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    Published : 2026-06-26
    Vol. 17 No. 2 (2026)

    „The Time of Things Has Passed”. Byung-Chul Han on Deobjectification of the World

    Witold M. Nowak

    https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3799-1851

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.18290/rkult26172.4

    Abstract

    Byung-Chul Han, writing in German, is one of the most important contemporary media theorists. From Han’s work, I chose to analyze one of the central issues in his work, which is the change in human attitude toward things, material objects. I focus on an issue that was previously addressed creatively – especially by Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer,  which is the deobjectification of the world by transforming things into non-things. This phenomenon not only involves changing the ontic status of objects, but also people losing rational contact with reality and sinking into illusion.  Gone is the era of object-oriented fetishism, or Marxist “commodity fetishism”. Information is becoming a fetish – this is where digitalization dematerializes and deobjectifies reality. Of various detailed issues, I discus Han’s attitude to the system of consumption, the widespread adoption of smartphones and the selfie culture, as well as our expectations of artificial intelligence. Finally, I critique Han’s writing style, some of his views on historical explanation, and his understanding of the role of philosophy and philosophers in contemporary society

    Keywords:

    Byung-Chul Han, material culture, modernity, Big Data, culture crisis



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    Nowak, W. M. (2026). „The Time of Things Has Passed”. Byung-Chul Han on Deobjectification of the World. Roczniki Kulturoznawcze, 17(2), 109–128. https://doi.org/10.18290/rkult26172.4

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    Roczniki Kulturoznawcze · ISSN 2082-8578 | eISSN 2544-5219 | DOI: 10.18290/rkult

    © Towarzystwo Naukowe KUL & Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II

    Articles are licensed under a Creative Commons  Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)