Critical Notes on Byung-Chul Han’s Psyche of Violence

Abstract

Throughout his philosophical work, Byung-Chul Han develops the notion of burnout society as an interpretative and explanatory concept of current social and cultural configurations. What would characterize modern-day society is that the subjects are saturated with themselves; they work exhaustive days to fulfill self-imposed demands like the ideology of the search and achievement of realizing their lives. This dynamic has meant that the exercise of violence is internalized by having it be exercised on itself. For Han, there has been a transformation in the psychic constitution that has made it possible for duty, which imposed the ideal of the I on the self, which was negativity and represented an exercise of violence from the outside towards the subject, to be transformed into power. Now, Han supposes, the ideal of the self, as a psychic element that defined negativity, has been diluted or merged with the self. The subject now “rather obeys himself.” According to his interpretation, narcissism would be what now defines the subject of the performance society. However, Han’s interpretation of the implications of duty and power in the relation of the self and the ideal of the self seems erroneous in light of a rereading of the Freudian proposal on the dialectic and psychic topic. In this paper, some arguments will be offered to support this thesis, which, first of all, goes through the reading of the Freudian hypothesis about sexual drives and death drives; for the rereading of the Freudian formulation of the psychic topic; for the idea of Kantian autonomy that Han supposes in his argument; and for the reference to the use and purpose of the Benthamian panoptic.