As críticas implacáveis de Byung-Chul Han ao capitalismo digital revelam como esse sistema sufocante cria vidas vazias
Josh Cohen
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Ao lado do rio Spree gelado em Berlim, Alemanha, 6 de janeiro de 2016. Foto de Pawel Kopczynski/Reuters |
Eu conheci Byung-Chul Han no final da década anterior, enquanto escrevia um livro sobre os prazeres e descontentamentos da inatividade. Minhas primeiras pesquisas sobre nossa cultura de excesso de trabalho e estímulo perpétuo logo revelaram The Burnout Society, de Han, publicado pela primeira vez em alemão em 2010. As descrições de Han sobre a cultura de exaustão do neoliberalismo me atingiram com aquela rara, mas inconfundível, mistura de gratidão e ressentimento despertada quando o pensamento de outra pessoa dá expressão precisa e totalmente formada às próprias intuições desajeitadas.
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Byung-Chul Han em Barcelona, Espanha, em 2018. Foto de Album/Archivo ABC/Inés Baucells |
No cerne da concepção de Han de uma sociedade de burnout (Müdigkeitsgesellschaft) está um novo paradigma de dominação. O trabalhador da sociedade industrial internaliza o imperativo de trabalhar mais duro na forma de culpa do superego. O superego de Sigmund Freud, um supervisor hostil que nos persegue de dentro, surge quando a psique infantil internaliza o pai proibitivo. Em outras palavras, o superego tem sua origem em figuras externas a nós, de modo que, quando ele nos diz o que fazer, é como se estivéssemos ouvindo uma ordem de outra pessoa. A sociedade de realizações de nosso tempo, argumenta Han, não funciona com culpa do superego, mas com positividade ideal do ego — não de um "você deve", mas de um "você pode". O ideal do ego é aquela imagem de nossa própria perfeição refletida para nossos eus infantis pelo olhar adorador de nossos pais. Ele vive em nós não como um outro persecutório, mas como uma espécie de versão superior de si mesmo, uma voz de encorajamento implacável para fazer e ser mais.
Com esse triunfo da positividade, a aspereza do chefe exigente dá lugar à suavidade (um termo-chave de Han) do treinador implacavelmente encorajador. Nessa visão, a depressão é o mal-estar definitivo da sociedade de conquistas: o efeito de ser sempre levado a sentir que estamos correndo irremediavelmente atrás do nosso próprio ego-ideal, nos exaurindo no processo.
A figura do sujeito de conquistas dá origem a algumas das evocações mais vívidas de Han sobre debilitação psíquica e corporal:
O sujeito de realização exausto e depressivo se desgasta... Ele está cansado, exausto por si mesmo e em guerra consigo mesmo. Totalmente incapaz de sair, de ficar fora de si mesmo, de confiar no Outro, no mundo, ele trava suas mandíbulas em si mesmo; paradoxalmente, isso leva o eu a se esvaziar e esvaziar. Ele se desgasta em uma corrida de ratos que corre contra si mesmo.
Lendo esta passagem agora, lembro-me de quão surpreendentemente verdadeiro me pareceu na primeira leitura. Isso me fez voltar aos primeiros anos da minha vida acadêmica profissional, o zumbido de fundo permanente de frustração ansiosa, enquanto a pesquisa — ao mesmo tempo a primeira e a mais distante prioridade profissional, o único sinal indiscutível de realização do trabalho — estava para sempre subordinada às demandas cotidianas de ensino, marcação e reuniões de comitê. Nas escassas horas fora dessas funções, eu voltava a trabalhar em um artigo e rapidamente percebia que precisava vasculhar mais uma dúzia de fontes antes de poder começar a escrevê-lo. De repente, percebi o quão cansado eu estava; incapaz de trabalhar ou me abster disso, eu ficava suspenso em um estado de vigília cansada. Aquele eu de realização esvaziado, "em guerra consigo mesmo", era muito familiar.
A crítica de Han à vida contemporânea se concentra em seu fetiche de transparência; a compulsão à autoexposição impulsionada pelas mídias sociais e pela cultura passageira das celebridades; a redução da individualidade a uma série de pontos de dados positivos; e a hostilidade que a acompanha à opacidade e estranheza do ser humano. Isso pode explicar por que a reflexão autobiográfica mal figura nos escritos de Han: ele sem dúvida tem medo de se tornar apenas mais uma voz buscando ser ouvida em meio à cacofonia de opiniões.
