The Agony of Eros by Han Byung-Chul; Badiou Alain; Butler Erik

Author:Han, Byung-Chul; Badiou, Alain; Butler, Erik
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: love; desire; loss; erotic; social interaction; individualism; radical Other; narcissism; contemporary society; philosophy; social media; porn; online pornography; Melancholia; Fifty Shades of Gray; facebook; depression; culture
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2017-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

Everyday life consists of discontinuities. Erotic experience opens the way to “continuity of being”—which only death, as the end of “the discontinuity of beings,” can provide.21

In a society where everyone is an entrepreneur of the self, the economy of survival reigns. It stands diametrically opposed to the non-economy of eros and death. 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 life. 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. Negativity is essential to vitality: “Something is alive … only to the extent that it contains contradiction within itself: indeed, [its] force is this, to hold and endure contradiction within.”23 Thus, vitality differs from the vigor or fitness of bare life, which lacks all negativity. A survivor is like the undead: too dead to live, and too alive to die.

The Flying Dutchman’s ship—manned by the undead, according to legend—offers an analogy to contemporary burnout society. 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 self-exploitation. Capitalist production is aimless, too. It no longer has any concern for the good life. The Dutchman is undead, unable either to live or to die. Damned to journey eternally in the inferno of the same, he yearns for an apocalypse that would set him free from torment:

Great day of judgment, nearing slow

When wilt thou dawn and chase my night?

When comes it, that o’erwhelming blow,

Which strikes the world with crushing might?

When all the dead are rais’d again

Destruction I shall then attain,

Ye worlds, your course continue not!25

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