Bøker av Byung-Chul Han

Every epoch has its emblematic illnesses, this book argues, and our society is undergoing a silent paradigm shift that has led to the pathological exhaustion commonly referred to as "burnout."

Exploring how neoliberalism has discovered the productive force of the psycheByung-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.

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.

"A sharp critique of our contemporary societies in which pseudo-communication and narcissism have replaced community"--

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.

In this work, cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han looks at how we have exchanged variety with an age of sameness, not characterised by external repression but by depression through the self. Tracing this violence through phenomena such as terrorism, he argues that by acknowledging the Other again, we can overcome a crushing process of 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 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.