Byung-Chul Han Quotes on Freedom
Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society (Müdigkeitsgesellschaft, 2010), Psychopolitics (2014), and a steady stream of short books in the same vein give contemporary continental philosophy one of its most widely read diagnoses of late-capitalist freedom. The principal claim is that the disciplinary society Foucault analyzed has given way to an achievement society in which the subject exploits itself voluntarily under the banner of freedom and self-realization — and that the resulting pathologies (depression, burnout, attention fragmentation) are the signature ills of a regime in which external coercion has been internalized as the imperative to perform. The framework, drawing on Heidegger, Adorno, and East Asian philosophical sources, shapes a popular continental engagement with the digital, neoliberal, and attention-economy conditions of the early twenty-first century.
Quotes
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Attributed to Byung-Chul Han:
“The achievement subject exploits itself; it is at once master and slave in one person.”
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Attributed to Byung-Chul Han:
“Power that operates through freedom is the most efficient form of power.”
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“Violence and freedom are the two endpoints on the scale of power.”
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“Power is not opposed to freedom. It is precisely freedom that distinguishes power from violence or coercion.”
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“Rather, power is most powerful, most stable, where it creates a feeling of freedom and where it does not need to resort to violence.”
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