Nascido em Seul em 1959, quando criança Han mexeu em fios e produtos químicos em seu quarto, imitando seu pai engenheiro civil, que havia trabalhado em grandes projetos públicos na Coreia do Sul. Mas esses experimentos chegaram ao fim depois que ele desencadeou uma explosão química em seu quarto que quase o cegou, deixando cicatrizes físicas que ele ainda carrega. Ele passou a estudar metalurgia.
Mas a leitura e o pensamento de Han o estavam atraindo cada vez mais para a Europa e para o estudo da filosofia. Aos 22 anos, ele deixou a Coreia do Sul para a Alemanha, dizendo aos pais que continuaria seus estudos científicos (‘eles não teriam me deixado estudar filosofia’, ele disse ao El País em 2023). Han chegou à Alemanha com quase nenhum conhecimento do idioma. No entanto, ao longo dos anos, ele efetuou uma notável autotransformação, de estudante de metalurgia tecnófilo coreano para filósofo e crítico social alemão emigrado. Agora, ele disse a um entrevistador no Der Zeit, sua manipulação é feita com o material do pensamento em vez de ‘fios ou ferros de solda’. A metáfora transmite uma sensação de pensamento mais como um ambiente do que uma atividade, uma concepção distintamente alemã da vocação do pensador.
A afinidade de Han com o pensamento e a cultura alemães é profunda, especialmente no que diz respeito ao seu status ambíguo da Alemanha como, ao mesmo tempo, o lar filosófico do Iluminismo e de sua crítica abrangente. Ele segue muito a tradição da Escola de Frankfurt, desenvolvendo para a era do capitalismo digital um novo capítulo de sua investigação sobre a "dialética do Iluminismo" - aquela interação perturbadora entre progresso e atavismo, e criação criativa e explosão traumática, que moldou a passagem para a modernidade.
Essas pequenas insinuações do homem e de sua vida reverberam por meio de seu pensamento e prosa. O consertador é uma figura brincalhona, trazendo diferentes elementos químicos e forças físicas para novos e imprevisíveis tipos de contato. Mas para o menino Han, a peça terminou em horror que se transfere diretamente para a atividade posterior de pensar: "Pensar também é consertar, e pensar pode produzir explosões. Pensar é a atividade mais perigosa, talvez mais perigosa do que a bomba atômica."
Han esclarece que seu próprio pensamento é perigoso não porque fomenta a violência, mas porque revela um mundo que é "implacável, louco e absurdo". Ele está escrevendo de dentro da experiência do que T. W. Adorno chama de "vida danificada", no subtítulo de Minima Moralia (1951) — um livro que Han frequentemente cita — ou a desintegração, sob o capitalismo de consumo avançado, de formas e instituições culturais e a deformação que a acompanha da consciência individual e dos relacionamentos pessoais.
Han escreve como se tivesse sofrido os danos de uma explosão quase fatal — ao mesmo tempo a conflagração em seu quarto de infância e a explosão mais generalizada de formas de vida anteriores. E os danos são irreparáveis: "O tempo em que havia algo como o Outro acabou", ele escreve em The Expulsion of the Other (2016). A voz literária de Han é melancólica no sentido estritamente freudiano de estar selada dentro de sua própria dor, transmitindo uma convicção absoluta na consignação do eu e do mundo a um curso de destruição tão inevitável quanto irreversível.
A música é central para a identificação de Han com a tradição cultural alemã. Ele falou sobre seu prazer em cantar Winterreise (1827) de Franz Schubert, um ciclo de canções cuja beleza está inextricavelmente ligada à sua desolação. Lamentando um amor perdido, o cantor vagueia por uma paisagem noturna de inverno, dilacerado pela solidão enquanto anseia por uma morte que não virá. Não é uma má aproximação, talvez, do Han que sai das páginas de seus livros, caminhando desanimadamente pelo inverno da civilização, alerta aos vestígios de tudo o que foi perdido: a continuidade do tempo, o grão da beleza, as tensões do eros, a substancialidade da individualidade.
Talvez os outros prazeres pessoais aos quais Han aludiu em entrevistas — cuidar de seu jardim, boa comida em restaurantes sofisticados, uma sociabilidade um tanto hesitante — devam ser vistos no contexto dessas perdas: uma determinação de se apegar ao mundo de sensações refinadas que está sendo tão inexoravelmente corroído pela vida virtual. Não estou sugerindo que os livros de Han sejam explicitamente lacrimosos. Seu tom manifesto é mais de raiva de olhos secos, tornado melancólico pela ausência de qualquer saída ou remédio para isso. Sob seu olhar, os setores político, financeiro e tecnológico são ladrões a quem entregamos voluntariamente nossas vidas e nós mesmos, junto com qualquer capacidade de dissidência ou resistência.
