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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
Our societies today are characterized by a universal algophobia: a generalized fear of pain. We strive to avoid all painful conditions - even the pain of love is treated as suspect. This algophobia extends into society: less and less space is given to conflicts and controversies that might prompt painful discussions. It takes hold of politics too: politics becomes a palliative politics that is incapable of implementing radical reforms that might be painful, so all we get is more of the same. Faced with the coronavirus pandemic, The Palliative Society is transformed into a society of survival. The virus enters the palliative zone of well-being and turns it into a quarantine zone in which life is increasingly focused on survival. And the more life becomes survival, the greater the fear of death: the pandemic makes death, which we had carefully repressed and set aside, visible again. Everywhere, the prolongation of life at any cost is the preeminent value, and we are prepared to sacrifice everything that makes life worth living for the sake of survival. This trenchant analysis of our contemporary societies by one of the most original cultural critics of our time will appeal to a wide readership.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Algophobia
Notes
The Compulsion of Happiness
Notes
Survival
Notes
The Meaninglessness of Pain
Notes
The Cunning of Pain
Notes
Pain as Truth
Notes
The Poetics of Pain
Notes
The Dialectic of Pain
Notes
The Ontology of Pain
Notes
The Ethics of Pain
Notes
The Last Man
Notes
Translator’s Notes (*)
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Begin Reading
Translator’s Notes (*)
End User License Agreement
Pages
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The Palliative Society
Pain Today
Byung-Chul Han
Translated by Daniel Steuer
polity
Originally published in German as Palliativgesellschaft. Schmerz heute © MSB Matthes & Seitz Berlin Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, Berlin 2020. All rights reserved.
This English edition © 2021 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13 978-1-5095-4725-8
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Dedication
Of all the corporeal feelings, pain alone is like a navigable river which never dries up and which leads man down to the sea. Pleasure, in contrast, turns out to be a dead end, wherever man tries to follow its lead.
Walter Benjamin*
Algophobia
Tell me your relation to pain, and I will tell you who you are!1 This line from Ernst Jünger can be applied to society as a whole. Our relation to pain reveals what kind of society we are. Pain is a cipher. It contains the key to understanding any society. Every critique of society must therefore provide a hermeneutics of pain. If pain is left to medicine, we neglect its character as a sign.
Today, a universal algophobia rules: a generalized fear of pain. The ability to tolerate pain is rapidly diminishing. The consequence of this algophobia is a permanent anaesthesia. All painful conditions are avoided. Even the pain of love is treated as suspect. This algophobia extends into society. Less and less space is given to conflicts and controversies that might prompt painful discussions. Algophobia also takes hold of politics. The pressure to conform and to reach consensus intensifies. Politics accommodates itself to the demands of this palliative zone and loses all vitality. ‘There is no alternative’: this is a political analgesia. The vague ‘centre ground’ has a palliative effect. Instead of argument and competition over the better ideas, there is a surrender to systemic compulsion. Post-democracy, palliative democracy, is spreading. This is why Chantal Mouffe demands an ‘agonistic politics’ that does not shy away from debate.2 Palliative politics is incapable of implementing radical reforms that might be painful. It prefers quick-acting analgesics, which only mask systemic dysfunctionality and distortion. Palliative politics lacks the courage to endure pain. So all we get is more of the same.
Today’s algophobia is based on a paradigm shift. We live in a society of positivity that tries to extinguish any form of negativity. Pain is negativity par excellence. This paradigm shift is also present in psychology, where there has been a movement away from a negative ‘psychology of suffering’ and towards a ‘positive psychology’ concerned with well-being, happiness and optimism.3 Negative thoughts are to be avoided. They should immediately be replaced with positive ones. Positive psychology subjects even pain to a logic of performance. For the neoliberal ideology of resilience, traumatic experiences should be seen as catalysts that increase performance. There is even talk of ‘post-traumatic growth’.4 The idea that we should build our resilience in order to increase our psychological strength has turned the human being into a permanently happy subject of performance, a subject as insensitive to pain as it is possible to be.
