Top 35 Byung-Chul Han Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “One feels free in relationships of love and friendship. It is not the absence of ties, but ties themselves which set us free. Freedom is a word which pertains to relations par excellence. Without hold there is no freedom.”

— Byung-Chul Han

2. “In social networks, the function of “friends” is primarily to heighten narcissism by granting attention, as consumers, to the ego exhibited as a commodity.”

— Byung-Chul Han

3. “Culture presumes an environment in which deep attention is possible. Increasingly, such immersive reflection is being displaced by an entirely different form of attention: hyperattention.”

— Byung-Chul Han

4. “Today we live in a world that is very poor in interruption; “betweens” and “between-times” are lacking.”

— Byung-Chul Han

5. “The complaint of the depressive individual, “Nothing is possible,” can only occur in a society that thinks, “Nothing is impossible.” No-longer-being-able-to-be-able leads to destructive self-reproach and auto-aggression. The achievement-subject finds itself fighting with itself. The depressive has been wounded by internalized war. Depression is the sickness of a society that suffers from excessive positivity. It reflects a humanity waging war on itself.”

— Byung-Chul Han

6. “If sleep represents the high point of bodily relaxation, deep boredom is the peak of mental relaxation. A purely hectic rush produces nothing new. It reproduces and accelerates what is already available.”

— Byung-Chul Han

7. “Today, everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise. People are now master and slave in one. Even class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself.”

— Byung-Chul Han

8. “Now, under the neoliberal regime of auto-exploitation, people are turning their aggression against themselves. This auto-aggressivity means that the exploited are not inclined to revolution so much as depression.”

— Byung-Chul Han

9. “The violence of positivity does not deprive, it saturates; it does not exclude, it exhausts.”

— Byung-Chul Han

10. “In contrast, the occupants of today’s digital panopticon actively communicate with each other and willingly expose themselves. That is, they collaborate in the digital panopticon’s operations.”

— Byung-Chul Han

11. “The complaint of the depressive individual, “Nothing is possible,” can only occur in a society that thinks, “Nothing is impossible.”

— Byung-Chul Han

12. “The age of haste, its cinematographic succession of point-like presences, has no access to beauty or to truth. Only in lingering contemplation, even an ascetic restraint, do things unveil their beauty, their fragrant essence. It consists of temporal sedimentations emitting a phosphorescent glow.”

— Byung-Chul Han

13. “For human beings to be able to act freely, the future must be open. However, Big Data is making it possible to predict human behaviour.”

— Byung-Chul Han

14. “Nietzsche already observed that, after the death of God, health rose to divine status. If a horizon of meaning extended beyond bare life, the cult of health would not be able to achieve this degree of absoluteness.”

— Byung-Chul Han

15. “What proves problematic is not individual competition per se, but rather its self-referentiality, which escalates into absolute competition. That is, the achievement-subject competes with itself; it succumbs to the destructive compulsion to outdo itself over and over, to jump over its own shadow. This self-constraint, which poses as freedom, has deadly results.”

— Byung-Chul Han

16. “Deep tiredness loosens the strictures of identity. Things flicker, twinkle, and vibrate at the edges. They grow less determinate and more porous and lose some of their resolution. This particular in-difference lends them an aura of friendliness. Rigid delimitation with respect to one’s surroundings is suspended:.”

— Byung-Chul Han

17. “According to Ehrenberg, depression spreads when the commandments and prohibitions of disciplinary society yield to self-responsibility and initiative. In reality, it is not the excess of responsibility and initiative that makes one sick, but the imperative to achieve: the new commandment of late-modern labor society.”

— Byung-Chul Han

18. “Un exceso de velocidad destruye el sentido. Una velocidad demasiado baja, en cambio, genera un atasco que impide cualquier movimiento.”

— Byung-Chul Han

19. “As the entrepreneur of its own self, the neoliberal subject has no capacity for relationships with others that might be free of purpose. Nor do entrepreneurs know what purpose-free friendship would even look like.”

— Byung-Chul Han

20. “If language is deprived of what is indirect in it, its nature approaches that of a scream or order. Friendliness and politeness are also based on the circuitous and indirect. The orientation of violence, by contrast, is towards directness.”

— Byung-Chul Han

21. “Neoliberalism represents a highly efficient, indeed an intelligent, system for exploiting freedom. Everything that belongs to practices and expressive forms of liberty –emotion, play and communication –comes to be exploited.”

— Byung-Chul Han

22. “The history of violence culminates in this merging of victim and perpetrator, of master and slave, of freedom and violence.”

— Byung-Chul Han

23. “In the course of general acceleration and hyperactivity we are also losing the capacity for rage.”

— Byung-Chul Han

24. “Love of self is still determined by negativity insofar as it devalues and wards off the Other in favor of the Own.”

— Byung-Chul Han

25. “Frente a la infinitud del tiempo, la breve vida humana es una nada.”

— Byung-Chul Han

26. “Today, even the so-called immigrant is not an immunological Other, not a foreigner in the strong sense, who poses a real danger or of whom one is afraid. Immigrants and refugees are more likely to be perceived as burdens than as threats.”

— Byung-Chul Han

27. “Hojas de flor flotan al viento. Con cada una envejece la rama del ciruelo. BUSON.”

— Byung-Chul Han

28. “So long as what is foreign does not attract unwelcome attention, immune defenses ignore it. It follows that the biological immune system is more hospitable than previously assumed. That is, it does not harbor xenophobia. As such, it proves more intelligent than human societies. Xenophobia is a pathologically escalated immunoreaction that proves damaging to one’s own development.”

— Byung-Chul Han

29. “Concern for the good life, which also includes life as a member of the community, is yielding more and more to the simple concern for survival.”

— Byung-Chul Han

30. “Big Data has announced the end of the person who possesses free will.”

— Byung-Chul Han

31. “The violence of positivity does not deprive, it saturates; it does not exclude, it exhausts. That is why it proves inaccessible to unmediated perception.”

— Byung-Chul Han

32. “Since there is no possibility of relieving debt and guilt, the state of unfreedom perpetuates itself: ‘A vast sense of guilt that is unable to find relief seizes on the cult, not to atone for this guilt but to make it universal.”

— Byung-Chul Han

33. “Si la vida carece de toda forma de unidad de sentido, acaba a destiempo.”

— Byung-Chul Han

34. “La sociedad de trabajo y rendimiento no es ninguna sociedad libre.”

— Byung-Chul Han

35. “The new human type, standing exposed to excessive positivity without any defense, lacks all sovereignty.”

— Byung-Chul Han

36. “It is not the imperative only to belong to oneself, but the pressure to achieve that causes exhaustive depression.”

— Byung-Chul Han

37. “As consumers, today’s voters have no real interest in politics – in actively shaping the community. They possess neither the will nor the ability to participate in communal, political action. They react only passively to politics: grumbling and complaining, as consumers do about a commodity or service they do not like.”

— Byung-Chul Han

38. “First and foremost, depression is creative fatigue and exhausted ability.”

— Byung-Chul Han

39. “The negativity of otherness or foreignness is de-interiorized and transformed into the positivity of communicable and consumable difference: ‘diversity’.”

— Byung-Chul Han