[ Rituals ] turn the world into a reliable place. They are to time what a home is to space: they render time habitable.

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: they render time habitable.

A smartphone is not a ‘thing’ in Arendt’s sense. It lacks the very self-sameness that stabilizes life.

Forms of ritual, such as manners, make possible both beautiful behaviour among humans and a beautiful, gentle treatment of things

The emotionalization of commodities and the associated aestheticization of commodities are subject to the compulsion of production. Their function is to increase consumption and production. As a consequence, the aesthetic is colonized by the economic.

The neoliberal regime pushes serial perception, reinforces the serial habitus. It intentionally abolishes duration in order to drive more consumption.

Rituals are processes of embodiment and bodily performances. In them, the valid order and values of a community are physically experienced and solidified. ... A ritual community is a communal body

Digital communication is increasingly developing into communication without community.

Everyone is producing him- or herself in order to garner more attention. The compulsion of self- production leads to a crisis of community.

Contrary to Taylor’s assumptions, however, authenticity is in fact the enemy of community. The narcissism of authenticity undermines community. In terms of its content, what is crucial is not its reference to a community or some other higher order but its market value, which effaces all other values...Within the cult of authenticity, the production of self becomes a permanent activity. Authenticity thus atomizes society.

The neoliberal regime exploits morality. Once it is able to present itself as freedom, domination becomes complete...You exploit yourself voluntarily in the belief that you are realizing yourself.

Politeness is an as-if ritual. Culture as such is made up of as-if rituals. If we remove the as-if gestures in the name of authenticity or genuineness, we destroy the element of civilization...A ritual of politeness is not an expression of subjective feeling; it is an objective act. It resembles a magical invocation that produces a positive mental state.

A ritual of politeness is not an expression of subjective feeling; it is an objective act. It resembles a magical invocation that produces a positive mental state.

Today, the arts are also increasingly rendered profane and disenchanted. Magic and enchantment – the true sources of art – disappear from culture, to be replaced by discourse.

In the absence of the negativity of closure, what emerges is an endless addition and accumulation of the same, an excess of positivity, an excrescent proliferation of information and communication. Where everything is connected, no closure is possible. The loss of forms of completion that accompanies overproduction and overconsumption leads to systemic collapse.

The inability to bring about closure is connected with narcissism. The narcissistic subject feels itself most intensely not in what it does, in the work completed, but in ongoing performance. What is done, what is completed, exists as an independent, finished object, something inde- pendent of the producing subject’s self. Thus, the subject avoids bringing anything to completion

Collective consciousness creates a community without communication. For the villagers, there is one story, continuously repeated, and this story is the world: ‘They do not have opinions on this or that, but incessantly tell just one great story.

A narrative is a form of closure: it has a beginning and an end and is characterized by a closed order. Information, by contrast, is additive, not narrative. It does not combine into a story, a song, that could form the basis of meaning and identity. Information can only be endlessly accumulated.

Human beings are creatures of sites [Ortswesen]. Dwelling, staying, is only possible where there is a site. But a creature of sites is not necessarily a site fundamentalist [Ortsfundamentalist]. Being a creature of sites does not rule out hospitality. The destructive de-siting of the world by the global smooths out all differences and permits only variations of the same.

In ancient Greek, ‘school’ is scholé, that is, leisure. Schools of higher education would thus be schools of higher leisure. Today, they are no longer places of high leisure. They have become places of production, factories of human capital.

We celebrate [begehen wir] a festival, but it is not possible to celebrate work [die Arbeit zu begehen]

The festival is also the origin of art: ‘The essence of our temporal experience of art is in learning how to tarry in this way. And perhaps it is the only way that is granted to us finite beings to relate to what we call eternity.’

The glory of play goes along with sovereignty, where sovereignty simply means being free from necessity, from purpose and utility.

Georges Bataille distinguishes between two types of play, strong and weak. In a society in which utility has become the dominant principle only weak play is deemed acceptable. Weak play fits into the logic of production because it serves the purpose of recreation, time away from work. Strong play, by contrast, cannot be reconciled with the principle of work and production. It puts life itself at risk. It is characterized by sovereignty.

Death is not a loss, not a failure, but an expression of the utmost vitality, force and desire.

Language as a medium of information has no splendour. It does not seduce. Poems are structures with strict forms that shine all by themselves. .... In poetry, language plays. For this reason, we hardly read poems any more. Poems are magic ceremonies of language. The poetic principle returns pleasure to language through a radical break with the economy of the production of meaning. The poetic does not produce. This is why '[t]he poetic is the insurrection of language against its own laws' (Baudrillard), against the laws that serve the purpose of producing meaning.

Politeness is pure form. Nothing is intended by it. It is empty. As a ritual form, it is devoid of any moral content...As a form of ritual, politeness is without heart and with- out desire, without wish.

In the empire of signs, the soul, psychology, is erased. There is no soul to infect the holy seriousness of ritual play. The place of psychology is taken by a passion for rules, a passion of form.

As a form of ritual, politeness is without heart and without desire, without wish. It is more art than morality. It exhausts itself in the pure exchange of ritual gestures. Within the topology of Japanese politeness as a ritual form, there is no inside, no heart, that would render the politeness a merely external etiquette. It cannot be described using the opposition of inside and outside...In the empire of signs, the soul, psychology, is erased. There is no soul to infect the holy seriousness of ritual play.

Modern wars lack the character of play. Here, too, the basic formula applies: the compulsion of production destroys play. Modern wars are battles of production.

But [ J. Huizinga ] turns play into something absolute, and he therefore misses the decisive paradigm shift within knowledge transfer in the history of the Occident, namely the transition from myth to truth, which coincides with the transition from play to work. Along the path towards work, thinking gradually distances itself from its origin in play.

Kant is deeply irritated by the idea of pure play as an end in itself...In this passage, Kant speaks explicitly of a ‘product’ and, as he often does, of a ‘business’...Play is subordinated to work and production.

The Copernican anthropological turn which made man an autonomous producer of knowledge is being superceded by the dataistic turn. ... No longer the producer of knowledge, the human being cedes its sovereignty to data. Dataism puts an end to the idealism and humanism of the Enlightenment. The human being is no longer the sovereign subject of knowledge, the originator of knowledge. Knowledge is now produced mechanically.

The knowledge produced by big data escapes understanding. Human cognition is not powerful enough. Processors are faster than a human being precisely because they neither think nor understand; they only calculate. The proponents of dataism would argue that humans invented thinking because they cannot calculate fast enough, and that the age of thinking will prove to be a short historical interlude.

The compulsion of production eliminates the space of games and narration. Algorithmic processes of calculation are not narrative but only additive, which is why they can always be accelerated. Thinking, by contrast, cannot be accelerated. Theories still contain elements of narrative. Algorithms count, but they do not recount.

Dataism turns the production of knowledge into something pornographic. Thinking is more erotic than calculating. It is Eros who gives wings to thinking... Without Eros, the steps of thinking degenerate into the steps of a calculation, that is, the steps of work to be performed. Calculation is naked, pornographic.