Psychopolitics by Byung-Chul Han

Abstract

Drawing on Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Foucault, Han diagnoses a loss of negativity and authentic recognition. Digital culture creates a society of achievement where power operates by seduction, positivity, and internalised self‑discipline rather than external coercion. He proposes resistance through slowness, silence, opacity, and communal practices that reclaim negativity, alterity, and collective spaces beyond performance metrics, thereby countering the pervasive psychopolitical domination.

Author

Byung-Chul Han is a South Korean-born philosopher, Catholic theologian and cultural theorist living in Germany. He was a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts and still occasionally gives courses there. His work largely centres around critiques of neoliberalism and its impact on society and the individual. Psychopolitics was published in 2014.

Philosophical context

Hegel: Byung-Chul Han adopts a Hegelian sense of negation and dialectical tension to diagnose contemporary social flattening. He writes that modern society lacks negativity and thus loses the “contradiction that produces subjectivity,” echoing Hegel’s view that selfhood emerges through struggle and negation rather than mere affirmation.

Han reworks Hegel’s master–slave motif to describe neoliberal self-exploitation: the contemporary subject becomes a project and self-commodifies, producing what Han calls a society of achievement where domination persists without an external master. This reformulates Hegel’s insight that recognition and power are co-constitutive, while stressing that today’s power operates through voluntary self-submission.

Han’s critique of recognition follows Hegel’s claim that genuine intersubjectivity requires mutual acknowledgement. The author laments that digital culture fosters narcissism and transparency that prevent true recognition. He warns that the result is an “expulsion of the Other,” a loss of alterity that undermines the ethical freedom Hegel associated with mediated social institutions.

Kierkegaard: Byung-Chul Han's interest in Kierkegaard stems from his own Freiburg PhD dissertation on the philosopher, received in 1994.

Han takes Kierkegaard’s inward turn as a resource for diagnosing contemporary subjectivity. Kierkegaard’s account of interiority, his claim that the greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world. This is secularised by Han into a critique of self-directed optimisation: the modern subject is not freed by inwardness but transformed into an “achievement-subject” who quietly loses itself to productivity and self-exploitation.

Han translates Kierkegaardian despair into a sociological description of burnout. Kierkegaard’s Sickness unto Death distinguishes despair as “the self that is not itself”. Han reframes this as a social pathology in which the neoliberal imperative produces a subject who becomes both exploiter and exploited, leading to what he calls “the burnout society”.

Han borrows Kierkegaard’s notion of repetition as ethically charged renewal to critique digital repetition. Kierkegaard’s posits repetition as a possibility for existential restoration, rather than mere recurrence: “repetition is the movement of being able to will the same again”, and Han contrasts that with the simulacral loops of social media, where endless repetition produces surface sameness rather than transformative return.

Han reads Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the neighbour and ethical responsibility to argue that modern transparency erodes alterity. Kierkegaard’s concern for the other’s ethical demand (the neighbour who calls one beyond the self) informs Han’s claim that the transparency society reduces the other to data and spectacle, undermining the genuine, demanding face of the neighbour. In Han’s words, transparency produces “the extinction of the other.”

Han adopts Kierkegaard’s valorisation of negativity and the paradoxical in religious life to oppose contemporary positivity culture. Kierkegaard insists that faith involves paradox, suffering, and limit-experiences. Han uses this to argue that an aversion to negativity — optimising, affirmative culture — blocks the necessary breaks, crises, and “no’s” that allow ethical and existential depth to emerge.

Han also uses Kierkegaard to attack performative existence. Kierkegaard opposes the aesthetic and the ethical forms of life (the aesthetic life’s empty performance), and Han updates this by diagnosing a culture of continuous performance and exhibitionism, where Kierkegaard’s call toward authentic subjectivity becomes a critique of a subject constituted by metrics, likes, and relentless self-presentation.

Foucault: The author also situates Psychopolitics within a Foucauldian lineage, arguing that power has shifted from external disciplining to internalised psychic governance. As Han writes:

“...we no longer live in a disciplinary society but in a performance society." 

