À notre époque, d'où la passivité semble proscrite, Byung-Chul Han n'oppose pas une rêverie nostalgique sur un quelconque "monde d'hier", mais une analyse vigoureuse et précise de notre rapport au temps et à l'activité.
Byung-Chul Han dévoile dans ce court texte un changement de paradigme, le passage d'une société disciplinaire, où les contraintes sur l'individu se multiplient, à une société de la performance, où la contrainte sur l'individu ne vient plus de l'ordre social mais de l'individu lui-même. L'excès de travail et de performance est l'indice d'une exploitation du soi par lui-même, une auto-exploitation. La liberté individuelle devient contrainte pour maximiser le résultat de nos actions et de nos activités. À rebours de l'accélération, de la précipitation, de l'hyperactivité, de la dispersion qui semblent caractériser notre époque, le philosophe nous montre comment de la fatigue peuvent naître la sérénité, l'attention, la guérison ?
Byung-Chul Han développe une réflexion personnelle et singulière sur la relation qu'il entretient avec la nature - il jardine et s'adonne à la botanique chez lui, près de Berlin - et une pensée critique sur la relation que l'homme entretient avec la terre au XXIe siècle.
Ouvrage illustré noir et blanc (planches de botanique).
Le tsunami d'informations déclenché par la numérisation menace de nous submerger dans une mer de communication frénétique qui perturbe de nombreuses sphères de la vie sociale, y compris la politique. Les campagnes électorales sont maintenant menées comme des guerres d'information, et la démocratie dégénère en infocratie. Dans son nouveau livre, Byung-Chul Han soutient que l'infocratie est la règle dans le capitalisme d'information contemporain. Alors que le capitalisme industriel a fonctionné avec la contrainte et la répression, ce nouveau régime d'information exploite la liberté au lieu de la réprimer. La surveillance et la punition font place à la motivation et à l'optimisation : nous imaginons que nous sommes libres, mais nos vies entières sont enregistrées afin que notre comportement puisse être contrôlé psychopolitiquement. Sous le régime néolibéral de l'information, les mécanismes du pouvoir fonctionnent non pas parce que les gens sont conscients de la surveillance constante, mais parce qu'ils se pensent libres.
C'est à la disparition du monde des "choses" ou des "objets" que Byung-Chul Han consacre ce nouveau livre. Les choses stabilisent la vie humaine, lui confèrent une continuité. Pôles de repos du monde, les choses sont aujourd'hui totalement recouvertes par les informations. Mais il n'est pas possible de séjourner auprès des informations... Quel rapport entretenons-nous désormais avec les choses ? Que deviennent-elles lorsque, pénétrées par les informations, elles deviennent elles-mêmes des informations et s'immatérialisent ? Han poursuit sa critique de la rationalité technique et numérique en s'interrogeant sur la signification des objets et leur effet dans notre existence. Sans doute le plus nostalgique, le plus touchant et le plus polémique des livres de Han parus en langue française.
Ce que nous nommons la croissance aujourd'hui est en fait une excroissance, une prolifération qui détruit l'organisme social. D'une vitalité inexplicable et mortelle, ces excès métastasent et prolifèrent à l'infini. Arrivée à un certain stade, la production devient destructrice. Le capitalisme a depuis longtemps dépassé ce point critique. Ses pouvoirs destructeurs produisent non seulement des catastrophes écologiques ou sociales, mais aussi des catastrophes mentales. Les effets dévastateurs du capitalisme suggèrent l'influence d'une pulsion de mort. Sigmund Freud n'a initialement introduit le concept de pulsion de mort qu'après bien des hésitations. Il avoua immédiatement après qu'il « ne pouvait pas penser autrement » car ce concept avait acquis un grand pouvoir sur lui. Penser le capitalisme aujourd'hui ne peut se faire sans l'acceptation de cette pulsion. Traduction de l'allemand par Olivier Mannoni
La transparence, leitmotiv de nos sociétés, est-elle si souhaitable ? Elle n'est pas seulement affaire de liberté de l'information ou de responsabilité des gouvernants devant le peuple, mais elle structure, tel un régime totalitaire, tous les aspects de notre vie allant du collectif à l'individuel, du politique à l'intime.Car nous vivons aujourd'hui dans « la société de transparence ». Une société d'abord positive, où le négatif est démantelé. Une société où les choses sont lissées, intégrées sans résistance dans les flux de la communication et dépouillées de leurs singularités. Comme sur un marché, tout doit être exposé, réduit à son prix et privé de récit. Les corps eux-mêmes sont dénués de sens ; les visages perdent toute scénographie ; le temps est atomisé et dépossédé d'orientation. Nous voilà dans un « enfer de l'identique » où les informations se succèdent pour combler le vide permanent dont nous sommes prisonniers, et où il ne nous reste comme choix que de liker pour approuver. Ne tolérant aucune faille, la société de transparence nous pose donc un choix : être visible ou être suspect. L'homme peut-il encore s'échapper de cette société de contrôle mutuel ?
