French Literature Reviews - 2026
Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals
Philosophy, Anthropology and Ideas
Translated by Olivier Mannoni
“We no longer inhabit the earth and the sky; we inhabit Google Earth and the Cloud. The world is becoming increasingly elusive, nebulous, and spectral.” This is Byung-Chul Han’s observation: the world of things is vanishing; the concrete and enduring world is being eroded in favor of an ephemeral universe where manual labor has given way to the sliding of fingers across a smartphone screen and an artificial “intelligence” that “thinks from the past” and is “blind to the event.” As Han emphasizes, “Only the hand receives the gift of thought.”
The era of digitization transforms things into mere actors processing information. But what happens to things when, penetrated by information, they become immaterial?
The smartphone, digital photography, and artificial intelligence are the primary targets of this study on advancing inhumanity, whose high point—by way of contrast—is a moving hymn to the jukebox, the thing par excellence. “Its rumbling comes from the depths of its belly, as if it were the expression of its voluptuousness. Digital sound is devoid of any thing-noise. It is incorporeal and smooth. The sound produced by the jukebox partakes of both the thing and the body.”
Undoubtedly Byung-Chul Han’s most nostalgic, touching, and polemical essay.
*
Press Review
It indeed resonates like a melancholy question running through the entire work, hurled at a disappearing world—the world of things.
David Zerbib, LE MONDE DES LIVRES
Perhaps a Korean living and working in Berlin speaks best about what digital capitalism has in store for us. (...)
Digital modernity derealizes the world through the systematic elimination of things, which are converted into information. To successfully carry out this operation, it possesses formidable weapons that have become our everyday companions: the smartphone, social networks, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things. (...)
The world is no longer inhabited, life is no longer lived, time is no longer sensible, and we are dispossessed of our lives by new technologies: we know the nostalgic refrain, often reprised in an apocalyptic tone. But the Korean philosopher refuses to play on the fear of man being completely replaced by the machine. He simply registers the programmed erasure of things by the digital order—and the resulting disorientation.
Paul-Henri Moinet, LE NOUVEL ÉCONOMISTE
Byung-Chul Han [...] speaks [...] of the erosion of things, of their progressive replacement by digital entities [...]. The most striking chapter is the one devoted to thought and artificial intelligence. Drawing on Heidegger and Deleuze, among others, Byung-Chul insists on the fact that thought stems from an “analogical process”: “before it apprehends the world in the form of concepts, it is seized, or better, affected by the world,” so much so that “the first image of thought is goosebumps.” This is something artificial intelligence will never possess, and consequently, it does not think [...].
Robert Maggiori, LIBÉRATION
Nourished by Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School's pessimism regarding the commodification of the modern world, Byung-Chul Han regrets, in The Disappearance of Rituals, the time of aura, of presence, of what he striking describes as “goosebumps.” His new target? The digital order, which instrumentalizes and flattens everything, down to the very shape of the smartphone - “ Its smooth surface alone communicates a feeling of lack of resistance. On its smooth touch screen, everything appears manageable and compliant.”
Juliette Cerf, TÉLÉRAMA
Information has replaced things. This is the alarmed observation that opens the latest, as brief as it is scathing, work by the German-Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han. In seeking to free ourselves from the unsettling opacity of things, with which one must always negotiate, we have paved the way for a much more dangerous alienation. Deprived of the “resting poles of the world,” man exhausts himself in an incessant dispersion of himself. There is an urgent need to relearn how to “dwell among things.” To relearn the meaning of those “matters of the heart” with which we can forge lasting ties, to the extent that we recognize their strangeness, their alterity. Information is always immediately subjugated; the thing, on the contrary, must be tamed.
Octave Larmagnac-Matheron, PHILOSOPHIE MAGAZINE
Byung-Chul Han offers a brilliant analysis of our digital societies, where existences buckle under the weight of information and cut themselves off from the materiality of the world. With The Disappearance of Rituals, this professor at the Berlin University of the Arts formulates a critique made all the more brilliant as current events, in an era of infatuation with the metaverse and NFTs, lend it an extra edge of acuity. The core of this critique can be summed up in a few words: whereas the industrial revolution expanded the sphere of matter, “the computerization of the world turns things into infomates.”
Youness Bousenna, MARIANNE
Byung-Chul Han explores the transition from a world defined by concrete, enduring objects to an ephemeral digital landscape dominated by information. The text highlights how modern technologies, including smartphones and artificial intelligence, transform physical entities into immaterial data, leading to a sense of disorientation and the loss of what the author terms resting poles. By contrasting the tactile nature of analog items, such as the jukebox, with the smooth, resistant-free surfaces of digital devices, the work addresses the psychological consequences of living in a society that favors constant connectivity over the presence of things.
The critique situates itself within a tradition of cultural pessimism that questions the impact of technological advancement on human experience and perception. By drawing on philosophical inquiries into the nature of thought and the materiality of the world, the study reflects on how the digital order flattens human engagement with reality. The author suggests that the systematic replacement of things with information deprives individuals of the ability to form lasting ties with their environment. Readers interested in contemporary critiques of digital capitalism and the philosophical implications of the information age may find this analysis relevant to their concerns.