I came across Byung-Chul Han towards the end of the previous decade, while writing a book about the pleasures and discontents of inactivity. My first researches into our culture of overwork and perpetual stimulation soon turned up Han’s The Burnout Society, first published in German in 2010. Han’s descriptions of neoliberalism’s culture of exhaustion hit me with that rare but unmistakable alloy of gratitude and resentment aroused when someone else’s thinking gives precise and fully formed expression to one’s own fumbling intuitions.
Byung-Chul Han in Barcelona, Spain, in 2018. Photo by Album/Archivo ABC/Inés Baucells
At the heart of Han’s conception of a burnout society (Müdigkeitsgesellschaft) is a new paradigm of domination. The industrial society’s worker internalises the imperative to work harder in the form of superego guilt. Sigmund Freud’s superego, a hostile overseer persecuting us from within, comes into being when the infantile psyche internalises the forbidding parent. In other words, the superego has its origin in figures external to us, so that, when it tells us what to do, it is as though we are hearing an order from someone else. The achievement society of our time, Han argues, runs not on superego guilt but ego-ideal positivity – not from a ‘you must’ but a ‘you can’. The ego-ideal is that image of our own perfection once reflected to our infantile selves by our parents’ adoring gaze. It lives in us not as a persecutory other but as a kind of higher version of oneself, a voice of relentless encouragement to do and be more.
With this triumph of positivity, the roughness of the demanding boss gives way to the smoothness (a key Han term) of the relentlessly encouraging coach. On this view, depression is the definitive malaise of the achievement society: the effect of being always made to feel that we’re running hopelessly behind our own ego-ideal, exhausting ourselves in the process.
The figure of the achievement subject gives rise to some of Han’s most vivid evocations of psychic and bodily debilitation:
The exhausted, depressive achievement-subject grinds itself down … It is tired, exhausted by itself, and at war with itself. Entirely incapable of stepping outward, of standing outside itself, of relying on the Other, on the world, it locks its jaws on itself; paradoxically, this leads the self to hollow and empty out. It wears out in a rat race it runs against itself.
Reading this passage now, I recall how startlingly true it seemed to me on first reading. It sent me back to the early years of my professional academic life, the permanent background hum of anxious frustration, as research – at once the first and the most distant professional priority, the job’s one indisputable signal of achievement – was forever subordinated to the workaday demands of teaching, marking and committee meetings. In the scarce hours outside of those duties, I’d return to work on an article and quickly realise that I needed to comb a dozen more sources before I could begin to write it. Abruptly, I became aware of how tired I was; able neither to work nor refrain from it, I’d lie suspended in a state of weary wakefulness. That hollowed-out achievement self, ‘at war with itself’, was all too familiar.
Han’s critique of contemporary life centres on its fetish of transparency; the compulsion to self-exposure driven by social media and fleeting celebrity culture; the reduction of selfhood to a series of positive data-points; and the accompanying hostility to the opacity and strangeness of the human being. This may explain why autobiographical reflection barely figures in Han’s writings: he is doubtless wary of becoming just another voice seeking to be heard in among the cacophony of opinion.
Born in Seoul in 1959, as a child Han tinkered with wires and chemicals in his bedroom, emulating his civil engineer father, who had worked on large public projects in South Korea. But these experiments came to an end after he triggered a chemical explosion in his bedroom that almost blinded him, leaving physical scars he still bears. He went on to study metallurgy.
But Han’s reading and thinking were drawing him increasingly towards Europe, and the study of philosophy. At 22, he left South Korea for Germany, telling his parents that he was continuing his scientific studies (‘they wouldn’t have allowed me to study philosophy,’ he told El País in 2023). Han arrived in Germany with almost no knowledge of the language. Yet over the years he effected a remarkable self-transformation, from Korean technophile metallurgy student to émigré German philosopher and social critic. Now, he told an interviewer in Der Zeit, his tinkering is done with the stuff of thought rather than ‘wires or soldering irons’. The metaphor conveys a sense of thinking as more an environment than an activity, a distinctly German conception of the thinker’s vocation.
