Abstract

Byung-Chul Han’s critique of contemporary society is based on a Heideggerian understanding of the history of philosophy. This paper claims that Han’s account takes the shape of a historiographical genre that Rorty calls Geistesgeschichte, characterized by establishing a narrative structure. It is argued that this narrative structure is inherently problematic when accounting for the history of philosophy, for it incurs in an instrumental use of the negative: the very issue Han attributes to the metaphysics of identity that, according to Heidegger, constitutes the bedrock of Western thought.