Byung-Chul Han

Byung-Chul Han was born in Seoul, South Korea, in 1959. He initially studied metallurgy in Korea, then moved to Germany in the 1980s, where he studied philosophy, German literature, and Catholic theology in Freiburg and Munich. In 1994, Han received his PhD from the University of Freiburg with a dissertation on the concept of mood in the thought of Martin Heidegger, and in 2000 he completed his habilitation at the University of Basel.

Han has taught at the University of Basel, Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, and later the Berlin University of the Arts. His fields of work are wide-ranging and include social philosophy, ethics, phenomenology, aesthetics, philosophy of religion, media theory, and criticism of contemporary culture. His principal renown, however, rests on his short and compact essays analysing the psychological and social consequences of late capitalism and digital technology.

One of Han’s best-known concepts is the “burnout society.” He argues that power in contemporary society operates less through prohibition and direct coercion and more by inducing people toward self-optimisation, greater performance, and self-exploitation. From this perspective, the contemporary individual imagines themself free, yet this very freedom can lead to permanent pressure for success and eventually to burnout, depression, and a sense of incapacity.

In The Transparency Society and other works on digital media, Han criticises a culture that drives everything toward display, disclosure, data, and immediate accessibility. In his view, unlimited transparency can weaken privacy, trust, secrecy, distance, and even the possibility of profound experience. In Psychopolitics, he links this analysis to new technologies of power, showing how data, social networks, and the desire for self-display can become new instruments of control.

In works such as The Expulsion of the Other, The Agony of Eros, The Disappearance of Rituals, In the Swarm, and The Crisis of Narration, Han addresses themes such as the loss of otherness, the decline of rituals, loneliness, love, digital communication, and the crisis of shared narratives. An important part of his project is a defence of silence, contemplation, distance, ritual, and forms of life that resist speed, productivity, and consumability.

Han’s works have been translated into many languages, and in 2025 he received the Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities. His importance in contemporary philosophy lies above all in his ability to formulate concise and influential concepts for describing lived experience in digital capitalism, from burnout and self-exploitation to transparency and the erosion of deep relationships.