“I’m dynamite!” This was the explosive self-affirmation with which Nietzsche revealed his revolutionary status in German philosophy. In its most external aspect, it dynamited – in a phrasal style, in short and clear phrases that would fit perfectly into the ever-burning networks today – of the linguistic absurdity and impenetrability of one of the primordial axes of European thought. Byung-Chul Han (Seoul, South Korea, 1959) would be the potential heir of the Nietzschian revolution today because of his ability to place himself at the center of philosophical thought and the far-reaching projection of his work, which became a publishing phenomenon. But also for the clarity of their analysis this time; The most recent example is the book Crisis of Narrative, in which he explores in depth what will be the collapse of postmodernity.
Its editors introduce Han as the most read philosopher of the day. It probably fits that label, which has tremendous value with its novelty shelves full of covers offering the false promise of philosophy as consolation and personal growth. Among the twenty books he published, the books that glorify him are those in which he maps the contemporary world with precise and concise prose that is well suited to the conditions of the reader facing the present, with titles such as The Fatigue Society. or In the Herd. Han’s style, with a certain French touch, is shaped by seemingly light essays developed very assertively, without excessive argument, like a distillation of the deep thought revealed in the three sentences he claims to write every day. This set of books does not constitute a corpus in the classical sense, it lacks the pretensions of system, but they intersect with the same guiding idea of removing the deception of the world by revealing the nerves of time.
The South Korean writer, a philosopher with a Heideggerian matrix who puts more emphasis on his success by overcoming the formal rigidity of a certain German philosophy, blends with the very moment he speaks through this synthetic and cutting format. It is none other than the postmodernity that surrounds us. Far from being a philosophical concept, postmodernity has been demonstrated for what it is: the cultural form of late capitalism, so to speak, as the leading contemporary critic Fredric Jameson has described it – invoking a term already coined by the Frankfurt School. more than thirty years ago. “Postmodernity is not the cultural domination of an entirely new social order (…) it is merely the reflection and concomitant part of another systemic modification of capitalism itself,” he explains in The Theory of Postmodernity .
According to Jameson, postmodernity consists of “a radical change in the public sphere: the emergence of a new realm of imaginary reality, both fictional (narrative) and factual”; it has “become semi-public”, unlike “classical culture”. It is autonomous and floats above reality.” Whereas in that classical period reality existed independently of that “cultural, emotional and romantic sphere (…) today it seems to have lost that separate form of existence.” In other words, postmodernity preferably leads to the loss of the real reference which the story replaces. reality, both collectively and individually, will be reduced to a narrative structure, from science or economics to philosophy. And in this process of narrativization, all goes well. In Jameson’s words, very close to the nursery rhyme, “the return of narrative as the narrative of the end of narratives.” And as a literary critic, he knows exactly what he’s talking about.
Byung-Chul Han’s work also develops within this conceptual framework, and he would bring us to the brink of the end of this time with The Crisis of Narrative. This crisis is a result of the “inflationary use of narratives”. That the world is full of stories to replace other ways of interpretation or analysis demonstrates both the success and misery of the postmodern. Here’s the story: To paraphrase Clint Eastwood’s ass-ass character: everyone has one. This dominant form of narrative constitutes a powerful tool of control, as Christian Salmon makes clear in Storytelling (The machine for making stories and shaping minds). Salmon demonstrated the close connection between this storytelling and the unstoppable expansion of neoliberalism since the 1980s. “The Empire has appropriated the story in an incredible robbery of the imaginary,” he declared almost fifteen years ago in his widely influential book. Even then, he predicted that “the confusion of the story idea could render the concept useless”; It’s a problem Han is very much facing right now, and for him “narrative is indistinguishable from advertising. “That’s what the current crisis of narrative is all about.”