Continuing forward with some more facets of modern life that prevent the emergence of the Other and therefore hinder love, Han introduces us first to the notion that fantasy and desire are detrimentally affected by increases in information. “Today’s computerized high-definition imagery eliminates vagueness and ambiguity. Yet fantasy inhabits space that is undefined. Information and fantasy are opposing forces….The construction of the Other does not depend on whether more or less information is available. Only the negativity of withdrawal brings forth the Other in its atopic otherness. Information, as such, is positivity that leads to a dismantling of the Other’s negativity.” Too much information is bad for the imagination and so “…pornography—which maximizes visual information, as it were—destroys erotic fantasy.”
More information often leads to more choice considerations. For example seeking more information about a potential online purchase opens up more and more choices and variations from your first imagined need. “…unchecked freedom of choice is threatening to bring about the end of desire. Desire is always desire for the Other. The negativity of privation and absence nourishes it [desire]. As the object of desire, the Other escapes the positivity of choice. Today’s ego, with its ‘endless capacity to enunciate and refine criteria in mate selection’, does not desire. To be sure, consumer culture is constantly producing new wants and needs by means of media images and narratives. But desire is something different from both wanting and needing.”
Han mentions Lacan in connection with needs, wants, and desires. A need is like oxygen and water: one can’t live without it – literally. A want is always a want for the “no thing”: the limit of what can be had. Desire is always for the other and love, the highest desire, is desire for the desire of the Other. Wants tend to die when they are unattainable: not so for desires. When one plays the social strategy known as “hard to get” one is arousing desire; being the “no thing” that is playing “impossible to get” kills a want. The phrase “absence makes the heart grow fonder” illustrates the growth of desire. Constant connectedness on Facebook or messenger hampers desire and turns love into a want. Wants are trophies to be displayed and as such are obscene when they are people.
“Shutting your eyes is negativity, which does not pair well with the positivity and hyperactivity of contemporary acceleration society. Compulsive hyper-vigilance makes it hard to close your eyes. This also accounts for the achievement-subject’s nervous exhaustion. Lingering in contemplation is a form of closure….Indeed, closing your eyes visibly signifies as much. Perception can arrive at a conclusion only by way of peaceful contemplation.” Consider a kiss: we usually close our eyes while experiencing a kiss – there is a certain peaceful contemplation that would be destroyed if one opened one’s eyes and started staring at one’s lover. It is impossible to achieve desire (that is, the peaceful contemplation of the Other) while receiving too much information such as while watching TV or one’s newsfeed. Cutting off access to information is negativity and this negativity enhances desire and fantasy.
In the last two chapters Han takes on a common ancient Greek Platonic image that our civilization has inherited: A charioteer, Logos (intellect, reason or thinking) driving two horses Eros and Thumos (spiritedness or courage). Together Logos, Thumos, and Eros make up the ancient Greek’s conception of the human psyche. The implication is that our intellect should direct our erotic love and our spiritedness. For Han this is seriously bad because this cultural inheritance is today killing Eros. Han argues that Eros should be the driver of our Thumos and our Logos.
“Eros makes thumos bring forth beautiful deeds. Thumos, then, would be where eros and politics touch. However, contemporary politics—which lack not only thumos, but eros as well—has degraded into mere work. Neoliberalism is depoliticizing society in general—and not least of all, by replacing eros with sexuality and pornography. It [neoliberalism] is based on epithumia [fleshly desire or lust]. In a burnout society of isolated, self-alienated achievement-subjects, thumos is also withering away. Communal action—a we—now proves impossible….Political action is mutual desire for another way of living—a more just world aligned with eros on every register. Eros represents a source of energy for political revolt and engagement.” Recall that an encounter with the Other has a destabilizing, dehabitualizing, and denarcissifying quality to it. Where most common political action is meant to stabilize and or is for ego’s sake, a cataclysmic encounter with Eros in politics would break down barriers that previously would have been thought impossible to overcome. Perhaps, the author is thinking of the rapid pace of events such as in the fall of the Berlin wall, the end of Apartheid in South Africa and the peace process in Northern Ireland.
“For the surrealists, eros is the medium of a poetic revolution in language and existence. It is exalted as the energetic source of renewal, which also feeds political action. Through its universal power, it combines the artistic, the existential, and the political. Eros manifests itself as the revolutionary yearning for an entirely different way of loving and another kind of society. Thereby it remains faithful to what is yet to come.”
The atopic Other resists classification and as such offers a level of resistance to deep thought because of its unknowability. “Calculating, data-driven thought utterly lacks the resistance offered by the atopic Other. Without eros, thinking is merely repetitive and additive. Likewise, love without eros and the spiritual lift it provides deteriorates into mere ‘sensuality.’ Sensuality and work belong to the same order. They both lack spirit and desire.” The end of theory has been posited as a good thing by some. Google has made lots of money with large quantities of data calculating, analyzing, and manipulating it for patterns and correlations but this is not thinking. Thinking requires theory. “There is no such thing as data-driven thinking. Only calculation is data driven. The negativity of the incalculable is inscribed in thinking. As such, it is prior and superordinate to ‘data’ which means ‘things given.’ Indeed, for thought, negativity is preexisting and prescribed. The theory underlying thinking is a precept, guide, and parameter. It transcends the positivity of given facts and makes them suddenly appear in a new light.”
Data driven science without theory might get to correlation but never to truth in a narrative or interpretive way. The theory of evolution has data but is not data driven; causality is also a theory that has data but could not be derived from the data. “Because of [information’s] positivity, it is additive and cumulative. As positivity, information changes nothing and announces nothing. It is utterly inconsequential. In contrast, insight is a negativity. It is exclusive, exquisite, and executive. An insight preceded by experience is capable of shaking up the status quo in its entirety and allowing something wholly Other to begin….information society has no access to the wholly Other. It lacks eros—which transforms.” Eros through and with the Other is what takes thinking into the new and unknown. It is Eros that generates insight from mere information. “Thinking…begins with eros. To be able to think, one must first have been a friend, a lover. Without eros, thinking loses all vitality and turmoil, and becomes repetitive and reactive. Eros infuses thinking with desire for the atopic Other.”