Case Study: Byung-Chul Han’s Philosophy of Writing

The field of philosophy is full of bad writing. Most philosophers are convinced that if their ideas are good enough, then the writing will simply take care of itself. This is how we end up with prose like this:

As 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.

That was one sentence that ballooned into a paragraph from The Political Unconscious. Its author Fredric Jameson won The Bad Writing Contest2 (sponsored by the Philosophy and Literature Journal) in 1997. The judges even went as far as to say that Jameson was

“A man who on the evidence of his many admired books finds it difficult to write intelligibly and impossible to write well.”

On the other end of the extreme, you’ll end up with a philosopher who writes like this: