On Byung-Chul Han's, "Topology of Violence"

Excerpted from the above video:

Let's read so some passages about the psychologization of violence. How violence has turned from being something, a phenomenon or a set of phenomena outside of the psyche, to a phenomenon inside the psyche.

So we read: "Violence is increasingly internalized, psychologized, and thus rendered invisible. More and more, it rids itself of the negativity of the other or the enemy, becoming self-referential. External violence unburdens the psyche."

He's not saying that external violence is good. When a person is violent to other people, but he's saying that the form of violence is easier on the psyche. External violence unburdens the psyche because it externalizes suffering. The psyche doesn't antagonize itself with endless internal discussion. So this is the advantage of externalizing violence, presumably.

Han says, "In Societies in the past, we let to people staging violence, to having ceremonial relationships with violence including, but not limited to, religious sacrifices." So he continues: "In archaic culture as well as in Antiquity, the staging of violence was an integral, even Central component of societal communication. Violence did not conceal itself, it was visible and manifest. It had no shame, it was eloquent. And signifying, it signified something. It expressed itself. It was not shameful. Rather than staging its magnificence, now violence conceals itself in shame. It continues to be wielded, but not publicly staged. It does not expressly draw attention to itself. It lacks all language and symbolism."

And it makes sense, the more you read, the more you follow his arguments about the "self-referentiality of violence". The violence is something that we do to ourselves, that a person in our contemporary culture, the "entrepreneur of the self", the self-exploiting subject with their "projects". Of course, it shouldn't enter into language. The fact that they are exercising self-violence. It should not become symbolically expressed in thought. The very fact of violence should be invisible and repressed.

Which brings us to Freud. We read: "Freud's psychoanalysis is Possible only in repressive societies, such as the Society of Sovereignty" or "the Disciplinary Society" which base their organization on the negativity of prohibitions and commands. The late-modern "Achievement Subject"...."

The Achievement Subject is a big theme in Han's work: "...The late-modern Achievement Subject possesses a completely different psyche than the "Obedient Subject" to whom Freud's psychoanalysis refers. The work performed by Freudian Ego consists above all in fulfilling a duty." And then he makes a comparison to Kant.

Let's move on: "The modal verb that dominates the Society of Achievement isn't the Freudian "should", but rather "can". This societal shift entails restructuring within the psyche."


We should take a step further than that, okay? The modal verb is "can". "I can do this." "I can do that." But that "can" very quickly translates to "I must." "If I can, therefore I must." That's why it becomes "Force", "push".

Let's continue: "The 'Dialectic of Freedom' entails the development of new constrictions. Freedom "from the Other" becomes a narcissistic relationship to the "Self", which is responsible for many of the Achievement Subject's psychic disorders."

Okay, there's implication on health, physical bodily health, of this kind of Society. We read: "Faced with the atomization of society and the erosion of the social..." because every everybody develops a much stronger self-referential mode of being. So, Social Community, those aspects of Life, are eroded, they become much weaker. "...Faced with the atomization of Society and the and the erosion of the "social", all that is left is the body of the Self, which must be kept healthy at all costs."

Why? Elsewhere we read that it's because everything that you have, everything that you are and you have, is a commodity. It's Capital, and it should be leveraged for production and productivity. So, the body has to be prepared at all times to do work.

"The capitalist economy absolutized 'Survival'. It is not concerned with the 'Good Life', it feeds on the illusion that more 'Capital' generates more 'Life', and more 'ability to Live'. The Mania for' Health' arises where life has become bare like a piece of currency, and void of any narrative content. Bare life, void of narrative content.

So we become "healthy", not for the perpetuation and continuation of a narrative. We become "healthy" just for the sake of readiness for work. Bare life.

In connection to narcissism, going back to narcissism, and how that's not the same thing as love, "Self-love."

We read: "To love oneself is to position oneself expressly against the 'Other'. In the case of Narcissus, on the other hand, the border with the 'Other' blurs entirely. Those who suffer from a narcissistic disorder sink into themselves... [which means] no stable conception of the 'Self' can form."

Narcissism, of course, is connected with depression. "In depression, all bonds break, even bonds with the 'Self'. [...] [It] makes sense to differentiate Depression from Melancholia. Melancholia is preceded by an experience of loss. Thus it always exists in a relationship, namely, in a negative relationship to the absent. Depression, on the other hand, is cut off from all relationships and bonds."

Somebody breaks up with you, or you lose a family member to death, or for whatever reason. And that loss results in Melancholia, or Mourning. But Depression is cut off from all relationships and bonds.

"The late-modern 'Self' expends most of its' libidinal energy on itself. What is left of the libido is spread thin across steadily increasing contacts and fleeting relationships. Burnout is the pathological consequence of voluntary self-exploitation, the imperative to personal expansion, transformation, and reinvention which is the flip side of Depression, presumes a wide array of products associated with Identity."

"Contrary to Baudrillard's thesis, social antagonism is not developing between the global and the singular today. Contemporary society, which displays increasing erosion of the Social, produces scattered self-focused selves with weak connections to the "We". Existing under intensely competitive conditions, they are micro-entrepreneurs who can only have business relations, if any."

Related to loneliness and isolation... and here Han is commenting on Hart and Negri... he writes: "It is not Multitude, but Solitude that typifies contemporary social composition. Isolation doesn't generate power. Hart and Negri fail to take this Social Development into account. Contrary to Hart and Negri's conclusion, today the communal is in a state of increasing decline. The decline of the communal makes Collective action ever less likely. They overestimate the strength of the resistance against the capitalist neoliberal system."

"Agamben (he also he's also also criticized), Agamben completely misses the topological shift of violence that is the basis for the shift from the "Society of Sovereignty" to the "Society of Achievement" when he's discussing a Homo Sacer, which is a concept referring to the margin of the social order.

Han does something really interesting, and very topological. He writes: Homo Sacri of a Totalitarian Society are at the outermost edge of a societal order. So the edge of society, the margin of society. Homo Sacer is a marginal figure. He, or she, or they... "they" are located in a non-Place. A non place like the Concentration Camp. And the late-modern Homo Sacer, the "Achievement Subject" is centrally located. The typical Homo Sacer now is the typical citizen, centrally located. Directly at the center of an order, social order. "Labor camps" are no longer located on the outskirts, rather, every Achievement Subject carries the camp with it. The Achievement Subject is Prisoner and Warden at once. It cannot defend itself from the violence, because, it is committed by itself. The center becomes indistinguishable from a non-place. Related to invisibility, and the psychic nature of violence. How center of a social order, becomes its margin, becomes the locus of a non-place, becomes non-place.

Burnout Bonus: 

A longer video on "The Topology of Violence"