By CARLOS EDUARDO ARAÚJO*

Byung-Chul Han's work, by varnishing its message with seductive rhetoric, becomes a product of cultural consumption that, although it seems critical, reinforces the logic of domination and exploitation.

1.

Byung-Chul Han is a publishing phenomenon, but his work deserves to be examined with a critical eye and without the reverence that usually accompanies it. Although he is presented as a “philosopher” who diagnoses the ills of neoliberalism and contemporary society, his production seems more like an incessant variation on the same themes, revolving around concepts such as transparency, performance, positivity and self-exploitation.

There is something industrial about his writing, in the most Fordist sense of the term: his books follow a mass-production model, resulting in intellectual products that are easy to consume, quickly digested, but with little nutritional value for truly critical thinking.

The main criticism that can be leveled at Byung-Chul Han is his superficiality. He often uses philosophical concepts as if they were slogans, reducing complex ideas to seductive and accessible formulas. The effect is deceptive: his prose is concise and engaging, giving the impression of depth, but upon closer inspection it reveals itself to be repetitive and incapable of developing its own premises with any rigor.

This oversimplification gives the impression that Byung-Chul Han does not propose a robust critique of neoliberalism, but merely describes its dynamics with a certain melancholic tone, without offering solutions or alternatives. His diagnosis is always the same: we live in a performance society, we exploit ourselves and we are sickened by an excess of positivity. But what happens next? Byung-Chul Han does not go into more detail.

Moreover, his meteoric rise in popularity raises eyebrows. Genuinely radical philosophers are not usually well received by the publishing market, especially when they are supposedly criticizing the dominant structure. The proliferation of his works—which are often mere developments of previous ones, with no significant additions—suggests that he has found a perfect niche: light, palatable criticism that doesn’t really challenge anyone but offers a veneer of reflection to readers who want to feel intellectually engaged without having to face the weight of rigorous philosophy.

He offers no robust conceptual tools for truly transforming reality. His aesthetic approach and aphoristic style make him more like a guru than a truly subversive thinker. In the end, Han is not a problem because he is wrong—he is a problem because he is insufficient.

Byung-Chul Han has become a global publishing phenomenon, with books translated into several languages ​​and a legion of readers who find in his work a diagnosis of the ills of contemporary times. However, a critical – and, more precisely, a Marxist – look reveals that his philosophy is not only insufficient but also harmless for a real critique of capitalism.

When describing the dynamics of the society of performance and self-exploitation, Byung-Chul Han avoids pointing out those specifically responsible for the situation, making his analysis more of a melancholic elegy than a transformative critique.

2.

His books follow a repetitive pattern: we are victims of excessive positivity, compulsory transparency, digital hypercommunication, and the exhaustion caused by overwork and self-exploitation. But by formulating this critique in such an abstract way, Byung-Chul Han ignores the structural elements of capitalist exploitation. Where is the surplus value? Where is the expropriation of the means of production? Where is the figure of the boss, the bourgeois, the owner of capital?

By placing the worker as the exploiter of himself, Byung-Chul Han shifts the responsibility from the capitalist system to the individual himself, as if exhaustion and anxiety were merely symptoms of a diffuse malaise, and not the direct result of economic exploitation.

The notion of “self-exploitation,” so dear to Byung-Chul Han, is a veiled way of emptying the Marxist concept of exploitation. If the worker now exploits himself, then who benefits from this exploitation? Capital continues to accumulate wealth, the means of production remain in the hands of the bourgeoisie, and structural inequality is perpetuated. But Byung-Chul Han does not tell us about this. He describes the anguish of the neoliberal subject, but does not denounce the economic structure that imprisons him. His critique, therefore, is merely an impotent lamentation.

His popularity is also worth noting. Byung-Chul Han is celebrated, sold in airports and consumed as a pop thinker. This is because his philosophy, despite its critical tone, does not threaten capitalism – on the contrary, it fits perfectly with it. By offering a harmless and individualized critique, he allows his readers to remain immersed in the system without having to truly confront it.

Byung-Chul Han is a symptom of the society he purports to criticize. His philosophy is not a weapon against capitalism; it is a sophisticated product of capitalism itself, sold as an intellectual relief to those who sense that something is wrong but are unwilling – or unable – to confront the roots of the problem.

3.

Byung-Chul Han's work functions as a simulacrum of critical philosophy, a cultural product that offers its readers a sense of depth without requiring them to make any real effort to reflect on or confront the structures that sustain capitalist exploitation. His thought is the epitome of fast-paced intellectualism: easy to digest, elegant in form, full of seductive terms, but essentially empty of transformative content.

This characteristic makes Byung-Chul Han especially appreciated by an audience that wishes to display an appearance of erudition without committing itself to rigorous study or truly revolutionary criticism. He provides the vocabulary for salon debates, for coffee shop conversations between liberal professionals and light academics who wish to appear engaged but whose commitment to social change is limited to a scattered reading of short essays and vague aphorisms.

Byung-Chul Han, by coating his criticism with elegant language and apparent depth, offers a seductive palliative for an audience that seeks to display an intellectuality, even if it is shallow and superficial. His work, when dealing with the “performance society” and “self-exploitation”, presents concepts that, although they may seem innovative, are nothing more than reformulations of already known criticisms – without, however, pointing out those truly responsible for the exploitation.

This analysis, impregnated with a stylistic varnish, covers up the absence of a diagnosis that goes to the root of the capitalist contradiction, moving away from the Marxist core that identifies the holder of capital and the expropriation of surplus value as central elements of exploitation.

From this perspective, Byung-Chul Han’s critique becomes an exercise in intellectual self-aggrandizement, where the worker, when forced to exploit himself, is indirectly blamed for his own condition. The capitalist system, with its mechanisms of accumulation and concentration of the means of production, remains untouched – its expropriatory function is left aside in favor of a narrative that aims to comfort the neoliberal subject with superficial and stylized reflections.

Thus, instead of revealing the true exploiter – the holder of capital – Byung-Chul Han feeds the illusion that the solution to contemporary problems lies in melancholic self-analysis, and not in the structural transformation of society.

The effect of this “varnish” is twofold. On the one hand, it confers an aura of depth that attracts an audience eager for reflections that sound revolutionary but which, in practice, remain devoid of a commitment to a real critique of power structures.

On the other hand, this superficial approach serves as an ideological instrument that perpetuates the status quo, offering aesthetic satisfaction without provoking the changes necessary to overcome the fundamental contradictions of capitalism.

In short, Byung-Chul Han's work, by varnishing its message with seductive rhetoric, transforms itself into a product of cultural consumption that, although it appears critical, ends up reinforcing the logics of domination and exploitation that true Marxist analysis would require us to denounce.

*Carlos Eduardo Araujo Master in Theory of Law from PUC-MG.

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