Byung-Chul Han

Byung-Chul Han in 2015

Byung-Chul Han is a South Korean-born Swiss-German philosopher and cultural theorist. He was a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts and still occasionally gives courses there.

Quotes

What is Power? (2005)

• "Violence and freedom are the two endpoints on the scale of power."

• "The task of power is to transform the always possible 'no' into a 'yes.' "

• "Power is not opposed to freedom. It is precisely freedom that distinguishes power from violence or coercion. "

• "A truly powerful holder of power does not simply elicit agreement, but enthusiasm and excitement. "

• "Often what is absent has more power than what is present. "

• "When power is separated from any communicative context, it becomes naked violence. "

• "Power is more 'spacious' than violence. And violence becomes power if it 'gives itself more time.' Looked at from this perspective, power rests on an excess of space and time. "

• "Architecture is a way for power to achieve eloquence through form. "

• "Rather, power is most powerful, most stable, where it creates a feeling of freedom and where it does not need to resort to violence. "

• "Power is never naked. Rather, it is eloquent. "

• "An absolute power would be one that never becomes apparent, never pointed to itself, one that rather blended completely into what goes without saying. Power shines in its own absence. "

• "Power turns pure being into a having."

• "Violence may capture space, but it does not create space."

• "Power tends to reduce openness... Power tries to solidify and stabilize its position by eradicating spaces open to play, or incalculable spaces."

• "An ethos of freedom stops power from solidifying into domination and makes sure it remains an open game."

• "Perhaps power is never free from a feeling of lack."

The Burnout Society (2010)

• "Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society [Leistungsgesellshaft]."
  • Source: Page 8

• "Disciplinary society is still governed by no. Its negativity produces madmen and criminals. In contrast, achievement society creates depressives and losers."
  • Source: Page 9

• "However, the disappearance of domination does not entail freedom. Instead, it makes freedom and constraint coincide. Thus, the achievement-subject gives itself over to compulsive freedom--that is, to the free constraint of maximizing achievement. Excess work and performance escalate into auto-exploitation."
  • Source: Page 11

The Agony of Eros (2012)

• "Depression is a narcissistic malady."

• "Eros and depression are opposites."

• "Eros, erotic desire, conquers depression. It delivers us from the inferno of the same to the utopia, indeed utopia, of the wholly other."

• "Catastrophic fatality abruptly switches over into salvation."

• "Eros conquers depression."

• "Whatever is merely positive is lifeless. Negativity is essential to vitality."

• "Happiness is the proof that time can accommodate eternity."

• "What is obscene about pornography is not an excess of sex, but the fact that it contains no sex at all."

• "The pornographic face says nothing. It has no expressivity or mystery."

• "The erotic is never free of secrecy."

• "Pornography completes the deritualization of love."

The Disappearance of Rituals (2020)

• "Rituals are symbolic acts. They represent, and pass on, the values and orders on which a community is based. They bring forth a community without communication; today, however, communication without community prevails."

• "We can define rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world. They transforming being at home to being in the world. They turn the world into a reliable place. They are to time what a home is to space. They render time habitable."

• "Ritual practices ensure that we treat not only other people but also things in beautiful ways, that there is an affinity between us and other people as well as things."

• *Rituals are also symbolic practices... in the sense that they bring people together to create an alliance, a wholeness, a community."

• "Those who devote themselves to rituals must ignore themselves. Rituals produce a distance from the self, a self-transcendence."

• "Every religious practice is an exercise in attention. A temple is the highest degree of attention."

• "The 'intense life' advertised by the neoliberal regime is in truth simply a life of intense consumption."

• "Rituals are processes of embodiment and bodily performances. In them, the valid order and values of a community are physically experienced and solidified."

• "Today, tattoos lack symbolic power. All they do is point toward the uniqueness of the bearer. The body is neither a ritual stage nor a surface of projection; rather, it is an advertising space."

• "Sabbath rest does not follow creation; it brings creation to completion."

• "When we subordinate rest to work, we ignore the divine."

• "Silent listening unites a people and creates community without communication."

• "In contrast to festivals, events do not create community."

• "Capitalism lacks narrativity."

• "Capitalism dislikes silence."

• "Sovereignty, the freedom unto death, is threatening to a society that is organized around work and production."

• "It is a sign of sovereignty to risk one's life, that is, to turn life into a game."

• "Following Foucault, we may define the art of life as a practice of suicide, of giving oneself to death, of depsychologizing oneself, of playing."

• "Today, to live means merely to produce."

• "Poems are magic ceremonies of language."

• "The liturgy of emptiness dispels the capitalist economy of the commodity."

• "Ritual society is a society of rules. It is based not on virtues but on a passion for rules."

• "In the empire of signs, the soul, psychology, is erased. There is no soul to infect the holy seriousness of ritual play."

• "It is not honourable to attack an enemy without putting yourself at risk."

• "Thinking is more erotic than calculating."

• "The pornographic body lacks any symbolism. The ritualized body, by contrast, is a splendid stage, with secrets and deities written into it."

The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism (2022)

• "The freedom of the 'everyday mind' consists rather in not kneeling down in awe. Its mental attitude is better expressed as "sitting unmoveable like an object."

• "Haikus all the whole world to appear within things."

• "...Zen Buddhism, this religion of immanence."

• "God is nothingness: He is 'beyond all speech.'"

• "...I pray to God to make me free of God."

• "At the deepest level, the desire for complete union with God exhibits a narcissistic structure."

• "Zen Buddhism is inspired by a basic trust in the Here, a basic trust in the world."

• "The huge laugh is a most extreme expression of freedom."

• "Enlightenment is an awakening to the everyday."

• "Emptiness empties the one seeing into what is seen."

• "Emptiness simply prevents what is individual from insisting on itself."

• "The emptiness of Zen Buddhism... creates a neighborly nearness between things."

• "To die is to wander."

• "When we resist impermanence, the self intensifies."

• "Emptiness is not a denial of the proper but an affirmation of it."