Download or read book Topology of Violence written by Byung-Chul Han and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-04-20 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of today's most widely read philosophers considers the shift in violence from visible to invisible, from negativity to excess of positivity. Some things never disappear—violence, for example. Violence is ubiquitous and incessant but protean, varying its outward form according to the social constellation at hand. In Topology of Violence, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han considers the shift in violence from the visible to the invisible, from the frontal to the viral to the self-inflicted, from brute force to mediated force, from the real to the virtual. Violence, Han tells us, has gone from the negative—explosive, massive, and martial—to the positive, wielded without enmity or domination. This, he says, creates the false impression that violence has disappeared. Anonymized, desubjectified, systemic, violence conceals itself because it has become one with society. Han first investigates the macro-physical manifestations of violence, which take the form of negativity—developing from the tension between self and other, interior and exterior, friend and enemy. These manifestations include the archaic violence of sacrifice and blood, the mythical violence of jealous and vengeful gods, the deadly violence of the sovereign, the merciless violence of torture, the bloodless violence of the gas chamber, the viral violence of terrorism, and the verbal violence of hurtful language. He then examines the violence of positivity—the expression of an excess of positivity—which manifests itself as over-achievement, over-production, over-communication, hyper-attention, and hyperactivity. The violence of positivity, Han warns, could be even more disastrous than that of negativity. Infection, invasion, and infiltration have given way to infarction.
Download or read book Topology of Violence written by Byung-Chul Han and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-04-20 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of today's most widely read philosophers considers the shift in violence from visible to invisible, from negativity to excess of positivity. Some things never disappear—violence, for example. Violence is ubiquitous and incessant but protean, varying its outward form according to the social constellation at hand. In Topology of Violence, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han considers the shift in violence from the visible to the invisible, from the frontal to the viral to the self-inflicted, from brute force to mediated force, from the real to the virtual. Violence, Han tells us, has gone from the negative—explosive, massive, and martial—to the positive, wielded without enmity or domination. This, he says, creates the false impression that violence has disappeared. Anonymized, desubjectified, systemic, violence conceals itself because it has become one with society. Han first investigates the macro-physical manifestations of violence, which take the form of negativity—developing from the tension between self and other, interior and exterior, friend and enemy. These manifestations include the archaic violence of sacrifice and blood, the mythical violence of jealous and vengeful gods, the deadly violence of the sovereign, the merciless violence of torture, the bloodless violence of the gas chamber, the viral violence of terrorism, and the verbal violence of hurtful language. He then examines the violence of positivity—the expression of an excess of positivity—which manifests itself as over-achievement, over-production, over-communication, hyper-attention, and hyperactivity. The violence of positivity, Han warns, could be even more disastrous than that of negativity. Infection, invasion, and infiltration have given way to infarction.
Download or read book Shanzhai written by Byung-Chul Han and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-10-06 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing the thread of “decreation” in Chinese thought, from constantly changing classical masterpieces to fake cell phones that are better than the original. Shanzhai is a Chinese neologism that means “fake,” originally coined to describe knock-off cell phones marketed under such names as Nokir and Samsing. These cell phones were not crude forgeries but multifunctional, stylish, and as good as or better than the originals. Shanzhai has since spread into other parts of Chinese life, with shanzhai books, shanzhai politicians, shanzhai stars. There is a shanzhai Harry Potter: Harry Potter and the Porcelain Doll, in which Harry takes on his nemesis Yandomort. In the West, this would be seen as piracy, or even desecration, but in Chinese culture, originals are continually transformed—deconstructed. In this volume in the Untimely Meditations series, Byung-Chul Han traces the thread of deconstruction, or “decreation,” in Chinese thought, from ancient masterpieces that invite inscription and transcription to Maoism—“a kind a shanzhai Marxism,” Han writes. Han discusses the Chinese concepts of quan, or law, which literally means the weight that slides back and forth on a scale, radically different from Western notions of absoluteness; zhen ji, or original, determined not by an act of creation but by unending process; xian zhan, or seals of leisure, affixed by collectors and part of the picture's composition; fuzhi, or copy, a replica of equal value to the original; and shanzhai. The Far East, Han writes, is not familiar with such “pre-deconstructive” factors as original or identity. Far Eastern thought begins with deconstruction.