Subjects are transformed into “self‑entrepreneurs” who police themselves. This reframing echoes Michel Foucault’s concepts of biopolitics and governmentality but Han emphasises affect and subjectivity. Power operates through desire, positivity, and voluntary self‑optimisation rather than overt coercion.

German idealism: Han’s approach draws on phenomenology and German Idealism in its attention to interior experience and the structure of subjectivity. He describes contemporary life as marked by exhaustion and burnout produced by a culture that valorises constant productivity. For Han, burnout is the pathology of freedom, showing how freedom becomes its own form of domination. This diagnosis reframes neoliberal ethics, where autonomy is celebrated as a mechanism of control. Subjects are compelled to perform their own subjection.

Hannah Arendt and Han converge in their concern with modernity’s effects on the human condition, yet they diagnose different pathologies and emphasise distinct political stakes. Arendt locates crisis in the erosion of the public-political realm and the rise of “the social”, the absorption of political action into economic administration and privacy, which undermines freedom and collective world-building. Han, writing four decades later in a neoliberal, digital age, argues that we live in a “society of transparency” and an “achievement subject” that produces exhaustion, depression, and self-exploitation. Where Arendt worries about the disappearance of public speech and action, Han emphasises the interiorising, atomising effects of late-capitalist optimisation on subjectivity.

Arendt’s key concept of “the space of appearance” frames politics as collective speech and action that makes individuals visible and accountable to one another. For her, totalitarianism destroys plurality and factuality, replacing opinion with ideology and eradicating the conditions for meaningful judgment. Han, by contrast, diagnoses a different mechanism: the imperative to perform and to be transparent renders plurality invisible through uniformity. Everyone is an entrepreneur of the self, measurable and comparable, leaving little room for nondiscursive, contemplative forms of relation. Where Arendt defends political action as the antidote to alienation, Han emphasises the loss of contemplative distance and the resulting psychic malaise as central threats.

Both theorists worry about truth and the public realm but on different axes. Arendt’s attention to “the factual” and the danger of lies in totalitarian propaganda connects to her account of responsibility and judgment. She insists on the necessity of testimony and plurality to establish facts. Han, addressing post-truth-era technologies and the attention economy, focuses on how ubiquitous exhibitionism and algorithmic visibility corrode authentic experience and trust. The erosion is less about explicit propaganda and more about performative credulity, self-disclosure, and the collapse of private depth into public data streams.

Their normative prescriptions also diverge. Arendt valorises collective, plural action, the revitalisation of civic space, and institutions that protect the space of appearance and speech. She sees hope in joining with others in unpredictable action that can create new beginnings. Han proposes a more cultural and ethical remedy. Reclaiming silence, contemplative attention, and limits to transparency, practices that resist the self-exploitative logic of performance and restore depth to human relations. Where Arendt’s remedy is political and institutional, Han’s is cultural and existential, though both recognise that restoring meaningful human plurality requires forms of resistance to prevailing systems.

Philosophically, Arendt’s work is anchored in phenomenological description of political events, historical examples (totalitarianism, the trial of Eichmann), and an emphasis on responsibility, judgment, and natality. Han adopts a diagnostic approach influenced by continental thought (Heidegger, Foucault) and contemporary critiques of neoliberalism and technology. His essays read as cultural pathology reports aimed at modern sensibilities.

Despite differences, they shared concern with how modern structures, whether bureaucratic-totalitarian or digital-neoliberal, threaten human plurality, speech, and the conditions for meaningful political life. They both create dialogue for thinking about resistance, whether through collective action or practices of silence and refusal.

Zurboff: The book dialogues with critical theory and contemporary critiques of surveillance capitalism. While Han’s tone is diagnostic rather than empirically detailed, he echoes concerns similar to Shoshana Zuboff’s claim that datafication transforms behaviour into economic value: 

“Big data makes us transparent and therefore exploitable.” 

Han adds that transparency functions as a technology of domination, producing predictability and conformity rather than liberation.

