On Byung-Chul Han's "The Expulsion of the Other"

Excerpts:

So, beginning with Byung-Chul Han's, "The Terror of the Same". Roughly, if I were to simplify the the central argument of the book, it's about the opposition between two tendencies, or two kinds of logic. One: the logic of the Same, imposition of the Same, the hegemony of the Same. And the other tendency, one that "regards the Other", where the Same, the logic of the Same, is being criticized and where the tendency to assimilate everything into one and the Same world view, one and the Same frame of mind, that excludes what doesn't fit in. It expels what doesn't fit in it. 

And one way to exclude, that doesn't look like excluding, is when we misrepresent something that we are apparently including, but we are including a mere image of it, a judgment (caricature/ strawman) of it that is effectively a way of excluding it. Here you might remember there is an old interview with Slavoj Zizek in which Zizek says, "You know, I'm very popular, I'm famous and popular, but I'm popular for being a funny philosopher, funny speaker, and making a lot of dirty jokes, and my image as a clown is a way of repressing me, is a way of dismissing me." So, that's a really good example of how a way of representing someone despite their popularity can be a way of excluding them from serious conversation, from serious engagement.

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...So, this passage is about experience, what experience is, and the fact that genuine experience, real experience, is always about something "Other". So, I'm reading:

"To have an experience of something means that something befalls us, strikes us, comes over us, overwhelms and transforms us. The negativity of the Other end of transformation is what constitutes experience in an emphatic sense."

I'm not reading anymore, I'm just talking. This is a comment. This view of experience, this way of paying attention to experience, the structure of experience, the essential encountering feature of experience with something transformative, was picked up by people like Gadamer (and philosophical hermeneutics is very attentive to this way of thinking about experience).  Okay, going back to the text:

"The proliferation of the Same ('Same' with capital S)... the proliferation of the Same presents itself as growth. At a certain point, however, production is no longer productive but destructive, information is no longer informative but deformative, and communication is no longer communicative but merely cumulative."

I'm going to jump and include a couple of passages, just one passage from chapter five, which is titled "Thresholds" here because it's relevant to what I just read:

"The compulsion to accelerate the global circulation of Capital, Communication and Information... breaks thresholds down and results in a threshold-less, smooth space with an extremely accelerated internal rotation. This is where a new anxiety develops, an anxiety that is completely disconnected from the negativity of the Other."

It's the anxiety of excess. Not being able to stop, and this is the anxiety that is characteristic of binge watching, or binge eating. And Han talks about binge eating and binge watching in this book and in other works.  Back to chapter one, we read:

"The 'Terror of the Same' affects all areas of life today. One travels everywhere, yet does not experience anything. One catches sight of everything, yet reaches no Insight. One accumulates information and data, yet does not attain Knowledge. One lusts after adventures and stimulation, but always Remains the Same. One accumulates online friends and followers, yet never encounters another person."

Okay, now moving to the chapter entitled "The Violence of the Global and Terrorism". He writes:

"Hospitality is the highest expression of a Universal Reason, Universal human Reason that has come into its' own. Globalism doesn't result in Hospitality."

I'm not reading now. I have to say when I'm quoting and when I'm not I'm not quoting right now. Globalism doesn't result in Hospitality, that's why it's not synonymous with progress in Civilization, especially because it can be combined with high degrees of xenophobia, hatred of other people. Back to reading Han:

"How civilized a society is can be judged by its' Hospitality in particular, indeed its' friendliness. Xenophobia is hatred, and ugly. It is an expression of a lack of Universal Reason, a sign of a sign that Society is still in an unreconciled State." 

Let me read that sentence one more time. "Hospitality is the highest expression of a Universal Reason that has come into its' own."

Okay, jumping to the chapter called "The Language of the Other. How to move to this chapter most directly engages with how to move move against the imposition of the Same. And the answer, one answer, is poetry, literature, literary imagination. So we read:

"Poetic imagining, literary imagination, works the foreign into the Same like a like a good host. Art and philosophy are obliged to reverse the betrayal of the foreign, of that which is different from subjective spirit. This means liberating the Other from the categorical web of subjective Spirit, restoring to it, its' strange, wondrous Other, giving it its' due."

Poetry, according to Salon, shows a strong tendency towards silence. The noise of communication makes it impossible to listen. Poetry shows a strong tendency towards silence the listening silence.

The final chapter is, called "Listening". I found it extremely beautiful and moving. In this chapter, Han quotes Elias Kennedi(?). Elias Kennedi has a three volume Memoir, or autobiography I guess, Memoir. And in the third volume he talks about several literary characters, figures, including Herman Brock. And he talks about Herman Broch, how great of a listener he was. In his experience, Herman Broch is somebody that Milan Condere(?) also talks about in his essays, in "The Art of the Novel." So now, this is a code from Elias Kennedy about Herman Broch included in this book by Byung-Chul Han. It's a description of having a conversation with Broch, and the quality of that conversation, being with a person who is such a great listener, and you don't have to stop with them, you don't have to tell yourself that "this is the limit, you have to stop here":

"While in other such conversations there comes a point where one suddenly says to oneself: 'Stop, this far and no further,' where one senses the danger of relinquishing too much - for how does one find the way back to oneself, and how after that can one bear to be alone?' - with Broch, there was never such a point or such a moment, one never came up against warning signs, one staggered on, faster and faster, as they drunk. It is devastating to discover how much one has to say about oneself; the further one ventures, the more one loses oneself, the faster the words flow..."

That was Elias Kennedi quoted by Byung-Chul Han.