Como seus predecessores da Escola de Frankfurt, Han vê a penetração do capitalismo nas profundezas da vida psíquica e cultural como a chave para esse fenômeno. A Burnout Society insiste que o poder hoje não funciona por meio de repressão e perseguição, mas por meios astutos e insidiosos de "autoexploração". Em um regime autoadministrado desse tipo, a revolução é quase literalmente impensável: "Burnout e revolução são mutuamente exclusivos", ele escreve mais tarde, em Capitalism and the Death Drive (2019).
As investigações de Han sobre as diferentes regiões da experiência contemporânea, incluindo trabalho, tempo, amor e arte, produzem um projeto de pensamento notavelmente consistente, uma crítica implacável das privações espirituais e políticas do capitalismo digital. A questão preocupante para qualquer um que leia amplamente o corpus de Han é se essa consistência tenazmente sustentada acaba se tornando um sintoma do que ele critica? Ou seja, a negatividade ininterrupta das descrições de Han, sua relutância em encontrar algo além de perda e degradação nas formas da experiência contemporânea, acaba reproduzindo a lógica unidimensional do próprio capitalismo digital?
One of the weirder recent innovations of the tourism and leisure industry is the immersive art experience, in which viewers are invited to stand or lounge around cavernous dark spaces bordered by giant screens, onto which are projected digitally manipulated reproductions of great paintings. Vincent van Gogh’s or Claude Monet’s brush strokes, Piet Mondrian’s colour blocks, Salvador Dalí’s melting vistas – they all float across the screens, bursting into life and disintegrating into virtual piles on the floor, before rising in swirling maelstroms to combine and recombine on the walls.
Enter one of these attractions after reading Han, and it will look rather more sinister than an elaborate exercise in kitsch gimmickry, since he believes that the cultural symptoms of digital capitalism effectively degrade the very nature of experience. Han regularly invokes Walter Benjamin’s distinction between the two senses of experience concentrated in the German words Erfahrung and Erlebnis. Erfahrung denotes an experience of what philosophy calls the negative – that which is irreducibly other to consciousness. As an encounter with the new and unknown, Erfahrung is intrinsically transformative, writes Han in The Palliative Society (2020), ‘a painful process of transformation that contains an element of suffering, of undergoing something.’
Art can provoke such an experience. A poem or play or painting may be what Franz Kafka called ‘the axe for the frozen sea inside us’, calling into question the ways we see, think and feel, even the way we live. It’s the kind of encounter Mark Rothko might have been alluding to when he noted that ‘a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures …’ Looked at through Han’s sensibility, Rothko’s paintings seem to cut straight through the smooth artifices of digital life, restoring contact with the tremulous realities of bodily and spiritual life from which we have so long been exiled.
Enter one of these attractions after reading Han, and it will look rather more sinister than an elaborate exercise in kitsch gimmickry, since he believes that the cultural symptoms of digital capitalism effectively degrade the very nature of experience. Han regularly invokes Walter Benjamin’s distinction between the two senses of experience concentrated in the German words Erfahrung and Erlebnis. Erfahrung denotes an experience of what philosophy calls the negative – that which is irreducibly other to consciousness. As an encounter with the new and unknown, Erfahrung is intrinsically transformative, writes Han in The Palliative Society (2020), ‘a painful process of transformation that contains an element of suffering, of undergoing something.’
Art can provoke such an experience. A poem or play or painting may be what Franz Kafka called ‘the axe for the frozen sea inside us’, calling into question the ways we see, think and feel, even the way we live. It’s the kind of encounter Mark Rothko might have been alluding to when he noted that ‘a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures …’ Looked at through Han’s sensibility, Rothko’s paintings seem to cut straight through the smooth artifices of digital life, restoring contact with the tremulous realities of bodily and spiritual life from which we have so long been exiled.
For a work of art to have this effect, it must in some sense resist us, cause a disturbance of our familiar modes of language and perception. To be receptive to this kind of disturbance requires certain basic experiential conditions; we must be in an environment that permits lingering, an open-ended remaining in its presence. The paradox of lingering is that it fosters an intimacy that conveys the artwork’s irreducible strangeness. When a painting draws us towards it, we find it eludes us the closer we try to get to it. This is why we can find ourselves gazing at it for so long, often in a kind of stupefaction.
Immersive Van Gogh, its creators claim, puts us inside the paintings, into a new, tactile proximity to their composition and texture. But it does so by annihilating what Han in The Scent of Time (2009) calls the ‘temporal gravitation’ of the originals, unmooring them from any location in space or time. A painting derives its meaning from the fixed relation of its spatial textural and chromatic elements, of, say, this thick band of yellow to that underlying wisp of black. This is what we call its composition. To digitalise a painting is to decompose it, to deprive it of ground.
