{"title":"Books by Byung-Chul Han","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9780262537506","title":"Good Entertainment","description":"\u003cb\u003eA philosopher considers entertainment, in all its totalizing variety—infotainment, edutainment, servotainment—and traces the notion through Kant, Zen Buddhism, Heidegger, Kafka, and Rauschenberg.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eGood Entertainment\u003c\/i\u003e, Byung-Chul Han examines the notion of entertainment—its contemporary ubiquity, and its philosophical genealogy. Entertainment today, in all its totalizing variety, has an apparently infinite capacity for incorporation: infotainment, edutainment, servotainment, confrontainment. Entertainment is held up as a new paradigm, even a new credo for being—and yet, in the West, it has had inescapably negative connotations. Han traces Western ideas of entertainment, considering, among other things, the scandal that arose from the first performance of Bach's \u003ci\u003eSaint Matthew's Passion\u003c\/i\u003e (deemed too beautiful, not serious enough); Kant's idea of morality as duty and the entertainment value of moralistic literature; Heidegger's idea of the thinker as a man of pain; Kafka's hunger artist and the art of negativity, which takes pleasure in annihilation; and Robert Rauschenberg's refusal of the transcendent.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe history of the West, Han tells us, is a passion narrative, and passion appears as a killjoy. Achievement is the new formula for passion, and play is subordinated to production, gamified. And yet, he argues, at their core, passion and entertainment are not entirely different. The pure meaninglessness of entertainment is adjacent to the pure meaning of passion. The fool's smile resembles the pain-racked visage of \u003ci\u003eHomo doloris\u003c\/i\u003e. In \u003ci\u003eGood Entertainment\u003c\/i\u003e, Han explores this paradox.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56230984155509,"sku":"9780262537506","price":15.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780262537506_91ae7136-b51b-4754-b5a5-31362cc7a00e.jpg?v=1786012580"},{"product_id":"9780262533362","title":"In the Swarm","description":"\u003cb\u003eA prominent German thinker argues that—contrary to “Twitter Revolution” cheerleading—digital communication is destroying political discourse and political action.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe shitstorm represents an authentic phenomenon of digital communication.\u003cbr\u003e—from \u003ci\u003eIn the Swarm\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDigital communication and social media have taken over our lives. In this contrarian reflection on digitized life, Byung-Chul Han counters the cheerleaders for Twitter revolutions and Facebook activism by arguing that digital communication is in fact responsible for the disintegration of community and public space and is slowly eroding any possibility for real political action and meaningful political discourse. In the predigital, analog era, by the time an angry letter to the editor had been composed, mailed, and received, the immediate agitation had passed. Today, digital communication enables instantaneous, impulsive reaction, meant to express and stir up outrage on the spot. “The shitstorm,” writes Han, ”represents an authentic phenomenon of digital communication.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMeanwhile, the public, the senders and receivers of these communications have become a digital swarm—not a mass, or a crowd, or Negri and Hardt's antiquated notion of a “multitude,” but a set of isolated individuals incapable of forming a “we,” incapable of calling dominant power relations into question, incapable of formulating a future because of an obsession with the present. The digital swarm is a fragmented entity that can focus on individual persons only in order to make them an object of scandal.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHan, one of the most widely read philosophers in Europe today, describes a society in which information has overrun thought, in which the same algorithms are employed by Facebook, the stock market, and the intelligence services. Democracy is under threat because digital communication has made freedom and control indistinguishable. Big Brother has been succeeded by Big Data.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56232217182581,"sku":"9780262533362","price":13.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780262533362_896a22ba-e68d-442a-8669-f4b5c528e5b6.jpg?v=1786012540"},{"product_id":"9780804795098","title":"The Burnout Society","description":"Our competitive, service-oriented societies are taking a toll on the late-modern individual. Rather than improving life, multitasking, \"user-friendly\" technology, and the culture of convenience are producing disorders that range from depression to attention deficit disorder to borderline personality disorder. Byung-Chul Han interprets the spreading malaise as an inability to manage negative experiences in an age characterized by excessive positivity and the universal availability of people and goods. Stress and exhaustion are not just personal experiences, but social and historical phenomena as well. Denouncing a world in which every against-the-grain response can lead to further disempowerment, he draws on literature, philosophy, and the social and natural sciences to explore the stakes of sacrificing intermittent intellectual reflection for constant neural connection.