The Disappearance of Rituals - A Topology of the Present (Byung-Chul Han)

Han, Byung-Chul

2026-01-29 20:38 | Page No.: 8

Rituals are constituted by symbolic perception. Symbol (Greek: symbolon) originally referred to the sign of recognition between guest-friends (tessera hospitalis). One guest-friend broke a clay tablet in two, kept one half for himself and gave the other half to another as a sign of guest-friendship. Thus, a symbol serves the purpose of recognition.

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Today, the world is symbolpoor. Data and information do not possess symbolic force and so do not allow for recognition. Those images and metaphors which found meaning and community, and stabilize life, are lost in symbolic emptiness. The experience of duration diminishes, and contingency dramatically proliferates.

In his novel Citadelle, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry describes rituals as temporal techniques of making oneself at home in the world:

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Today, time lacks a solid structure. It is not a house but an erratic stream. It disintegrates into a mere sequence of point-like presences; it rushes off. There is nothing to provide time with any hold [Halt]. Time that rushes off is not habitable.

For Hannah Arendt it is the durability of things that gives them their ‘relative independence from men’. They ‘have the function of stabilizing human life’. Their ‘objectivity lies in the fact that … men, their ever-changing nature notwithstanding, can retrieve their sameness, that is, their identity, by being related to the same chair and the same table’.3 In life, things serve as stabilizing resting points. Rituals serve the same purpose.

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The contemporary compulsion to produce robs things of their endurance [Haltbarkeit]: it intentionally erodes duration in order to increase production, to force more consumption.

And the same compulsion of production destabilizes life by undermining what is enduring in life.

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The restlessness inherent in the apparatus makes it a non-thing. The way in which people reach for their smartphones is also compulsive. But things should not compel us in this way.

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In a ritual context, things are not consumed or used up [verbraucht] but used [gebraucht]. Thus, they can also become old. Under the compulsion of production, by contrast, we behave towards things, even towards the world, as consumers rather than as users. In return, they consume us.

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And the result of the beautiful handling of things: a spirit-lifting gaiety.

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Today, we consume not only things themselves but also the emotions that are bound up with things. You cannot consume things endlessly, but emotions you can

In consuming emotions we do not relate to things but to ourselves. What we seek is emotional authenticity. Thus, the consumption of emotions strengthens the narcissistic relationship to ourselves. The relationship to the world that we have by way of the mediation of things is thereby increasingly lost.

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Neoliberalism often makes use of morality for its own ends. Moral values are consumed as marks of distinction. They are credited to the ego-account, appreciating the value of self. They increase our narcissistic self-respect. Through values we relate not to community but to our own egos.

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The Greek symbállein thus means ‘to bring together’. Rituals are also symbolic practices, practices of symbállein, in the sense that they bring people together and create an alliance, a wholeness, a community.

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The narcissistic process of internalization develops an aversion to form. Objective forms are avoided in favour of subjective states.

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Symbolic perception is gradually being replaced by a serial perception that is incapable of producing the experience of duration. Serial perception, the constant registering of the new, does not linger. Rather, it rushes from one piece of information to the next, from one experience to the next, from one sensation to the next, without ever coming to closure.

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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.

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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.

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The daily bread provides no stimuli. Stimuli quickly pale. Repetition discovers intensity in what provides no stimuli, in the unprepossessing, in the bland. The person who expects something new and exciting all the time, by contrast, overlooks what is already there. The meaning, that is, the path, can be repeated.

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In order to escape routine, to escape emptiness, we consume ever more new things, new stimuli and experiences. It is precisely the feeling of emptiness which spurs communication and consumption. The ‘intense life’ advertised by the neoliberal regime is in truth simply a life of intense consumption.

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Rituals produce sociocultural axes of resonance along which may be experienced three different kinds of resonant relationship: vertical (e.g. to the gods, the cosmos, time, or eternity), horizontal (within one’s social community), and diagonal (with respect to things).

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Resonance is not an echo of the self; the dimension of the other is inherent in it. It means accord. Where resonance disappears completely, depression arises.

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A ritual community is a communal body [Körperschaft], and there is a bodily dimension inherent to community. To the extent that it exerts a disembodying influence, digitalization weakens common ties.

In a ritual of mourning, the community is the actual subject that mourns. Faced with the experience of loss, the community imposes the mourning upon itself. Such collective feelings consolidate a community.

