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nausikaa

nausikaa@wyrmsign.org

Joined 10 months, 3 weeks ago

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Simon Critchley: Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us (Hardcover, 2019, Pantheon) 4 stars

History tells us no purposive story, whether progressivist or regressivist. If only a God can save us, as Heidegger said, then we know—deep down—there is no such thing. Salvation is the wrong concept when it comes to thinking through and assessing the value of human life. The world was not made for us; nor we for the world… Human beings' relation to the world is a marriage of convenience or adaptation made neither in heaven nor in nature, but on the slaughter bench of history. We are consequences of an awkward process of cultural adaptation and mutation. No totalizing theory or complete theory of everything is going to satisfy our urge to make sense of the whole, certainly not the currently cynical minestrone of cosmology, neuroscience, and American Buddhism.

Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us by  (Page 70)

Byung-Chul Han: The Agony of Eros (Paperback, The MIT Press) 3 stars

An argument that love requires the courage to accept self-negation for the sake of discovering …

Strong premise, not sure it goes anywhere

3 stars

I found this less compelling than The Disappearance of Rituals, despite its intriguing premise. In part, I just found it less intelligible. Theoryish assertions piled on top of each other. Still, the premise provoked some thought even if it didn't unfold into anything deeper than that. May yield more on a subsequent read.

Byung-Chul Han: The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present (2020) 4 stars

Punchy, stimulating, provocative: making oneself at home in time

4 stars

Review: The disappearance of rituals, by Byung-Chul Han

Having only seen the titles of Byung-Chul Han's other essays, I wonder whether he has only ever written one text, iterated and extruded into several compact volumes. From its point of entry at the loss of ritual under neoliberalism, this short book seems to take Han through familiar territory: transparency contra ambiguity, authenticity and narcissism contra community, production contra play. I feel that the concept of ritual houses the conversation well (along with play, which ritual seems to transmute into around the fifth chapter, titled ‘A Game of Life and Death’). Rather than presenting rituals nostalgically, as a form to return to, in this essay they “serve as a background against which our present times may be seen to stand out more clearly,” according to Han’s ‘Preliminary Remark’ at the start (the remark works so well as a review of the book …