Byung-Chul Han

In Infocracy, Byung-Chul Han delves into the profound transformations that digital information technology has wrought in contemporary society. The book paints a compelling picture of how the dizzying flood of data and the ubiquity of technology have reshaped the landscape of human interaction and political discourse. At its core, Han's work examines how this relentless stream of information is not...

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 civilisation 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...

The earth is not a dead, mute landscape but an eloquent, living being. Sometimes it just takes a spade, a packet of seeds, and a pair of sturdy boots to realise it. The philosopher Byung-Chul Han spent three springs, summers, autumns, and winters in his secret garden in Berlin, devoting himself to daily gardening in all weathers. For Han, gardening...

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...

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...

Western thinking has long been dominated by essence, 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...

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...

Our societies today are characterised by a universal algophobia: a generalised 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...

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...

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...

We no longer inhabit earth and dwell under the sky: these are being replaced by Google Earth and the Cloud. The terrestrial order is giving way to a digital order, the world of things is being replaced by a world of non-things – a constantly expanding ‘infosphere’ of information and communication which displaces objects and obliterates any stillness and calmness...

What is 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...

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...

Zen Buddhism is a form of Mahāyāna 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...

Untrammelled neoliberalism and the inexorable force of production have produced a 21st century crisis of community: a narcissistic cult of authenticity and mass turning-inward are among the pathologies engendered by it. We are individuals afloat in an atomised society, where the loss of the symbolic structures inherent in ritual behaviour has led to overdependence on the contingent to steer identity. Avoiding...

The days of the Other are over in this age of excessive communication, information, and consumption. What used to be the Other, whether as a 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 a lecture given in 2023, Byung-Chul Han likened his thinking to music: like the Goldberg Variations, his books present variations on themes, though in his case the variations are articulated in the form of fundamental concepts. He also explained that his thinking is rooted in German Romanticism and Far Eastern thought: 'If I may compare my thinking with a...

Byung-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...