I came across Byung-Chul Han towards the end of the previous decade, while writing a book about the pleasures and discontents of inactivity. In other words, the superego has its origin in figures external to us, so that, when it tells us what to do, it is as though we are hearing an order from someone else. It lives in us not as a persecutory other but as a kind of higher version of oneself, a voice of relentless encouragement to do and be more.
With this triumph of positivity, the roughness of the demanding boss gives way to the smoothness a key Han term of the relentlessly encouraging coach. Reading this passage now, I recall how startlingly true it seemed to me on first reading.
Born in Seoul in , as a child Han tinkered with wires and chemicals in his bedroom, emulating his civil engineer father, who had worked on large public projects in South Korea. But these experiments came to an end after he triggered a chemical explosion in his bedroom that almost blinded him, leaving physical scars he still bears. He went on to study metallurgy. Han arrived in Germany with almost no knowledge of the language.
These small intimations of the man and his life reverberate through his thought and prose. The tinkerer is a playful figure, bringing different chemical elements and physical forces into new and unpredictable kinds of contact. Thinking is the most dangerous activity, maybe more dangerous than the atomic bomb.
Han writes as though from the damage of a near-fatal explosion β at once the conflagration in his childhood bedroom and the more generalised explosion of previous forms of life.
