Ronald Düker, "Byung-Chul Han: Desire thrives on the impossible” (Google translated from French)
Byung-Chul Han's journey is astonishing: he left Korea at the age of 22 for Germany to study metallurgy. But it is towards philosophy that he turns. For him, our society, prisoner of narcissism, incessant activity and the cult of performance, dries up desire at its source. A sharp and clear thought, to be discovered.In autumn 2011 we launched a German edition of Philosophy magazine . During our first discussions, our editor-in-chief in Berlin, Wolfram Eilenberger, wanted to introduce us to a philosopher who had not yet been translated into French, Byung-Chul Han. His journey is remarkable in more than one respect. A Korean, Han emigrated to Germany when he was 22 to study mechanics. But once there, he turned towards theology and philosophy, and he is the only student of foreign origin to have achieved the feat of defending a state thesis in philosophy in Germany and in German. Han has since been appointed professor at the famous Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung (“National Higher School for Formal Design”) in Karlsruhe, where Peter Sloterdijk also teaches – but the two men apparently don't like each other. As much as Sloterdijk's books are abundant, full of digressions and interludes, Han's are compact and abrupt; his style is incredibly economical. “His sentences are like ax blows, each one achieves its goal. He writes like a man who would like to cut down trees,” explains our colleague Wolfram. And in fact, to read Han is to enter into a thought that practices staccato, very far from the dialectical windings and their legato so usually prized by German thinkers.
Byung-Chul Han in seven dates:1959 Born in Seoul (South Korea)Han writes to combat current evils and convince. He is now translated all over the world, notably in Korea and China, where some of his essays are bestsellers. Will the French enjoy reading it? This month, two essays by Han appear . The first, In the Cloud , is a brilliant meditation on the condition of digital man, the digital age and dispersion in the cloud . The second, Desire or The Hell of the Identical, questions the possibility of love and eroticism in a society where the figure of the Other tends to disappear. Han is an imprecator but also a moralist. While stress affects us all, he pleads, in extremely tense prose, for a philosophy of relaxation and openness. A paradox which makes all its salt.
1978-1982 Studies of metallurgy in South Korea
1982-1988 Studies of philosophy, German language and civilization, and Catholic theology, first in Freiburg im Breisgau, then in Munich
1994 Doctorate in Friborg with a thesis entitled Heideggers Herz. Zum Begriff der Stimmung bei Martin Heidegger (“The heart of Heidegger. On the concept of tonality in Martin Heidegger”)
2000 Accreditation at the University of Basel
2000-2010 Privatdozent at the philosophy seminar of the University of Basel
Since 2010 Chair of Philosophy and Media Theory at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe
Your trajectory is unusual. What attracts a Korean to Germany, and why does a metallurgist become a philosopher?
Byung-Chul Han: There are ruptures and metamorphoses in life that we cannot explain. Perhaps my unusual decision is also largely linked to the name I bear. Adorno once said that names are initials that we don't understand, but obey. The Chinese ideogram for “Chul” recalls, by its sound, both iron and light. In Korean, “philosophy” means the “science of light”. So it's possible that I was just following my name.
All the way to Germany…
Yes, I arrived in Germany with an admission qualification to study metallurgy at the Technische Universität in Clausthal-Zellerfeld, near Göttingen. I told my parents that I would continue my technology studies in Germany. I was forced to lie to them, otherwise they wouldn't have let me go. In fact, I simply left the camp, in a completely different country where I knew neither the language nor the writing at the time, and I threw myself into completely different studies. It was like a dream. I was 22 years old.“The current performance society is a voluntary self-exploitation society”Your essay on The Society of Fatigue, a bestseller in Germany, has become a cult book in South Korea. How do you explain it?
Clearly, Koreans were concerned with the fundamental thesis of the book: that today's performance society is a society of voluntary self-exploitation, and exploitation is now possible even without domination. South Korea is a society of terminal fatigue. And it's a fact, in Korea, you see people sleeping everywhere. In Seoul, subway trains are like sleeping cars.
Was it different in the past?
