Byung-Chul Han, La scomparsa dei riti – una topologia del presente, 2019

Today’s obsession with an authenticity based on the narcissism of the ego, the constant search for the new and the unprecedented, the consumerist bulimia of the disposable that pervades every field determine, in the relationships and practices that characterize contemporary society, an increasingly evident and symptomatic disappearance of ritual forms. However, the immutable and repetitive structure, as well as the theatricality of gestures and the attention paid to the “beautiful appearance”, give the rites a deeply unifying symbolic power. The silence, the recollection, the sense of sacredness necessary to the performance of the ritual establish a link between the self and the Outside, between the self and the Other – rites “objectify the world, structure a relationship with the world”, creating a community even without communication.

This community without communication is countered by Han’s communication without community, that “hubbub” in which, in an increasingly atomizing society, the subject expresses himself and “produces” himself, finding himself turning empty around himself, lacking a world and real interactions. In order to break this short-circuit, and within a wider critique of contemporary pathologies, Byung-Chul Han proposes a recovery of the symbolism of rituals as a practice “potentially able to free society from its collective narcissism”, reopening it to the sense of a real connection with the Other – and re-enchanting the world.