Cultural Critique

Byung-Chul Han writes short books, lots of them, in uncharacteristically short-sentenced German. He goes quickly, his favored mode being the assertion, shorn of almost any argumentation. In just the past few years, a number of Han's books have begun appearing in English translation, including Topology of Violence, originally published as Topologie der Gewalt in 2011. The books translated so far come from Han's work over the past decade, during which time he has increasingly focused on diagnosing the contemporary condition. The news he brings is not good; in fact, it is rather grim. In what Han calls the late-modern achievement-society (die spätmoderne Leistungsgesellschaft), the lives of its subjects "are like those of the undead": doped up and depressed, they are "too alive to die and too dead to live" (130/170).¹ This is Han's conclusion to Topology of Violence. Readers of Han's The Burnout Society (the first of his books to appear in English translation) would not be mistaken in having thought these the concluding words to that book for the simple reason that they are.² Despite the shared conclusion (and, I suppose, the numerous other passages repeated between the two books), we can still see Topology of Violence as the other book's sequel. In it Han furthers his reflections on die Müdigkeitsgesellschaft (literally the fatigue- or tiredness-society) in the direction of a genealogy of violence mentioned but not so fully developed in the previous book. Han's genealogy presents three successive topologies marked by an increasing internalization of violence, such that in our late-modern burnout [End Page 207] or achievement society (they are the same thing) violence no longer comes upon the subjected from an external force. Violence has been completely self-internalized by a new achievement-subject for whom this internal violence now coincides with what was once the opposite of violence, namely freedom. We feel most free when we are most thoroughly thrashing ourselves. And not in a good way.

Han begins Topology of Violence with the less-than-genealogical claim that there is always violence. There are things, he says, that never disappear, violence (die Gewalt) being one of them (vii/7). The claim is not historical—that, for example, we can empirically disclose the presence of violence in all historical periods or in all human societies—but ontological, violence having the attribute of not-being-able-to disappear presumably because, like Anselem's God, its essence involves necessary existence. However, unlike God, who is always the same, being perfect and therefore immutable, Han's violence can actualize itself variously—more like the devil, it takes on "its outward form according to the social constellation at hand" ("verändert sich ihre Erscheinungsform," it itself changes its form of appearance) (vii/7). Counter, then, to what some have claimed (Han's exemplar is the German literary scholar Jan Philip Reemtsma), Han contends that modernity is not at all characterized by an aversion to or a delegitimation of violence. While Han agrees that violence directly enacted by an external force upon a body, raw violence that we can see, is not as prevalent or dominant as it once was—that it has indeed been delegitimated such that today we (more on who this is later) reject every form of physical violence ("man heute jede Form der körperlichen Gewalt ablehnt")—Han nonetheless insists that violence is still very much with us, not at all having decreased, persisting today in ever more subtle, systemic forms—and is possibly, Hans says, even more fatal today (womöglich fataler), which suggests violence able to increase or decrease in degree, to be better in some forms and worse in others (viii/8; 131 n.1/173 n.1; 148 n.53/187 n.54).

So we remain in the midst of violence; it has gone nowhere, and no amount of social progress will get rid of it. But there is...