From The Philosopher, vol. 112, no. 2 ("Violence")
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A Korean wave in popular entertainment has swept over the globe in the past decade in music, film, and television. Many of the smash hits—think “Gangnam Style,” Parasite, and Squid Game—inveigh against extreme inequality and other dystopian effects of global capitalism. Their socially conscious messages seem to resonate with audiences worldwide. Koreans are well-placed to tell cautionary tales of rapid changes brought about by market society. Among the very poorest nations in the world in 1960, today South Korea is one of the wealthiest. Bitterly, however, the country’s suicide rate leads the developed world. Rapid economic growth has come at a cost, especially, it seems, in terms of South Koreans’ mental health.
Seoul’s exhausted commuters, extravagant coping mechanisms for stress (Have you tried lying in a coffin and simulating your own death?), and exhortations to would-be bridge-jumpers on illuminated guardrails (“Would we like to go out to eat?”) are front-and-center in the 2015 documentary The Burnout Society: Byung-Chul Han in Seoul/Berlin. Isabella Gresser’s film, which makes a fantastic introduction to Han’s ideas, follows the Korean-German philosopher around the two cities that can claim him. It is available for free on YouTube. Byung-Chul Han argues that Koreans suffer from a combination of hyperactive screen addiction and burnout, exhaustion, or fatigue. In the film, Park Chan-wook talks with Han about how he worked 24/7 with film crews in Los Angeles, Prague, and Seoul while producing the dystopian science-fiction film Snowpiercer. Park agrees with Han that the smartphone can act as a “mobile labor camp”. Of course, this is not only a Korean malaise. Han warns that burnout is the future towards which the whole world has been hurtling. From Brazil to Turkey, readers from all over the world are sharing his warning. If you search Byung-Chul Han on X (formerly Twitter), you will find more discussions of Han in Portuguese, Spanish, and Turkish than in German or English.
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.
Han implies that philosophy is not for professional philosophers but instead for everyone, so that we can better understand our exhausting times.
Han writes short books, often fewer than one hundred pages long, that are accessible to anyone with a smattering of continental philosophy knowledge. They are often topical interventions on pressing issues: for example, the COVID-19 pandemic (The Palliative Society), the mental health crisis (The Burnout Society), screen addiction (In the Swarm: Digital Prospects), and surveillance capitalism (Psychopolitics). Since Han covers a broad range of topics, there are many ways of approaching him, as our recent book Byung-Chul Han: A Critical Introduction demonstrates. Here are five approaches: Han is a cosmopolitan, a contemplative, a social critic, a media-technology theorist, and a philosopher of beauty.
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To begin with an obvious starting point for a Korean-German philosopher: Han is a cosmopolitan. In some ways, Han’s widely read critiques of global capitalism follow the contours of the “Korean wave” in the entertainment industry, but Han writes in German (which he now claims to speak better than Korean) and has long made Berlin his home. Han calls himself an “optimistic refugee” in the country that gave him the opportunity to study philosophy. So while he writes about the maladies of globalization that are particularly intense in Korea, and often draws on Buddhism and Taoism, his main philosophical touchstones are German-language writers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Peter Handke.
The connecting thread that runs through Han’s works, from beginning to end, is Freundlichkeit. “Friendliness” does not quite capture this word that means openness to the world and all others; we occasionally use the clunkier term “world-friendliness” in our critical introduction to remind readers of this. In our age of digital distraction, Han rues the decline of a “profound boredom” that leads to this kind of open friendliness. This is not a restless boredom, but one in which we sink fully into the moment and become more broadly receptive to the world around us. It is a boredom in which the ego “lets go” of itself, thus becoming “friendly” to others. For Han, friendly moods like profound boredom (as well as longing and wonder) relax us, reduce our anxiety (especially about death), and make us receptive to the unfamiliar and the beautiful. Friendliness is an ethical, as well as an existential, attunement because it disposes towards friendly greeting. In friendly moods, we allow others to appear as they are, bidding them to enter our lives. Han’s book Absence: On the Culture and Philosophy of the Far East, includes an extended reflection on East Asian cultures of bowing, especially the Zen practice of becoming “no one” in order to let others appear. Friendliness is the predisposition to encounter the world beyond the desires, projects, and projections that Han thinks burn so many people out. It is also a predisposition to mingle with others without trying to change or control them. Politically, then, friendliness is what makes Han a cosmopolitan.
