Byung-Chul Han Quotes

The complaint of the depressive individual, "Nothing is possible," can only occur in a society that thinks, "Nothing is impossible.

The history of violence culminates in this merging of victim and perpetrator, of master and slave, of freedom and violence.

From a pathological standpoint, the incipient twenty-first century is determined neither by bacteria nor by viruses, but by neurons. Neurological illnesses such as depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), borderline personality disorder (BPD), and burnout syndrome mark the landscape of pathology at the beginning of the twenty-first century. They are not infections, but infarctions; they do not follow from the negativity of what is immunologically foreign, but from an excess of positivity. Therefore, they elude all technologies and techniques that seek to combat what is alien.

One feels free in relationships of love and friendship. It is not the absence of ties, but ties themselves which set us free. Freedom is a word which pertains to relations par excellence. Without hold there is no freedom

The acceleration of contemporary life also plays a role in this lack of being. The society of laboring and achievement is not a free society. It generates new constraints. Ultimately, the dialectic of master and slave does not yield a society where everyone is free and capable of leisure, too. Rather, it leads to a society of work in which the master himself has become a laboring slave. In this society of compulsion, everyone carries a work camp inside. This labor camp is defined by the fact that one is simultaneously prisoner and guard, victim and perpetrator. One exploits oneself. It means that exploitation is possible even without domination.

In social networks, the function of "friends" is primarily to heighten narcissism by granting attention, as consumers, to the ego exhibited as a commodity.