Han’s affinity with German thought and culture runs deep, especially in regard to its ambiguous status of Germany as at once the philosophical home of the Enlightenment and of its comprehensive critique. He is very much in the tradition of the Frankfurt School, developing for the age of digital capitalism a new chapter of its enquiry into the ‘dialectic of Enlightenment’ – that disturbing interplay between progress and atavism, and creative making and traumatic explosion, that has shaped the passage to modernity.
Han’s writerly voice is melancholic in the Freudian sense of being sealed inside its own grief
These small intimations of the man and his life reverberate through his thought and prose. The tinkerer is a playful figure, bringing different chemical elements and physical forces into new and unpredictable kinds of contact. But for the boy Han, the play ended in horror that transfers directly to the later activity of thinking: ‘Thinking is also tinkering, and thinking can produce explosions. Thinking is the most dangerous activity, maybe more dangerous than the atomic bomb.’
Han clarifies that his own thinking is dangerous not because it foments violence, but because it discloses a world that is ‘merciless, mad and absurd’. He is writing from inside the experience of what T W Adorno calls ‘damaged life’, in the subtitle to Minima Moralia (1951) – a book Han often quotes – or the disintegration, under advanced consumer capitalism, of cultural forms and institutions and the accompanying deformation of individual consciousness and personal relationships.
Han writes as though from the damage of a near-fatal explosion – at once the conflagration in his childhood bedroom and the more generalised explosion of previous forms of life. And the damage is irreparable: ‘The time in which there was such a thing as the Other is over,’ he writes in The Expulsion of the Other (2016). Han’s writerly voice is melancholic in the strict Freudian sense of being sealed inside its own grief, conveying an absolute conviction in the consignment of self and world to a course of destruction as inevitable as it is irreversible.
Music is central to Han’s identification with German cultural tradition. He has told of his pleasure in singing Franz Schubert’s Winterreise (1827), a song cycle whose beauty is inextricably bound to its bleakness. Grieving a love lost, the singer wanders through a nocturnal winter landscape, riven by loneliness while longing for a death that will not come. Not a bad approximation, perhaps, of the Han that comes off the pages of his books, walking dejectedly through the winter of civilisation, alert to the traces of all that has been lost: the continuity of time, the grain of beauty, the tensions of eros, the substantiality of selfhood.
Perhaps the other personal pleasures to which Han has alluded in interviews – tending to his garden, good food in high-end restaurants, a somewhat tentative sociability – should be seen in the context of these losses: a determination to cleave to the world of refined sensation that is being so inexorably eroded by virtual life. I’m not suggesting that Han’s books are explicitly lachrymose. Their manifest tone is more one of dry-eyed anger, rendered melancholic by the absence of any outlet or remedy for it. Under his gaze, the political, financial and technological sectors are thieves to whom we have willingly handed over our lives and selves, along with any capacity for dissent or resistance.
Like his Frankfurt School predecessors, Han sees capitalism’s penetration into the deepest reaches of psychic and cultural life as the key to this phenomenon. The Burnout Society insists that power today works not through repression and persecution but by sly and insidious means of ‘self-exploitation’. In a self-administered regime of this kind, revolution is almost literally unthinkable: ‘Burnout and revolution are mutually exclusive,’ he writes later, in Capitalism and the Death Drive (2019).
Han’s enquiries into the different regions of contemporary experience, including work, time, love and art, yield a remarkably consistent project of thought, a relentless critique of the spiritual and political privations of digital capitalism. The troubling question for anyone who reads widely in Han’s corpus is whether this tenaciously sustained consistency ends up becoming a symptom of what it critiques? That is, does the unbroken negativity of Han’s descriptions, his unwillingness to find anything other than loss and degradation in the forms of contemporary experience, end up reproducing the one-dimensional logic of digital capitalism itself?
One of the weirder recent innovations of the tourism and leisure industry is the immersive art experience, in which viewers are invited to stand or lounge around cavernous dark spaces bordered by giant screens, onto which are projected digitally manipulated reproductions of great paintings. Vincent van Gogh’s or Claude Monet’s brush strokes, Piet Mondrian’s colour blocks, Salvador Dalí’s melting vistas – they all float across the screens, bursting into life and disintegrating into virtual piles on the floor, before rising in swirling maelstroms to combine and recombine on the walls.
