Hello, how are you? I'm Alfredo Oliva, a university professor, and today I want to talk about Byung-Chul Han once again. I want to begin an analysis of another of his books called Psychopolitics.
I want to record the first video on this topic, and I will explain this whole story to you. But I want to start by remembering that Byung-Chul Han is an Asian philosopher, born in South Korea in 1959, who has lived in Germany since his youth. He is an essayist on the contemporary world.
And this book called Psychopolitics has an edition in Portuguese, it has an edition here in our country, but I will use a Spanish edition because it is the only one I found in digital format, and you know I am prioritizing reading books in digital format, okay? Psychopolitics is a book published in 2014 in Germany and translated, in the case of Brazil, into Portuguese in 2018 by Editora Vozes, right? The electronic version I use is in Spanish and it was made, right?
It was translated in 2021. I would like to highlight some aspects of the first chapter, titled The Crisis of Freedom. So, let's go.
He starts by talking about internal coercion. I think this is the motto of the book called psychopolitics, or psychopower, right? So, we know that Byung-Chul Han is a reader of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, and Michel Foucault was the specialist on power.
However, Foucault died in 1984, and we are already in 2023, right? Since '84, a lot has changed, a lot has altered in terms of the debate on power, in terms of the technology of power. So, Byung-Chul Han says that the more recent type of technology that Foucault did not have time to visualize because he died in '84, is what he calls psychopolitics.
It is a type of power that gains expression in the interiority of the subject when the subject themselves coerces, right? So Foucault, for example, when he analyzed the technology of disciplinary power, he said that disciplinary power is fundamentally an external phenomenon to the subject that functions coercively in relation to the subject. Psychopower is when the subject internalizes the values of contemporary society and they themselves, right, they themselves coerce themselves, they look within, they internalize the values.
So let's take a look at this here, look. He says this: "Today we believe we are not a subjected subject, but a free project that constantly reinvents itself, right ? So it's interesting, we don't think we are being coerced externally, right?
Let's think, for example, if you are a freelancer, for instance, if you have your own business, you're saying:" Look , nobody controls my own business. No one is, no one controls my working time . I am a free person.
I work whenever I want, I do what I want. "And what he is saying is not quite like that. He is saying that today people have the illusion that they are free, but they are only free from external coercion, they are only free from an external power instance that forces that person to work.
What makes people work today? It is the fact that they are convinced that they must work. They have internalized the value of work, they have internalized that they must work.
So, people are, in quotes, free to do what they want, but, in reality, they have been convinced that they are obliged to work, that they are obliged to be entrepreneurs, that they are obliged, right? So this is an internalized value. So they are the ones coercing themselves.
That is what he is calling psychopolitics. He still says the self as a project that believes it has freed itself from external coercions and the coercions of others submits itself to internal coercions and coercions of its own in the form of a compulsion to perform and to optimize. Do you understand this expression well, right?
So, the self is no longer in the neoliberal world, in the contemporary capitalist world. And the self no longer needs to be coerced. It is no longer subjected to a disciplinary power that coerces it, that subjects it to work discipline.
The subject themselves has internalized values such as the desire for performance, the desire for optimization, the desire for enterprise , and it is the subject themselves. The coercion comes from within, right? In the burnout society, Byung-Chul Han uses a quite interesting image.
He says that in societies prior to contemporary ones, we were attacked metaphorically, we were attacked by bacteria, by viruses, by fungi. In other words, there were external agents that attacked us and our immune system organized itself to resist these external attacks, right? This is a metaphor for the world before this stage of neoliberal capitalism.
What happens in the present time? He says:" What is happening is that we are being attacked by ourselves. "He says what happens to us in the contemporary world can be compared to an autoimmune disease.
Our immune system is attacking our own immune system. In other words, the attack comes from within; the attack is internal. We are producing, in quotation marks, metaphorically speaking, an autoimmune disease.
Meaning, we ourselves are attacking ourselves. in order to become productive people. That is what I think is stamped in this phrase I just read, right?
Look, the self as a project that wants to have freed or liberated itself from external constraints and the constraints of others, right? which come from other people, submits itself to internal constraints and one's own constraints in the form of a compulsion to perform. I mean, when you demand that you be productive, you are doing to yourself what external power structures did to you in the past.
At least if you are a person who has been around for some time like me, right, who is 55, almost 56 years old, I lived long enough to have experienced a disciplinary society, where I was externally coerced into work, and I now live, for some time, in a society where I demand, right, productivity from myself, or, well, I am now learning to resist this demand for productivity as well. He says then that there is a paradox in this, right? He says:" We find ourselves, therefore, in a paradoxical situation.
Freedom is a counter-figure to coercion. Freedom which is supposed to be the opposite of coercion, generates coercion, right? I mean, our own freedom, the very freedom that was built by us, has turned into coercion, right?
We have the freedom to coerce ourselves, right? To demand productivity from ourselves. This is what is happening to people.
This is the paradox. And so he ends this excerpt talking about the achievement-subject. What is the achievement-subject?
It is the subject of the contemporary world. It is the subject of the achievement society. What is the achievement society?
It is the society, these are the societies that exist today, right, of neoliberal capitalism. He says: "The achievement-subject that claims to be free is, in fact, a slave, an absolute slave in that, without any master, without any lord, they exploit themselves voluntarily, right? So, the achievement-subject is the subject who exploits themselves.
It's not the one who has someone to demand their performance, but someone who demands their performance from themselves, right? And he says:" The neoliberal subject, as an entrepreneur of the self , is not capable of establishing relationships with others that are free from any purpose. "That is another quite interesting question, isn't it?
I mean, we only seek relationships that are permeated by a certain purpose. It is a utilitarian society. Whenever I do something in the contemporary world, my question is: what is the purpose of this, right?
If you think about what the purpose of leisure is, what the purpose of reading poetry is, what the purpose of play is, what the purpose of doing nothing is? Right? No purpose at all.
And it is exactly in those moments where there is no purpose at all that we recover our humanity, right? So what he is saying is that basically we need to resist this coercion for productivity in which we are implicated in the contemporary world. Okay?
Well, there is still much to say about this book, I will explore many other aspects and I hope to see you in the next video . Best wishes and see you then.