Psychoanalysis: psychoanalytic themes are present but repurposed. Han speaks of guilt, compulsive self‑optimisation, and the internalisation of norms, yet he does not adhere strictly to Freudian frameworks. He writes that neoliberal subjects become subjects of performance who turn their lives into projects, a move that collapses political critique into personal management and erodes collective agency. As a result, Han warns that there is no enemy to struggle against in the traditional sense, because power now works by inducing voluntary compliance.

Baudrillard: Byung‑Chul Han and Jean Baudrillard share affinities in diagnosing late‑modernity’s cultural logic but differ in emphasis, method, and political implication. Both analyse the effects of media, commodification, and simulation on subjectivity, yet Han grounds his critique in phenomenology, ethics, and late‑capitalist psychopolitics, while Baudrillard focuses on semiotics, simulation, and the collapse of the real.

Baudrillard’s central claim is that contemporary society is dominated by signs and simulations that have replaced and then obliterated referential reality:

"we live in a world of simulacra where the map precedes the territory."

For him, consumer culture, mass media, and symbolic exchange produce hyperreality: objects and social relations governed by images, codes, and the circulation of signs rather than material referents or political substance.

Han picks up the diagnosis of mediated, commodified life but shifts the analytic axis to the subject’s interior economy:

"We live in an achievement society whose imperative is to optimise the self."

Where Baudrillard emphasises the disappearance of the real into signs, Han underlines the absorption of the self into the logic of performance, positivity, and affective self‑exploitation more than pure semiotic collapse.

Both theorists see consumption and media as corrosive of genuine social bonds. Baudrillard argues that consumer choice functions as a system of symbolic distinction and simulation. Consumption produces identity through images rather than authentic social relations. Han similarly diagnoses social atomisation and the loss of otherness, but he frames it as the result of neoliberal psychopolitics that convert relational space into arenas of self‑display and continuous optimisation.

On power, Baudrillard is famously sceptical about traditional Marxist conceptions: power operates not only through material exploitation but also through the systemic production of signs, codes, and meanings that neutralise dissent. Han extends this scepticism but reintroduces ethical and political agency via affect and attention. Power now seduces (positivity, transparency) and thus requires resistance in the forms of slowness, silence, and preservation of negativity.

In relation to simulation and authenticity, Baudrillard sees the very possibility of authenticity as undermined by simulacra. Authenticity becomes indistinguishable from its image. Han maintains a stronger normative space for authenticity, cultivated through slowness, contemplative practices, and opacity, even while acknowledging pervasive mediations. For Han, practices that reduce exposure and resist performance can recover pathways to genuine encounter.

Methodologically, Baudrillard’s style is provocatively aphoristic and theoretical, often dissolving clear empirical anchors. Han’s work is also aphoristic but more explicitly therapeutic and ethical, drawing on phenomenology, cultural critique, and examples of digital life to propose modes of resistance.

Critics note Han’s strength in vivid diagnosis and cultural critique, while some call for more empirical grounding and engagement with political economy. Nonetheless, Psychopolitics contributes a succinct account of how contemporary power exploits interiority: it reframes domination as psychological and affective, arguing that the politics of the mind is the central battleground of our time.

Summary

The Crisis of Freedom

Byung‑Chul Han argues that neoliberalism has inverted the classic relationship between freedom and domination. What appears as autonomy becomes a new form of control. He writes that contemporary power no longer primarily forbids but rather permits everything while making subjects comply out of their own will, turning freedom into an obligation to perform. This shift produces a culture in which individuals are encouraged to become "entrepreneurs of themselves," constantly optimising and monetising their identities.

This psychopolitical regime functions through technologies and practices that solicit confession and transparency. Social media, platforms and metrics operate as subjectivation apparatuses that demand continuous self‑exposure. Han notes that instead of direct surveillance, power now relies on voluntary disclosure and peer monitoring, creating a milieu of self‑exploitation where subjects willingly supply data and labour. The result is not open rebellion but a diffuse conformity maintained by likes, metrics and the pressure to be visible.

Psychic and political consequences follow. Aggression is turned inward and failures become personal moral deficits, producing "burnout, depression and shame." Han warns that because domination now masquerades as freedom and self‑realisation, resistance is rendered more difficult. Critique must therefore expose how the rhetoric of autonomy conceals compulsion and seek spaces of non‑productive, collective freedom.

