Books
Byung-Chul Han. The agony of eros.
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MPH, MSc
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Byung-Chul Han (1959-) is a South Korean philosopher who wrote his work The Agony of Eros in 2012. This text analyzes how hedonism, contractual rationalization of relationships and positivization through constant exposure to signs dissolve the experience of eros and human relationships. The loss of otherness and lack entail the reduction of desire and the impossibility of true love.
There is a technology of choice that generates a structure of communication and behavior that affects human relationships, including couple relationships. Love is supplanted by a transaction through an infinite a la carte catalog. This produces a rationalization on the one hand, and a process of narcissistic fetishization on the other. One does not love, one takes, one serves. The technology of choice does not facilitate a more satisfactory reality, on the contrary, it only facilitates the fact of choosing, while it destroys the human relationship and the experience of love, supplanted by an incessant mental expectation incompatible with reality. There is a "coercion of the optimum", comparison of everything with everything. The person does not seek the real, but pursues a mental fetish of a non-existent but constant conditional expectation.
The consumer society does not exploit satisfaction, but dissatisfaction. The Internet positions people not only as consumers, but as fantasy subjects, subjects who long for experiences and lifestyles, subjects desiring everything they do not have. People who live in a world that is not present, but who live in an imaginary universe, in unrealized possibility. The modern subject lives dissociated from reality, in a constant longing, perceiving himself as his desire, as the emotions aroused by an imaginary reality. The person perceives himself through the perceptual framework imposed by the images he sees, not as his reality in the world. The consequence of what has been created fundamentally in the imagination is disappointment, which he tries to overcome by generating a new expectation.
Only the negativity of subtraction produces the atopic otherness that manifests itself in Eros. The structures based on the negativity of limits have changed into an endless catalog of possibilities that follow one after the other. Thus, one thing can be substituted for another. There is no scarcity, but hyperabundance. Erotic tension is exchanged for immediate availability. There is no distance, no lack. The personal scarcity that can be experienced, is flooded with systematic evaluations of potential candidates for an app, or with pornography. There is no absence in which the special presence of the other manifests itself. "As a search and consumption machine," the desire for that special and absent thing necessary for eros is suppressed.
What is truly loved is atopic. Love presupposes the different, the asymmetrical, the incomprehensible, the mysterious. The positivized ceases to be mysterious, the rationalized ceases to be mysterious, the equalized ceases to be mysterious. "In the hell of the equal, which today's society increasingly resembles, there is no erotic experience." Love presupposes the difference of the other, and not the sameness in which there is nothing opposite to attract. "Today's culture of constant equalizing does not allow for any negativity of the atopos." Our society seeks to "eliminate atopic otherness in favor of consumable, heterotopic differences." The mysterious and different is exchanged for a catalog of positivized characteristics after comparing everything with everything. Thus, everything has become the same. The other disappears.
Love cannot be rationalized, flattened, equalized, agreed upon. The growing capacity for choice produces a rationalization of that which must arise instinctively. The exposure of people as a catalog generates a cognitivization of human relationships. What is fundamentally instinctive and unconscious becomes a conscious choice. Increased exposure produces an increased expectation, an increased imagination of what should be desirable attributes. That with a passionate appearance, comes from a judgment of what has characteristics that are desirable or undesirable for consumption. It involves a rationalization of desire, not necessarily entirely conscious, not necessarily entirely rational in its cognitivization and categorization. However, it results in disappointment because no one is what he or she could be in that judgment of the characteristics of the mental fetish.
But also in the moral and legal domestication of what couple relationships should be in order to turn it into mere utilitarian formulas oriented to satisfy the self. Formulas of transaction and coexistence. Eros is politicized and thus destroyed. Love can only be in the field of the other, and of the lack of the other. In transcendence, not in calculation, valuation and choice.
Everything is destined to fail when the comparison is with everything. If the society of discipline was the society of duty, the current neoliberal system for Han is that of can, which directs the person toward an ethic of the self. The person seeks his or her own recognition in the endless comparison of everything with everyone. Sexuality becomes performance, with the body ready to be consumed by that consumer who is also valued as a desirable object to be consumed. There is no experience between two bodies to be discovered, but an experience of consumption under the judgment of its desirability characteristics and the thermometer of arousal. Under the dictates of performance, the body is transformed into a commodity with exhibition value. But also the soul is transformed into an exhibition of vanity compared to moral virtue signaling. The other person is transformed into a measure of expectation and excitement.
