In his famous book La condition postmoderne, Jean-François Lyotard formulates the well-known thesis about the end of the grand narratives. Lyotard, however, continues by suggesting that smaller narratives (petit récit) still persist, through which people structure and interpret their lives. In 2023, the German-writing philosopher Byung-Chul Han published a short book, Die Krise der Narration, in which he argues that, as a consequence of the contemporary loss of attention, we are no longer capable even of conceiving our own lives as a petit récit. For Han, the symbolic expression of this new condition is the "stories" on social media that disappear after twenty-four hours. According to Han, narration in its original sense has disappeared, and we are left with only storytelling, which he understands as a story-selling.
In my paper, I will present Byung-Chul Han's arguments concerning the loss of attention and its implications for understanding the human person within the horizon of theological anthropology. I will then attempt to develop this topic in the context of Christian spirituality. If Han's thesis is correct—that the loss of attention entails the loss of the ability to narrate—Christianity must reconsider many of its spiritual practices. I will briefly propose three possible forms of Christian spirituality in an age of diminished attention and the crisis of narration, drawing on a variety of theological sources. The first is a theology of place, inspired by my previous research on literary texts; the second is a theology of the fragment, drawing on the late theology of David Tracy; and the third is an understanding of Christianity as an alternative to a world in which everything, including our attention, becomes an object of the market. Here, I will draw on Mark Fisher's philosophy.