Smart Power

Byung‑Chul Han describes "smart power" as a subtler form of domination that replaces older disciplinary mechanisms. It no longer primarily "prohibits" but instead "seduces" and "enables," making subjects complicit in their own control. Han argues that this power operates through attraction and persuasion rather than visible force, so that people internalise norms and willingly adapt their behaviour to systemic demands.

Technologies and platforms are central to smart power. Digital environments function as apparatuses of exposure that solicit transparency, data and continual self‑optimisation. Han points out that power now works by "making the subject transparent," turning actions into metrics and thereby shifting surveillance into forms of voluntary disclosure and peer regulation. This creates a context where visibility itself becomes a mechanism of governance.

The psychological and political effects are profound. Smart power converts external coercion into internal pressure, producing self‑exploitation and a populace driven by performance and affirmation. Han warns that because domination is experienced as freedom and self‑improvement, resistance is complicated. Critique must reveal how the promise of autonomy conceals new forms of control and cultivate collective spaces beyond productive visibility.

The Mole and the Snake

Han contrasts two figures of power: the mole, which operates by digging and appearing invisibly beneath the surface, and the snake, which strikes visibly and instills fear. He says modern power has become more like the mole—“hidden, subterranean, and insidious”— working through subtle processes rather than overt displays of force. This subterranean mode corrodes institutions quietly, undermining resistance by avoiding clear targets for critique or revolt.

The mole’s tactics rely on soft mechanisms such as datafication, platformisation and algorithmic suggestion that reorganise social life without dramatic rupture. Han writes that power now advances by eroding and disappearing into the background, so domination no longer announces itself with prohibitions but with an ambient normalisation that subjects accept as ordinary. Visibility and spectacle, associated with the snake, give way to diffuse shaping of desires and attention.

Psychologically, this shift produces a populace less likely to recognise or oppose control. The wound is internalised rather than externalised and people come to police themselves. Han warns that because the mole’s work is clandestine: “it burrows into the soul”. Political response must change. Critique must excavate hidden operations, make the subterranean visible, and rebuild collective capacities to resist forms of power that do not strike openly.

Biopolitics

Han traces biopolitics back to Foucault’s analytics of power that manages life itself — regulation, normalisation and care of populations — and contrasts that with newer, more insidious forms of control. He notes that classical biopolitics aimed at "making live and letting die" through institutions and disciplinary measures, whereas contemporary regimes shift toward optimisation and market‑friendly management of life.

The chapter emphasises how modern power governs bodies and populations through metrics, health imperatives and productivity goals. Life is reduced to performance and risk management, subject to continuous measurement and optimisation. Han argues that this produces a society where the biological becomes political through datafication, turning health, work and intimacy into arenas of governance.

Psychologically and politically, Han warns that biopolitics erodes collective forms of resistance by rendering subjects as masses to be managed and individuals to be optimised, leading to "self‑exploitation" and a depoliticised public. He urges exposing the ways life is administrated and reclaiming a politics that resists reduction of human existence to calculable life processes.

Foucault's Dilemma

Han explains that Foucault showed how power operates through institutions that "punish and normalise," but today power increasingly "acts through freedom" by inducing self‑management rather than external coercion. This shift complicates Foucault’s model because domination no longer always appears in clear institutional forms.

Han argues that contemporary control combines elements of both regimes. The old disciplinary apparatuses remain, but are supplemented by technologies that produce voluntary transparency. He warns that Foucault’s analytic tools risk becoming insufficient if they treat power only as an external constraint. Instead, one must account for how power now internalises domination.

The political implication is urgent: critique must adapt by revealing how freedom is instrumentalised and by cultivating collective forms of refusal. Han insists that exposing the way power "seduces rather than forbids" is necessary to recover spaces of genuine autonomy and to reforge political solidarity capable of resisting both visible and invisible dominations.