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56294829752693,"sku":"9780804795098","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780804795098_828a54bd-4d03-4cb2-8ce0-2edf7e7a37be.jpg?v=1786015654"},{"product_id":"9780804794602","title":"The Transparency Society","description":"Transparency is the order of the day. It is a term, a slogan, that dominates public discourse about corruption and freedom of information. Considered crucial to democracy, it touches our political and economic lives as well as our private lives. Anyone can obtain information about anything. Everything—and everyone—has become transparent: unveiled or exposed by the apparatuses that exert a kind of collective control over the post-capitalist world.  Yet, transparency has a dark side that, ironically, has everything to do with a lack of mystery, shadow, and nuance. Behind the apparent accessibility of knowledge lies the disappearance of privacy, homogenization, and the collapse of trust. The anxiety to accumulate ever more information does not necessarily produce more knowledge or faith. Technology creates the illusion of total containment and the constant monitoring of information, but what we lack is adequate interpretation of the information. In this manifesto, Byung-Chul Han denounces transparency as a false ideal, the strongest and most pernicious of our contemporary mythologies.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56294869893493,"sku":"9780804794602","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780804794602_0329c9c0-ae18-46f1-92a3-130010b7fc0d.jpg?v=1786015653"},{"product_id":"9781509558018","title":"Vita Contemplativa","description":"In our busy and hurried lives, we are losing the ability to be inactive. Human existence becomes fully absorbed by activity – even leisure, treated as a respite from work, becomes part of the same logic. Intense life today means first of all more performance or more consumption. We have forgotten that it is precisely inactivity, which does not produce anything, that represents an intense and radiant form of life.   For Byung-Chul Han, inactivity constitutes the human. Without moments of pause or hesitation, acting deteriorates into blind action and reaction. When life follows the rule of stimulus–response and need–satisfaction, it atrophies into pure survival: naked biological life. If we lose the ability to be inactive, we begin to resemble machines that simply function. True life begins when concern for survival, for the exigencies of mere life, ends. The ultimate purpose of all human endeavour is inactivity.   In a beautifully crafted ode to the art of being still, Han shows that the current crisis in our society calls for a very different way of life: one based on the vita contemplative. He pleads for bringing our ceaseless activities to a stop and making room for the magic that happens in between. Life receives its radiance only from inactivity.   Also available as an audiobook.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56301462552949,"sku":"9781509558018","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781509558018_7789e927-6a4b-4c82-a874-7b70db701c31.jpg?v=1786034609"},{"product_id":"9781509565191","title":"The Spirit of Hope","description":"A spectre is haunting us: fear. We are constantly confronted with apocalyptic scenarios: pandemics, world war, the climate catastrophe. Images of the end of the world and the end of human civilization are conjured up with ever greater urgency. Anxiously, we face a bleak future. Preoccupied with crisis management, life becomes a matter of survival.   But it is precisely at such moments of fear and despair that hope arises like a phoenix from the ashes. Only hope can give us back a life that is more than mere survival. Fear isolates people and closes them off from one another; hope, by contrast, unites people and forms communities. It opens up a meaningful horizon that re-invigorates and inspires life. It nurtures fantasy and enables us to think about what is yet to come. It makes action possible because it infuses our world with purpose and meaning. Hope is the spring that liberates us from our collective despair and gives us a future.   In this short essay on hope, Byung-Chul Han gives us the perfect antidote to the climate of fear that pervades our world.   Also available as an audiobook","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56301474644341,"sku":"9781509565191","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781509565191_592c0bcf-f8f9-4f83-a3d3-66ad7b61f1eb.jpg?v=1786022310"},{"product_id":"9781509516100","title":"What is Power?","description":"Power is a pervasive phenomenon yet there is little consensus on what it is and how it should be understood. In this book the cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han develops a fresh and original perspective on the nature of power, shedding new light on this key feature of social and political life.    Power is commonly defined as a causal relation: an individual’s power is the cause that produces a change of behaviour in someone else against the latter’s will. Han rejects this view, arguing that power is better understood as a mediation between ego and alter which creates a complex array of reciprocal interdependencies. Power can also be exercised not only against the other but also within and through the other, and this involves a much higher degree of mediation. This perspective enables us to see that power and freedom are not opposed to one another but are manifestations of the same power, differing only in the degree of mediation. This highly original account of power will be of great interest to students and scholars of philosophy and of social, political and cultural theory, as well as to anyone seeking to understand the many ways in which power shapes our lives today.