Byung-Chul Han e Hannah Arendt: ensaio de crítica da “autonomia” no contemporâneo

Abstract

This research is a critical essay about the notion of “autonomy” produced by the neoliberal hegemonic system of the XXI century in the West. A philosophical approach of authorial-thematic nature which aims at transposing the socioeconomic debate, opening space for an ontic-ontological understanding, based on the works of Byung-Chul Han and Hannah Arendt, about this new modulation of the “society of the self-employed” that converts citizens in “self-exploiters”, amidst a complete lack of assistance. In the setting where autonomy is put as a synonym of “entrepreneurial individualism”, a way of existing that this century requires, “the achievement subject” of the psychopolitics, disconnected from any entity other than the individual himself, with a self-measure positioned by a mere narcissistic idealization. In this sense, society becomes market, a citizen becomes consumer-competitor, social bonding becomes networking. This existence submitted to continuous self-improving continues without stopping, in tension and anxiety to the point of exhaustion, failing to make hermeneutical depth viable neither for oneself, nor the other. Without bonding and belonging, according to Byung-Chul Han, the “psychic infarct” becomes widespread and diseases such as burnout, depression, stress, and insomnia require primary attention, while entertainment offered by the digital panopticon catches all by means of smartphones and social networks. A numbness that disguises the heavy load of this "autonomy" as "the individual's exasperation", in which self-assertion and the assertion about the other are, predominantly, not only at work, but all around - in one's health, home, friendship, loving relationship etc. This research defends the thesis that it is possible to use one's own point of the "primacy of autonomy" to subvert this notion without pointing out prescriptions or formulas for the concept. Instead, it promotes resistance to nihilistic individualism - which for Hannah Arendt is related to the notions of ‘alienation’ and ‘deworldlization’ of the world -, especially regarding commonplace, calculating logics and behavior dictatorship. It is, in fact, a matter of re-applying the notion of autonomy by the Arendtian understanding of Politics, based on the axis of excellence of the human condition: the "thinking", the "action" and the "speech" – articulated by the faculty judging - requalifying the singularity amidst plurality, from a ‘self-care’ woven into the ‘care of the world’. A "political-plural autonomy".