Healing as Killing

Han argues that contemporary therapeutic and medical discourses often transform care into a form of control. Practices meant to "heal" can end up "neutralising" or "administering" life, thereby constraining autonomy rather than restoring it. He suggests that the therapeutic imperative, aiming to optimise well‑being and performance, turns patients into objects of management, where treatment becomes conflated with normalisation.

The chapter highlights how medicine's emphasis on diagnostics, metrics and risk‑management, reduces suffering to problems to be solved, producing a form of biopolitical governance that eradicates difference in the name of health. Han contends that this clinical rationality can function as a subtle violence. Interventions that promise liberation from pain may simultaneously impose new norms and expectations on conduct and identity. He analyses this as the transition from orthopaedics to aesthetics.

Psychologically and ethically, Han warns that healing framed solely as correction fosters dependency and diminishes political capacity. By converting vulnerabilities into technical defects to be fixed, care risks "killing" the possibility of collective solidarity and meaningful dissent. He calls for a reconsideration of therapeutic practices that preserves human plurality, the openness of suffering, and spaces where pain is not instantly instrumentalised as a target for optimisation.

Shock

In this chapter Han diagnoses a fundamental shift in how power operates: from external coercion to internalised persuasion. Where disciplinary societies used prohibition and visible institutions to shape behaviour, psychopolitics works through allure and positivity, turning subjects into voluntary performers. Han writes, 

"Power no longer disciplines by negation; it seduces by means of positivity."

This means that domination now appears as self-chosen optimisation rather than imposed rule.

Han links this transformation to neoliberal ideology and datafication. Individuals are groomed to continuously optimise, to translate life into metrics and marketable traits. The result is widespread self-exploitation — people freely comply by chasing productivity, visibility, and likes. As Han puts it, 

"Today, the subject is not so much dominated as exploited from within: the neoliberal subject exploits himself."

This internalisation of control produces psychological consequences that replace classic political resistance with symptoms of overstimulation: burnout and depression. Rather than sparking collective revolt, psychopolitics yields "exhaustion—the symptom of a society of performance." Han emphasises that transparency and measurement are central mechanisms: 

"Transparency functions as a mode of control: everything that counts must be visible and measurable."

Friendly Big Brother

Han examines how contemporary surveillance is soft, seductive, and integrated into everyday life rather than overtly coercive. Surveillance today operates through platforms, apps and devices that promise convenience, personalisation, and connection. Users willingly disclose data in exchange for tailored services, mistaking exposure for empowerment. Han argues this produces a benevolent-seeming authority — “friendly” because it caters to desires — which quietly shapes behaviour, choices, and subjectivity without visible force.

He contrasts this with earlier, disciplinary models. Bentham's panopticon made power visible and thus resistible; the new surveillance is pervasive but invisible, embedded in networks of attention and algorithmic recommendation. Han writes that this dynamic converts political freedom into consumer choice, replacing collective deliberation with individualised optimisation and constant self-monitoring. Big Brother has been replaced by Big Data..

Datafication and algorithmic governance transform intimacy, identity, and social bonds into commodities. The consequence is not only loss of privacy but also erosion of the public sphere and critical agency: when platforms anticipate desires and normalise particular behaviours, dissent is softened. Han warns that the allure of personalisation masks structural domination. Users become collaborators in their own surveillance.

His proposed remedies include opacity, solidarity and slowing down, reclaiming forms of secrecy and collective spaces that resist being fully captured by metrics and recommendation engines. Only by cultivating practices that interrupt algorithmic capture can political subjectivity and genuine public life be recovered.

Emotional Capitalism

Byung-Chul Han argues that late capitalism has transformed emotions into economic resources. Feelings are harvested, packaged, and monetised to drive consumption, productivity, and social ranking. Emotional displays — authenticity, charisma, enthusiasm — become forms of capital that individuals cultivate to increase visibility and market value. Han observes that this turns inner life into a site of accumulation:

"Emotions have become assets; they must be managed and capitalised."

This shift produces a pressure to perform positivity and likeability. Rather than overt coercion, power now operates by soliciting affective labour, users and workers alike commodify their moods and relationships for likes, ratings, and brand value. Han writes, 

"The imperative is to be cheerful, entrepreneurial, and communicative; negativity is pathologised."