Download or read book Good Entertainment written by Byung-Chul Han and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A philosopher considers entertainment, in all its totalizing variety—infotainment, edutainment, servotainment—and traces the notion through Kant, Zen Buddhism, Heidegger, Kafka, and Rauschenberg. In Good Entertainment, Byung-Chul Han examines the notion of entertainment—its contemporary ubiquity, and its philosophical genealogy. Entertainment today, in all its totalizing variety, has an apparently infinite capacity for incorporation: infotainment, edutainment, servotainment, confrontainment. Entertainment is held up as a new paradigm, even a new credo for being—and yet, in the West, it has had inescapably negative connotations. Han traces Western ideas of entertainment, considering, among other things, the scandal that arose from the first performance of Bach's Saint Matthew's Passion (deemed too beautiful, not serious enough); Kant's idea of morality as duty and the entertainment value of moralistic literature; Heidegger's idea of the thinker as a man of pain; Kafka's hunger artist and the art of negativity, which takes pleasure in annihilation; and Robert Rauschenberg's refusal of the transcendent. The history of the West, Han tells us, is a passion narrative, and passion appears as a killjoy. Achievement is the new formula for passion, and play is subordinated to production, gamified. And yet, he argues, at their core, passion and entertainment are not entirely different. The pure meaninglessness of entertainment is adjacent to the pure meaning of passion. The fool's smile resembles the pain-racked visage of Homo doloris. In Good Entertainment, Han explores this paradox.
Download or read book What is Power written by Byung-Chul Han and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-12-28 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Power is a pervasive phenomenon yet there is little consensus on what it is and how it should be understood. In this book the cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han develops a fresh and original perspective on the nature of power, shedding new light on this key feature of social and political life. Power is commonly defined as a causal relation: an individual’s power is the cause that produces a change of behaviour in someone else against the latter’s will. Han rejects this view, arguing that power is better understood as a mediation between ego and alter which creates a complex array of reciprocal interdependencies. Power can also be exercised not only against the other but also within and through the other, and this involves a much higher degree of mediation. This perspective enables us to see that power and freedom are not opposed to one another but are manifestations of the same power, differing only in the degree of mediation. This highly original account of power will be of great interest to students and scholars of philosophy and of social, political and cultural theory, as well as to anyone seeking to understand the many ways in which power shapes our lives today.
Download or read book The Agony of Eros written by Byung-Chul Han and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-03-31 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An argument that love requires the courage to accept self-negation for the sake of discovering the Other. Byung-Chul Han is one of the most widely read philosophers in Europe today, a member of the new generation of German thinkers that includes Markus Gabriel and Armen Avanessian. In The Agony of Eros, a bestseller in Germany, Han considers the threat to love and desire in today's society. For Han, love requires the courage to accept self-negation for the sake of discovering the Other. In a world of fetishized individualism and technologically mediated social interaction, it is the Other that is eradicated, not the self. In today's increasingly narcissistic society, we have come to look for love and desire within the “inferno of the same.” Han offers a survey of the threats to Eros, drawing on a wide range of sources—Lars von Trier's film Melancholia, Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, Fifty Shades of Grey, Michel Foucault (providing a scathing critique of Foucault's valorization of power), Martin Buber, Hegel, Baudrillard, Flaubert, Barthes, Plato, and others. Han considers the “pornographication” of society, and shows how pornography profanes eros; addresses capitalism's leveling of essential differences; and discusses the politics of eros in today's “burnout society.” To be dead to love, Han argues, is to be dead to thought itself. Concise in its expression but unsparing in its insight, The Agony of Eros is an important and provocative entry in Han's ongoing analysis of contemporary society. This remarkable essay, an intellectual experience of the first order, affords one of the best ways to gain full awareness of and join in one of the most pressing struggles of the day: the defense, that is to say—as Rimbaud desired it—the “reinvention” of love. —from the foreword by Alain Badiou
Download or read book The Burnout Society written by Byung-Chul Han and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-12 with total page 69 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our competitive, service-oriented societies are taking a toll on the late-modern individual. Rather than improving life, multitasking, "user-friendly" technology, and the culture of convenience are producing disorders that range from depression to attention deficit disorder to borderline personality disorder. Byung-Chul Han interprets the spreading malaise as an inability to manage negative experiences in an age characterized by excessive positivity and the universal availability of people and goods. Stress and exhaustion are not just personal experiences, but social and historical phenomena as well. Denouncing a world in which every against-the-grain response can lead to further disempowerment, he draws on literature, philosophy, and the social and natural sciences to explore the stakes of sacrificing intermittent intellectual reflection for constant neural connection.
