Onanistic Subject’s Death

In his book Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, the German philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues, that the new surveillance society that has arisen since 1984 is more “elegantly totalitarian and oppressive than anything described by Orwell or Bentham”. According to him, the neoliberal era made capitalism realise that seduction is a better way of dealing with its subjects than toughness. He calls this “smartpolitics”. I would call it seductivepolitics and understood it as an exterior and distinct feature of his concept of psychopolitics. Read the rest of this entry »