Consequently, negative affects (anger, doubt, boredom) are suppressed or medicalised, undermining critique and solidarity.

Emotional capitalism also deepens self-exploitation and people continually optimise their emotional presence, blurring work and leisure, public and private. This creates exhaustion and alienation masked as self-realisation. Subjects believe they freely cultivate themselves while serving market logics. As Han notes:

"The neoliberal subject exploits himself in the name of authenticity."

Han calls for reclaiming affective depth and collective forms of feeling that resist commodification: cultivating silence, reflection, and shared negativity can puncture the market’s capture of emotion and reopen spaces for political dissent and genuine care.

Gamification

“people are now master and slave in one.”

Gamification produces a double movement. First, it enforces conformity by making social recognition measurable and comparable: transparency becomes a soft injunction to perform. Second, it produces exhaustion and depression rather than rebellion, because subjects willingly intensify their own activity in pursuit of ever‑higher scores and recognition. As Han puts it, neoliberal power uses freedom as its instrument. Freedom is reframed as the freedom to optimise oneself, which functions as a new form of domination.

The chapter links gamification to emotional capitalism: affective engagement (likes, shares, feedback) is monetised and harnessed to governance. Digital devices become confessional and devotional tools:

“the smartphone is not just an effective surveillance apparatus; it is also a mobile confessional.”

Self‑tracking and playful interaction supply data and consent. Gamification thus quiets traditional antagonism. It channels desire into platformised, metricised games where participants believe they choose, while in fact they reproduce and intensify systems of control.

Big Data

Byung‑Chul Han diagnoses Big Data as a central instrument of contemporary psychopolitics that transforms individuals into transparent, optimisable subjects. Unlike earlier biopolitical techniques that regulated bodies through prohibition and discipline, Big Data enables a soft, pervasive power that operates through visibility, prediction and personalisation. Datafication reduces human life to streams of behavioural signals that can be aggregated, algorithmically profiled and monetised, turning conduct into calculable probabilities and governance into continuous nudging.

Han emphasises how Big Data dissolves the boundary between private interiority and public exposure. Where confession once required an external authority, today self‑disclosure is solicited and rewarded: platforms elicit constant input (searches, likes, location, purchases), which is then fed into predictive systems that shape possibilities and desires. This creates a feedback loop. People adapt to the metrics that measure them, thereby consenting to and reinforcing the very regimes that govern them. As Han writes, the new power “does not forbid; it invites”, using freedom and personalisation as vehicles of domination.

The chapter also links Big Data to the neoliberal imperative of self‑optimisation. Algorithms produce individualised recommendations and risk profiles that appear helpful but in practice narrow choice and intensify performance pressure. Han argues that this leads not to emancipation but to psychical exhaustion. The subject is compelled to constantly optimise, compare and self‑exploit. Big Data thus produces not only surveillance and control, but a form of subjectivity characterised by transparency, calculability and accelerating self‑management.

Beyond the Subject

Han opens the chapter by diagnosing the decline of a mediated, dialectical subject and the rise of a flattened, performance-oriented self. He states that the contemporary subject is without depth, a figure formed more by optimisation and exhibition than by the Hegelian process of contradiction (thesis > antithesis > synthesis) that forges inwardness. The chapter argues that when negativity disappears, subjectivity loses its formative tension and becomes a transparent, consumable surface.

The chapter then traces how neoliberal mechanisms transform subjects into self-exploiting projects: individuals internalise demands and turn labour inward, producing themselves as capital. Han writes that subjects are reduced to a project which constantly optimises, and thus domination becomes seamless since power no longer appears as an external master but as an internal injunction. This shift erases the space for genuine resistance and authentic recognition.

Finally, Han explores the ethical and relational consequences of this post-subjective condition, emphasising the loss of alterity and reciprocal recognition. He warns of an “expulsion of the Other,” whereby digital transparency and performative positivity preclude the difficult negativity necessary for ethical freedom. The chapter closes by urging a recovery of otherness and negation as conditions for a renewed, noninstrumental subjectivity.

