Born in South Korea, Byung-Chul Han has taught and written about philosophy at German universities. Over the past decade, his books have been appearing in English translation at an accelerating clip. They are the shortest books, with the shortest sentences, of any philosopher or cultural theorist known to me, and they appear at such a pace that I hesitate to describe Vita Contemplativa: In Praise of Inactivity (Polity) as his latest title in English, since another will be out within about a week of this column’s publication.
The dimensions of his books—most of them might be called pamphlets—seem in tension with the scale of the issues they take up. Most of them (and all of the ones I have read) analyze the confluence of neoliberal order and cybercultural chaos. Those forces inspire much public anxiety and complaint, of course, and Han brings to the discussion wide and deep reading (chiefly in European philosophy and literature) and shows a knack for the trenchant comment.
Published in Germany in 2013 and issued in translation by MIT Press four years later, Han’s In the Swarm: Digital Prospects has flashes of insight that verge on the prophetic. Extrapolating from the digital media environment circa 2010, Han wrote that it “heralds the end of the politician in the strong sense—that is, politicians who insist on a standpoint and, instead of walking in line with constituents, walk ahead of them with a vision. The future, as the time of the political, is disappearing.” (The frequent use of italics is characteristic of Han’s style, as is the brisk syntax.)
In the same text, he cited the German jurist (and important Hitler enabler) Carl Schmitt’s notorious aphorism “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” Han updated it for the 21st century: “Sovereign is he who commands the shitstorms of the Net.”
Toward the volume’s conclusion, Han posed a not-entirely-rhetorical question: “What kind of politics—what kind of democracy—is still conceivable today, given that civil society is vanishing, given the mounting egoization and narcissification of human existence?” Whatever the answer to that question may turn out to be, we seem to be living through it.
Vita Contemplativa, the book at hand, pursues a line of thought tangential to Han’s concern with “egoization and narcissification” as tendencies in digital culture. Han has written elsewhere that the culture of narcissism fuels a relentless drive to self-exploitation. “Always refashioning and reinventing ourselves” under the promptings of market and media, we pursue “compulsive achievement and optimization” aided by digital monitoring of our performance—whether it’s “likes” or steps taken per day, or impact factor. This leaves 21st-century subjectivity self-absorbed but not self-determining.
Han’s criticism of these tendencies is not delivered as moral admonition: They are functional within a system operating to maximize its own speed, efficiency and profitability—a system fashioning us in accord with its own imperatives.
“Because we look at life exclusively from the perspective of work and performance,” Han writes in Vita Contemplativa, “we view inactivity as a deficiency that must be overcome as quickly as possible.” Setting aside time for leisure and relaxation is no escape from this rule.
“Because it serves the purpose of respite from work,” he writes, leisure time “remains tied to the logic of work. As derivative of work, it represents a functional element of production … ‘Leisure time’ lacks both intensity of life and contemplation. It is time that we kill so as not to get bored. It is not free, living time; it is dead time.”
The contrast between “dead time” and “free, living time” that Han emphasizes in the new book distinguishes it from his earlier criticisms of digital/neoliberal culture. Against “the constant compulsion to increase performance” and “the universal ability that makes everything accessible, calculable, controllable, steerable, manageable, and consumable,” Vita Contemplativa advocates for inactivity as a human capability.
Rather than a symptom of personal crisis or some failure of the will, inaction as Han conceives it is challenging as well as diverse in its possible manifestations. It includes receptivity to intense aesthetic experience; the “holy, festive calmness” possible in communal celebrations; boredom at intensities that amount to an altered state of consciousness; and moments of facing the natural world as a “you” rather than an “it.”
None of these examples necessarily count as a variety of religious experience, but bringing them under the heading of “contemplation” is at least somewhat spirituality adjacent. Han is reportedly a Catholic and has studied theology, and he has an interest in Zen Buddhism.
That is not to suggest that any sort of proselytizing is underway. Vita Contemplativa is part of the author’s ongoing secular critique of contemporary culture and society—conducted with constant reference to Heidegger, Arendt, Foucault and Agamben, among others, but as conversational partners (and sometimes sparring partners) rather than as figures under examination. As, in effect, a book on meditation without advice on how to do it, the audience will be self-selecting, which is as it should be.