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The present hype surrounding the concept has primarily economic causes: empathy is used as an efficient means of production; it serves the purpose of emotionally influencing and directing people.

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Everyone is producing him- or herself in order to garner more attention. The compulsion of selfproduction leads to a crisis of community. The so-called ‘community’13 that is today invoked everywhere is an atrophied community, perhaps even a kind of commodified and consumerized community. It lacks the symbolic power to bind people together.

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Rituals, by contrast, are narrative processes that do not allow for acceleration. Symbols stand still. This is not the case with information: information exists by circulating. Stillness only means that communication ceases, stands still.

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It exploits itself voluntarily and passionately until it breaks down. It optimizes itself to death. Its failing is called depression or burnout

Rituals contain aspects of the world, and they produce in us a strong relationship to the world. Depression, by contrast, is based on an excessive relation to self. Wholly incapable of leaving the self behind, of transcending ourselves and relating to the world, we withdraw into our shells. The world disappears. We circle around ourselves, tortured by feelings of emptiness. Rituals, by contrast, disburden the ego of the self, de-psychologizing and de-internalizing the ego.

Wholly incapable of leaving the self behind, of transcending ourselves and relating to the world, we withdraw into our shells. The world disappears. We circle around ourselves, tortured by feelings of emptiness. Rituals, by contrast, disburden the ego of the self, de-psychologizing and de-internalizing the ego.

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Roland Barthes also conceives of rituals and ceremonies from the perspective of ‘making at home in the world’. They protect us, he says, against the abysses of being: ‘Ceremony … protects like a house: something that allows one to live in one’s feelings. Example: mourning… .

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The compulsion of production cannot cope with this transcendental lack of protection and lack of being at home, which it ultimately exacerbates.

2. The Compulsion of Authenticity

2026-01-30 11:23 | Page No.: 23 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.

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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:

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The nineteenth century discovered work, and play became increasingly distrusted. There was now much more work than play: the world resembled a factory rather than a theatre. The culture of theatrical presentation gave way to the culture of interiority. This development can also be seen in fashion. Stage costumes and ordinary clothes began to differ more and more. The theatrical element disappeared from fashion. Europeans started to wear work clothes:

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Today, the world is not a theatre in which roles are played and ritual gestures exchanged, but a market in which one exposes and exhibits oneself.

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The narcissistic cult of authenticity makes us blind to the symbolic force of forms, which exert a substantial influence on emotion and thought. We may imagine a ritual turn that re-establishes the priority of forms. It would invert the relationship between inside and outside, spirit and body. The body moves the spirit, not vice versa. Body does not follow spirit, but spirit follows body. We may also say: the medium produces the message. This is the force of ritual.

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Magic and enchantment – the true sources of art – disappear from culture, to be replaced by discourse. The enchanting exterior is replaced with the true interior, the magic signifier with the profane signified. The place of compelling, captivating forms is taken by discursive content.

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The language of forms, of signifiers, is characterized by compression, complexity, equivocation, exaggeration, a high degree of ambiguity that even reaches the level of contradiction. These suggest meaningfulness without immediately being reducible to meaning.

Art is not a discourse. It produces its effects through forms and signifiers, and not through the signified. The process of internalization destroys the arts, bringing them closer to discourse and forsaking the mysterious outside for the profane inside.

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We might thus expect a re-enchantment of the world to create a healing power that could counteract collective narcissism

3. Rituals of Closure

2026-01-30 16:22 | Page No.: 34 Only contemplative lingering is capable of closure. The closure of the eyes is emblematic of contemplative closure. The flood of images and information makes closure of the eyes impossible.

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The neoliberal regime abolishes all forms of closure and completion in the name of increased productivity. The We that is capable of joint action is also a form of closure. Today, it disintegrates into egos who voluntarily exploit themselves as entrepreneurs of their own selves.

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The inability to bring about closure is connected with narcissism. The narcissistic subject feels itself most intensely not in what it does, in the work completed, but in ongoing performance. What is done, what is completed, exists as an independent, finished object, something independent of the producing subject’s self.

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Globalization also dissolves all closed structures in order to accelerate the circulation of capital, commodities and information. It removes boundaries, desites [ent-ortet] the world, turning it into a global market. A site [Ort] is a form of closure. The global market is an off-site [Ab-Ort]. Digital networks also abolish sites. The Internet is an off-site, too. It is not possible to dwell in it. We surf the net.

