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Byung-Chul Han

The Disappearance of Rituals

Summary

In The Disappearance of Rituals, Han argues that modern society’s emphasis on productivity and individualism has eroded the shared rituals that once fostered true community. Without these symbolic practices, people are left isolated and vulnerable, creating a shallow, commodified sense of connection that lacks the depth and solidarity needed for genuine togetherness.

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Key Takeaways:

  1. The present essay is not animated by a desire to return to ritual. Rather, rituals serve as a background against which our present times may be seen to stand out more clearly. Avoiding nostalgia, I sketch a genealogy of their disappearance, a disappearance which, however, I do not interpret as an emancipatory process. Along the way, the pathologies of the present day will become visible, most of all the erosion of community. At the same time, I offer reflections on different forms of life that might be able to free our society from its collective narcissism.
  2. Rituals are symbolic acts. They represent, and pass on, the values and orders on which a community is based. They bring forth a community without communication; today, however, communication without community prevails.
  3. We can define rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world. They transform being-in-the-world into a being-at-home.
  4. Rituals stabilize life.
  5. The contemporary compulsion to produce robs things of their endurance [Haltbarkeit]: it intentionally erodes duration in order to increase production, to force more consumption. Lingering, however, presupposes things that endure. If things are merely used up and consumed, there can be no lingering. And the same compulsion of production destabilizes life by undermining what is enduring in life. Thus, despite the fact that life expectancy is increasing, production is destroying life’s endurance.
  6. The narcissistic process of internalization develops an aversion to form. Objective forms are avoided in favour of subjective states. Rituals evade narcissistic interiority. The ego-libido cannot attach itself to them. Those who devote themselves to rituals must ignore themselves.
  7. While symbolic perception is intensive, serial perception is extensive. Because of its extensiveness, serial perception is characterized by shallow attention. Intensity is giving way everywhere to extensity. Digital communication is extensive communication; it does not establish relationships, only connections.
  8. Every religious practice is an exercise in attention. A temple is a place of the highest degree of attention. According to Malebranche, attention is the natural prayer of the soul. Today, the soul does not pray. It is permanently producing itself.
  9. Repetition stabilizes and deepens attention.
  10. Rituals are characterized by repetition. Repetition differs from routine in its capacity to create intensity.
  11. Chasing new stimuli, excitement and experience, we lose the capacity for repetition.
  12. The compulsion to reject routines produces more routines.
  13. The society of authenticity is a performance society. All members perform themselves. All produce themselves. Everyone pays homage to the cult of the self, the worship of self in which everyone is his or her own priest.
  14. The creation of self, however, must not be self-centred; it has to take place against the backdrop of a social horizon of meaning that gives the act of self-creation a relevance that transcends the self.
  15. The neoliberal imperative of optimization and performance does not allow for any completion. Everything is provisional and incomplete; nothing is final and conclusive. It is not only computer software that is subject to the compulsion of optimization. All areas of life are subordinated to its dictates, even education. Life-long learning does not involve completion. It amounts only to life-long production. The neoliberal regime abolishes all forms of closure and completion in the name of increased productivity.
  16. Rituals give form to the essential transitions of life. They are forms of closure. Without them, we slip through. Thus, we age without growing old, or we remain infantile consumers who never become adults.
  17. God blessed and sanctified the seventh day. The rest enjoyed on the Sabbath consecrates the work of creation. It is not mere idleness. Rather, it is an essential part of creation. In his commentary on the Book of Genesis, Rashi thus remarks: ‘After the six days of creation, what was still missing from the universe? Menuchah [inoperativity, rest]. The Sabbath came, the menuchah came, and the universe was complete.’1 Sabbath rest does not follow creation; it brings creation to completion. Without it, the creation would be incomplete. God does not rest on the seventh day simply to recover from the work he has done. Rather, rest is his nature. It completes the creation. It is the essence of the creation. Thus, when we subordinate rest to work, we ignore the divine.
  18. Exalted time [Hoch-Zeit] is also the temporality of schools of higher education [Hoch-Schule]. In ancient Greek, ‘school’ is scholé, that is, leisure. Schools of higher education would thus be schools of higher leisure. Today, they are no longer places of high leisure. They have become places of production, factories of human capital. They pursue professional training rather than formative education.
  19. The glory of play goes along with sovereignty, where sovereignty simply means being free from necessity, from purpose and utility. Sovereignty reveals a soul ‘which stands aloof from caring about utility’. The compulsion of production destroys sovereignty as a form of life. Sovereignty gives way to a new kind of subordination which, however, masquerades as freedom. The neoliberal subject of performance is an absolute slave insofar as, in the absence of a master, it voluntarily exploits itself.
  20. Because of the compulsion of work and production, we are losing the capacity to play. We only rarely make playful use of language; we only put it to work. It is obliged to communicate information or produce meaning. As a result, we have no access to forms of language that shine all by themselves. Language as a medium of information has no splendour. It does not seduce. Poems are structures with strict forms that shine all by themselves. Very often, they do not communicate a message. They are characterized by an excess of the signifier; they are luxurious.
  21. The mistrust of play intensifies in the age of the Enlightenment. Kant subordinates play to work. His aesthetics, for instance, is characterized by the primacy of work. In the face of beauty, the cognitive faculties, namely imagination and understanding, are in play mode. The subject likes what is beautiful; the beautiful creates a feeling of pleasure by triggering a harmonious interplay of the cognitive faculties. The beautiful does not by itself produce knowledge, but it entertains the cognitive mechanisms and, by doing so, promotes the production of knowledge. Kant is deeply irritated by the idea of pure play as an end in itself. Music is to be avoided insofar as it is incapable of performing any thinking ‘business’, ‘because it merely plays with sensations’.7 Because music merely plays, it is incompatible with conceptual work.

What I got out of it:

  1. It got me to rethink and reprioritize a lot of my routines. Trips with loved ones, day to day rituals, how we spend weekends. Very worthwhile read.

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