THE CRISIS OF NARRATION
By Byung-Chul Han
Published by Polity
Cambridge, UK, 2024
Whether railing against the invasive and invisible forces of global capital in Psychopolitics (2017), the cult of wellness and personal improvement in The Burnout Society (2015) and Saving Beauty (2017), or the intangible ghosts of modernity in Non-things (2022), the Korean-born German philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s prognosis is that our contemporary world is sick. Across a number of essay-length books he has expounded upon the tragic maladies of our age, the most immediate being the digital era in which we are currently lost.
In (2024) Han treads familiar paths and follows similarly pessimistic lines of argument, reinforcing his concerns surrounding our addiction to smartphones and the inevitable loss of attention and mental illness they induce. He may not be an especially original thinker (after all, he leans heavily on his radical forebears: Benjamin, Arendt, Sontag, Adorno, Baudrillard, Heidegger et al.) but he is a serious and committed writer, relentless in his disdain for the
