Introducción: Fiesta y ritual: las continuas metamorfosis de lo invariable

In one of his latest books, the prolific South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han (2020) bluntly states that we are witnessing the disappearance of rituals, which would be caused by a suffocating social atomization that only allows the narcissistic self-celebration of the individual. The economy of desire, characteristic of the current phase of capitalism, would have swept away the old temporality of the cyclical ceremonial repetition characteristic of previous times, necessary for the meaningful ordering of social life, and the constant production of falsely authentic moments would have ended with the ritual experience of collective authenticity. The phenomenon, logically, would include the extinction of community festivals, sadly belonging to the past those moments of celebration in which "life refers to itself".