A review by florencebrino
The Agony of Eros by Byung-Chul Han

4.0

According to Ficino, love is the “most serious disease of all”; a “change,” it “takes away from a man that which is his own and changes him into the nature of another.”
Such injury and transformation constitute its negativity. Today, through the increasing positivization and domestication of love, it is disappearing entirely. One stays the same and seeks only the confirmation of oneself in the Other.
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Passion and pain are giving way to pleasant feelings and inconsequential arousal. In the age of the “quickie,” the casual encounter, and sex as stress-relief, sexuality is losing all negativity, too. 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.
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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. 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.

Mar 02, 18
Review to come?
* Maybe later on my blog.