The Agony of Eros

Meaning can exist for the narcissistic self only when it somehow catches sight of itself. It wallows in its own shadow everywhere until it drowns—in itself.

The final chapter affirms that love is necessary for thought to exist at all. “To be able to think, one must first have been a friend, a lover.” So concludes an encomium of love joined to a radical critique of a world that refuses it: to be dead to love is to be dead to thought.

In the inferno of the same, the arrival of the atopic Other can assume apocalyptic form. In other words: today, only an apocalypse can liberate—indeed, redeem—us from the inferno of the same, and lead us toward the Other.

Eros concerns the Other in the strong sense, namely, what cannot be encompassed by the regime of the ego. Therefore, in the inferno of the same, which contemporary society is increasingly becoming, erotic experience does not exist. Erotic experience presumes the asymmetry and exteriority of the Other. It is not by chance that Socrates the lover is called atopos. The Other, whom I desire and who fascinates me, is placeless. He or she is removed from the language of sameness: “Being atopic, the Other makes language indecisive: one cannot speak of the Other, about the Other; every attribute is false, painful, erroneous, awkward.”

“Capitalism is aggravating the pornographication of society by making everything a commodity and putting it on display. Knowing no other use for sexuality, it profanes eros—into porn.” Love alone permits eroticism, or sex, to be ritualized—instead of being put on show. Thereby is the mystery of the Other—which contemporary exhibitionism is degrading into a dull article for consumption—preserved, even in nakedness.

There can be no Absolute without absolute negativity. Only in love can Spirit assume the experience of its own annihilation—that is, as Hegel puts it, “preserve itself even in death”—because, for the Other to arrive, one must no longer be anything at all.

Implacably, Han argues that the minimum condition for true love is possessing sufficient courage to accept self-negation for the sake of discovering the Other.

In this book, Byung-Chul Han bears witness to how love—in the strong sense that a long historical tradition has granted it—is threatened. Perhaps it is already dead—at any rate, it is gravely ill. Hence the title, The Agony of Eros. But whose blows have struck true love so low? The perpetrators are contemporary individualism, the effort to determine the market value of everything, and the set of monetary interests that now govern all conduct. In truth, love refuses to accept all such norms of the contemporary world—the world of globalized capitalism—because it is not a simple pact of pleasant coexistence between two individuals; rather it is the radical experience, perhaps to the outermost point, of the existence of the Other.