Inflation of the self not only destroys the capacity to love, but traps the person in his or her own mind. Even psychological suffering is for Byung-Chul Han a narcissistic pathology of ego orientation. The depressive is often a narcissist of the self. Depression for the author is based on an "exaggerated and pathologically overloaded relationship to oneself". The person is exhausted of himself, but is unable to get out of himself, and to orient himself to the other. "Depression is a narcissistic illness," says Han. The problem of the depressive is to be trapped in himself. Although the philosopher's words need further explanation and some nuance, the fact that the greatest antidote to depression may well be true and genuine love is not a misguided idea, and is not far from a Buddhist view of mindfulness.
Love is dissolution in otherness, it can only exist in the loss of the constituted form of self and other. Something is living only when it contains within itself its own contradiction. For Hegel love is the capacity to "forget oneself in another selfhood". A spirit cannot be given in its positivity, because its unfolding needs the other. Only in this way does the spirit return to itself. Love loses itself in the orientation towards the self, in the search for self-confirmation in the other.
It is visible that people have lost the capacity to love, not even to understand what it is to love. Most people simply evaluate desirable characteristics of potential candidates as objects of consumption. They grab what they can, as in a sale. Or they pursue some kind of mental fetish projected onto a person, hopelessly with an expiration date. This in turn feeds a void that is not filled. Not to mention the frontal use of seduction as a monetization tool, which exploits the loneliness, particularly of millions of men, who have never received a single glance in their lives. Many with mental health problems. The other side of the coin that the violent propaganda of the system forbids to talk about.
However, techno-narcissism and the disintegration of the spirit is not the product of consumer freedom, nor an attempt to optimize the neoliberal society that Byung-Chul Han claims. It is the mirage of Ulysses, the constant song of the sirens. The tragedy at the psychological level is that the expectation is not even real, it only exists in people's minds as a perpetual projected illusion. Engineering of the mesolimbic dopaminergic neurons that activate the mirage that never turns off. Engineering of sign, approaching the code stage of the Matrix. The visible aesthetic sordidness proudly exhibited is the by-product of the process of fragmentation of the spirit, decomposition prior to the programming of the human consciousness of the scientistic utopia. It is the neurotic-rationalizing people who do not know what it is to love who are most trapped in their own "narcissism of selfhood". The epidemic of self-importance, as Escohotado said. In any case, a coercive techno-dystopian society, not a liberal society of self-discipline. That ended long ago. Now we are facing a direct political and media attack on human bonds, and the establishment of the definitive techno-leviathan.
CONSUMER LOVE
For Byung-Chul Han, unlimited choice destroys love. Modern consumer societies are characterized by the existence of a permanent coercion towards the following. We do not live in a reality, but in an expectation of what could be that is constantly projected in our mind. Thus, what we have in reality never is, since it could always be something else that it is not. This not only affects the world of objects, but deeply affects human relationships themselves, turning love into consumer relationships. "It is not only the oversupply of others," says Chul Han, but "the erosion of the other." Consumerism is the disappearance of the other. However, the erosion of the other is also the erosion of the self.There is a technology of choice that generates a structure of communication and behavior that affects human relationships, including couple relationships. Love is supplanted by a transaction through an infinite a la carte catalog. This produces a rationalization on the one hand, and a process of narcissistic fetishization on the other. One does not love, one takes, one serves. The technology of choice does not facilitate a more satisfactory reality, on the contrary, it only facilitates the fact of choosing, while it destroys the human relationship and the experience of love, supplanted by an incessant mental expectation incompatible with reality. There is a "coercion of the optimum", comparison of everything with everything. The person does not seek the real, but pursues a mental fetish of a non-existent but constant conditional expectation.
The consumer society does not exploit satisfaction, but dissatisfaction. The Internet positions people not only as consumers, but as fantasy subjects, subjects who long for experiences and lifestyles, subjects desiring everything they do not have. People who live in a world that is not present, but who live in an imaginary universe, in unrealized possibility. The modern subject lives dissociated from reality, in a constant longing, perceiving himself as his desire, as the emotions aroused by an imaginary reality. The person perceives himself through the perceptual framework imposed by the images he sees, not as his reality in the world. The consequence of what has been created fundamentally in the imagination is disappointment, which he tries to overcome by generating a new expectation.