Idiotism

Han begins by diagnosing a cultural shift toward solitary disengagement. Modern communication produces isolated individuals who withdraw from genuine communal bonds. He describes this condition as a form of “idiotism” where people become inwardly sealed off, preferring fragmented, shallow contacts to sustained, meaningful relations.

The chapter links idiotism to digital culture’s acceleration and stimulation economy, which encourages attention-grabbing surfaces rather than depth. Han writes that the web promotes a culture of distraction which transforms engagement into brief, consumable moments, undermining concentration and the capacity for contemplative thought.

Finally, Han emphasises the political and ethical consequences. Idiotism erodes solidarity and collective deliberation, making people incapably atomised and easily governable. He warns that the result is a weakened public sphere and diminished resistance, a scenario he evokes as the expulsion of the Other from shared civic life.

Themes

Neoliberalism

Han argues that contemporary power no longer relies chiefly on external coercion but on internalised self-regulation. As he writes in Psychopolitics, 

“...power today is not exercised as compulsion but as suggestion.”

This is a form of governance that encourages individuals to become entrepreneurial selves who willingly self-exploit. The result, Han contends, is a subject shaped by performance metrics and self-optimisation rather than by obedience to external authorities.

The author describes the modern achievement society as one where success is framed as personal responsibility, producing exhaustion rather than the guilt-driven discipline of the past. 

“The society of performance produces pathologies of excess: burnout, depression, and attention deficit.” (The Burnout Society.) 

In this view, mental illness stems from hyperactivity and overachievement, not merely from external deprivation.

Formal freedoms under neoliberalism, choice, autonomy, and market participation, become mechanisms of control when they force continuous self-improvement. Han remarks, “Freedom is the new form of coercion,” meaning that the imperative to choose and optimise functions as a subtle compulsion, erasing space for passivity, reflection, and otherness.

Han critiques contemporary transparency culture for dissolving privacy and meaningful speech into constant exposure and performative communication. He notes, “Transparency abolishes the secret that sustains meaningful relations,” arguing that social media’s demand for visibility turns relationships into transactional displays and undermines genuine intimacy and discretion.

Under neoliberal logic, Han argues, every dimension of existence: time, attention, desire, is marketable and subject to optimisation. 

“Everything becomes a product and a project.”

He laments how commodification displaces ritual, contemplation, and spaces of symbolic depth. This erosion, he suggests, weakens communal bonds and the capacity for sustained thought.

Han links neoliberal subjectivity to an atrophy of eros and the expulsion of the other. Relationships become instruments of self-realisation rather than encounters with alterity. He contends that narcissistic self-focus and functionalisation of others undermine genuine love, solidarity and care.

Although compelling, Han’s aphoristic cultural diagnoses have been critiqued for slender empirical grounding and sweeping generalisations. Even so, his concise formulations, such as “performance society,” “psychopolitics,” and “transparency society”, provide powerful lenses for examining how neoliberalism shapes subjectivity, affect, and everyday life.

Positive Psychology

Byung‑Chul Han argues that contemporary life is dominated by an imperative to perform and optimise the self: 

"We live in an achievement society in which the subject is a project that must constantly be improved."

For Han, this relentless self‑management transforms freedom into a new form of coercion, where individuals internalise demands formerly imposed by institutions, producing exhaustion and a collapse of genuine relationality.

Positive psychology centres on empirically grounded interventions to increase well‑being, summarised in frameworks like Seligman’s PERMA: 'positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment.' Its aim is practical, to teach practices such as gratitude, and strengths that reliably raise life satisfaction and reduce depressive symptoms.

Han is sharply critical of what he sees as the neoliberal capture of positivity: 

"Positivity becomes a new ideology that masks domination by turning critique into a pathology."

From his perspective, when positive‑psychology practices are harnessed to boost productivity or individual competitiveness, they risk reinforcing the very dynamics of self‑exploitation, hypertransparency, and social atomisation that generate suffering.

Yet there are convergences: both Han and positive psychology recognise the importance of relationships and meaning. Positive psychology’s emphasis that relationships are the central pillar of well‑being aligns with Han’s concern that contemporary subjectivity erodes genuine otherness. Both imply that cultivating deep interpersonal bonds counters alienation.

