Feast in the Burnout Society: Byung-Chul Han on Excessive Positivity

This paper explores the disappearance of the feast, the loss of the ability to celebrate, and the “catastrophe” that engendered this phenomenon in light of the writings of Byung-Chul Han, especially The Burnout Society (2019) and The Disappearance of Ritual: A Topology of the Present (2023). Through Han’s insights, the paper highlights how the compulsion to positivity and productivity diminishes our capacity for celebration and explores ways to reinvent the feast by looking beyond productivity and positivity.