Under the rule of digital capitalism, time itself is severed from any ‘narrative or teleological tension’, that is, from any discernible purpose or meaning, and so, like the digital paintings in an immersive show, it ‘disintegrates into points which whizz around without any sense of direction.’ In such a regime of time, there is no possibility of Erfahrung, which depends on a sense of narrative continuum and duration. There is only the proliferation of its pale counterpart Erlebnis: the discrete event that ‘amuses rather than transforms’, as Han would later put it in The Palliative Society.
Immersive Van Gogh, its creators claim, puts us inside the paintings, into a new, tactile proximity to their composition and texture. But it does so by annihilating what Han in The Scent of Time (2009) calls the ‘temporal gravitation’ of the originals, unmooring them from any location in space or time. A painting derives its meaning from the fixed relation of its spatial textural and chromatic elements, of, say, this thick band of yellow to that underlying wisp of black. This is what we call its composition. To digitalise a painting is to decompose it, to deprive it of ground.
Under the rule of digital capitalism, time itself is severed from any ‘narrative or teleological tension’, that is, from any discernible purpose or meaning, and so, like the digital paintings in an immersive show, it ‘disintegrates into points which whizz around without any sense of direction.’ In such a regime of time, there is no possibility of Erfahrung, which depends on a sense of narrative continuum and duration. There is only the proliferation of its pale counterpart Erlebnis: the discrete event that ‘amuses rather than transforms’, as Han would later put it in The Palliative Society.
The thrust of Han’s writing is, above all, philosophical. Social and cultural life are occasions for addressing metaphysical questions. As such, the surface symptoms of digital culture are secondary to its ontological premises. Like Martin Heidegger, on whose concept of Stimmung, or mood, he wrote his 1994 PhD thesis (as well as a 1999 introduction to Heidegger), he seeks to unearth the underlying metaphysics of our present-day culture. In particular, and again like Heidegger, Han is concerned with how the environment of a hyper-accelerated culture conditions the fundamental relationship between consciousness and the world.
The Burnout Society crystallised the critique of the self-exploitative logic of contemporary capitalism that Han has been elaborating ever since. Prior to that, his output had been significantly more variegated; there were books on death, Far Eastern philosophy and a study of the concept of power in the Continental philosophical tradition. However, What Is Power? (2005) is intriguing for its adumbration of a non-coercive notion of power that uncannily anticipates his conception of digital capitalism’s burnout society.
Because power so often involves coercion, Han argues, there has been a tendency to see them as inextricable. But it is only when power is poor in mediation, felt as alien to our own lives and interests, that it resorts to threatened or actual violence. Whereas when power is at the ‘highest point of mediation’ – when it seems to speak from a recognition of its subjects’ needs and desires – it is more likely to receive those subjects’ willing consent. One could conceive of a power, therefore, that has no sanctions at its disposal, but which is nonetheless rendered absolute by its subjects’ full identification with it.
The less it relies on the threat of punitive measures to back it up, the more power maximises itself. ‘An absolute power,’ writes Han, ‘would be one that never became apparent, never pointed to itself, one that rather blended completely into what goes without saying.’ This is precisely what happens in digital capitalism’s burnout society, where the power of capital consists not in its power to oppress but in the voluntary surrender of its subjects to their own exploitation.
Han draws on the German-American theologian Paul Tillich’s conception of power as ipsocentric, that is, as Han puts it, centred around ‘a self whose intentionality consists of willing-itself’, cultivating and bolstering its own status. God is the ultimate embodiment of power because, in the words of G W F Hegel, ‘he is the power to be Himself’. This will to persist in one’s own existence, to cling to one’s own selfhood, is the basic premise of the Western mode of being. We can discern it at work in the empty narcissism of social media and the culture of self-display in which we’re all enjoined to participate. Self-exploitation is, in a sense, a twisted variant on the Cartesian cogito: I am seen therefore I am. In making myself perpetually visible, I may empty myself out, lose the last vestiges of my interiority. But, in cleaving to the bare bones of a self-image, some form of my existence survives.
The less it relies on the threat of punitive measures to back it up, the more power maximises itself. ‘An absolute power,’ writes Han, ‘would be one that never became apparent, never pointed to itself, one that rather blended completely into what goes without saying.’ This is precisely what happens in digital capitalism’s burnout society, where the power of capital consists not in its power to oppress but in the voluntary surrender of its subjects to their own exploitation.
