Byung-Chul Han and the Affective Regime of Contemporary Societies

Philosopher Byung-Chul Han offers a compelling critique of modern society’s affective regime, which demands constant positivity, productivity, and self-optimization. In Han’s analysis, those who suffer—whether through mental illness, grief, or withdrawal—are marginalized or blamed for their “lack of resilience” within a system that has no true outside or escape. This systemic imperative absorbs all affect into the logic of performance, leaving no room for authentic vulnerability or rest.

Han’s critique reveals a form of persecution that is not marked, primarily, by physical violence but by erasure and implicit blame. The suffering individual becomes invisible, or worse, culpable for their own pain. This dynamic constitutes a form of affective violence that compounds suffering by denying recognition and solidarity.

The Ethical Horror of Persecuting Sufferers

Why might persecuting sufferers be considered “worse” than other forms of persecution? At its core, such persecution represents a moral inversion: the very condition that should elicit moral regard becomes grounds for exclusion and punishment. This inversion destroys empathy, a foundational element of ethical and social life, and replaces it with contempt and neglect.

Moreover, this form of persecution inflicts irredeemable harm. It attacks not only the body or social standing but the existential possibility of healing, dignity, and selfhood. The suffering person is trapped in a cycle where their pain justifies further marginalization, creating a feedback loop of despair and invisibility.

Summary

While all persecution is morally abhorrent, the targeting of those who suffer for their suffering represents a uniquely profound ethical violation. It compounds harm, erodes empathy, and inverts the fundamental moral imperative to protect or to do right by the injured. As thinkers like Byung-Chul Han remind us, such affective regimes demand critical resistance and a reorientation toward genuine moral regard, rest, and recognition. Only by reclaiming the space for authentic vulnerability can society hope to overcome the cruelty of persecuting its most wounded members.

That said, Han doesn’t foreground vulnerability in any emancipatory way. It’s not his axis. If anything, he mourns the loss of true contemplative withdrawal (vita contemplativa), but he doesn’t offer vulnerability as a counter-force. In this affective regime, as Han observes, pain is rendered unproductive and thus invisible. The suffering subject is not merely pitied or ignored; they are reframed as a malfunction in the system of optimization.

   

Postscipt

In Foucault's analysis the normalizing imperative does not kill directly; it sorts and disciplines, rendering certain lives inadmissible to full social recognition. Will Conway builds on this by identifying how modernity’s eugenic metaphysics subtend this sorting process—refinement becomes the teleological endpoint of human development, and anything less is deviation marked for correction, containment, or disposal.

Agamben pushes this logic to its barest form. The sufferer, once excluded from the sphere of productive life, is reduced to bare life—included only as a figure of exception, stripped of political intelligibility but subjected to its effects. The cruelty, then, lies not just in neglect, but in the way suffering is metabolized by power: made unrecognizable, depoliticized, and re-encoded as failure.

Butler doesn’t let vulnerability sit still. For her, it’s never just a tender little truth we bring into the world like an open wound. It’s structured, mediated, always exposed through relations of power. Vulnerability isn’t just a thing you feel; it’s a position you’re put into—by discourse, by policy, by history. “Who’s reclaiming it? From whom? With what political baggage? What does “authentic vulnerability” actually mean in a world where every emotion is commodified?”

Footnotes

Martha C. Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Harvard University Press, 2006), 35–40.

This analogy is commonly used in ethical discussions to illustrate differential moral obligations based on vulnerability; see Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 95–97.

Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933–1945 (Harper Perennial, 2009).

Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society (Stanford University Press, 2015), 23–27.

Han, The Burnout Society, 15–20.

Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Power (Verso, 2017), 45–50.

Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (Duquesne University Press, 1969), discusses the ethical primacy of the Other’s vulnerability.

Perplexity