Enter one of these attractions after reading Han, and it will look rather more sinister than an elaborate exercise in kitsch gimmickry, since he believes that the cultural symptoms of digital capitalism effectively degrade the very nature of experience. Han regularly invokes Walter Benjamin’s distinction between the two senses of experience concentrated in the German words Erfahrung and Erlebnis. Erfahrung denotes an experience of what philosophy calls the negative – that which is irreducibly other to consciousness. As an encounter with the new and unknown, Erfahrung is intrinsically transformative, writes Han in The Palliative Society (2020), ‘a painful process of transformation that contains an element of suffering, of undergoing something.’
Art can provoke such an experience. A poem or play or painting may be what Franz Kafka called ‘the axe for the frozen sea inside us’, calling into question the ways we see, think and feel, even the way we live. It’s the kind of encounter Mark Rothko might have been alluding to when he noted that ‘a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures …’ Looked at through Han’s sensibility, Rothko’s paintings seem to cut straight through the smooth artifices of digital life, restoring contact with the tremulous realities of bodily and spiritual life from which we have so long been exiled.
To digitalise a painting is to decompose it, to deprive it of ground
For a work of art to have this effect, it must in some sense resist us, cause a disturbance of our familiar modes of language and perception. To be receptive to this kind of disturbance requires certain basic experiential conditions; we must be in an environment that permits lingering, an open-ended remaining in its presence. The paradox of lingering is that it fosters an intimacy that conveys the artwork’s irreducible strangeness. When a painting draws us towards it, we find it eludes us the closer we try to get to it. This is why we can find ourselves gazing at it for so long, often in a kind of stupefaction.
Immersive Van Gogh, its creators claim, puts us inside the paintings, into a new, tactile proximity to their composition and texture. But it does so by annihilating what Han in The Scent of Time (2009) calls the ‘temporal gravitation’ of the originals, unmooring them from any location in space or time. A painting derives its meaning from the fixed relation of its spatial textural and chromatic elements, of, say, this thick band of yellow to that underlying wisp of black. This is what we call its composition. To digitalise a painting is to decompose it, to deprive it of ground.
Under the rule of digital capitalism, time itself is severed from any ‘narrative or teleological tension’, that is, from any discernible purpose or meaning, and so, like the digital paintings in an immersive show, it ‘disintegrates into points which whizz around without any sense of direction.’ In such a regime of time, there is no possibility of Erfahrung, which depends on a sense of narrative continuum and duration. There is only the proliferation of its pale counterpart Erlebnis: the discrete event that ‘amuses rather than transforms’, as Han would later put it in The Palliative Society.
The thrust of Han’s writing is, above all, philosophical. Social and cultural life are occasions for addressing metaphysical questions. As such, the surface symptoms of digital culture are secondary to its ontological premises. Like Martin Heidegger, on whose concept of Stimmung, or mood, he wrote his 1994 PhD thesis (as well as a 1999 introduction to Heidegger), he seeks to unearth the underlying metaphysics of our present-day culture. In particular, and again like Heidegger, Han is concerned with how the environment of a hyper-accelerated culture conditions the fundamental relationship between consciousness and the world.
The Burnout Society crystallised the critique of the self-exploitative logic of contemporary capitalism that Han has been elaborating ever since. Prior to that, his output had been significantly more variegated; there were books on death, Far Eastern philosophy and a study of the concept of power in the Continental philosophical tradition. However, What Is Power? (2005) is intriguing for its adumbration of a non-coercive notion of power that uncannily anticipates his conception of digital capitalism’s burnout society.
The power of capital is in the voluntary surrender of its subjects to their own exploitation
Because power so often involves coercion, Han argues, there has been a tendency to see them as inextricable. But it is only when power is poor in mediation, felt as alien to our own lives and interests, that it resorts to threatened or actual violence. Whereas when power is at the ‘highest point of mediation’ – when it seems to speak from a recognition of its subjects’ needs and desires – it is more likely to receive those subjects’ willing consent. One could conceive of a power, therefore, that has no sanctions at its disposal, but which is nonetheless rendered absolute by its subjects’ full identification with it.
The less it relies on the threat of punitive measures to back it up, the more power maximises itself. ‘An absolute power,’ writes Han, ‘would be one that never became apparent, never pointed to itself, one that rather blended completely into what goes without saying.’ This is precisely what happens in digital capitalism’s burnout society, where the power of capital consists not in its power to oppress but in the voluntary surrender of its subjects to their own exploitation.