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56301831651701,"sku":"9781509516100","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781509516100_a2b32d19-bac7-4b16-9e60-8108e8b4c811.jpg?v=1786022304"},{"product_id":"9781509545001","title":"Capitalism and the Death Drive","description":"What we call growth today is in fact a tumorous growth, a cancerous proliferation which is disrupting the social organism. These tumours endlessly metastasize and grow with an inexplicable, deadly vitality. At a certain point this growth is no longer productive, but rather destructive. Capitalism passed this point long ago. Its destructive forces cause not only ecological and social catastrophes but also mental collapse. The destructive compulsion to perform combines self-affirmation and self-destruction in one. We optimize ourselves to death. Brutal competition ends in destruction. It produces an emotional coldness and indifference towards others as well as towards one’s own self.    The devastating consequences of capitalism suggest that a death drive is at work. Freud initially introduced the death drive hesitantly, but later admitted that he ‘couldn’t think beyond it’ as the idea of the death drive became increasingly central to his thought. Today, it is impossible to think about capitalism without considering the death drive.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56301865238901,"sku":"9781509545001","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781509545001_a83b3b3c-f0af-4b38-ab3c-d550f650d3fa.jpg?v=1786021857"},{"product_id":"9781509546206","title":"Absence","description":"\u003cp\u003eWestern thinking has long been dominated by essence, by a preoccupation with that which dwells in itself and delimits itself from the other. By contrast, Far Eastern thought is centred not on essence but on absence. The fundamental topos of Far Eastern thinking is not being but ‘the way’ (\u003ci\u003edao\u003c\/i\u003e), which lacks the solidity and fixedness of essence. The difference between essence and absence is the difference between being and path, between dwelling and wandering. ‘A Zen monk should be without fixed abode, like the clouds, and without fixed support, like water’, said the Japanese Zen master Dōgen.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eDrawing on this fundamental distinction between essence and absence, Byung-Chul Han explores the differences between Western and Far Eastern philosophy, aesthetics, architecture and art, shedding fresh light on a culture of absence that may at first sight appear strange and unfamiliar to those in the West whose ways of thinking have been shaped for centuries by the preoccupation with essence.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56301865468277,"sku":"9781509546206","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781509546206_0d1eb0a3-ddb3-4a20-a6cc-94bd706ba89a.jpg?v=1786021875"},{"product_id":"9781509552986","title":"Infocracy: Digitization and the Crisis of Democrac y","description":"The tsunami of information unleashed by digitization is threatening to overwhelm us, drowning us in a sea of frenzied communication and disrupting many spheres of social life, including politics.  Election campaigns are now being waged as information wars with bots and troll armies, and democracy is degenerating into infocracy.    In this new book, Byung-Chul Han argues that infocracy is the new form of rule characteristic of contemporary information capitalism. Whereas the disciplinary regime of industrial capitalism worked with compulsion and repression, this new information regime exploits freedom instead of repressing it.  Surveillance and punishment give way to motivation and optimization: we imagine that we are free, but in reality our entire lives are recorded so that our behaviour might be psychopolitically controlled.  Under the neoliberal information regime, mechanisms of power function not because people are aware of the fact of constant surveillance but because they perceive themselves to be free.    This trenchant critique of politics in the information age will be of great interest to students and scholars in the humanities and social sciences and to anyone concerned about the fate of politics in our time.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56301879001461,"sku":"9781509552986","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781509552986_80572301-388f-40a6-a357-6a9a329e7cb4.jpg?v=1786021992"},{"product_id":"9781509515103","title":"Saving Beauty","description":"Beauty today is a paradox. The cult of beauty is ubiquitous but it has lost its transcendence and become little more than an aspect of consumerism, the aesthetic dimension of capitalism. The sublime and unsettling aspects of beauty have given way to corporeal pleasures and 'likes', resulting in a kind of 'pornography' of beauty.   In this book, cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han reinvigorates aesthetic theory for our digital age. He interrogates our preoccupation with all things slick and smooth, from Jeff Koon's sculptures and the iPhone to Brazilian waxing. Reaching far deeper than our superficial reactions to viral videos and memes, Han reclaims beauty, showing how it manifests itself as truth, temptation and even disaster.   This wide-ranging and profound exploration of beauty, encompassing ethical and political considerations as well as aesthetic, will appeal to all those interested in cultural and aesthetic theory, philosophy and digital media.   Also available as an audiobook.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":56302164771189,"sku":"9781509515103","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"Hardback","offer_id":57688178426229,"sku":"9781509515097","price":40.