Our Fear of the Dark/Absence: On the Culture and Philosophy of the Far East

I stumbled upon Weird Studies a couple of weeks ago when I was reading an essay about Twin Peaks that mentioned the podcast. When I looked it up, I saw their most recent episode was on . . . Twin Peaks. Weird indeed! I've been catching up on past episodes and loved "Our Fear of the Dark" about Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows. Tanizaki was a featured writer in my doctoral dissertation, and Ford and Martel do a glorious reading. If you enjoyed that episode, I recommend Absence: On the Culture and Philosophy of the Far East, the recently released book by Byung-Chul Han. It's a fascinating companion piece to In Praise of Shadows, written by a South Korean philosopher trained in Germany, who uses examples from both the Far Eastern (Basho, Kukai) and Western (Kafka, Benjamin) tradition. I'd love to see Weird Studies tackle this book or anything to do with Benjamin for a full episode.