Untrammelled neoliberalism and the inexorable force of production have produced a 21st century crisis of community: a narcissistic cult of authenticity and mass turning-inward are among the pathologies engendered by it. We are individuals afloat in an atomised society, where the loss of the symbolic structures inherent in ritual behaviour has led to overdependence on the contingent to steer identity. <br /><br />Avoiding saccharine nostalgia for the rituals of the past, Han provides a genealogy of their disappearance as a means of diagnosing the pathologies of the present. He juxtaposes a community without communication – where the intensity of togetherness in silent recognition provides structure and meaning – to today’s communication without community, which does away with collective feelings and leaves individuals exposed to exploitation and manipulation by neoliberal psycho-politics. The community that is invoked everywhere today is an atrophied and commoditized community that lacks the symbolic power to bind people together. For Han, it is only the mutual praxis of recognition borne by the ritualistic sharing of the symbolic between members of a community which creates the footholds of objectivity allowing us to make sense of time. <br /><br />This new book by one of the most creative cultural theorists writing today will be of interest to a wide readership.
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Byung-Chul Han. The Disappearance of Rituals
Contents
Guide
Pages
The Disappearance of Rituals. A Topology of the Present
PRELIMINARY REMARK
1 The Compulsion of Production
NOTES
2 The Compulsion of Authenticity
NOTES
3 Rituals of Closure
NOTES
4 Festivals and Religion
NOTES
5 A Game of Life and Death
NOTES
6 The End of History
NOTES
7 The Empire of Signs
NOTES
8 From Duelling to Drone Wars
NOTES
9 From Myth to Dataism
NOTES
10 From Seduction to Porn
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
POLITY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
Отрывок из книги
Byung-Chul Han
Translated by Daniel Steuer
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Today, many forms of repetition, such as learning by heart, are scorned on account of the supposed stifling of creativity and innovation they involve. The expression ‘to learn something by heart’, like the French apprendre par coeur, tells us that apparently only repetition reaches the heart. In the face of increasing rates of attention deficit disorder, the introduction of ‘ritual studies’ as a school subject has recently been advocated as a means of reviving the exercise of ritual repetition as a cultural technique.7 Repetition stabilizes and deepens attention.
Rituals are characterized by repetition. Repetition differs from routine in its capacity to create intensity. What is the origin of the intensity that characterizes repetition and protects it against becoming routine? For Kierkegaard, repetition and recollection represent the same movement but in opposite directions, ‘because what is recollected has already been and is thus repeated backwards, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forwards’.8 Repetition, as a form of recognition, is therefore a form of completion. Past and present are brought together into a living present. As a form of completion, repetition founds duration and intensity. It ensures that time lingers.