Download or read book A Typology of Domestic Violence written by Michael P. Johnson and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2010-09-01 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reassesses thirty years of domestic violence research and demonstrates three forms of partner violence, distinctive in their origins, effects, and treatments
Download or read book Archeology of Violence new edition written by Pierre Clastres and published by Semiotext(e). This book was released on 2010-10-08 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Clastres's final, posthumous book on the affirmative role of violence in “primitive societies.” The war machine is the motor of the social machine; the primitive social being relies entirely on war, primitive society cannot survive without war. The more war there is, the less unification there is, and the best enemy of the State is war. Primitive society is society against the State in that it is society-for-war.—from the Archeology of Violence Anthropologist and ethnographer Pierre Clastres was a major influence on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, and his writings formed an essential chapter in the discipline of political anthropology. The posthumous publication in French of Archeology of Violence in 1980 gathered together Clastres's final groundbreaking essays and the opening chapters of the book he had begun before his death in 1977 at the age of 43. Elaborating upon the conclusions of such earlier works as Society Against the State, in these essays Clastres critiques his former mentor, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and devastatingly rejects the orthodoxy of Marxist anthropology and other Western interpretive models of “primitive societies.” Discarding the traditional anthropological understanding of war among South American Indians as arising from a scarcity of resources, Clastres instead identifies violence among these peoples as a deliberate means to territorial segmentation and the avoidance of a State formation. In their refusal to separate the political from the social, and in their careful control of their tribal chiefs—who are rendered weak so as to remain dependent on the communities they represent—the “savages” Clastres presents prove to be shrewd political minds who resist in advance any attempt at “globalization.”The essays in this, Clastres's final book, cover subjects ranging from ethnocide and shamanism to “primitive” power and economy, and are as vibrant and engaging as they were thirty years ago. This new edition—which includes an introduction by Eduardo Viverios de Castro—holds even more relevance for readers in today's an era of malaise and globalization.
Download or read book Social Chemistry written by Marissa King and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-01-05 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of 2021's Most Highly Anticipated New Books—Newsweek One of The 20 Leadership Books to Read in 2020—Adam Grant One of The Best New Wellness Books Hitting Shelves in January 2021—Shape.com A Top Business Book for January 2021—Financial Times A Next Big Idea Club Nominee Social Chemistry will utterly transform the way you think about “networking.” Understanding the contours of your social network can dramatically enhance personal relationships, work life, and even your global impact. Are you an Expansionist, a Broker, or a Convener? The answer matters more than you think. . . . Yale professor Marissa King shows how anyone can build more meaningful and productive relationships based on insights from neuroscience, psychology, and network analytics. Conventional wisdom says it's the size of your network that matters, but social science research has proven there is more to it. King explains that the quality and structure of our relationships has the greatest impact on our personal and professional lives. As she shows, there are three basic types of networks, so readers can see the role they are already playing: Expansionist, Broker, or Convener. This network decoder enables readers to own their network style and modify it for better alignment with their life plans and values. High-quality connections in your social network strongly predict cognitive functioning, emotional resilience, and satisfaction at work. A well-structured network is likely to boost the quality of your ideas, as well as your pay. Beyond the office, social connections are the lifeblood of our health and happiness. The compiled results from dozens of previous studies found that our social relationships have an effect on our likelihood of dying prematurely—equivalent to obesity or smoking. Rich stories of Expansionists like Vernon Jordan, Brokers like Yo-Yo Ma, and Conveners like Anna Wintour, as well as personal experiences from King's own world of connections, inform this warm, engaging, revelatory investigation into some of the most consequential decisions we can make about the trajectory of our lives.
Download or read book The Scent of Time written by Byung-Chul Han and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-09-25 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his philosophical reflections on the art of lingering, acclaimed cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han argues that the value we attach today to the vita activa is producing a crisis in our sense of time. Our attachment to the vita activa creates an imperative to work which degrades the human being into a labouring animal, an animal laborans. At the same time, the hyperactivity which characterizes our daily routines robs human beings of the capacity to linger and the faculty of contemplation. It therefore becomes impossible to experience time as fulfilling. Drawing on a range of thinkers including Heidegger, Nietzsche and Arendt, Han argues that we can overcome this temporal crisis only by revitalizing the vita contemplativa and relearning the art of lingering. For what distinguishes humans from other animals is the capacity for reflection and contemplation, and when life regains this capacity, this art of lingering, it gains in time and space, in duration and vastness.
