The Agony of Eros
Today, we live in an increasingly narcissistic society. Libido is primarily invested in one’s own subjectivity. Narcissism is not the same as self-love. The subject of self-love draws a negative boundary between him- or herself and the Other. The narcissistic subject, on the other hand, never manages to set any clear boundaries. In consequence, the
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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
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 It no longer represents plot, narration, or drama—only inconsequential emotion and arousal.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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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
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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If one could possess, grasp, and know the other, it would not be other. Possessing, knowing, and grasping are synonyms of power.5
Byung-Chul Han • The Agony of Eros
it is the radical experience, perhaps to the outermost point, of the existence of the Other.
Byung-Chul Han • The Agony of Eros
“The negativity of Otherness—that is, the atopia of the Other, which eludes all ability—is constitutive of erotic experience.”
Byung-Chul Han • The Agony of Eros
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.