Han draws on the German-American theologian Paul Tillich’s conception of power as ipsocentric, that is, as Han puts it, centred around ‘a self whose intentionality consists of willing-itself’, cultivating and bolstering its own status. God is the ultimate embodiment of power because, in the words of G W F Hegel, ‘he is the power to be Himself’. This will to persist in one’s own existence, to cling to one’s own selfhood, is the basic premise of the Western mode of being. We can discern it at work in the empty narcissism of social media and the culture of self-display in which we’re all enjoined to participate. Self-exploitation is, in a sense, a twisted variant on the Cartesian cogito: I am seen therefore I am. In making myself perpetually visible, I may empty myself out, lose the last vestiges of my interiority. But, in cleaving to the bare bones of a self-image, some form of my existence survives.
The fundamental basis of this erosion of meaningful experience, argues Han, is felt at the level of temporality. The accelerated time of digital capitalism effectively abolishes the practice of ‘contemplative lingering’. Life is felt not as a temporal continuum but as a discontinuous pile-up of sensations crowding in on each other. One of the more egregious consequences of this new temporal regime is the atomisation of social relations, as other people are reduced to interchangeable specks in the same sensory pile-up. Trust between people, grounded in both the assumption of mutual continuity and reliability, and in a sense of knowing the other as singular and distinct, is inexorably corroded: ‘Social practices such as promising, fidelity or commitment, which are temporal practices in the sense that they commit to a future and thus limit the horizon of the future, thus founding duration, are losing all their importance.’
This corrosion of fidelity and commitment is especially evident, Han argues, in the conduct of love and relationships. Love rests on a willingness to risk not knowing, since time changes both the lovers and the world in ways they cannot anticipate. In this regard, love is the exemplary experience of the negative, a refusal of conceptual and categorical knowledge.
As Han conceives it, love has nothing to do with the cosily sentimental coupling promoted by consumer culture, in which the loved object is reduced to a narcissistic projection of the self. It is rather an encounter with radical otherness, with the pain and madness – both are implied in the word passion – that comes of risking oneself. Fixated on comfort, on the reduction of the lover to a known and unthreatening quantity, ‘Modern love lacks all transcendence and transgression,’ writes Han in The Agony of Eros (2012).
Transcendence and transgression are twin dimensions of the negative: both involve going above and beyond the already known. Just as they are being extirpated from the erotic, so they are also losing their place in the aesthetic. Contemporary art, Han argues in Saving Beauty (2015), has become the expressive organ of a ‘society of positivity’, as manifested in the ‘smooth’ aesthetic common to iPhones, Brazilian waxes and Jeff Koons sculptures. What these apparently disparate objects have in common is the impervious gloss of their surfaces.
Han specifically targets Koons in whose work ‘there exists no disaster, no injury, no ruptures, also no seams.’ By ‘seams’ he means those traces of the labour and suffering that went into its making: glitches in the easy passage from the work to its consumption. More broadly, says Han: ‘The smooth object deletes its Against. Any form of negativity is removed.’ Such negativity, or resistance, presents an obstacle to ‘accelerated communication’. This might be at the level of the material – the rough grain of the sculptor’s stone, the impasto thickness of paint, the dissonances of poetic or musical language. Or it may belong more to the substance of the work, an alienation of imagery, composition, form. Either way, relieved of any such interruption, the smooth artwork travels through its viewer’s perceptual field with the ease of a milkshake slipping down the digestive tract.
This hollowed-out flatness is equally evident in a related crisis of digital capitalism, the exhaustion of narrative forms as bearers of social meaning. In The Crisis of Narration (2023), Han echoes a now-familiar analysis. He ascribes the rise of populist nationalist movements to their leaders’ canny if cynical recognition of a public yearning for ‘meaning and identity’ in a world in which temporality has been eroded in such a way that it reduces the calendar to ‘a meaningless schedule of appointments’ and lays waste to any sense of continuity, or community.
Consumer culture, with its compulsion for novelty and perpetual stimulation, likewise erodes the bonds of shared experience that engender meaningful narratives. The fire around which human beings would once have gathered to hear stories has been displaced by the digital screen, ‘which separates people as individual consumers.’ Time, love, art, work, narrative; these are the key zones of experience hollowed out by the disintegrative logic of digital capitalism. Each is a rich store of transformative encounter, or Ehrfahrung, which the ‘non-time’ of the present has reduced to empty instances of Erlebnis.