Han draws on the German-American theologian Paul Tillich’s conception of power as ipsocentric, that is, as Han puts it, centred around ‘a self whose intentionality consists of willing-itself’, cultivating and bolstering its own status. God is the ultimate embodiment of power because, in the words of G W F Hegel, ‘he is the power to be Himself’. This will to persist in one’s own existence, to cling to one’s own selfhood, is the basic premise of the Western mode of being. We can discern it at work in the empty narcissism of social media and the culture of self-display in which we’re all enjoined to participate. Self-exploitation is, in a sense, a twisted variant on the Cartesian cogito: I am seen therefore I am. In making myself perpetually visible, I may empty myself out, lose the last vestiges of my interiority. But, in cleaving to the bare bones of a self-image, some form of my existence survives.
The fundamental basis of this erosion of meaningful experience, argues Han, is felt at the level of temporality. The accelerated time of digital capitalism effectively abolishes the practice of ‘contemplative lingering’. Life is felt not as a temporal continuum but as a discontinuous pile-up of sensations crowding in on each other. One of the more egregious consequences of this new temporal regime is the atomisation of social relations, as other people are reduced to interchangeable specks in the same sensory pile-up. Trust between people, grounded in both the assumption of mutual continuity and reliability, and in a sense of knowing the other as singular and distinct, is inexorably corroded: ‘Social practices such as promising, fidelity or commitment, which are temporal practices in the sense that they commit to a future and thus limit the horizon of the future, thus founding duration, are losing all their importance.’
This corrosion of fidelity and commitment is especially evident, Han argues, in the conduct of love and relationships. Love rests on a willingness to risk not knowing, since time changes both the lovers and the world in ways they cannot anticipate. In this regard, love is the exemplary experience of the negative, a refusal of conceptual and categorical knowledge.
As Han conceives it, love has nothing to do with the cosily sentimental coupling promoted by consumer culture, in which the loved object is reduced to a narcissistic projection of the self. It is rather an encounter with radical otherness, with the pain and madness – both are implied in the word passion – that comes of risking oneself. Fixated on comfort, on the reduction of the lover to a known and unthreatening quantity, ‘Modern love lacks all transcendence and transgression,’ writes Han in The Agony of Eros (2012).
The smooth artwork travels through the perceptual field with the ease of a milkshake down the digestive tract
Transcendence and transgression are twin dimensions of the negative: both involve going above and beyond the already known. Just as they are being extirpated from the erotic, so they are also losing their place in the aesthetic. Contemporary art, Han argues in Saving Beauty (2015), has become the expressive organ of a ‘society of positivity’, as manifested in the ‘smooth’ aesthetic common to iPhones, Brazilian waxes and Jeff Koons sculptures. What these apparently disparate objects have in common is the impervious gloss of their surfaces.
Han specifically targets Koons in whose work ‘there exists no disaster, no injury, no ruptures, also no seams.’ By ‘seams’ he means those traces of the labour and suffering that went into its making: glitches in the easy passage from the work to its consumption. More broadly, says Han: ‘The smooth object deletes its Against. Any form of negativity is removed.’ Such negativity, or resistance, presents an obstacle to ‘accelerated communication’. This might be at the level of the material – the rough grain of the sculptor’s stone, the impasto thickness of paint, the dissonances of poetic or musical language. Or it may belong more to the substance of the work, an alienation of imagery, composition, form. Either way, relieved of any such interruption, the smooth artwork travels through its viewer’s perceptual field with the ease of a milkshake slipping down the digestive tract.
This hollowed-out flatness is equally evident in a related crisis of digital capitalism, the exhaustion of narrative forms as bearers of social meaning. In The Crisis of Narration (2023), Han echoes a now-familiar analysis. He ascribes the rise of populist nationalist movements to their leaders’ canny if cynical recognition of a public yearning for ‘meaning and identity’ in a world in which temporality has been eroded in such a way that it reduces the calendar to ‘a meaningless schedule of appointments’ and lays waste to any sense of continuity, or community.
