Cohen, Josh. "The Winter of Civilization." Aeon (February 28, 2025) ["Byung-Chul Han’s relentless critiques of digital capitalism reveal how this suffocating system creates hollowed-out lives"]
Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society. Stanford University Press, 2015. ["Our competitive, service-oriented societies are taking a toll on the late-modern individual. Rather than improving life, multitasking, "user-friendly" technology, and the culture of convenience are producing disorders that range from depression to attention deficit disorder to borderline personality disorder. Byung-Chul Han interprets the spreading malaise as an inability to manage negative experiences in an age characterized by excessive positivity and the universal availability of people and goods. Stress and exhaustion are not just personal experiences, but social and historical phenomena as well. Denouncing a world in which every against-the-grain response can lead to further disempowerment, he draws on literature, philosophy, and the social and natural sciences to explore the stakes of sacrificing intermittent intellectual reflection for constant neural connection." Excerpt of the 1st chapter available from Stanford University Press]
---. The Crisis of Narration. Polity Press, 2024. ["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 could recreate the fire around which humans gather to tell each other stories. That fire has long since burnt out. It has been replaced by the digital screen, which separates people rather than bringing them together. Through storytelling, capitalism appropriates narrative: stories sell. They are no longer a medium of shared experience. The inflation of storytelling betrays a need to cope with contingency, but storytelling is unable to transform the information society back into a stable narrative community. Rather, storytelling as storyselling is a pathological phenomenon of our age. Byung-Chul Han, one of the most perceptive cultural theorists of contemporary society, dissects this crisis with exceptional insight and flair."]
---. In the Swarm: Digital Prospects. MIT Press, 2017. ["A prominent German thinker argues that—contrary to “Twitter Revolution” cheerleading—digital communication is destroying political discourse and political action. The shitstorm represents an authentic phenomenon of digital communication.
Digital communication and social media have taken over our lives. In this contrarian reflection on digitized life, Byung-Chul Han counters the cheerleaders for Twitter revolutions and Facebook activism by arguing that digital communication is in fact responsible for the disintegration of community and public space and is slowly eroding any possibility for real political action and meaningful political discourse. In the predigital, analog era, by the time an angry letter to the editor had been composed, mailed, and received, the immediate agitation had passed. Today, digital communication enables instantaneous, impulsive reaction, meant to express and stir up outrage on the spot. “The shitstorm,” writes Han, ”represents an authentic phenomenon of digital communication.” Meanwhile, the public, the senders and receivers of these communications have become a digital swarm—not a mass, or a crowd, or Negri and Hardt's antiquated notion of a “multitude,” but a set of isolated individuals incapable of forming a “we,” incapable of calling dominant power relations into question, incapable of formulating a future because of an obsession with the present. The digital swarm is a fragmented entity that can focus on individual persons only in order to make them an object of scandal. Han, one of the most widely read philosophers in Europe today, describes a society in which information has overrun thought, in which the same algorithms are employed by Facebook, the stock market, and the intelligence services. Democracy is under threat because digital communication has made freedom and control indistinguishable. Big Brother has been succeeded by Big Data."]
---. The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism. Polity Press, 2022. ["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 out its philosophical insights. In this short book, Byung-Chul Han seeks to unfold the philosophical force inherent in Zen Buddhism, delving into the foundations of Far Eastern thought to which Zen Buddhism is indebted. Han does this comparatively by confronting and contrasting the insights of Zen Buddhism with the philosophies of Plato, Leibniz, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger and others, showing that Zen Buddhism and Western philosophy have very different ways of understanding religion, subjectivity, emptiness, friendliness and death. This important work by one of the most widely read philosophers and cultural theorists of our time will be of great value to anyone interested in comparative philosophy and religion."]
---. Psycho-Politics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. Verso, 2017. ["Exploring how neoliberalism has discovered the productive force of the psyche. 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 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."]
---. Saving Beauty. Polity Press, 2017. ["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 Han reinvigorates aesthetic theory for our digital age. He interrogates our preoccupation with all things slick and smooth, from Jeff Koon's sculptures and the iPhone to Brazilian waxing. Reaching far deeper than our superficial reactions to viral videos and memes, Han reclaims beauty, showing how it manifests itself as truth, temptation and even disaster. This wide-ranging and profound exploration of beauty, encompassing ethical and political considerations as well as aesthetic, will appeal to all those interested in cultural and aesthetic theory, philosophy and digital media."]