Han addresses cosmopolitanism directly in his 2005 book Hyperculture, his first extended intervention into a timely topic of general concern. Here he takes up multiculturalism, globalization, and nationalist backlashes against globalization—all matters of special concern to an optimistic immigrant like Han. Hyperculture criticizes Homi K. Bhabha, the Harvard professor whose concept of hybridity has become a touchstone of modern postcolonial studies. For Han, Bhabha is too fixated upon dialectics of oppressor and oppressed, an all-too-Western fixation that inherits G. W. F. Hegel’s famous master/slave dialectic. Han does not think he has lost his Korean roots in the process of assimilating into the dominant German culture around him. Increasingly, Han thinks, multiple processes of acculturation are taking place for people simultaneously that look nothing like exploitative cultural appropriation. The process is often more of a “hyphen culture,” a web of connections and influences with no center or clear dialectical structure. Far Eastern cultures, Han asserts, are friendlier. East Asians might adopt Western dress or fall in love with Western classical music without any sense of a dominant culture being imposed upon them, Han suggests, because of an openness to difference and otherness that is deeply rooted in Zen practice. He does not have Korean ‘roots’ he might say—though this borrows another famous image from Western philosophy, from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari—so much as Korean ‘rhizomes’ that branch out and hybridize with German ones. Han asserts that he locates his own thought within a network of Korean and German films, foods, ideas, songs, words—a hyperculture where new combinations are possible. His work emerges from a global hyperculture with largely Korean and German influences, emphasis on the friendly “and”.
Hyperculture is an ambivalent book, especially in comparison to Han’s starker theoretical statements beginning with The Burnout Society in 2010. Although openness to the cuisine, music, and philosophy of all world cultures ushers in exciting possibilities, there is the danger of becoming “tourists in Hawaiian shirts” who flatten out challenging otherness into consumable difference. The tourists whom Han has in mind politely sample a foreign dish, or ironically don foreign garb, without making a place for what is foreign in their lives in a friendly way. Diversity pleases but never challenges them.
Does happiness belong to a place—a home—or can people be happy and at-home anywhere, jet-setting from global city to global city?
Does happiness belong to a place—a home—or can people be happy and at-home anywhere, jet-setting from global city to global city? This unresolved question hovers over Hyperculture, a book that begins with tourists in Hawaiian shirts and ends with Heidegger seeking what is authentically his own in his Black Forest cottage and in the German language. Han ends with question marks: do we need a threshold of what is our own to ever make a crossing into otherness? Perhaps we need a home—a place of our own—to be happy. Han was not a tourist playing the German philosopher at the University of Freiburg in the 1990s. He seriously engages with Heidegger; still, retreating into a homey peasant’s hut in the German mountains would not be so echt for a Korean graduate student. Nonetheless, Heidegger and homesickness linger at the end of Hyperculture even as Han guides the way to a friendlier global culture, where foods and spices are fused unironically, and new relationships are made free from the specter of domination or exploitation.
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This cosmopolitan thinker is also a distinctively contemplative philosopher, and this is a second way of approaching Han. What Han contemplates more than anything else is whether there is something other than power out there. Is the world something other than the sum of measurable forces? The moods in which something other than power might appear, again, share the aspect of Freundlichkeit or world-friendliness. Like the late Heidegger, Han turns to Zen, though for twenty-five years he has challenged the “often asserted proximity” between Heidegger and Zen. In The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism, from 2002, Han argues that Zen is characterized by friendliness rather than inwardness. Zen eschews the heroic encounter with death that has shaped the soul in Western philosophy from Plato’s Socrates up to and including Heidegger. Han emphasizes the “great death” of the ego in Zen that relinquishes any thought of self, inwardness, or desire that is founded on anything other than the flowing world of impermanent things. A more “Zen” Heidegger, then, could have found more of himself in the modern world beyond his mountain hut. Zen makes the soul an open “guesthouse” of the world, Han writes. He means that contemplation gives us an open sense of self that is friendly to all of the people, places, and things that constitute us as persons.
