In the first part we looked at how internally the erosion and disappearance of the atopic Other is the root cause of the agony of Eros. In the second chapter, Being Able Not To Be Able, the author then goes on to describe some external aggravating forces that are killing the erotic in our lives and our societies.
Han begins by introducing us to the notion of “achievement society” as the latest manifestation of power and control over people. Achievement society is one in which people are obsessed with achievement in general: doing, experiencing, and achieving. For example being obsessed with doing one’s work, exercise, sport, or study as competitively as possible; experiencing as vast a set of experiences as possible; and achieving the most or highest honours, credentials, or recognitions as possible. “Achievement society is wholly dominated by the modal verb can—in contrast to disciplinary society, which issues prohibitions and deploys should. After a certain point of productivity, should reaches a limit. To increase productivity, it is replaced by can. The call for motivation, initiative, and projects exploits more effectively than whips and commands.” For Han, capitalism, in its quest to improve production and efficiency stumbled on a way to get the people to work harder and more productively than at any other time in history: get them to be internally self-motivated; get them to self-exploit rather than to directly exploit them from outside.
Han calls an individual who has accepted this new achievement society whole heartedly an “entrepreneur of the self” or the “achievement-subject”. Such a person is not directly controlled by a dominating or exploiting boss (although they may have a boss) but they are not really free either because they chose self-exploitation and such a person “is perpetrator and victim in one.” Such a person is also the proselytizer of the new system through an internal and external competition for bragging rights. “You can produces massive compulsion, on which the achievement-subject dashes him- or herself to pieces. Because it appears as freedom, self-generated compulsion is not recognized as such.”
Neoliberalism embraces the new achievement society whole heartedly because it increases productivity and hides the power relation. “The neoliberal regime conceals its compulsive structure behind the seeming freedom of the single individual, who no longer understands him- or herself as a subjugated subject (subject to), but as a project in the process of realizing itself…. That is the ruse: now whoever fails is at fault and personally bears the guilt. No one else can be made responsible for failure. Nor is there any possibility for pardon, relief, or atonement.”
Neoliberalism’s achievement society is very damaging to people psychologically and physically: the individual is induced into herculean efforts of self-mortification in the pursuit of achievement and bears the full weight of failure without the possibility of relief or forgiveness. “…capitalism only works with debt and default. It offers no possibility for atonement, which would free the debtor from liability. The impossibility of mitigation and atonement also account for the achievement-subject’s depression. Together with burnout, depression represents an unredeemable failure of ability—that is, it amounts to psychic insolvency.” It is a lack of a relationship with an Other that makes lenders think they should not offer bankruptcy forgiveness – it is this lack of a connection with an Other that makes them fight to reduce bankruptcy protection at every opportunity: “it is just business” is the logic and sentiment of a lack of connection to an Other. Burnout and depressions are symptoms of pushing oneself too far.
“Eros is a relationship to the Other situated beyond achievement, performance, and ability. Being able not to be able…represents its negative counterpart. The negativity of otherness—that is, the atopia of the Other, which eludes all ability—is constitutive of erotic experience….Absolutizing ability is precisely what annihilates the Other. A successful relationship with the Other finds expression as a kind of failure.”
“Absolutizing ability” has the sense of power over something. “Positivising” something also means being able to add to it or control it. Anything we say about the other is positivising it with our power and so the Other disappears (the Other is what cannot be talked about). Talking about “knowing”, or “having”, or “possessing” the Other is speaking in terms of power over the Other – but that is technically impossible. What is happening is a deforming of the Other into what we think we desire and in so doing we destroy the atopic Other.
“Today, love is being positivized into sexuality, and, by the same token, subjected to a commandment to perform. Sex means achievement and performance. And sexiness represents capital to be increased. The body—with its display value—has become a commodity. At the same time, the Other is being sexualized into an object for procuring arousal. When otherness is striped from the Other, one cannot love—one can only consume. To this extent, the Other is no longer a person; instead, he or she has been fragmented into sexual part-objects.”
“Primal distance” is another concept that Han introduces. It is the strict border established between one’s self-love and the Other. It is what keeps the other as an end in themselves and not a means to an end. Things that are owned are owned for a reason; a purpose. But ends in themselves have a dignity that is beyond ownership – ownership perverts them and destroys there otherness. Han quotes martin Buber: primal distance “serves as the very ‘principle of being-human’ and constitutes the transcendental condition for any alterity existing at all.”
This primal distance is what makes countenance possible. Things may have a face but an Other person has a countenance. We call for or call up things such as sex objects but we cannot properly address them. To address some one requires the dignity, propriety, and decency that distance affords. When the countenance is returned the Other becomes nearer and closer but still Other. “By means of social media, we seek to bring the Other as near as possible, to close any distance between ourselves and him or her, to create proximity. But this does not mean that we have more of the Other; instead, we are making the Other disappear. Nearness is negative insofar as remoteness is inscribed within it. But now, a total abolition of remoteness is underway. This does not produce nearness so much as it abolishes it. Instead of closeness, it entails crowding. Nearness acts negatively. Therefore, it is inhabited by tension. In contrast, crowding acts positively. The power of negativity lies in the fact that things are enlivened precisely by their opposite. Mere positivity lacks any such power to animate.”
The “performance principle” in reference to Eros refers to the positivizing of and “transforming everything into a formula for enjoyment and consumption”: an I want such and such. But it is negativity in the sense of transgression and surprise that cannot be formulized that enlivens Eros. However today anything cataclysmic is being engineered out of society in the optimized formula that looks to the future as a perfect present. However, the present is the inferno of the same and only an un-formulized future is open to the event of the appearance of the Other. Eros as an asymmetrical relation with the Other trivializes all this planning, formulizing, performance, debt and default.