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A review by casparb
The Agony of Eros by Byung-Chul Han
4.0
I feel contemporary German philosophers don't often come my way, so Byung-Chul Han is refreshing and noticeably German, I would say (rhyme). This is a short text- somewhere between an extended essay and a book, but I think BCH is perfectly restrained in achieving what he sets out to.
In a sense, The Agony of Eros functions as an extension of Georges Bataille's Eroticism, read through Hegel and I think secularised? There is a degree to which TAOE feels a completion of Bataille's project updated with love as it is known in the present and this Hegel emphasis (with the Other, atopos more fully realised. Very nice). Han more effectively links eros to politics, through the concept of autoexploitation, which seems to arrive in this text through a negation of Foucault's notion of freedom, though I'm not entirely convinced by his critique of the above. Is the auto-exploiting body so far from Foucault's docile body? hm hm hm
So I'd recommend! Though with caution - certainly it would be good to have read Eroticism, or at least have a good familiarity of Freud's love/death drives as GB synthesised them. I think encountering Hegel enriches this text (also makes one sceptical, plausibly. I do not claim it is an impeccable reading of GWFH). A text for the era. Pair it with Badiou's In Praise of Love.
In a sense, The Agony of Eros functions as an extension of Georges Bataille's Eroticism, read through Hegel and I think secularised? There is a degree to which TAOE feels a completion of Bataille's project updated with love as it is known in the present and this Hegel emphasis (with the Other, atopos more fully realised. Very nice). Han more effectively links eros to politics, through the concept of autoexploitation, which seems to arrive in this text through a negation of Foucault's notion of freedom, though I'm not entirely convinced by his critique of the above. Is the auto-exploiting body so far from Foucault's docile body? hm hm hm
So I'd recommend! Though with caution - certainly it would be good to have read Eroticism, or at least have a good familiarity of Freud's love/death drives as GB synthesised them. I think encountering Hegel enriches this text (also makes one sceptical, plausibly. I do not claim it is an impeccable reading of GWFH). A text for the era. Pair it with Badiou's In Praise of Love.