Post to @emsenn@kolektiva.social, 2025-09-04 08:36h

There's a really cool critique of Byung-Chul Han that's out, and that's useful because Han and I are pretty similar theorists, but with very different backgrounds and underlying ideologies. And I'm going through it, and I'm comparing what Han is saying to my ecclesiastical studies.

Basically Han (and others) are finding that the melancholy of the left might be the necessary precondition for non-optimistic hope, and they view this hope as the solution to the paralysis of melancholy.

That is, if you study the world, it will destroy your optimism, but this may be what can leave space for hope, which is actually what brings change.

I'm also thinking about this in the context of my own Lakotaean cosmology, and ideas like anarcho-nihilism's jouissance. But honestly I think it's more likely people will try and connect Han to decolonial or anarchist critique than ecclestiastical, so:

It'll take a fuller mapping, but my reading seems to show that what Han does to develop the idea of the left melancholy of the left, allows it to be functionally synonymous with the ideas of melancholy and hope established by Church doctrine.

The melancholy of the left is synonymous with "acedia," a type of spiritual slovenlyness, a sorrow at how arduous goodness is, a feeling that acts against charity, which is paralysis. (acedia, sloth, sorrow, arduous, good, charity, and paralysis are all precise doctrinal terms here; coming mostly from Aquinas)

Han's hope is synymous with the Church's spes (also from Aquinas), which is not optimism, but a virtue derived from grace, which means hope is a means and end of God, and is opposed to despire and presumption. That feels… pretty relevant to the negating-of-the-negative and a priori determinations that are hallmarks of contemporary critique work.

And more recently in 2007, Benedict 16 clarified the difference between Christian hope and secular optimism, labeling redemptions that usurp eschatology as cruel. This maps pretty neatly onto the 'hope without optimism' turn in leftism, and Han's recenter turn to wanting non-naive hope, that is, hope that is grounded in a faithfulness of salvation (specifically Paschal Mystery) not in wordly things.

Like… It's really weird to see just how much the contemporary liberal left has redecided so much of what the Church believes; it adds a lot of credence to all those claims that the State is the secular mask of the Church. And I'm saying all this as someone who doesn't think either of these institutions know shit!

But like Han's hope, Benjamin's weak messianic power, and Aquinas' hope, all get their practitioners thinking and doing the same stuff.

Han's "positive compulsion" - an idea I think is underdeveloped, before this critique situates it more fully in affect theory - also maps to a LOT of doctrine. Han and the Church both are rejectingg Pelagianistic action, mapping freedom to redeemability… but I will say, I actually agree with the Church more on some things, when it comes to defining a good practice, and I think this is where their on-the-ground experience has a role.

For example, Han's Leistungssubjekt is a secular formation of Church works-righteousness, which has its own set of doctrine that come into play, i.e. the distinction between virtue and compulsion (We could look at the Catholic habitus and Foucaultian routinization.) And while Han appeals to a vague "right to opacy," Catholic tradition already supports forum internum and the seal of confession, establishing space for wht I'll call a "graceful interiority": rather than Han's depressingly corporate view of personhood, a person is a sanctuary for grace.

Catholicism has protections for privacy, especially related to professional reputation, that Han incidentally argues against. There's a lot more connections between where Han's ideas are pointing and the Church: Catholic Social Teachings, Pope Francis' Fratelli Tutti, studiositas and curiositas, stabilitas, lectio divina, mystagogy, etc.

I'm bringing all this up not to say the Church is better at anything, but to highlight that, so far, the dominant liberal critique, and critique of critique, has followed the trajectory of the Church's critique, and critique of critique. This can be used to find the shape of what concepts are relevant to contemporary society that have not yet been identified by its systems of critique, and potentially, to anticipate which critiques will emerge and what shape they will take.

And I'm excited to continue on with this map because this post is actually what I did to take a break from the actual mapping I'm doing, before this one, and this post turned out pretty cool.