Han emphasizes the “great death” of the ego in Zen that relinquishes any thought of self, inwardness, or desire that is founded on anything other than the flowing world of impermanent things.
Zen contemplation is attractive in our globalized world because, apropos of the question raised at the end of Hyperculture, it promises us a way to wander and dwell anywhere. Zen inoculates its contemplatives against fundamentalism and reactionary nationalism. It inclines them to peacefulness and contentment. Unlike the tourist in the Hawaiian shirt who collects souvenirs and politely thanks the vendor, privately delighting in how outlandish he will appear to his friends, Zen makes way for what is foreign. But it is not simply passive; the friendly greeting is not devoid of agency, because allowing what is truly ‘other’ to constitute us, and reflecting on the new possibilities this creates, has a quiet transformative power. Consider in more detail the way that Han assimilates German philosophy into his thinking. Take Friedrich Nietzsche for example, the thinker to whom Han is friendliest and—perhaps surprisingly—almost never critical. (Many of us struggle with Nietzsche, overcome by his brilliance one moment, disgusted with his crude veneration of Conan-the-Barbarian-style men of action the next.) Han can be a tough critic of other philosophers, but Han bows to Nietzsche’s most contemplative moments. In What Is Power, Han directs us to a passage in Nietzsche’s notebooks where this famous philosopher of the will-to-power describes “the autumn of the North which I love as much as my very best friends because it is so mature and unconsciously without a wish.” The mild sunlight and falling fruits are beyond the will to power, and so beloved of Nietzsche. The Nietzsche whom Han greets—who dwells in Han’s guesthouse, we might say—is a contemplative, friendly thinker. Forgotten, strange, and even new elements of Nietzsche appear in the connections that Han makes.
Philosophy, Han tells a graduating class of Hungarian art and design students in 2022, means “thinking about thinking.” Han contemplates what puts us in the mood for thinking, but not what requires us to think practically. Rather, like Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, Han is concerned with what frees us up for thinking freely. His first answer (but not, as we shall see, his last) is the aforementioned profound boredom in which one’s ego dilates enough to feel a connection to others and things. This is a mood conducive to the kind of contemplative lingering familiar in Zen. And it just so turns out that the conditions of modern life in the free world are so completely exhausting as to bring us close to this kind of boredom, which would in turn make a new practice of freedom possible. In a society full of burnout, perhaps we can let go of the frantic pace and the self-flagellation and sink into a profound contemplative boredom, one marked by friendly openness and imaginative play, one that will ultimately provide a new departure point for a more truly decisive action.
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Han’s work to hybridize Eastern and Western contemplative traditions is less well-known than his critical theory. A third way to approach Han—easily the most common starting point for Han’s readers around the world—is to take stock of his unique approach to social criticism. For this reason, our recently published critical introduction starts with The Burnout Society, Han’s bestselling manifesto from 2010. Then, we work backwards through Han’s works to explain why contemplation is the remedy to burnout. The Burnout Society received widespread attention for its provocative claim that, increasingly, violence in the developed world is becoming a matter of self-inflicted harm. Power relationships are disappearing among people and becoming intra-psychic—the pressure we put upon ourselves in our own heads to achieve. Since we began this essay further back in Han’s oeuvre, with Hyperculture, the reader can see how The Burnout Society doubles down on Han’s earlier description of the emerging world full of hypercultural possibilities as opposed to Bhabha’s fading world of oppressive postcolonial legacies. Policemen, soldiers, and even germs are giving way to our career plans, fitness goals, and online image cultivation. “Achievement society,” Han concludes, is replacing “disciplinary society”. Yet Han is adamant that repression is disappearing only for a new contradiction of freedom to appear. This one is internal, or within the soul. Everywhere Han sees highly motivated people opt into personal projects and burn out pursuing them, so that self-inflicted harms replace other-inflicted ones. Han calls this “positive violence”.
Power relationships are disappearing among people and becoming intra-psychic—the pressure we put upon ourselves in our own heads to achieve.