When I was at school, we found frames on the walls of our classroom in which concepts such as patience, diligence, etc. were displayed. – the classic slogans of a disciplinary society. Today, the country has transformed itself into a performance society, and this change has been faster and more brutal than anywhere else. No one had time to prepare for this variant of neoliberalism, the harshest of all. Suddenly, it is no longer a question of necessity or duty, but of “capacity”. Classrooms today are full of slogans like: “Yes, you can!” » In a period like this, my book visibly acts as a counterpoison. He is perhaps the precursor of a critical consciousness – but it is only just beginning to form.
What exactly is the problem with performance ethics?
She is cunning and therefore devastatingly effective. I will explain to you what this ruse consists of. Karl Marx criticized a society governed by alienation for the benefit of a third party. In capitalism, the worker is exploited and this exploitation by a third party reaches its limits from a certain level of production. It is quite different for the self-exploitation to which we voluntarily submit ourselves today. Self-exploitation is limitless! We willingly bend until we break. If I fail, I blame myself for this failure. If I suffer because I go bankrupt, I am the only one to blame. Self-exploitation is exploitation without domination, because it is entirely voluntary. And it is because it places itself under the sign of freedom that it displays such effectiveness. We never see the formation of a collective, a “we” that could stand up against the system.
You make a diagnosis of our society by appealing to an unusual conceptual pair, that of positivity and negativity. And so you see that the negativity fades away.
Negativity is something that elicits an immunological defense response. The Other is thus the negative which penetrates into what is specific to us and seeks to deny it, to destroy it. I have argued that we live today in a post-immunological era. Current psychological pathologies, such as depression, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder [ADHD] or burnout, are not infections caused by viral or bacterial negativity, but heart attacks resulting from an excessive dose of positivity. Violence is not only born from negativity, but also from positivity, not only from the Other, but also from the Same. The violence of positivity or the identical is a post-immunological violence. It is the fatness of the system that makes you sick. We know that there is no immune reaction to fat.“Depression is the expression of a narcissistic self-relation that has reached a pathological level”To what extent is depression linked to the fading of negativity?
Depression is the expression of a narcissistic self-relation that has reached a pathological level. The depressive sinks and drowns within himself. The Other has ceased to be within his reach. Have you seen the film Melancholia, by Lars von Trier? The character of Justine illustrates what I mean: she is depressed because she is totally exhausted, crushed by herself. Her entire libido is centered on her own subjectivity, which is why she is incapable of love. And at that moment, yes, at that moment, a planet appears, the planet Melancholia. In the hell of the Same, the arrival of the Whole Other can take an apocalyptic form. The deadly planet reveals itself to Justine as the Whole Other who escapes from the narcissistic swamp. She literally hatches in front of the planet bringing death. She also discovers the others. Thus, she takes care of Claire and her son with kindness. The planet triggers erotic desire. Eros, as a relationship to the Whole Other, eliminates depression. Disaster brings salvation. Moreover, “disaster” comes from the Latin word, desastrum, which means “non-star”. Melancholia is a non-star.
Can you offer us a more precise definition of the other?
The Other is also the Gegenstand, “ that which is opposed to us”, and even the An-Stand, the “correction towards what is before us”. We have lost the capacity, the correction, to see the Other in their otherness because we overwhelm everything with our intimacy. The Other is something that calls me into question, that tears me away from my narcissistic interiority.
Where could we find a way out?
A society without the Other is a society without eros. Literature, art and poetry also live from the desire for the Whole Other. The crisis that art is going through today is perhaps also a crisis of love. Soon, I am sure, we will no longer understand the poems of Paul Celan, because they are addressed to the Whole Other. With new communication media too, we abolish the Other. Celan writes, in one of his poems: “You are near as if you did not live here” [extract from The Whitest of All Doves ]. That's what it's about ! Absence is the fundamental trait of the Other, it is negativity. Because he's not staying here, I can talk. It is for this reason alone that poetry is possible. Eros is oriented towards the Whole Other.
In this case love would be a utopian option, impossible to implement.
