
The Agony of Eros

Instead, autoerotic contact and auto-affection protect the ego from being touched or seized by the Other. Consequently, pornography intensifies narcissification.
Byung-Chul Han • The Agony of Eros
Neoliberalism, with its uninhibited ego- and achievement-impulses, constitutes a social order from which eros has vanished entirely. The society of positivity, from which negativity has disappeared, is a society of bare life, which is dominated exclusively by the concern “to make sure of survival”22 in the face of discontinuity. This is a slave’s l
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Capitalism’s compulsive accumulation and growth is specifically aimed against death, which counts as absolute loss.
Byung-Chul Han • The Agony of Eros
The wholesale absence of negativity is degrading love into an object of consumption, a matter of hedonistic calculation. The desire for the Other is giving way to the comfort of the Same. The aim is to procure the comfortable and, ultimately, dull immanence of the wholly identical. Modern love lacks all transcendence and transgression.
Byung-Chul Han • The Agony of Eros
Capitalism is eliminating otherness wholesale in order to subordinate everything to consumption. Eros, however, represents an asymmetrical relationship to the Other. As such, it interrupts the exchange rate. Otherness admits no bookkeeping. It does not appear in the balance of debt and credit.
Byung-Chul Han • The Agony of Eros
Today, love is being positivized into a formula for enjoyment. Above all, love is supposed to generate pleasant feelings. It no longer represents plot, narration, or drama—only inconsequential emotion and arousal. It is free from the negativity of injury, assault, or crashing. To fall (in love) would already be too negative. Yet it is precisely suc
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Today, more and more, dignity, decency, and propriety—matters of maintaining distance—are disappearing. That is, the ability to experience the Other in terms of his or her otherness is being lost.
Byung-Chul Han • The Agony of Eros
Today, love is being positivized into sexuality, and, by the same token, subjected to a commandment to perform. Sex means achievement and performance. And sexiness represents capital to be increased. The body—with its display value—has become a commodity. At the same time, the Other is being sexualized into an object for procuring arousal. When oth
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If one could possess, grasp, and know the other, it would not be other. Possessing, knowing, and grasping are synonyms of power.5