Dialectics of Digital Technology, Spiritual Politics, and Power Governance-An Exploration of Byung-Chul Han’s Digital Psychopolitics Thought

Byung-Chul Han formed the digital psychopolitics thought by revealing the operation mechanism of spiritual power in the digital age and the living conditions of the meritorious subjects. He claimed that the biopolitics constructed by Foucault, Agamben and others could not align with the operating rules of meritorious societies, and therefore would inevitably come to an end, being replaced by digital psychopolitics. By manipulating the spiritual highlands of human beings with digital technology, digital psychopolitics shapes the cultural scene of meritorious society in a positive and gentle way, induces meritorious subjects to immerse themselves in the illusory happiness of formal freedom, emotional release, spiritual influence and gaming experience, and to forget the enslavement and materialization of capitaland focus on themselves, actively optimizing themselves and ultimately forming self-exploitation. In response to the comprehensive penetration of digital psychopolitics, Byung-Chul Han provides flexible resistance technologies such as moving towards the other, depsychologizing and returning to “foolishness”. Byung-Chul Han’s digital psychopolitics thought provides an important intellectual source for the critique of contemporary capitalism from the perspective of spiritual philosophy, but it still suffers from the defects of subjectivism and uncritical humanism, which urgently need to be responded and corrected with the theoretical weapons of historical materialism and the critique of Marx’s politic.