Session 4: Vita Contemplativa (Ch. 12, in full)

04 OCTOBER 2026 / 16:00 – 18:00

This short series is an interlude following Reading Ghosts, before the group turns to a longer series on Arendt, Hartman, and Weil. Reading Ghosts asked what of the past persists, disrupts, or haunts the present, treating haunting itself as a method, following Avery Gordon's Ghostly Matters. Han approaches a kindred question from the opposite direction: he argues that contemporary life has entered a state of "non-time," an accelerated present so scentless that nothing lingers long enough to leave a trace. Where Reading Ghosts asked who haunts us, Han asks whether a culture that has lost duration can still be haunted by anything at all.