This short book, by Han, is a meditation on the conflict he sees between modernity and eros. Han begins, “The crisis of love does not derive from too many others so much as from the erosion of the Other. This erosion is occurring in all spheres of life; its corollary is the mounting narcissification of the Self…. Eros concerns the Other in the strong sense, namely, what cannot be encompassed by the regime of the ego…. Eros—erotic desire—conquers depression. It delivers us from the inferno of the same to the atopia, indeed the utopia, of the wholly Other.”
Modernity has become what Han describes as a “burnout culture.” He decries the sterilization, the lack of differentiation, the consumption, and the fetishization of materialism. “Today, more and more, dignity, decency, and propriety—matters of maintaining distance—are disappearing. That is, the ability to experience the Other in terms of his or her otherness is being lost…. Today, love is being positivized into a formula for enjoyment. Above all, love is supposed to generate pleasant feelings…. 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.” Han suggests that modernity lives in a constant present. It is unable to reach back into the past or push forward to a future, because it is stuck in banality. “Today, the future is shedding the negativity of the Other and positivizing itself an optimized present that excludes all disaster…. Memory is not an organ of simple restitution, by means of which one makes the past present again. In memory, what has been is constantly changing. It is a progressive, living, narrative process.”
Han discusses how eros necessitates the change of the ego upon first contact with the Other, “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.” Han stays on the theme of the transformation of the Self through eros, but with a Hegelian twist, “Love is an absolute end unto itself. It is absolute because it presupposes death, the surrender of the self. The “true essence of love consists in giving up consciousness of oneself, forgetting oneself in another.”” Han continues, “As an absolute end, love passes through death…. The reconciled return to oneself out of the Other means anything but violent appropriation of the Other…. Rather it is the gift of the Other—preceded by the surrender, the giving up, of one’s own self.” Han returns to Ficino, “When Ficino writes that the lover loses himself in another self—and yet, in this same waning oblivion, “recovers” and even “possesses” himself—this possession is the gift of the Other. The priority of the Other distinguishes the power of Eros from the violence of Ares. When power is a relation of domination, I assert myself against and oppose the Other by subjugating him or her to myself. In contrast, the power (Macht) or eros implies powerlessness and unconsciousness (Ohn-Macht); instead of affirming myself, I lose myself in (or for) the Other, who then rights me again: “The ruler possesses others through himself, but the lover takes possession of himself through another, and the farther each of the lovers is from himself, the nearer he is to the other, and though he is dead in himself, he comes to life again in the other.”” Han ends, “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.”
Han finishes by returning to the theme of the duality of eros, with a riff on Badiou, “Love is a “Two scene,” a theater meant for a duo, to paraphrase Badiou. Interrupting the isolated perspective of the One, it makes the world arise anew from the vantage point of the Other, or Difference. Love, as an experience and an encounter is marked by the negativity of upheaval: “It is clear that under the effect of a loving encounter, if I want to be really faithful to it, I must completely rework my ordinary way of ‘living’ [habiter] my situation.” The “event” is a moment of “truth”; it introduces a new and entirely different way of being into the habit of habiter, the situation at hand. It gives rise to something that circumstances cannot account for. It interrupts the Same in favor of the Other…. This transcendental fidelity may be understood as a universal quality of eros…. 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…. Eros manifests itself as the revolutionary yearning for an entirely different way of loving.”
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