HAN, Byung-Chul. On God

Thinking with Simone Weil. Barcelona: Paidós, 2025

Abstract

This review presents Byung-Chul Han’s On God: Thinking with Simone Weil, highlighting his philosophical-mystical reading of the French thinker as an interpretive key for diagnosing the spiritual wounds of contemporaneity. The text shows that Han mobilizes the concepts of attention, decreation, emptiness, silence, beauty, pain, and inactivity to criticize a culture marked by permanent distraction, consumption, self-exploitation, and the loss of transcendent meaning. The review demonstrates that, in dialogue with Weil, the current religious crisis is not limited to the loss of dogmas or institutional belonging, but involves the weakening of contemplative capacity, inner silence, and openness to the other. Finally, it emphasizes that the work proposes a spirituality of renunciation, attention, and inactivity, capable of reeducating the human gaze before God, the world, pain, and beauty, while suggesting an ethical critique of compulsive positivity and, more broadly, of contemporary spiritual emptiness.