Intérpretes Católicos de la posmodernidad: Byung-Chul Han - Fernando Pérez-Bormujo (UPF, Barcelona)

Overview

The video is a conference talk by Fernando Pérez-Bormujo (UPF/CEU context), presenting Byung-Chul Han as a “Catholic interpreter” or—more broadly—as a prophetic thinker for understanding contemporary postmodern/neoliberal societies.

The central claim is that Han’s diagnoses—often apocalyptic in tone—describe a spiritual and social pathology. At the same time, they imply (and in Han’s later work explicitly develop) a counter-dimension: hope grounded in spirituality, ritual, beauty, and a re-incarnation of life.

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1) Who Han is and why he’s treated as “prophetic”

• Pérez-Bormujo frames Han as shaped by:

  • German thought (e.g., Heidegger, Hegel)
  • Korean/Eastern traditions (e.g., Buddhist/Taoist influence with shamanic elements)

• Han’s writing style is described as clear and compact, functioning like a “saga” of sharp observation about contemporary ills.

• The “prophet” framing:

  • Han is presented as more than a critic of the present.
  • His work is interpreted as asking what a “spirit of hope” might mean after the collapse of earlier social and spiritual coordinates.

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2) Diagnosis of neoliberal and digital modernity: fatigue, transparency, swarm

Key points of Han’s critique (as presented in the talk):

• Society of Fatigue

  • Western neoliberalism shifts from overt coercion to a more efficient domination where people submit as “entrepreneurs of themselves.”
  • This produces exhaustion and depression rather than criminals or “madmen.”
  • Performance society (“you can”) replaces prohibition/duty with perpetual self-improvement.

• Transparency society (media/social networks)

  • Transparency becomes surveillance and coercion, not moral liberation.
  • Platforms operate as a modern panopticon, with users yielding personal data “voluntarily.”
  • Social life becomes hypervisible but not truly communal—driven by likes/ego accumulation and lacking authentic political “we.”
  • Images become “pornographic” in Han’s sense: immediate stimulation without depth, meaning, or opacity.

• Swarm

  • Digital public space turns private display into a continuous spectacle.
  • Anonymity enables “shitstorms,” impulsiveness, and chain reactions.
  • Infinite production of information undermines truth, quality, and stable representative politics.
  • Outcome: chaos rather than mass, and communication without community.

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3) The expulsion of difference and the palliative society: pain anesthetized

The talk highlights Han’s later trajectory:

• “Expulsion of difference” (digital/global era)

  • Globalization and communication technologies supposedly erase effective otherness.
  • There is no real “opponent” or genuine alterity.

• Inability to generate revolution

  • Domination works by privatizing suffering and fear, preventing their politicization/socialization.

• Palliative society / algophobia

  • Society becomes afraid of pain (algophobia), leading to an anesthetized existence.
  • Conflict in politics is avoided; psychology promotes productivity/resilience while hiding pain.
  • Pain used to acquire meaning through narratives (religious/symbolic/ethical frameworks).
  • Now pain is made meaningless.
  • Han’s claim (as relayed): society faces a “crisis of narration” in the digital age, and storytelling can alleviate pain.

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4) Hope: not optimism, but a spiritual orientation tied to death/birth and renewal

Although the talk emphasizes apocalyptic diagnosis, it insists Han’s account is not hopeless:

• Hope is framed as transcendent and ethical, not as naïve “better tomorrow” optimism.
• Resurrection is described as requiring the reality of death (not denying it).
• Hope is portrayed as open to the unforeseeable, and “nested in despair”—dialectical, but oriented toward the future.
• Hope connects to:
  • Joy (as fruit of hope)
  • Forgiveness and promise as stabilizing forces for free human life
  • Ultimately birth/freedom—connected by Pérez-Bormujo to Christian meaning

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5) A “recovery” program: incarnation, rituals, beauty, earth (and critique of disembodiment)

Han’s counter-movement is presented as re-grounding life:

• Incarnation vs. disembodiment

  • Modern life flees death by hiding illness, ugliness, and pain.
  • Virtual/technological mentalism contributes to a spectral mode of existence.
  • The “cure” is not escapist naturalism; it is confrontation with mortality through lived embodiment.

• Rituals

  • Rituals transmit values and orders that keep communities cohesive.
  • Modern “communication without community” replaces durable symbolic forms.
  • Rituals anchor time (beginning/end closures) and help societies confront death honestly.

• Beauty

  • Han’s complaint about contemporary ugliness is central.
  • Beauty is tied to mystery, transcendence, eroticism (eros), and festal sacred time.
  • Beauty’s “salvation” includes preserving difference and community; its death is treated as a death of humanity.

• Earth / gardening

  • In Regarding the Earth, Han emphasizes reconnecting with the earth’s regenerative, patient power.
  • Gardening becomes a meditation/prayer-like practice.

• Overall implied orientation:

  • Return to things, bodies, time, symbols, and communal forms, rather than consumption of the ephemeral.

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6) Q&A: Han’s Eastern kindness, Christian resonance, and Catholic “readability”

Clarifications introduced in the discussion:

• Eastern kindness and Levinas

  • Pérez-Bormujo argues Han critiques Levinas while also admiring him.
  • Han’s “kindness without possessing the other” is framed as compatible with (but distinct from) Levinas.
  • A Christian frame is emphasized: incarnation and divine presence relationally support respect for otherness.

• Kiefer and apocalyptic materiality

  • A question links Han with artist Anselm Kiefer.
  • Pérez-Bormujo suggests Kiefer’s harsh corporeality and death-embracing aesthetics give Han’s text its “point,” preventing hope from becoming empty vitalism.

• Is Han anti-western and only East-focused?

  • The talk rejects a simplistic “East vs. West” view:
    • Han critiques capitalist societies in Korea and also describes Germany’s intellectual/spiritual environments.
    • Freiburg/Franciscan formation and German Catholic theology—especially the ranking of rituals—matter to Han’s proposed antidotes.
    • Post-unification Berlin/Eastern Europe is described as retaining some communal residues lost under “savage capitalism.”
    • A Mediterranean Catholic resonance is suggested: Spain/Italy/Greece/Portugal as places where Han’s critique and “recipes” are already spiritually intelligible.

• English reception and metaphysics critique

  • Pérez-Bormujo says English-speaking reception is hard to gauge, though Han has been widely translated.
  • Against claims that Han lacks metaphysics, he argues Han’s foundations are ontological (Heidegger/Hegel), and that “phenomenology vs. ontology” is treated as a false opposition.

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Presenters or contributors

• Fernando Pérez-Bormujo (main presenter)
• Enrique Sánchez Costa (mentioned in the introduction; CEU/Foundation hosting)
• Byung-Chul Han (subject of the talk)
• Anselm Kiefer and Vin Benders (documentary)

Philosophers/authors mentioned (as referenced in the talk)

Seneca, Maimonides, Averroes/Averroës, Schelling, Jürgen Habermas, Heidegger, Hegel, Ortega, Unamuno, Eugenio Trías, Foucault, Zuboff (referred to as “Zubov”), Plato, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Walter Benjamin, Levinas, Bart(s), Gadamer, Richard Malujan (as referenced), Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt (mentioned as “Hann Aren”), Simone Weil/Simón Bell (referenced indirectly), Gabriel Marcel, Toni (Tertulian/“Terryton” as said), Molman Blog (as said), Ricoeur (not clearly), plus Karl Marx not mentioned.