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781509515097_48e116cd-fee5-4d88-b0d3-075a31e3e7e5.jpg?v=1792686085"},{"product_id":"9781509545100","title":"The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism","description":"Zen Buddhism is a form of Mahâyâna Buddhism that originated in China and is strongly focused on meditation. It is characteristically sceptical towards language and distrustful of conceptual thought, which explains why Zen Buddhist sayings are so enigmatic and succinct. But despite Zen Buddhism's hostility towards theory and discourse, it is possible to reflect philosophically on Zen Buddhism and bring out its philosophical insights.   In this short book, Byung-Chul Han seeks to unfold the philosophical force inherent in Zen Buddhism, delving into the foundations of Far Eastern thought to which Zen Buddhism is indebted. Han does this comparatively by confronting and contrasting the insights of Zen Buddhism with the philosophies of Plato, Leibniz, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger and others, showing that Zen Buddhism and Western philosophy have very different ways of understanding religion, subjectivity, emptiness, friendliness and death.   This important work by one of the most widely read philosophers and cultural theorists of our time will be of great value to anyone interested in comparative philosophy and religion.   Also available as an audiobook.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56302169653621,"sku":"9781509545100","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781509545100_0078e036-b59b-49bc-9c73-a77c17d37be1.jpg?v=1786021858"},{"product_id":"9781509547241","title":"The Palliative Society","description":"Our societies today are characterized by a universal algophobia: a generalized fear of pain. We strive to avoid all painful conditions – even the pain of love is treated as suspect. This algophobia extends into society: less and less space is given to conflicts and controversies that might prompt painful discussions. It takes hold of politics too: politics becomes a palliative politics that is incapable of implementing radical reforms that might be painful, so all we get is more of the same.    Faced with the coronavirus pandemic, the palliative society is transformed into a society of survival. The virus enters the palliative zone of well-being and turns it into a quarantine zone in which life is increasingly focused on survival. And the more life becomes survival, the greater the fear of death: the pandemic makes death, which we had carefully repressed and set aside, visible again. Everywhere, the prolongation of life at any cost is the preeminent value, and we are prepared to sacrifice everything that makes life worth living for the sake of survival.    This trenchant analysis of our contemporary societies by one of the most original cultural critics of our time will appeal to a wide readership.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56302173815157,"sku":"9781509547241","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781509547241_019870db-c7c7-46e6-801a-8244b177b81e.jpg?v=1786021891"},{"product_id":"9781509546176","title":"Hyperculture: Culture and Globalisation","description":"In the wake of globalization, cultural forms of expression have become increasingly detached from their places of origin, circulating in a hyper-domain of culture where there is no real difference anymore between indigenous and foreign, near and far, the familiar and the exotic. Heterogeneous cultural contents are brought together side by side, like the fusion food that makes free use of all that the hypercultural pool of spices, ingredients and ways of preparing food has to offer. Culture is becoming un-bound, un-restricted, un-ravelled: a hyperculture. It is a profoundly rhizomatic culture of intense hybridization, fusion and co-appropriation. Today we have all become hypercultural tourists, even in our 'own' culture, to which we do not even belong anymore. Hypercultural tourists travel in the hyperspace of events, a space of cultural sightseeing. They experience culture as cul-tour.    Drawing on thinkers from Hegel and Heidegger to Bauman and Homi Bhabha to examine the characteristics of our contemporary hyperculture, Han poses the question: should we welcome the human of the future as the hypercultural tourist, smiling serenely, or should we aspire to a different way of being in the world?","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56302221623669,"sku":"9781509546176","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781509546176_8f1ca61c-effa-45aa-950b-bc5c2a9189b4.jpg?v=1786021874"},{"product_id":"9781509516056","title":"The Scent of Time – A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering","description":"In his philosophical reflections on the art of lingering, acclaimed cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han argues that the value we attach today to the vita activa is producing a crisis in our sense of time. Our attachment to the vita activa creates an imperative to work which degrades the human being into a labouring animal, an animal laborans. At the same time, the hyperactivity which characterizes our daily routines robs human beings of the capacity to linger and the faculty of contemplation. It therefore becomes impossible to experience time as fulfilling.   Drawing on a range of thinkers including Heidegger, Nietzsche and Arendt, Han argues that we can overcome this temporal crisis only by revitalizing the vita contemplativa and relearning the art of lingering. For what distinguishes humans from other animals is the capacity for reflection and contemplation, and when life regains this capacity, this art of lingering, it gains in time and space, in duration and vastness.   