The Gadfly

The partial disclosure of something that remains “somewhat hidden” can be erotic. And besides The Burnout Society, Han’s most representative book might be The Agony of Eros, in which he explores the replacement of the hidden, irrational erotic by something he calls “bare life,” a term he borrows from Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben.

The Gadfly - an essay by Scott Thomas Beauchamp about German-Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han offers surprising insights into our contemporary condition.

Today the defense of bare life is intensifying into the absolutization and fetishization of health. [Modern man] prefers it to sovereignty and freedom. He or she resembles the ‘last human beings’ Nietzsche describes, for whom health per se represents an absolute value. It is exalted and made ‘the great goddess’: one honors health. ‘We invented happiness,’ say the last human beings, and they blink. Where bare life is hallowed, theology gives way to therapy. Or therapy becomes theological.

By the same token, the mere act of sex comes to replace seduction or procreation. “Porn is a matter of bare life on display,” Han writes. It stands in opposition to the erotic, which makes us slow down, engage, wait, and wonder. Porn is to sex what data are to wisdom. “The pornographic face says nothing,” writes Han. “It has no expressivity or mystery.”

The triumph of pornography represents the death of the symbolic. “Symbol,” Han writes in The Disappearance of Rituals, “originally referred to the sign of recognition between guest-friends (tessera hospitalis). One guest-friend broke a clay tablet in two, kept one half for himself and gave the other half to another as a sign of guest-friendship.

Thus, a symbol serves the purpose of recognition. This recognition is a particular form of repetition.” To be truly human, according to Han, is to think and exist symbolically, to tarry with erotic anticipation while cultivating an appetite for truths that sometimes can only be expressed metaphorically.

The formation of metaphors is also a practice concerning truth to the extent that it creates a network of relationships, and lays open the connecting paths and channels of communication between things. The formation of metaphor counteracts the atomization of being. And it is a temporal practice to the extent that it opposes the quick succession of isolated events with the duration, even fidelity, of a relationship. Metaphors are the scent of things which they release when they befriend each other.

There’s far more to Han, both good and bad, than my brief assessment might suggest. I’ve outlined some of his major themes, but he also writes about literature, opera, movies, and art. His book Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese, for example, examines Western and Eastern notions of authenticity in art, while The Expulsion of the Other considers such topics as immigration and patriotism. Han’s breadth is exciting, though the excitement sometimes comes at the expense of consistency. Even where his work is consistent, he occasionally mistakes his own metaphors for settled reality.

упомянутые его книги вышли в интересной серии Untimely Meditations (17 book series). вторая книга в этой серии - On Hitler's Mein Kampf: The Poetics of National Socialism