Trumpism as Grief Culture
Rituals can be defined as temporal technologies for housing oneself. They turn being in the world into being at home. Rituals are in time as things are in space. They stabilize life by structuring time. They give us festive spaces, so to speak, spaces we can enter in celebration .
Byung-Chul Han • All That Is Solid Melts Into Information
The relationship at the heart of ritual is the relationship between life and death, mediated by elemental forces. The kinds of rituals that fall out of that might be a monthly day of silence, perhaps periodic fasting, perhaps singing around the fire. All such things need to be done as symbolic testimony to the joy and sorrow of being human, no... See more
Substack • Imagining a World Beyond Consumerism
It is time to grieve and mourn the dead and believe in the power of renewal. If we do not embrace our grief, our sadness will come out sideways in unexpected forms of depression and violence.
Terry Tempest Williams • The Pall Of Our Unrest
The present essay is not animated by a desire to return to ritual. Rather, rituals serve as a background against which our present times may be seen to stand out more clearly. Avoiding nostalgia, I sketch a genealogy of their disappearance, a disappearance which, however, I do not interpret as an emancipatory process. Along the way, the pathologies
... See moreByung-Chul Han • The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present
The edicts of 589 are only one example of many of how throughout Europe it actually became illicit to grieve one’s losses, as any deep expression of feeling was perceived as an incorrigible adherence to Pagan/tribal ignorance and a blatant refusal to accept the benefits of the “true faith.”