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 Scent of Time (2009)

• "If life is deprived of any meaningful closure, it will be ended in non-time."

• "God functions like a stabilizer of time."

• "A farewell does not dilute the presence of the past; it may make an even deeper presence."

• "If things are deprived of memory, they become information or commodities. They are pushed into a time-free, ahistorical place."

• "Promising, committment, and fidelity, for instance, are genuinely temporal practices."

• "The haste of day rules over the night as empty form."

• "Full of gods means full of meaning, full of narration. The world becomes readable, like a picture."

• "Historical time knows no lasting present."

• "Information has no scent."

• "Time begins to emit a scent when it gains duration; when it is given a narrative or deep tension; when it gains depth and breadth, even space."

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 inner music of things sounds only when you close your eyes."

• "Money, as a matter of principle, makes everything the same."

• "The eros-driven soul produces beautiful things, and, above all, beautiful actions, which have a universal value."

• "There is no such thing as data-driven thinking."

• "Thinking is an expedition into quietness."

• "Logos is powerless without the force of eros."

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 allow 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."

The Crisis of Narration (2023)

• "If life can no longer be narrated, wisdom deteriorates, and its place is taken by problem-solving."

• "Stories on digital platforms like Facebook or Instagram are not genuine stories. They have no narrative duration. Rather, they are just sequences of momentary impressions that do not tell us anything."

• "The smartphone seems to be a playground, but it is a digital panopticon."

• "Without narration, life is purely additive."

• "The reason that people take selfies is not narcissism. Rather, it is inner emptiness. There is no meaning to stabilize the ego. Faced with its inner emptiness, the ego constantly produces itself."

• "A screen bans reality."

• "Psychological disorders are symptoms of a blocked story... The patient is cured the moment she narrates herself free."