At 6.1 inches, with bushy white hair, Robin Dudley Edwards looked the very model of a professor of Irish history. Gifted with a photographic memory, he presented an intimidating image to the 400 first year students crammed into the Physics theatre in University College, Dublin in 1963. ‘Any questions’, he asked at the end of the course. ‘What is the ideal examination question length?’ a student asked. The reply unsettled: ‘we gave a first to a student who wrote five lines on each question’. Han’s works generate a similar startled response.
With over 20 books to his name, his work unsettles, not least because of their brevity. Usually under 100 pages, his chapters seem more like subheads, the prose is unremittingly succinct and the bibliographies are covered with much economy. Those concerned with academic productivity might be disturbed by Han’s comment that he writes three sentences per day. There is a staccato property to his works which fire off epigrams at the conventions of modernity. The targets are well chosen. In his case books, not blogs, tell the tales of the ills of a post-secular culture.
A Korean-born German philosopher, a Catholic with dalliances into Buddhism, Han’s background is in engineering, but he later switched his interests to study philosophy under Derrida in Paris. Not unexpectedly, his source material is largely German, with special reference to Arendt, Benjamin, Heidegger, and Nietzsche, though a much wider range of citations appear. Websites, stories, the ills of smartphones, and, of course, concerns with chatbot are well woven into the texts. The immediacy these generate adds to his credentials to be a superstar, at least in Europe, by reputation in the U.S.A., but little known in the United Kingdom. With many former superstars such as Bourdieu, Bauman and Foucault deceased, he is coming to seem a rare replacement for these. Certainly, he has generated the aura of an oracle of the times and one to watch. In interviews, he declares himself a Catholic and claims to pray in church, but when mass ends. As Simone Weil refused baptism but hung on to Catholicism, so too Han seems to make his own sacramental exile, one that facilitates unusual angles to his work. This might account for the edginess that haunts his text, which seems on the borders of the yet to be articulated elsewhere. Elegies to lost late medieval worlds take on a poignancy as the entrapments of life in digital orphanages become all too apparent.
Exhaustion, emptiness, loss of compass points, and vulnerability to the powers of digitalisation generate a sort of disembodied individualism where social bonds have melted. Han’s most famous work was on the burnt-out society, but others cover the disappearance of rituals and the deceits of fixation on transparency. As with his previous works, Han takes no hostages in his scalpel-like treatment of the illusions befogging an unfolding modernity under digital superintendence. These two works mark an interesting shift towards prospects of deliverance. Narratives are linked to storytelling and hope suggests the cultivation of prospects, expectations to be found outside digitalisation. Somehow, as the deus ex machina delivers plethora of information and its companion, chatbot offers limitless imitation, the virtues of wisdom generate an uncommon allure.
A remarkable amount of sociological reflection extramural to the discipline has been stimulated by digitalisation and chatbot. Some of it borders on panic. Responses to this state of affairs that shifts the basis of culture have engulfed the humanities and generated a certain paralysis in response. In the ‘tsunami of information’, the digital generates lies the crisis of narrative which occurs in a modernity increasingly lacking a sense of future, distance or vision (p. 15a). The outcome, spoken of earlier, is that ‘adrift in the sea of information and data, we seek a narrative anchor’ (p. xa). In response, Han seeks to restore a communal dimension to storytelling but in a way that marks an emancipation from its commodification. Shocks, colour and the virtues of touch are lost. A serious consequence for Han is that the present plethora of information undermines the need to seek theory, where narratives can be strung along. Perhaps the best part of the work is his demolition of dependence on information. It is limitless but in ways that permit judgement and choice to be postponed.
The loss of the mutuality of the gaze takes him to the borders of Goffman, leading to the erosion of aura, a casualty of the dominance of information (pp. 38–9a). His solution is persuasive and important, that ‘only spirit is capable of reordering things, of creating a new narrative’ (p. 50a). Matters could not be more of theological understanding than his conclusion (derived from Scholem) that with secularisation ‘the world becomes increasingly disenchanted. The mythical fire has long since burnt itself out. We no longer know how to say prayers. We are not able to engage in secret meditation’ (p. 42a). The capacity to tell that story is lost. The search for alternative stories moves to the issue of hope.
Coming from a philosophical direction with some theological detours, Han writes on the virtue of hope as an obvious necessity to seek in times of darkness, fear, uncertainty, and anxiety. For him, hope ‘represents a deep prayer of the soul, a passion that awakens in the face of despair’s negativity’ (p. 8b). He finds in Moltmann’s Theology of Hope a stress on the new that presses for action (p. 37b). But again, theological remit enters when he states that ‘the deepest roots of the hope are in the transcendent’ (p. 48b). The stirring of emotions generates demands for hope, and this leads him on to a vital point that ‘because feelings and affects are analogue, bodily events, they cannot be represented in algorithms. Intelligence merely calculates’ (p. 55b). That is the weakness of chatbot, that it can imitate tales of suffering but never experience these, nor can it feel despair suffice to generate hope. In Han’s work, the issue of the ‘not yet’ hovers. It provides the space for hope. So perfect in powers of imitation, chatbot lacks a crucial ingredient for hope to arise: hesitation. The ending on hope as a form of life is much concerned with Heidegger’s Being and Time. Its dealings with the non-transcendent, the self, and its isolation in ways stand at odds with the preceding chapters. The final chapter, ‘Hope as a Form of Life’ goes much too far inward in ways that contradict the outward expressions of hope and its mutuality. If the ending had followed a theological course into prayer and petition, it would have been a fascinating work in its completeness.
In these two works, and earlier ones, the virtues of acute scholarly reflection manage to offset numerous digital and mass media postings to supply a forensic exploration of the pathologies of contemporary life under a wide range of topics. It is a measure of his originality that his next topics are awaited with interest. The small size of his works indicates a flexibility in production, one that facilitates a remarkable capacity to re-cast understandings of the compass points of a bleak Zeitgeist.