To synthesise Han with positive‑psychology practice requires a cautious stance. You can adopt gratitude and strengths‑based exercises while heeding Han’s warning: "Preserve spaces of negativity and critique." That means using interventions to deepen communal ties and reflective depth rather than to increase output, treating sadness, anger, and dissent not as failures but as necessary signals for ethical and political awareness.

Emotion

Byung‑Chul Han treats emotion as both a symptom and an index of the cultural form of subjectivity: emotions in the neoliberal achievement society are intensively privatised, commodified, and optimised. He writes that contemporary life produces 'affective exhaustion', a diffuse, inward‑turned malaise, because subjects are driven to self‑stimulation and constant performance rather than to shared, porous relationality.

The author contrasts two regimes of affect. The disciplinary society cultivated fear, shame, and obedience through prohibition. Han notes that 'negative power commanded,' producing clear external limits. The achievement society, by contrast, operates through seduction and positivity: 'Power today seduces instead of forbids.' This shift transforms emotions into instruments of self‑exploitation: hope, enthusiasm, and optimism become pressures to produce, while guilt and burnout are internalised as personal failures rather than structural effects.

He is especially attentive to the political role of enforced positivity and transparency: Positivity becomes an ideology that neutralises critique, dissolving the space for anger, mourning, and dissent. Han sees the therapeutic imperative to foster happiness as depoliticising. Negative affects that historically enabled resistance (rage, grief) are reframed as individual dysfunctions to be corrected.

For Han, authentic emotion requires distance, otherness, and silence. He values 'negative' emotions insofar as they preserve interior depth and enable ethical responsiveness: mourning for the lost, anger at injustice, doubt that suspends facile affirmation. Such affective states resist commodification because they are neither immediately productive nor easily optimised.

Finally, Han links emotion to aesthetics and attention: genuine feeling emerges in modes of slowness, receptivity, and communal presence. Practices that slow perception, like listening, contemplation or shared rituals, allow emotions to disclose meanings beyond self‑management, restoring affective life as a ground for solidarity and critique.

Resistance

Byung‑Chul Han insists that resistance begins with slowing down: 

"Slowness is an art of resistance against the accelerated tempo of neoliberal life."

For Han, reclaiming time by refusing constant optimisation, deadlines, and the cult of productivity creates openings for reflection, deeper attention, and the recovery of interiority. Slowness is not merely individual rest but a political stance that undermines the temporal logic that sustains exploitation.

Han also advocates for preserving negativity and silence as powers of refusal:

'Silence resists the transparency imperative; it shelters the self and the other from exposure.'

In this register, refusing to perform constant positivity or to publicly disclose every interior state becomes an ethical practice. Silence and opacity protect relational depth, enabling otherness rather than reducing the other to a data point or mirror of the self.

Informed alternatives can be reoriented toward collective and contemplative ends:

"Cultivate practices that strengthen communal bonds, not productivity metrics."

Examples include group rituals of gratitude orientated toward mutual recognition rather than self‑enhancement, shared practices that slow experience and community strengths projects that redistribute care and responsibility.

Han proposes aesthetic and communal alternatives:

"The public sphere must become a space of commonness, not merely a market of opinions."

Art, ritual, and communal spaces that emphasise shared attention, concerts, reading circles, collective walks, cooperative meals, counteract atomisation. These modalities foster 'being‑with' (Mitsein) instead of performance‑based being‑for‑oneself.

Resistance also takes an ethical-technical form in limiting digital exposure. Practically, this means curating visibility (selective sharing, time offline), designing systems that preserve privacy and creating enclaves where conversation and presence are not monetised or quantified.

Finally, Han affirms the political importance of cultivating negative, critical affect: '

"Anger, mourning, and doubt are not pathologies but sources of truth and mobilisation."

Rather than pathologising discomfort through therapeutic quick‑fixes, alternative modes of existence valorise collective grieving, organised dissent, and critique as engines of change, transforming private malaise into shared political action.