Byung-Chul Han, The Palliative Society: Pain Today, Polity 2021, 76 pgs, $14.99 (paperback), ISBN: 9781509547241.

In a letter to Martin Heidegger, an indignant Ernst Jünger emphatically proclaimed, “Tell me your relation to pain, and I will tell you who you are” [1]. In the early thirties, Jünger published a controversial essay on pain that was dismissed by many of his contemporaries for covertly endorsing the ideology of Nazi Germany. Nearly eight decades later, Byung-Chul Han, the South Korean born German philosopher, is convinced that Jünger stumbled upon a great discovery — our relation to pain does indeed reveal what kind of society we are. Accordingly, Han believes that every social critique must therefore proceed by way of a “hermeneutics of pain” [p 8].