Byung-Chul Han
Story Stream
The Winter of Civilization March 03, 2025
I came across Byung-Chul Han towards the end of the previous decade, while writing a book about the pleasures and discontents of inactivity. My first researches into our culture of overwork and perpetual stimulation soon turned up Han’s The Burnout S...
The Business—and Politics—of Storytelling August 26, 2024
Byung-Chul Han is one of most popular figures in contemporary German philosophy. More a derivative than an original thinker, he applies ideas of Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, etc., to such facets of modern life as professional bur...
Signifying Nothing: Against Byung-Chul Han April 30, 2024
Just as political language both describes and expresses political forces, every public intellectual is both a doctor and a patient in the mental hospital of contemporary life. Defined against each other as products in a cornered market, each combines...
The Internet’s New Favorite Philosopher April 19, 2024
“The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark,” James Salter wrote in his 1975 novel, “Light Years.” An encounter with a single “slender” line of writing, as he put it, can send a reader spinning off on a new trajectory; her l...
Phono Sapiens April 15, 2024
My friend J, a computer programmer, once convinced his former roommate—also a programmer—to watch the Japanese art film Asako I & II, about a woman who falls in love with two identical-looking but different men. J’s roommate sat patiently through thi...
The Disenchantment of the World March 22, 2024
The children’s author Paul Maar tells the story of a boy who cannot tell stories. When his little sister, Susanne, is struggling to fall asleep, tossing and turning in her bed, she asks Konrad to tell her a story. He declines in a huff. Konrad’s pare...
