11 Facts About Byung-Chul Han

Byung-Chul Han was born on 1959 and is a South Korean-born philosopher and cultural theorist living in Germany.

Byung-Chul Han was a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts and still occasionally gives courses there.

Byung-Chul Han studied metallurgy at Korea University in Seoul before he moved to Germany in the 1980s to study philosophy, German literature and Catholic theology in Freiburg im Breisgau and Munich.

Byung-Chul Han wrote about the concept of shanzhai, a style of imitative variation, which pre-exist practices known in Western philosophy as deconstructive.

Much of Byung-Chul Han's writing is characterised by an underlying concern with the situation encountered by human subjects in the fast-paced, technologically-driven state of late capitalism.

In Byung-Chul Han carries forward thoughts developed in his earlier books The Burnout Society and Transparency Society.

Partly based on Lars von Trier's film Melancholia, where Byung-Chul Han sees depression and overcoming depicted, Byung-Chul Han further develops his thesis of a contemporary society that is increasingly dominated by narcissism and self-reference.

Byung-Chul Han's diagnosis extends even to the point of the loss of desire, the disappearance of the ability to devote to the "Other", the stranger, the non-self.

Thinking, Byung-Chul Han states, is based on the "untreaded", on the desire for something that one does not yet understand.

In, Byung-Chul Han continues his analysis of a society on the edge of collapse that he started with The Burnout Society.

Byung-Chul Han has written on topics such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, borderline personality disorder, burnout, depression, exhaustion, internet, love, multitasking, pop culture, power, rationality, religion, social media, subjectivity, tiredness, transparency and violence.