Han specifically targets Koons in whose work ‘there exists no disaster, no injury, no ruptures, also no seams.’ By ‘seams’ he means those traces of the labour and suffering that went into its making: glitches in the easy passage from the work to its consumption. More broadly, says Han: ‘The smooth object deletes its Against. Any form of negativity is removed.’ Such negativity, or resistance, presents an obstacle to ‘accelerated communication’. This might be at the level of the material – the rough grain of the sculptor’s stone, the impasto thickness of paint, the dissonances of poetic or musical language. Or it may belong more to the substance of the work, an alienation of imagery, composition, form. Either way, relieved of any such interruption, the smooth artwork travels through its viewer’s perceptual field with the ease of a milkshake slipping down the digestive tract.
This hollowed-out flatness is equally evident in a related crisis of digital capitalism, the exhaustion of narrative forms as bearers of social meaning. In The Crisis of Narration (2023), Han echoes a now-familiar analysis. He ascribes the rise of populist nationalist movements to their leaders’ canny if cynical recognition of a public yearning for ‘meaning and identity’ in a world in which temporality has been eroded in such a way that it reduces the calendar to ‘a meaningless schedule of appointments’ and lays waste to any sense of continuity, or community.
Consumer culture, with its compulsion for novelty and perpetual stimulation, likewise erodes the bonds of shared experience that engender meaningful narratives. The fire around which human beings would once have gathered to hear stories has been displaced by the digital screen, ‘which separates people as individual consumers.’ Time, love, art, work, narrative; these are the key zones of experience hollowed out by the disintegrative logic of digital capitalism. Each is a rich store of transformative encounter, or Ehrfahrung, which the ‘non-time’ of the present has reduced to empty instances of Erlebnis.
It is in Vita Contemplativa (2022) that Han ventures furthest beyond the confines of polemic to envision an alternative to the enervated politics and culture of the achievement society. The book mounts a philosophical defence of inactivity, conceived less in opposition to activity than as a possibility within it. Han cites a late fragment by Nietzsche on ‘inventive people’, which proposes that the authentically new can come into being only where there is sufficient time and freedom to think, apart from the imperatives of purpose and productivity.
This yet-to-exist Nietzschean community of the inventive echoes the German poet Novalis’s utopian imagining of a ‘republic of the living’. Novalis’s ideal of poetry is far more than a discrete literary form. It is radically expansive. For Novalis and the German Romantics, poetry is ‘a medium of unification, reconciliation and love.’ The poem’s capacity to find an image of the whole in an apparently discrete object serves as a kind of promise of the ultimate unity of part and whole, finite and infinite.
This utopian horizon is intimately bound up with the nature of poetry as a non-purposive activity. Because it has no instrumental aim, nothing in particular ‘to do’, it is capacious enough to draw into itself all of the human and non-human world, what Novalis calls ‘the world family’, without exclusion or exception.
Part of the beauty of this utopic vision is surely its impossibility, and Han knows better than to propose a programme for its realisation – not least because this would require an instrumental shift from the contemplative to the active. But this impossibility leaves his work split between the unremitting darkness of the world’s reality, and the pure light of its ideal, with very little sense of any passage between the two sides of this split.
This yet-to-exist Nietzschean community of the inventive echoes the German poet Novalis’s utopian imagining of a ‘republic of the living’. Novalis’s ideal of poetry is far more than a discrete literary form. It is radically expansive. For Novalis and the German Romantics, poetry is ‘a medium of unification, reconciliation and love.’ The poem’s capacity to find an image of the whole in an apparently discrete object serves as a kind of promise of the ultimate unity of part and whole, finite and infinite.
This utopian horizon is intimately bound up with the nature of poetry as a non-purposive activity. Because it has no instrumental aim, nothing in particular ‘to do’, it is capacious enough to draw into itself all of the human and non-human world, what Novalis calls ‘the world family’, without exclusion or exception.
Part of the beauty of this utopic vision is surely its impossibility, and Han knows better than to propose a programme for its realisation – not least because this would require an instrumental shift from the contemplative to the active. But this impossibility leaves his work split between the unremitting darkness of the world’s reality, and the pure light of its ideal, with very little sense of any passage between the two sides of this split.
This gap between the hopelessness of the existing world and the messianic perfection of an imagined one hints at a significant, if also very interesting flaw in Han’s thinking and writing, namely its tendency towards absolutist descriptions and conceptions. ‘The time in which there was such a thing as the Other is over.’ ‘The unconscious plays no part in depression.’ ‘[A] total abolition of remoteness is underway.’ These statements, each from a different book, have in common their foreclosure of any space through which another experience might intrude – a space where one might hear intimations of the Other or the unconscious or remoteness.
In this regard, they risk colluding with the suffocating conditions they describe. Han’s prose can read at times as though impelled by an inverse smoothness, a pure negativity that crowds out the possibility of otherness with a determination that mirrors uncannily the compulsory positivity he decries. In other words, it is liable to merge into the very malaise it’s lamenting.
