Narratives produce the ties that bind us. They create community, eliminate contingency and anchor us in being. And yet in our contemporary information society, where everything has become arbitrary and random, storytelling becomes storyselling and narratives lose their binding force.
Whereas narratives create community, storytelling brings forth only a fleeting community – the community of consumers. No amount of storytelling could recreate the fire around which humans gather to tell each other stories. That fire has long since burnt out. It has been replaced by the digital screen, which separates people rather than bringing them together. Through storytelling, capitalism appropriates narrative: stories sell. They are no longer a medium of shared experience.
The inflation of storytelling betrays a need to cope with contingency, but storytelling is unable to transform the information society back into a stable narrative community. Rather, storytelling as storyselling is a pathological phenomenon of our age. Byung-Chul Han, one of the most perceptive cultural theorists of contemporary society, dissects this crisis with exceptional insight and flair.
About Author:
Byung-Chul Han can be regarded as one of the strongest candidates for the philosopher of our time. Although it has been twenty years since the publication of his first book—a readable monograph on the concept of Stimmung, or mood, in Heidegger’s works—his writings have only been translated into other languages since 2009. The introspective tone of that first book has persisted throughout his later works, but a clear turn toward the political—and in particular toward historical models of coercion—became evident only with the publication of What is Power? in 2005. In 2010, Han released his groundbreaking book, translated into English as The Burnout Society, which gradually drew attention outside Germany, where he resides. Since then, his works have been translated into more than twenty languages, and in the past two years, the United States and the United Kingdom have joined this trend: Stanford and MIT have each published two of his books, with three more set to appear in the coming months.
Added Date: 2/10/2025 2:34:05 PM
Last update: 2/10/2025 6:22:34 PM
بیونگ چول هان را میتوان یکی از بهترین نامزدها برای فیلسوفِ دورانِ کنونی در نظر گرفت. اگرچه ۲۰ سال از زمان انتشار نخستین کتابش میگذرد -اولین کتاب او یک تکنگاریِ خواندنی دربارۀ مفهوم اشتیمونگ۱، یا ملال، در آثار هایدگر بود- آثار او فقط از سال ۲۰۰۹ به این سو به دیگر زبانها بازگردانده شده است. حالت دروننگرانۀ کتابِ نخستش بر کتابهای بعدی او نیز حاکم بوده است، و چرخشی مشخص بهسوی امر سیاسی، و بهویژه بهسوی مدلهای تاریخی اجبار، تنها با انتشار کتاب قدرت چیست؟۲ در سال ۲۰۰۵ نمایان شد. در سال ۲۰۱۰، هان کتاب ساختارشکن خود را منتشر کرد، که با نام جامعۀ فرسوده۳ به انگلیسی ترجمه شده است، و کمکم در خارج از آلمان، کشور محل اقامتش، مورد توجه قرار گرفت. از آن پس، آثار او به بیش از دهبیست زبان بازگردانده شده و، طی دو سال گذشته، آمریکا و انگلیس هم به این جریان پیوستهاند: اکنون استنفورد و اِم.آی.تی هر کدام دو کتاب منتشر کردهاند، و سه کتاب دیگر هم در ماههای آتی منتشر خواهد شد.