On the Agony of Eros
An Introduction to Byung-Chul Han
I have a pretty demanding post in the sociology of religion sitting in my draft folder waiting to go, but I am still unsure about whether to use the “Queer Pagan Flag” with its inverted pentagram on a black disc superimposed over the usual rainbow stripes. I am reticent to give publicity to mephitic sacrilege, but the proud affirmation of the satanic by the neo-pagan rainbow movement is on bold display in this visual trope. So, in the meantime, whilst I ruminate over that, here is a short introduction to the fascinating work of the Korean-born German Professor of Philosophy, Byung-Chul Han.
Han writes beautiful, philosophically serious, and very short books. His book – available in English from the MIT Press – The Agony of Eros, explores what amounts to the pending disappearance of the erotic. This may surprise you as we have never seen a more immersive saturation of Western culture in sensual hedonism and immediate-access pornography. But this is exactly Han’s point: there is a direct relationship between the commodification of consumable images of the sexualized human body, and the endangering, perhaps extinction, of genuine erotic love. Though Han does not apply this insight to the trans phenomenon (his book was published in 2012) I think his observation has a lot to do with something like a fear or revulsion of real sexual embodiment, and a withdrawal from the genuine venture into the unknown of heterosexual love, amongst many young people today.
Han looks at trends in powerfully commercialized and algorithmically crafted cultural formation. That is, he explores the iPhone world of people born this century. Han notices that our young people grow up tacitly believing that personal choice in everything is their birth-right, all relationships are technologically mediated, and that the primary meaning of humanity is as consumers and producers. Further, they tacitly accept that they are producers of their own identity, which they project into the world for consumption by other consumers. Hopefully, the exchanges involved in the production and consumption of identities is mutually satisfying for all involved in any given transaction (that is, ‘consent’ is the only marker of proper satisfaction). In this context, Han explore the nature of the Same and the Other.
The world our young people grow up in has no genuine Other in it. The Self is the All for each individual, hence there is no real Other in their own right. In this ego-centric constructed social world, there are now no persons who are not functions of one’s own needs and desires, who are not – in the end – commodities for consumption, who are not constructed projection enterprises to emulate, or not merely optional possibilities vying for one’s attention and transactional engagement. This is a world of atomized individuals all seemingly secure in the privacy of their own inner narcissism, interfacing with ‘others’ only through a screen.
Unsurprisingly, this is an incredibly mentally ill world. For there is no real Other, no person who I must relate to who is not a function of my own identity constructions, projections, consumptions, and productions. Here, all persons, all things, are the Same. But here is the core problem with this, there is no real ‘I’ in this world of simulacra either. For in actual reality, we are only solidly an ‘I’ in genuine relation to an Other. It is the Other who sees me as not of their self, as not a ‘thing’ in their constructed world, as uniquely and irreplaceably Other, who in love gives to me a real identity as a person.
Persons only exist in relation, and only in the relation of love, which is to say only in a relation where they are given value for their own sake as Other. And this is the one thing we are no longer able to have. We do not have identity as gift – of God, of nature, of kin, of specific time, place, language, faith, culture – for we must make up our identity as a project to be performed, as a function of our own freedom and our own ego alone. Thus we live in a world where all individuals are blankly the Same (i.e., not persons but projects) and the ego-centric blank ‘I’ must construct its ‘identity’ from an endless plethora of fictions, images, products, and marketable desires and desirabilities.
In this context, there can be no love, and there can be no eros, for eros is only possible through the recognition of real difference (Otherness), and through the seeing of the Other for their own sake. So – thinking forward from Han – not only eros, but the Otherness of sexual difference, is anathema to the world our children are being (de)formed to fit.
Out of fear of the Other, young women want to be men. Then, perhaps, as a ‘man’ they can relate to a ‘male’ sexually. The denial of real difference between males and females is necessary for equality, for the removal of Otherness, for the safety of Sameness. And if there is anything they perceive as unfeminine about their adolescent and young woman’s sexually maturing bodies – where ‘feminine’ is defined by stereotyped and pornographied categories of feminine sexual attractiveness, in all its pouting, self-objectifying, self-degrading, arousal stimulation – it can be overcome by rejecting the female as an identity. And if they just don’t want to be thought of as a sexual object of desire at all, then swapping from being the object of the male pornographic gaze, to being the male gazer – be that gaze directed towards females or males – is obviously more empowering.
Out of resentment that there is really an identity they cannot have, that is genuinely Other to themselves, some men want to be women. All real Otherness must be removed, over-written by Sameness, the sameness of all sexes – in whatever fictive number one chooses – being constructed. Thus the transwoman insists that they really are female. All real difference is denied. All sexes, all genders, are performances, they are personally constructed identities, projections and fictionalized narratives of self-determined meaning. There can be no real sexual Other.
Increasingly, young people seem to want to view their own bodies as objects of identity construction and consumption, as, indeed, on-line porn. Bodily undefined gender-identity seems to be just that, a sameness, a singleness, and primarily for the narcissistic self, and for consumable display to the self. But auto-eroticism is not erotic love, for here it is only the Self that is the object of desire, pleasure, and ‘meaning’. Love is a giving to the Other, and a dying to the self. Those who will not give, those who will not in some manner die to the Self, those who cannot really see and love the Other, for that Other’s sake, cannot know erotic love, cannot know love at all.
Thus does Eros itself die an agonizing death in our hyper sexualized age. In a most basic denial of what it means to be human, the very meaning of our sexuality loses connection with Otherness and biological reality. Who would have thought that this is where the sexual revolution of the 1960s was going to take us?
I will stop there for now. We shall return to Byung-Chul Han and his fascinating work on the burnout society and the agony of eroticism soon. In the meantime, if you are philosophically inclined, I’d recommend you read Han’s The Agony of Eros and The Burnout Society.
This was profound Paul. Fear of the Other!