This new essay by Byung-Chul Han tracks the violent power of the same in phenomena such as fear, globalization and terrorism, which characterize present-day society.

The times in which the other existed have passed. The other as a friend, the other as hell, the other as mystery, the other as desire are disappearing, giving way to the same. The proliferation of the same is what, posing as growth, constitutes today these pathological alterations of the social body. What is sick to society is not alienation, subtraction, prohibition or repression, but hypercommunication, excessive information, overproduction and hyperconsumption. The expulsion of the different and hell of the same set in motion a totally different destructive process: depression and self-destruction.