The village represents a closed order. It makes lingering possible. Thus, you do not need to go ‘yonder’. The old wild pear tree is a centre of gravity that creates a deep unity among the people.

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The rituals of closure stabilize the village. They produce a cognitive mapping, something that is dissolved in the course of digitization and globalization.

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A narrative is a form of closure: it has a beginning and an end and is characterized by a closed order. Information, by contrast, is additive, not narrative. It does not combine into a story, a song, that could form the basis of meaning and identity. Information can only be endlessly accumulated. Beneath the old wild pear tree, silence rules, because everything has already been told. Today, the noise of communication replaces the silence. The quietly wistful final line of Behutsame Ortsbestimmung reads: ‘Today, there are no chosen trees, and the song of the village has faded.’10

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Here, death ends in a birth. It is a form of closure. Death, understood in this way, is not an end, not a loss. It is imagined as a new beginning. The death canal, at the end of which a bright light can be seen, becomes the birth canal:

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The hour of death turns into the hour of birth. Thus, there emerges a cyclical connection between death and birth, which creates an infinity. Human life is seen as analogous to that cyclical time embodied by the wild pear tree.

Taking photographs, in this case, is a ritual of closure. The photographs create a peculiar temporal feeling, a cyclical time, meaning a time that is closed in itself.

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Rather, it is ‘its inherent heterogeneity [Fremdartigkeit in sich selbst], through which alone it [that is, the spirit; B.-C. H.] acquires the power of realizing itself as Spirit’.13 Spirit is a closure, an enclosing power which, however, incorporates the other, the foreign. The ‘inherent heterogeneity’ is constitutive of the formation of spirit.

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The global is not a site for spirit because spirit requires ‘inherent heterogeneity’. What is foreign enlivens, even inspires, spirit.

Most of all, the abolition of rituals removes autonomous time [Eigenzeit].

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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. The discontinuity of autonomous time gives way to the continuity of production and consumption.

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Thresholds, as transitions, give a rhythm to, articulate, and even narrate space and time. They make possible a deep experience of order.

In our attempt to produce more space and time, we lose them. They lose their language and become mute. Thresholds speak. Thresholds transform. Beyond a threshold, there is what is other, what is foreign. In the absence of the imagination of the threshold, the magic of the threshold, all that is left is the hell of the same.

4. Festivals and Religion

2026-02-01 22:01 | Page No.: 43 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.

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Silent listening unites a people and creates a community without communication:

The silence gives rise to listening. It is accompanied by a special receptivity, by a deep, contemplative attentiveness.

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In the digital world, where attention has a flat structure,

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And yet rest, as opposed to the commotion of everyday life, is part of the essence of the festival: a silence in which the intensity of life and contemplation are united, that can even still unite them when the intensity of life grows into exuberance.

Life reaches a true intensity at the very moment the vita activa (which in its late modern crisis degenerates into hyperactivity) incorporates the vita contemplativa.

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If rest becomes a form of recovery from work, as is the case today, it loses its specific ontological value. It no longer represents an independent, higher form of existence and degenerates into a derivative of work.

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The circularity of the festival corresponds to the continual alternation between work and rest, dispersal and assembly

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Society is able to revivify the sentiment it has of itself only by assembling. But it cannot be assembled all the time. The exigencies of life do not allow it to remain in congregation indefinitely; so it scatters, to assemble anew when it again feels the need of this.

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As forms of play, festivals are self-representations of life. They are characterized by an excess, an expression of an overflowing life that does not aim at a goal. This is what lies behind their intensity. They are an intense form of life. In the festival, life relates to itself instead of subordinating itself to external purposes.

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We are able to celebrate [begehen] a festival because it stands there, as though it were a building. The time of the festival is a time standing still.

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The celebration [Begehen] of a festival suspends transience [Vergehen]. The everlasting [Unvergängliches] is inherent to the festival. The time of a festival is exalted time [Hoch-Zeit].13

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It is the essence of art that it affords life durability: ‘That “something can be held in our hesitant stay” – this is what art has always been and still is today.’

During festivals, humans come close to the gods. A festival founds a community among humans and between humans and gods: it allows humans to participate in the divine. It brings forth intensities.

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They pursue professional training rather than formative education [Bildung]. Formative education is not a means to an end but an end in itself. Through formative education spirit relates to itself instead of subordinating itself to an external purpose.