When set alongside two of his most insistent and important reference points, Benjamin and Adorno, it is hard to avoid contrasting the minute and exacting attention that those earlier writers bestow on individual phenomena with the summary judgment with which Han despatches them. One need not have any special affinity for Koons, for instance, to notice the sheer finality of Han’s condemnation of his art. Indeed, he doesn’t differentiate between any of Koons’s works, as though each was too bereft of singularity to warrant close analysis: ‘[Hi]s art,’ writes Han, ‘does not require any judgement, interpretation or hermeneutics, no reflection or thought.’ Koons’s floating basketballs, gargantuan animal topiary pieces and pornographic self-portraiture are only instantiations of the same banality. As Han puts it: ‘Koons says that an observer of his work should only emit a simple “Wow”.’
But pull Koons’s work away from Han’s unforgiving judgment, and it is far from clear that it abolishes the negative. Is the mirrored surface of his featureless bear silhouette merely a smooth affirmation of pop-cultural positivity? Doesn’t its very blankness present to us as an impermeable opacity? In one sense, it bears out Han’s observation that Koons’s art refuses interpretation, but not in the sense that Han himself intends. Doesn’t the sheer thisness of the piece, its silent mockery of any symbolic decoding, constitute its own negativity?
Recalling that startle of recognition in my first encounter with The Burnout Society only amplifies my suspicion that Han’s polemic has become formulaic and, as such, a species of the very inattention he decries. I find myself wishing he would desist at least once from broad-brush essays on the fundamental logic of large-scale social conditions and instead zero in on a single object or phenomenon – an artwork, a place, a person. If attunement to otherness is disappearing, why not seek to revive it rather than mourn it?
In this regard, they risk colluding with the suffocating conditions they describe. Han’s prose can read at times as though impelled by an inverse smoothness, a pure negativity that crowds out the possibility of otherness with a determination that mirrors uncannily the compulsory positivity he decries. In other words, it is liable to merge into the very malaise it’s lamenting.
When set alongside two of his most insistent and important reference points, Benjamin and Adorno, it is hard to avoid contrasting the minute and exacting attention that those earlier writers bestow on individual phenomena with the summary judgment with which Han despatches them. One need not have any special affinity for Koons, for instance, to notice the sheer finality of Han’s condemnation of his art. Indeed, he doesn’t differentiate between any of Koons’s works, as though each was too bereft of singularity to warrant close analysis: ‘[Hi]s art,’ writes Han, ‘does not require any judgement, interpretation or hermeneutics, no reflection or thought.’ Koons’s floating basketballs, gargantuan animal topiary pieces and pornographic self-portraiture are only instantiations of the same banality. As Han puts it: ‘Koons says that an observer of his work should only emit a simple “Wow”.’
But pull Koons’s work away from Han’s unforgiving judgment, and it is far from clear that it abolishes the negative. Is the mirrored surface of his featureless bear silhouette merely a smooth affirmation of pop-cultural positivity? Doesn’t its very blankness present to us as an impermeable opacity? In one sense, it bears out Han’s observation that Koons’s art refuses interpretation, but not in the sense that Han himself intends. Doesn’t the sheer thisness of the piece, its silent mockery of any symbolic decoding, constitute its own negativity?
Recalling that startle of recognition in my first encounter with The Burnout Society only amplifies my suspicion that Han’s polemic has become formulaic and, as such, a species of the very inattention he decries. I find myself wishing he would desist at least once from broad-brush essays on the fundamental logic of large-scale social conditions and instead zero in on a single object or phenomenon – an artwork, a place, a person. If attunement to otherness is disappearing, why not seek to revive it rather than mourn it?
Acontece que há uma tensão na obra de Han que pelo menos aponta para essa possibilidade, a saber, seus escritos sobre a tradição cultural na qual ele nasceu. No reveladoramente intitulado Absence (2007), Han descreve o modo muito diferente de identidade e relacionamento nutrido na filosofia, cultura e linguagem do Extremo Oriente. Em contraste com o apego tenaz do eu ocidental ao seu próprio desejo, Han apresenta um eu que busca seu próprio "esvaziamento" - "Um andarilho é sem um eu, sem um eu, sem um nome". Onde a substancialidade do eu ocidental requer sua diferenciação máxima do mundo - o poder divino de ser si mesmo - o eu oriental visa uma espécie de fusão oceânica com o mundo.