Also available as an audiobook","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":56302511161717,"sku":"9781509516056","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"Hardback","offer_id":57688211882357,"sku":"9781509516049","price":40.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781509516056.jpg?v=1792686140"},{"product_id":"9781509560431","title":"The Crisis of Narration","description":"Narratives produce the ties that bind us. They create community, eliminate contingency and anchor us in being. And yet in our contemporary information society, where everything has become arbitrary and random, storytelling becomes storyselling and narratives lose their binding force.  Whereas narratives create community, storytelling brings forth only a fleeting community – the community of consumers. No amount of storytelling could recreate the fire around which humans gather to tell each other stories. That fire has long since burnt out. It has been replaced by the digital screen, which separates people rather than bringing them together. Through storytelling, capitalism appropriates narrative: stories sell. They are no longer a medium of shared experience.    The inflation of storytelling betrays a need to cope with contingency, but storytelling is unable to transform the information society back into a stable narrative community. Rather, storytelling as storyselling is a pathological phenomenon of our age. Byung-Chul Han, one of the most perceptive cultural theorists of contemporary society, dissects this crisis with exceptional insight and flair.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56302561821045,"sku":"9781509560431","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781509560431_144d8c88-06a3-4dbb-8694-f6dd1eb632f5.jpg?v=1786022179"},{"product_id":"9781509542765","title":"The Disappearance of Rituals – A Topology of the Present","description":"Untrammelled neoliberalism and the inexorable force of production have produced a 21st century crisis of community: a narcissistic cult of authenticity and mass turning-inward are among the pathologies engendered by it. We are individuals afloat in an atomised society, where the loss of the symbolic structures inherent in ritual behaviour has led to overdependence on the contingent to steer identity. Avoiding saccharine nostalgia for the rituals of the past, Han provides a genealogy of their disappearance as a means of diagnosing the pathologies of the present. He juxtaposes a community without communication – where the intensity of togetherness in silent recognition provides structure and meaning – to today’s communication without community, which does away with collective feelings and leaves individuals exposed to exploitation and manipulation by neoliberal psycho-politics. The community that is invoked everywhere today is an atrophied and commoditized community that lacks the symbolic power to bind people together. For Han, it is only the mutual praxis of recognition borne by the ritualistic sharing of the symbolic between members of a community which creates the footholds of objectivity allowing us to make sense of time. This new book by one of the most creative cultural theorists writing today will be of interest to a wide readership.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56302578401653,"sku":"9781509542765","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781509542765_97b18023-cd11-42c2-bddf-019e0e8dae52.jpg?v=1786021830"},{"product_id":"9781509551705","title":"Non–things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld","description":"We no longer inhabit earth and dwell under the sky: these are being replaced by Google Earth and the Cloud. The terrestrial order is giving way to a digital order, the world of things is being replaced by a world of non-things – a constantly expanding \"infosphere\" of information and communication which displaces objects and obliterates any stillness and calmness in our lives.    Byung-Chul Han's critique of the infosphere highlights the price we are paying for our growing preoccupation with information and communication. Today we search for more information without gaining any real knowledge. We communicate constantly without participating in a community. We save masses of data without keeping track of our memories. We accumulate friends and followers without encountering other people. This is how information develops a form of life that has no stability or duration. And as we become increasingly absorbed in the infosphere, we lose touch with the magic of things which provide a stable environment for dwelling and give continuity to human life. The infosphere may seem to grant us new freedoms but it creates new forms of control too, and it cuts us off from the kind of freedom that is tied to acting in the world.    This new book by one of the most creative cultural theorists writing today will be of interest to a wide readership.   Also available as an audiobook.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":56302590525813,"sku":"9781509551705","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"Hardback","offer_id":57688200020341,"sku":"9781509551699","price":45.