You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Published online: 28 November 2022
© The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2022
The Palliative Society is one of many books by the philosopher and cultural critic Byung-Chul Han, whose other titles include The Burnout Society (2010/2015) and Capitalism and the Death Drive (2019/2021). Eleven brief chapters constitute the book, examining pain from various perspectives, including its meaninglessness, its cunning, as a mode of truth, as a revelation of being, and our fear of it, our algophobia, throughout. The Palliative Society is the critique of modernity, signaled by the opening quotation from Ernst Jünger: “Tell me your relation to pain, and I will tell you who you are” (Jünger, 1934/2008, p. 32, quoted on p. 1). This slim volume, written aphoristically, explores the philosophical complexities of pain in societies marked by an extreme aversion to pain and discomfort. For Han, pain is not simply a sensation or feeling of displeasure; rather it constitutes important ways of what it means to be human. Indeed, for Han we are so much the worse for our penchant to flee it. Pain is an opening via negation to otherness, and without it we are lost “in the hell of the same” (p. 6, emphasis in original). What Han calls “the neoliberal dispositif of happiness” (p. 13) distorts happiness, which “is not at one’s disposal. Inherent in it is a certain negativity” (p. 13). “Dispositif,” a term of Foucault, designated “discursive and nondiscursive elements, … [that are] historical and culturally bound to a certain area or civilization, and … are answers to certain greater problems in a particular society” (Peltonen, 2004, p. 216). This neoliberal dispositif is palliative, seeking happiness by eliminating pain and discomfort without addressing the issues that, if attended to, might lead to radical social change: “Instead of revolution we thus get depression” (p. 12, emphasis in original). The neoliberal imperative, “be happy” (p. 11), draws upon our desire fo