Byung-Chul Han



Byung-Chul Han is a South Korean-born Swiss-German philosopher and cultural theorist. He was a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts and still occasionally gives courses there.

Quotes
What is Power? (2005)


 * "Violence and freedom are the two endpoints on the scale of power."


 * "The task of power is to transform the always possible 'no' into a 'yes.' "


 * "Power is not opposed to freedom. It is precisely freedom that distinguishes power from violence or coercion. "


 * "A truly powerful holder of power does not simply elicit agreement, but enthusiasm and excitement. "


 * "Often what is absent has more power than what is present. "


 * "When power is separated from any communicative context, it becomes naked violence. "


 * "Power is more 'spacious' than violence. And violence becomes power if it 'gives itself more time.' Looked at from this perspective, power rests on an excess of space and time. "


 * "Architecture is a way for power to achieve eloquence through form. "


 * "Rather, power is most powerful, most stable, where it creates a feeling of freedom and where it does not need to resort to violence. "


 * "Power is never naked. Rather, it is eloquent. "


 * "An absolute power would be one that never becomes apparent, never pointed to itself, one that rather blended completely into what goes without saying. Power shines in its own absence. "


 * "Power turns pure being into a having."


 * "Violence may capture space, but it does not create space."


 * "Power tends to reduce openness... Power tries to solidify and stabilize its position by eradicating spaces open to play, or incalculable spaces."


 * "An ethos of freedom stops power from solidifying into domination and makes sure it remains an open game."


 * "Perhaps power is never free from a feeling of lack."

The Scent of Time (2009)


 * "If life is deprived of any meaningful closure, it will be ended in non-time."


 * "God functions like a stabilizer of time."


 * "A farewell does not dilute the presence of the past; it may make an even deeper presence."


 * "If things are deprived of memory, they become information or commodities. They are pushed into a time-free, ahistorical place."


 * "Promising, committment, and fidelity, for instance, are genuinely temporal practices."


 * "The haste of day rules over the night as empty form."


 * "Full of gods means full of meaning, full of narration. The world becomes readable, like a picture."


 * "Historical time knows no lasting present."


 * "Information has no scent."


 * "Time begins to emit a scent when it gains duration; when it is given a narrative or deep tension; when it gains depth and breadth, even space."

The Burnout Society (2010)


 * "Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society [Leistungsgesellshaft]."
 * Source: Page 8


 * "Disciplinary society is still governed by no. Its negativity produces madmen and criminals. In contrast, achievement society creates depressives and losers."
 * Source: Page 9


 * "However, the disappearance of domination does not entail freedom. Instead, it makes freedom and constraint coincide. Thus, the achievement-subject gives itself over to compulsive freedom--that is, to the free constraint of maximizing achievement. Excess work and performance escalate into auto-exploitation."
 * Source: Page 11

The Agony of Eros (2012)


 * "Depression is a narcissistic malady."


 * "Eros and depression are opposites."
 * "Eros, erotic desire, conquers depression. It delivers us from the inferno of the same to the utopia, indeed utopia, of the wholly other."
 * "Catastrophic fatality abruptly switches over into salvation."


 * "Eros conquers depression."


 * "Whatever is merely positive is lifeless. Negativity is essential to vitality."


 * "Happiness is the proof that time can accommodate eternity."


 * "What is obscene about pornography is not an excess of sex, but the fact that it contains no sex at all."


 * "The pornographic face says nothing. It has no expressivity or mystery."


 * "The erotic is never free of secrecy."


 * "Pornography completes the deritualization of love."


 * "The inner music of things sounds only when you close your eyes."


 * "Money, as a matter of principle, makes everything the same."


 * "The eros-driven soul produces beautiful things, and, above all, beautiful actions, which have a universal value."


 * "There is no such thing as data-driven thinking."


 * "Thinking is an expedition into quietness."


 * "Logos is powerless without the force of eros."

The Disappearance of Rituals (2020)


 * "Rituals are symbolic acts. They represent, and pass on, the values and orders on which a community is based. They bring forth a community without communication; today, however, communication without community prevails."


 * "We can define rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world. They transforming being at home to being in the world. They turn the world into a reliable place. They are to time what a home is to space. They render time habitable."


 * "Ritual practices ensure that we treat not only other people but also things in beautiful ways, that there is an affinity between us and other people as well as things."


 * *Rituals are also symbolic practices... in the sense that they bring people together to create an alliance, a wholeness, a community."


 * "Those who devote themselves to rituals must ignore themselves. Rituals produce a distance from the self, a self-transcendence."


 * "Every religious practice is an exercise in attention. A temple is the highest degree of attention."


 * "The 'intense life' advertised by the neoliberal regime is in truth simply a life of intense consumption."


 * "Rituals are processes of embodiment and bodily performances. In them, the valid order and values of a community are physically experienced and solidified."


 * "Today, tattoos lack symbolic power. All they do is point toward the uniqueness of the bearer. The body is neither a ritual  stage nor a surface of projection; rather, it is an advertising space."


 * "Sabbath rest does not follow creation; it brings creation to completion."


 * "When we subordinate rest to work, we ignore the divine."


 * "Silent listening unites a people and creates community without communication."


 * "In contrast to festivals, events do not create community."


 * "Capitalism lacks narrativity."


 * "Capitalism dislikes silence."


 * "Sovereignty, the freedom unto death, is threatening to a society that is organized around work and production."


 * "It is a sign of sovereignty to risk one's life, that is, to turn life into a game."


 * "Following Foucault, we may define the art of life as a practice of suicide, of giving oneself to death, of depsychologizing oneself, of playing."


 * "Today, to live means merely to produce."


 * "Poems are magic ceremonies of language."


 * "The liturgy of emptiness dispels the capitalist economy of the commodity."


 * "Ritual society is a society of rules. It is based not on virtues but on a passion for rules."


 * "In the empire of signs, the soul, psychology, is erased. There is no soul to infect the holy seriousness of ritual play."


 * "It is not honourable to attack an enemy without putting yourself at risk."


 * "Thinking is more erotic than calculating."


 * "The pornographic body lacks any symbolism. The ritualized body, by contrast, is a splendid stage, with secrets and deities written into it."

The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism (2022)


 * "The freedom of the 'everyday mind' consists rather in not kneeling down in awe. Its mental attitude is better expressed as "sitting unmoveable like an object."


 * "Haikus all the whole world to appear within things."


 * "...Zen Buddhism, this religion of immanence."


 * "God is nothingness: He is 'beyond all speech.'"


 * "...I pray to God to make me free of God."


 * "At the deepest level, the desire for complete union with God exhibits a narcissistic structure."


 * "Zen Buddhism is inspired by a basic trust in the Here, a basic trust in the world."


 * "The huge laugh is a most extreme expression of freedom."


 * "Enlightenment is an awakening to the everyday."


 * "Emptiness empties the one seeing into what is seen."


 * "Emptiness simply prevents what is individual from insisting on itself."


 * "The emptiness of Zen Buddhism... creates a neighborly nearness between things."


 * "To die is to wander."


 * "When we resist impermanence, the self intensifies."


 * "Emptiness is not a denial of the proper but an affirmation of it."