Consumer culture, with its compulsion for novelty and perpetual stimulation, likewise erodes the bonds of shared experience that engender meaningful narratives. The fire around which human beings would once have gathered to hear stories has been displaced by the digital screen, ‘which separates people as individual consumers.’ Time, love, art, work, narrative; these are the key zones of experience hollowed out by the disintegrative logic of digital capitalism. Each is a rich store of transformative encounter, or Ehrfahrung, which the ‘non-time’ of the present has reduced to empty instances of Erlebnis.
It is in Vita Contemplativa (2022) that Han ventures furthest beyond the confines of polemic to envision an alternative to the enervated politics and culture of the achievement society. The book mounts a philosophical defence of inactivity, conceived less in opposition to activity than as a possibility within it. Han cites a late fragment by Nietzsche on ‘inventive people’, which proposes that the authentically new can come into being only where there is sufficient time and freedom to think, apart from the imperatives of purpose and productivity.
This yet-to-exist Nietzschean community of the inventive echoes the German poet Novalis’s utopian imagining of a ‘republic of the living’. Novalis’s ideal of poetry is far more than a discrete literary form. It is radically expansive. For Novalis and the German Romantics, poetry is ‘a medium of unification, reconciliation and love.’ The poem’s capacity to find an image of the whole in an apparently discrete object serves as a kind of promise of the ultimate unity of part and whole, finite and infinite.
This utopian horizon is intimately bound up with the nature of poetry as a non-purposive activity. Because it has no instrumental aim, nothing in particular ‘to do’, it is capacious enough to draw into itself all of the human and non-human world, what Novalis calls ‘the world family’, without exclusion or exception.
Part of the beauty of this utopic vision is surely its impossibility, and Han knows better than to propose a programme for its realisation – not least because this would require an instrumental shift from the contemplative to the active. But this impossibility leaves his work split between the unremitting darkness of the world’s reality, and the pure light of its ideal, with very little sense of any passage between the two sides of this split.
One need not have any special affinity for Koons to notice the sheer finality of Han’s condemnation of his art
This gap between the hopelessness of the existing world and the messianic perfection of an imagined one hints at a significant, if also very interesting flaw in Han’s thinking and writing, namely its tendency towards absolutist descriptions and conceptions. ‘The time in which there was such a thing as the Other is over.’ ‘The unconscious plays no part in depression.’ ‘[A] total abolition of remoteness is underway.’ These statements, each from a different book, have in common their foreclosure of any space through which another experience might intrude – a space where one might hear intimations of the Other or the unconscious or remoteness.
In this regard, they risk colluding with the suffocating conditions they describe. Han’s prose can read at times as though impelled by an inverse smoothness, a pure negativity that crowds out the possibility of otherness with a determination that mirrors uncannily the compulsory positivity he decries. In other words, it is liable to merge into the very malaise it’s lamenting.
When set alongside two of his most insistent and important reference points, Benjamin and Adorno, it is hard to avoid contrasting the minute and exacting attention that those earlier writers bestow on individual phenomena with the summary judgment with which Han despatches them. One need not have any special affinity for Koons, for instance, to notice the sheer finality of Han’s condemnation of his art. Indeed, he doesn’t differentiate between any of Koons’s works, as though each was too bereft of singularity to warrant close analysis: ‘[Hi]s art,’ writes Han, ‘does not require any judgement, interpretation or hermeneutics, no reflection or thought.’ Koons’s floating basketballs, gargantuan animal topiary pieces and pornographic self-portraiture are only instantiations of the same banality. As Han puts it: ‘Koons says that an observer of his work should only emit a simple “Wow”.’
But pull Koons’s work away from Han’s unforgiving judgment, and it is far from clear that it abolishes the negative. Is the mirrored surface of his featureless bear silhouette merely a smooth affirmation of pop-cultural positivity? Doesn’t its very blankness present to us as an impermeable opacity? In one sense, it bears out Han’s observation that Koons’s art refuses interpretation, but not in the sense that Han himself intends. Doesn’t the sheer thisness of the piece, its silent mockery of any symbolic decoding, constitute its own negativity?
Recalling that startle of recognition in my first encounter with The Burnout Society only amplifies my suspicion that Han’s polemic has become formulaic and, as such, a species of the very inattention he decries. I find myself wishing he would desist at least once from broad-brush essays on the fundamental logic of large-scale social conditions and instead zero in on a single object or phenomenon – an artwork, a place, a person. If attunement to otherness is disappearing, why not seek to revive it rather than mourn it?
