Badiou Alain - The Agony of Eros

Untimely Meditations

1.The Agony of Eros

Byung-Chul Han

2.On Hitlers Mein Kampf: The Poetics of National Socialism

Albrecht Koschorke

3.In the Swarm: Digital Prospects

Byung-Chul Han

4.The Terror of Evidence

Marcus Steinweg

Byung-Chul Han

foreword by Alain Badiou

translated by Erik Butler

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

2017 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Originally published as Agonie des Eros in the series Frhliche Wissenschaft by Matthes & Seitz Berlin: Matthes & Seitz Berlin Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, Berlin 2012. All rights reserved.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in PF Din Text Pro by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Han, Byung-Chul, author.

Title: The agony of eros / Byung-Chul Han ; foreword by Alain Badiou ;

translated by Erik Butler.

Other titles: Agonie des Eros. English

Description: Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2017. | Series: Untimely meditations

| Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2016031913 | ISBN 9780262533379 (pbk. : alk. paper)

eISBN 9780262339230

Subjects: LCSH: Love. | Desire. | Burn out (Psychology)

Classification: LCC BF575.L8 H334 2017 | DDC 128/.46--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016031913

ePub Version 1.0

In this book, Byung-Chul Han bears witness to how lovein the strong sense that a long historical tradition has granted itis threatened. Perhaps it is already deadat any rate, it is gravely ill. Hence the title, TheAgony 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 worldthe world of globalized capitalismbecause 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.

To demonstrate as much, the author offers a kind of phenomenology of true loveincluding sexual loveand tracks down, in their many forms, the threats it faces. On the one hand, this involves describing what occurs in the absolute experience of alterity; on the other, it means indicting, on an array of different registers, all that draws us away from such experienceand even prevents us from seeing that it exists at all, or the consequences this circumstance brings.

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. At the same time, he provides an intensive survey of all the traps set for, and attacks perpetrated on, the very possibility of eros in a world that, as it stands, cares only for agreement, agreeability, and narcissistic gratification.

This work proves utterly absorbing precisely because of its unlikely combination of philosophical rigor (it concludes with a striking quotation from Deleuze and Guattari) and a wealth of far-ranging sources.

The first chapter enlists Lars von Triers Melancholia, as well as Bruegels TheHunters in the Snow and Wagners Tristan und Isolde (both of which are featured in von Triers film), to show how the disastrous irruption of pure exterioritythe wholly Otherrepresents a catastrophe for the ordinary balance of the subject. By the same token, however, apparent disaster offers the good fortune of escape and absence from oneselfand ultimately shows the way to redemption.

After a severe critique of Foucaultwho is faulted for valorizing ability, power (in opposition to the passivity of knowledge), and therefore performancethe second chapter features a measured appreciation of Levinas and Buber, who discerned that, as Han puts it, Eros is a relationship to the Other situated beyond achievement, performance, and Can. What escapes Foucault entirely, and Levinas merely touches on, is, in fact, a central argument of the book: The negativity of Othernessthat is, the atopia of the Other, which eludes all abilityis constitutive of erotic experience. This striking formulation represents, as it were, the matrix of the work as a whole: Only by way of being able not to be able does the Other appear. The experience of love, then, is shot through with powerlessnessthe price to be paid for all revelation of the Other.

By way of a striking reading of Hegel, the third chapter identifies the power of love as a new measure of the Absolute. There can be no Absolute without absolute negativity. Only in love can Spirit assume the experience of its own annihilationthat is, as Hegel puts it, preserve itself even in deathbecause, for the Other to arrive, one must no longer be anything at all. In declaring as much, Hegel made Bataille possible. Han quotes with delight the latters terrible words: Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death.

The fourth chapter revisits the classic opposition between eroticism and pornography. Taking up Agamben and Baudrillardand not without ample criticismHan shows how pornography is nothing other than the profanation of eros. These pages include a brilliant appraisal of the culture and value of exhibition: 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 erosinto porn. Love alone permits eroticism, or sex, to be ritualizedinstead of being put on show. Thereby is the mystery of the Otherwhich contemporary exhibitionism is degrading into a dull article for consumptionpreserved, even in nakedness.

The fifth chapter takes the reader on a journey in the company of Eva Illouz (Why Love Hurts), Flaubert, Barthes, and others to explore how loveso rich in varied fantasies about the Otherlies in the throes of agony because the contemporary universe of normalization and capitalization presents the inferno of the same at every turn. Hans profound analysis shows how the barriers, borders, and exclusions that capitalism produces, especially between rich and poor, derive not so much from difference as from the identical: Money, as a matter of principle, makes everything the same. It levels essential differences. As configurations for shutting-out and excluding, such borders abolish fantasies of the Other.

The sixth chapter reveals the connection between love and politics. Via a subtle discussion of Plato and his dynamic conception of the soulwhich love steers toward the Ideaa marked contrast emerges to what Han calls burnout society, a remarkable coinage extremely well-suited to our world today. The author offers a strong reading of my own thesis that love is a Two scenea dual perspectiveand, by virtue of this fact, represents a kind of basic political matrix. The chapter concludes with loves transformative power: Eros manifests itself as the revolutionary yearning for an entirely different way of loving and another kind of society. Thereby, it maintains fidelity to what is yet to come.

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.