POSITIVIZATION AND RATIONALIZATION
The consumer society is a positive society, a society of mere life. A society of comfort. This search for the mere life destroys life, and the experience of it. Consumption, living surrounded by stimuli, the constant exposure of possibilities, and the possibility of unlimited choice, imply the elimination of longing, of emotions based on negativity and desire. Positivity implies the elimination of negativity. Eros is exhausted when it loses its atopic character to become something normativized as an institutionalized part of a system of transactions, when the other is part of an endless catalog, when it has become another consumer product to be used and discarded.Only the negativity of subtraction produces the atopic otherness that manifests itself in Eros. The structures based on the negativity of limits have changed into an endless catalog of possibilities that follow one after the other. Thus, one thing can be substituted for another. There is no scarcity, but hyperabundance. Erotic tension is exchanged for immediate availability. There is no distance, no lack. The personal scarcity that can be experienced, is flooded with systematic evaluations of potential candidates for an app, or with pornography. There is no absence in which the special presence of the other manifests itself. "As a search and consumption machine," the desire for that special and absent thing necessary for eros is suppressed.
What is truly loved is atopic. Love presupposes the different, the asymmetrical, the incomprehensible, the mysterious. The positivized ceases to be mysterious, the rationalized ceases to be mysterious, the equalized ceases to be mysterious. "In the hell of the equal, which today's society increasingly resembles, there is no erotic experience." Love presupposes the difference of the other, and not the sameness in which there is nothing opposite to attract. "Today's culture of constant equalizing does not allow for any negativity of the atopos." Our society seeks to "eliminate atopic otherness in favor of consumable, heterotopic differences." The mysterious and different is exchanged for a catalog of positivized characteristics after comparing everything with everything. Thus, everything has become the same. The other disappears.
Love cannot be rationalized, flattened, equalized, agreed upon. The growing capacity for choice produces a rationalization of that which must arise instinctively. The exposure of people as a catalog generates a cognitivization of human relationships. What is fundamentally instinctive and unconscious becomes a conscious choice. Increased exposure produces an increased expectation, an increased imagination of what should be desirable attributes. That with a passionate appearance, comes from a judgment of what has characteristics that are desirable or undesirable for consumption. It involves a rationalization of desire, not necessarily entirely conscious, not necessarily entirely rational in its cognitivization and categorization. However, it results in disappointment because no one is what he or she could be in that judgment of the characteristics of the mental fetish.
But also in the moral and legal domestication of what couple relationships should be in order to turn it into mere utilitarian formulas oriented to satisfy the self. Formulas of transaction and coexistence. Eros is politicized and thus destroyed. Love can only be in the field of the other, and of the lack of the other. In transcendence, not in calculation, valuation and choice.
AUTOAFFIRMATION OF THE SELF
Love is the impotence with which the self is lost in the other. In the words of Ficino, "it alienates man from his own nature, and brings him the stranger". Love exists only in negativity, in that which is not self. The self-affirmation of the self destroys eros, the other becomes the expectation of the narcissistic self. The self simply reasserts itself, enunciates, imposes, chooses. The subject of actual recognition is a subject of the self to itself, which is trapped in its own ego. Love is the opposite, it is towards the other, "eros tears the subject away from itself and leads it out". The libido is exhausted when society is created in a sense of for self. The narcissist satisfies a whimsical desire in which the person actually projects himself onto the other.Everything is destined to fail when the comparison is with everything. If the society of discipline was the society of duty, the current neoliberal system for Han is that of can, which directs the person toward an ethic of the self. The person seeks his or her own recognition in the endless comparison of everything with everyone. Sexuality becomes performance, with the body ready to be consumed by that consumer who is also valued as a desirable object to be consumed. There is no experience between two bodies to be discovered, but an experience of consumption under the judgment of its desirability characteristics and the thermometer of arousal. Under the dictates of performance, the body is transformed into a commodity with exhibition value. But also the soul is transformed into an exhibition of vanity compared to moral virtue signaling. The other person is transformed into a measure of expectation and excitement.
Inflation of the self not only destroys the capacity to love, but traps the person in his or her own mind. Even psychological suffering is for Byung-Chul Han a narcissistic pathology of ego orientation. The depressive is often a narcissist of the self. Depression for the author is based on an "exaggerated and pathologically overloaded relationship to oneself". The person is exhausted of himself, but is unable to get out of himself, and to orient himself to the other. "Depression is a narcissistic illness," says Han. The problem of the depressive is to be trapped in himself. Although the philosopher's words need further explanation and some nuance, the fact that the greatest antidote to depression may well be true and genuine love is not a misguided idea, and is not far from a Buddhist view of mindfulness.
Love is dissolution in otherness, it can only exist in the loss of the constituted form of self and other. Something is living only when it contains within itself its own contradiction. For Hegel love is the capacity to "forget oneself in another selfhood". A spirit cannot be given in its positivity, because its unfolding needs the other. Only in this way does the spirit return to itself. Love loses itself in the orientation towards the self, in the search for self-confirmation in the other.
PORNOGRAPHY AS ANTAGONISM OF EROS
Porn is more effective than normativity in annihilating sexuality itself, says Byung-Chul Han. There is no sex in porn. The opposite happens, sex between people is attempted to become porn. A staging. The equivalent of a museum, the exhibition of dead remains torn from the essence and the very life of what something was. In its very positivity and hyper-availability, pornography itself loses any sense of mystery it might have had. Porn is hyper-information, a reified mass of images in which all aspects of human experience disappear. The secularization of sexuality eliminates the transcendence of sexuality. Pornography is narcissistic, it is directed to the satisfaction of the self. There is no encounter, there is no skin, there is no discovery, there is no other. There is only an increase in the experience of the self. There is no ascending force, no transcendent elevation, only an amplified image in the retina, and a reified and repetitive relationship with oneself that destroys eros.FINAL REMARKS
In the name of false well-being, a fragmentation of people's own being has been created. Love can only exist towards others, so that the inflation of the self produces an incompatible spiritual state. The consumer society transforms life into a systematic search for opportunities for self-gratification. Coupled with a social structure of utilitarian contractualism that produces a rationalizing mentalism that dissolves the essence of love. Pact, sharing, limit. Certainly very psychologist-like. From the dimensions of capricious hedonism and utilitarian cynicism arises the epidemic narcissism, projected to human relationships. The inflated sense of self-importance and the need to attract attention try to compensate for the existential void. What remains of the person is a drifting product of environmental signals that produce dopamine, and of his or her own rationalizing judgments, integrated schemes of the products of that same system.It is visible that people have lost the capacity to love, not even to understand what it is to love. Most people simply evaluate desirable characteristics of potential candidates as objects of consumption. They grab what they can, as in a sale. Or they pursue some kind of mental fetish projected onto a person, hopelessly with an expiration date. This in turn feeds a void that is not filled. Not to mention the frontal use of seduction as a monetization tool, which exploits the loneliness, particularly of millions of men, who have never received a single glance in their lives. Many with mental health problems. The other side of the coin that the violent propaganda of the system forbids to talk about.
However, techno-narcissism and the disintegration of the spirit is not the product of consumer freedom, nor an attempt to optimize the neoliberal society that Byung-Chul Han claims. It is the mirage of Ulysses, the constant song of the sirens. The tragedy at the psychological level is that the expectation is not even real, it only exists in people's minds as a perpetual projected illusion. Engineering of the mesolimbic dopaminergic neurons that activate the mirage that never turns off. Engineering of sign, approaching the code stage of the Matrix. The visible aesthetic sordidness proudly exhibited is the by-product of the process of fragmentation of the spirit, decomposition prior to the programming of the human consciousness of the scientistic utopia. It is the neurotic-rationalizing people who do not know what it is to love who are most trapped in their own "narcissism of selfhood". The epidemic of self-importance, as Escohotado said. In any case, a coercive techno-dystopian society, not a liberal society of self-discipline. That ended long ago. Now we are facing a direct political and media attack on human bonds, and the establishment of the definitive techno-leviathan.
References:
Bordallo. A. Revisión de Byung-Chul Han. La agonía del eros. Accesible en https://www.icns.es/articulo_byung_chul_han__la_agonia_del_eros
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