The society of authenticity is a performance society. All members perform themselves. All produce themselves. Everyone pays homage to the cult of the self, the worship of self in which everyone is his or her own priest.

According to Malebranche, attention is the natural prayer of the soul. Today, the soul does not pray. It is permanently producing itself.

The mistrust of play intensifies in the age of the Enlightenment. Kant subordinates play to work. His aesthetics, for instance, is characterized by the primacy of work. In the face of beauty, the cognitive faculties, namely imagination and understanding, are in play mode. The subject likes what is beautiful; the beautiful creates a feeling of

Rituals are symbolic acts. They represent, and pass on, the values and orders on which a community is based. They bring forth a community without communication; today, however, communication without community prevails.

Exalted time [Hoch-Zeit] is also the temporality of schools of higher education [Hoch-Schule]. 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. They pursue

If life is deprived of any possibility of closure, it will end in non-time. Because it rushes from one sensation to the next, even perception is now incapable of closure. Only contemplative lingering is capable of closure. The closure of the eyes is emblematic of contemplative closure. The flood of images and information makes closure of the eyes

Because of the compulsion of work and production, we are losing the capacity to play. We only rarely make playful use of language; we only put it to work. It is obliged to communicate information or produce meaning. As a result, we have no access to forms of language that shine all by themselves. Language as a medium of information has no

Rituals are symbolic acts. They represent, and pass on, the values and orders on which a community is based. They bring forth a community without communication; today, however, communication without community prevails.

The compulsion to reject routines produces more routines.