Desire thrives on the impossible. But when we keep repeating, for example in advertising, “You can” and “Everything is possible”, then it is the end of erotic desire. There is no more love because we believe ourselves to be too free, because we choose between too many options. The Other is of course your enemy. But the Other is also the beloved. It's like in medieval minstrel song which Jacques Lacan said was a black hole around which desire condenses. We no longer know this hole.
You also say that we have replaced faith in transcendence with faith in transparency.
Yes, the secret is negativity. It is characterized by deprivation. Transcendence also is a negativity, while immanence represents a positivity. Thus the excessive dose of positivity is expressed as a terror of immanence. The transparency society is a positive society.“The temporality of the society of transparency is immediacy, authentic time”What do you think is the reason for the cult of transparency?
We must first understand the digital paradigm. I consider digital technology as a historical break as dramatic as, for example, the invention of writing or book printing. Digital itself is pushing for transparency. When I press a key on the computer, I get an immediate result. The temporality of the society of transparency is immediacy, authentic time. The traffic jam, the traffic jam of information, is no longer tolerated. Everything must be shown in the news of immediate visibility.
The Pirate Party [international political organization, more popular in Germany than in France] considers that politics can only benefit from this immediacy.
LiquidFeedback, this is undoubtedly the magic formula [ LiquidFeedback is software used in particular by the German Pirate Party to accelerate decision-making and make it more transparent]. It seems that representative democracy leads to an unbearable time bottleneck. But this view raises massive problems: there are indeed things that do not yield to immediacy. Things that must first mature. And politics should precisely be an experiment, an experiment with an open outcome. However, as long as we experiment, we cannot yet know the result. As long as we have to implement a vision, we really need the time cap. The policy that the Pirate Party strives to implement is therefore, and necessarily, a policy devoid of vision. And this also applies at the business level. There is always some sort of evaluation going on. You have to present optimal results every day. No long-term project is any longer possible. The digital habitus also means that we constantly change our points of view. From then on, there will be no more politicians. A politician is someone who persists in defending a point of view.
And do you understand all this as the result of a new technology?
What does the word “digital” mean? “Digital” comes from the Latin digitus, “finger”. In digital, the human act is reduced to the fingertip. For a long time, human activity has been associated with the hand - in German, where the word "hand" is Hand, this has given rise to terms like Handlung, the "deed", or Handwerk, the "craft", literally: the “work of the hand”. And the manuscript, of course. Now an act, a Handlung, in the emphatic sense, is always a kind of drama. The fetishization of the hand, in Heidegger, is already a protest against the digital.“The transparency society is a society without a future”According to this new digital logic, there are no leading figures; we are seeing the emergence of a policy without leaders.
When you want to lead, you have to keep the future in sight. A leader is someone who looks to the future. And when I carry out a political experiment, I must also be able to take a risk, because the result is not immediate, because I am going into an unpredictable space. A leader, in the sense of “scout”, goes into the unpredictable. Transparency, which is, on the other hand, associated with digital, aims at total predictability. Everything must be calculable in advance. But there is no act whose consequences are predictable. If that were the case, it would be a calculation – better: a statement, an invoice. Action always touches on the unpredictable, on the future. This means that the society of transparency is a society without a future. The future is the temporal dimension of something completely different. Today, the future is only the optimized present.
Doesn’t the celebration of immediacy also have something to do with infantilization?
Of course. Digital infantilizes us because we can't wait any longer. Think, for example, of how the temporality of love is lost. Saying “I love you” is a promise aimed at the future. Today we are witnessing an atrophy of human actions which relate, emphatically, to the future, such as responsibility or promise. Even knowledge, knowledge or experience has a time horizon located in the future. The temporality of information or experience, on the other hand, is the present. There is a new disease of the information society. It's called Information Fatigue Syndrome . One of its symptoms is paralysis of analytical capacity. At the heart of the flow of information, we are clearly no longer able to distinguish the essential from the inessential. Interestingly, another symptom of this is the inability to take responsibility.
You also call the transparency company the “porn company”. For what ?