---. The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering. Polity Press, 2017.
---. The Spirit of Hope. Polity Press, 2024. ["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 book on hope, Byung-Chul Han gives us the perfect antidote to the climate of fear that pervades our world."]
---. Vita-Contemplative: In Praise of Inactivity. Polity Press, 2023. ["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 anything, that represents an intense and radiant form of life. For Byung-Chul Han, inactivity constitutes the human. Without moments of pause or hesitation, acting deteriorates into blind action and reaction. When life follows the rule of stimulus–response and need–satisfaction, it atrophies into pure survival: naked biological life. If we lose the ability to be inactive, we begin to resemble machines that simply function. True life begins when concern for survival, for the exigencies of mere life, ends. The ultimate purpose of all human endeavour is inactivity. In a beautifully crafted ode to the art of being still, Han shows that the current crisis in our society calls for a very different way of life: one based on the vita contemplative. He pleads for bringing our ceaseless activities to a stop and making room for the magic that happens in between. Life receives its radiance only from inactivity."]
West, Stephen. "Achievement Society and the rise of narcissism, depression and anxiety - Byung-Chul Han." Philosophize This! (September 6, 2023) ["Today we talk about positive power, neoliberalism, narcissism as a reaction to modern life, how technology makes isolation easier, and some tactics to find peace in the digital panopticon."]
---. "Byung Chul Han - The Crisis of Narration." Philosophize This! #232 (July 7, 2025) ["Today we talk about the book The Crisis of Narration by the philosopher Byung Chul Han. We talk about the history of storytelling. Walter Benjamins distinction between a Paris fire and a revolution in Madrid. The effects of social media on memory. Story telling vs story selling. AI as pure Intelligenz lacking Geist. The ability for stories to give shape to suffering. The importance of boredom for self-discovery."]
---. "Everything that connects us is slowly disappearing. - Byung Chul Han pt. 2." Philosophize This! #189 (October 3, 2023) ["Today we talk about the disappearance of rituals, truth, community, communication, public spaces and talk about the importance sometimes of being an idiot."]
---. "The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism." Philosophize This! #235 (September 3, 2025) ["Today we talk about one of Han's earlier books where he offers an alternative to classic western ideas about subjectivity. We talk about Zen as a religion without God. Substance and emptiness. Alternatives to the reified self. Dwelling nowhere. Original friendliness. And death as an event we desperately try to control."]
---. "Resistance, Love, and the importance of Failure. (Zizek, Byung Chul Han)." Philosophize This! #201 (May 6, 2024) ["This episode explores Slavoj Žižek’s idea that in a world where grand narratives have lost their power, most people fall into one of three paths: burnout and escapism, obsessive careerism, or trying to revive old traditions to find meaning. But Žižek hints at a fourth option—one where people deeply engage with something they truly care about, not to achieve it perfectly, but to fail at it meaningfully and continuously. Through examples like falling in love or pursuing a passion, he shows how real freedom comes from resisting surface-level, commodified experiences and instead embracing deeper, more transformative efforts. Žižek connects this to surplus enjoyment—how people often find meaning not in achieving goals but in the struggle itself, which can be exploited by society. Ultimately, he encourages listeners to take control of their desires, engage deeply with what matters to them, and live in ways that challenge the shallow structures of consumer life."]
Wyllie, Robert and Steven Knepper. "Five Ways to Read Byung-Chul Han." The Philosopher 112.2 (Autumn 2024) ["In the world of philosophy and social criticism, a niche market by comparison to pop music and film, Han is a one-man Korean wave. He has published a book each year, on average, for the past thirty years, and he has become an internationally known figure in the past decade. He is the rare philosopher who tries to write for a large popular audience. In a 2013 interview in Korea JoongAng Daily, Han explains, “Philosophy is a tool for better understanding the world, but it is losing ground because philosophers tend to publish such difficult books that nobody dares to read.” Han implies that philosophy is not for professional philosophers but instead for everyone, so that we can better understand our exhausting times. In the same interview, he describes the “duty” of the philosopher to help people discover—and linger in—the world beyond their work and personal projects. He uses one of his favorite metaphors for contemplative immersion in the moment: “I think it’s one of the duties of philosophers to help people find their scent of time.” His writings are marked by a concern with getting us outside of our heads, or at least explaining how we became obsessed with our life projects to the point of self-harm."]
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