Download or read book Post Ottoman Topologies written by Nicolas Argenti and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2019-04-21 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How are historians and social scientists to understand the emergence, the multiplicity, and the mutability of collective memories of the Ottoman Empire in the political formations that succeeded it? With contributions focussing on several of the nation-states whose peoples once were united under the aegis of Ottoman suzerainty, this volume proposes new theoretical approaches to the experience and transmission of the past through time. Developing the concept of topology, contributors explore collective memories of Ottoman identity and post-Ottoman state formation in a contemporary epoch that, echoing late modernity, we might term “late nationalism”.
Download or read book The Violence of Financial Capitalism written by Christian Marazzi and published by Semiotext. This book was released on 2010 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innovative analysis of financialization in the context of postfordist cognitive capitalism.
Download or read book Topology written by Richard Earl and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-01-11 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How is a subway map different from other maps? What makes a knot knotted? What makes the M�bius strip one-sided? These are questions of topology, the mathematical study of properties preserved by twisting or stretching objects. In the 20th century topology became as broad and fundamental as algebra and geometry, with important implications for science, especially physics. In this Very Short Introduction Richard Earl gives a sense of the more visual elements of topology (looking at surfaces) as well as covering the formal definition of continuity. Considering some of the eye-opening examples that led mathematicians to recognize a need for studying topology, he pays homage to the historical people, problems, and surprises that have propelled the growth of this field. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Download or read book Psychopolitics written by Byung-Chul Han and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2017-12-05 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring how neoliberalism has discovered the productive force of the psyche Byung-Chul Han, a star of German philosophy, continues his passionate critique of neoliberalism, trenchantly describing a regime of technological domination that, in contrast to Foucault’s biopower, has discovered the productive force of the psyche. In the course of discussing all the facets of neoliberal psychopolitics fueling our contemporary crisis of freedom, Han elaborates an analytical framework that provides an original theory of Big Data and a lucid phenomenology of emotion. But this provocative essay proposes counter models too, presenting a wealth of ideas and surprising alternatives at every turn.
Download or read book Capitalism and the Death Drive written by Byung-Chul Han and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-05-18 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What we call growth today is in fact a tumorous growth, a cancerous proliferation which is disrupting the social organism. These tumours endlessly metastasize and grow with an inexplicable, deadly vitality. At a certain point this growth is no longer productive, but rather destructive. Capitalism passed this point long ago. Its destructive forces cause not only ecological and social catastrophes but also mental collapse. The destructive compulsion to perform combines self-affirmation and self-destruction in one. We optimize ourselves to death. Brutal competition ends in destruction. It produces an emotional coldness and indifference towards others as well as towards one’s own self. The devastating consequences of capitalism suggest that a death drive is at work. Freud initially introduced the death drive hesitantly, but later admitted that he ‘couldn’t think beyond it’ as the idea of the death drive became increasingly central to his thought. Today, it is impossible to think about capitalism without considering the death drive.
Download or read book A Topological Picturebook written by George K. Francis and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-19 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Praise for George Francis's A Topological Picturebook: Bravo to Springer for reissuing this unique and beautiful book! It not only reminds the older generation of the pleasures of doing mathematics by hand, but also shows the new generation what ``hands on'' really means. - John Stillwell, University of San Francisco The Topological Picturebook has taught a whole generation of mathematicians to draw, to see, and to think. - Tony Robbin, artist and author of Shadows of Reality: The Fourth Dimension in Relativity, Cubism, and Modern Thought The classic reference for how to present topological information visually, full of amazing hand-drawn pictures of complicated surfaces. - John Sullivan, Technische Universitat Berlin A Topological Picturebook lets students see topology as the original discoverers conceived it: concrete and visual, free of the formalism that burdens conventional textbooks. - Jeffrey Weeks, author of The Shape of Space A Topological Picturebook is a visual feast for anyone concerned with mathematical images. Francis provides exquisite examples to build one's "visualization muscles". At the same time, he explains the underlying principles and design techniques for readers to create their own lucid drawings. - George W. Hart, Stony Brook University In this collection of narrative gems and intriguing hand-drawn pictures, George Francis demonstrates the chicken-and-egg relationship, in mathematics, of image and text. Since the book was first published, the case for pictures in mathematics has been won, and now it is time to reflect on their meaning. A Topological Picturebook remains indispensable. - Marjorie Senechal, Smith College and co-editor of the Mathematical Intelligencer
