Byung-Chul Han

Byung-Chul Han (born 1959 in Seoul) is a philosopher and essayist who was born in South Korea and writes in German. He teaches in Berlin, and his work is among the most widely read contemporary philosophy in Spanish-speaking countries. His writing focuses on the critique of neoliberal capitalism, the culture of work, technology and the demand for transparency.

He first studied metallurgy at Korea University but gave it up and moved to Germany at 22, without knowing German or having read much philosophy. He studied philosophy, German literature and Catholic theology in Freiburg and Munich. In 1994 he earned his doctorate in Freiburg with a dissertation on Martin Heidegger, centred on the notion of mood. In 2000 he joined the University of Basel, where he completed his habilitation, and he later taught in Karlsruhe. Since 2012 he has taught philosophy and cultural studies at the Berlin University of the Arts.

Han has published more than thirty books in a compact, aphoristic style that rarely argues step by step and constantly engages other thinkers. In The Burnout Society he describes a world where the danger is no longer prohibition but an excess of positivity: people exploit themselves and fall into depression, burnout and exhaustion. In The Transparency Society he argues that the demand to expose everything erodes trust, secrecy and privacy. Psychopolitics describes a power that seduces rather than represses, and later books such as Saving Beauty and The Expulsion of the Other extend these ideas to art and to our relation with otherness. His notion of shanzhai, the creative copying found in China, offers a counterpoint to Western ideas of originality.

His influence is strong in debates about technology, social media and mental health, though critics find his sententious and sweeping style open to objection. He is best read as a diagnosis of the present rather than as a closed system.