Evaluation of Byung-Chul Han’s “Vita Contemplativa” (opinion)

Born in South Korea, Byung-Chul Han has taught and written about philosophy at German universities. Over the previous decade, his books have been showing in English translation at an accelerating clip. They’re the shortest books, with the shortest sentences, of any thinker or cultural theorist recognized to me, they usually seem at such a tempo that I hesitate to explain Vita Contemplativa: In Reward of Inactivity (Polity) as his newest title in English, since one other will likely be out inside a couple of week of this column’s publication.

The size of his books—most of them is perhaps known as pamphlets—appear in rigidity with the size of the problems they take up. Most of them (and all the ones I’ve learn) analyze the confluence of neoliberal order and cybercultural chaos. These forces encourage a lot public nervousness and criticism, after all, and Han brings to the dialogue large and deep studying (mainly in European philosophy and literature) and exhibits a knack for the trenchant remark.

Printed in Germany in 2013 and issued in translation by MIT Press 4 years later, Han’s Within the Swarm: Digital Prospects has flashes of perception that verge on the prophetic. Extrapolating from the digital media atmosphere circa 2010, Han wrote that it “heralds the tip of the politician within the robust sense—that’s, politicians who insist on a standpoint and, as an alternative of strolling according to constituents, stroll forward of them with a imaginative and prescient. The future, because the time of the political, is disappearing.” (The frequent use of italics is attribute of Han’s type, as is the brisk syntax.)

In the identical textual content, he cited the German jurist (and vital Hitler enabler) Carl Schmitt’s infamous aphorism “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” Han up to date it for the Twenty first century: “Sovereign is he who instructions the shitstorms of the Internet.”

Towards the quantity’s conclusion, Han posed a not-entirely-rhetorical query: “What sort of politics—what sort of democracy—continues to be conceivable in the present day, on condition that civil society is vanishing, given the mounting egoization and narcissification of human existence?” Regardless of the reply to that query could transform, we appear to be dwelling by way of it.

Vita Contemplativa, the guide at hand, pursues a line of thought tangential to Han’s concern with “egoization and narcissification” as tendencies in digital tradition. Han has written elsewhere that the tradition of narcissism fuels a relentless drive to self-exploitation. “At all times refashioning and reinventing ourselves” underneath the promptings of market and media, we pursue “compulsive achievement and optimization” aided by digital monitoring of our efficiency—whether or not it’s “likes” or steps taken per day, or influence issue. This leaves Twenty first-century subjectivity self-absorbed however not self-determining.

Han’s criticism of those tendencies will not be delivered as ethical admonition: They’re practical inside a system working to maximise its personal velocity, effectivity and profitability—a system fashioning us in accord with its personal imperatives.

“As a result of we have a look at life solely from the angle of labor and efficiency,” Han writes in Vita Contemplativa, “we view inactivity as a deficiency that have to be overcome as shortly as potential.” Setting apart time for leisure and rest isn’t any escape from this rule.

“As a result of it serves the aim of respite from work,” he writes, leisure time “stays tied to the logic of labor. As spinoff of labor, it represents a practical ingredient of manufacturing … ‘Leisure time’ lacks each depth of life and contemplation. It’s time that we kill in order to not get bored. It’s not free, dwelling time; it’s lifeless time.”

The distinction between “lifeless time” and “free, dwelling time” that Han emphasizes within the new guide distinguishes it from his earlier criticisms of digital/neoliberal tradition. Towards “the fixed compulsion to extend efficiency” and “the common potential that makes every thing accessible, calculable, controllable, steerable, manageable, and consumable,” Vita Contemplativa advocates for inactivity as a human functionality.

Reasonably than a symptom of non-public disaster or some failure of the need, inaction as Han conceives it’s difficult in addition to numerous in its potential manifestations. It consists of receptivity to intense aesthetic expertise; the “holy, festive calmness” potential in communal celebrations; boredom at intensities that quantity to an altered state of consciousness; and moments of going through the pure world as a “you” moderately than an “it.”

None of those examples essentially rely as quite a lot of spiritual expertise, however bringing them underneath the heading of “contemplation” is a minimum of considerably spirituality adjoining. Han is reportedly a Catholic and has studied theology, and he has an curiosity in Zen Buddhism.

That’s not to recommend that any form of proselytizing is underway. Vita Contemplativa is a part of the creator’s ongoing secular critique of latest tradition and society—performed with fixed reference to Heidegger, Arendt, Foucault and Agamben, amongst others, however as conversational companions (and generally sparring companions) moderately than as figures underneath examination. As, in impact, a guide on meditation with out recommendation on do it, the viewers will likely be self-selecting, which is correctly.