Author: Byung-Chul Han
- Explores themes of love, desire, and death
- Apocalypse and deliverance
- Eros eradicates depression
- Other versus narcissism, fixation on Self
- Thus the introduction of the Other is apocalyptic in that it forces a paradigm shift
- Other versus narcissism, fixation on Self
main argument
- Love of the Other is the renunciation of the Self
supporting arguments
- Modern society has an aversion to negativity
- Whatever is merely positive is lifeless
- As an absolute end, love passes through death
- The focus of sexuality in society is an obsession with performance through possessing and knowing
- “Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking” — Jung
- The body become a commodity and appeal becomes capital
- The Other is an apocalyptic deliverance of love, desire, and death {🔗 Federico García Lorca (1898 – 1936)} ^966060
- The Other is inherently negative, which grants life its vitality
- There is no longer a teleology of a good life
- Capitalism enforces fixation on bare life
- Eros is the medium for intensifying life to the point of death
- Faithfulness is a form of decision and conclusion that introduces an eternity into time
- Pornography contains no sex
- It is a profanation of eros by putting on a display of bare life
- Borders are now unified under the Inferno of the same, no longer thresholds or transitions that lead to something other
- There is a crisis of fantasy and the disappearance of the Other — this is the agony of eros
- “Massive information massively heightens the entropy of the world; it raises the level of noise. Thinking demands calm. Thinking is an expedition into quietness.”
- Eros
- Pleasure-based desire (epithumia)
- Courage (thumos)
- Reason (logos)
- Philosophy is the translation of eros into logos
- The friend introduces the Other into thought
scholarly debate
- Eva Illouz
- Alain Badiou
- Slavoj Žižek
terms and themes
- Self
- Other
- Inferno of the same
- Whatever is merely positive is lifeless
- Information accelerates entropy
highlights
Eros and depression are opposites. Eros pulls the subject out of itself, toward the Other. Depression, in contrast, plunges the subject into itself. — location: 115
A singular process of weakening lays hold of the subject of love — which, however, is accompanied by a feeling of strength. This feeling is not the achievement of the One, but the gift of the Other. — location: 121
Mimicry when people are not proactively thinking and creating
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. — location: 123
it is a negative, emanating a healing, cleansing effect. — location: 127
Depression represents the impossibility of love. — location: 132
Therefore a living Inferno
Alternatively, it is the impossibility of love that has led to depression. — location: 133
Magically, it invokes the proximity of eros and death, apocalypse and deliverance. — location: 139
Catastrophic fatality abruptly switches over into salvation. — location: 180
Homo oeconomicus only thinks himself free when in fact he is exploiting himself. — location: 190
You can produces massive compulsion, on which the achievement-subject dashes him- or herself to pieces. — location: 198
Can this relationship with the other through Eros be characterized as a failure? Once again, the answer is yes, if one adopts the terminology of current descriptions, if one wants to characterize the erotic by “grasping,” “possessing,” or “knowing.” But there is nothing of all this, or the failure of all this, in eros. If one could possess, grasp, and know the other, it would not be other. Possessing, knowing, and grasping are synonyms of power. — location: 216
When otherness is stripped from the Other, one cannot love — one can only consume. — location: 223
the otherness of the Other commands distance. — location: 231
The power of negativity lies in the fact that things are enlivened precisely by their opposite. Mere positivity lacks any such power to animate. — location: 237
Note: difference produces meaning
Achievement society —which is dominated by ability, and where everything is possible and everything occurs as an initiative and a project— has no access to love as something that wounds or incites passion. — location: 242
Technological data storage strips all life from what has been. It is without time. Thus, a total present prevails today. It is abolishing the irretrievable moment. — location: 263
Photo obsession
The caress is a “game with something slipping away.”12 It reaches for what is vanishing into the future without end. Its desire is nourished by what doesn’t yet exist. — location: 269
“For those eyes of yours, gliding through my eyes to the depths of my heart, stir the hottest fire in my marrow. Therefore, have mercy on me, who die because of you.”2 Here, blood serves as the medium of erotic communication. A kind of transfusion occurs between the eyes of the lover and the beloved: — location: 286
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. — location: 305
Preferring servitude to the threat of death, the slave clings to bare life. — location: 310
The party who emerges as master does not fear death. The desire for freedom, recognition, and sovereignty raises the master above concern for bare life. — location: 308
History, understood as the history of freedom, is not over, then. It would only be over if we were really free — if we were neither master nor slave: neither enslaved masters nor slaves who think themselves masters. — location: 330
