Byung-Chul Han b. 1959

Byung-Chul Han is a Korean-born German philosopher and cultural theorist, professor at the Berlin University of the Arts, whose short and aphoristic books have become widely read diagnostic essays on contemporary digital society. The Burnout Society argued that the disciplinary society of the twentieth century has given way to a society of self-exploiting achievement subjects, while The Transparency Society and Psychopolitics anatomized the ways in which neoliberal data capitalism captures freedom itself in the form of voluntary self-disclosure. His later books, including Saving Beauty and The Disappearance of Rituals, defend the slow, the silent, and the ritual against the regime of acceleration and visibility.

Byung-Chul Han was born at Seoul in 1959 and trained as a metallurgical engineer in South Korea before moving to Germany in the early 1980s, taking his master's and doctorate at the University of Freiburg in 1994 with a thesis on Heidegger's concept of mood, published as Heideggers Herz. He habilitated at Basel in 2000 with a study of Hegel and the question of power. After teaching at Basel and at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, where he was professor of philosophy and cultural studies, he settled in Berlin and from the early 2010s has worked as an independent author and lecturer.

His many short books, originally written in German and widely translated, include Müdigkeitsgesellschaft (The Burnout Society, 2010), Topologie der Gewalt (Topology of Violence, 2011), Transparenzgesellschaft (The Transparency Society, 2012), Agonie des Eros (The Agony of Eros, 2012), Im Schwarm (In the Swarm, 2013), Psychopolitik (Psychopolitics, 2014), Die Errettung des Schönen (Saving Beauty, 2015), Vom Verschwinden der Rituale (The Disappearance of Rituals, 2019), Undinge (Non-things, 2021), and Vita Contemplativa (2022).

Han diagnoses late capitalism as an 'achievement society' in which the disciplinary subject of Foucault has given way to a self-exploiting subject of performance whose characteristic illnesses are depression, burnout, and attention deficit. He has argued that digital media dissolve the otherness of the other, the friction of the negative, and the temporal architecture of ritual, and has called, in a Heideggerian and Daoist key, for a renewed contemplative life against the smoothness of the transparent and the swarm.