As it happens, there is a strain in Han’s work that at least points to this possibility, namely his writings on the cultural tradition into which he was born. In the tellingly titled Absence (2007), Han describes the very different mode of selfhood and relationship nurtured in Far Eastern philosophy, culture and language. In contrast to the Western self’s tenacious attachment to its own desire, Han presents a self that seeks its own ‘emptying’ – ‘A wanderer is without an I, without a self, without a name.’ Where the substantiality of the Western self requires its maximal differentiation from the world – the divine power to be oneself – the Eastern self aims at a kind of oceanic merger with the world.
The marine adjective is not arbitrarily chosen. Han relates the 4th-century BCE Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi’s tale of a giant fish that lives in a dark sea of the north and transforms into a giant bird. Had this fish-bird not been giant, it would have had to muster a heroic individuality and marshal the full force of its will against the sky and sea. But its colossal size instead enables it to be borne effortlessly by the force of the waves and winds. By analogy, the mind that sets itself against the world sees their relationship only in oppositional terms. If the world is a hostile, overbearing sea, then the mind is an embattled little fish struggling to marshal all its power and cunning to avoid being beached by its currents. But if the fish is commensurate in scale with the sea, it can yield to rather than fight the waves: ‘If the mind is the sea, the sea poses no threat.’
This difference in the philosophical underpinning of selfhood extends to broader cultural differences between West and East, for example, the atmospheres of their respective cities. Western cities tend to set clear boundaries between different kinds of space, creating ‘a feeling of narrowness’. Whereas, despite their noise and congestion, the spaces and denizens of Eastern cities more typically flow into one another to live in a kind of friendly proximity: ‘They do not have much to do with each other. Rather, they empty themselves into an in-different closeness.’
It mediates between the East’s indifferent friendliness and the West’s passionate friendship
Far Eastern rituals of greeting express a similarly generalised and empty friendliness. When the Western individual looks into the eyes of the other and grasps his hand, she is speaking as one bounded and differentiated self to another. This creates what Han calls a full ‘dialogical space’ spilling over with gazes, persons and words.
The Eastern bow is rather intended to empty the greeting of content, to render both its subject and its object absent to one another. Participants in a bow ‘look nowhere’, as though greeting no one in particular: ‘The grammar of bowing has no nominative or accusative, neither a subjugating subject nor a subjugated object, neither active nor passive … This absence of cases constitutes its friendliness.’ This is a friendliness distinct from the passions of friendship, where the friend is chosen on the basis of their singularity. To bring another into the inclusive zone of my friendship implies an accompanying exclusion, a choosing of this rather than that person’s companionship and love. The friendliness of the bowing ritual ciphers instead a radical universality – a love relieved of any of the prejudices of subjectivity.
Han believes the German Romantic tradition to be the bearer of a similar albeit distinct conception of universal friendliness, in which all human beings may become ‘fellow citizens in a republic of the living’. It is a conception that mediates between the East’s indifferent friendliness and the West’s passionate friendship, between the universality and the singularity of others.
It seems to me that, if the German tradition carries Han’s preferred ideal of universality, it is Far Eastern thought, language and culture that enable a more playful and alive appreciation for the particular, insinuating shade and colour into prose that can seem increasingly monochromatic in tone. We might think of these two strains as the interplay of the poet and the tinkerer in showing an evident pleasure in observation and association. To quote Han, tempura batter transforms pieces of vegetable or fish into ‘a crisp agglomeration of emptiness’; in the Zen stone garden, ‘nature shines in emptiness and absence.’ Unlike the emptiness of the consumerist West that Han decries for being imposed from above by corporate masters, the emptiness of the Zen garden or the cities of the Far East is organic to the culture.
Han’s 2023 El Pais interview ends with his suggestion, after the recorder has been turned off, that he and the interviewer relocate to his favourite Italian restaurant. Eating a dish of fish soup, he relaxes, jokes around, takes all the pleasure in free-flowing conversation that seemed absent in the formal interview setup. What might such an infusion of vitality and play do for his writing? Han would likely object that such glimmers of positivity would only blunt the negative edge of his thought. But I can’t help wondering if the opposite is the case.
