Research Catalog

Title

The agony of eros / Byung-Chul Han ; foreword by Alain Badiou ; translated by Erik Butler.

Author

Han, Byung-Chul

Publication

Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2017]

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Additional Authors

Butler, Erik, 1971-

Description

xi, 60 pages; 18 cm.

Summary

Byung-Chul Han is one of the most widely read philosophers in Europe today, a member of the new generation of German thinkers that includes Markus Gabriel and Armen Avanessian. In The Agony of Eros, a bestseller in Germany, Han considers the threat to love and desire in today's society. For Han, love requires the courage to accept self-negation for the sake of discovering the Other. In a world of fetishized individualism and technologically mediated social interaction, it is the Other that is eradicated, not the self. In today's increasingly narcissistic society, we have come to look for love and desire within the inferno of the same. Han offers a survey of the threats to Eros, drawing on a wide range of sources -- Lars von Trier's film Melancholia, Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, Fifty Shades of Grey, Michel Foucault (providing a scathing critique of Foucault's valorization of power), Martin Buber, Hegel, Baudrillard, Flaubert, Barthes, Plato, and others. Han considers the pornographication of society, and shows how pornography profanes eros; addresses capitalism's leveling of essential differences; and discusses the politics of rros in today's burnout society. To be dead to love, Han argues, is to be dead to thought itself. Concise in its expression but unsparing in its insight, The Agony of Eros is an important and provocative entry in Han's ongoing analysis of contemporary society. This remarkable essay, an intellectual experience of the first order, affords one of the best ways to gain full awareness of and join in one of the most pressing struggles of the day: the defense, that is to say -- as Rimbaud desired it -- the reinvention of love. -- from the foreword by Alain Badiou.

Series Statement

Untimely meditations

Uniform Title

• Agonie des Eros. English
• Project Muse UPCC books

Alternative Title

Agonie des Eros.

Subject

• Love
• Desire
• Burn out (Psychology)
• Burnout, Professional

Note

• Translated from the German.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

The reinvention of love / by Alain Badiou -- Melancholia -- Being able not to be able -- Bare life -- Porn -- Fantasy -- The politics of eros -- The end of theory.

ISBN

• 9780262533379
• 0262533375

LCCN

^^2016031913

OCLC

• 958097650
• SCSB-11213024

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library