There is a relationship between the ‘Mission Happiness’ of positive psychology and the promise that one can live a life of permanent drug-induced well-being. The US opioid crisis is emblematic in this context. This crisis is not just a matter of the greed of pharmaceutical companies. Rather, its foundation is a fateful assumption regarding human existence. Only an ideology of permanent well-being could have brought it about that a medication originally for use in palliative medicine could have been administered on a mass scale to healthy individuals. It is no coincidence that an American expert on pain, David B. Morris, remarked decades ago: ‘Americans today probably belong to the first generation on earth that looks at a pain-free life as something like a constitutional right. Pain is a scandal.’5
The palliative society and the performance society coincide. Pain is interpreted as a sign of weakness. It is something to be hidden or removed through self-optimization. It is not compatible with performance. The passivity of suffering has no place in an active society dominated by ability. Today, pain cannot be expressed. It is condemned to be mute. The palliative society does not permit pain to be enlivened into a passion, to be given a language.
The palliative society is also the society of the like [Gefällt-mir], increasingly a society characterized by a mania for liking. Everything is smoothed out until it becomes agreeable and well-liked. The like is the signature, even the analgesia, of the present. It dominates not only social media but all areas of culture. Nothing is meant to cause pain. Not just art but life itself should be instagrammable, that is, free of rough edges, of conflicts or contradictions that could cause pain. What has been forgotten is that pain purifies. It has a cathartic effect. The culture of the likeable and the agreeable lacks any opportunities for catharsis. We are thus suffocated by the residues of positivity which accumulate beneath the surface of the culture of likes.
A report on an auction of modern and contemporary art reads: ‘Whether Monet or Koons, whether Modigliani’s popular reclining nudes, Picasso’s female figures, or Rothko’s sublime colour-block paintings – even, at the top end of the market, excessively restored pseudo-Leonardo trophies – apparently all these need to be assignable upon first sight to a (male) artist and to be so likeable as to border on the banal. At least now a female artist has begun to break into this circle: Louise Bourgeois set a new record for a gigantic sculpture – thirty-two million for her work from the nineties, Spider. Even a gigantic spider can apparently be more decorative than threatening.’6 In the works of Ai Weiwei, even morality is presented in such a way as to inspire likes. Morality and likeability enter into a happy symbiosis. Dissidence decays into design. Jeff Koons, by contrast, creates like-worthy art that is morality-free, and ostentatiously decorative. The only adequate response to his artworks, as he himself states, is ‘Wow’.7
Art today is vehemently forced into the straitjacket of the like. The old masters are not spared by this anaesthetization of art either. They are even linked up with fashion design: ‘The exhibition of selected portraits was accompanied by a video demonstrating how well historical paintings by, for instance, Lucas Cranach the Elder or Peter Paul Rubens could be colour matched with contemporary designer clothes. And of course the video did not fail to mention that historical portraits are a precursor of today’s selfies.’8
The culture of likeability has manifold causes. First of all it follows from the economization and commodification of culture. Cultural products have increasingly become subject to the compulsion of consumption. They have to assume a form that makes them consumable, that is, likeable. This economization of culture runs in parallel with the culturalization of the economy. Consumer goods come to bear a cultural surplus value. They promise cultural and aesthetic experiences. Design therefore becomes more important than use value. The sphere of consumption enters into the artistic sphere. Consumer goods are presented as works of art, and this leads to a mingling of the artistic and consumer spheres which, in turn, means that the arts come to draw upon the aesthetics of consumption. Art becomes likeable. The economization of culture and the culturalization of the economy are mutually reinforcing. The walls between culture and commerce, between art and consumption, between art and advertisement, break down. Artists are forced to become brands. They begin to conform to the market, to be likeable. The culturalization of the economy also affects production. Post-industrial, immaterial production incorporates artistic forms of production. It has to be creative. But creativity as an economic strategy only permits variations of the same. It does not have access to what is wholly other. It lacks the negativity of a break which hurts. Pain and commerce are mutually exclusive.
When the cultural sphere was sharply delineated from the sphere of consumption, when it followed its own logic, it was not expected to be likeable. Artists steered clear of commerce. Adorno’s catchphrase about art’s ‘[f]oreignness to the world’ was still valid.9 Art that aims to serve human well-being is, accordingly, a contradiction. Art must be able to alienate, irritate, disturb, and, yes, even to be painful. It dwells somewhere else. It is at home in what is foreign