À l'ère de l'hyper-communication, de l'information continue et de la consommation de masse, la figure de l'Autre a disparu. L'Autre (l'ami, la personne désirée ou détestée) se fond désormais dans le flux de notre désir narcissique d'abolir toutes frontières et de s'approprier le monde. Gouvernées par cette « terreur du même », nos vies ont renoncé à la quête de la connaissance, à l'introspection, à l'expérience tout court pour devenir les chambres d'écho des réseaux sociaux où les rencontres sont illusoires. Ce qui peut conduire les individus désorientés et en quête de sens à des gestes extrêmes envers eux-mêmes et envers les autres. Aujourd'hui, ce n'est pas la répression qui nous menace mais notre propre dépression intérieure. Restaurer une société de l'écoute et de reconnaissance de l'Autre est la seule voie de salut pour combattre l'isolement et la souffrance qu'a engendrés un processus d'assimilation aveugle. Publication originale : Matthes & Seitz, 2018. Traduit de l'allemand par Olivier Mannoni.
Saturés de connexions, sommés d'être libres, comptables de l'amour et entrepreneurs de nous-mêmes, nous sommes épuisés par la société de la performance. Ayant perdu la faculté de désirer, le sujet contemporain, tel un personnage du best-seller 50 nuances de Grey, ne voit plus dans le monde que son propre reflet. C'est l'"enfer de l'identique", cette aporie née d'une jouissance pauvre qui rapporte tout à soi, au moindre coût.
Dès lors, comment résister à cette mort programmée du désir ?
Le divertissement règne aujourd'hui en maître. Après avoir prospéré à travers les jeux vidéo et les shows télévisuels, il est devenu un puissant moyen de communication et concerne désormais toutes les sphères de notre vie quotidienne. Comment interpréter ce phénomène ? Et d'où vient que la philosophie occidentale ait développé une véritable aversion pour le divertissement ? Dans ce court essai ambitieux et novateur, Byung-chul Han s'attache à revisiter différentes formes de divertissement, souvent associées dans la tradition occidentale à l'immaturité, l'oppression ou l'aliénation. En compagnie de Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Bach, Kafka et quelques autres, il invite le lecteur à une promenade intellectuelle au terme de laquelle passion et divertissement se trouvent réhabilitées. Publication originale, Matthes und Seitz, 2018. Traduit de l'allemand par Olivier Mannoni.
Jeff Koons, l'iPhone, l'épilation brésilienne : pourquoi sommes-nous obsédés à ce point par ce qui est lisse ? La beauté aujourd'hui est paradoxale : d'un côté elle s'étend de manière exponentielle - le culte de la beauté est partout ; de l'autre elle perd toute transcendance et se soumet à l'immanence du consumérisme - elle est l'aspect esthétique du capital. Sauver le Beau, c'est aussi sauver l'altérité radicale nous dit Han dont le regard qui combine philosophie, esthétique et politique est une expression de la modernité.
Zen Buddhism is a form of Mahayana 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.
Our societies today are characterized by a universal algophobia: a generalized fear of pain. We strive to avoid all painful conditions - even the pain of love is treated as suspect. This algophobia extends into society: less and less space is given to conflicts and controversies that might prompt painful discussions. It takes hold of politics too: politics becomes a palliative politics that is incapable of implementing radical reforms that might be painful, so all we get is more of the same. Faced with the coronavirus pandemic, the palliative society is transformed into a society of survival. The virus enters the palliative zone of well-being and turns it into a quarantine zone in which life is increasingly focused on survival. And the more life becomes survival, the greater the fear of death: the pandemic makes death, which we had carefully repressed and set aside, visible again. Everywhere, the prolongation of life at any cost is the preeminent value, and we are prepared to sacrifice everything that makes life worth living for the sake of survival. This trenchant analysis of our contemporary societies by one of the most original cultural critics of our time will appeal 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
The tsunami of information unleashed by digitization is threatening to overwhelm us, drowning us in a sea of frenzied communication and disrupting many spheres of social life, including politics. Election campaigns are now being waged as information wars with bots and troll armies, and democracy is degenerating into infocracy. In this new book, Byung-Chul Han argues that infocracy is the new form of rule characteristic of contemporary information capitalism. Whereas the disciplinary regime of industrial capitalism worked with compulsion and repression, this new information regime exploits freedom instead of repressing it. Surveillance and punishment give way to motivation and optimization: we imagine that we are free, but in reality our entire lives are recorded so that our behaviour might be psychopolitically controlled. Under the neoliberal information regime, mechanisms of power function not because people are aware of the fact of constant surveillance but because they perceive themselves to be free. This trenchant critique of politics in the information age will be of great interest to students and scholars in the humanities and social sciences and to anyone concerned about the fate of politics in our time.
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 Dogen. 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.
