Byung-Chul Han’s “A Journey Through the Gardens”: Celebrating the Land

A trip to the gardens

de Byung-Chul Han

Translated from German by Olivier Mannoni

Actes Sud, 144 p., €17.

“I once felt a deep and burning desire, better still an acute need to be close to the earth”. This confidence which opens the last book of the German philosopher Byung Chul-Han introduces a work of a new style in his work. An incisive critical thinker of technico-capitalist modernity (Dans la Nuée, 2015; Thanatocapitalisme, 2021; La Fin des choses, 2022), the philosopher embarks here on a meditative and spiritual path, celebrating flowers, the earth and creation. . It comes from a new commitment at their bedside: for three years, the urban and cerebral intellectual turned into a gardener, joining every day with the ardor of a lover his garden near Lake Wannsee, in Berlin.

This experience was one of beauty, care, silence, withdrawal. “Gardening has been a silent experience for me, a stay in silence. With him, time was lasting and fragrant,” notes the philosopher. In the garden, time “stretch out”. It is the “time of the other”, because “the garden has its own time, which I cannot dispose of”. It is also an open time, since “hope is the gardener’s temporal mode”.

The garden, “magic, enigma and mystery”

More than spring, winter is omnipresent in these pages, the philosopher having challenged himself to create a space that flourishes all year round. He is particularly sensitive to the vitality of nature in the dark and cold months, when life must assert itself, make itself resistant. This choice is illustrated in the elegant illustrations of Isabella Gresser, where the flowers, as in photographic negatives, appear in white on a black background.

In the garden, the earth is “magic, enigma and mystery”. It becomes more obvious that it should be treated. The gardener’s hand is “a hand that loves, that waits, a hand that waits. It touches what is not yet there. She keeps the distance”. The right approach is one of delicacy – “to treat it like a resource to be exploited is already to destroy it” – and of celebration, in the company of the poets very present in these pages.

In its form, the work is probably not Byung Chul-Han’s most accomplished. There are repetitions and some lengths in the descriptions. However, those familiar with the author will be sensitive to its atmosphere and the pacification to which it bears witness. Byung Chul-Han makes the words of the German philosopher Adorno his own: “The memory of nature shatters the arrogance of self-affirmation: “My tears are flowing, the earth has won me back! “This is how the spirit frees the self from the prison it was for itself”.

This book also stands out on a spiritual level. If the previous works of the philosopher already revealed a fine knowledge of Christian theology, this one deploys a real creed: “I am deeply convinced today that the earth is a divine creation”, writes Byung Chul-Han. “The stay in the flower garden restored my piety. I believe that the Garden of Eden existed and will exist”. Here, the spiritual feeds no flight, it is embodied in a relationship to the land, received as a donation: “I like the earthly order. I will not leave him. I feel towards this precious gift of God a feeling of profound fidelity, of profound alliance. »

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