Good Entertainment - A Deconstruction of the Western Passion Narrative

In Good Entertainment, Byung-Chul Han examines the notion of entertainment—its contemporary ubiquity, and its philosophical genealogy. Entertainment today, in all its totalizing variety, has an apparently infinite capacity for incorporation: infotainment, edutainment, servotainment, confrontainment. Entertainment is held up as a new paradigm, even a new credo for being—and yet, in the West, it has had inescapably negative connotations. Han traces Western ideas of entertainment, considering, among other things, the scandal that arose from the first performance of Bach''s Saint Matthew''s Passion (deemed too beautiful, not serious enough); Kant''s idea of morality as duty and the entertainment value of moralistic literature; Heidegger''s idea of the