Byung Chul Han was born in South Korea in 1959 and now teaches philosophy and cultural studies in Germany. In His book “The Agony of Eros,” first published in German in 2012 and translated into English in 2017, he writes about the threats to love and desire in contemporary society.
Han, starts off by taking for granted that true love is under threat. He lists the usual suspects as 1) the ideal of an endless freedom of choice; 2) the actual overabundance of options; and 3) the compulsion for perfection as described in popular media and concludes that “In a world of unlimited possibilities, love itself represents and impossibility.” However, before expanding on that, he goes on to say: “Passion, too, is said to have grown cold.” The usual suspects in this case are “[1] the rationalization of love and [2] expanding technologies of choice.” For Han, these explanations are more like symptoms and examples of a deeper more fundamental crisis of love. What causes these symptoms; what hides behind these simple answers is the erosion and disappearance of “the Other”. “This erosion is occurring in all spheres of life; its corollary is the mounting narcissification of the Self. In fact, the vanishing of the Other is a dramatic process – even though, fatefully enough, it largely escapes notice.”
First, Han develops some interesting concepts. The repetitiveness of what we know and are comfortable with is referred to as “the inferno of the same”. It is what the world is and more perfectly aspires to today – comfortable, safe, familiar, and just accepted. If you have ever said or heard a lament like “we have 100 plus channels and nothing is on” then you have felt the inferno of the same. His claim is that everything in our society is devolving into the inferno of the same. This does not mean the world is the same only that we desire and are programed to prefer and seek the same over and over again.
The author uses the term atopia, an inhospitable place that cannot be turned into a dwelling place, and often links it with the Other, as in the atopic Other, to describe an Other that cannot be familiarized or with which one cannot be made comfortable in a familiar knowable way. Words used to compare the unknown to the known and/or explain the unknown as a case of the known makes us comfortable; it reveals the unknown as really just the known. The atopic Other is something that cannot be spoken of or about with any satisfaction or accuracy and therefore maintains its otherness in spite of language’s taming and explanatory attempts.
There is a good negativity in atopic Otherness that is different from difference. Where difference is often thought of as the list of variations in attributes or as a list of non-common attributes of things compared, the negativity of the atopic Other refers to what is unknowable or unclassifiable about the Other. Difference is a positive (in two senses: 1. Adding information and 2. A good thing) in our society, difference makes the inferno of the same fascinating – like watching a flickering candle. Negativity, unfortunately, is disappearing; it is what society seeks to destroy by finding and cataloging difference, by comparing to the known, by flattening to the same, by consumption. The atopic Other is precisely NOT consumable, not the same, not known, and not comparable or catalogable.
“Eros concerns the Other….in the inferno of the same,…erotic experience does not exist. Erotic experience presumes the asymmetry and exteriority of the Other….Being atopic, the Other makes language indecisive”. When an Other, any Other, enters our perception the Other is unknown, possibly dangerous, possibly lovely, and immediately of concern. The Other hits us like a cataclysm. It may be sudden or gradual but it is always disrupting even to the point of death. The stories of Romeo and Juliet, and Tristan und Isoldo are examples of “liebestod” the concept of a love death.
In our increasingly narcissistic and unhealthy society people increasingly put more value on the “love” of their self-image at the expense of love of themselves. “The subject of self-love draws a negative boundary between him- or herself and the Other. The narcissistic subject…never manages to set any clear boundraries….The world appears only as adumbrations of the narcissist’s self, which is incapable of recognizing the Other in his or her otherness – much less acknowledging this otherness for what it is. Meaning can exist for the narcissistic self only when it somehow catches sight of itself.” The narcissist needs to see their-self in the Other to get any affirmation of their self-image. This pathologically distorted need for self-image affirmation explains the prevalence for the desire for the inferno of the same. The Narcissist uses the other and imposes their own self-image onto the other. Thus forcing the Other to conform to an alien self-image. This is a recipe for maladies of depression and insanity. How often is your self-image in others? How much mental stretching of reality does one have to do to achieve this? The devolving into the inferno of the same facilitates this at the expense of authenticity, uniqueness, and otherness.
“Eros and depression are opposites. Eros pulls the subject out of itself, toward the Other. Depression, in contrast, plunges the subject into itself….Eros…makes possible experience of the Other’s otherness, which leads the One out of a narcissistic inferno. It sets into motion freely willed self-renunciation. A singular process of weakening lays hold of the subject of love – which, however, is accompanied by a feeling of strength. This feeling is not the achievement of the One, but the gift of the Other.”
The appearance of the Other is always an unexpected cataclysm that decenters the self toward the Other. If it were not unexpected or cataclysmic then it would merely be just more of the same. The arrival of the Other is an awe inspiring and fearful event – if we are open to it. If we are not open to it, then we misinterpret, tame, or ignore it out of our conscience like an ostrich with its head in the sand.
“Eros—Erotic desire—conquers depression. It delivers us from the inferno of the same to the atopia, indeed the utopia of the wholly Other.” Eros is salvation from the same. It turns what is inhospitable and uninhabitable into a redemptive salvation. In the extreme, Romeo and Juliet were saved from not having to live apart by death. “The disastrous event…unfolds as dispossession…an annulment and voiding of the Own; that is, it unfolds as death.”
In less extreme cases “the death” is merely a catastrophe for the usual balance of a person which results in a changed person; a born again person, where “Catastrophic fatality abruptly switches over into salvation.” This is what erotic love can do to a person: change their life abruptly, unexpectedly, and permanently if they are open to the Other. “…the minimum condition for true love is possessing sufficient courage to accept self-negation for the sake of the Other…[this is difficult maybe impossible]…in a world that, as it stands, cares only for agreement, agreeability, and narcissistic gratification.”