Born in South Korea, Byung-Chul Han has taught and written about philosophy at German universities. Over the previous decade, his books have been showing in English translation at an accelerating clip. They’re the shortest books, with the shortest sentences, of any thinker or cultural theorist recognized to me, and so they seem at such a tempo that I hesitate to explain Vita Contemplativa: In Reward of Inactivity (Polity) as his newest title in English, since one other shall be out inside a few week of this column’s publication.
The scale of his books—most of them is perhaps known as pamphlets—appear in stress with the dimensions of the problems they take up. Most of them (and the entire ones I’ve learn) analyze the confluence of neoliberal order and cybercultural chaos. These forces encourage a lot public anxiousness and grievance, in fact, and Han brings to the dialogue large and deep studying (mainly in European philosophy and literature) and reveals a knack for the trenchant remark.
Printed in Germany in 2013 and issued in translation by MIT Press 4 years later, Han’s Within the Swarm: Digital Prospects has flashes of perception that verge on the prophetic. Extrapolating from the digital media atmosphere circa 2010, Han wrote that it “heralds the top of the politician within the sturdy sense—that’s, politicians who insist on a standpoint and, as an alternative of strolling consistent with constituents, stroll forward of them with a imaginative and prescient. The future, because the time of the political, is disappearing.” (The frequent use of italics is attribute of Han’s fashion, as is the brisk syntax.)
In the identical textual content, he cited the German jurist (and necessary Hitler enabler) Carl Schmitt’s infamous aphorism “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” Han up to date it for the Twenty first century: “Sovereign is he who instructions the shitstorms of the Internet.”
Towards the quantity’s conclusion, Han posed a not-entirely-rhetorical query: “What sort of politics—what sort of democracy—continues to be conceivable at present, on condition that civil society is vanishing, given the mounting egoization and narcissification of human existence?” Regardless of the reply to that query could change into, we appear to be dwelling by means of it.
Vita Contemplativa, the e book at hand, pursues a line of thought tangential to Han’s concern with “egoization and narcissification” as tendencies in digital tradition. Han has written elsewhere that the tradition of narcissism fuels a relentless drive to self-exploitation. “At all times refashioning and reinventing ourselves” beneath the promptings of market and media, we pursue “compulsive achievement and optimization” aided by digital monitoring of our efficiency—whether or not it’s “likes” or steps taken per day, or affect issue. This leaves Twenty first-century subjectivity self-absorbed however not self-determining.
Han’s criticism of those tendencies is just not delivered as ethical admonition: They’re practical inside a system working to maximise its personal velocity, effectivity and profitability—a system fashioning us in accord with its personal imperatives.
“As a result of we take a look at life completely from the attitude of labor and efficiency,” Han writes in Vita Contemplativa, “we view inactivity as a deficiency that should be overcome as rapidly as doable.” Setting apart time for leisure and rest isn’t any escape from this rule.
“As a result of it serves the aim of respite from work,” he writes, leisure time “stays tied to the logic of labor. As by-product of labor, it represents a practical factor of manufacturing … ‘Leisure time’ lacks each depth of life and contemplation. It’s time that we kill in order to not get bored. It isn’t free, dwelling time; it’s useless time.”
The distinction between “useless time” and “free, dwelling time” that Han emphasizes within the new e book distinguishes it from his earlier criticisms of digital/neoliberal tradition. In opposition to “the fixed compulsion to extend efficiency” and “the common skill that makes every part accessible, calculable, controllable, steerable, manageable, and consumable,” Vita Contemplativa advocates for inactivity as a human functionality.
Moderately than a symptom of non-public disaster or some failure of the need, inaction as Han conceives it’s difficult in addition to numerous in its doable manifestations. It consists of receptivity to intense aesthetic expertise; the “holy, festive calmness” doable in communal celebrations; boredom at intensities that quantity to an altered state of consciousness; and moments of dealing with the pure world as a “you” slightly than an “it.”
None of those examples essentially depend as a wide range of spiritual expertise, however bringing them beneath the heading of “contemplation” is at the least considerably spirituality adjoining. Han is reportedly a Catholic and has studied theology, and he has an curiosity in Zen Buddhism.
That isn’t to counsel that any type of proselytizing is underway. Vita Contemplativa is a part of the writer’s ongoing secular critique of latest tradition and society—performed with fixed reference to Heidegger, Arendt, Foucault and Agamben, amongst others, however as conversational companions (and generally sparring companions) slightly than as figures beneath examination. As, in impact, a e book on meditation with out recommendation on the best way to do it, the viewers shall be self-selecting, which is accurately.
