The Disappearance of Rituals
A Topology of the Present

Byung-Chul Han (Author), Daniel Steuer (Translated by)

9781509542765, Polity Press

Paperback / softback, published 4 September 2020

186 pages
20.8 x 14 x 1 cm, 0.181 kg

"Byung-Chul Han's new book challenges the reader to go far beyond the worn-out critique of neoliberalism. On the one side, there is the progressive replacement of substance through communication, painted as a road to existential perdition; it contrasts, on the other side, with the utopian view of a return towards the security of rituals in their form and appearance. This reversal of long-established thought is expressed in a compressed and energetic language that reads like a manifesto."
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Stanford University

"The kind of book … that leads one to rethink our standard narratives of history and to see our society and era in a fresh light."
Steven Mintz, Inside Higher Ed

"an essential philosopher for anyone wanting to diagnose what plagues the modern person"
The Gospel Coalition

"This book is a powerful reminder of the purpose and potential of ritual actions, and what role the arts can serve in our alienated and desacralized times."
Yuval Sharon, The New Yorker

“In a culture obsessed with progress, disruption, and innovation, Han’s conservative defense of ritual feels both radical and necessary. For anyone concerned with the spiritual and social dimensions of modern life, Byung-Chul Han’s The Disappearance of Rituals is worth reading.”
Jeremy Bassetti

“Han is a joy to read. His writing isn’t quite aphoristic, but it has an Hemingway-esque sinewy strength to it. His pronouncements hit you at a gut level."
Law & Liberty

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. 

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. 

This new book by one of the most creative cultural theorists writing today will be of interest to a wide readership.

Preliminary Remark vi

1. The Compulsion of Production 1

Subject Areas: Sociology & anthropology [JH]