THE RITUAL TURN AND THE ETHICS OF ALTERITY IN BYUNG-CHUL HAN: REINTEGRATING THE ART OF ATTENTION, LISTENING AND LOOKING IN COMMUNITY LIFE

Abstract

Rituals are symbolic actions. They transmit and represent values and orders that keep a community together. They are "techniques of temporal closure", aimed at permanence and bonding, and represent axes of stabilization for life. This paper will discuss possibilities for reinserting this collective practice in the context of a Performance Society. This societal configuration has presented itself in a brutalized, atomized and amorphous moral way, in a scenario in which the hell of sameness is characterized by the expulsion of alterity. Based on Byung-Chul Han's thought matrix, we therefore propose a call for a ritual turn in order to offer "possible mimicries of happiness" and mediate a "reference to the world". In addition, recovering the rites values the enjoyment of a cadenced and contemplative time, a time of the other and of sipping things. What's more, it re-signifies the power of its own forms to allow sensitivity, the acceptance of self and also the recovery of otherness, which strives for difference in communal living. These experiences of completion permeate a type of ethics that develops us in an atopic and not simply authentic way in the encounter with the entirely other, which is "constitutive for the formation of a stable self". A propositional ethical path is promoted, through a return to the art of listening, deep attention, the courtesy of gesture inherent in the quality of the gaze and the corporeality of the voice.