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Today, universities are abandoning rituals. The modern university, understood as a business that has to serve its customers, no longer has any need for them. Rituals conflict with work and production, and where they are nevertheless re-introduced they are purely decorative and impotent: they are simply opportunities to take selfies or revel in one’s own achievements. Where everything is subordinated to production, ritual disappears.

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The event, the consumerist form of festival, possesses an altogether different temporal structure, as can be seen in the Latin word eventus, meaning ‘suddenly coming to the fore’. The temporality of the event is that of the eventuality. It is accidental, arbitrary and non-committal. Rituals and festivals, however, are anything but contingent and non-committal.

In contrast to festivals, events do not create communities. Today’s popular festivals have become mass events, and masses are not communities.

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Here, leisure time, a time empty of work, becomes a torment. Active, ritual silence gives way to tormenting idleness.

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Today, it is work that has become frenzied, and the need for festival and assembly is not felt. Thus, the compulsion of production leads to the disintegration of community.

Capitalism is often interpreted as a religion. However, if religion is understood in terms of religare, as something that binds, then capitalism is anything but a religion because it lacks any force to assemble, to create community. Money, by itself, has an individualizing and isolating effect. It increases my individual freedom by liberating me from any personal bond with others.

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And what is essential to religion is contemplative rest, but this is the antithesis of capital. Capital never rests. It is its nature that it must always work and continue moving. To the extent that they lose the capacity for contemplative rest, humans conform to capital

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The religion of Christianity is to a large extent narrative. Festivals such as Easter, Whitsun and Christmas are key narrative moments within an overall narrative which provides meaning and orientation. Every day is given a narrative tension, is made meaningful, by the overall narrative. Time itself becomes narrative, that is, meaningful. Capitalism lacks narrativity. It does not narrate anything [erzählt nichts]; it merely counts [zählt]. It deprives time of all meaningfulness. Time is profaned, reduced to labour time. Thus, all days resemble each other.

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The assembly is the characteristic trait of sites:

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Its gathering power penetrates and pervades everything. The site, the gathering power, gathers in and preserves all it has gathered, not like an encapsulating shell but rather by penetrating with its light all it has gathered, and only thus releasing it into its own nature.19

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Synagogue is derived from the Greek synagein, meaning, like symbállein, to bring together.

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To have seen is the formula of consumption relating to relegere. It does not indicate a deep form of attention. A sight differs fundamentally from the site which shines through what is assembled and releases it into its own nature. Sights do not possess that deep symbolic power which creates a community. Sights are places one passes by. They do not permit any lingering or staying.

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What must be won back is contemplative rest. If our life is deprived of all its contemplative elements, we become suffocated by our own activity. The fact that contemplative rest, silence, is essential to religion is suggested by the existence of the Sabbath. In this way, religion is diametrically opposed to capitalism. Capitalism dislikes silence.

5. A Game of Life and Death

2026-02-02 19:07 | Page No.: 54 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’. 1 The compulsion of production destroys sovereignty as a form of life.

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To a society that declares bare life sacred, this ritual appears as pure madness, as a theatre of cruelty. A society obsessed with production does not have any access to strong play, to death as an intensity of life. In this archaic society, more is sacrificed than is produced. Sacrificium denotes the creation of sacred things. The sacred presupposes a de-production [Ent-Produktion].

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Thus, as opposed to the sovereign warrior, a player, he is afraid of death. He risks his life because he receives payment for it. The soldier, as a mercenary, is a wage earner, a worker, an employee. He does not play. He trades his life. Strong play, whose principle is sovereignty, does not fit into the society of production, which aims at utility, performance and efficiency, and which declares bare life, survival, the continuation of a healthy life, to be an absolute value.

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Bataille suspects that behind the compulsion of accumulation lies the fear of death

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The banishment of death from life is constitutive of capitalist production. Death is meant to be produced away. An antidote against the compulsion of production is therefore the symbolic exchange with death: ‘The removal of death from life, that is the very operation of the economic – it leaves a residual life which can from now on be read in the operational terms of calculation and value.

Death is an aspect of life, and life is only possible in symbolic exchange with death. Rituals of initiation and sacrifice are symbolic acts which regulate numerous transitions from life to death. Initiation is a second birth, following upon death, that is, the end of a phase of life. The relationship between life and death is characterized by reciprocity.

