Ritual Repetition Time Rest

Trevor Kaiser Allred
4 min readSep 8, 2023

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Byung-Chul Han’s “The Disappearance of Rituals”

This letter will wrap up the recent sprint through my recent reading into Byung-Chul Han’s work, though I’m certain I’ll be back. In this one, The Disappearance of Rituals, I find myself impressed but also lost.

There are truly impressive ideas in this book. Here is one to behold:

“We can define rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world. They transform being-in-the-world into a being-at-home. They turn the world into a reliable place. They are to time what a home is to space” (2).

Rituals are to time what homes are to space. Incredible.

Ritual Repetition Time Rest

If that doesn’t change how you see your daily life, I don’t know what will. I read it again and again and again. When I think of a home as a tool, in that it allows me to do things (rest, harbor abundance, plan), I am wholly invited to think how any rituals I do change my sense of time. They help indicate or demark time, they seem to imbue or load meaning into things.

He move this way as well:

“Forms of rituals, such as manners, make possible both beautiful behaviour among humans and a beautiful, gentle treatment of things. In a ritual context, things are not consumed or used up but used. Thus, they can also become old” (4).

I am tempted to try an example at ritual, at least as far as those motions make possible the gentle treatment of things around me or that I use (e.g. making coffee in the morning but maybe more something like trading out winter and summer wardrobes perhaps. Even then, I am not sure, and it is difficult to think of ritual outside of a religious context).

“Rituals are characterized by repetition. Repetition differs from routine in its capacity to create intensity” (8).

I wonder about the etymology of intensity. It carries a meaning of extreme, which can be understood in a sense of “being removed from the usual” if we think of it used in a way to define the far-end of a spectrum, “the extreme end of things”. Repetition then seems to offer an ability to be removed from the usual or normal. Repetition creates a kind of distance.

The returning action of something in repetition seems to move it farther from normal life and into something meaningful. Intensity seems to be the compounding enriching of meaning during these symbolic techniques. Routine seems to be treated as if a type of baseline. It is the motion and ritual is the meaning.

But Han carries worry that this form of meaning, the ritual, is being replaced:

“Symbolic perception is gradually being replaced by a serial perception that is incapable of producing the experience of duration…dwelling requires duration” (7).

His use of the word ‘serial’ calls on the sentiments from previous works in these letters around acceleration and rush, but at this point I am less sure of my footing in these concepts.

“In a present characterized by an excess of openings and dissolving boundaries, we are losing the capacity for closure, and this means that life is becoming a purely additive process” (27).

What ritual seems to offer, apart from symbolic meaning, is also a sense of distinction. Symbolic meaning contrasts routine and helps distinguish moments of time from one another. Moving to another trope of his, work vs. rest:

“Rest and work represent two fundamentally different existential forms…Rest is not merely recovery from work, nor is it a preparation for further work. Rather, it transcends work, and it must in no way come into contact with work…Life that exhausts itself in work and production is an absolutely atrophied life” (39–41).

For a sense of his urgency, I add to this litany of quotes his final comment: 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” (89).

When thinking of this “atrophied life” Han is serious about what is at risk. He is talking about health and an enduring sense of wellness that includes meaning and fulfillment. It would be easy to disregard these as second-order needs, but anyone who has felt dread, exhaustion, being lost or adrift, languishing, anxiety more knows that the absence of these things make a life unbearable.

My takeaway returns to the power play Han made from the beginning. Rituals are a forgotten art, and I am keen to explore them so that I can understand and build my own. Much is at stake.

More soon,

Trevor

Now-reading affiliate links:

  1. Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino” — Héctor Tobar: Amazon | Bookshop
  2. Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals — Oliver Burkeman: Amazon | Bookshop
  3. Arabian Love Poems Nazir Qabbani: Amazon

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Trevor Kaiser Allred

Pieces from "A Serious Thing", my newsletter about the love of life and art of thought.