Оглавление
Byung-Chul Han. Capitalism and the Death Drive
CONTENTS
Guide
Pages
Capitalism and the Death Drive
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Capitalism and the Death Drive
NOTES
Why Revolution Is Impossible Today
NOTES
The Total Exploitation of the Human Being
NOTES
Inside the Digital Panopticon
NOTES
Only What Is Dead Is Transparent
NOTES
Dataism and Nihilism
Torturous Emptiness
NOTES
Jumping Humans
NOTES
Where Do the Refugees Come From?
NOTES
Where the Wild Things Are
NOTES
Who Is a Refugee?
NOTES
Beauty Lies Yonder, in the Foreign1
NOTES
The Big Rush
NOTES
In Your Face: How the Arts are Turning into Pornography. Or: On the Compulsion to Get Down to it, Without Seduction
NOTES
The End of Liberalism: The Coronavirus Pandemic and Its Consequences
It Is Eros That Defeats Depression
NOTES
Capitalism Dislikes Silence
NOTES
COVID-19 Has Reduced Us to a ‘Society of Survival’
‘I Am Sorry, But These Are the Facts’
NOTES
POLITY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
Отрывок из книги
Byung-Chul Han
Translated by Daniel Steuer
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Adalbert von Chamisso’s novella Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte [The Wonderful History of Peter Schlemihl] can be read as an allegory of the capitalist economy. Schlemihl sells his shadow to the devil in return for a bottomless bag of gold (that is, infinite capital). The pact with the devil turns out to be a pact with capitalism. Infinite capital makes the shadow – which stands for the body and death – disappear. But Schlemihl soon realizes that a life without a shadow is impossible. He walks the earth as the undead. The moral is: death is a part of life. The story thus ends with this admonition: ‘But you, my friend, if you want to live among mankind, learn to revere first your shadow, and then your money.’16
Capitalism is obsessed with death. The unconscious fear of death is what spurs it on. The threat of death is what stirs its compulsion of accumulation and growth. This compulsion drives us towards not only ecological but also mental catastrophe. The destructive compulsion to perform combines self-affirmation and self-destruction in one. We optimize ourselves to death. Relentless self-exploitation leads to mental collapse. Brutal competition ends in destruction. It produces an emotional coldness and indifference towards others as well as towards one’s own self.
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