He studied metallurgy in Seoul, then moved to Germany to explain why achievement is a disease.
Byung-Chul Han was born in Seoul, South Korea, in 1959. He studied metallurgy at Korea University before moving to Germany in the 1980s to study philosophy, German literature, and Catholic theology in Freiburg and Munich.1 He arrived without knowing German and without having read almost any philosophy. He received his doctorate from Freiburg in 1994 with a dissertation on Martin Heidegger.
Han became a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts, where he still occasionally teaches. He writes exclusively in German, yet his books have found their widest audiences in Spanish-speaking countries and South Korea.
In 2010, Han published Müdigkeitsgesellschaft, translated into English in 2015 as The Burnout Society.2 The book argued that twenty-first-century society had shifted from a disciplinary model, in which institutions controlled people through prohibition, to an achievement model, in which people exploit themselves through the compulsion to perform. Depression, attention deficit disorder, and burnout were not infections from outside but infarctions caused by an excess of positivity.
The book was translated into more than 35 languages. Several South Korean newspapers voted it the most important book of 2012.3
Han's argument inverted the usual diagnosis of workplace suffering. The problem was not that people were forced to work too hard by external authorities. The problem was that they had internalized the demand for achievement so completely that they exploited themselves without anyone needing to make them do it. "The achievement-subject exploits itself until it burns out," he wrote.4
In Psychopolitics, published in 2014, Han extended the argument to digital technology, claiming that data-driven systems had perfected the art of making self-exploitation feel like freedom.5 A man who began his education studying the properties of metal ended up studying the properties of exhaustion. The Los Angeles Review of Books described him as "as good a candidate as any for philosopher of the moment."