In addition to content, books also have covers (for sure). The contents of the book consist of several pages, so we will draw thin lines at the edges to show that its a stack of multiple papers. Next, we will add some details to the outline. Otherwise, it will just look like a piece of paper. The basic shape is now visible, and we are stepping into the thickening stage where we will try to make the book drawing look thick. Once completed, you’ll have the form of an open book drawing. To start drawing the basic shape of the book, connect each straight line with a curved line. We will use these lines as a reference to draw the basic shape. Adding two more linesĪfter that, add another one to the left and right. The first step in drawing an opened book is to make a straight line as a reference. 1.3 Drawing the basic shape of the bookĭrawing an opened book Starting with a vertical line.In Han’s book Absence 6, he explained that in Eastern philosophy, writing is viewed as a “subjectless happening (Han 77). The writer has to accept that sometimes ideas move in unpredictable ways beyond their control. Writing an insightful and condensed sentence could take hours after multiple drafts. On the other hand, “letting words come to you” is more demanding than writing run-ons. And when writers forget to grow out of the habit, they end up filling up hundreds of pages with little substance. Teachers assign us “word counts” we have to hit, so we resort to waffling and purple prose when we fall short. This way of writing contrasts with how schools taught us to write. “I don’t claim authorship of my books: that’s why the words in them are wiser than I am,” he said, “they have to interview my books, not me. Han prefers to “receive thoughts” without forcing them. Maybe I write three sentences a day, which then becomes a book.” And then, maybe I sit at my desk for an hour. I work in the garden most of the time and play the piano. When his mind drifted to his writing process, he confessed that he “writes little”: He showed up to the interview 15 minutes late on a bike, refused a typical Q&A format and rambled about whatever came to his mind. The recent EL PAÍS interview 5 with Byung-Chul Han in October painted him as a “somewhat eccentric guy” and a “proudly lazy thinker”. Because his genius doesn’t lie in his ideas alone, but in his articulations of them. So, in this post, I would like to draw from two interviews with Byung-Chul Han (the guy rarely accepts interviews so these are solid gems) and write a case study on his philosophy of writing. Inaccessibility becomes a badge of honour at the expense of the life-affirming power of ideas. Academically minded people tend to place their pride before the readers’ understanding. In this age where academic and technical writing can’t seem to reach the public, Han is the exemplar of how complex ideas should be articulated. During a commencement speech 4, Han confessed that he has a “bad habit” of condensing his sentences so much that his readers are “forced to underline each and every sentence”. This is an excerpt from Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society : a groundbreaking work that didn’t go beyond 50 pages. The ideas in this paragraph are so clear that we almost feel guilty when we understand them. Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society (Han 8) 3. It has long been replaced by another regime, namely a society of fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls, and genetic laboratories. Today’s society is no longer Foucault’s disciplinary world of hospitals, madhouses, prisons, barracks, and factories. On the other end of the extreme, you’ll end up with a philosopher who writes like this: “A man who on the evidence of his many admired books finds it difficult to write intelligibly and impossible to write well.” The judges even went as far as to say that Jameson was Its author Fredric Jameson won The Bad Writing Contest 2 (sponsored by the Philosophy and Literature Journal ) in 1997. That was one sentence that ballooned into a paragraph from The Political Unconscious. This is how we end up with prose like this:Īs for periodization, its practice is clearly enveloped by that basic Althusserian conceptual target designated as "historicism" and it can be admitted that any rewarding use of the notion of a historical or cultural period tends in spite of itself to give the impression of a facile totalization, a seamless web of phenomena each of which, in its own way, "expresses" some unified inner truth-a world-view or a period style or a set of structural categories which marks the whole length and breadth of the "period" in question (Jameson 12) 1. Most philosophers are convinced that if their ideas are good enough, then the writing will simply take care of itself. The field of philosophy is full of bad writing.
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