Before we tally off obvious counterexamples, from mass incarceration and the COVID-19 pandemic to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Bhabha’s enduring postcolonial legacies, we should pause to consider just how contrarian Han’s claim is on its face. Political theorists have spent the last two hundred years—at least since John Stuart Mill’s ‘tyranny of the majority’ and ‘despotism of custom’—unmasking the hidden structures by which one group dominates another. Typical critical theorists debate which vectors of oppression prevent us from achieving the free society; the administrative state, crony capitalism, patriarchy, global elites, sexual repression, and structural racism are all familiar candidates. From political science textbooks to leading critical theorists like Wendy Brown, we assume, as Brown claims in Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics, that politics just is “human relations organized by power.” Enter Han, who asserts in his book Topology of Violence: “Power is no longer a key medium of politics.” Most politicians are like Angela Merkel, he argues, simply trying to be as likeable or relatable as possible, changing their opinions to gratify voters. They do not govern, but seek to facilitate our desires. Powerful corporations do the same. Capitalists and democratic politicians empower themselves by providing what we want. Of course, for any philosopher who takes Zen seriously, pursuing desire after desire does not make us feel free and happy in the long run. For Han, we are enslaved by our desires.
Han is less suspicious of the claim that we live in a free society than critical theorists usually are; instead, he thinks our ideas and experiences of freedom are vulnerable to exploitation. Many citizens of, say, Berlin and Seoul live in genuinely free societies. However, their new freedom—all that they can do now—is disorienting, exhausting, and unsatisfying. So long as they feel like they should do simply what they can do, to take advantage of every opportunity that presents itself, they will take advantage of themselves. Their self-compulsion leads them to exhaustion. All of this is worsened, for Han, by the Western (now global and hypercultural) sense that the self is something that must be made, a culture where everyone is an “entrepreneur of the self.” Freedom itself is being exploited in the free society—corporations of course profit from our frenetic activity—because people around the world increasingly lack contemplative practices.
In our book, we point to a number of ways that Han nuances the hyperbolic claims of The Burnout Society in his subsequent works. Indeed, we suggest that The Burnout Society, despite its popularity, can be a misleading starting place in Han’s oeuvre because he makes his starkest and least plausible contrast of the disciplinary society and the achievement society there. He elsewhere fully recognizes the continued presence of prisons, sweat shops, war, and inequalities. Later works like Psychopolitics contain trenchant insights about the hybridity between the disciplinary society and the achievement society in the surveillance capitalism of the digital age. But even at his starkest, Han is onto something about compulsive e-mail checkers, social-media oversharers, workaholics, shopaholics, gym rats, and hustlers. Many people are chasing the next dopamine hit of achievement—“likes,” gains, earnings—to the point of burnout. A culture of ambient encouragement or ‘toxic positivity’ has taken hold online, in schools, and in workplaces that facilitate this achievement mindset or ‘grindset’.
More interesting than defending Han from these obvious objections, however, is to point out how he relates theory and philosophy in a way that insists on a place for overstatement. Thinking is under threat from Big Data, Han fears, which floods the world with information. Strong distinction, narrative, and even oversimplification are the task of theory. Han argues in The Agony of Eros that theory or narration cut “a clearing of differentiation through untrodden terrain.” Case in point: Han’s theory of positive violence in The Burnout Society and The Topology of Violence. The critique of positive violence or absolute self-exploitation illuminates problems in our idea of freedom itself. While it is hyperbole to claim that disciplinary repression is a thing of the past, Han’s brazen declaration that we are living in a new age of self-inflicted violence illuminates the ways that profits and votes increasingly accrue for those who merely facilitate our own self-exploitation.
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The striking and downright contrarian insistence in Han’s social criticism that our ideas and experiences of freedom tempt us to tyrannize ourselves—that ultimately our desires are to blame—becomes more plausible in light of what our co-author Ethan Stoneman calls the “media-studies turn” in Han’s thought marked by the 2013 book, In the Swarm: Digital Prospects. A fourth way to approach Han is as a theorist of media technology. The Internet ‘smooths’ out global hyperculture, so that it is easier than ever to project ourselves “beyond any inherited possibilities or valuations.” Blind algorithms assist us as we seek out others with our niche interests. We find ourselves in echo chambers or digital silos. The Internet is a visceral medium. We log into our fellows’ emotions and ‘swarm’ with other users in fleeting fits of outrage or ecstasy. In the sheer “obesity” of information—often Han borrows from Jean Baudrillard—we find the algorithmically manufactured “Same”. Even if our networks are distinctly hypercultural, like English-speaking aficionados of Japanese anime and manga, nothing truly different, foreign, or ‘other’ challenges us to think. ‘Information hunters,’ like tourists guided by Big Data, are exhaustively self-absorbed. Borrowing a term from the Canadian media theorist Harold Innis, Stoneman calls this a digital bias towards positive violence. The Internet facilitates, rather than determines, our self-exhaustion and isolation from the other.