The society of transparency is a pornographic society to the extent that visibility is totalized and absolutized, and secrecy completely disappears. Capitalism increases the pornographicization of society to the extent that it exposes everything as a commodity and makes it visible. What we strive to achieve is maximization of exposure value. Capitalism knows no other use of sexuality. Erotic tension springs not from the permanent exposure of nudity, but from the staging of an opening and closing of the diaphragm. It is the negativity of the interruption that gives nudity an erotic sheen.
The pornographic therefore destroys the erotic…
Yes. Just think of that wonderful moment in Flaubert's Madame Bovary : the carriage that carries Léon and Emma – an aimless stroll through Rouen, and the reader learns nothing, absolutely nothing, about what is happening inside of the vehicle. Flaubert simply lists the names of places and streets. And, at the end, Emma holds her hand out the window and lets little scraps of paper fall, flying like butterflies over a field of clover. Her hand is the only nudity in this scene – and it's the most erotic moment ever. Because we don't see anything. In the hypervisibility that surrounds us, such a thing is no longer conceivable.
What role does philosophy play in the hell of the Same?
Philosophy, for me, is the attempt to outline a completely different form of life, to experiment with other life projects, at least through thought. Aristotle gave us the example of what this means. He invented the vita contemplativa. Today, philosophy is very far from it. She has become a part of the hell of the Same. There is a letter in which Heidegger compares thought and eros. He speaks of the beating of the wings of eros, which carries its thoughts on the paths where no one has walked. Philosophy is perhaps the caress that draws linguistic forms and models in the skin of the other, devoid of language.Today you hold a chair, but your relationship with academic philosophy has not always been free of tension, am I correct?“We should now replace the subject with the project. We are no longer “thrown away”. We no longer have a “destiny”. We are planning projects »
As you know, I am a philosophy professor in a major art school. I'm probably too rambunctious to teach in a philosophy department at a traditional university. University philosophy in Germany is, alas! totally frozen and inanimate. She does not engage in present time.
Where do you think the greatest challenges to thought lie?
There are so many things and events today that need a philosophical explanation. Depression, transparency… We need a new anthropology, better, a digital anthropology of knowledge and perception. We need a digital social philosophy and a philosophy of culture. We should have updated Heidegger's Being and Time for the digital world a long time ago.
What do you mean ?
Heidegger replaced the subject with Dasein . We should now replace the subject with the project. We are no longer “discarded”. We no longer have a “destiny”. We are planning projects. Digitalization definitively makes Heidegger’s “thing” disappear. It produces a new Being and a new time. We must dare to have more theory. Academic philosophy is too anxious for that. I wish him more courage and audacity. “Spirit” originally means restlessness or apprehension.
Byung-Chul Han's books
In FrenchThe Fatigue SocietyIn German
(trans. J. Stroz, Circé, 2014)
How can we explain that our time is much more comfortable than previous ones, that we do not work with our hands, and yet we feel so tired? Han analyzes the devastating effects of the cult of performance.
In the cloud
(trans. M. Dumont, Actes Sud, 2015)
In the digital age, there are no longer really acts, but actomes , that is to say atomized actions. Everyone in their corner, behind their computer screen, feeds the cloud, the digital cloud. But what do we get in exchange?
Desire or the hell of the same
(trans. O. Mannoni, preface by Alain Badiou, Autre, 2015)
Why will the heroine of 50 Shades of Gray never experience the passion that linked Tristan and Yseult? Why does she only access impoverished enjoyment? Because our society has replaced the Other with the Same, the event with representation.Shanzhai. Chinese construction
(“Shanzhai. Deconstruction in Chinese”, Merve, 2011)
Starting from the term shanzhai, the Chinese notion to designate fakes (“fakes”, “falsifications”), Han deconstructs the Western concept of the original and criticizes Chinese capitalism which is based on copying. It thus plunges into the heart of the contemporary competition between Western and Asian civilizations.
Transparenzgesellschaft
(“The transparency society”, Matthes & Seitz, 2012)
A critical look at the requirement for transparency. Han reveals transparency as the heart of a culture of self-discipline and absolute operationalization, which ultimately keeps the political system alive, rather than threatening it.
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