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781509551705.jpg?v=1792686121"},{"product_id":"9781804298428","title":"Psychopolitics","description":"\u003cb\u003eExploring how neoliberalism has discovered the productive force of the psyche\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eByung-Chul Han, a star of German philosophy, continues his passionate critique of neoliberalism, trenchantly describing a regime of technological domination that, in contrast to Foucault’s biopower, has discovered the productive force of the psyche. In the course of discussing all the facets of neoliberal psychopolitics fueling our contemporary crisis of freedom, Han elaborates an analytical framework that provides an original theory of Big Data and a lucid phenomenology of emotion. But this provocative essay proposes counter models too, presenting a wealth of ideas and surprising alternatives at every turn.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56307476857205,"sku":"9781804298428","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781804298428_6fc0a0cd-0d5a-4ab0-8ef4-4d7b6c93a850.jpg?v=1786026834"},{"product_id":"9780262533379","title":"The Agony of Eros","description":"\u003cb\u003eAn argument that love requires the courage to accept self-negation for the sake of discovering the Other.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cp\u003eByung-Chul Han is one of the most widely read philosophers in Europe today, a member of the new generation of German thinkers that includes Markus Gabriel and Armen Avanessian. In \u003ci\u003eThe Agony of Eros,\u003c\/i\u003e a bestseller in Germany, Han considers the threat to love and desire in today's society. For Han, love requires the courage to accept self-negation for the sake of discovering the Other. In a world of fetishized individualism and technologically mediated social interaction, it is the Other that is eradicated, not the self. In today's increasingly narcissistic society, we have come to look for love and desire within the “inferno of the same.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHan offers a survey of the threats to Eros, drawing on a wide range of sources—Lars von Trier's film \u003ci\u003eMelancholia,\u003c\/i\u003e Wagner's \u003ci\u003eTristan und Isolde,\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eFifty Shades of Grey\u003c\/i\u003e, Michel Foucault (providing a scathing critique of Foucault's valorization of power), Martin Buber, Hegel, Baudrillard, Flaubert, Barthes, Plato, and others. Han considers the “pornographication” of society, and shows how pornography profanes eros; addresses capitalism's leveling of essential differences; and discusses the politics of eros in today's “burnout society.” To be dead to love, Han argues, is to be dead to thought itself.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eConcise in its expression but unsparing in its insight, \u003ci\u003eThe Agony of Eros\u003c\/i\u003e is an important and provocative entry in Han's ongoing analysis of contemporary society.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis remarkable essay, an intellectual experience of the first order, affords one of the best ways to gain full awareness of and join in one of the most pressing struggles of the day: the defense, that is to say—as Rimbaud desired it—the “reinvention” of love.\u003cbr\u003e—from the foreword by Alain Badiou\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56311667556725,"sku":"9780262533379","price":13.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780262533379_211a62b6-6769-4f59-a41c-b4ca572164ad.jpg?v=1786012542"},{"product_id":"9781509567898","title":"In Praise of the Earth","description":"The earth is not a dead, mute landscape but an eloquent, living being. Sometimes it just takes a spade, a packet of seeds, and a pair of sturdy boots to realize it.   The philosopher Byung-Chul Han spent three springs, summers, autumns, and winters in his secret garden in Berlin, devoting himself to daily gardening in all weathers. For Han, gardening is a form of silent meditation, a lingering in stillness. It gives you a different sense of time. Every plant has its own time that is specific to it, and the garden is a space in which these multiple temporalities overlap and cut across one another. The longer he worked in the garden, the more respect he developed for the earth and for its enchanting beauty.   Gardening taught him what care for others means. Each organism has its own consciousness of time passing; each organism lives in its own micro-universe. Step by step, Han receded from himself and the world, moving closer and closer to an exuberant, divine nature which we are increasingly in danger of losing.   Through this rich meditation on plants, soil, gardening, and time, Han unfolds a way of relating to and tending the earth that is in sharp contrast to the brutal, incessant exploitation of our planet that we see all around us today.   Also available as an audiobook.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56312512479605,"sku":"9781509567898","price":16.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781509567898_217b8e47-30bb-4447-95a8-f2c001715d08.jpg?v=1786022380"},{"product_id":"9781509569670","title":"The Tonality of Thought","description":"In a lecture given in 2023, Byung-Chul Han likened his thinking to music: like the Goldberg Variations, his books present variations on themes, though in his case the variations are articulated in the form of fundamental concepts. He also explained that his thinking is rooted in German Romanticism and Far Eastern thought: 'If I may compare my thinking with a fruit, then its skin and flesh are deeply romantic. The seed, in contrast, is Far Eastern.'In the three lectures that make up this book, Han invites readers into his world, discusses some of the artists and thinkers who have shaped his thinking, and explores some of the central preoccupations of his work. 