Capitalism and the Death Drive

Byung-Chul Han, Daniel Steuer

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781509545001, 9781509545018
• eBook ISBN: 9781509545025
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

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.

CONVERSATIONS

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A Conversation with Ronald Düker and Wolfram Eilenberger

Philosophie Magazin: Let us first talk about your background, because it is rather unusual. What attracts someone from South Korea to Germany? Why does a student of metallurgy become a philosopher?

Byung-Chul Han: There are certain ruptures and transformations in one’s life that cannot be explained. I may have taken this unusual decision because of my name. Adorno once said names are initials that we do not understand but that we obey. The Chinese sign for ‘Chul’, when spoken, means both ‘iron’ and ‘light’. In Korean, philosophy is the ‘science of light’. I may have thus just been following my name.

PM: To Germany . . .

BCH: Yes, I came to Germany after having been accepted to study metallurgy at the Technische Hochschule Clausthal Zellerfeld, near Göttingen. I told my parents that I would continue to study for my technology degree in Germany. I had to lie to them. Otherwise, they would not have let me go. I simply set off, to an altogether different country, whose language I could neither speak nor write, and I plunged into the study of an altogether different discipline. It was as in a dream. I was twenty-two at the time.

PM: Your book The Burnout Society was a bestseller in Germany, and has now also attracted a cult following in South Korea. How do you explain its success?

BCH: That’s true – it sold as many copies there as Stéphane Hessel’s Time for Outrage! sold in Germany. Apparently, the central thesis of the book – that today’s performance society is a society of self-exploitation, and that exploitation now takes place even without domination – appealed to the Koreans. South Korea is a burnout society in the final stages of the syndrome. In fact, everywhere in Korea you can see people sleeping. Subway trains in Seoul look like sleeper cars.

PM: And that used to be different?

BCH: When I was at school, there were slogans displayed on the classroom wall praising concepts such as patience, diligence and so on: the classic slogans of a disciplinary society. But today the country has been transformed into a performance society, and this transformation took place more rapidly and more brutally than elsewhere. No one was given time to prepare for neoliberalism, the most extreme version of the performance society. Suddenly, everything is about ‘skills’ and being-able-to-do, and no longer about what you must or should do. The classrooms are now filled with slogans like ‘yes you can!’ My book seems to have been something of an antidote to this situation. Maybe its success heralds a more critical consciousness, albeit one that is only just beginning to emerge.

PM: What is the basic problem with the neoliberal ethics of performance?

BCH: The problem is that it is so cunning, and therefore so devastatingly efficient. Let me explain this. Karl Marx criticized a society in which external domination ruled. Under capitalism, the worker is exploited by others, and this external exploitation, given a certain level of production, reaches a limit. The self-exploitation to which we submit ourselves today is very different. Self-exploitation is limitless! We voluntarily exploit ourselves until we break down. If I fail, I take responsibility for this failure. If I suffer, if I go bust, I have only myself to blame. Because it is wholly voluntary, self-exploitation is exploitation without domination. And because it takes place under the guise of freedom, it is highly efficient. There is no emerging collective, no ‘we’, that could rise up against the system.

PM: Your diagnosis of our society’s ills deploys the unusual conceptual pair of positivity and negativity. You find that negativity is disappearing. What is the purpose of negativity? And what do you mean by ‘negativity’ in the first place?

BCH: Negativity is something that triggers a defensive immunological response. The other is a negativity that seeks to penetrate into oneself, and seeks to negate, to destroy you. I have claimed that we are currently living in a postimmunological age. Today’s psychological illnesses, such as depression, ADHD or burnout, are not infections caused by viral or bacterial negativity but infarctions caused by an excess of positivity. Violence is not only caused by negativity but also by positivity – not only by the other but also by the same. The violence of positivity, or the same, is a postimmunological violence. What makes us ill is the obesity of the system. As we know, there is no immunological reaction to fat.

PM: In what sense is depression related to the disappearance of negativity?

BCH: Depression is a consequence of a pathologically intensified narcissistic relation to the self. Those suffering from depression sink and drown in themselves. They have lost the other. Have you seen Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia? The protagonist, Justine, is an illustration of what I’m saying: she is a depressive because she is totally exhausted, worn down by herself. All of her libido is directed at her own subjectivity, and she is therefore incapable of love. And then – well, then a planet appears, the planet Melancholia. In the hell of the same, the arrival of what is wholly other can take the form of the apocalypse. The death-dealing planet reveals itself to Justine as the wholly other, which wrests her out of her narcissistic swamp. In the face of this death-dealing planet, she flourishes. She discovers others. She begins to care for Claire and her son, for example. The planet sparks erotic desire. Eros, the relation to the wholly other, cures depression. The disaster carries salvation within it. The word ‘disaster’, incidentally, comes from the Latin desastrum, meaning ‘unlucky star’. ‘Melancholia’ is an unlucky star.

