An argument that love requires the courage to accept self-negation
for the sake of discovering the Other. Byung-Chul Han is one of the
most widely read philosophers in Europe today, a member of the new
generation of German thinkers that includes Markus Gabriel and
Armen Avanessian. In The Agony of Eros, a bestseller in Germany,
Han considers the threat to love and desire in today's society. For
Han, love requires the courage to accept self-negation for the sake
of discovering the Other. In a world of fetishized individualism
and technologically mediated social interaction, it is the Other
that is eradicated, not the self. In today's increasingly
narcissistic society, we have come to look for love and desire
within the "inferno of the same." Han offers a survey of the
threats to Eros, drawing on a wide range of sources-Lars von
Trier's film Melancholia, Wagner's Tristan und Isolde,Fifty Shades
of Grey, Michel Foucault (providing a scathing critique of
Foucault's valorization of power), Martin Buber, Hegel,
Baudrillard, Flaubert, Barthes, Plato, and others. Han considers
the "pornographication" of society, and shows how pornography
profanes eros; addresses capitalism's leveling of essential
differences; and discusses the politics of eros in today's "burnout
society." To be dead to love, Han argues, is to be dead to thought
itself. Concise in its expression but unsparing in its insight, The
Agony of Eros is an important and provocative entry in Han's
ongoing analysis of contemporary society. This remarkable essay, an
intellectual experience of the first order, affords one of the best
ways to gain full awareness of and join in one of the most pressing
struggles of the day: the defense, that is to say-as Rimbaud
desired it-the "reinvention" of love. -from the foreword by Alain
Badiou
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