Original language: German
Original title: The crisis of narrative
Translation: David Torres in Catalan and Alberto Ciria in Spanish for Herder Editorial
Year of publication: 2023
Valuation: advisable

Those who have minimally followed the professional and literary career of the South Korean philosopher will have noticed that he focuses his reflection and discourse on current society and the loss of values, not only in a personal and individual sense but also in a collective sense. In this case, the author addresses the narrative crisis, not in regard to the literary theme but in the discursive aspect of each of us.

In this essay, the author tells us about narrative in its most global and generic aspect, a necessary narrative that is being lost and, with the loss, so is our identification as a society since “narratives are generators of community. He storytellingon the other hand, only creates communities. The community It is the community in commodity form. It consists of consumers. Thus, the author criticizes the purpose of the current narrative, since really the «storytelling es storyselling“To explain stories is to sell them.” For this reason, the author states that “in our daily lives we explain fewer and fewer stories to ourselves. “Communication as an exchange of information paralyzes the telling of stories” so that our discourse is built mainly on the provision of data, but without a correlation or analysis that develops a story when transmitting it. With this approach, the author also influences the narrated life and relates it to happiness, which is not a “one-time event.” “It’s like a comet with a very long tail that reaches into the past.” Thus, the author evokes memory and makes special mention of the work of Proust and Heideger who fought “temporal atrophy, the threat of the disintegration of time” and, quoting the German author, reminds us of his theory in which he states that «Man does not exist at every moment. It is not a being of moments. Existence covers the entire period that extends from birth to death. Because of the lack of external orientation, because there are no narrative anchors in the being, the strength must come from within oneself to contract the span between birth and death, and turn it into a living unit that penetrates and understands all events and all. the facts.” Thus, continuing with his allusions to Heideger, the author indicates that we must try to ensure that existence “does not disintegrate into momentary realities of experiences that happen and disappear”, an existence threatened by the ease with which we take snapshots of our reality, increasingly exposed and immortalized in a technology that favors digitalization that “aggravates the atrophy of time. “Reality disintegrates into information with a very small margin of relevance.” With this purpose, and linking technology with its use, the author also talks about social networks and cites the stories of Instagram stating that “they are a simple succession of snapshots that do not narrate anything. In reality, they are nothing more than visual information that disappears quickly. There is nothing left”, as well as the selfieswhich “do not serve to remember, but to communicate”, in an approach that he already shared in “The expulsion of the different” and that here he repeats by stating that “life cannot be narrated in the form of quantifiable events” in a bad way. use that enhances and magnifies narcissism, that great danger that “eliminates the gaze, that is, the other, and replaces it with an imaginary mirror image.”

The author states that “memory is not a mechanical repetition of what has been experienced, but rather a narrative that must continually be explained again. Memories necessarily have gaps (…); when everything experienced (…) is available, the memory disappears (…) Whoever wants to narrate or remember has to be able to forget or omit many things. The society of transparency means the end of narration and memory” and supports this thesis by stating that “it is narration that elevates life above mere facticity, above its nakedness. Narrating consists of making the passage of time make sense, it consists of giving time a beginning and an end. Without narrative, life is merely additive.

With this book the author invites us to reflect and challenges us by stating that “we should be aware that, deep down, thinking is nothing other than narrating, and that thought advances with narrative steps.” Thus, we have to reclaim the power of storytelling, and not let the storytelling become a storyselling that locks us in ourselves, limiting us to other worlds, other narratives, other ways of life.

Source: https://unlibroaldia.blogspot.com/2024/12/byung-chul-han-la-crisis-de-la-narracion.html



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