PM: You want to say: only a disaster can save us?¹

BCH: We live in a society that is fully geared towards production, fully geared towards positivity. This society abolishes the negativity of the other, or of the foreign, in order to accelerate the cycle of production and consumption. The only differences that are permitted are those that can be consumed. An other whose otherness has been taken away cannot be loved, only consumed. This is perhaps why there is a renewed interest in the apocalypse. We are aware of a hell of the same from which we wish to escape.

PM: Could you possibly offer us a catchier definition of ‘the other’?

BCH: The other is also the object [Gegenstand]; it is even decency [Anstand]. We have lost the capacity, the decency, to see the other in its otherness, because we flood everything with our intimacy. The other is something that questions me, that wrests me from my narcissistic inwardness.

PM: But are we not in fact witnessing the formation of a resisting ‘we’ in, for instance, recent protest movements like Occupy – a ‘we’ that sees the system, here represented by the stock exchange and markets, as an other that it wants to attack?

BCH: That is not enough. A stock market crash isn’t quite an apocalypse. It is a problem internal to the system, and it has to be resolved quickly. And what difference do 300 or 400 people, quickly carted away by the police, make here? This is not even close to the kind of ‘we’ that we would need. The apocalypse is an atopical event. It comes from an altogether different place.

PM: What, then, is the way out?

BCH: A society without the other is a society without Eros. Literature, art and poetry also live off the desire for the wholly other. The current crisis in the arts is perhaps also a crisis of love. Soon – I am certain about this – we will no longer understand the poems of Paul Celan, because they are addressed to the wholly other. The new media of communication abolish the other. One of Celan’s poems reads: ‘You are so close, as if you were not lingering here.’ This is what it is about! Absence: that is the fundamental trait of the other; that is negativity. Because he does not linger here, I am able to speak. Only for that reason is poetry possible. Eros aims at the wholly other.

PM: That would make love utopian, something that cannot possibly be realized.

BCH: Desire is fuelled by the impossible. But if the constant message, for instance in advertising, is ‘you can’ and ‘everything is possible’, then this marks the end of erotic desire. There is no love any longer because we imagine ourselves to be utterly free, because we have too many options to choose from. Of course, the other is your enemy. But the other is also your lover. It is like mediaeval courtly love: as Jacques Lacan said, it is like a black hole around which desire condenses. We are no longer familiar with this hole.

PM: Haven’t we replaced a belief in transcendence with a belief in transparency? Hardly anything else matters any more, especially in politics.

BCH: Yes, secrets are a negativity. They are characterized by a withdrawal. Transcendence is also a negativity, while immanence is a positivity. Thus, the excess of positivity appears in the form of the terror of immanence. The transparency society is a society of positivity.

PM: How do you explain the cult of transparency?

BCH: First of all, it is important to understand the digital paradigm. I consider the introduction of digital technologies to be a historical turning point as dramatic as the invention of writing or the printing press. The digital as such pushes us towards transparency. When I push a button on the computer I immediately get a result. The temporality of the transparency society is immediacy, real time. Any logjam, any logjam in the flow of information, is no longer tolerated. Everything must be immediately visible in the present.

PM: The Pirate Party believes that this immediacy can improve our politics.

BCH: ‘Liquid feedback’, I think, is the magic phrase in this context. It is as though representative democracy created an unbearable temporal logjam. But this idea leads to massive problems, because there are things that cannot be done immediately, things that first need to mature. And politics should be an experiment, an experiment where the outcome is open. As long as experimentation is ongoing, the result cannot be known. If one is implementing a vision, one actually needs a temporal logjam. What the Pirate Party envisages is therefore a politics without vision. And the same holds true at the level of the corporation. Everything is being endlessly evaluated. An optimal result must be achieved every day. It is no longer possible to pursue long-term projects. The digital habitus also involves us in constantly changing our positions. Politicians will therefore cease to exist, for a politician is someone who insists on a certain position.

PM: And you take all this to be the result of the new technology?

BCH: Well, w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Capitalism and the Death Drive
• Why Revolution Is Impossible Today
• The Total Exploitation of the Human Being
• Inside the Digital Panopticon
• Only What Is Dead Is Transparent
• Dataism and Nihilism
• Torturous Emptiness
• Jumping Humans
• Where Do the Refugees Come From?
• Where the Wild Things Are
• Who Is a Refugee?
• Beauty Lies Yonder, in the Foreign
• The Big Rush
• In Your Face
• The End of Liberalism
• Conversations
• End User License Agreement