Review of Books described him as "as good a candidate as any for philosopher of the moment."NEWS,weblink Media and Transparency: An Introduction to Byung-Chul Han in English, West, Adrian Nathan, Los Angeles Review of Books, 2019-01-09, 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.")NEWS, Klarheit schaffen,weblink der Freitag, de, 7 June 2012, 3 July 2012, 16 September 2018weblink >last1=Kraft, Steffen,

Works in English

• The Burnout Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015) {{ISBN|9780804795098}}.
• The Transparency Society (Stanford: Stanford Briefs, 2015) {{ISBN|080479460X}}
• The Agony of Eros (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2017) {{ISBN|0262533375}}
• In the Swarm: Digital Prospects (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2017), {{ISBN|0262533367}}
• Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power (London & New York: Verso Books, 2017) {{ISBN|9781784785772}}
• Saving Beauty (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017) {{ISBN|9781509515103}}
• The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017) {{ISBN|1509516050}}
• Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2017) {{ISBN|0262534363}}
• The Expulsion of the Other: Society, Perception and Communication Today (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018) {{ISBN|1509523065}}
• Topology of Violence (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2018) {{ISBN|9780262534956}}
• What Is Power? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018) {{ISBN|9781509516100}}
• Good Entertainment: A Deconstruction of the Western Passion Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2019) {{ISBN|0262537508}}
• The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020) {{ISBN|1509542760}}
• Capitalism and the Death Drive (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021) {{ISBN|9781509545018}}
• The Palliative Society: Pain Today (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021) {{ISBN|9781509547258}}
• Hyperculture: Culture and Globalisation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022) {{ISBN|9781509546183}}
• Infocracy: Digitization and the Crisis of Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022) {{ISBN|9781509552986}}
• Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022) {{ISBN|9781509551705}}
• The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022) {{ISBN| 9781509545100}}
• Absence: On the Culture and Philosophy of the Far East (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2023) {{ISBN|9781509546206}}
• Vita contemplativa: In praise of inactivity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2023) {{ISBN|9781509558018}}
• The Crisis of Narration (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2024) {{ISBN|9781509560431}}

References

{{reflist}}

External links

{{cc}}

• {{DNB-Portal|11437810X}}
• weblink" title="web.archive.org/web/20120908073612weblink">Byung-Chul Han's web page at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung, Karlsruhe
• Byung-Chul Han, Essay on the ethics of drones
• Interview with Byung-Chul Han in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung
• El espejo intervenido: una conversación entre David Hume y Byung-Chul Han. Revista de Filosofía, 38(97), 2021, pp. 50-70. ISSN 0798-1171
• Prácticas de la amabilidad: una interpretación del pensamiento de Byung-Chul Han. Areté. Revista de Filosofía, 34(2), 2022, pp. 291-318. ISSN 1016-913X
• ¿Lejano Oriente como arma para la revolución? Reflexiones sobre el papel de la filosofía oriental en la obra de Byung-Chul Han. Estudios de Filosofía, 67, 2022, pp. 5-24. ISSN 0121-3628
• Juan David Almeyda Sarmiento: Hacia una ética del jardín. Estudios filosóficos sobre el pensamiento de Byung-Chul Han. Editorial Universidad Industrial de Santander. 2023. ISBN 978-958-5188-64-8
• Byung-Chul Han: the critique of achievement society in For Work / Against Work Debates on the centrality of work

{{Authority control}}