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Good Entertainment: A Deconstruction of the Western Passion Narrative (Untimely Meditations) by Byung-Chul Han, Adrian Nathan West is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Good Entertainment: A Deconstruction of the Western Passion Narrative (Untimely Meditations) about?

A philosopher considers entertainment, in all its totalizing variety—infotainment, edutainment, servotainment—and traces the notion through Kant, Zen Buddhism, Heidegger, Kafka, and Rauschenberg. In Good Entertainment , Byung-Chul Han examines the notion of entertainment—its contemporary ubiquity, and its philosophical genealogy. Entertainment today, in all its totalizing variety, has an apparently infinite capacity for incorporation: infotainment, edutainment, servotainment, confrontainment. Entertainment is held up as a new paradigm, even a new credo for being—and yet, in the West, it has had inescapably negative connotations. Han traces Western ideas of entertainment, considering, among other things, the scandal that arose from the first performance of Bach's Saint Matthew's Passion (deemed too beautiful, not serious enough); Kant's idea of morality as duty and the entertainment value of moralistic literature; Heidegger's idea of the thinker as a man of pain; Kafka's hunger artist and the art of negativity, which takes pleasure in annihilation; and Robert Rauschenberg's refusal of the transcendent. The history of the West, Han tells us, is a passion narrative, and passion a

Author

Byung-Chul Han, Adrian Nathan West

Publisher

The MIT Press

Published

2019

Language

EN

ISBN

9780262354554

Subjects

Philosophy, Sports, Anthropology

Updated

2026-03-24