Capitalism absolutizes bare life. Its telos is not the good life. Capitalism’s compulsive accumulation and growth is specifically aimed against death, which counts as absolute loss. — location: 332
Concern for bare life, for survival alone, strips life of all vitality, which is in fact a very complex phenomenon. Whatever is merely positive is lifeless. — location: 398
Instead, the impulse to live, heightened to the utmost and affirmed, approaches the impulse to die. Eros is the medium for intensifying life to the point of death: — location: 379
As an absolute end, love passes through death. Although one dies in the Other, this death is followed by a return to oneself. The reconciled return to oneself out of the Other means anything but violent appropriation of the Other; wrongly, this has been declared the main figure of Hegelian thought. Rather it is the gift of the Other — preceded by the surrender, the giving up, of one’s own self. — location: 360
However, the absolute conclusion is long and slow; it is preceded by tarrying: abiding or dwelling. The dialectic itself is a movement of closing, opening, and closing again. The Spirit would bleed to death from the wounds inflicted by the Other’s negativity, were it not capable of reaching a conclusion. Not every end amounts to violence. Peace is concluded. Friendship is an end unto itself. Love is an absolute end unto itself. It is absolute because it presupposes death, the surrender of the self. — location: 354
Where the purely positive —positivity to excess— prevails, no Spirit exists. — location: 349
Spirit owes its liveliness specifically to the capacity for death. — location: 346
The process of capitalization and production is assuming infinite dimensions by doing away with the teleology of the good life. — location: 337
“Something is alive… only to the extent that it contains contradiction within itself: indeed, [its] force is this, to hold and endure contradiction within.” — location: 399
The Dutchman, “flying like an arrow without aim, without rest, without peace,”24 is like today’s exhausted and depressive achievement-subject, whose freedom amounts to being condemned to perpetual selfexploitation. — location: 403
Faithfulness is a form of decision and conclusion that introduces an eternity into time. It encloses the former within the latter: “But love, the essence of which is fidelity…, demonstrates how eternity can exist within the time span of life itself. Happiness, in a word! Yes, happiness is the proof that time can accommodate eternity.” — location: 419
What is obscene about pornography is not an excess of sex, but the fact that it contains no sex at all. — location: 426
Capitalism is aggravating the pornographication of society by making everything a commodity and putting it on display. — location: 469
This profanation is unfolding as deritualization and desacralization. Today, ritual spaces and actions are disappearing. The world is becoming more naked and more obscene. — location: 471
pornography is eliminating erotic seduction, which toys with scenic illusion and deceptive appearances. — location: 474
consumer culture is constantly producing new wants and needs by means of media images and narratives. — location: 515
Information and fantasy are opposing forces. — location: 518
The eros-driven soul produces beautiful things and, above all, beautiful actions, which have a universal value. — location: 567
But if love is profaned into sexuality, as is happening today, the universal quality of eros vanishes. — location: 568
Eros represents a source of energy for political revolt and engagement. — location: 586
In contrast, love as an event —as a “Two scene”— is dehabitualizing and denarcissifying. It generates a “rupture,” a “hole” in the order of the Habitual and the Same. — location: 602
André Breton ascribes a universal power to eros: “The only art worthy of man and of space, the only one capable of leading him further than the stars… is eroticism.” — location: 605
Without seduction by the atopic Other, which sparks erotic desire, thinking withers into mere work, which always reproduces the Same. — location: 619
Without eros, thinking is merely repetitive and additive. Likewise, love without eros and the spiritual lift it provides deteriorates into mere “sensuality.” — location: 624
There is no such thing as data-driven thinking. Only calculation is data driven. The negativity of the incalculable is inscribed in thinking. — location: 640
Massive information massively heightens the entropy of the world; it raises the level of noise. Thinking demands calm. Thinking is an expedition into quietness. — location: 650
Data-driven, positive science produces neither insight nor truth. — location: 660
Logos is powerless without the force of eros. — location: 674
Philosophy is the translation of eros into logos. — location: 679
Eros leads and seduces (führt und verführt) thinking down untrodden paths, through the atopic Other. — location: 676
Thinking, in the strong sense, begins with eros. To be able to think, one must first have been a friend, a lover. Without eros, thinking loses all vitality and turmoil, and becomes repetitive and reactive. — location: 684
Does not the friend reintroduce into thought a vital relationship with the Other that was supposed to have been excluded from pure thought?” — location: 688