Salvation of Beauty

Jeff Koons, the iPhone, Brazilian waxing: why are we so obsessed with smoothness?


Beauty today is caught in a paradox: on the one hand, it is expanding exponentially – the cult of beauty is everywhere. On the other hand, it is losing all transcendence and exposing itself to the immanence of consumerism – it is the aesthetic side of capital. Our experience of the negative in the face of beauty – as overcome, stunned, shaken – has been replaced with a tepid culinary preference, a Like; so that in the end we have turned the beautiful pornographic. This essay summons up those forms of the beautiful that manifest as truth, as disaster, as seduction. Han also examines those dimensions of beauty on which an ethics or politics of beauty might be founded.

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  • Publisher: S. FISCHER
  • Release: 23.07.2015
  • ISBN: 978-3-10-002431-2
  • 112 Pages
  • Author: Byung-Chul Han
Salvation of Beauty
Byung-Chul Han Salvation of Beauty
S. Fischer Verlag GmbH
© S. Fischer Verlag GmbH
Byung-Chul Han

Byung-Chul Han, born in 1959, studied metallurgy in Korea, then philosophy, German, and Catholic theology in Freiburg and Munich. After a philosophy professorship in Basel, he became professor of philosophy and media theory at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe in 2010. Since 2012, he has been a professor of cultural sciences at the Universität der Künste in Berlin. His books with S. Fischer include Psychopolitik: Neoliberalismus und die neuen Machttechniken (2014) and Die Errettung des Schönen (2015).