Be happy — that is the new formula of domination. The positivity of happiness pushes away the negativity of pain. Happiness, as positive emotional capital, is meant to keep performance and capability from weakening, so they can continue to be exercised. Self-motivation and self-optimization make the neoliberal happiness apparatus operate very efficiently, because domination can be carried out without incurring any major cost. The subjugated do not even know that they are subjugated. They believe themselves to be free. Even though there is no external coercion at all, they think they are realizing themselves and exploit themselves voluntarily. Freedom is not suppressed but exploited. The command to be free produces a more destructive coercion than the command to obey.
Under neoliberal rule, power too takes on a positive form. Power becomes smart. Unlike the repressive disciplinary power, smart power inflicts no pain. Power is completely separated from pain. Power is maintained without any oppression. Subjugation takes place by way of self-optimization and self-realization.
— Byung-Chul Han, The Palliative Society — The Compulsion of Happiness
Pain strengthens self-perception. Pain reveals the contour of the self. Pain marks the outline of the self. The increase in self-harm can be seen as a desperate attempt by the narcissistic, depressive self to confirm and feel itself. I feel pain, therefore I am. Even the sense of existence is only possible through pain. When pain disappears completely, people seek something to replace it. Artificially produced pain becomes the remedy. Extreme sports and adventurous attitudes are attempts to confirm one's existence. In this way the palliative society paradoxically produces extremists. Without a culture of pain, barbarism arises.
"In a desensitized society, ever stronger stimuli are needed to make people feel alive. Among the stimuli that still allow self-experience, only drugs, violence, and terror remain."
— Byung-Chul Han, The Palliative Society — Pain as Truth
Today we do not want to be exposed to pain. But pain is the midwife of the new, the midwife of the wholly other. The negativity of pain interrupts the same. In the palliative society, the hell of the same, no language of pain, no poetics of pain is possible. The palliative society permits only the prose of comfort — that is, only writing under the sun.
— Byung-Chul Han, The Palliative Society — The Poetics of Pain
Spirit is pain. Only through pain does spirit reach new insight, a higher form of knowledge and consciousness. According to Hegel, the characteristic of spirit is to "dwell within contradiction, and thus within pain." In the process of formation, spirit falls into contradiction with itself. Spirit is split. This split, this contradiction, gives pain. Pain leads spirit to form itself. Bildung (formation) presupposes the negativity of pain. Spirit overcomes painful contradiction by developing into a higher form. Pain is the motor of the dialectical formation of spirit. Pain transforms spirit. Verwandlung (transformation) is bound to pain. Without pain, spirit remains in the same state. The path of formation is the via dolorosa, the path of pain.
Without pain, an insight that fundamentally breaks with the existing is impossible. Erfahrung (experience) in the strict sense also presupposes the negativity of pain. Experience is the painful process of transformation. To endure and pay for pain is one moment of experience. In this regard, experience is different from Erlebnis (lived experience), which produces no change of state. Erlebnis enjoys instead of transforms. Only pain produces fundamental change. In the palliative society, the same persists. We travel to all sorts of places, yet we have no experience at all. We acquire knowledge of all sorts of things, yet we never reach insight. Information produces neither experience nor insight. Information lacks the negativity of transformation.
The negativity of pain is essential to thought. What distinguishes thought from calculation and artificial intelligence is pain. Intelligence means inter-legere, choosing among things. Intelligence is the capacity to discriminate. Thus intelligence does not step outside the existing. Intelligence cannot produce something wholly other. In this respect intelligence differs from spirit. Pain gives depth to thought. But there is no such thing as deep calculation. What is the depth of thought? Unlike calculation, thought produces a wholly different perspective on the world, indeed a different world.
— Byung-Chul Han, The Palliative Society — The Dialectic of Pain
The order of the earth, the order of the land, is coming to its end today. This order is being replaced by the digital order. Heidegger is the last thinker to think the order of the earth. Death and pain do not belong to the digital order. They are merely disturbances. Sorrow and longing are also suspect. The digital order does not know the painful nourishment of nearness. In nearness, distance is inscribed. The digital order makes nearness shallow, turning it into the absence of distance, so that nearness no longer causes pain. The compulsion to be able to do as one pleases turns everything into something reachable and consumable. The digital order assumes the attitude that anything must be available for one's disposal at once. The aim of the digital order is to make everything disposable. The digital order has no "slowness of hesitation that lingers before what cannot be done."
Secrecy is essential to the order of the earth. By contrast, the slogan of the digital order is transparency. Transparency removes all concealment. The digital order also makes language transparent. By reifying language into information, it turns language into something disposable. Information has no concealed reverse side. As the world becomes data, it becomes transparent. Algorithms and artificial intelligence make human attitudes transparent as well. They turn them into something calculable and steerable. The digital order is caught in Dataism, in data-totalitarianism. The digital order replaces Narration with Addition. The word digital refers to the numerical. The numerical is more transparent and more easily disposable than the narrative.
— Byung-Chul Han, The Palliative Society — The Ontology of Pain
Today we are too thoroughly ruled and captured by the self, even intoxicated by it. The ever-strengthening narcissistic self meets, first of all, only itself in the other. Digital media also encourage the disappearance of the other. Digital media turn the other into an object available for disposal, weakening the other's resistance. We are increasingly losing the ability to perceive the otherness of the other. Once the other is stripped of its otherness, that other can only be consumed.
Sensitivity to the other presupposes "Ausgesetztheit" — being exposed "to the point of pain." This being-exposed is pain. When this primordial pain is absent, the self again raises its head, asserts its Für-sich, its for-itself, and reifies the other into an object.
— Byung-Chul Han, The Palliative Society — The Ethics of Pain
