Saving Beauty

Thoughts on Saving Beauty
by Byung-Chul Han

My first thought is that beauty is apprehended according to each relation. Saving Beauty brings forward a consideration of what could constitute beauty’s character. Han submits our smoothed over, hypermediated aesthetics of frictionless positivity obfuscates the sublime beauty that shakes us to our unknowable and deindividuated place in eternity. The velocity of the consumptive present forecloses on a slow beauty of recollection. Sociality and the ritual or cultic use of objects has been consumed by spectacle, museology and the market. Digital culture, with its unrelenting flows of hollow affect and lonely narcissism erodes our capacity to experience these heightened states of beauty and disalienation. Han seems to disappear behind his pantheon of great European philosophers and it’s mostly through negation or triangulation that I locate examples of the affirmative at the personal level. Surfing at sunset comes to mind as a ritual where I become completely taken by beauty and connection with something akin to the eternal. I think of celebrating with community, eating and dancing together—moments where the feeling of being a precarious individual dissolves into an expansive belongingness to a shared existence. I think of long quiet walks through the woods and by the ocean, where a simple presence of mind reveals a shuddering beauty. Han’s thinking strikes me as decidedly rooted in the predigital and I feel a bit more nuanced and undetermined with my relationship to emerging technologies. I’m observing my faculties of memory and perception evolving with these epochal shifts alongside my daughter’s endemic development. A video loop of Agnes in a mossy tree, bathed in warm golden light with her quiet chirping voice and softly windblown hair may be my madeleine dipped in lime-blossom tea. Edward Said offers that lateness in art exhibits a surrender of knowability and abandon of resolution. This seems compatible with Han’s beauty. The book concludes—at least in my reading—with a sentiment I share: art, at the best of times, can develop sensitivities to appreciate what is always already there, and in abundance.