'If asked to summarize my philosophical thoughts in one sentence, I would say: The Other disappears.' The more we immerse ourselves in digital communication, the more we lose the sense of touch and the physical presence of the Other. We become entangled in our own egos and become more and more depressed. We live in a society that is becoming increasingly narcissistic, in which individuals are turned in on themselves, incapable of relating to the Other in the way that Eros, as distinct from sex, requires.   Wide ranging in scope and conversational in style, these lectures are an ideal introduction to one of the most influential philosophers and cultural theorists writing today.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56368946020725,"sku":"9781509569670","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781509569670_cbdcbc58-d64d-4312-be75-8a8662e87ba0.jpg?v=1786034624"},{"product_id":"the-expulsion-of-the-other-society-perception-and-communication-today","title":"The Expulsion of the Other – Society, Perception and Communication Today","description":"The days of the Other are over in this age of excessive communication, information and consumption. What used to be the Other, be it as friend, as Eros or as hell, is now indistinguishable from the self in our narcissistic desire to assimilate everything and everyone until there are no boundaries left. The result is a 'terror of the Same', lives in which we no longer pursue knowledge, insight and experience but are instead reduced to the echo chambers and illusory encounters offered by social media. In extreme cases, this feeling of disorientation and senselessness is compensated through self-harm, or even harming others through acts of terrorism. Byung-Chul Han argues that our times are characterized not by external repression but by an internal depression, whereby the destructive pressure comes not from the Other but from the self. It is only by returning to a society of listeners and lovers, by acknowledging and desiring the Other, that we can seek to overcome the isolation and suffering caused by this crushing process of total assimilation.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57484334924149,"sku":"9781509523061","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781509523061.jpg?v=1786266395"},{"product_id":"speaking-about-god","title":"Speaking About God","description":"The crisis of religion today stems not simply from the fact that certain tenets of faith have lost their validity for us, or that we no longer believe in God. The crisis of religion has a deeper source: it is rooted in a crisis of attention, a crisis of seeing and hearing. It is not God that is dead, declares Byung-Chul Han, it is the human to whom God revealed himself that is dead.   For many people today, attention has been displaced by perception, and perception, in our age of information overload, has become voracious – it has become 'binge watching'. It is flattened with junk information and communication, with sonic and visual waste. We 'eat' but we no longer 'look'. Our voracious perception has no need of attention; it is controlled by addiction and dopamine and it devours whatever is presented to it. And a soul that only eats without looking loses its contemplative capacity.   Only the soul that fasts can start to contemplate deeply, to observe things without wishing to appropriate or absorb them. Religion presupposes an attention to the things that elude availability, elude consumption. If we looked attentively, with pure attention undisturbed by the frenzied distractions of our digital culture, we would encounter God.   Through a dialogue with the thought of Simone Weil, Byung-Chul Han shows us that beyond the immanence of production and consumption, beyond the immanence of information and communication, there is a higher reality that can lead us out of a life that has lost all meaning and grant us an exhilarating fullness of being.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57504936362357,"sku":"9781509574193","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781509574193.jpg?v=1786953854"},{"product_id":"friendliness","title":"Friendliness","description":"In this book, Byung-Chul Han explores the inner life of Hegel's philosophy by examining it in terms of the phenomenon of power. Power is not a marginal building block in the Hegelian system; it is its inner constitution. But for all its pomp and splendour, indeed despite a certain beauty, power does not exhaust being. Through his examination of power in Hegel's work, Han seeks to make visible another form of being – friendliness.   While power encloses and fences in, friendliness de-internalizes the spirit to become a fully open house. Friendliness involves humans retreating so that the world can blossom, in the way that Cezanne's landscapes portray a nature without humans which shines with a special friendliness and warmth: the landscape smiles, for once things are emptied and de-internalized, they become open and welcoming, they are mutually permeable and they mirror one another. Through analyses of art and music, Han invites us to attune ourselves to multiplicity and diversity, to the small and the unassuming, and to withdraw the self in a way that allows the world to have a say. Only friendliness allows us to perceive the beauty of the world beyond us in a non-teleological fashion, and to sidestep the self-affirmation of power.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":57682742411637,"sku":"9781509574988","price":15.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"Hardback","offer_id":57504944193909,"sku":"9781509574971","price":50.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781509574988_0317a16a-18ca-429e-b66d-86888fa6b806.jpg?v=1792511627"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-byung-chul-han.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}