Han is concerned that we are losing all forms of negativity or friction that resist our increasingly digitalized life pursuits: real-world relationships, liturgies, rituals, nature, and even physical things. The Burnout Society describes the dystopia where our freely chosen projects are all we have, now drained of meaning, and with the promise of nothing but exhaustion. The only remedy is to find a more profound dimension of tiredness. This, of course, is the friendly boredom of the Zen contemplative which embraces dissipation. Yet Han thinks more usually we binge watch and scroll through our malaise, continually in a digitally mediated state of chronic burnout.
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Perhaps this is why Han pursues another possibility for escape from self-absorbed achievement in a loose trilogy of works published between 2012 and 2016: The Agony of Eros, Saving Beauty, and The Expulsion of the Other. Profound boredom leading to contemplative openness is a perennial possibility, but in a time when we pull out our digital devices at the first hint of boredom it is also a possibility widely foreclosed. So, Han examines in this trilogy of books how the restless, ultimately self-referential, desires that we pursue on the phone and in the workplace can be elevated into an erotic longing for the truly other. Here we find a fifth way of approaching Han, and the most recent to appear in his writings: the philosopher of beauty.
Beauty, eroticism, and otherness are closely linked for Han, powerful forces that draw us out of the self-absorbed projects and pursuits that exhaust us.
Beauty, eroticism, and otherness are closely linked for Han, powerful forces that draw us out of the self-absorbed projects and pursuits that exhaust us. “Eros,” he writes in The Agony of Eros, “concerns the Other in the strong sense, namely, what cannot be encompassed by the regime of the ego.” He elaborates that “eros pulls the subject out of itself, toward the Other.” So the erotic is not a powerful desire from within, according to Han, but an attraction that comes from without.
Friendship, love, and all manner of meaningful relationships are central for Han in these books. The demands of these bonds can transcend the career goals that we pursue and transcend the self-images that we cultivate. What Han means by friendliness has nothing to do with the sociability to which you might aspire to better yourself or build ‘your community’ through ‘power networking’. “Friendship is an end unto itself,” Han claims in The Agony of Eros. “Love is an absolute end unto itself.” There are clear ethical implications here. Han allows his thoughts to resonate with the concerns of philosophers from Martin Buber and Emmanuel Lévinas to Alain Badiou (who writes the foreword to The Agony of Eros). We find fulfillment ultimately neither in self-assertion nor even in self-care, but as a gift from the Other. This is the difference between an eager tourist and a contented guest for Han the cosmopolitan, but now the emphasis transcends political concerns and falls on the beloved. On the other side of Han’s critical turn against the digitalized achievement society, the ambivalent hope in Hyperculture to live in tranquil contentment anywhere seems to swell into a stronger (or more desperate) hope for someone or something that can save us from ourselves.
Han’s account of eros takes some bearings from the Socrates of Plato’s Symposium and the Phaedrus. In those ancient dialogues, beauty stirs eros and draws one out of the self. Returning to Plato allows Han to challenge the common relegation of beauty to the soothing or the nice. Beauty can wound the ego. It can break through our defenses. It can draw us out of ourselves toward an excessive other. There is no sharp distinction between the (awesome, awful) sublime and the (pleasing) beautiful for Han, like the one in Immanuel Kant (and sometimes ordinary language) that demotes the beautiful to the pleasant. Consider the modern artist who declares she is not interested in beauty. It conjures for her images of impressionist watercolors long since become kitchen art, which seems insipid. She therefore regards “beauty” as a byword for the bourgeois, kitsch, saccharine, or merely “nice”.
Han’s aesthetics involve two main criticisms of Kant’s aesthetics, which largely set the parameters for contemporary thinking about the sublime and the beautiful.