O adjetivo marinho não é escolhido arbitrariamente. Han relata o conto do filósofo chinês Zhuangzi do século IV a.C. sobre um peixe gigante que vive em um mar escuro do norte e se transforma em um pássaro gigante. Se esse peixe-pássaro não fosse gigante, ele teria que reunir uma individualidade heróica e reunir toda a força de sua vontade contra o céu e o mar. Mas seu tamanho colossal, em vez disso, permite que ele seja suportado sem esforço pela força das ondas e ventos. Por analogia, a mente que se coloca contra o mundo vê seu relacionamento apenas em termos de oposição. Se o mundo é um mar hostil e autoritário, então a mente é um pequeno peixe em apuros lutando para reunir todo o seu poder e astúcia para evitar ser encalhado por suas correntes. Mas se o peixe for proporcional em escala ao mar, ele pode ceder em vez de lutar contra as ondas: "Se a mente é o mar, o mar não representa ameaça".
Essa diferença na base filosófica da individualidade se estende a diferenças culturais mais amplas entre o Ocidente e o Oriente, por exemplo, as atmosferas de suas respectivas cidades. As cidades ocidentais tendem a estabelecer limites claros entre diferentes tipos de espaço, criando "uma sensação de estreiteza". Enquanto isso, apesar do barulho e do congestionamento, os espaços e os habitantes das cidades orientais geralmente fluem uns para os outros para viver em uma espécie de proximidade amigável: "Eles não têm muito a ver uns com os outros. Em vez disso, eles se esvaziam em uma proximidade indiferente".
Os rituais de saudação do Extremo Oriente expressam uma amizade igualmente generalizada e vazia. Quando o indivíduo ocidental olha nos olhos do outro e agarra sua mão, ele está falando como um eu limitado e diferenciado para outro. Isso cria o que Han chama de "espaço dialógico" completo, transbordando com olhares, pessoas e palavras.
A reverência oriental tem a intenção de esvaziar a saudação de conteúdo, de tornar tanto seu sujeito quanto seu objeto ausentes um do outro. Os participantes de uma reverência "não olham para lugar nenhum", como se não cumprimentassem ninguém em particular: "A gramática da reverência não tem nominativo ou acusativo, nem sujeito subjugador nem objeto subjugado, nem ativo nem passivo... Essa ausência de casos constitui sua simpatia". Essa é uma simpatia distinta das paixões da amizade, onde o amigo é escolhido com base em sua singularidade. Trazer outro para a zona inclusiva da minha amizade implica uma exclusão concomitante, uma escolha da companhia e do amor desta pessoa em vez daquela. A simpatia do ritual da reverência cifra, em vez disso, uma universalidade radical - um amor aliviado de qualquer preconceito da subjetividade.
Han acredita que a tradição romântica alemã é portadora de uma concepção semelhante, embora distinta, de simpatia universal, na qual todos os seres humanos podem se tornar "concidadãos em uma república dos vivos". É uma concepção que media entre a simpatia indiferente do Oriente e a amizade apaixonada do Ocidente, entre a universalidade e a singularidade dos outros.
Parece-me que, se a tradição alemã carrega o ideal preferido de universalidade de Han, é o pensamento, a linguagem e a cultura do Extremo Oriente que permitem uma apreciação mais lúdica e viva do particular, insinuando sombra e cor em prosa que pode parecer cada vez mais monocromática em tom. Podemos pensar nessas duas vertentes como a interação do poeta e do consertador ao mostrar um prazer evidente na observação e associação. Para citar Han, a massa de tempura transforma pedaços de vegetais ou peixes em "uma aglomeração crocante de vazio"; no jardim de pedras Zen, "a natureza brilha no vazio e na ausência". Ao contrário do vazio do Ocidente consumista que Han condena por ser imposto de cima por mestres corporativos, o vazio do jardim Zen ou das cidades do Extremo Oriente é orgânico para a cultura.
A entrevista de Han para o El Pais de 2023 termina com sua sugestão, depois que o gravador foi desligado, de que ele e o entrevistador se mudem para seu restaurante italiano favorito. Comendo um prato de sopa de peixe, ele relaxa, brinca, tira todo o prazer de uma conversa fluida que parecia ausente na configuração formal da entrevista. O que tal infusão de vitalidade e brincadeira poderia fazer por sua escrita? Han provavelmente objetaria que tais lampejos de positividade apenas atenuariam a ponta negativa de seu pensamento. Mas não posso deixar de me perguntar se o oposto é o caso.
Josh Cohen é um psicanalista em consultório particular em Londres. Ele é professor emérito de teoria literária moderna na Goldsmiths University of London. Seus livros mais recentes incluem Losers (2021) e All the Rage: Why Anger Drives the World (2024).
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