Exchanging Gazes with the World Book Review: Han, Byung-Chul. (2024). The Crisis of Narration . Polity Press

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han weaves a story about narrative capacity or storytelling that is constitutive to living a meaningful existence. Emotional experience, thinking of new possibilities, stability of identity, courage, happiness, and unity with community all depend on the stories we tell together. The erosion of this capacity, driven by oppressive forces such as neoliberalism and the digital consumerist society, serve to disconnect us from our humanity, from our participation with agency and vitality in communal social life and from our connections to self and others. Bringing us into the storytelling art, Han offers a framework that I connect with pragmatic psychoanalysis to elucidate the cultivation of a method for narrativizing. The function of storying between analyst and person develops our narrative capacity and becomes a liberatory act. Han’s explication of narrative and storytelling contributes to our understanding of storying actions.