Han wants to save beauty. “Inconspicuous events,” he writes in Saving Beauty, “such as white dust swirled up by a drop of rain, snow falling silently in the morning twilight, or a scent coming off a rock in the summer heat, all these can also be disastrous events, namely events of emptiness which empty the ego, de-subjectify it and take away its inwardness, thus making it happy.” Beauty can be sublime. Han’s aesthetics involve two main criticisms of Kant’s aesthetics, which largely set the parameters for contemporary thinking about the sublime and the beautiful. First, he rejects a neat division of sublime and beautiful. Second, he rejects the way that Kant’s account of the sublime abstracts from otherness. Faced with a vertiginous cliff or a howling gale, the Kantian subject brings to mind the concept of infinity (and, self-referentially, our inward capacities to perceive infinite space and time). “Instead of opposing the sublime to the beautiful,” Han contends in Saving Beauty, “one should return to beauty a sublimity that cannot be subjected to inwardness, a de-subjectivizing sublimity, and thus undo the separation of beauty and the sublime.” Han wants to linger in the aftermath of these storms.
At this point, Han’s reflections on beauty dovetail with his media criticism. He laments a counterfeit of beauty that he sees everywhere in the digital culture of the twenty-first century. He calls this counterfeit “the smooth.” The smooth offers no resistance, no wound. It is meant to be liked, to be a mirror for the self and its desires. Han points to phenomena as varied as Jeff Koons’s mirror-like balloon sculptures and the completely waxed and tweezed bodies of pornographic videos. But his main example of the smooth, and certainly the most pervasive, is the smooth touchscreen of the digital device. Smartphones seem to open up a portal to anyone and anywhere. But no stranger or potential friend will really appear; so long as the continually adjusting algorithms serve us up the world we are looking for, the digital world will become a self-reflection. Han compares it to a hall of mirrors, a smooth facilitator of gratification, a slippery slope to exhaustion, even though we have scarcely lifted our eyes and fingers that sweep across the screen. (Think of the smooth transitions that segue to the next auto-play video on streaming services.) Han engages in some philosophical fisticuffs with Kant in Saving Beauty—he is not so gentle with all of his fellow German philosophers as he is with Nietzsche—in order to offer a penetrating critique of how our digital lives are all but impervious to the healing wound of beauty.
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There are many other Hans that we could discuss in this piece and which we do discuss in our recently published book-length critical introduction to Han’s large body of work. There is the philosopher of religion in The Disappearance of Rituals and his highly personal, as-yet-untranslated gardening journal Lob der Erde. There is Han the collector in Non-things, who is reminiscent of Walter Benjamin strolling the Parisian arcades. And there is Han the ecologist, who at the end of Vita Contemplativa deepens his cosmopolitanism with frequent reference to the German Romantics: “Human beings are but fellow citizens in a republic of the living—of plants, animals, stones, clouds and stars.” Our contention in Byung-Chul Han: A Critical Introduction is that the same core concerns and consistent arguments run through all of these Hans, even if they are not always evident on the surface. These succinct, timely, and urgent books are not addressed primarily to scholars; Han is less interested in demonstrating the depth and consistency of his thought than in reaching out to a broad audience of readers, and warning them against burning out in pursuit of all the new global and digital possibilities for self-improvement that the world seems to offer us every day. Han brings some of the most ancient philosophical wisdom to our timeliest concerns. He brings theoria—contemplation—back into contemporary theory.
Robert Wyllie is Assistant Professor of Political Science and the director of the Political Economy Program at Ashland University. He teaches courses in political economy, history, and political philosophy. He is co-author (with Ethan Stoneman and Steven E. Knepper) of A Critical Introduction to Byung-Chul Han (Polity, 2024).S
teven E. Knepper is associate professor in the department of English, rhetoric, and humanistic studies at Virginia Military Institute. He is co-author (with Ethan Stoneman and Robert Wyllie) of A Critical Introduction to Byung-Chul Han (Polity, 2024).
From The Philosopher, vol. 112, no. 2 ("Violence")
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He believes that the consumer culture and the explosion of digital technology tiny fishing has created an environment where people are pressured to constantly work, constantly innovate and are unable to rest or breathe outside of their work. This is a strong reminder of the imbalance in modern society, when people cannot find peace in their lives.