Byung Chul Han, South Korean professor at the University of Basil, knows about love. It is threatened. Eros is dead.
It is always good to start a book with a cliff hanger…
It was in A.D. 14–37 that the great god Pan was declared death by a sailor called Thamus. He had heard of his death in a divine whisper.
With the death of the horned god Pan came the birth of theology.
And now Byung Chul Han, even though he is not sailing on a ship, has heard a similar divine whisper. The great god Eros is dead… And in this book he analysis love in every manifestation possible.
The Agony of Eros (Click to buy the book and support Mindfunda) from The MIT Press, published in 2017, originally published as “Agonie des Eros” in the series Fröhliche Wissenschaft by Matthes & Seitz Berlin.
In seven chapters love is taken into the box ring. Dragged from depression to powerlessness, to pornography and emptiness, to nowadays superficial consumerism.
But it also triggers your mind. What is love for you? What are your feelings about porn? Is there love in politics?
Byung Chul Han: a Man’s Vision on Eros
copyright S Fischer Verlag
Byung Chul Han is a man. (I know you start to laugh right now because it is so obvious). And it shows in his analysis and his texts. I can not help but wonder how a female philosopher would have taken on the challenge of the death of Eros.
Do you remember the film Pan’s Labyrinth? It is also a man’s vision on female initiation in a patriarchal society. Nothing would please me more as a woman’s vision on this subject.
Don’t get me wrong. i like this book. A lot. let me explain why in the next paragraph.
Byung Chul Han: The Other
Being a Jungian, I am always pre-occupied with the Self. Byung Chul Han is preoccupied with the Other (written with a capital O just like the Jungian Self is always written with a capital S).
“Eros is a relationship to the Other situated beyond achievement, performance, and ability” (page 11).
The Other is defined in Lao’s von Trier’s Melancholia how the Other brings you in a state of disbalance…
The Other-ness is also the fuel for erotic attraction between partners. And to fully conceive and appreciate the Otherness a death of the Self is in order. That does remind you of the words of Joseph Campbell, doesn’t it? How he spoke of marriage as death.
The agony of Eros, the depreciation of the value of Otherness, lies in the unification of contemporary society. Or what Byung Chul Han calls: “the inferno of the same” at every turn .
Conclusion
This book is not for everybody. It assumes a vast knowledge of philosophers and films that not everybody will have.
But it is an excellent work out for your mental muscles. How does Byung Chul Han differ from Joseph Campbell for example? Joseph Campbell, seems to contradict Byung Chul Han because Joseph assumed that society in the middle ages had discovered eros. In his interviews with Bill Moyers he talks about how in the 12th century love was re-invented by the troubadours. They spread the word about this new standard for eros and marriage very rapidly. Byung Chul Han suggests that we now have buried love/eros. In a time with multiple divorces it seems like we have gotten back to pre-medieval times.
Byung Chul Han’s perspective on Eros raises critical questions about how love is shaped in the modern world, especially in relation to consumerism and the erosion of the Other. In today’s hyper-connected, hyper-productive society, the lines between individuality and shared experience are often blurred, leading to a paradox: the more we connect, the less we seem to truly connect. Han argues that our constant drive for efficiency, pleasure, and self-optimization has drained love of its depth and complexity. It is no longer about encountering the Other as a transformative force, but rather about achieving a goal or fulfilling a need. In this sense, Eros is not so much dead as it is hollowed out by the demands of a world that treats relationships as transactions.
Yet, while Han’s critique paints a bleak picture of modern love, there’s an underlying call to reconsider and redefine our understanding of Eros. Love, according to Han, is not just about the union of two individuals; it is about the ability to stand in the presence of the Other and experience vulnerability, unpredictability, and mystery. This is something that transcends the rational and the performative. Perhaps, instead of mourning Eros, we should embrace Han’s challenge to reimagine it—recognizing that true love requires a willingness to confront the unknown, to risk a kind of death to the self in order to fully experience the transformative power of the Other. This is a call to reclaim love not as a commodity, but as a deep, profound force that requires both the courage to face the Other and the humility to let it change us.
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