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PHILOSOPHERS NEWSContemporary philosophers · ideas · books
Philosopher
Cultural theorist — Berlin University of the Arts
Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) · Germany · d. 1959
The Korean-born German philosopher known for his critique of the burnout society, the transparency society and digital culture. His books are translated widely and quickly.
Susan Neiman wants the word 'evil' back. Byung-Chul Han wants 'respect'. Žižek and Butler think the words on offer are traps. Habermas, in a volume finished before his death, denied that anything was lost. The year's other book list, read as one argument.
Byung-Chul Han, Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, Jürgen Habermas, Susan Neiman
Eight books published or due between now and the end of December, none of them covered in this week's two surveys. Read together, they show a discipline that has stopped asking whether machines can think and started asking what thinking is worth — and a logic revival almost nobody has noticed.
Byung-Chul Han
Ninety-four pages on the decay of respect, which Han holds has been displaced by attention and by public shaming. Neoliberal performance culture turns respect into status competition; respect itself requires a distance that digital publics abolish. The book closes with a politics of friendship founded on distance and mutual recognition. No English edition announced.
Matthes & Seitz Berlin · 2026 · German
Publisher page →Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han argues that the crisis of religion is a crisis of attention, of seeing and hearing, rather than of belief, and that constant information consumption has displaced the contemplative capacity on which any experience of transcendence depends. Written in dialogue with Simone Weil. Published 3 September 2026, 108 pages.
Polity · 2026 · English · Translated by Wieland Hoban
Publisher page →Byung-Chul Han, Giorgio Agamben, David Chalmers
Rhizome, assemblage, deterritorialisation, lines of flight: the words are everywhere and the metaphysics that made them mean something is largely gone. Three decades after his death, a reckoning with what Deleuze actually argued, what his critics actually alleged, and why three pages he wrote in 1990 still describe 2026.
Byung-Chul Han, Nick Land, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze
