Byung-Chul Han and beauty as spiritual resistance in the fase of Nietzsche’s pronouncement of the death of God

Abstract

This article proposes an interpretation of beauty in the thought of Byung-Chul Han as a form of spiritual resistance to Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God. Taking into account Han’s critical diagnosis of late modernity—characterized by the hegemony of positivity, acceleration, and the neoliberal logic of performance—it argues that the death of God does not signify the disappearance of the divine, but rather an anthropological crisis of the human being’s capacity to receive transcendence. In dialogue with Michel Foucault, this crisis is understood as the exhaustion of a historical figure of subjectivity closed off to alterity. Nevertheless, through engagement with Hartmut Rosa’s theory of resonance, the article shows that experiences of reopening to the unavailable still persist. Within this framework, beauty emerges as an experience irreducible to consumption, capable of wounding, interrupting, and disposing the subject toward contemplation. In this regard, the aesthetic theory of Roger Scruton reinforces this intuition by highlighting the connection between beauty, sacrifice, and transcendence. Finally, the article examines Han’s spiritual proposals—silence, contemplation, ritual, pain, and festivity—as critical gestures that preserve a sensitivity to the sacred in a world dominated by closed immanence.