The antinomies of Byung Chul Han three ways of reading

Abstract

Introduction newlineOn thinking or putting an apparently stable world in peril newlineLike many accidents, beginning with the ones by which one happens to be born in place Z newlineinstead of in place Y, this thesis on certain aspects of Byung-Chul Han s writings on what he newlinecalls the achievement-subject and achievement-society has evolved out of certain accidents. The newlinemost immediate of these accidents concerns the circumstances under which I was introduced to newlinecritical discourse on liberalism and neoliberalism through the works of Byung-Chul Han, whose newlinePsychopolitics1 my friend Bidyut had suggested me to have a look at. Which I did, in the midst newlineof a global pandemic and in the second term of Narendra Modi as the PM of a country which newlinethinkers like Ambedkar and Bhagat Singh had yearned to transform into a just and egalitarian newlinedemocracy, an yearning which that country has extremely ominously turned against. newlineWithout access to digital libraries like Library Genesis and podcasts like The Dig, Democracy newlineNow, DiEM25, Citations Needed, Intercepted, Life from Plato s Cave and many other such newlineresources for education, it would have been impossible to even conceive the idea of doing this newlinethesis. Without these resources it would have been as difficult to recover from the shock of newlinereading Han as it had been to recover from the profoundly unsettling experience of reading newlineDerrida s Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences which too I had read newlinetogether with Bidyut when we were doing MA in English in Banaras in 2010-2012. I remember newlinefeeling as if I was either too dumb to grasp Derrida s point or was being left out in the cold by newlinemy friend who appeared to have grasped the essence of Derrida s essay and found his argument newlineto be convincing and was unavailable to see why I should be seeing Derrida as if this guy was pulling from under my feet that desperately needed rug of truth which I felt I was convinced of newlineand would never let go of. newlineAt this point I am not going to cross check whether what I had taken away in my first and only newliner