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In his film, Schroeter develops a utopia in which death represents an intensity, an intensive form of life. It is pure expenditure, an expression of sovereignty.

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Sovereignty, the freedom unto death, is threatening to a society that is organized around work and production, that tries to increase human capital by biopolitical means. That utopia is anarchist insofar as it represents a radical break with a form of life that declares pure life, continued existence, sacred. Suicide is the most radical rejection imaginable of the society of production. It challenges the system of production. It represents the symbolic exchange with death which undoes the separation of death from life brought about by capitalist production.

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Following Foucault, we may define the art of life as a practice of suicide, of giving oneself death, of depsychologizing oneself, of playing: ‘The art of living is to eliminate psychology, to create, with oneself and others, individualities, beings, relations, unnameable qualities.

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The sacred seriousness of play has entirely given way to the profane seriousness of work and production. Life subordinated to the dictates of health, optimization and performance comes to resemble mere survival. It lacks splendour, sovereignty, intensity. The Roman satirist Juvenal expressed this well when he spoke of ‘losing the reasons to live for the sake of staying alive’ (propter vitam vivendi perdere causas).

6. The End of History

2026-02-02 23:10 | Page No.: 64 Hegel does not side with the master but with the slave. He does so because he is a philosopher of modernity. Work, for him, has primacy. Thinking itself is work. Spirit works. Work forms the spirit. Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave looks at human existence exclusively from the perspective of work. Hegel has no access to the freedom of the player who despises work and leaves it to the slave

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Given the primacy of work in Marx, it is noteworthy that his son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, wrote a tract entitled The Right to Be Lazy. 3 Lafargue begins by invoking the free man of ancient Greece:

7 The Empire of Signs

2026-02-02 23:15 | Page No.: 67 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. We enjoy in particular their perfection of form. In poetry, language plays. For this reason, we hardly read poems any more. Poems are magic ceremonies of language.

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Thus, wit is ‘blooming’, just as ‘nature seems to be carrying on more of a game with its flowers but a business with fruits’.

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Wit demonstrates that language has an orientation toward non-meaning – provided it is enchained by its own play.

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Eloquence and linguistic elegance also derive from the luxury of the signifier. Only through the overabundance, the excess, of the signifier does language appear magical, poetic and seductive:

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This overabundant order of the signifier is that of magic (and poetry)… . The long work of joining signifier and signified, the work of reason, somehow brakes and absorbs this fatal profusion. The magical seduction of the word must be reduced, annulled. And it will be so the day when all signifiers receive their signifieds, when all has become meaning and reality.

Ritual signs cannot be assigned a determinate meaning either. Thus, they appear enigmatic. As language becomes increasingly functional and informational, the overabundance, the excess, of the signifier diminishes. Language is disenchanted.

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We now live in a culture of the signified, which dismisses the signifier, form, as something external. Our culture is hostile to pleasure and form.

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the haiku is not a rich thought reduced to a brief form, but a brief event which immediately finds its proper form.

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Capitalism is based on the economy of desire. Thus, it is incompatible with a ritual society. The intensity of the ritual form arises out of a passion for rules, which creates an altogether different form of pleasure.

8. From Duelling to Drone Wars

2026-02-02 23:37 | Page No.: 77 Rituals generally have a strong formative power. Warfare as ritual combat harnesses violence by imposing a form, strict rules of play, on its use. Violence gives way to the passion of play.

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Marshall McLuhan’s thesis, ‘the medium is the message’, also applies to weapons as media. A medium is not merely the bearer of a message; rather, the message is produced by the medium itself. A medium is not a neutral container carrying different contents.

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a new medium creates a specific content, for instance a new perception

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Superiority in the topological sense, that is, in the sense of being above the enemy, generates a different mental attitude towards the enemy. The asymmetry in the means of destruction at each party’s disposal leads the superior one to adopt an altogether different estimation of the enemy.

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Technological superiority turns into moral superiority. Technology and ethics condition each other. An enemy in a war is not a criminal who must be destroyed at any cost. Rather, he is an equal opponent, a competing player. Such an enemy is afforded equal rights.

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Here, death is produced mechanically. Drone pilots work shifts. For them, killing is mainly work.

