WORK
The Palliative Society
Han's 2020 book arguing that a civilization organized around the elimination of pain has destroyed the conditions under which transformation, growth, and meaning become possible.
The Palliative Society (
Palliativgesellschaft, 2020, English
translation 2021) advances one of Han's most precise and uncomfortable arguments. The palliative society is not a society in pain. It is a society that has organized itself with extraordinary efficiency around the elimination of pain, and has discovered too late that pain-elimination is also the elimination of the conditions under which anything can matter. The word
palliative comes from
palliare — to cloak. Palliative medicine does not cure. It manages symptoms. Han's use is diagnostic: a palliative society does not cure its pathologies. It manages their symptoms, makes the suffering comfortable
enough to continue. The engine is
algophobia, the fear of pain, which treats every form of discomfort as a problem to be solved rather than a signal to be heeded. Physical pain is medicalized. Psychological discomfort is pathologized. Boredom is filled. Uncertainty is resolved. The moment of not-knowing — which is also the moment of potential discovery — is answered before the discomfort has had time to produce its cognitive