The Expulsion of the Other: Society, Perception and Communication Today

by Byung-Chul Han

The noisy society of fatigue is deaf. The society to come, by contrast, could be termed a society of listeners and hearkeners. What is needed today is a temporal revolution that ushers in a completely different time; we must rediscover the time of the Other. Today’s temporal crisis is not acceleration, but rather the totalization of the time of the self. The time of the Other eludes the logic of increase based on performance and efficiency, which creates a pressure to accelerate. The neoliberal politics of time does away with the time of the Other, which it considers an unproductive time. The totalization of the time of the self goes hand in hand with the totalization of production, which affects all areas of contemporary life and leads to the total exploitation of humans. The neoliberal politics of time also does away with the time of celebration, the time of joyful bloom, which evades the logic of production. For it is concerned with de-production. Unlike the time of the self, which isolates and separates us, the time of the Other creates a community. It is therefore a good time.