9. From Myth to Dataism

2026-02-02 23:44 | Page No.: 83 Huizinga suspects that the very beginnings of philosophy are to be found in ritual games of riddle-solving:

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He challenged his rivals, he attacked them with vehement criticism and extolled his own opinions as the only true ones with all the boyish cocksureness of archaic man.

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For Heraclitus, the ‘dark philosopher’, nature and life are a griphos, an enigma, and he himself is the riddle-solver.

The agonistic character of philosophy represents the cosmic process, understood as the eternal strife between primordial oppositions. For Heraclitus, war is father of all, and according to Empedocles, affection (Greek: philia) and strife (Greek: neikos) are the two fundamental principles that determine the course of the world.

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The Platonic dialogues still exhibit elements of play. The Symposium is structured like a ritual competition: the participants in the conversation compete with speeches praising the god Eros

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Despite the obvious elements of play in his dialogues, Plato inaugurates the transition from myth to truth. In the name of truth, he distances himself from the play to which the sophists are devoted

The sophists are seen as mere travelling showmen who are occupied solely with the playful. But play has now to give way to the work of uncovering the truth.

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namely the transition from myth to truth, which coincides with the transition from play to work. Along the path towards work, thinking gradually distances itself from its origin in play.

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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

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Today, a further paradigm shift is silently taking place. The Copernican anthropological turn which made man an autonomous producer of knowledge is being superseded by the dataistic turn. The human being now has to comply with data. No longer the producer of knowledge, the human being cedes its sovereignty to data. Dataism puts an end to the idealism and humanism of the Enlightenment.10 The human being is no longer the sovereign subject of knowledge, the originator of knowledge. Knowledge is now produced mechanically. The data-driven production of knowledge takes place without the involvement of the human subject or consciousness.

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The compulsion of production eliminates the space of games and narration. Algorithmic processes of calculation are not narrative but only additive, which is why they can always be accelerated. Thinking, by contrast, cannot be accelerated. Theories still contain elements of narrative. Algorithms count, but they do not recount. The transition from myth to dataism is the transition from recounting to pure counting.

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Thinking is more erotic than calculating. It is Eros who gives wings to thinking: ‘I call it Eros, the oldest of the gods according to Parmenides… . The beat of that god’s wings moves me every time I take a substantial step in my thinking and venture onto untrodden paths.’11 Without Eros, the steps of thinking degenerate into the steps of a calculation, that is, the steps of work to be performed

10. From Seduction to Porn

2026-02-02 23:55 | Page No.: 91 Seduction is a game. It belongs to the order of ritual. Sex, by contrast, is a function. It is part of the order of the natural. Seduction is structured like a ritual duel. Everything takes place in an ‘almost liturgical realm of challenge and duel’.

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Thus, Foucault interprets power from the perspective of the economy of pleasure: Power is not evil. Power is games of strategy. We all know that power is not evil! For example, let us take sexual or amorous relationships: to wield power over the other in a sort of open-ended strategic game where the situation may be reversed is not evil; it’s a part of love, of passion and sexual pleasure.

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Seduction is based on extimacy, on the exteriority of the other, an exteriority that escapes the sphere of the intimate. Constitutive of seduction is a fantasy of the other.

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We rarely read poems any more. Unlike popular crime novels, they do not contain a final truth. Poems play with fuzzy edges. They do not admit of pornographic reading; they do not possess pornographic sharpness. They resist the production of meaning.

Ambiguities are essential to the language of eroticism. The rigorous linguistic hygiene of political correctness makes erotic seduction impossible.

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The principle of performance has also taken hold of sex, giving the body the function of a sexual machine. Sex, performance, achievement, libido and production come to be bound up with one another.5 Baudrillard derives the compulsion to ejaculate from the compulsion of production:

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Ours is a culture of premature ejaculation.

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The pornographic body lacks any symbolism. The ritualized body, by contrast, is a splendid stage, with secrets and deities written into it.

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What is pornographic is the immediate contact, the copulation, of image and eye

Porn kills off sexuality and eroticism more effectively than moral repression ever could have hoped to.

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The pathology of today’s society is the excess of positivity. It is a ‘too much’, not a ‘too little’, that is making us sick

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The Disappearance of Rituals

The Disappearance of Rituals - A Topology of the Present (Byung-Chul Han)

Han, Byung-Chul

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2. The Compulsion of Authenticity

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3. Rituals of Closure

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4. Festivals and Religion

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5. A Game of Life and Death

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